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[hamletofficial]

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. Just a few inches of soil is enough to keep startling secrets, hold astonishing cargo: an eighth of the world’s total biomass comprises bacteria that live below ground, and a further quarter is of fungal origin.

- Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time journey.

[hamletofficial]

As Merlin speaks I feel a quick, eerie sense of the world shifting irreversibly around me. Ground shivering beneath feet, knees, skin. If only your mind were a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning . . .

- Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time journey.

[hamletofficial]

Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism, I find it hard not to imagine these arboreal relations in terms of tenderness, generosity and even love: the respectful distance of their shy crowns, the kissing branches that have pleached with one another, the unseen connections forged by root and hyphae between seemingly distant trees. I remember something Louis de Bernières has written about a relationship that endured into old age: ‘we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.’ As someone lucky to live in a long love, I recognize that gradual growing-towards and subterranean intertwining; the things that do not need to be said between us, the 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.

[hamletofficial]

Living wood, left long enough, behaves as a slow-moving fluid. Like glacial ice – like the halite I had seen in Boulby, like the calcite I had seen in the Mendips, like stained glass in medieval churches which, over centuries, gradually thickens out at the base of each pane – living wood flows, given time.

- Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A deep time journey.

[hamletofficial]

[Weakly interacting massive particles, WIMPs] – like neutrinos, nicknamed ‘ghost particles’ – have scant regard for the world of baryonic matter. WIMPs traverse our livers, skulls and guts in their trillions each second. Neutrinos fly through the Earth’s crust, mantle and solid iron-nickel core without touching a single atom as they go. To these subatomic particles, we are the ghosts and ours the shadow-world, made at most of a diaphanous webwork.

- Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A deep time journey.

[hamletofficial]

Limestone, in particular, has long been a geology of burial – in part because it is so common globally, in part because its erosive tendencies create so many natural crypts into which bodies may be laid, and in part because limestone is itself, geologically speaking, a cemetery. Limestone is usually formed of the compressed bodies of marine organisms – crinoids and coccolithophores, ammonites, belemnites and foraminifera – that died in waters of ancient seas and then settled in their trillions on those seabeds. These creatures once built their skeletons and shells out of calcium carbonate, metabolizing the mineral content of the water in which they lived to create intricate architectures. In this way limestone can be seen as merely one phase in a dynamic earth cycle, whereby mineral becomes animal becomes rock; rock that will in time – in deep time – eventually supply the calcium carbonate out of which new organisms will build their bodies, thereby re-nourishing the same cycle into being again.

- Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A deep time journey.

[hamletofficial]

Burial often aspires to preservation – of memory, of matter – for time behaves differently in the underland, where it might be slowed or stayed.

- Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time journey.

[hamletofficial]

And among this new generation of the forest’s linguists and mappers is a young plant scientist called Merlin Sheldrake.

Truly, that is his name.

Omg, Merlin Sheldrake mention

(For some context, Underland was published in 2019 and Entangled life was published in 2020)

[hamletofficial]

What these narratives all suggest is something seemingly paradoxical: that darkness might be a medium of vision, and that descent may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation.

- Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A deep time journey.

[hamletofficial]

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.

- Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A deep time journey.

[hamletofficial]

There is dangerous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does our behaviour matter, when Homo sapiens will have disappeared from the Earth in the blink of a geological eye? Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd – crushed to irrelevance. Assertions of value seem futile. A flat ontology entices: all life is equally insignificant in the face of eventual ruin. The extinction of a species or an ecosystem scarcely matters in the context of the planet’s cycles of erosion and repair. We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite – deep time as a radical perspective, provoking us to action not apathy. For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us.

- Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A deep time journey.

[hamletofficial]

So these scenes from the underland unfold along the walls of this impossible chamber, down in the labyrinth beneath the riven ash. 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.

- Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A deep time journey.

[hamletofficial]

Space is behaving strangely – and so too is time. Time moves differently here in the underland. It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows.

- Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A deep time journey.

[hamletofficial]

Oh, this is going to be fun.

Starting Underland :)

[hamletofficial]

Starting Underland :)

[hamletofficial]

the girls are FIGHTINGGGGGGGG

[hamletofficial]

WOWIE thanks a lot for the attention on my previous post!! Here's another one for you, hehe! Hopefully I will finish all of the illustrations 'till the end of July