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. ...
Walking beyond and walking within are both done on water. I will arise and go with her to the American Northwest, to Seattle, Puget Sound, to greet the dawn. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time. Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise 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.... He is Puget Sound, the Pacific; his breast rises from the pastures; his fingers are firs; islands slide wet down his shoulders. Islands slip blue from his shoulders and glide over the water, the empty lighted water like a stage. Today’s god rises, his long eyes flecked in clouds. He flings his arms, spreading colors; he arches, cupping sky in his belly; he vaults, vaulting and spread, holding all and spread on me like skin. The borderlands were home to frontier freeholders , and the waters were plied by sailors as hearty and ancient as Phoenicia. As late as the nineteenth century, Ivan Vazov can describe his mountain travels toward Rila as a journey into the wilderness. For those who will seek directly, by entering the primary temple, the wilderness can be a ferocious teacher, rapidly stripping down the inexperienced or the careless. It is easy to make the mistake that will bring one to an extremity. During the summer sun worshipers dotted the 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. Then one day, nobody knew exactly why, the pristine seaside backwaters and alpine retreats, like rustic wild ducks underwent a surprising transformation. The freeholders awoke to find that they were tending golden geese that sat on golden eggs. Soon the earth-movers and sub-contractors turned the villages into boomtowns. Then as if out of nowhere, hordes of real estate agents appeared, selling apartments and vacation villas that existed only as a gleam in some developer’s eye, roughed out on a blueprint. The land was auctioned off by the square acre and square meter, for surprising sums. The more square meters for sale, the more the builders will profit, and the more the agents can mark up the builders’ asking price, without having to build anything. He imagines a time when the sea of faith girdled the world, when it all seemed bright and new. Now all he can hear is the water receding from the world’s naked shingles, mingled with the distant thunder of ignorant armies that clash by night on a darkling plain, the discordant alarums of struggle and fright. The salt, estranging sea spoke to such brooding men down the millennia, spoke to Homer and Sophocles. For Arnold contemplating Europe from across the Channel, the sea carried an eternal note of sadness to all the borders it touched. He turned to his companion, pleading, "Love! Let us be true to one another." Those words echo and ring true, and not just in rented hotel rooms late at night. Maybe even the rockosaurus Rolling Stones. The town is most definitely on the tourist map, the "rokeri" roll in, and the cash registers play their own jingle jangle. The garden of earthly delights, to be sure a scene worthy of Breughel: a sloshed army of will-be investors surrounded by packs of hucksters and get-rich-quick artists howling welcome and have we got a deal for you! Here is your bed and your breakfast, and dobre doshli. Pilgrims might climb thousands of feet, sleep in the plain board guesthouses, 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). The will-be buyers come from England, Scotland, and Wales, Ireland and the Netherlands, ready money in hand. Apparently, they believe what they are told: that their investments are bound to double and triple in a few years, when Bulgaria joins the Union. The investors generally have no intention of occupying the residences they buy, but will rent them by the day or week to vacationing Italians, Spaniards, Germans, and Austrians, a hundred Euro a night, two hundred.... The land is plowed under, gutted, then fortified with concrete and turned into a jumble of high-rise apartment complexes and swell hotels. The cumulative effect is like a total eclipse of the sun. Greed exposes the foolish person or the foolish chicken alike to the ever-watchful hawk of the food-web and to early impermanence. Preliterate hunting and gathering cultures were highly trained and lived well by virtue of keen observation and good manners... The investment banker and insurance executive, Emil Kiulev, worth around 500 million dollars, is assassinated
on the streets of Sofia, shot fifteen times while sitting in the back seat of his BMW, on his way to work. They say he owed the Russians money he cann’t pay. How much money, how much land does a man need? Or a woman, since the grieving widows of these men have been somewhat comforted by their late husbands’ vast bequests. But the boom is still in full swing, so nobody asks too many hard questions, even as the death toll among Bulgarian executives and urban warriors rises. These are the highest rollers, the entrepreneurs who goose the golden goose for the last of its eggs. If they live long enough, they may stifle the goose entirely, before they remember that their Balkan paradise was a free gift and not a promotional gimmick. Even those 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. Organized society can inflame, pander to, or exploit these weaknesses, or it can encourage generosity, kindness, trust. There is reason, therefore, to be engaged in a politics of virtue (Snyder, The Practice of the Wild 92). In Bulgaria, the "politics of virtue" can well be another, smaller, but ultimately more profitable business: ecotourism. Interior discipline of trained imagination is needed for good citizenship, and needed to adapt modern machine craft to such higher uses as will expand and enrich the quality of all human life.... But first we need a new aesthetic - also a new idea of what constitutes "profit"; a new idea of what constitutes success; a new idea of what constitutes luxury. Beauty in all its phases as a native must grow naturally among us here. Machine power, decentralized and better distributed, more directly and simply applied to humane purposes, is the clear basis of any practical expression of social life.... Developed machine-age life, as luxury, must consist of more appropriate use and intelligent limitation of machinery in devising new patterns inevitable for life in the New... No, these are the words of America’s greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, written almost fifty years ago (Wright, The Living City 90). Naming names - putting things in their rightful 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. All of these exercises of power depend on inscribing an "inside" and cordoning it off from an "outside," then building walls, defending the fortress, hiring the guards. The temptation is too great, the rewards a palpable Elysium, the forces of social control so formidable, the powers that run the world well-nigh unassailable. No, this is the way we have made the world, in our own distorted image. This is what our children will inherit, and their children, for as long as we inhabit Gaia, our fragile island home. They should do what they can to stop us. Other orders of beings have their own literatures. Narrative in the deer world is a track of scents that is passed on from deer to deer with an art of interpretation which is instinctive. A literature of bloodstains, a bit of piss, a whiff of estrus, a hit of rut, a scrape on a sapling, and long gone. And then there might be a "narrative theory" among those other beings - they might ruminate on "intersexuality" and "decomposition criticism" (112). Will there be no transcendence beyond these ruts, sloughs, and luxurious labyrinths? After the rules have been invented, the laws codified, or the programs designed, the machinery runs on its own. But our human being is not, need not be, mechanical or predetermined. We make a grave mistake to allow the machinery of greed to run on unchecked. Between I and Thou, between desire and its expression, repression, or fulfilment, there needs to be room to move, to turn around, to go back and do our best to start over, to repent of our wrongheaded actions and false starts. Legend has it that a great Chinese 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. The peasant informed him that he had made a wrong turning, that he must go back the way he came and start over, and follow the signs. But the emperor, being an emperor, was imperious. He refused to take advice from someone so lowly. Sure of his power, he drove his horses on, and all his power only led him farther and farther down the wrong road. We also see that we must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others. There will be enough pain in the world as it is. The school where these lessons can be learned, the realms of caribou and elk, elephant and rhinoceros, orca and walrus, are shrinking day by day. Creatures who have been with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat - and the old, old habitat of humans - falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies (Snyder, The Practice of the Wild 4-5). And Snyder answered: "Mountains... Waters are feminine: wet, soft, dark "yin" with associations of fluid-but-strong, seeking (and carving) the lowest soulful, life-giving, shape-shifting.... The two are seen as buddha-work partners: ascetic discipline and relentless spirituality balanced by compassionate tolerance and detached forgiveness. Mountains and waters are a dyad that together make wholeness possible.... As such it goes well beyond dichotomies of purity and pollution, natural and artificial. The whole, with its rivers and valleys, obviously includes farms, fields, villages cities, and the (once comparatively small) dusty world of human affairs" (Snyder, The Practice of the Wild 101-2). Wallace Stevens: a relatively contented, relatively successful businessman, yet not dull or dulled - ever-thoughtful, always listening. Kierkegaard might have called both Snyder and Stevens "knights of faith," who learn to turn the leap of faith into a daily walk. Stevens was always looking for signs, wherever his journeys took him. He discerned such a sign, an idea of order (an intimation of immortality, perhaps), in the whisper of a song above the ocean waves that mingled with them and turned their churning rush into something intelligible, a song. It is the music of borders and origins, gateways and distant portals beckoning. It is: The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins. It is something wild and free that leads us to the end of ourselves, toward another life that inhabits us. Perhaps it is the sound of water, whether oceanic or the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. Like the Irish poet and senator William Yeats, and no doubt like you, I have heard it too. But it is also simply the stream we "go a-fishing in." That’s what Thoreau calls it. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I will drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars" (Walden 71). Now (in the world that is always now) a veterinarian’s assistant, part-time sheepherder, and brilliant essayist, Diane Kappel-Smith, is travelling through the high back country somewhere in wild Utah, to spend the summer herding sheep. She will often be called upon to help with the difficult births. Pressing my face against my horse’s neck, I tasted horse and horse sweat and rain. All things had become inextricably mixed. The medium of our common life began with this sea that flowed over us" (from "Salt," in Best American Essays 1995 149). It seems we can’t live without it. They washed a baby in water, salted him, and wrapped him in cloths... His arms spread, bearing moist pastures; his fingers spread, fingering the shore. He is time’s live skin; he burgeons up from day like any tree. His legs spread crossing the heavens, flicking hugely, and flashing and arcing around the earth toward night. This is the one world, bound to itself and exultant. It fizzes up in trees, trees heaving up streams of salt to their leaves.... The joke of the world is less like a banana peel than a rake, the old rake in the grass, the one you step on, foot to forehead. You have to admire the gag for its symmetry, accomplishing all with one right angle, the same right angle that accomplishes all philosophy.... We’re tossed broadcast into time like so much grass, some ravening god’s sweet hay. You wake and a plane falls out of the sky. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. Looking down at them, he is brought up short, troubled by the feeling that they look up at him as attentively, with as much interest, as he looks down at them. Their calm, inscrutable features are those 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. Just another stop on Meredith’s 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. They are personae that speak to the poet out of a silence as final as a whirlwind, in speech hammered past words into beauty and truth. Meredith translates their vast silence into veritable human speech, in one of his finest poems. I am appending one of those photographs. Border Zones: Travel, Fantasy and RepresentationSektionsgruppen| Section Groups| Groupes de sectionsInhalt | Table of Contents | Contenu16 Nr.For quotation purposes: David Jenkins (Plovdiv University, Bulgaria): Mountains to the Sea.