Reading David Hinton's Existence, which is, among other things, Hinton looking at a Chinese painting that leads him into the world of Chinese thinking – that thinking which developed across Taoism, Zen Buddhism, etc.
He speaks for a while of mountains, and the Chinese sense that the awareness of existence, emptiness, and a lot of other things is best experienced in mountains: the heights, the sky – mountain ranges in China were usually wild and high, with few people; more northern, steeply ascending towards Mongolia and Tibet.
There's a lot of Ch'an poetry from and about mountains, translated by Hinton and Red Pine, two of the finest translators of the stuff (I know Kenneth Rexroth didn't know the language well but I will always dearly love his books of Chinese and Japanese translations). (And just last week I was looking, again, at the film and book of Le otto montagne, the amazingly beautiful 2022 film based on a novel/memoir of two friends and their changes and losses, which will also be a story whose back is broken over the need for or rejection of mountains.)
***
But – am I just being self-centered or petty here, in the face of deep work? – I keep thinking: I prefer the sea. Oceans, the largest lakes. Waves. Blues/greens that are always much more than definitions of blue or green, ideally to a horizon.
I felt some of this in Zürich: V. clearly drew her sense of vastness, life, a larger universe, meaning, and a host of other things whose names, words and distinctions end up feeling like trivial markers for things that are so much greater than language – like any good Swiss, or most central Europeans, she saw nature as a mountain. I kept thinking: yes, mountains are amazing, extraordinarily beautiful, but – for me they are like images (perhaps I haven't spent enough time climbing them). Even in a train in the Swiss countryside, such beauty, I am indeed amazed – but they are more like pictures of beauty, they don't have the visceral impact of the Ocean.
Seas: smells, the air is entirely different. And it's transformed in the best way: when I wish I could move to Barcelona, or anywhere south – and even when, some years ago, I thought I'd be happier in northeast England if I moved to one of the small towns at the end of the metro – it's always about being by the sea. Certainly my heart beats more calmly and consistently, my breath and skin are very different there – they all, very obviously, work much better, all the operations of my mind and body seem in line with the local air and its dampness, and with greater things, things that keep existing and moving back and forth: waves, rather than frozen peaks.
But in these Chinese, or Zen or Taoist or poetic or existential or psychological or Germanic or European or other ways – is my preference for the sea a lesser thing than a preference for mountains?
It feels a bit like those divisions among older gods between those who are on mountains and those who land in the sea (I'm ignoring underworlds here, though they do seem more fluidly (?) entwined with the sea than with mountains). I suppose the sea seems less from some points of view. Obviously from other angles it is the place of creation, the vastness out of which everything is created (traditionally more female than male, more birth than reaching-upward).
But I wouldn't like any gendered separation here, that's all... it's too merely human, not at the level of this everything-ness. If we split the universe that way that's merely our problem, or one of them at least. For me, the sea is as much as the sky.... and more than mountains.
I can try to read all these books and poems with my background corrections: sea for sky, perhaps... a bit of static I suppose, recurrent small bits of redirection, or misdirection. Perhaps not ideal. But I'd like to stick to my waves....
***
I'm aware that I usually open with my surrounding frames: frames of mind, of circumstances, of events. I don't feel like doing that here. But I can tag them on, at the end:
It's a beautifully sunny day, one I would love to have spent outside – but I wasn't feeling particularly well this week. Not dreadful, but - a mild queasiness, some weakness; last night spells of vertigo, which is odd, those haven't happened at night much.
Even detailing those now seems so tiresome! I've been telling friends about feeling these ways for months now, and they don't indicate any real dangers to health – perhaps they'll be resolved by treatments scheduled for July, in two months – but it all seems... so very boring.
As I'm sure I've been boring everyone for some months, probably intermittently for years. Not unforgivable, but it feels like a waste of my time and theirs. A. was listening to me a lot last month, and kindly arguing and supporting – and finally I reached a point of having less of a need to whinge about it all.
Perhaps now it all feels merely like: this body, this apartment – this city, currently accepted by me though not particularly loved – along with any desire for other places and other lives, any concerns about what I am doing or not doing – they all seem less heavy, and much less important.
I can move through the day, managing or revising plans in relation to how I'm feeling, without getting particularly irritated about it all...
***
Mountains. Seas. Waves.
And right now, out of this window, evening light, warm, branches waving mildly – it's all sort of golden....
Comments