张家界 « Smartly Evade the Evil Claw Arrest

张家界

19 05 2010

Zhangjiajie

: Can you believe they still use these to carry lazy tourists up and down mountains?

Resting against his walking stick in one hand, and curling his long white beard around the index finger of the other, the philosopher and poet is at a loss for words. He simply stares. He has taken up residence here, under these heavenly spires that gouge holes in the rain clouds, the tips of which seem forever shrouded in mist and the dull white light behind them. He is a hermit. China is not yet China, but a series of boundaries and battle fronts, as of yet with out a true sense of itself. It is divided by several hundred different dialects and as many different cultures and ways of life. This man now wanders from Tujia village to Miao village, preferring solitude in the deep recesses and narrow canyons of this corner of the world. With rainwater he writes characters on the steep sandstone walls; the brushstrokes are rough but determined over the jagged surfaces. In other areas he chisels a more permanent mark on a pillar more than three thousand feet tall, inscribing it with red paint. Because he cannot describe them sufficiently, he gives them each names, sometimes spending hours deciding on the perfect characters. It is not just a word he is choosing, but an image, and idea a unique identity captured only by a unique set of characters never used before and never to be used again: 天外来客 “tianwai laike…” Roughly translated, this means “Visitor from beyond the sky.”

I look out at the vast expanse, my mind just as vacant as I had hoped it would be, looking and looking and finally thinking: “What?” I realized I felt just as I did when I used to sit on those old wooden recliners on the terrace of my Grandmother’s home in Italy staring up at the night sky wondering: “What the hell were the Greeks thinking?” All those years ago, they gave names to each pattern of stars in the sky. Some overlapping, reusing stars from previous constellations to draw up images (multi-headed serpents, centaurs, lions), that to many of us today seem absurd. Well, we know now the Ptolemy got some things wrong, but that’s not the point. Looking out at that expanse, the green so green it seemed worked over in Photoshop, the stone pillars balancing so precariously that they seemed they could fall at any minute, and yet there they stand and have stood for millions of years… you see what you want to see and that’s exactly what is so profound about a view like that. It clears your mind and takes over completely. In that moment, you are free thinking, a blank slate, your mind wanders without direction. The landscape impresses itself onto your brain, painting a picture for you because you can never hope to understand. You can only interpret, and you will inevitably lose something in translation.

My whole time at Zhangjiajie I stayed off the main paths. Even the constant rain barely had an impact on the influx of tourists (mainly Chinese and Korean) to the park that week. But for the two full days I was in the park I managed to avoid them almost completely. The paths I took were perhaps a little less ‘family friendly.’ Some of them were just slick stone and no handrail next to a thousand foot drop off, but I was as safe as I could be about it. Their air was the freshest I’ve breathed in a long time and my mind took a break from the thought pollution (which is only one of the many varieties) in Changsha.