A particularly porous place

Underground, Will Hunt, Simon and Schuster.

I love caves – the beauty hidden away, the wonder of rock sculpted by water, the sense, when you enter, of discovering an alien world just below our feet, where time passes differently. But I also have claustrophobic dreams, and shudder at the kind of adventure caving that entails squeezing through passages only as wide as a human body. The underground has both pull and push. It is comforting like the womb, and oppressive like the tomb.

The underground inspires both awe and fear, ancient, primal emotions. In Underground Will Hunt notes that in the distant past, while caves could provide shelter from war or just the weather, they were also places of dread. Entering a cave could mean performing ancient rites while watching out for the threat from wild animals. Imagine, he says, crawling through the dark passages with a simple pine-branch torch, on your way to perform some sacred necessity, and seeing the tell-tale scratch marks of bears. My parents-in-law have shallow lava caves on their Western Victorian farm, and as fascinating and compelling as they are, one has to watch out for snakes. While we might not believe, like the Mayans, that the underworld is literally enterable via caves, or populated by monsters, when we go underground we retrace the same steps as our ancestors, and revive a hardwired alertness, with a sort of cultural muscle memory perhaps.

Hunt notes the ancient links between caves and religious ritual. The prehistoric cave artists of France were initially thought by discoverers of the art in the nineteenth century to have been simply practising art, but because the paintings of bison and the like are so consistently deeply hidden, archaeologists now think the paintings were part of a ritual that drew out a sort of magical power over the animals the people hunted. The Mayans thought demonic gods inhabited the underground of Central America, a particularly porous place. The Aborigines mining for ochre in Western Australia and South Americans hauling silver out of the richest silver mine in the world were (and still are) wary of malicious spirits. All three groups developed elaborate rituals for placation.

Christianity, interestingly, although it developed the concept of the underworld into Hell, was revolutionary in its discarding of these placatory aspects of religion, seeing them as superstition, or at least reinterpreting them into care of others on the surface world, in the here and now, as a way of pleasing God, and, more than this, as a way of communing with God on the surface world. In being driven to acts of love by the God of love, the fear, the ‘sting’ of the underworld crumbled, as Paul joyously exclaimed in his first letter to the Corinthians. Monks and ascetics were still drawn to caves, not in order to appease angry gods, but because the isolation and simplicity of caves aided in contemplation.

As with Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, Hunt visits both natural and man-made sites. (It seems they were simultaneously and coincidentally writing books on similar topics.) Like Macfarlane, Hunt hikes through the Paris catacombs, sleeping ‘overnight’, though he points out that, underground, day and night become abstract concepts. In New York City he clandestinely tours the subway system hunting for the work of graffiti artist REVS, who, rather than finding the most prominent spot to display his artworks, sometimes hides them deeply away, like votive offerings to whatever modern demon might patrol the Gotham underworld.

New York, too, can evoke the primal, as abandoned lines and stations revert to cave-like spaces, sometimes inhabited by troglodyte homeless, though the abandoned City Hall station is an art-deco wonder, all the more beautiful perhaps for being hidden away, now only regularly glimpsed by drivers of passenger-free trains passing through, though you can visit on a tour courtesy of the New York Transit Museum. In Paris too, the underground is prone to abandonment. Once used, underground spaces can become forgotten, awaiting rediscovery tens, hundreds, thousands of years later. The underground cities of Cappadocia, some seven stories deep, housed thousands but were forgotten for centuries. Now archaeologists find it difficult to figure out exactly what cataclysm caused such a radical retreat from the lit surface world (but religious persecution is a possibility). In Paris now, the abandoned catacombs are a welcome retreat for the city’s mavericks, creating an alternate city where the literal and figurative underground meld, in a distorted echo of the early Christian community that hid among the catacombs of Rome.

We can make adjustments but we are not built for living underground. The pitch dark of caves provides for extreme sensory deprivation. With no light whatsoever, humans soon start hallucinating lights and shapes. Hunt notes that these hallucinations are the same as those described by shamans, who deliberately cultivate a mesmeric state, in order to, they believe, move beyond this world. Caves, too, are places where humans can easily become out-of-bodied, discombobulated but hypersensitive. Archaeologists have made the link between shamanic experience and caves. The archaeologist David Lewis-Williams described prehistoric cave art as often depicting ecstatic, hallucinatory states (a still controversial theory). In one way or another, Hunt says, those that head underground are seeking transcendence – weirdly, since we often think symbolically of transcendence as an upward movement. Entering the earth becomes a mirror of gazing at the heavens. Underground we get the sense of a hidden world beyond, more than just the subsurface infrastructure of cities that is vital but unnoticed, a glimpse of meaning operating at different scales. But, of course, in human history, the association of underground with the tomb means that it is a darker world we often get the sense of. Hence the underworld being a metaphor for criminality. The underground is dangerous, but an object of fascination.

Mine and grave

Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane, Hamish Hamilton.

Robert Macfarlane’s writing career is in decline. But not in terms of quality or popularity – his latest book (which fits into the category of nature writing but overspills its borders somewhat) has been heavily promoted, reviewed and, one assumes, purchased. Rather, his subject matter, as he says, in terms of geographic and geological position, has declined. Literally. He has gone from writing about mountains to trails (surface of the earth) to what happens below the ground.

In Underland he goes caving, in the UK and eastern Europe, visits a salt mine under the North Sea and prehistoric cave art in Norway, hikes a glacier in Greenland and ponders a site for the supposedly safe disposal of nuclear waste. As the subtitle of the book suggests, he writes not only about what goes on below the surface of the earth, but what goes on above and below the surface of the present day. His book returns repeatedly to the long history preserved in and on rock, and what will remain of us.

Interestingly, for such an accomplished writer, he writes about how the places he visits in this book make words fail. Not only as if the business of writing is a surface-dweller’s activity, but also because in places such as Greenland the sheer scale, he says, renders the pen and the tongue mute. Words seem like trivialities. In much the same way that apocalyptic visions of heaven cause a flailing and floundering in the attempt to depict them. Underground is the realm of the fantastic, and deep time the region of the overstretched superlative. Caves are ‘thin’ places, between this world and the next, enchanted places for prehistoric peoples, retaining something of the spiritual for modern people, places where the rational and literal give way to the emotional and metaphoric. Macfarlane also writes about the interconnections of fungi in the soil and how words, geared towards the on-the-surface distinctions between species and individual life forms, become inadequate to convey what exactly fungi is and how it is in symbiotic relationships with other plant life in the forest.

Not that, for Macfarlane, words really fail. His subject matter inspires. The first chapter is symphonic, introducing melodies and harmonies that will recur in subsequent, more elaborate movements. At times the prose blurs into poetry: ‘The berg sweats, the man flemes the porpoise, the children and the dogs bounce and howl.’ Lines recur like choruses. Thematically he plays with dualities. Caves can be safe; they were our first houses, the provide protection in war, but they can be hell, in mythology and in life; the Thai footballers spent a week in utter blackness and ignorance of the forces marshalling to rescue them. As he notes in his first chapter, his prose rising to a crescendo, we dig underground for both extraction and installation, as mine and grave. He is attuned to resonances too. Interconnections. He notes the porousness of material to neutrinos, whose detection must be sought deep underground away from surface interference, and then the porousness of the city, to those who bypass normal conventions of trespass, especially in the tunnels under Paris.

He is surprised that in his exploration of a world largely foreign to the sunlit human one, the anthropocentric keeps popping its head in. In particular, he wonders about how the Anthropocene will be preserved in the geological record (plastics, carbon spikes). Here again, language breaks down in step with the breakdown of ecosystems we have taken for granted. Permafrost is proving impermanent. ‘Glacial pace’ seems inappropriate for glaciers that are speeding up. ‘Deep time’ often implies the insignificance of human beings, but Macfarlane wants us to re-imagine its meaning, prompting us to think out of the hectic present and notice the interconnections and implications. The Anthropocene, as part of the geological nomenclature now, signals the frightening ability of humans, with our weight of numbers and ability to extract energy from the underground, to change what previously was thought of as wildly beyond our control – atmosphere, climate, glaciers, makeup of the ocean – change that will end up a layer of the underland.

Likely to be unconcerned

The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, Thomas Laqueur, Princeton University Press.

Saint Francis told his followers to throw his dead body on the rubbish tip when he died. (They didn’t oblige.) This is one story that isn’t related in Thomas Laqueur’s massive and not necessarily morbid book, but it parallels the Greek philosopher Diogenes’ question (which Laqueur’s book is largely a response to), why don’t we just throw dead bodies to the dogs (seeing as we generally recognise that when our loved ones are dead they are no longer ‘here’)?

Dead bodies aren’t, contrary to popular opinion, generally unhealthy, but, Laqueur suggests, an un-cared-for dead body is mentally unhealthy for the living. The living have an understandable connection to the recently deceased, and we also generally share an unease about what might happen to our own bodies after we die, even if we can also admit we are likely to be unconcerned at the time. Therefore, despite being dead, the dead still have a pull on the living.

Care for the dead is culturally ubiquitous (and can be traced back to the earliest of human archaeological evidence) and is not dependent on religious views of the afterlife. We can see this in the atheist Soviet Union’s reverence for and preservation of Lenin’s body (although there was also the issue there that just maybe modern science would be able to resuscitate Lenin).

In his recent book Underland Robert Macfarlane writes that sometimes we are more tender to the dead than the living. (Maybe this is because, like babies, the dead completely lack autonomy.) In previous centuries riots and revolutions were caused by relatives of those dead disturbed by military or other authorities. Sometimes this reverence took on weird (to modern readers) forms, such as radical writer William Cobbett ‘owning’ the bones of Tom Paine, whose skull Cobbett engraved with his name (a not uncommon practice, Laqueur tells us).

We have a connection to the dead because there is something of the person still there, even if, as Francis recognised, the soul is gone and the body is dirt. Saint Augustine agreed, but suggested that reverence for the dead helps the living and shows a religious disposition. The body is still remnant, like a dead person’s clothing and possessions, and we connect memories to physical objects. People are combinations of the physical and mental.

Despite traceable universals, Laqueur also tracks shifts in the way we care for the dead. Churchyards were a change from the ancient practice of keeping the dead away from sacred spaces. (Early Christianity’s reverence for the dead perhaps fits with their care of the other marginalised entities in society, orphans and widows and the like.) Christian churches became sacred partly because of the proximity of the dead. Whereas in the classical era the dead were often thought of as exiled, in early Christianity the porousness of the division between the physical and supernatural also included connections to the dead. The treatment of relics evolved from the desire to be buried near the saintly. Augustine, despite saying that the fate of the body didn’t determine the fate of the soul, thought that the saints’ dead bodies had power and being buried near them certainly couldn’t hurt.

The English churchyard (where Laqueur spends a lot of time wandering, at least metaphorically) was a natural extension, a community of believers, both living and dead, sharing sacred space. But who was allowed in became an issue. At one end of the scale, proximity to the altar showed the status of the gentry, and being buried in the church rather than outside it became a matter of pride. In contrast, there was debate about how far from the church the poor, suicides, the unbaptised and irreligious should be, where they should be relegated, and whether they should be allowed into the churchyard at all.

This changed fundamentally in the early nineteenth century with the creation of city cemeteries, beyond the direct control of clergy. Laqueur also notes the shifts from church to government and from priest to doctor in care of the dying. With the latter came a shift from death being a community affair to being hidden away. Death (as distinct from a funeral) shifted from public to private, and from being thought of as natural to something akin to disease.

These topics are but the tip of the gravestone in Laqueur’s monumental book. He also covers the Mormon collection and storage of millions of names of the dead in a vault under Utah, the deathbed confessions of atheists and their use in propaganda, hysteria over dead bodies, especially of the poor, piling up in the eighteenth century graveyards of Paris and London, which were as crowded above as below, and the proliferation of Great War monuments to the dead. Through all this, his careful attendance to the way practices change indicates that the dead don’t always rest peacefully.

Impression of being unimpressed

A recent London Review of Books reviewer suggested of Robert Macfarlane that the landscapes in his books are strangely depopulated. This fits with his penchant for wild places, as the title of an earlier book of his has it, and his intention is to draw the eye (or brain) away from the urban landscape we are familiar with to the natural one we are increasingly blind to. But the reviewer has a point.

That criticism could not be made of James Rebanks, and indeed Rebanks’ intention is somewhat the opposite of Macfarlane’s, even if they share a spirit, and can be both lumped into the species of new nature writers that are spinning out some wonderfully evocative and important prose. Rebanks lives and works in the Lakes District as a sheep farmer – a shepherd – and even tweets on shepherding (imagine!). He wants, in his book The Shepherd’s Life, to refocus on the landscape of this northern part of England, from the typical tourist view, which tends to see the landscape as a place of wild beauty and ignores the farmers (or worse, sees them as intruders in an outdoor photo opportunity), to the working landscape of himself, his family and neighbours and their ancestors, who work and live through not just the district’s beautiful summers but also through its ferocious winters.

Rebanks is not your typical shepherd – local boy fails school, goes back onto farm, discovers books, ends up at Oxford while farming on weekends and now consults for the UN. The book’s narrative has a certain arc that privileges the traditional life over all that other stuff that goes on in the city, and clearly Rebanks downplays his more sophisticated (if that is not too much of a loaded word) doings against the earthy, simple farm life. (A reader may at some point wonder, ‘if he failed school then what is he doing writing this book?’) This is all fine and good, but there is also an element of anti-intellectualism here, and even though Rebanks is an Oxford scholar, he gives the impression of being unimpressed with the intellectual life, which is not as simply practical as sheep farming (itself something of a stereotype. Architecture or medicine, say, have their practical uses and tend to work better after some academic training). It is a worthy thing for Rebanks to defend shepherding as intelligence ‘tuned to a different channel’, but there is always the danger of defence turning to offence.

This is a downside of Rebanks’ bluntness, but otherwise his book is a corrective to the kind of nature writing that carries us off into the uninhabited zones, encouraging the feeling that the world would be better off without human beings (as well it might, but this is a strangely self-loathing utopian dream). Rebanks’ writing has its affinities with the writing of Iain Sinclair, who writes in an urban context but focuses on people and things flying under the radar of modern society, and its definitions of worthy pursuits, success, utility and beauty.

 

Longing for belonging

Fish Ladder, Katharine Norbury, Bloomsbury

Katharine Norbury decides to make a trek alongside a river, from the sea to its source, partly inspired by an old book, partly to make an emotional connection – to ‘complete something’ – after a miscarriage. After some false starts she settles on a Scottish river where salmon run. But the book is more than this story, and like a river it meanders through various landscapes, physical and mental, as she describes the relationships with her nine year-old daughter and adoptive mother, her serious illness, her father’s death, and her search for her birth mother. All the while, this narrative is punctuated by her careful descriptions of wilderness and water. She has a fondness for the fanciful descriptive analogy, perhaps in emulation of her friend and fellow nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s renowned work (though she does have a tendency to repeat particular descriptive words she likes, which noticeably jars).

Christianity sits at the edges of the book. She compares groves to cathedrals, quotes Jesuit poet Gerald Manley Hopkins, visits Fountains Abbey, relays stories of saints and sacred wells, and visits the convent where she was born. And she quotes C S Lewis’ description of a sort of holy longing – indeed, much of the book centres on an adopted child’s longing to find a sense of belonging.

 

Noticing everything

Robert Macfarlane is a perceptive writer, and there is no better proof of this than the soaring, comprehensive, inspiring introduction he has written for a recent edition of Nan Shepherd’s nature writing classic, The Living Mountain, which Macfarlane praises as worthy of keeping company with Chatwin’s In Patagonia and Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. Macfarlane notes Shepherd’s close and patient observation, her descriptions of how that observation can be warped by the environment, her preference for just being in the mountains, rather than conquering them, and her physical, rather than merely intellectual or emotional, reaction to the landscape.

Indeed, when she is looking Shepherd notices everything – colours, shadows, textures. She spends two pages describing the various patterns freezing water makes. But she also notes the illusions of the mountains – the way the air can distort distances, the way mist and snow obscures and highlights. She describes how the mind shifts in its perceptions, that looking is not merely a matter of eyesight. And she shows how being in the natural world brings alive our bodies, which Macfarlane suggests is becoming more critical as many of us live somewhat removed from nature.

 

Loitering in the liminal

Philip Hoare’s The Sea Inside is a mighty fine piece of sustained observation, as nature writing should be. Unlike, say, a David Attenborough documentary, it is also a personal one. He is something of a lost soul, cruising the world for sightings of whales and birds. There is something appropriate about his loitering in the liminal spaces, gazing after half-glimpsed creatures. He hints at darkness in his past and comments that home doesn’t really exist. Nature writing often tends, perhaps against expectations, to be more personal than cold scientific observation, and whether it be Ronald Blythe or his predecessor Francis Kilvert, or Iain Sinclair (who is a sort-of suburban nature-writer) or the recent wonder The Old Ways, from Robert Macfarlane, nature writing, as it describes the outside world, can often have things to say, perhaps inadvertently, about the inner one, as perhaps Hoare’s title hints at. Following on from his book about Moby Dick (another book that purports to be about the “outer” world of whaling but is as much about the inner world), Hoare observes the sea and its inhabitants and fringe-dwellers in the southern part of England before venturing wider to Tasmania and New Zealand, in search of, or in lament of, the thylacine and the moa. Along the way he mentions the desert fathers, Thomas Merton, and the preposterously good looking (female) whaling captain Valentina Orlikova, who even featured on the cover of Harpers Bazaar. And like the aforementioned Macfarlane, Hoare gives us a reversal of the usual map of the world, which places the oceans as blank frames for the land. Hoare quotes Arthur C Clarke, who said that our planet should more realistically be called ‘The Ocean’. Writers are often thought of as hunched over a desk, and far from outdoorsy, but Hoare and Macfarlane dispel that image for a more Hemingwayesque one, with their icy swimming, rough sleeping, and early morning rises.

Warmed by the intensity

One is at risk of being overwhelmed by the forest of recommendations adorning the paperback version of Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways. Thankfully the hype is justified. This is an extraordinarily piece of nature writing; one is warmed by the intensity. Like the writing of Iain Sinclair, Macfarlane sees all the nuances, history and beauty in landscapes we would normally pass by, as well as in some sublime places, such as the Himalayas.

The book starts with a closely observed stroll in the midnight snow, and from there, amongst other journeys, he takes a boat ride in the UK’s north, and takes an eerie walk on the treacherous mudflats of the coast of East Anglia, where sky blurs with water, and walkers can easily become disoriented. All the while he refers to writers who have travelled before him, such as the poet Edward Thomas, who made his name as a nature writer before becoming famous as a poet, and who was a chronicler of walks. Macfarlane’s emphasis on the paths of England give the book’s title its double meaning, both in the sense of the traditional, and, more literally, ‘ways’ being paths in the countryside. As Ronald Blythe points out in relation to the poetry of John Clare, country paths used to be sites full of traffic and stories.

Not coincidence exactly

I have been reading Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful, acclaimed The Old Ways, and he takes much inspiration for his perambulations (both mental and physical) from the English poet Edward Thomas (above), who was a nature and travel writer before he was a poet. (Interestingly, it was Robert Frost who recognised the poetry lurking within Thomas’s prose and encouraged him to try poetry.) Macfarlane says he didn’t realise that while writing his own book (partly) on Thomas, Matthew Hollis was writing one also. I recently happened to pick up a copy of Hollis’s biography, All Roads Lead to France, not really knowing who Thomas was, but thinking that he looked interesting and was someone I probably should know about. In fact I nearly didn’t get the book, because one needs to curb one’s book collecting somehow. I thought, why yet another book on someone I don’t even know? But I have often found that these are exactly the type of books that I find later to be a dot in a line of connecting dots. I have often found that I have discovered someone hitherto unknown to me, only to read about them in subsequent books I pick up.

Now, this is not coincidence exactly, or some fortuitous alignment of the stars or whatever, after-all one would expect this sort of thing to happen from time to time. It’s only logical. But it is lovely how books are rarely self-contained, and a library will be a collection of books that share more than simply a connection of physical proximity.

Sometimes this can be a negative. The more one is referred to other writers from our current reading material, the more one is aware of the deficiencies in one’s knowledge.