Outdoors in my head
I’ve been reading a lot more than I used to, since the lock-down started. Social media channels are filled with Covid-19 news and there is only so much I can take. I’ve thrived on escapism for years and it is no different now — I continue to counter difficult phases with books and imagination.
Some of you have been privy to these flights of fancy in the past. You know about the high, moonlit rooms which made me imagine I was Heidi in her attic bed. Or the time I pretended I was the Rain Goddess, because I could just never have enough rain. Admittedly, these fantastic visions have reduced, but I still soothe myself into thinking that pushing the curtains away in the morning will reveal a crystal-clear lake, reflecting snow-topped, jagged peaks. You are never too old to imagine or to dream — try as you might.
(I did see the Alps eventually but in Austria: this counts in my book, if you consider that many of those dreams were dreamt before I understood that being adult didn’t necessarily mean sanction and wherewithal to go anywhere in the world. I’m still waiting to be able to produce rain at will and wake up to mountains.)
Recently, I haven’t had to rely on my imagination, because Robert Macfarlane has done most of the work in the pages of Underland, travelling through the most “exotic” landscapes of the underground, physically or through conversations and books (so far — I’m only a third through). He talks of mines and fungal networks in the soil; of the invisible cities of Paris, as explained by Walter Benjamin. Macfarlane couches his research in the most exquisite language. He piques your interest in things you didn’t know you could enjoy. He pushes you to think about things you take for granted. Sample this.
We tend to imagine stone as inert matter, obdurate in its fixity. But here in the rift it feels instead like a liquid briefly paused in its flow. Seen in deep time, stone folds as strata, gouts as lava, floats as plates, shifts as shingle. Over aeons, rock absorbs, transforms, levitates from seabed to summit.
Macfarlane is probably right when he says that much of our fascination tends to be for heights rather than depths. “Claustrophobia is surely the sharpest of all common phobias,” he says. “I have often noticed how claustrophobia — much more so than vertigo — retains its disturbing power even when being experienced indirectly as narrative or description. Hearing stories of confinement below ground, people shift uneasily, step away, look to the light — as if words alone could wall them in.” I can’t remember a single time when I sought an underground experience. The closest I came to geology was looking at minerals in a museum. Growing up in industrial towns, we heard mostly of the final product but rarely of what gave birth to it. We grew up and grew out of these claustrophobic small towns where little of note ever happened, and joined the busy hearts of cities. Rising, as he points out elsewhere, is considered progress. The eye automatically looks skywards.
I don’t seek to unravel the mysteries of the underground myself — I’m too fainthearted for that — but reading Macfarlane brings to life what I’ll never know on my own and puts me back in touch with nature. If this is what you seek as well, and if you will read only one book this year, let it be Underland.
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When I wonder what we will leave behind for future generations to uncover, I often think of monuments. Macfarlane thinks of these.
Among the relics of the Anthropocene, therefore, will be the fallout of our atomic age, the crushed foundations of our cities, the spines of millions of intensively farmed ungulates, and the faint outlines of some of the billions of plastic bottles we produce each year — the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.
It isn’t all gloom, though. As a reminder of what we have and should save, he invites you to lose yourself in good, pure language, evoking nature with such passion that concrete walls melt into vistas of green and blue, and the wind brushes past your ears.
Near dusk I am in the ridge-and-fold limestone valleys of the North Pennines. The easterly breeze of the morning has grown in force to a gale. At Rookhope I park and walk the mile or so up onto the moor above the village.
The wind at that height is chilling, though the late sun is still strong. Cottontails of bog-grass thrum in the wind, glowing like gas mantles. Four kestrels, strung in a ragged low line above the moor to my west, hold their positions with grace against the wind. I gorge on the glut of light, the fetch of space. Reaching a jumble of boulders I stand on the highest stone, face east and lean a little into the wind, feeling the push of its hand on my chest — holding me in part-flight, kestrelling me.
A memory comes back to me. G. and I are on the edge of the Grand Canyon, washing away the electric lights of Las Vegas and its excesses. We let the sudden rain shower, then the cloud-dispelling sunshine, carry us close to the rim, where we are buffeted by the wind. I’m no good with heights and my legs freeze, but G. perches himself on the ledge, and we are both one with the soil and the sky. The ancient rock, a riot of colours in its own subtle way, stretches out all around us, dotted with shrubs, exposing the dry lines where the Colorado or its tributaries must have once flowed. At that moment, we celebrate both heights and depths at once; we commune with space and earth and time, and realise what home can mean.
Once you’ve found home in these vast spaces, it is difficult to return to the confines of a routine in a concrete box — and when you do return, it is equally hard to tug yourself away (unless you are forced to stay in). Thankfully, we have Macfarlane, Annie Dillard, Ruskin Bond, and all the others who bring us the world through words and make hope feel less foolish.
Which is why I believe that some day, I’ll stumble upon another reservoir like the one in the Ooty clearing, or an enchanted wooden throne like the one in a forest in the South Downs. For now, G. and I lie on the terrace, squinting at the night sky till we can make out more stars and planets, hoping to catch a shooting star or two. The coconut palms remind us that the sea isn’t too far away. There will be electric lights, yes, but there will also be a silver beam reflecting off the waves, the smell of salt, and another homecoming.
