And yet, deep in the woods, what we see of animals is troubling. How can we be certain that a dancing cloud of midges in the setting sunlight has no meaning? What do we know about the thoughts of a bear? What if crustaceans bless the coolness of water without having any way to let us know this, while we have no hope of ever figuring this out? How can we measure the emotions of sparrows when they greet the dawn from the highest branches? And why shouldn’t butterflies in the noonday sun find some aesthetic feeling in their choreography? ‘The one-year-old bird has no notion of the eggs for which it builds a nest, or the young spider any idea of the prey for which it spins a web …’ (Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation). But what do you know about that, Arthur? Where did you obtain your information on this subject, from what conversation with which bird do you draw such certainty? My two dogs choose to face the lake, blinking, enjoying the peace of the day, and their drool is a thanksgiving. They are conscious of the happiness of resting there, on the summit, after the long climb. Heidegger tumbles into the water and Schopenhauer as well. Glug-glug, goes thought. I regret that some philosopher schooled in the old humanism (a spiritual masturbation) cannot witness the silent prayer pronounced by two five-month-old pups before a geological fault 25 million years old.
Back to the lake. It creaks in the peace of the evening. The ice is saying farewell: no wonder it’s moaning.
28 MAY
I spend the day with Delachaux and Niestlé’s bird guide: ‘848 species and 4,000 drawings’. This book is a breviary devoted to the ingenuity of life, to the infinite subtleties of evolution, a celebration of style. Even the most sophisticated of urban dwellers for whom birds are stupid robots with crazed eyes, blown hither and yon by the wind, will bow before the audacious livery of the pheasant, the rock ptarmigan or the ruddy shelduck. I try to identify each of the visitors from the sky. Putting names to plants and animals using field guides is like recognizing superstars in the street thanks to celebrity magazines. Instead of: ‘Ohmigod, it’s Madonna!’, you exclaim: ‘Wow, there’s a Siberian crane!’
29 MAY
I always go out with a flare gun in my hand in case a bear is roaming the forest. The wilderness begins right outside the door. My home offers no transition; no garden, for example. There is a threshold, of course: a plank, an ‘air lock’ between the civilized world and the perils of the forest. Stags, lynxes and bears stroll by the cabin; the dogs sleep right outside the door, flies buzz up under the eaves. The two realms are contiguous. The cabin is a tiny island of human survival in this Eden and not an implantation of pioneers determined to improve the earth. During the conquest of Siberia, the tsar’s Cossacks built entrenched camps, enclosing a church, an arms depot and a few buildings behind a palisade of pines trimmed into points at the top. They called such a small fortress an ostrog, and these posts protected them from an outside world that had all the time in the world to wait them out. If the Cossacks were there, it was because they dreamed of transforming the taiga, whereas a hermit is content to be dwelling in the forest. The windows serve to welcome nature per se, not to fend it off. The hermit contemplates nature, uses what he needs of it, but cherishes no ambitions to subdue it. The cabin allows him to take a position, but does not enforce a statute. He may play the hermit, but not claim to be a pioneer.
The hermit agrees to be henceforth weightless in the workings of the world, no longer counting as anything in the chain of causality. His thoughts will not influence anyone, or affect the course of events. His actions will signify nothing. (Perhaps he may still figure in a few memories.) How light that thought is! And how clearly it foretells the final release: we are never so alive as when we are dead to the world!
A russet moon rose tonight, its reflection in the shattered lake ice like a blood-red Host on a wounded altar.
30 MAY
Today I wrote little things on the trunks of some birches. Birch, I entrust this message to you: go tell the sky I say hello. Birch bark feels as pleasant to write on with a pen as parchment is. Certain zeks recorded their memories on the skin of these trees.
After that, I skipped some stones, and now I’m trying to improve my knife-throwing with an old board for a target.
It really is nice to have some free time.
31 MAY
A mountain slope of 5,000 feet extends that much again on its journey down to the bottom of Baikal, and my cabin sits precisely at this halfway point, on a tiny break in a descent just under two miles long. I live balanced between a gulf and a rock face. The river has finally broken the sheath of ice along the shore, opening the sluices. The torrents tumble and frolic all the way to the lake, making the sound of life on its way to a party. The rivers are slashing their way through the forest.
A pair of eiders takes the waters just off the cape. Whenever two sheets of drifting ice threaten to close in on them, they fly off to another open spot. An allegory of exile.
Sometimes my gaze lingers on a stretch of open water on which two ducks then suddenly alight, as if to fulfil a presentiment. As when the eye discovers in a book a phrase for which the mind has long been waiting without ever managing to compose it.
The first Capricorn beetles have arrived. They fly heavily through the clearing and plunk down upon the chopping-blocks. I feel affection for these insects. Their long, black, backswept antennae frame their jet carapaces. They scramble clumsily over the trunks of the pines. Love thy neighbour as thyself. Wouldn’t real love be the love of what is irremediably different from us? Not a mammal or a bird, for they are still too close to our humanity, but an insect, a paramecium. Humanism gives off whiffs of a corporatism based on the imperative to love what resembles us. We are supposed to love one another the way the dentist loves other dentists. In the clearing, I reverse the proposition and try to love creatures with an intensity proportional to their degree of biological distance from me. To love is not to celebrate one’s own reflection in the face of one’s double, but to recognize the value of what one can never know. Loving a Papuan, a child or one’s neighbour is hardly a challenge. But a sea sponge! A lichen! One of those tiny plants roughed up by the wind! Here’s what’s tough: feeling infinite tenderness for the ant busy rebuilding its hill.
A short afternoon at Middle Cedar Cape to observe the geese sailing around the inland pond. On the way back, I find fresh bear tracks mixed with mine. They weren’t there before. The dogs don’t react at all. I pass again by the ruins of the refusenik’s cabin. Must a man head for the woods at all costs if he rejects his times? There is silence to be found in these secluded vaults.
One can also close one’s eyes: the eyelid is the most effective screen between the self and the world.
V.E. down at Zavorotni has often spoken to me about the dissident who lived here, describing him to me as a nice fellow. The idea of this noble soul’s existence in harmony with the brutal beauty of these surroundings makes me see this cabin in a friendly light. I imagine the poor man picking wild onions to flavour his char, talking to the birds, leaving the remains of his fish on the shore for the foxes. It’s only in Paris, where I live, that intellectuals cultivate a fascination for bastards and make heroes of criminals. Which is the error denounced by Varlam Shalamov, who survived seventeen years in the gulag, in his Essays on the Criminal World: ‘… every writer seems to have chipped in on this sudden demand for a romanticism of crime, this frenzied poeticizing of thugs …’ Criminals are not heroic wolves. And the cabins that have sheltered them do not give off an aura of serenity.
The high pressures building up at the foot of the mountains plunge me into lethargy for the rest of the day. Dreary hours of ennui, rocking in the hammock.
I haven’t even the
strength to read. I’m dozing beneath a cedar when a rainstorm chases me into the cabin. And then the sight of a steaming cup of tea fills me with an immense feeling of security as the heavens rampage outside. To the west, liquid chaos. Rain was invented so that we can be glad to be under a roof. The dogs are beneath the front door awning. Ideal companions for these moments of withdrawal: vodka and a cigar. They’re all that poor people and loners have left. And the health police would like to outlaw these blessings! So that we can die in good shape?
The rain has passed, the air is drying the forest. Through my binoculars I spot a bear standing two or three hundred yards away on the south shore. The bear stays perfectly still. Then I realize that the boulders are quivering in the evening air: I’m having palpitations over a mirage.
I make some bread. I knead the dough for a long time. Nothing is softer or sweeter to the touch when one is alone. It’s easy to understand the wealth of expressions exploring this relationship between flesh and dough. A woman baking things is an aphrodisiac figure, plump and rosy, evoking a healthy eroticism. I eat my bread and force myself not to think any more about women baking because I still have two months to go out in this hole.
JUNE
Tears
1 JUNE
Watching the aerial displays of the ducks and geese, I sit at my table on the beach like one of those judges at a figure-skating competition getting ready to hold up their signs.
Amorous geography: I prefer shingle beaches where people shiver in wool sweaters to those deep-fryer sandy strands littered with oily bodies. Baikal’s stony shores fall into the first category.
The plugs of slushy ice blocking the bay for several days have been dispersed by the storm; the wind punished the innocent cabin all night long.
2 JUNE
Zen monks called lingering in bed in the morning ‘forgetfulness in sleep’. My forgetfulness lasts until noon.
I assemble my kayak of blue canvas, but slowly, due to my lack of technical expertise. The instructions say the assembly should take two hours. I put in five, and it’s a major victory when I glide out onto the water this evening. With a few strokes of the paddle, I regain what the breakup of the ice had cost me: the possibility of seeing the mountain whole. It has turned green. The larches have got dressed again. Up to their chests in water, Aika and Bek, in a panic, can’t figure out how to follow me and let out keening moans. Then Aika realizes that I’ll eventually come back to the beach, so they need only run beside the lake in the same direction as I’m paddling.
‘Never go more than 300 feet from shore.’ This was Volodya’s injunction up at Elohin the last time I was there. The lake water is so cold that if you capsize, you will die. No one can survive in 37º F water, and fishermen have drowned here within shouting distance of the shore, even though Jules Verne mentions the legend of this lake in Michael Strogoff: ‘No Russian has ever drowned in Baikal.’
There is water, and there are winds. Both are treacherous. Born in the mountains, the sarma can awaken in minutes and whip up waves nine feet high. Boats are swept out and overturned. The lake takes payment in men for what they take away in fish: death pays the debt. I learned recently that Volodya lost his son to the lake five years ago, and then I understood why he spent hours staring out through the clear glass. Sometimes one contemplates a landscape while thinking of the people who once loved it; the atmosphere is steeped in remembrance of the dead.
The dogs slaver their joy when I return to shore. Avian squadrons streak through the sky. Reflections offer the chance to admire Baikal’s glory twice over.
3 JUNE
Addressing the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus, Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his letter of 17 February 1903: ‘If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it, blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches …’ And here is the American naturalist and essayist John Burroughs, in The Art of Seeing Things: ‘The tone in which we speak to the world is the one the world uses with us. Give your best and you will get the best in return.’ We alone are responsible for the gloominess of our lives. The world is grey because of our blandness. Life seems pallid? Change your life, head for the cabins. In the depths of the woods, if life remains dreary and your surroundings unbearable, the verdict is in: you can’t stand yourself! Make the necessary adjustments.
I spend an hour sawing up the trunk of a dead larch in the clearing. The wood is still viable and the growth rings clearly visible. The sun tints the tree’s flesh, making it look appetizing. There are some sights that the human eye has no right to see, as when man exposes to the light things that were not at all prepared to receive it, thus breaking a taboo, changing the writing. In The Golden Pavilion, Mishima describes the cross-section of a tree that is now open ‘to the rustling flow of the wind and the sun, for which it was never destined’. Cutting down trees, picking flowers: will we one day pay for these tiny liberties that we take with the order of things, these infinitesimal transformations of the initial set-up? When one of his disciples suggested to Confucius that irrigation ditches be dug in the kitchen garden, the sage replied, watering can in hand: ‘Who knows where that would lead us?’ The advantage, in a cabin, is that aside from the occasional felling of a tree, one doesn’t change much in the general layout.
I’m gliding over silk. The sound of paddles in the silence … The dogs didn’t whine when I set out and they’re trotting along to the south. Bek’s white coat stands out against the azaleas of the slope. Volodya was no fool: after a quarter-hour of caution, I’m boldly cutting between the capes and have wound up more than a mile from shore, sitting in a canvas craft supported by a wooden frame I put together while taking a few liberties with the instructions. I’ve reached the ice jam that floats way offshore; the frozen chunks clink in the sun. I float perfectly still on the cold oily surface. Two yards from my bow, a seal pokes its head up and stares at me. It has no arms, no legs, but the look in its eyes is something like an old man’s, a gaze as deep as its domain. I speak to the seal, which listens, peers at me nearsightedly, and dives.
4 JUNE
Every morning, upon rising, I greet the ducks. More and more of them are arriving at the lake after days of flying up along the 105th meridian east. According to the dictionary of symbols, ducks represent love and fidelity for the Japanese. As for the cedars here, they stand for virginity and purity in European esotericism. My stay is placed under the auspices of virtue.
I owe my presence here to that July day seven or eight years ago when I discovered the shores of Baikal, a first impression that became the certainty that I would one day see them again. Like those followers of the Sufi doctrines espoused by the French intellectual René Guénon, esotericists who are obsessed with finding the Golden Age, we are a few nomadic souls who seek by any means to relive the most intense moments of our existence. For some of us, these moments were in our childhood; for others, they were our first kiss under the local railway trestle, or a feeling of ineffable bliss one summer evening alive with the trilling of cicadas, or a winter’s night filled with the rumination of high-minded and generous thoughts … For me, the apex was at the edge of that sandy talus sloping down to Lake Baikal.
Mishima in The Golden Pavilion: ‘… What gives meaning to our life’s actions is fidelity to a certain moment, and our effort to make that moment last for ever …’ Everything we undertake to do would flow from an ephemeral and intangible inspiration; a fraction of a second would establish existence. The Buddhists call them satori, these moments when our consciousness glimpses something that disappears forthwith. Blindly, we attempt to recover it, longing to revive that vanished sensation. Days stream by in this fumbling quest; we wander through and throughout our lives. We
advance, butterfly net in hand, hoping to catch what has fled. This attempt to relive the satori, thwarted and revived a thousand times, will drive our efforts until death delivers us from the obsessive desire to resuscitate what has fainted away.
Alas, one cannot bathe in the same lake twice. The satori cannot ever be repeated. A hierophany – a physical manifestation of the sacred serving as spiritual inspiration – visits us only once. Madeleines cannot be reheated. And the shores of Baikal are now too familiar to me to draw the slightest tear from my eye.
5 JUNE
I paddle to the north, as this afternoon draws to a close, with two fishing rods hooked on the gunwales. The bays spread out beaches of pink shingle. The water’s clarity allows glimpses of rocks on which the sun slaps splashes of lagoon brightness. An ice raft slips by with eight seagulls sunning themselves. From out on the lake, I discover the new face of the mountain. The tender green strip of larches supports the greenish-bronze band of cedars coiffed by the bluish-green frieze of the dwarf pines. Surviving patches of granular snow punctuate these lines like commas. The mountains are playing at standing on their heads, and their reflections are even lovelier than the reality. The water’s depth and mystery impart vibrancy to the images, and the trembling of the surface conjures visions at the edge of a dream.
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga Page 15