mountains of the mind

Since our first fateful meeting, just beyond Zoji La on the road from Srinigar to Leh, the dashing Mahbub Ali and I have exchanged many letters.

Often times I will write after I complete my morning circumambulation around the lake. He says he imagines me,

Walking past the Canadian geese and the hummingbirds, and the rabbit, through the
sweet-smelling roses, as the sun bakes down on you.

He, in turn, often writes after work, in the blackness of the Tokyo night.

We talk of books, places we have visited. We makes lists of things we have in common and of things we have never done but want to. We sometimes talk of mountains. He knows I am slowly making my way through a book called, Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination. Another friend, a certain Monsieur Rodriguez once brought it to my attention that this book about the allure of mountains has seen its subtitle change from "A History of Fascination" to "How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit." Getting progressively worse, my copy's subtitle is: "Adventures in Reaching the Summit." 

Reaching the summit...

Often dominating the entire landscape, that mountains can have an overwhelmingly powerful draw on us is with a doubt. There are mountains in winter but also the condition of being between mountains and the sea. 

My tea teacher's daughter was married to a mountain climber. He started off going out for a few weeks a year; then a few months a year. By the end, he quite simply refused to come home. It is the indescribable allure of mountain peaks-- attempting the summit of Everest, George Mallory wrote this one night to his wife in his tent by the "granular light of a Tilley lamp"

Everest has the most steep ridges and appalling precipes that  have ever seen. My darling... I can't tell you how it possesses me.

To be possessed...

Macfarlane, a mountain climber himself, takes great care to make one point clear: that it is not that mountains themselves have the power to possess us, but rather that possession occurs at precisely that disjuncture between the real and the imagined. A colloboration between phyisical form and human imagination-- the Readers of these Pages will understand if I suggest here that imaginary possession is a kind of mood. Mountains surely have possess a powerful draw on our imaginations in this way. It was Maurice Herzog's famed climb up Annapurna which inspired Macfarlane's own obsession. As a boy, reading about Herzog's climb-- a climb which resulted in the loss of most of Herzog's fingers and toes-- Macfarlane says,

I read Annapurna three times that summer. It was obvious to me that Herzog had chosen wisely in going for the top, despite the subsequent costs. For what, he and I were agreed, were toes and fingers compared to having stood on those few square yards of snow? If he had died it would still have been worth it. This was the lesson I took away from Herzog's book: that the finest end of all was to be had on a mountain-top - from death in valleys preserve me, 0 Lord. (More on Paul's blog here)

These books which so affect us, Macfarlane's entire life was shaped by his childhood reading of Herzog's memoir-- just as Peter Hopkirk's was of Kim or Gavin Young's was of Conrad.  

***

 

Pretending to read Dante, I lie by the pool today and imagine mountains:   

"Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost."

And, I tell him: That is me. I am on a mountain path. At a complete dead end.  And, I know that I want to climb upward-- I mean, I can actually see the top of the mountain, snow sparkling like a diamond way above.

But I stand there pertrifying.

Remember how rocky and dry the roads are up there on the mountain slopes... It is so very slippery. Those paths just cling to the edges of the mountains, don't they?

And so the poet-- in order to travel to the mountain top-- actually turns around and descends (all the way to hell).

In the poem. Dante too is standing there terrified; petrifying.

"What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;"

But he calls for help. In LA, he would have doubtlessly, turned to prozac and therapy. In Japan, perhaps he would have cried and drank plum wine. But, in real life-- in Florence-- a person could really and truly call for help. And doing so, there he is illuminated. Virgil appears and leads our man Dante back down the mountain.

Interesting, in order to climb to the top of heaven, they must first descend into hell.

That is what it was like. Standing at a dead-end on a very slippery slope, a person struggles to regain their footing. Typical of midlife crises, it is not simply a matter of either going forward or turning back, is it? Indeed, the solution perhaps has little to do with a person trying to "just keep walking." Because what is at issue is not direction as much as that of regaining footing. Robert Harrison, discussing the first canto makes a similar point when he says that, In Dante's world, one can only call out for help.

My friend Jeff also loves the mountains. He is traveling up in the mountains right now, up over 5000 meters. In the early pages of his book The Ancient Tea Horse Road, he describes in much detail the act of choosing the people who will travel the road with him. He takes great time and care to choose those companions who will walk with him way up in those dangerous altitudes. That is wise, for to whom will he call to for help should he loses his footing? He seems to choose them mainly for their character. Choosing them for their physical and spiritual strength; choosing them by the look in their eyes. It all overwhelmingly reminds me of the Poet, Dante-- at a dead end, where the straightforward path has been lost. First meeting a panther, then a lion and then wolf, at last he meets his guide-- the Roman Virgil.

By that same God whom thou didst never know,
So that I may escape this woe and worse,
Thou wouldst conduct me there where thou hast said,
That I may see the portal of Saint Peter,
And those thou makest so disconsolate."
Then he moved on, and I behind him followed.

All this I suppose happening in the mountains of his mind....O the mind, mind has mountains.

 

Comments

[denske]

Those paths really do cling to the edge of the mountains. Remembering that road still makes me shake. Jeff has good judgment: the right companions make all the difference.

[Casey Kochmer]

beautiful

and always: always

exploring of how we wander our life

[J]

Vistas at altitude remind of the breadth of all: the soul, of possibilities of choices, the physically perilous. Inspiration that comes from enormous 'scapes' and heights often worry because they show all that was missed, but fires the soul with the tangible grandeur of what can be seen. The ascent that frightens offers up two alternatives: to continue on with the eyes one metre ahead and the mind two metres in front shutting that ever clever brain down completely, the other alternative is to simply turn back and realize that the fear is affecting the form and the limbs. The mind cannot unlock fear in the mountains, it cannot deconstruct it once it has arrived. Leave the scene one way or another. Once, however, one has 'peaked' at a summit...this is a taste and sensation that will run roughshod over the next fearful encounter and urge the memory and body upwards and onwards. Sight lines which ripple with blowing white, thin air which rips into the lungs and winds that decimate any thoughts of real power resting elsewhere ultimately provide an elixir that punishes with pleasure. The imagination drawn up in three dimensions take a sword to anything not crucial - such is the mountain - human contract.

[peony (on the slopes of mount delectable)]

A friend-- who lives below sea level-- tells me he has never really seen the mountains. He tells me that he was surprised that I would imagine those woods as being on the mountainside.

In my mind, when I imagine Dante, I imagine the poet standing in a wood at the base of a mountain. And through the trees he can just make out the snowy summit of Mount Delectable. Not unlike the forested area at the base of Mount Fuji.

However, when I imagine-- instead of Dante-- myself in the poem, I am no longer in the wood, but rather I am on a slippery mountain path clinging to the side of the Himalaya-- just past Zoji La on the road to Leh.

My friend who says he doesn't know mountains also tells me a bit about how he imagines hell. Hell. For whatever reason, my mind always stops prior to that-- petrified at the dead-end on the mountain slope; petrified, instead of going forwatd or turning back, I go lie by the pool and imagine paradise....

By the way, friend and fellow citizen of the empire, I just remembered that our mutual Conrad recommended the Everyman Library Edition of the Divine Comedy, in part because they have the Botticelli drawings that I love so much. So, with that, I will pick up a copy to bring back. Believe it or not I am still debating the book of illustrations from the exhibition of the drawings that was put on in London several years back.

[canto i]

And I to him: “Poet, I thee entreat,
By that same God whom thou didst never know,
So that I may escape this woe and worse,

Thou wouldst conduct me there where thou hast said,
That I may see the portal of Saint Peter,
And those thou makest so disconsolate.”

Then he moved on, and I behind him followed.

[peony (on the slopes of Pureland Mountain)]

Prince Pirooz in Kyoto just emailed to remind me of our mutual friend Bob Brady's beautiful article, "Mountains of the Mind"-- originally printed in one of my favorite ever issues of Kyoto Journal:

MOUNTAINS OF THE MIND

Everyone knows that the mind becomes extremely mountainous only a few steps in from the coast. The creatures that reside in this uncharted area on our mental maps are seldom seen by others, yet are common to us all; still, they can be a hazard to the solitary explorer who is not prepared to confront the unbelievable in his hinterland as he wends his way into the nether regions, from which few return unchanged.

Hermits, poets and other explorers of these fastnesses are well acquainted with the species of the inward realms, and are even known on occasion to have them eating out of their hands. But these nether fauna can never be completely tamed; and what would the outer reaches be, without their inner complement of native wildlife?

Between ourselves, however, we can only use metaphoric nomenclature to speak of these denizens we harbor in common, the names we call them imparting no description of their morphology, coloring or way of life. These are not crude and dispensable beings, but highly developed and specialized life forms essential to our spiritual ecology (psychological and religious taxonomy notwithstanding).

And there are many more such beings that have no names; yet we all know very well in ourselves of at least the presence of these creatures, who have at times poked their heads out of the thick undergrowth that adorns the verge of each of us; they are all part of the vastness of the experience when, in the world outside, we see a mountain and its wilds, that call to us as like to like; to climb such a peak and view the world from its summit is to do so as well within ourselves, to view at one remove the panoramas that we are.

And in so ascending we metaphorically surmount the wilderness within, survive vicarious passage to the summits of ourselves, to a clearer light, a cleaner wind. And we take this knowledge with us on our return to the narrow lowlands where we spend our daily lives as habitants of seeming mountainous islands, surrounded by seas of intercourse teeming with creatures that thrive in the depths of the apparent distance between us, those sometimes stormy, sometimes tranquil seas of relation that are as much illusion as the real world; for as each mountain is aware, at the foundation we are all connected.

[From the archives, July 2003.
First published in Kyoto Journal
The Sacred Mountains of Asia issue, 1993;
issue republished as a book of the same title
by Shambala Press, 1995, ed. John Einarsen.]