The soft underbelly of Infra_Structures

Sofia Batalha
2 min readMay 20, 2024
Photo by Ricardo Soria on Unsplash

Over millennia, we, in the West, have abandoned Underworld devotional protocols for civilisation infrastructures and commodities. We’ve severed organic, ecological, and seasonal Land shifts by building vast fixed infrastructures. We’ve exiled psyche and body from the territory and Ancestors, becoming violently isolated.

Security over impermanence.

Infra_Structures: The immobilised high walls built to keep cataclysms, catastrophes, and the feral wilds outside.

Protection over transiency.

Infra_Structures: Rejecting Ground invocation, constructing deep foundations but bypassing sacred Catabasis, disregarding Underworld seasonal pilgrimages, and forgetting Ancestors’ protocols. Neglecting deep ancestral wisdom. Forgotten.

Immediate linear defence over vast complex cyclicity.

Infra is a word-forming element that refers to “below, beneath,” also naming something inferior, related to Infernus (Hell) “low, under;” Structure comes from the Latin word structura, “a fitting together, adjustment; a building;” about the sense of “arrangement, order.” These modern structures conquered hell, cataloguing and ordering its fierce underscapes, domesticating and suffocating the depths under the weight of civilization’s superficial heights. In a hierarchic illusion, we are led to believe that the dominant Infra_Structures hold everything together, forgetting the Ground anchoring and sustaining their foundations.

The Ground rumbles, ripped, choking, crushed, stifled.

Infra_Structures: Stretching and accumulating fixed high walls and borders, establishing passages and closed gates. Assembling rigidity and conquering the old Chthonic Metamorphic Gods.

Bastions of ordered authority praise the sky god, but neglect the Ground gods.

Drying swamps, digging wells, crushing hills, chemically extracting yield, mining, drilling and ripping open hard Ground, ravaging soft Ground, grinding stones and desecrating bones. Enslaving and silencing the Ground. But the promise of keeping uncertain and instability at bay is unfulfilled, for the Infra_Structures don’t prevent the Ground from shaking or the walls from crumbling. Foundations rot, and empires fall. In the porous Infra dimension, Compost Chthonic Gods decompose and corrode, for the nutrition of life comes from the slow digestion of death.

Living in such an arid context, intergenerational enclosed psyches believe they are severed from everything outside the Infra_Structures walls, living in high apartment buildings, aching to hear the Ground again. Catatonic psyches are immobilized and long to stretch outside the constructed barricades. This imprisonment, keeping us inside civilisation commodities and Infra_Structures is a catabolism, a destructive metabolism, in need of a catalysis, a dissolution, a dissolving.

A bowing down, a surrendering.

A looking down and touching the soft underbelly.

There are no walls here.

Just soft belly on soft Ground.

Right here, where the old Gods still live.

* The etymology of the prefix Cata (Kata) comes from down, downward, down from, down to, below, and underneath.

[all etymology was checked here: https://www.etymonline.com/]

--

--

Sofia Batalha

Journeying 🌿 between inner and outer landscapes, remembering ancient earth practices, radical presence, active listening, ecopsychology, art and writing.