"Paths run through people as surely as they run through places"
Having read 'The Old Ways' during year 1, I was so struck with the way in which Macfarlane thinks so profoundly about our place in time, and how our journey as a species impacts the next. His philosophy (I guess you could call it that) really chimes with the things I've been looking at particularly in relation to old paths and tracks, trodden over centuries. But I'm linking this physical concept with the neurological, finding a visual narrative for how we experience life events and memories on a cellular level.
How long have we been neurologically impacted by where we are and what we experience? Is this something early neolithic people would have experienced too or is it the result of the way we live now?
Refs:
Landscape, Travel and Connection - Robert Macfarlane [2012] | Intelligence Squared - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=321FqIO_y2U
Book: Underland: A Deep Time Journey Hamish Hamilton books published 2019
Short film: Are we being good ancestors? A journey through deep time
Intelligence squared talk: An interesting question posed by the poet Edward Thomas as referenced by Macfarlane in this online talk:
"How we are affirmed and scattered by; how we are consoled and troubled by; the landscapes through which we move, and the places in which we live"
Landscape and the human heart: "I'm interested in the ways in which our minds and our moods and our imaginations and our identities are influenced by the textures and the weathers and the forms and the slopes and the curves and the creatures remembered and actual of the places we inhabit. I'm interested in the ways in which the feel of the world influences our feeling for the world"
Paths connect to real locations, but they also lead inwards to the self.
Mapping melancholy and hopes.
"We are porous to the world. I think our moods and emotions are configured by our surroundings in ways that are hard to speak about but powerful to experience"
Book: Underland
There's so much in this book I haven't put it all down here but wanted to record a few key quotes that will be useful for me to come back to...
On the chapter titled, Descending -
'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 : epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates' (epochs is an event or a time that begins a new period or development and an aeon is an indefinite or very long period of time).
While this largely refers to the geological physical matters of time - so much here can be mirrored in our own inner time as people. How we can keep hold of it in some way in our bodies.
'At its best, 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'
I think of cave painting here. The earliest form of sending a message to the world perhaps??
Then later, a passage that really translates to the idea of hidden or buried landscapes in a psychological sense: ' ...that darkness might be a medium of vision, and that descent may be a towards revelation rather than deprivation. Our common verb 'to understand' itself nears an old sense of passing beneath something in order fully to comprehend it. To 'discover' is to 'reveal by excavation', 'to descend and bring to the light', to 'fetch up from depth'. These are ancient associations.
'A subsurface network of echoes, patterns and connections'
On the chapter titled 'Burial' (definitely one that caught my eye)
'In burial, the human body becomes a component of the earth, returned as dust to dust - inhumed, restored to humility, rendered humble. Just as the living need places to inhabit, so it is often in the nature of our memory-making to wish to be able to address our dead at particular sites on the Earth's surface. The burial chamber, the gravestone, the hillside on which ashes have been scattered, the cairn: these are places to which the living can return and where loss might be laid to rest'.
'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 fades folds as strata, gouts as lava, floats as plates, shifts as shingle. over aeons, rock absorbs, transforms, from seabed to summit. Down here too, the boundaries between life and not-life are less clear.
When talking of a visit to an ancient barrow in the Mendip hills, Somerset:
'Modern archaeologists excavating a Bronze Age barrow in a Mendips wood find the remains of a woman placed in a funerary urn. The barrow had already been ruptured by deep ploughing with the cemetery was planted with trees early in the twentieth century, but the urn somehow survived. The archaeologists disinter the urn and study the remains of the woman that it holds. once their work is done, one evening while the white moths flit in the shadows of trees, the rebury the woman's remains in a replica urn. As they do so one of them speaks a blessing at the graveside - a reburial ritual performed across the space of several thousand years, spoken out of respect and also, perhaps, out of apology......We lie on the barrow's turf for so long that, when we leave, I look back and see that we have pressed imprints of our own bodies into the grass of that burial site, leaving outlines of what is to come'.
Short film: Are we being good ancestors? A journey through deep time:
"It seems to be me that a vital part of good ancestry is not knowing. Is relinquishing control over the exact outcome of one's actions. But instead planting those acorns, and trusting that they will grow, through deeper time than one's own, flourishing first into trees, and then forests that are thriving and irreplaceable communities of life".
The idea of not knowing, or sewing seeds that will flourish over time. I think of Barton, and how the longevity of that site has been just that. A seemingly bare stretch of land that was planted with saplings by people who probably won't be alive when the woodland comes into full maturity. The idea of bedding down into the soil, of being there with a community - not just a community of mourners or those experiencing grief - but also those who are alive now, experiencing life now. This to me is represented by my daughter, and my own evolved experience of that place being so changed as I've become a parent, and as the years have past, moving me further away from grief but with branches of it still clinging to me.