The Uses of High Places

 

 

    Great heights have long been inspirations fora sense of the sublime, the physical altitude stimulating high thoughts. In China scholars and poets like Tao Qian, Wang Wei, and Han Shan found contemplative roosts in the mountains and even today contemplatives meditate in Tapovan near the source of the Ganges. Symbolic heights like ziggurats, pyramids (in Egypt and Mesoamerica), and soaring Gothic cathedrals encouraged people’s consciousness upward while, even to the less spiritual, mountain views are universally considered beautiful, even exhilarating.

     Having recently lingered for a spell in the Colorado Rockies, I was struck by the distinctly American use to which some of the grandest regions in our magnificent mountains have been put. Our most glorious sites have been bought up by the one percent. Though they must tolerate hoi polloi to some extent, it is only as intruders in their bought-and-paid-for domain.

     Vail, Colorado, is scarcely a town at all, but more closely resembles an upscale shopping mall. It came into existence only with the development of ski resorts in the ‘sixties, and now housing of one sort or another has usurped the most scenic spots. As a single-family dwelling currently averages over two million dollars in the community, a difficulty has arisen in figuring out where to put people to do the plumbing and landscaping and childcare and stock the shelves in the local market. 

     Aspen looks something more like an actual community, but even the tidy, well-kept cottages are in fact second homes for the fatter among the fat cats. Here the average price is fourteen million. An airport with no scheduled flights accommodates only the wasteful jets of America’s oligarchs.  A company boasting it offers "the world's largest yachts" has a showroom here, a thousand miles from the sea.  In Jackson, Wyoming, homes average two million while the existence of working people in the outskirts is attested by the average income of Teton County: a mere half million.

     Even before the ever-increasing wealth gap enabled this usurpation of areas which are indeed national treasures, turning them into trophy leisure locations, of course, the Rockies were viewed through a different financial lens. While the mountains were simply an obstacle to those seeking level farmland further west, the discovery of gold, silver, and other metals brought settlers hoping for more rapid wealth than agriculture could bring. Their eyes were focused on the subterranean realms in which the minerals were hidden, scarcely on the grand landscapes above ground. For these pioneering prospectors the conditions were harsh, at times dangerously so. The industrialization of mining brought dangerous and exploitative working conditions for miners and ferocious repression to any who tried to better their condition. Hundreds died in Cripple Creek, Telluride, Coeur d’Alene and elsewhere, victims of the rapacious greed of the bosses.

     When the ore was exhausted, mines were abandoned and their structures allowed to deteriorate. Now the workers’ struggles are forgotten and even the ugly heaps of tailings are perceived as “historic,” and thus, to the Chamber of Commerce, as assets. As a practical account book matter, the mountains were significant to the land's owners only as a shipping inconvenience.

     Apart from the reduction of mountains either to a marker of prestige or a source of money, they are today a focus of athletic activity. In recent years skiing has vastly increased while hiking, rock climbing, biking, and other strenuous activities have grown as well.  Physical exertions are, of course, wholesome, yet for me the stink of money lingers about the fit bodies one encounters in these glorious mountains.  Whereas George Mallory originally rejected carrying oxygen as “unsporting,” and Edmund Hillary went up Everest wearing hunting tweeds, today special clothing and costly equipment are as significant as performance, signifying affluence like country club membership did for golfers in the past.  The high peaks remain incidental, appreciated by many only for the glamorous background they provide for a display of one’s physique and one’s sophisticated gear. 

     The poets can remind us how to regard mountains as mountains.  Their suggestion is consistent over the centuries.  The old Tang poets knew the proper uses of high places.  Han Shan who adopted the mountain’s name as his own, collapsing the gap between ego and object, atman and Atman.  The mountain is all but invisible, since he inhabits it.

 

Bird-song drowns me in feeling.

Back to my shack of straw to sleep.

Cherry-branches burn with crimson flower,

Willow-boughs delicately trail.

Morning sun flares between blue peaks,

Bright clouds soak in green ponds.

Who guessed I’d leave that dusty world,

Climbing the south slope of Cold Mountain?

                      (translated by A. S. Kline)

 

Almost half a millennium later Shiwu’s motives are the same.

 

Forty-some years I've

Lived in the mountains,

Ignorant of the world's

Rise and fall.

Warmed at night by a stove

Full of pine needles;

Satisfied at noon by a bowl

Of wild plants;

Sitting on rocks

Watching clouds and empty thoughts;

Patching my robe in sunlight;

Practicing silence

Till someone asks

Why Bodhidharma came east,

And I hang out my wash.

                    (trans. By Bill Porter)

 

     And a similar poetic respect for mountains as mountains appears no less in European literature, in Shelley, for instance. 

 

from Mont Blanc

                                     V

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights,

And many sounds, and much of life and death.

In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,

In the lone glare of day, the snows descend

Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,

Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,

Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend

Silently there, and heap the snow with breath

Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home

The voiceless lightning in these solitudes

Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods

Over the snow. The secret Strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome

Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

If to the human mind's imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

 

     In Shelley’s Mont Blanc he finds “the secret Strength of things” all the more present when “none beholds them there,” since their power transcends human vision.  Though “voiceless,” the mountain signifies Ultimate Reality for the poet specifically because he cannot encompass its vastness.  No further commentary is needed (or even possible) since the mountain is neither more nor less than itself. 

     For Gary Snyder the mountain setting has a purgative effect, clearing his mind of obstacles and distractions, allowing the consciousness to focus with precision. 

 

 

    Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout

 

    Down valley a smoke haze

    Three days heat, after five days rain  

    Pitch glows on the fir-cones

    Across rocks and meadows

    Swarms of new flies.

    I cannot remember things I once read

    A few friends, but they are in cities.  

    Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup  

    Looking down for miles

    Through high still air.

 

     Getting a perspective on the landscape may be elusive for today’s visitor to Vail.  Procuring a parking space and ten-dollar scoop of ice cream may rise to the foreground of thought for today’s mountaineer.  But the high altitude remains in spite of exploitation and development, in spite of skis that cost thousands of dollars and lifts that cost hundreds, the cold is there and the indifferent thin air and now and then even an affluent athlete, we are liberal enough to observe, may catch a whiff of what’s real and what will last.  The shops, like the miners, may prove in the end a brief and passing phase.