by Jeff Long
Too
Close
To
God
Selected Mountain Tales
Jeff Long
Copyright Jeff Long © 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Before photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright, the Canadian Reprography Collective, before proceeding.
Published by the Imaginary Mountain Surveyors
www.imaginarymountains.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Long, Jeff
Too Close to God / Jeff Long
ISBN 978-0-9918076-5-9
I: Title. II. Title: Too Close to God.
Publisher: Dustin Lynx
Foreword: Katie Ives
Editor: Dustin Lynx
Cover photo: Jeff Long;
see www.longrangephotography.com
Layout and Artwork: Jerry Auld
The characters and events in these stories are works of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. Furthermore, the opinions expressed in the forward and comments are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of the publisher.
To Barbara,
The mother of my daughter,
The keeper of my soul
Stories
Through the Skin of the World
The Word is the Mountain
When God throws Angels Down
Revenge
In Gentle Combat with the Cold Wind
The Virgins of Imst
The Ice Climber
The Soloist’s Diary
Abe (The Ascent)
Cannibals
Ike (The Descent)
Too Close to God
Acknowledgments
Through the Skin of the World
Climbing guidebooks begin with an obvious disclaimer that the activity is dangerous—a warning that, when I was young, gave the contents a nearly magical aura, as if the words themselves might transport me to some twilit land at the edge of life and death. Reading, I felt, then and now, is at its best a hazardous activity in which a sentence can unfold into unexpected, fathomless layers of new meaning, until reality no longer appears the same to us, and our vision of our place within it might irrevocably change.
To open the cover of this collection is to enter a realm that is not at all safe (as all locations for true adventure must be) where a reader might wander with doomed men up an infinite fastness of stone or find herself falling to the earth through the blue-shadowed air. A sense of mystery lurks amid wildwoods of blind alleys and spiraling paths, glittering ice walls and high rock faces. Cryptic signs draw us, higher up and deeper in: an ideogram from an unknown language carved into a tree; sounds that hover and vanish like frost crystals, leaving only the memory of distinct, yet unheard melodies; the torn pages of a comic book found on a ledge; the rotting parchment of lost climbers’ journals, dangling from a giant cliff; the song of a dying woman rising from the depths of a crevasse; and the knowledge that at the heart of this vast maze there might be the shimmers of eternity, the reflections of a void or only the answers of death.
Here, all at once around us, mirrors shatter, words disintegrate and maps rip apart—until, climbers or not, we too might realize, waking with a start, “the ritually fatal power of our dreams.”
I first came across the writing of Jeff Long in 2007 when I reviewed his novel The Wall for The American Alpine Journal. From the start, I found myself immersed in landscapes both surreal and recognizable. Like many climbers, I’d experienced those seemingly alchemic moments when the ordinary world appears transmuted by ice, rock, snow, movement, joy and fear into something more luminous, redolent with inchoate promises of transcendence and mystery. I’d thought that climbing might provide a portal to real adventure, a word that, since childhood, had become almost sacred to me.
Similar longings drive the characters of The Wall toward the destruction of themselves and others. Nonetheless, struggling high on El Capitan, haunted by loss and guilt, Long’s protagonist believes that somehow, “if he could finish this thing and get to the top, then the smoke would part, and the floor would lie revealed, and he would surely be able to read his own fate.” It was in this instant that I realized what could become so mesmerizing about Long’s prose. Beyond the workings of elaborate plots, a question lingers that hints at the core of our existence: whether the intricate patterns of events and images conceal mere random disorder—or else some sudden, startling glimpse of truth.
To admit to a love of fictional climbing narratives is to confess membership in a fervent underground society of readers. Those who appreciate the genre might find it strange that any preface to a collection of it must include, sooner or later, a defense. And yet, in the introduction to the comprehensive anthology One Step in the Clouds (1991), editors Audrey Salkeld and Rosie Smith began, as if with a sigh, “There is wide subscription to the idea that most climbing fiction has failed…. Time and again, when putting this book together, we have bumped against the same well-worn attitude.”
Despite their detractors, mountaineering fiction writers have, undeniably, produced a scattering of cult classics. Since 1952, René Daumal’s allegorical fragment Mount Analogue has defined the purpose of ascent for its devoted readers: “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above…. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up.” Thirty-seven years later, the narrator of M. John Harrison’s novel The Climbers questioned that enlightenment amid haunting images of ragged cities and dusky crags: “I realised I didn’t know any more than I had the last time I sat there. I didn’t know anything about anything.” In 1979 James Salter, one of the greatest living prose stylists, distilled the lives of 1960s alpinists into the spare, existential strivings of Solo Faces. With his 1980 novella, “Like Water and Like Wind,” David Roberts imagined the inner turmoil of a mountaineer who fabricates a tale of a successful ascent after a partner dies; in the process, Roberts provided some of the clearest insights into the unknown emotional conflicts behind real hoaxes. And in a 1970s fable, Bernard Amy took the concept of climbing as a spiritual pursuit to its logical end, depicting a man who tries to become “The Greatest Climber in the World,” only to learn after a long quest that “the ultimate stage of the spoken word is silence. The ultimate stage of climbing is not to climb.”
Among the various complaints made about the genre, Salkeld and Smith list perhaps the most common argument, summed up in Claire Eliane Engel’s A History of Mountaineering in the Alps (1950), “One of the elements which tend to paralyze the novelist who treats of mountain adventures is the fact that real stories—the stories of great climbs or mountain tragedies—are so perfect in all their details that it is difficult to imagine more effective or better planned episodes.” Here, Salkeld and Smith pause, “She had unconsciously put her finger on the major source of resistance: climbing is considered by its adherents to be somehow too sacred to fictionalize. Its vivid real-life dramas and intense loyalties, its acts of heroism and the all-too-frequent encounters with violent death are too precious, too poignant, too much part of some private lore and myth to become the raw material of fiction.”
Perhaps they are right: if mountain fiction appears oddly threatening to many climbing readers, it may be because it is inherently subversive. The best works question precisely what numerous mountaineers consider to be “sacred,” daring to tear down t
he immense architecture of myth that underpins much of our history, to turn it inside out, to reveal glimpses of its hidden scaffolding, to show how we project our inmost fears and desires across the glassy surfaces of icefields and granite walls.
Yet when pundits dismiss the possibility that a great alpine tale could be anything other than a straightforward report, they forget that “nonfiction” is never really straightforward. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable, particularly at high altitudes. Fiction examines, at times with more integrity, all that gets shorn away in most trip reports and films: the secret thoughts that climbers don’t share for risk of offending sponsors or friends; the murky realities behind heroic narratives, the missing pieces of history; the varying perspectives that different team members have of the same ascent, the extent to which they find each other’s versions unrecognizable. In Alpinist 21, Slovenian climber Marko Prezelj insisted on referring to a summary of his own expeditions as “based on a true story.” Since “the essence of a climb burns out in the moment of experience,” he argued, even the most well-intentioned writers have only “the vague residue of memory and the cinders of words,” from which to improvise a tale.
“You could say that the absence of fictional writing from the literature of mountaineering is remarkable,” literature professor Stephen Slemon notes, “since mountaineering ‘non-fiction’ is constructed in very similar ways to the novel (centrality of the individual protagonist; the deployment of round and flat characters; the build to the climax; the turn to the metaphysical…). A radical critical position might start from the assumption that it’s all fiction in a structural sense—and that when people mistakenly call mountain books ‘novels,’ as they seem always to do, they are actually, curiously, being right.” By accepting fiction as a valid genre of mountaineering stories, we open a portal for tales that might, in fact, alter our fundamental understanding, not only of the pursuit, but also of ourselves.
Much of mountaineering is an act of imagination. Even backyard peaks and crags offer us the chance to become a character in a novella of our own creation, following the natural narrative arc that sweeps from base to summit and back again. In cultures around the world, mountains symbolize bridges between the earth and the heavens, the abyss and the heights, the worldly and the otherworldly. Elements of fiction and myth alter our perceptions of real landscapes, shaping the metaphors we layer upon peaks, weighting them with individual and collective dreams, thick as drifting snows.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the growth of modern fantasy and that of climbing literature both represented a response, in some ways, to the surge of industrialization and the decline of mystery, wildness and faith. The philosopher Tzvetan Todorov famously defined the “fantastic” as a genre of uncertainty, an intrusion of possible enchantment into a rational world: “The ambiguity is sustained to the very end of the adventure: Reality or dream? Truth or illusion?” Likewise, as the historian Michael Reidy points out in Alpinist 39, Victorian climber Leslie Stephen envisioned alpinism as a paradoxical form of “secular mysticism,” a solace for agnosticism, evoking moments of communion on snow-lit summits. More than a hundred years after Stephen’s quests, the theologian Belden C. Lane concluded that, for some climbers, high-altitude experiences fracture the usual conventions by which we measure the world. “[D]esert and mountain terrain provokes the identification and reordering of boundaries,” Lane explained in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (2007). “It confronts people with their edges…. ‘We need to witness our own limits transgressed,’ wrote Henry David Thoreau…. In stretching the self to its edges, the geography helps in forcing a breakthrough to something beyond all previously conceived limits of being.”
Jeff Long’s characters occupy this space of ambiguity and transgression, confronted by sublime and menacing visions that might be altitude-induced hallucinations, reflections of their own unconscious, metaphors of colonialism, or incursions of otherworldly forces. Ornate enigmas appear to invite interpretations, but yield only fragmentary and elusive clues, emblems of hope or horror, significance or meaninglessness, revelation or delusion. Although the stories were originally published separately, they blend together readily as a single work. The same leitmotivs emerge from tale to tale as if echoing each other: themes of hubris and retribution; of expeditions that fall apart; of desires that mirror the less-seemly sides of the Western imagination; of would-be conquistadors who find themselves conquered. “Birds and angels may disown the darkness they cast far below,” muses one climber at the base of El Capitan, as the light fades from the day and he realizes how close he came to attacking an innocent man. “But this one dark shadow is my own.” A second climber, in a different story, seems to offer a reply: “By climbing an infinite height, we have created an infinite depth….”
Amid shadows of ghosts and monsters, we begin to imagine the pieces of what forgotten things might rise up in our own minds and lives, the bones and dust behind the shimmering visions of alpine purity, the violent histories beneath symbols of dominion, worlds fallen into chaos where redemption becomes even more uncertain than survival.
The decades between the 1970s and 1990s, when these stories first appeared, proved a high point of climbing fiction in the English language. Back then, an array of mountain magazines featured creative short stories in their pages, nurturing the development of writers like Jeff Long. Some of those magazines have since folded. Today, only a few publications still print climbing fiction. This shift away from the unruly, the experimental and the artistic is not restricted to the alpine community. Obsessed with profitable data and technological information, many are apt to forget, as Azar Nafasi writes in The Republic of Imagination (2014), that “imaginative knowledge is one of the most potent ways of understanding and communicating with the world.”
At the same time, the recent publications of Tanis Rideout’s Mallory novel Above All Things (2012), Jerry Auld’s story collection Short Peaks (2013) and David Stevenson’s award-winning Letters from Chamonix (2014), among other examples, indicate that talented mountain writers are continuing to test the unique possibilities of fiction. Perhaps this new anthology may inspire more. For we need a greater influx of such tales—cures for the creeping traces of banality and conformity in outdoor journalism, the steady encroachments of native advertising, the reenacted-for-camera ascents and the made-for-media expeditions, the replacement of storytelling with PR-driven content stripped of real context and devoid of unsettling questions.
The mistake we frequently make is in viewing adventure stories as pure escapism. At their best, they are not a flight from reality, but a struggle toward some fleeting vision of the world that is starker—and often more honest—than the larger-than-life deeds and action-figure heroes of many expedition narratives. Fiction, with its strangely radical and marginalized status, may be best positioned, these days, to recall the real significance of the unknown, the value of solitary immersion, the limits of mere information. In a sense, Long’s prose may be more meaningful to current readers than when it was first published.
The spread of horror, science fiction and fantasy in other forms of literary fiction might well reflect just how much apocalyptic and dystopian visions increasingly symbolize their audiences’ own anxieties. We live in an era defined by words such as disruption, meltdown, disaster and precariousness; when, as Alastair Bonnett writes in Unruly Places (2014) an “atavistic” longing for lost wild places and extinct creatures may make us more ready to identify with “dark fantasies of nature’s revenge.” In a widely read 2013 New York Times editorial, Roy Scranton argues that the possibility of catastrophic climate change gives new urgency to a central philosophical problem: “[T]he question of individual mortality—‘What does my life mean in the face of death?’—is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination…. What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization?”
It is in the effort to answer such questions that we realize
what only fiction offers: the ability to cross the threshold entirely into the dark and still return with a story, to report firsthand from the aftermath of an apocalypse. Long’s stories excel in capturing the final instants of dying and transfiguration. “In the labyrinth of death, as in the beat of a heart, there is nameless repetition,” a narrator explains. Another speaks of that persistent, ineluctable hope “to have mattered, one mute perception spanning the ages.” Perhaps, cast into the wreckage of all we know, we too might gaze up, as one character does, at scorched and shattered granite walls and see both horror and strange beauty, wondering “what the stars had thrust down from the vacuous sky.” We too might try to gather up our whole being in the seconds before plummeting through “the skin of the world.” Or we might keep striving beyond hope, wishing to complete something more before the fall of night.
Throughout the decades, amid the handful of critical articles on climbing fiction, another, more hopeful theme appears, futuristic and utopian: the idea of some as-yet-unwritten novel that would transform literature altogether. In the 1942 American Alpine Journal, E. Cushing and J.M. Thorington wrote, “We shall wait for it, in all probability, many a year, and in the meantime be obliged to content ourselves with lurid tales of crime on the heights.” Thirty-seven years later, George Pokorny echoed their words in Climbing Magazine, “The great peaks continue to succumb on all sides to the efforts of expert climbers using advanced techniques to assist them. It remains to be seen if a great mountaineering story will be created using a new and imaginative writing approach.”
What follows, in fact, is an attempt at just that: a collection of something more than mere climbing fiction, an attempt at a kind of total literature, a work of art that might begin to chart the invisible geographies of our deepest apprehensions and yearnings, piecing together torn scraps and fragments from American Westerns, modern fables and medieval allegories, refractions of biblical stories, Greek tragedies and Shakespeare—and between the gaps—the shadows and silences of the unseeable and the unspeakable, the suppressed and the erased. Jeff Long lists the writings of Jorge Luis Borges among his influences; gathered together here in one volume, these burnished, interlacing tales recall the Argentinean author’s short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in which the pages of a novel serve as an infinite labyrinth. Long intended his own prose, he tells us, as a guide to future writers, a warning of the risks of dedicating oneself to an esoteric genre and of the potential that might yet be attained, a map of the borderlands of a still-unimagined, luminous and flawless work that one of you—readers—may now create.