Ascent

We made the ascent frequently when I was young, my father, my brother, and I. We would march up on hot summer days. This one was cold and wet, and I was alone -a partial reunion anyhow. It's named 鼓山 (Gu Shan), or The Drum Mountain. Called so because there's a stone at the top, which has been known to resound powerfully against heavy wind and rain. A temple was erected there, which is still visited today.

I rode the bus for an hour or so to get out there. It was already drizzling by the time I got to the base, where a few lethargic locals lingered . I didn't think I would meet many people on a day so muggy, but I spied familiar strangers every so often: alone, together, weary, unwound, there on the pilgrim's stair. There are a few different ways to reach the top of the mountain, and I found myself weaving in-out and between them. The capillary paths paved by wandering soles brought me off the stones, out and away from the shared stream of voices. I do not know how those dewy leaves so well muffled the sounds of the universe.
I climbed for a few hours. Occasionally I paused to check my progress by the city sinking below me. There are a great many graves on the mountainside, of unknown age. I would find them intermittently, stone carved beds in the side of the mountain -a half circle of rough stone with an altar for offerings (my Grandfather was buried the same way). The few I encountered on my way up were all indistinguishable. Either the stone was too worn, or the tomb had been overgrown by vegetation. Many had become resting places of a different kind, littered with the plastic bi-products of refreshment, persisting relics of the modern pilgrim. I did not linger long at any of these.

The end of the trail has a few shops selling overpriced food and bottled water -one could also purchase tickets to visit the Temple, which was another three hundred meters to ascend. I was tired, and decided not to complete the trek. Although I would later find myself at a temple nonetheless, I remember not believing that there could possibly be anyone at the summit. I imagined cold stone echoing the supple voices of rain. I saw sticks of damp incense before the darkened alter. I wondered if the arrival of a guest have woken a denizen.

The Bright Side

I'm taller than average here, so that's pretty sweet.

Rain

I have been in Fuzhou for three days now. It has rained every one. I think the water is probably dirty before it hits the ground.

Nothing is washed away in these showers. The detritus (plastic bottles, the disemboweled chrome of crisp bags, cigarettes, fruit skin, etc) bubbles up from the sewers and water washes muddy clay under the oily boots of workmen (There is always construction. Always something being torn down, or something going up). After the rain, the plastic and organic corpses rises from the earth to remind us of our terrible interconnectedness: the permanent and uncountable reverberations of our lives. It recalls to my mind that somber closing of James Joyce's The Dead, but here is no solace:

that rain which has always been echoing, its drops fall faintly through the universe, ...upon all the living and the dead. 

Urban Mesh

"If a pauper were to leap from the parapet of this bridge each time we draw breath, we should live forever, because Nessus breeds and breaks men faster than we respire."

(Gene Wolfe, The Book of The New Sun)

The frightening sublimity of Wolfe's city of Nessus has often pushed my imaginative capabilities to their breaking point. A city of a thousand spans, towering to heaven and burrowing its roots deep beneath the dead earth: brim spilling over with people -an eternal city, perpetually being birthed to gasp its rattling death. To hold those spans of uncountable beings in the mind is beyond the limits of cognition.

I am finding this limit once and again here in my ancestral home of Fuzhou, China. 

Fuzhou has roughly the same density as Houston (1423 persons / km² vs 1505 persons / km²)

The difference: Houston is about 627 sq miles big, Fuzhou is 4702. A true urban sprawl.

The fantastical cityscapes of Wolfe's creation have arrived. They are here. I am living in one. A container for souls stretching exhaustively, stacked with people upon people, lives falling under lives. Here, each day I see the impossible dimensions of place crack open like the cruel smile of an endless labyrinth. The nauseating puzzle of flesh and concrete taunts me with its humming, tuneless song.

But most terrifying of all is to realize that the city looks not upon you as a stranger but as an intimate. We are these cities and they are us. We live in the teeth of the beast. We are the blood that colors its lidless eyes.

"Imagining infinity [is] easier than imagining very large finitudes"

(Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought)

In the Book of The New Sun, Severian is spared from these maddening meditations of the horizonless mesh. He casts his mind outside of it, so that the strangeness of the undulating beast need not break his mind with its vast terribleness.

As I continue trying to think about ecology and mesh, this is the same sublimity which threatens to drive me to insanity. How can we take ethical action within the rippling fabric, if we cannot hold even the smallest part of it steady? My friend Ross is looking for some way to satisfy this question. What tools can we possibly find to unfix us from this paralysis -as we gaze into the widening gyre, the shriekingly silent gyre which slowly devours us. Where do we find strength to turn away from it, or scream, or even whimper?

Some Scattered Thoughts on Proust and Planes

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me;

(Marcel Proust, Swann's Way)

Think of your own experiences in transit, drifting in and out of sleep. Perhaps your seat was never comfortable enough for true rest -so you doze: all the better. Sleep and conciousness intermingle in the potion of the mind, and reality begins to smile its wide smile. Who truly remembers well the events of a twenty hour flight (like mine), What becomes of memory in these places? The pretty waitress's smile grows a fang in your eye and the fragrance of the slowly warming fruit (ever warmer) paints an orchard tween your luminous eyes [half shut -whole shut] spying the dim lit screen -how many hours have past?

To be IN TRANSIT can be a horrible thing. To be nowhere (nowhen as well) is unbearable. Is that why my brain slips me down to Marsailles? Bruges? Ryusshu?

Heisenberg told me that we're all nowhere and that's the only way to be somewhere but I'm

Awake now and none of that seems very silly.

The time is 336 in New York and Midnight in Vancouver.

Few writers can make me envy the swirling channel of near sleep -that bare conciousness which opens the mind to be inhabited by a thousand bright beasts, stage within stage on which tragedy and farce fall upon the other, always, like blind brothers at reunion -no no, few writers conjour these intoxicating half-knowns half as well, few manifest those shadowy half-lits which fill the between-places, none so best as Proust.

I say copies of Proust's Swann's Way should be kept on all long distance flights. I've no doubt that someone will find it more useful than a catalog of Duty-Free perfumes. A joy in itself, but it's greatest gift might simply be to reveal one of the most interesting benefits of flight: an upheaval of the mind.

Where do I begin to search for my lost time? Did I leave it in Eastern? Pacific? Maybe it escaped to CEST. I imagine a swirling pool of time below our static humming cabin. When will we arrive? Perhaps we already have? On a high speed jet it would be possible for me to wake up before I fell asleep. When reading Proust, we might ask how different that is from any other twilight when the world dims.

Suspension

The temple bell stops

but I still hear the sound

coming out of the flowers

-Matsuo Basho

I have had no greater privilege than to be among these sensitive friends of mine. We have been discussing suspension, and I can't rid myself of the image:

bells ringing. Bells ringing in a clock tower. . At the end of each reverberation, time itself is suspended with us as we wait for the next sound -or the gasp made in its absence.

On Antagonism

"The proverb says, 'one finds what one looks for', and nothing is easier to find than an enemy, even if you do not go far to look."

(Renato Poggioli, The Theory of The Avant-Garde)