Hello from a finally-spectacular autumn in Maryland. A client-friend sent me this picture of her kitchen, along with a lovely note of thanks for the work we did together ten+ years ago. I thanked her right back, knowing how lucky I was to have that opportunity. It was the only time I did a complete gut renovation of a house where we subtracted rather than added space. Polly Bart and her team from Greenbuilders1 did a fantastic job. (Look at that reflection in the foreground countertop!)
If you’re a fan of Joseph Cornell’s quirky, mysterious boxes, you’ll enjoy my collaboration with
and — our responses to one of his more enigmatic creations.October’s “Talking Back to Walden” considered how trees teach us to let go and let be. You can read it here. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next monthly installment.
Last week, we considered the cellar’s associations with refuge, permanence, persistence, memory, self-sufficiency, and revealing layers of the past. Today, we’ll explore the cellar’s underworld connections to mysterious realms, both real and imagined. Enjoy. (Links to the full series are at the bottom of this post.)
By virtue of being beneath the surface, the cellar connects, imaginatively and sometimes literally, to unknown realms. As the place of origin described in Part 2, the cellar is a shadowy center from which to set out on adventure. The nature of such exploration depends on whether you start from a city house or a country house. As we saw last week, city houses built on constructions from previous centuries might literally connect to past civilizations and even tombs.
City cellars may also connect through secret passages to other houses, networked with human technology, like the wine caves of the charming old city of Beaune in France’s Burgundy region. Each vineyard has its presence in a storefront. You descend and find yourself wandering cool wine cellars, crisscrossing beneath the busyness of the town. In my imagination, I enter one winery’s tasting room and connect via the cellar-tunnels to another, popping up in a different part of town. I just spent a fruitless half-hour searching for a map of these cellars, so this may be a complete fabrication.
One very real underworld network is found in Paris. In his marvelous book, Underland, Robert Macfarlane narrates an epic adventure exploring the sewers, caves, catacombs and limestone tunnels of underground Paris, guided by a multi-layered map that sounds like something invented by J.K. Rowling. He describes these underground subtractions as the negative impression of the city—its famous sun-kissed buildings were built with stone cut from this subterranean world.
“The invisible city exists across multiple levels of depth, each connected to the other by staircases and wells. . . . The map’s place names traverse a range of cultural registers, from the classical to the surreal to the military-industrial. The Room of Cubes. The Passage of the Claustrophile. The Boutique of Psychosis.”2
In contrast to city houses, the cellars of country houses and castles connect more directly to natural places: caverns, mountains, water sources. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard writes of the undergrounds of legendary fortified castles with mysterious passages running beneath the enclosing walls, ramparts, and even the moat. The heart of the castle might communicate directly with the forest. Chateaux could be imagined as living beings, planted on hillsides, rooted into the earth with a cluster of cellars.
“This house with cosmic roots will appear to us as a stone plant growing out of the rock up to the blue sky of a tower.”3
Bachelard reports that, in a story by Bosco called “L’Antiquaire,” the cellar is a cosmic place, a labyrinth of corridors carved out of the rock. The wandering reader encounters a body of murky water—a primordial spring appearing out of the darkness. It has been entrapped for so long, “its very nature appeared to have been changed.” Bachelard writes:
“The house, the cellar, the deep earth, achieve totality through depth. The house has become a natural being . . . [which] would not flourish if it did not have subterranean water at its base.”4
This connection between cellar and water-source can be literal, as with this Pennsylvania cave cellar. An opening in the wall allows cool air from the well to circulate freely into the cellar. Other cellars led to escape tunnels in case of attack or siege by displaced Native people.
In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the cellar enables transition from the known to the unknown. A secret passage to the forbidden library begins at the altar of a chapel in the church and leads down through the catacomb. This direct connection between the cellar and an underworld place of death invigorates our fear of mortality, which is all the more impressive considering the protagonists are traveling with no idea of who or what they will encounter on their nocturnal prowling.
In Jorge Luis Borges’ story, “The Immortal,” the hero must find his way through a series of underground chambers beneath the City of the Immortals, in his attempt to pass from the outside world into this mythical place. After much disoriented and disconcerting wandering, he arrives at a vertical opening to the blue sky above. “Thus I was afforded this ascension from the blind region of the dark interwoven labyrinths into the resplendent City.”5
His climb is a metaphor for his rebirth. He leaves behind his known, mortal world to wander blindly in pursuit of a place which he does not comprehend. In both stories, the underground is a place of trials to test one’s mettle and prove one’s worth—a risk worth taking to reach the almost incomprehensible destination.
Next week, we’ll elaborate on the cellar’s architecture, from the thick walls that hold back the weight of the earth, to the steep stair that connects the underworld to day-world and beyond.
Read past installments of “Digging into the cellar” here:
Part 2: Where we encounter deep time, birth, death, and a return to origins
Part 3: Finding refuge, permanence and timelessness
Part 5: Cosmos, chaos, walls and stairs
Part 6: Social hierarchy and the unconscious
Part 7: Knowing and transforming our darkness
Robert Macfarlane, Underland (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p.20-22.
Bachelard, p.23.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal,” in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions Publ. Corp.., 1982), p.110.
Thinking of your cellars while reading @The Healthy Jew this morning on Israel’s historic tunnels that Jews built to escape from Romans. Tunnels of war are something else again.
Hi Julie! Fascinating essays about basements, I’m reading this piece in Iceland where it’s a cold dark morning. And while I can see stars in the sky I can imagine the being in the cavernous basements you describe! I love your writing! Larry says hi.
Hugs, Susan