Delve

Welcome back to Edges and Entries, where I share discussion of those spaces and states between worlds, so far introducing some of my thoughts on doors and coastlines. I do this through a brief essay and collection of ideas, vignettes, and observations which I try to wrangle into something approaching sense, followed by a photograph of mine which fits and, finally, a piece of fiction (usually—sometimes, I experiment with other ideas), whether flash fiction, an excerpt from something longer, or a poem.

As I mentioned in the last season, season three (this one!) is called Underworld. I want to look at those places beneath us, those spaces which are hollowed out, which dig deep into the earth, or form from crack and fissure, seep and deep time.

There shall be ten letters in this series, and I plan on sharing one every two weeks. This gives me space in between to share other things or to pause, giving myself a little leeway when needed. Time is difficult to corral at this moment.

Delve

There are places in this world of ours, places concealed, places now lost, which were our homes—homes over generation after generation, decade after decade and, in many cases, millennium after millennium.

Shelter is one of the most important things to us, it divides us into the ‘normal’ and the homeless, it protects from weather, from the wild, from each other, it is home. It is no surprise that children, left free range and semi-feral will, at some point, always, always build dens, create a home-from-home, a place to be themselves, unshackled yet with their own strictures—what’s the password?

And the ultimate shelter, for the vast majority of our existence was the underworld. In some places on this remarkable planet of ours, it still is. We pass from the light through and into darkness, we impose our will on that space and make it ours, whether by drilling tunnels to house our underground rail networks, platforms lit with sickly fluorescence, or by taking ochre and charcoal and capturing the spirit images the rock already shows us, those horses, bison, mammoth, species we knew, hunted, and revered.

Caves are our home still, we’ve just learnt how to build them from different materials, caves in the sky, caves stacked high on one another. Gone are the cave bear and cave lion, our predators are now almost exclusively human—whether real or, more likely, feared and imagined. We lock our doors and do our best to ignore the lions.

Our cities are never two dimensional, there are hollows and hidden places, networks beneath our feet, some in use, many forgotten. As on high, so it is below, and those who run the rooftops often also moonlight beneath, tracing routes through sewer and quarry, catacomb and buried street. A constant drip drip drip and muffled echo of…something…in the dark their soundtrack, sound sometimes travelling surprisingly far, sometimes absorbed and deadened within a very short distance. The rules here are not those you are used to.

As back then, we still decorate these tendrils into the earth, scratching our names, recording our presence, the scent of chemicals replacing that of the ground rock, spray here, graffiti there. When your metro, your tube, your underground pauses in tunnel somewhere below, and you see a splash of paint on the walls, you are an archaeologist, Howard Carter with his ‘wonderful things’. Some of those paintings and tags are from artists who are no longer alive. In other places, I have entered a bunker and seen the names of the men who served scratched into the walls, in others, the names of those who died or disappeared defending their homes, their own caves.

We love to delve and we love to tunnel, we dig out and enhance, we smooth and drill. We cover naked rock with clothing of steel and concrete—an illusion of strength and normality— umbilicals of electric, of air, water, gas, and fibre, all stretching out, keeping us alive and informed. We try and make these places safe, ours, but we also know they will remain wild, no matter how we sanitise and conceal their true nature. Mud will be mud, stone is always stone, and the earth itself is always restless—we exist only on a thin slice of relative stability, below, it churns and it spins. It takes little for that crust to slip.

Passing through, whether by walking a flight of steps or taking the escalator down to a platform, or by slipping through a manhole and heading down, rung after rung, or by worming our bodies through clay-slick, wet gaps, toes pushing us along, arms stretched out, pulling—these are all forgotten memories of a pilgrimage into something Other, something we have always known cannot quite be tamed, a world we visit and use, yet a world not quite ours.

Such is the underworld, whether cave or crypt, river vanishing into rock, only to reappear somewhere distant, roots clawing through all, sewer or passage, lava tube or mine shaft, pot holes, tunnels and pipes, cracks, crevices, fissures, wells, cellars, dungeons, labyrinth and catacomb—all are between this world of ours, the daylight or night-lit world, and another: the Underworld. I think it deserves capitalisation.

How do you feel underground? Does it intrigue or inspire fear? If you find a hole, will you shine a light down there and investigate, perhaps slip inside, or do you give it a wide berth? What has been your favourite (or least-favourite) experience of the Underworld?

Stone Dancing

The light from the fat and rush lantern dappled and danced, bringing the rock to life, shadows adding movement, texture, and reality.

We were deep now, deeper than I had ever been, led into the earth itself by trust and belief, seeking the stone pasture we would paint, waiting for it to reveal its nature in that movement of shadow and light.

We watched the light, knowing it could be extinguished if there was not enough air to breathe, but we could do nothing about those places where the air itself was death, nothing, that is, but trust. And trust we did, or we would not be down here.

Outside, beyond the wide cave porch, it was the end of winter, the sun had already begun to warm and coax the land into growth once more, the animals were moving but, down here, there were no seasons, only darkness and the sudden sound of dripping water, deadened by the cave itself, all life removed from the noise, or echoed through the space and, perhaps, time itself.

In the stream we followed and, at times, crossed, strange things moved, strange white wormlike creatures we knew we could not touch for fear of disturbing the ancestors, angering them with our meddling.

Sometimes, we followed prints of brother bear, sometimes we passed a wall polished by their flanks as they found their way in and out every autumn and every spring, sometimes we entered a taller space and lifted our lanterns high, to where, half again as tall as the tallest of us, we could see marks left by the claws of bears now long returned to the earth. Sometimes, the stone itself had grown over the bones of the bears, stone which flowed and formed so very slowly, the passing of time and seasons here different to that above under the light. Did we ourselves slow? Some of us believed this, others thought not. I was unsure—it was certainly the case that our heightened awareness led to a different way of acknowledging time, similar to when we would share the Winter Mushrooms.

We were doing the same as those bears, leaving our own marks, revealing only what the rock told us.

‘Here,’ I said, my voice hushed and strange to my ears, ‘look.’

I raised my lantern and the others did the same, the stone here had called me. Was it really me, talking?

‘Look.’ I repeat the sound and test it in my mouth, my hand tracing the curves without touching the surface of the rock itself, the lines, spreading my fingers to reveal the mane, moving my thumb to share the depression where the eye was already staring back at us. ‘This is it. They want to run.’

We paused and watched as the horses moved across the stone, their heads tossing, nostrils flaring, then the work to help them cross over began. The rock would be grateful.

Until the next time, a big thank you for reading and, if you have enjoyed this first foray underground, do please share with anyone you think might appreciate it.