The Feet of the Dead, the Feet of the Living

In class, we have read sections from Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks. Today, however, I want to think about two passages from his most recent book, Underland. Underland explores the world beneath our feet: the strange tunnels and caves, the possibilities of splunking, the exploration of rock formations tens of thousands of years old as well as the exploitation of that world through mining and other industrialized ventures. The "underland" is a magical space of deep time as well as a corporate space of resource extraction.

The first passage struck me for its attention to sheltering:

"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 to lose, and that which we love and wish to save." (8)

The second passage resonates with our reading of Affliction:

"I have for some time now been haunted by the Saami vision of the underland as a perfect inversion of the human realm, with the ground always the mirror-line, such that 'the feet of the dead, who must walk upside down, touch those of the living, who stand upright.' The intimacy of the posture is moving to me--the dead and the living standing sole to sole. Seeing photographs of the early hand-marks left on the cave walls of Maltravieso, Lascaux or Sulawesi, I imagine laying my own palm precisely against the outline left by those unknown makers. I imagine, too, feeling a warm hand pressing through the cold rock, meeting mine fingertip to fingertip in an open-handed encounter across time" (18).