Going underground 1

Undergorund is a good place to be. Deep underground where they can't get you, underground where it's dark. Like at the bottom of an ocean or the bottom of some deep sepulchral mine, blue-black, shifting, yet a more substantial, more solid physical state than being up and out in the open air. It is secret, fantastical, sublime. In many cultures and old religions, a sacred association was attached to "the underworld", the underground regions, like the Celts digging deep shafts to reach down, ever farther down into earth. You can get in touch with something intangible there, in the deepest cave, because of the sensory deprivation, the mild shocks of fear that fume hesitantly from your breath, like exhaust fumes, like respiratory waste peremptorilly exuded, like cursewords. Because of this, the depth at which you stand, the weight of silent earth above you, the darkness, your fears and emotions, your quick-morphing desires seem to spark and quiver from you, like little gurgles of electric orgasm, and seem in the darkness to take living and ominous form. The spirits that rise from you open their mouths and let out inaudible shrieks of primitive joy and fury, which you can nevertheless as shivers in your viscera, seismic, real, almost spiritual is the sensation.
The darkness of the deepest underground cavern is different from the stuffy and homely darkness of your bedroom at night, where grey-faced phantoms, the echoes of despondent old suicides, might so easily lurk. The darkness of the underground is far more ominous and blacker, more vast and unfeeling than the bitterest arctic night. The ghosts that may be found there are not the flickering recordings of dispossesed humanity found in suburbs and forgotten industrial towns. There you might encounter the ghost of the earth itself, a sterner and more ancient ghost, but one that the ancient inhabitants of this island knew about from the earliest times. Their attitude to what lay beneath the ground in dark places was one of reverence and awe, giving way to intimate respect. This is the love of the earth itself. And why not because the earth deserves to be loved. The primitive heart, which saw more clearly than the modern heart, was always able to perceive this. But where i differ from Native American and a lot of other traditions is not to resolutely see the earth as a mother, a womb, always soft, bounteous, rolling, blossoming forth in fruit for her children....