Knowledge and Pain
(2001, 1997, 1991, 1994)
We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through the fabric of illusion.
—Ansel Adams
The Fabric of Illusion
Mahendra: Kale phe. Go slowly. If you slip . . .
Tom: I know, we’re gonna die.
We ride out of Lo Manthang over the pass, along a terrifying cliffside where I close my eyes sometimes not so much in fear as in resignation, Jamling’s hooves striking the soft lip of the edge of the nothingness we will fly into should one rock dislodge or the earth shift downward a few inches from our weight, and I slip my boots out of the stirrups thinking I might have a chance to save myself but probably not. Jamling stumbles, dropping his head, and I float above him for a moment, an awful feeling of disconnection, my feet scrambling in the air to find the stirrups again. The roof of the world, and we are riding along its window ledges, reeling with adrenaline. Behind me, I hear Mahendra laughing— “Oh, you caused me so much problems when you didn’t know how to ride. Now everything is better.” I suppose it’s true, we wouldn’t have been so foolish to stay mounted on such a dangerous path in the early days of our horsemanship.
We are happy to be moving again, trying to reclaim the robust momentum we had established coming up the canyon, the energy taken out of us by Lo Manthang’s constant furtive press of traders determined to sell us carpets, turquoise, temple bells, antiques, the family jewels, by the city’s fog of intrigue, by the melodrama at the temple. No one would argue that we had overstayed our visit, and I feel a great sense of regret for Tom and Jann, the reversals of this, their long-deferred adventure together to the Forbidden Kingdom, and cannot shake the irony out of my mind, the image-spool of Jann as she left the walled city forever in a smoldering rage at the injustice dumped on her husband like a pail of foul dishwater.
Past Tsarang, our day’s final destination isn’t far, the village of Ghami, three hours by foot. Four of us decide to walk the distance; Laird, the Captain, and Mike will ride, but not before napping through the heat of the afternoon on the cushions of Tsewang’s tearoom. Jann and Mark are the most intrepid striders, a blessing in disguise, for my wife and I soon find ourselves alone on the trail together, enjoying a day made sublime by the singular pace that is us. Tsarang La, the second-highest pass we will walk over on the expedition, at 12,836 feet, rises ahead of us, and with each ten steps we take up the incline, another panel of the view unfolds, until we are standing on the col awestruck by the full panorama of the Himal, snow peaks as far as the eye can see. I rummage in my pack for the last roll of prayer flags I’ve carried with me to Mustang and climb the cairn, thousands of small rocks to mark the gratitude of the pilgrims who have passed this way throughout the ages, and tie one end of the string to the pole on the summit, its shaft swathed in wind-shredded flags. My wife of twenty-five years grabs the other end and we stretch our prayers across the narrow gap of the col, where they speak more eloquently than any other religious symbol of the beauty and sorrow of the world, of life’s fragility and lost souls and remembrance and the eternity that we fall back into. The wind lifts the flags and we hold each other dearly. Except when someone has died, we have never cried together. She has never seen the Himalayas, but she has carried the ache of their ineffability inside since the morning I stood without her in Darjeeling, waiting for the sun to rise . . . well, I have a roundabout explanation.
Ten years ago, while Tom Laird was on his way up-canyon to Mustang and the first President Bush was marshaling coalition forces against nearby Iraq, I stood atop Nemrut Dagi in eastern Turkey, sniffing the air for windblown chemicals and waiting for the sun to float up over Persia and bathe the Euphrates River valley in rosy light, and it was there I first encountered a disturbing trend among sunrises: that, like celebrities, some are so well attended that they never have a moment’s peace, and their fame churns up a hungry cloud of avarice—of both sybaritic and sacred varieties—in its wake. Which is to say, sunrises as cottage industries are peculiarly irreverent events, eclipsed by a motorized army of famous-sunrise worshippers followed close by the entrepreneurial tribes: the famous-sunrise postcard vendors, the famous-sunrise fake archaeological treasure hucksters, the famous-sunrise Polaroid artists, and the famous-sunrise tea merchants, toting large thermoses—all of which Lo Manthang can look forward to. In Turkey at least, the majority of celebrants were not outsiders but national tourists, welcoming their world-renowned sunrise with the robustness of soccer fans, singing patriotic songs, loudly reporting the progress and possibilities of the forthcoming show, and blowing snot out of each nostril onto the cold ground. As the darkness ended and the landscape brightened into silhouettes, flashbulbs popped like sniper fire. Every few minutes the horde of pilgrims reached a shivery consensus and warmed up with calisthenics. Forget meditative repose, the precious silence of dawn. Think of a virgin theme inseminated with an embryonic park, though no one in particular—not even a Disney—is to blame for the vulgarization of this ancient site, acclaimed by Alexander the Great.
I mention all this so you will be sympathetic, perhaps, to the skepticism and jaded sense of déjà vu with which I approached my second famous sunrise three years later, standing atop Tiger Hill, above the former colonial hill resort of Darjeeling in northeastern India. I was on my way to Sikkim, the Himalayan mountain-state which, I had read, “Tibetans have long regarded as a mysterious hidden sanctuary resembling the fictional Shangri-la.” The government of India had just opened Sikkim’s northern district to foreigners for the first time in a generation, and I had stopped for several days in Darjeeling to begin acclimating myself to the altitude, which is not so easy to do at sea level in Florida, where I live.
The spectacle of Tiger Hill had been playing for at least a century, since the carriages of the British raj were drawn up its severe slopes to deposit their cargo of tea planters and memsahibs on its bracing crown. Like all famous sunrises, the attraction was double-headed—the sun shared the bill with what its rising revealed. In the case of Tiger Hill, spectators gathered to divide their attention between the eastern and northern views. To the east, the sun mounted the endless corrugations of southwestern China and burst forth over another formerly forbidden and still restricted kingdom, Bhutan. As it did so, however, it cast an unforgettable kaleidoscope of color, light, and shadow upon one of the planet’s most stunning panoramas, a mammoth uplift of the earth’s crust culminating in the five summits of the world’s third-highest mountain, and most sacred of its fourteen 28,000-foot peaks, Kangchenjunga.
I had been in this part of Asia only once before—a short but ambitious side trip out of Hong Kong, where I was teaching, to visit old friends in Kathmandu. A week later I had returned to the States with two staggeringly vivid images imprinted on my memory and, for lack of any other word to say this, ever-present in my soul. (One wonders, however, as a product of a post-religious society, how I came to have a soul, and what is to be done with it?)
Pashupatinath, the temple compound on the banks of Nepal’s holiest river, was an engine of surreality, emitting a steady exhaust of details both hellish and transcendent. Here the dying and dead were brought for their final earthbound performance, to be set afire on the stone and concrete platforms—ghats—lining the bankside, their ashes picked through by monkeys, then broomed into the filthy water and slowly drained molecule by molecule into the Ganges. Crossing a footbridge, I saw a sight that penetrated the intense calm of Pashupatinath, its otherworldly and pitiless absence of sorrow. Where the bridge joined the stone embankment, a pyre had burned sufficiently to require tending, tidying. In its case of flames, a skull radiated with heat, on the verge of transparency, and at the center of the ghat, the furious transformation was complete; no trace of human being was evident among the coals. But at the end nearest me, a set of white-hot discs that were knees were still attached to blackened shanks, each tapering to a perfectly good feminine foot
sticking out of the blaze, the gauze shroud burned away without effect and the manicured toes pointed skyward. I stopped to stare, horrified, because these blisterless, youthful, and indeed healthy-looking feet seemed to contain a heartrending surplus of untraveled miles. As I watched, an attendant ambled forward. With his pole, he tucked the disembodied pair under a golden blanket of flame where her womb would be, and finally I turned away, self-absorbed, obviously, by mortality. They made chilling metaphoric sense to me, these feet—the reluctance of flesh to follow spirit and step away from life. But in Nepal, and later in Sikkim, I learned that it is quite possible, though never as easy as it looks, to walk right out of the world.
All I knew before arriving in Kathmandu that first time was that the mountains lay somewhere north of the city, shielded by intervening hills and the last days of monsoon season. I had resigned myself to the expectation that any pleasure I got from the Himalayas would derive simply from being in the neighborhood, like visiting the home of a Hollywood star who won’t come out of her room. It hardly strained my senses, though, to feel them out there, titans looming behind the clouds: Annapurna, Everest, Kangchenjunga.
Frustration got the better of me and on my last day in Kathmandu I borrowed my host’s mountain bike and pushed out into the murderous morning traffic, headed for the medieval city of Bhaktapur, en route to Nagarkot, a hilltop village on the northeastern rim where, with any luck, the legendary snow peaks would expose themselves wholesale. Sixty klicks up and back but a dream-easy ride through time more than space, despite a four-thousand-foot rise in elevation. The day was bright with sunshine and, on the wooded slopes and free of diesel fumes, exhilaratingly fresh. I topped the ridge by late morning and found myself at the end of the road, a barrier and guard post announcing the perimeter of a military zone.
Dismounting, I walked the bike down a footpath traversing the northern face of the ridge, scouting for an isolated spot to perch in solitude and look out upon the roof of the world, first with great anticipation but then with a mild sense of disappointment. I rationalized that a landscape so painted in awe-inspired rhetoric as the Himalayas was likely to be a few degrees overrated. The midland range that helped shape the bowl of Kathmandu rolled down into another terraced valley, then hopped up again to another ridgeline, then another and another, an ocean of crests, each successively higher and steeper and ultimately capped by a froth of clouds. Showers still roamed the vista during these last days of September, although the overcast was beginning to tear up and scatter.
I peered into those clouds, their perceptible flux, disappointed but not crushed: not seeing the Himalayas was not, after all, the equivalent of life passing you by. And, if somewhere concealed within the impenetrability of the clouds lay an answer, an epiphany, a step in the direction of truth or enlightenment, I had, without regrets, become middle-aged without that answer, and probably would be stumped about how to use it anyway. My good fortune, however circumscribed, would consist of being where I was, on a ridge above Kathmandu, on a beautiful day, with hope in my heart. That should have been enough.
After several minutes I saw a hawk plunge, swooping down into the inner valley. It stalled and seemed to change its mind, wings expanding to release itself back into the updraft above the wheat-colored paddies. I watched as the bird climbed above the layered ridges until it was level with, and then higher than, the mountainous horizon. From my perspective, it appeared to ascend above the clouds into smears of blue atmosphere, and I tracked its flight until my mouth gaped and I shook my head, disbelieving. In the high air, where nothing belonged or ever existed for me, forms shifted, crystallized, spilled vapor, like humpback whales knifing straight up through the surface. What I saw I felt was inconceivable—another world embedded in the stratosphere, exactly where I gazed a minute ago, seeing emptiness, dismissing any other possibility. Sometimes you have to look at something many times, physicists are fond of saying, before you see it once.
They were there, wrote the Scottish mountaineer W. H. Murray, describing his first sight of the Himalayan snow peaks. An arctic continent of the heavens, far above the earth and its girdling clouds: divorced wholly from this planet.
“A mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest,” Salman Rushdie wrote in The Satanic Verses, “is land’s attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded flight, the earth mutated—nearly—into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted.”
What should have been a cerulean void was stacked magnificently with dazzling snow-streaked fantasies—veiled, unveiling, veiled again, ducked behind their screen of mists, there for an ephemeral moment but ever-elusive, a trait I have come to associate with the Himalayas (and, I suppose, consciousness, insight, truth, meaning). The moon had crashed here, cracking into a half-dozen colossal, icy pieces. I’ve never been so surprised by geography nor so thunderstruck by the generous scale of reality. What I mean is this:
My eyes played upon the divine. Framed. Lucid. Like before and after pictures from the Hubble telescope. Feeling fucked is an appropriate first response. The ridge above Kathmandu seemed to place me right on the edge of godly disclosure—not the most comfortable feeling, metaphysically speaking. Nor, I suppose, should it be. At moments like this, perhaps the first goal of enlightenment is to resist the compulsion to begin bargaining for your life and the way you’ve been living it, or pissing it away. I bargained for a single blessing: the opportunity to return to the Himalayas, to find the third image that was the synthesis between a pair of feet in flames and a celestial graph of sacred peaks.
I pedaled back to the ridgetop village to buy a cold soda from a tea shop. On an adjoining patio, a group of Nepalese students, young men, beckoned me over. One of them was struggling to compose a love letter to his sweetheart down in the valley, hoping to impress her with his command of English, and asked for my help. After several trial lines, he made his intentions, and stylistic requirements, clear to me, and I began in earnest on the sentimental greeting card he handed me: My Dearest Darling—I count the minutes and the hours until we are together again, dreaming of your devastating beauty. What does this word mean, devastating? the student asked. It’s the greatest form of beauty, I told him. The most sublime. It was as if we had connected to share a common cause, each addicted to his own inescapable desire.
Three years later I found myself in the back of a Jeep, in the pitch of night, freezing, thrown about as the driver muscled the wheel into another hairpin turn. Steeling herself against nausea, Christine, a British tourist I had met at the airport in Bagdogra, down on the steamy plains of West Bengal, rode shotgun, trying not to vomit. We left the roller-coaster streets of Darjeeling below us and soon fell in line with a sluggish caravan of fellow sightseers, our chain of headlights sweeping the mountainside as we plowed up Tiger Hill. My mood soured as I realized that the summit would be as crowded, commercialized, and philistine as the scene I had once observed on Nemrut Dagi.
There’s so little left of the world where men and women live their lives in the luminous presence—and ominous throb—of its physical sacredness, and I had to wonder, riding up Tiger Hill, if any place remained where the sublime continued to exist unviolated; where, with some assurance, a person could invest his or her spirit in the world without battling the adulterations. For me, nature wasn’t a metaphor or a myth informing a system of worship, but a pure interpretation of the mind of God, or, to say this another way, the force of intelligence within creation. But was this force best acknowledged in solitude, or queued up in noisy fellowship, like angels on the head of a pin?
On the other hand, how could such a thing matter? Back on the ridge above Kathmandu, the sensation that I looked upon divinity had been immediate and, at the time, in complete ignorance of the cultures and theological traditions of the Himalayas. But, what then? Celebrate? Propitiate? Prostrate? All my life, either growing up in a zealous Catholic household, or later as an agnostic, contemptuous of the great religions, either God
was shouting in my face or God was dead on arrival, a prop for the powerful vanities of man. Perhaps the best angle on God was indifference—the hell with God. Who cares? God never seemed able to exercise a working knowledge of compassion, it seemed, when it came to human affairs, or seemed to have a proper place to be—except, of course, in nature. Yet even nature’s literalness could be obscured by narrative device, outrageous symbolism, and illusion. Sometimes it was easiest to believe that the divine could only be adequately approached in the nuclear lab, counting quarks. Still, when it wasn’t trying to kill you with the fury of an absolute truth, nature could always be relied upon to provide glimmerings, intimations, whiffs of hyperconsciousness—bursts of sensory phrasings that seemed freighted with meaning, but nothing too articulate, nothing that could be explicated or deconstructed into understanding. In a small boat far away from land, or walking across flat desert, or lying on your back under a night sky salted with stars, you got pretty strong clues about the character of infinity, but still they were only clues. Nothing to take to the cosmic bank.
We passed through Tiger Gate, then maneuvered our way through the observatory’s busy parking lot to a space at the north rampart, where the world dipped away from Tiger Hill and then heaved itself, fifty miles off in the distance, up into the solar system. It was 5:30 a.m.; the viewing area swarmed with people, mostly Indian tourists. A continuous stream of Land Rovers disgorged passengers into a cul-de-sac of fumes. Unlike the daylight hours, the predawn sky was pristine, clear, inky blue except for a faint scarlet thread of light in the east. When we had picked up Christine at her hotel, she was drinking tea in the lobby with an Australian couple, also heading up Tiger Hill, and they had asked me about the weather. Excellent, I told them. “Good thing,” said the man. “I didn’t come all this way to see clouds.” Sometimes that’s exactly what you come all this way for, I felt the urge to say to him, but he was a bit of an ass, and I think he would have misunderstood me.
Kingdoms in the Air Page 12