Event: Philip Marsden - Under a Metal Sky
Ysella Sims joins a journey through minerals, greed and wonder at a Quay Words literature event at Exeter Custom House
Down on Exeter’s quay on Thursday evening, you could feel the weekend inching closer. An Italian couple pored over a map; sun-pinked youngsters in crop tops and tiny shorts ambled up the cobbles towards town; kayakers drifted, along with the swans, down the dappled Exe. At tables outside the Prospect Inn, and on the benches beside the Transit shed - where once cargo was weighed, stored and loaded - office workers in rolled-up sleeves caught the last of the sun, together with a hubbub of early evening drinkers.
Inside the nearby 17th-century Custom House - once an excise centre for the busy port, now a visitor centre and arts and culture hub - an audience was gathering to hear Philip Marsden talk about his new book, Under a Metal Sky - a journey through minerals, greed and wonder. It’s a fitting venue, given the book’s exploration of our relationship with the natural world and its resources. In the adjoining rooms, an Art Work Exeter exhibition invited reflection on the way that we trade across cultures and nations in Pile Up! Worlds of Stuff.
Photo by Ysella Sims
The question of our relationship to the Earth is a timely one and comes, in his book, with an invitation to accept our connectedness to it. “We are hitched up to the entire universe,” he says. Although it’s often the animals, the flora, the “beautiful aspects” that get all the attention, ecological thinking has shifted, he says - no longer relying on distinct or binary assumptions about whether aspects of the natural world are ‘dead or alive, animal, vegetable or mineral’, but instead viewing them as interconnected systems that mirror each other. Even metals, rotting, and inanimate things are an equal part of the whole system, he says. “We are in relationship to all things.”
This relationship is reflected in the way Marsden draws on geology, history, culture, geography, archaeology, astronomy and science to explore the effect of metals on the practical, philosophical and imagined. Everything, he explains, is connected. It’s an approach which can help us to understand how our conceptual and physical relationships with the Earth shape our systems and the damage they cause.
He spoke with excitement about the discovery of the “hidden treasure beneath our feet”, and the sense of possibility and transformation that accompanied the revelation of metals - the “opening up of the Earth”. “We are surrounded by metal in our civilisation,” he says. “Everything has metal in it.” But it’s an excitement tempered by awareness of the greed and exploitation that so often accompany extractive industries. We need to think about the costs as well as the benefits, he says, about “what they’ve done to us as well as for us”.
Marsden describes the key moments that led to writing the book, beginning with a childhood obsession with rocks - breaking them open to discover a kind of treasure, “another reality; ammonites and fossils”. “My book is about the way we are hammering away at the surface of the world,” he tells us.
Another turning point came when he read Romanian historian Mircea Eliade’s The Forge and the Crucible, in which Eliade argues that the discovery of metallurgy was not just a technological leap, but also a catalyst for profound changes in human spirituality, mythology, and the perception of reality. “The imaginary world came into being with the discovery of metals,” Marsden says - an idea he explores in his book. Are rocks alive and the genesis of imagination, ideas and stories? Have the Earth’s raw materials shaped not just our tools and economies, but the myths and meanings which help us to understand ourselves?
The discovery of ochre had made artistic expression possible, while the combination of tin and copper had resulted in “the first great metal age” of the Bronze Age - with changes in farming, movement, the development of city-states and the cult of the warrior. The proliferation of silver as a currency - “the oil of the time” - after the Black Death in the 14th century, even replacing rice as currency in China, marked the first time all four continents traded with one another and the beginning of the “superfast world”. With prices no longer fixed, it was also the start of inflation, and “running up a debt against nature itself”.
A travel writer in his element, Marsden leads us from the stars and science, across continents, tracing the impact of metals - from disused Cornish tin mines to Germany and the Czech Republic, where radium, one million times more radioactive than uranium, was first used in microscopic amounts in face cream, and then as an instrument of war. He finishes in the gold-rich mountains of Georgia, recounting the heartening and courageous action taken by locals to turn away corporate extraction on a massive scale.
I go home looking at the world in a new way, thinking of the fitting quote with which he ends his talk, from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: “The bottom of the world is gold, and the world is upside down.”
This event was part of Literature Works’ Quay Words programme, as part of their Cultural Partner residency at Exeter Custom House.