TRANS Nr. 16: David Jenkins (Plovdiv University, Bulgaria ...

TRANS Nr. 16: David Jenkins (Plovdiv University, Bulgaria ...
David Jenkins (Plovdiv University, Bulgaria): Mountains to the Sea. In: TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No. 16/2005. ...
TRANS Nr. 16: David Jenkins (Plovdiv University, Bulgaria ...
(Plovdiv University, Bulgaria): Mountains to the Sea Trans Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 16. resentation Herausgeberin | Editor | Éditeur: Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria) Dokumentation | Documentation | Documentation Mountains to the Sea David Jenkins (Plovdiv University, Bulgaria)   Above all waters are all mountains. mountains walk with their toes on all waters and splash there. t;Mountains and Waters" sutra)   I will arise and go with Annie Dillard, the exemplary American poet, essayist, and natural philosopher. rise and go with her to the American Northwest, to Seattle, Puget Sound, to greet the dawn. aise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split.... rises from the pastures; his fingers are firs; islands slide wet down his shoulders. sky in his belly; he vaults, vaulting and spread, holding all and spread on me like skin. mountains and the sea walked together, flowed together, every day blessed by the sun. mountain travels toward Rila as a journey into the wilderness. hose who will seek directly, by entering the primary temple, the wilderness can be a ferocious teacher, rapidly stripping down the inexperienced or the careless. licity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness (Snyder, The Practice of the Wild 23). mountains and sea were once wild and fecund, teeming with animal and marine life, and the mountain villages and seaside hamlets were the province of hunting reserves and prosperous fisheries. beach, and alpine enthusiasts trekked and skied the slopes in winter, but during the off season the towns remained hardy and wild, encampments of self-reliant settlers. seaside backwaters and alpine retreats, like rustic wild ducks underwent a surprising transformation. beach-front condos or gentrified alpine investment properties, tucked away behind locked gates guarded night and day. selling apartments and vacation villas that existed only as a gleam in some developer’s eye, roughed out on a blueprint. asking price, without having to build anything. Beach, watching the dark seas heave from his rented room. sea of faith girdled the world, when it all seemed bright and new. sea spoke to such brooding men down the millennia, spoke to Homer and Sophocles. sea carried an eternal note of sadness to all the borders it touched. hose words echo and ring true, and not just in rented hotel rooms late at night. Kavarna Tsonko Tsonev, has lately turned the sleepy Black Sea town from a backwater to Bulgaria’s rock capital, booking Deep Purple and The Scorpions in the same summer, with promises of bigger bangs: head banging Manowar, sex bomb Tom Jones, and who knows? town is most definitely on the tourist map, the "rokeri" roll in, and the cash registers play their own jingle jangle. Black Sea Megalopolis that will stretch from Balchik Tsarevo and on to the Turkish border, where the vast herds of dazzled, frazzled tourists will teeter in and totter on, on their seven-day, all-inclusive holidays, snapping their fingers to a stageful of heavy metal groups and chugging beer by the tons-full. cise, according to those who were keeping score, eight tons of beer were consumed at the Scorpions concert, to wash down the more than fifteen thousand kebabche, and who knows how many thousand kiufte? Places like the Rila Wilderness and the Pirin National Park may still be almost as pristine as they have always been, but they are also highlighted and underlined as selling points in the advertisements and tourist brochures. ouses, eat rice gruel and a few pickles, and circumambulate set routes burning incense and bowing at site after site (Snyder, The Practice of the Wild 99). mountain and seaside retreats, plied with the local cuisine and strong drink, coddled by real estate agents who double as tour guides, at their clients’ beck and call. seaside resorts’ pristine beaches have disappeared under umbrellas for hire, casinos and strip joints do a very brisk business, the boardwalk kiosks offer anything and everything, most of it cheap kitsch and glitter, gingirea. rise apartment complexes and swell hotels. poses the foolish person or the foolish chicken alike to the ever-watchful hawk of the food-web and to early impermanence. resorts such as Borovetz and Arbanasi, steps out of his Mercedes in Sofia and is gunned down. Plovdiv, also of Multigroup, a man rumored to have bribed and threatened his club, Plovdiv Lokomotiv, into a national football championship, walks out of his Sunny Beach pleasure palace, the Buddha Bar, and is gunned down amidst his phalanx of security guards. Sofia, shot fifteen times while sitting in the back seat of his BMW, on his way to work. hese men have been somewhat comforted by their late husbands’ vast bequests. start-up money for the resort development comes from? asks too many hard questions, even as the death toll among Bulgarian executives and urban warriors rises. hese are the highest rollers, the entrepreneurs who goose the golden goose for the last of its eggs. oose entirely, before they remember that their Balkan paradise was a free gift and not a promotional gimmick. hose who will like to go back, who think they hold return tickets to the Shangrila they once knew, will be sadly disappointed to find their return tickets are really one-way. itself is a reflex of ignorance and delusion that comes from not seeing who we "truly" are. hese weaknesses, or it can encourage generosity, kindness, trust. Bulgaria, the "politics of virtue" can well be another, smaller, but ultimately more profitable business: ecotourism. citizenship, and needed to adapt modern machine craft to such higher uses as will expand and enrich the quality of all human life.... hases as a native must grow naturally among us here. poses, is the clear basis of any practical expression of social life.... use and intelligent limitation of machinery in devising new patterns inevitable for life in the New... place; the machine in his hand as a tool. hese the words of a pie-in-the-sky pseudo-philosopher? hese are the words of America’s greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, written almost fifty years ago (Wright, The Living City 90). place, drawing up blueprints or marketing plans - too easily becomes the heady promises of the developers, the method and what passes for the soul of science, the scope of jurisprudence. hese exercises of power de­pend on inscribing an "inside" and cordoning it off from an "out­side," then building walls, defending the fortress, hiring the guards. hose who don’t agree with business as usual, who show up without sufficient dough, re, mi, or who have not been given an express invitation to the festivities, are generally viewed with suspicion, targeted and made scapegoats, ultimately ejected as cranks and troublemakers, though the great circle dance goes on, round and around. hased at the Vienna Westbahnhof on Friday, December 9: George Bush Jr. hose gathered at the Weltklima Gipfel - the World Summit on Climate Control. nicht verstehen .") Is this really the way the world is, or has to be? place): All our literatures are leavings [too] - of the same order as the myths of wilderness peoples, who leave behind only stories and a few stone tools. assed on from deer to deer with an art of interpretation which is instinctive. hose other beings - they might ruminate on "intersexuality" and "decomposition criticism" (112). hese ruts, sloughs, and luxurious labyrinths? start over, to repent of our wrongheaded actions and false starts. nese emperor galloped past a peasant by the side of the road, then reined in his frothing team of horses to ask directions to a certain destination. fused to take advice from someone so lowly. orses on, and all his power only led him farther and farther down the wrong road. see that we must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. hese lessons can be learned, the realms of caribou and elk, elephant and rhinoceros, orca and walrus, are shrinking day by day. seeking (and carving) the lowest soulful, life-giving, shape-shifting.... seen as buddha-work partners: ascetic discipline and relentless spirituality balanced by compassionate tolerance and detached forgiveness. o;Mountains and waters’ is a way to refer to the totality of the process of nature. cities, and the (once comparatively small) dusty world of human affairs" (Snyder, The Practice of the Wild 101-2). beach in Florida on a warm evening, where he heard the murmur of the waves advancing and receding, ebbing and flowing, as Arnold had a century before. aused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, the veritable ocean. beach hears the sea and something more, an oversound, the harmonic vibration of human artifice and artistry, a melody crossing the water, where many a king has gone, and many a king’s daughter. sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins. city can give us, we carry this dim inheritance with us, the sound faintly heard: here, now, always. urselves, toward another life that inhabits us. eanic or the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. senator William Yeats, and no doubt like you, I have heard it too. see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars" (Walden 71). Seele Gleicht dem Wasser: Vom Himmel kommt es, Zum Himmel steigt es, Und wieder nieder Zur Erde muss es, Ewig wechselnd. urselves and of our origins: the border to a far country from which we have all come, to which we return when as sparrows we fly from the mead-hall. orse’s neck, I tasted horse and horse sweat and rain. sea that flowed over us" (from "Salt," in Best American Essays 1995 149). mise [to Aaron and all the Levites]: "a covenant of salt forever." In the Roman Church baptism, the priest places salt in the infant’s mouth" (Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm). skin; he burgeons up from day like any tree. ossed broadcast into time like so much grass, some ravening god’s sweet hay. stark and metaphysical, in Dillard’s Pulitzer-prizewinning journal of all weathers, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "I think that the dying pray at the last not ‘please,’ but ‘thank you,’ as a guest thanks his host at the door. erse was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. tunic like a live coal that neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part . see: the American poet William Meredith, a smiling, public man lately enfeebled and rendered almost dumb by a series of strokes, is taken by his Bulgarian hosts to see the masks of gold housed in a necropolis near Varna. hose of ancient nobility and fierce warriors, noble savages preserved for millennia, now at rest and on display in a glass case in a seaside museum. guided tour, for such a ragged coat upon a stick as this, it can only be a welter of sights and sounds joined by "and" and "and." But these masks are different, definitive. resentation accompanied by some fifty photographs that I took in Bulgaria and elsewhere. resentationSektionsgruppen| Section Groups| Groupes de sections       Inhalt | Table of Contents | Contenu  16 Nr.For quotation purposes: David Jenkins (Plovdiv University, Bulgaria): Mountains to the Sea.