Underneathness

While seeing at last beneath the surface of things, he sees that underneathness is not so much a system as a unity. He does glimpse the system: what he sees is the trace of a process, and that process is a system at work.

A house’s underneathness is crushing—weight of sleep pressing from the flats above, little lumps of coal releasing miniature avalanches which rattle down the black pile, furnace grimly dead, asbestos-covered arms prying into every corner.

1973, Edward Wellen, “Chalk Talk,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1973, p. 52, reprinted in The 21st Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 25 Stories by Edward Weller, Wildside Press, 2015, But below the surface are the reelings and writhings that make the floor of a Freudian jungle a lively place. Dr. Chomsky calls this underneathness, this grimmer grammar, the ‘deep structure.’