You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
--Anna Akhmatova
I am a man with no ambitions And few friends, wholly incapable Of making a living, growing no Younger, fugitive from some just doom. Lonely, ill-clothed, what does it matter? At midnight I make myself a jug Of hot white wine and cardamon seeds. In a torn grey robe and old beret, I sit in the cold writing poems, Drawing nudes on the crooked margins, Copulating with sixteen year old Nymphomaniacs of my imagination. --Martial
No sport that I know of has spawned a literature as introspective, as probing, or ultimately as religious as mountaineering. The sport causes climbers to experience unimaginable hardships and then, at the ends of their ropes, to plumb their souls for meaning. They emerge from their excursions to the edge of unknowing with insights into their spiritual natures that transcend the possibility of mere sport. The literature is replete with tales of magic and mystery, of wild humor and terrible sadness and loss and then rebirth---all integral to the practice of climbing, all the result of protracted contact with the unseeable. A marvelous example of this class of writing is Hermann Buhl's stirring account of his 1953 solo ascent of Nanga Parbat, a 26,600-foot mountain in the Himalaya of Kashmir. In only nine pages Buhl manages to transport the reader from the depths of torment and despair to the heights of fantasy and ecstasy and, finally, to the triumph of the human spirit.
As dawn breaks over the mountains we see Buhl moving steadily upward, "an undulating sea of summits" on all sides, a fine mist in the valley below. Alone and determined, he ascends past 24,000 feet, climbing hard snow and "bare, bluish iridescent ice... How often had I dreamed of this moment!" he exults. At 25,000 feet he begins to slow. Because he carries no oxygen, his body seems paralyzed, his lungs unable to expand properly. He fears he has reached the limits of his endurance.Yet he goes on, moving slowly across Nanga Parbat's great Silver Plateau. There is no wind. The air is fearfully dry. A scorching sun beats down on him with Saharan fire and malice. The weight of his rucksack grows intolerable. He has no choice: after stuffing a few essential items into his pockets, he abandons his pack. Willpower alone now carries him upward. He gives no thought to the movement of his legs. He is lost in a vivid dream of home. Making the first ascent of perhaps the world's most treacherous mountain (Nanga Parbat had already claimed thirty-one lives), he believes he is climbing a friendly peak in his native Tyrol. Late in the day he surpasses 26,000 feet. Ahead rises a steep mass of boulders, the most technically difficult section of the climb. He surmounts these somehow, then, with one final effort, drops onto all fours and drags himself to the top. "I was not, I confess, fully conscious of the significance of that moment, nor did I have any feeling of elation at my victory. I simply felt relieved to be on top and to know that all the sweat and toil of the ascent were behind me."
Molly Tuttle: Standing on the Moon...12/2/20
As Buhl stands atop the peak, the highest creature on earth, he watches bemusedly as the sun sinks below the horizon in the west. Suddenly the air is bitterly cold. Unable to think clearly, he makes a terrible mistake: he leaves his ice axe on the summit. Now the problems compound. As he descends a steep ice slope in the murky dusk, a crampon drops from his foot. He is left "like a stork standing on the smooth hard surface." Buhl continues his harrowing descent with the aid of one crampon and a pair of ski poles. Darkness finds him marooned on a fifty-degree slope a few hundred feet below the summit. All his bivouac equipment lies far below in his abandoned rucksack. He crawls onto a rock, then pulls on a thin sweater, his only emergency clothing. Through the long night he stands atop the rock, dancing to keep his feet from freezing. At dawn his feet are numb, his boots glazed with ice. With surpassing care he moves down perilous slopes, unaware of the passage of time. He is not alone: throughout the day another descends with him. The two become a team. When Buhl misplaces a pair of gloves, it is his phantom companion who tells him they are lost. The sun is again a torment. The descending climber is plagued by hunger and thirst. His mouth bleeds. He hears voices but no one comes to save him. He finds his pack and falls onto it, only to discover that he is unable to swallow the dry food. He takes a small drink, then sees two distant figures approaching. Ah, the joy of it. Someone was coming! I heard voices too, calling my name."
Peter Rowan / Tony Rice: Cold Rain and Snow
He watches the two specks below but they come no closer. At last he understands the bitter truth: his saviours are rocks on the mountainside. Each step now requires a dozen breaths. He moves twenty or thirty yards, then collapses. His ordeal seems interminable. The sun is nearing the horizon. Buhl must reach safety soon, for he cannot survive another night in the open. And then it is over. He staggers into the arms of a friend who has come to meet him. "He looked aged by twenty years," writes another. "His face, desiccated and deeply lined, bore the imprint of intolerable suffering." Buhl manages to mutter eight words, a simple report of his visit to the edge: "Yesterday was the finest day of my life."
--Robert Leonard Reid Mountains Of The Great Blue Dream
The world began with what it is now the fashion to call the "Big Bang."
It could not, of course, have been a bang of any sort,
with no atmosphere to conduct waves of sound, and no ears.
It was something else, occuring in the most absolute silence
we can imagine.
It was the Great Light.
--Lewis Thomas Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony
mysterious free holy after you had gone i put back on my lunatic mask wore wilted winter roses and whispered about your eyes to the vast indifferent darkness the deserted sleepless streets bottles turned up empty everywhere i had just been waiting for magic is thirsty work pounding the miracle beat stalking a backtracking love vision in the multi-colored fog i have punched that unkind clock before and more than long enough "the weird vigil is over" i heard myself mutter to no one in particular "fear is a bug that deserves to be stepped on" then the word was passed along to our enormous secret gathering to jugglers and muggers mothers and joggers alike the parade shifted gears and we were all at a loss for words stampeding past the invisible podium like drunken homing pigeons toward the moon --tw
Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years.
I think you’re crazy,
was the way Clevinger
had responded
to Dunbar’s discovery. Who wants to know?
Dunbar answered. I mean it,
Clevinger insisted. Who cares?
Dunbar answered. I really do.
I’ll even go as far
as to concede that life
seems longer i—
—is longer i—
—is longer—IS longer?
All right, is longer
if it’s filled with periods
of boredom and discomfort, b—
Guess how fast?
Dunbar said suddenly. Huh? They go, Dunbar explained. Who? Years. Years? Years, said Dunbar. Years, years, years. Do you know how long
a year takes
when it’s going away?
Dunbar asked Clevinger. This long.
He snapped his fingers. A second ago you were
stepping into college
with your lungs full of fresh air.
Today you’re an old man. Old? asked Clevinger
with surprise. What are you talking about? Old. I’m not old. You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?
Dunbar was almost angry when he finished. Well, maybe it is true, Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one? I do, Dunbar told him. Why? Clevinger asked. What else is there?
They say the immigrants steal the hubcaps
Of respected gentlemen
They say it would be wine and roses
If England were for englishmen again
I saw a dirty overcoat
At the foot of the pillar of the road
Propped inside was an old man
Whom time would not erode
The night was snapped by sirens
Those blue lights circled past
The dancehall called for an ambulance
The bars all closed up fast
My silence gazing at the ceiling
While roaming the single room
I thought the old man could help me
If he could explain the gloom
You really think it's all new
You really think about it too
The old man scoffed as he spoke to me
I'll tell you a thing or two
I missed the fourteen-eighteen war
But not the sorrow afterwards
With my father dead and my mother ran off
My brothers took the pay of hoods
The twenties turned the north was dead
The hunger strike came marching south
At the garden party not a word was said
The ladies lifted cake to their mouths
The next war began and my ship sailed
With battle orders writ in red
In five long years of bullets and shells
We left ten million dead
The few returned to old Piccadily
We limped around Leicster Square
The world was busy rebuilding itself
The architects could not care
But how could we know when I was young
All the changes that were to come?
All the photos in the wallets on the battlefield
And now the terror of the scientific sun
There was masters and servants and servants and dogs
They taught you how to touch your cap
But through strikes and famine and war and peace
England never closed this gap
So leave me now the moon is up
But remember all the tales I tell
The memories that you have dredged up
Are on letters forwarded from hell
The streets were by now deserted
The gangs had trudged off home
The lights clicked off in the bedsits
Old England was all alone
It was at some moment in the Pleistocene that humanity crossed what the geologist-theologian Pierre Tielhard de Chardin called the Threshold of Reflection, when something in people "turned back on itself and so to speak took an infinite leap forward. Outwardly, almost nothing in the organs had changed. But in depth, a great revolution had taken place: consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of super-sensory relationships and representations; and simultaneously consciousness was capable of perceiving itself in the concentrated simplicity of its faculties. And all this happened for the first time." Friars of another sort--evangelists of the so-called Environmental Movement--have often made use of the geologic time scale to place in perspective that great "leap forward" and to suggest what our reflective capacities may have meant to Mother Earth.
Charles Mingus: Meditation on Inner Peace
David Brower , for example, the founder of Friends of the Earth and emeritus hero of the Sierra Club, tirelessly travelled the United States for thirty years delivering what he himself referred to as "the sermon," and sooner or later in every talk he invited his listeners to consider the six days of Genesis as a figure of speech for what has in fact been four and a half billion years. In this adjustment, a day equals something like seven hundred and fifty million years, and thus "all day Monday and until Tuesday noon creation was busy getting the earth going." Life began Tuesday noon, and "the beautiful, organic wholeness of it" developed over the next four days. "At four o'clock on Saturday afternoon, the big reptiles came on. Five hours later, when the redwoods appeared, there were no more big reptiles. At three minutes before midnight, man appeared. At one-fourth of a second before midnight, Christ arrived. At one-fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began. We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark raving mad."
Holding up a photograph of the world--blue, green and swirling white--Brower would say: "This is the sudden insight from Apollo. There it is. That's all. We see through the eyes of the astronauts how fragile our life really is." Brower once computed that we are driving through the earth's resources at a rate comparable to driving an automobile a hundred and twenty-eight miles an hour--and said that we are accelerating.
In like manner, geologists will sometimes use the calendar year as a unit to represent the time scale, and in such terms the Precambrian runs from New Year's Day until well after Halloween. Dinosaurs appear in the middle of December and are gone the day after Christmas. The last ice sheet melts on December 31st at one minute before midnight, and the Roman Empire lasts five seconds. With your arms spread wide again to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained file you could eradicate human history. Geologists live with the geologic scale. Individually, they may or may not be alarmed by the rate of exploitation of the things they discover, but, like the environmentalists, these use these repetetive analogies to place the human record in perspective--to see the Age of Reflection, the last few thousand years, as a small bright sparkle at the end of time. They often liken humanity's presence on earth to a brief visitation from elsewhere in space, its luminous, explosive characteristics consisting not merely of the burst of population in the twentieth century but of the whole millenial moment of people on earth--a single detonation, resembling nothing so much as a nuclear implosion with its successive neutron generations, whole generations following one another once every hundred-millioneth of a second, temperatures building up into the millions of degrees and stripping atoms until bare nuclei are wandering in electron seas, pressure building up to a hundred million atmospheres, the core expanding at five million miles an hour, expanding in a way that is quite different from all else in the universe, unless there are others who also make bombs.
Charles Mingus: Myself When I'm Real
The human consciousness may have begun to leap and boil some sunny day in the Pleistocene, but the race by and large has retained the essence of its animal sense of time. People think in five generations--two ahead, two behind--with heavy concentration on the one in the middle. Possibly that is tragic, and possibly there is no choice. The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it. At least, that is what geologists wonder sometimes, and they have imparted the questions to me. They wonder to what extent they truly sense the passage of millions of years. They wonder to what extent it is possible to absorb a set of facts and move with them, in a sensory manner, beyond the recording intellect and into the abysmal eons. Primordial inhibition may stand in the way. On the geologic time scale, a human life is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information. Geologists, dealing always with deep time, find that it seeps into their beings and affects them in various ways. They see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s into the sky. They see the thin band in which are the all but indiscernible stratifications of Cro-Magnon, Moses, Leonardo, and now. Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneosness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death.
In geologists' own lives, the least effect of time is that they think in two languages, function on two different scales.
"You care less about civilization. Half of me gets upset with civilization. The other half does not get upset. I shrug and think. So let the cockroaches take over."
"Mammalian species last, typically, two million years. We've about used up ours. Every time Leakey finds something older I say, 'Oh! We're overdue.' We will be handing the dominant-species-on-earth position to some other group. We'll have to be clever not to."
"A sense of geologic time is the most important thing to suggest to the non-geologist: the slow rate of geologic processes, centimeters per year, with huge effects, if continued for enough years."
"A million years is a short time--the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth."
"If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever."
--John McPhee Outcroppings
One of the best stories
of the early
Christian desert hermits
goes like this: Abbe Lot
came to Abbe Joseph
and said: Father,
according as I am able,
I keep my little rule,
and my little fast,
prayer, meditation
and contemplative silence;
and according as I am able
I strive to cleanse
my heart of thoughts:
Now what more should I do?
The elder rose up in reply
and stretched out
his hands to heaven,
and his fingers became
like ten lamps of fire.
He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?
--Annie Dillard
*
* Johnny Sixpack on Hermit Trail
** Bruce Springsteen: Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
I think that I am here, on this earth, To present a report on it, but to whom I don't know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place Has meaning because it changes into memory. --Czesław Miłosz
