One week of mountains and texts

Whether by causation or coincidence, on the day of China’s 70th anniversary military parade and mega-show, I felt an overwhelming desire to escape from the oppressive absurdity of this world.

I say causation because bombastic displays of state power (larger, faster, louder militaries) and glory (“伟大的 [fill in the blank]”) always trigger a deep cynicism in me, regardless the country. But maybe it was not to do with that this time. Others around me were quite moved by the ceremonies and I too enjoyed the fireworks show. I partook in the spectacle just a little bit.

So maybe the timing was coincidence.

When these waves of cynicism well up my mind’s desire, without fail, turns to the natural world, to mountains in particular.

Right now I am craving to be alone in the wind, chill, tranquility and violence of mountains. To feel their peace and to feel their power.

Why? Why do I always revert to such places for escape?

I’m not the only one, clearly. I read Robert Macfarlane’s classic this week, Mountains of the Mind, in which he traces the history of imaginations of mountains, from places one steered clear of to places promising escape and adventure. The current age of mountainphilia — I think we can call it — was very much born out of Europe’s twin revolutions of science and romanticism, he traces, the 19th century awe of “the Sublime” in particular.

In the opening sections of the book Macfarlane writes about the powerful aura of mountains and about the“deepening of time” felt in these spaces where time is writ larger than the human mind can conceive.

I reflected similarly earlier this year when I wrote about the experience of running 100km through the northern Chinese mountains. Allowing myself to quote myself:

I contemplated my transience, my minuscule size and significance, my enormous limitations.

At the beginning of the National Holiday week I started filling my craving for mountains vicariously via the most millennial of mediums, YouTube videos. In the centre of a city of 20 million, I sat on my bed watching videos of runners and climbers scale Scottish, Norwegian, Alpine peaks.

That was a sure sign that it was time to get out of the city.

It was raining and a blustery wind blew in from the north west, cooling the air a good ten degrees from the day before. As I hiked up the first climb, into and very nearly above the clouds, the chill, breezy, wet air reminded me of home, the hills of west Ireland or Scotland.

With weather like that, there were very few people up on the ridge. Just me and the wind, the falling leaves and the fluttering birds. The damp kicked up the smell of rotting early autumn leaves, and triggered memories of that wet and atmospheric season back home, with the curious clarity only smells can stimulate.

I breathed it in, deep, deep lung fulls of that moist air. Heavy with mist, heavy with the smells of autumn, it seemed to nourish me, both mentally and physically. This is what I had been craving.

For Macfarlane, the fascination for mountains seems to begin with rocks, with geology, with the epic and monumental forces that push lava through cracks in the earth’s surface, make it bubble up and cool into basalt, granite, schist.

But, I noticed this week, for me it’s as much about the life that these rocky spires support, in surprising abundance, as it is their grand formations themselves. I marvelled at the gnarled, slow growing trees which clung, exposed, to the finger-wide gaps between rocks. Their leaves turning and weighed down by raindrops, their tough bark streaked black with damp. And of the rocks underfoot, it was the mosses and lichen, whose vibrant greens and yellows the rain had sharpened, that were a source of wonder as much as the rocks themselves. The big and the small, the old and the young, the monumental and the delicate, the cycle of life in an ecosystem.

Am I just another Romantic?

Am I buying into the 19th century bourgeois ideal of sublime mountain spaces, awe inspiring for the roughness and the savagery they symbolise, a contrast to the civilised and genteel metropole? Victorian images of masculinity and power — personal and imperial — the desire to conquer.

But it is not just European culture that idolises mountain spaces. If I have one gripe with Macfarlane’s book it is its almost singular focus on Western imaginations of mountain spaces.

Macfarlane writes that mountains are as much constructs of cultural imagination as they are physical objects on the earth’s surface. So how then, have other cultures imagined the mountains around them? That’s a question ripe for a whole PhD thesis on comparative cultural studies, but I’ll just take a quick dive into some of the more obvious and famous imaginations of mountains in Chinese culture — Tang poetry. [Chinese cultural imaginations of mountains and wild spaces, reading recommendations on this please.]

China’s Tang poets were clearly obsessed with the magical minutiae of natural and, more often than not, mountainous spaces. Below are just three examples, translations taken from the English version of Francois Cheng’s Chinese Poetic Writing.

Monumental and timeless as they may seem, the world’s mountains are in fact some of the most delicate ecosystems on our planet.

Of mountains, we can — in fact we must — go further than Stegner’s musings on wild places, however. Mountains are not “simply there” for us to observe and re-find our sanity — though I certainly don’t deny that function, they’ve done so for me many times, the National Holiday week included.

Mountains are a part of, a critical part of, the living global ecosystem to which we are inextricably tied. More than “simply there”, our relationship to mountains is symbiotic.

They are not there for us, but we need them.

We are not here for them, but, as anthropogenic emissions continue to rise, we hold their fate, along with our own, in our hands.

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