“The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful. Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives). Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions). Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets). Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.”
“Force yourself to see more deeply.”
“The underland is vital to the material structures of contemporary existence, as well as our memories, myths and metaphors.”
“Our ‘flat perspectives’ feel increasingly inadequate to the deep worlds we inhabit, and to the deep time legacies we are leaving.”
“‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland. Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years.”
“When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.”
“It is a paradox of his work that in order to watch the stars he must descend far from the sun. Sometimes in the darkness you can see more clearly.”
“To perceive matter that casts no shadow, you must search not for its presence but for its consequence.”
“In a landscape where the earth was once raked and gouged in search of a highly valued rare metal, the search is now ongoing for a substance that is plentiful beyond imagination and of no worth at all.” (dark matter)
“My sense is that the search for dark matter has produced an elaborate, delicate edifice of presuppositions, and a network of worship sites, also known as laboratories, all dedicated to the search for an invisible universal entity which refuses to reveal itself. It seems to resemble what we call religion rather more than what we call science.”
“Above all the Anthropocene compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weigh what we will leave behind, as the landscapes we are making now will sink into strata, becoming underlands. What is the history of things to come? What will be our future fossils? As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping.”
“The Anthropocene requires us to undertake a retrospective reading of the current moment, however—a “paleontology of the present” in which we ourselves have become sediments, strata and ghosts. It asks that we imagine a single figure: a hypothetical post-human geologist who—millions of years into the future, long after the extinction of our species—will examine the underland for what it reveals of the epoch of anthropos.”
“A trace fossil is the sign left in the rock record by the impress of life rather than life itself. … A trace fossil is a bracing of space by a vanished body, in which absence serves as a sign. We all carry trace fossils within us—the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. … Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace—and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.”
“As someone lucky to live in a long love, I recognize the gradual growing-towards and subterranean unspoken communication which can sometimes tilt troublingly towards silence, and the sharing of both happiness and pain. I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings. Theirs, too, seems to me then a version of love’s work.”
“I am reminded once more of how resistant the underland remains to our usual forms of seeing; how it still hides so much from us, even in our age of hyper-visibility and ultra-scrutiny.”
Mycologist Merlin Sheldrake: “The forest is always more complicated than we can ever dream of. Trees make meaning as well as oxygen. To me, walking through a wood is like taking a tiny part in a mystery play run across multiple timescales. Maybe, then, what we need to understand the forest’s underland is a new language altogether—one that doesn’t automatically convert it to our own use values. Our present grammar militates against animacy; our metaphors by habit and reflex subordinate and anthropomorphize the more-than-human world. Perhaps we need an entirely new language system to talk about fungi. We need to speak in spores.”
“The real underland of language is not the roots of single words, but rather the soul of grammar and syntax, where habits of speech and therefore also habits of thought settle and interact over long periods of time.”
“Words are world-makers—and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene.
“If there is human meaning to be made of the wood wide web, it is surely that what might save us as we move forwards into the precarious, unsettled centuries ahead is collaboration: mutualism, symbiosis, the inclusive human work of collective decision-making extended to more-than-human communities.”
(re: Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams”): “itself an exploration of the currents and flows of a psychological underland—the starless rivers of the id that rush beneath the sunlit uplands of the conscious mind, here and there surging powerfully up.”
“Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope—and this is another kind of oppression.”
“Ice has a memory. It remembers in detail and it remembers for a million years or more. … It remembers and it tells—tells us that we live on a fickle planet, capable of swift shifts and rapid reversals.”
“Ice is a recording medium and a storage medium. It collects and keeps data for millennia. … To imagine ice as a ‘medium’ in this sense might also be to imagine it as a ‘medium’ in the supernatural sense: a presence permitting communication with the dead and the buried, across gulfs of deep time, through which one might hear distant messages from the Pleistocene.”
“As a human mind might, late in life, struggle to remember its earliest moments—buried as they are beneath an accumulation of subsequent memories—so the oldest memory of ice is harder to retrieve, and more vulnerable to loss.”