letter from nepal 3.23.08

8/7/2019 Letter from Nepal 3.23.08

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L et t er f r o m N e p a l

C.J. Sentell

We are civilized generation number 500 or so, counting from 10,000 years ago when we settleddown. We Homo Sapiens generation number 7,500 counting from 150,000 years ago when our

species presumably arose. And we are human generation number 125,000, counting from theearliest Homo species. Yet how can we see ourselves as only a short-term replacement cast for a

long-running show, when a new batch of birds flies around singing, and new clouds move? Livingthings from hyenas to bacteria whisk the dead away like stagehands hustling props between

scenes. To help a living space last while we live on it, we brush or haul away the blown sand andhack or burn the greenery. We are mowing the grass at the cutting edge.

- Annie Dillard


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Letter from NepalAs on my self, on my shelf are six months of dust. Collected through the square light of day

and gathered among the lonely warmth of quiet wood, dust mixes two primordially opposing

forces, earth and air, calling into question the latter's independence. Substance suspended,

earth clinging to corporeal air, weighing down and capturing it, if but briefly, between the

equally austere auspices of time and distance. And yet to wipe this dust from my shelf

requires another primordial element, water. Water and work, really, just some moisture in

motion through time. For work, for movement, fire is added. This dust no doubt has layers,

sections that can be dissected. And thus to Szymborska's archeology I add geology: a

geology of dust that extends as far as the rise and fall of the world's largest mountains. "Show

me your whatever and I'll tell you who you were," she says. Inhale my substance, and show

me what I am.

Here are all the ingredients - earth, air, water, and fire -

needed to make work possible. Could the ancients have

gotten this one right, thereby lending impetus to the

transcendental impulse? Before the world is possible,there must be something rather than nothing. Only then

can you have the elements necessary for motion, for

velocity and force, for work. Perhaps. But such

questions almost invariably put matters the wrong way

round, ignoring Alice's insight just before landing in

Wonderland. Do cats eat bats?, she asks herself

dreamily, Do bats eat cats? But since neither question

had an answer, it didnt much matter how it was asked.

So instead of demurring, Ill declare. There are but two

forces in the world: orogeny and erosion. The work of air

and water against earth and fire, the subtle and not-so-subtle violence with which the earth rises and then, without fail and only with gravity's

slightest invitation, declines inexorably into the sea. Orogeny and erosion: the building and

the taking down of things. Constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed: the earth born and

reborn time and again through time, for the time being, here, revealing the shape of things as

they are, without hesitation. Bodies in motion and at rest. The world without end amen.

Oriental Orogenies

I have come to this country as part of a mountaineering expedition. Yes, in fact, such things

still exist, and they exist in much the same way as they began in the late-nineteenth century.

The group of which I am a part intends to climb Annapurna III, a peak just shy of eight

thousand meters in the Annapurna Himalaya range, west of Kathmandu. The ridge by whichwe will summit the southeast ridge has never been climbed, and has claimed around

eleven different lives in the process of moving out of that quasi-insulting and ever-taunting

category of unclimbed.

When I say we, however, I speak loosely, for I was going to do no such thing. I'm not a

climber, you see, I'm a walker, having long ago subscribed to that rather curmudgeonly idea

that the only places worth going to in the world are places to which you can walk. If you

have to strap teeth to your shoes or pull yourself up with axes pitched into growing ice, if you


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have to crawl, dig, or swim your way to the summit, perhaps, Edward Abbey suggests, you

ought to carefully reconsider the means to your end. So, in truth, my two companions mean

to climb Annapurna III, and I am to accompany them as the expedition chronicler, naturalist,

and friend.

In addition to these duties, I am also slated to help ferry the expedition gear to an advanced

base camp directly below the ridge they hope to climb. But, as I quickly discovered, such

services as these would not be needed, as the term "expedition" actually now denotes

something very far from carrying-your-own-gear-through-the-rugged-mountains. This,

because eco-tourism is now Nepal's primary source of economic throughput; this, because an

only slightly exaggerated transitive for "expedition" is "vacation". (One of my companions

assures me that there is an important difference between travelers and tourists, but I strain to

locate the difference that makes any difference.) To outfit and arrange a 45 day

mountaineering expedition in Nepal today requires just as many, if not more, people than it

did when Sir George Everest began to survey these hills in the 1830s or when Maurice

Herzog climbed Annapurna I, the first of the 14 eight-thousand metre peaks to be conquered

by man, in 1952. To get us up the river, over the ridge, and to the camp from which the ridge

would be climbed will take 19 porters, 4 kitchen staff, and two guides. For an expedition ofthree. And don't forget the return journey, if such a thing is required at all.

This is my first experience outside the

comfortable familiarity of Europe or the

ambient cultures of South America. This

is my first time to Asia, to the East. And

so a trip to Nepal lands me at the

crossroads of this vast continent-concept,

lying at just about the geographical center

of Asia: to the north, Tibet and China; to

the south, India; to the west, Pakistan and

the Middle East; and to the east, the

Indochinese peninsula and beyond.

Crossing from China and Tibet through

Nepal into India and Pakistan, people

have walked the ways between these mountains, between these ancient and venerable

civilizations, for thousands of years. Containing the birthplace of the Buddha, present-day

Nepal was in 566 B.C.E. the Sakya kingdom where Siddhartha Gautam was born. The

tourist brochures will tell you that Nepal is the worlds only Hindu nation and that, before

1990 when the Peoples Movement began to demand democratic reforms, the people of

Nepal worshipped their king as an incarnation of Vishnu. This exotic allure or, as a guide

told me, this eternal attraction of Nepal is further bolstered by the fact that Shangri-La is

reputed to be within its borders and Sagarmatha, or the mother goddess of the earth, standsto the north as the highest point on the globe.

Kathmandu lies within the centrally located Nepal Valley, which as far back at 700 B.C.E.

was one of the wealthiest settlements along the Himalayan belt. From even before this time,

though, the Valley was the geographical junction of trade routes stretching from Tibet to

India, cross-pollinating the religions, customs, and politics of so many ancient cultures

through trade and the movement of goods, that civilizational sine qua non. So until the mid-

18th century, present-day Nepal was actually a widely heterogeneous mixture of tiny hill


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kingdoms, tribes, and regional cultural groups that were shaped by local topography and

economy, that spoke a dizzying array of languages of both Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman

origin, and observed religious practices ranging from Hindu to Buddhist to Muslim and every

local variation in between. Given all these differences of identity and place, then, it is not

surprising that all these groups were, on most everyones account, constantly at war with one

another from the beginning.

Like almost every state on earth, present-day Nepal is the conglomeration of many different

peoples under the unitary, nominal form of the nation. The state is the occlusion of

difference for the sake of unity. As an institutional consolidation of bodies, the state

abstracts a national space and identity from a geographical place and difference, and effaces

that difference in the name of its people so that they may find a place in the triumphal

course of nations and history. Under the aegis of a power relinquished or taken, the state

becomes the repository of political power through the alienation of the authority experienced

in the course of each life moving through place and time. So even today, Nepal finds itself a

country of many faces, of many religions and languages, of many hopes and many pasts.

Today there are roughly 60 ethnicities and over 125 different languages spoken in a

landlocked country just slightly larger than Arkansas. Yet every particular inevitably fallsunder the universal, Nepal.

Manjushree Thapa, among others, now sings the song of Nepalese history, one with so many

threads from so many disparate but interlocking histories that stretches some three thousand

years. Nepal is a country whose history is largely forgotten, its facts lost through the cracks

of time and conquest. The few facts that do remain, however, comprise a national narrative

that struggles to find voice outside of the political consolidation of state power. Its particular

histories, as the histories of lives, loves, and labors over time, have been ground into the dust

of history, much like it mountains that have been shed into the sea.

Of what remains, Nepals nationalnarrative begins in the mid-18th century, when the British

East India Company was beginning its rule in Bengal and was breaking apart what remained

of the Mughal Empire in present-day Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Around 1743, a

minor ruler to the west of Kathmandu, Prithvi Narayan Shah, began to consolidate power in

his home kingdom of Gorkha and then turned his gaze eastward. By 1768, Shah had unified

the various kingdoms under marital fiat and consolidated them into the nation-state of Nepal.

While the traditional historical narrative of Nepalese history takes pride in the fact that Nepal

has never been under direct foreign, colonial rule, it turns out that Shahs expansionist

ambitions were largely inspired by the ascendancy of the British. (Oh, and they gave him

some weapons and money, too.) After unification, Shah expelled all foreigners and moved

his court to Kathmandu. We might politely call this homegrown colonialism. / By the 19th

century, the Raj was at its height in India, and the Rana family, as the caste that controlled

the military, had come to a power-sharing agreement with the Shah line of kings. Through a bloody exchange at the countrys central armory, the Ranas forced the Shahs into

establishing them as maharaja (roughly equivalent to hereditary prime ministers) who would

advise the king on matters of state. But rather than diffusing central authority and stabilizing

the state, this in fact simply established a monarchy within a monarchy, doubling the problem

of tyrants. In 1850, the new Rana maharaja made the first ever voyage of a head of state

outside the Nepalese kingdom to pay a visit to Queen Victoria, who, in exchange for the

conscription of the Gorkha soldiers into the British regiments governing the burgeoning

empire, promised both her financial and political support. This arrangement lasted through


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the First World War, before which around 1,500 Nepali men served in British regiments, but

after which involved up to 100,000 Nepali men serving the Allies in India, France, Egypt,

Palestine, and Africa. / These experiences of the world beyond the landlocked borders of

their country must have had a dramatic effect at home. As India stood up to the British,

politics was variously radicalized across Southeast Asia. The Rana rulers attempted to stem

the tide of political consciousness coming out of India especially the Indian colleges by

establishing one of their own in Kathmandu in 1919; they attempted to appease the reform-

demanding masses by building bridges, roads, and hospitals. In 1923, for the first time ever,

the government granted farmers ownership rights to land (who theretofore had only the rights

of tenants) and signed the Treaty of Friendship with Great Britain, which promised to respect

Nepali sovereignty in exchange for the sole right to import goods into the country. After

being carried over the hills and into the valley on the backs of porters, the first automobile

appeared on the streets of Nepal shortly thereafter. / Since then, Nepal has vacillated between

autocratic rule and democratic struggle. With land rights and the ever-increasing influence of

Western economies, a small section of the population was transformed into bourgeoisie, who

agitated for political reform and yearned for a national identity of which they could be proud.

In the 1930s members of this nascent class established the Mahabir School in Kathmandu,

which became a hotbed of bourgeois revolution througha curriculum that aimed at cultivating a certain political

consciousness in its students. By the 1940s, a movement

had arisen to do away with the monarchy and maharajas

altogether, and aimed to establish a democratic state.

One dramatic incident during this time involved Yogmaya,

considered to be Nepals first woman poet, returning from

exile in India and organizing for a government free from

religious influence. Yogmaya and many of her followers

were of the priestly Bahun caste, and so when they

threatened to immolate themselves in protest the

government dispatched troops to arrest them, as such an act

would destroy the moral and religious credibility of the

maharajas. After their release, however, Yogmaya and 69 of her followers walked into the

Arun River and drowned themselves in protest. / The first airplane landed in Nepal in 1942.

With the advent of the Second World War, Nepal now had upwards of 200,000 men fighting

for the Allies in lands as distant as Iraq, Tunisia, Burma, and Greece. Upon their return,

many brought back experiences of the worlds social, political, and material progress, which

sparked yet another movement for government reform. Political parties formed, mostly in

India due to the dangers of doing so at home, and political consciousness arose in the midst

of a rising popularity of socialist and communist thinking. One of leaders that quickly gained

prominence was B. P. Koirala, a novelist and activist who served as Nepals prime minister

during its first short-lived experiment with democracy in 1959; since then, Koirala has

attained almost legendary status in Nepals struggle toward democracy. A year later,however, the Shah king arrested Koirala, suspended the government, banned political parties,

and reassumed direct power. Exactly why he did this is widely disputed, but one persistent

reason given was the interminable bickering of the political parties that weakened the

government and raised the spectre, present even today, of a state take-over by India. Yet

another reason given was that it was in the name of economic development; without the

centralization of power, the argument went (and goes) such development could not occur, or

at least not occur fast enough. But whatever the reason, the king then established the

Panchayat system a one-party democracy much in the style of communist countries but


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controlled by the monarchy which governed the country throughout the 1970s and created

an atmosphere of secrecy, intrigue, and fear. / The first television came to Nepal in 1985, and

though its programming was by all accounts crude, it did serve to connect the still-growing

bourgeoisie to the wider world. Throughout the 1980s, while the Panchayat system became

destabilized from within by members of the outlawed political parties, the government

campaigned to sell Nepal to the world as a poor but happy mountain nation, the birthplace of

the Buddha, a non-aligned nation that was branded as a Zone of Peace to gain entry into the

United Nations. But in the winter of 1989, a widespread popular movement began that led to

riots across the country, thousands of arrests, hundreds of deaths by state actors, all in the

name of democratic reform. And, in April 1990, the king announced that political parties

were once again legal, that parliamentary elections would be held, and that a new constitution

would be drafted. This announcement came, of course, from the television, and Kathmandu

exploded in celebration. / But as the reforms got underway, the competitive framework of

parliamentary democracy began to reveal its darker side. The small but ambitious business

community began to buy influence with the new parliamentarians. Corruption became

rampant. Governments dissolved and formed anew under prime minister after prime

minister. By 1994 vote buying, ballot stuffing, and intimidation at the polls marked the new

Nepalese democracy. In the same year, Man Mohan Adhikari led a minority government asthe first democratically elected communist prime minister in the world. With programs

such as Lets Develop Our Villages Ourselves, which gave money to local committees for

grassroots governance, Adhikari tried to reconcile free market reformism with communist

revolutionary ideas, but corruption continued apace, with some communist party leaders

building extravagant houses in the heart of Kathmandu. Over time it became clear that the

democratic reforms of the early 1990s were not working out so well. As Thapa recounts,

what resulted was a democracy that looked like a democracy, but that functioned as an elite

class and caste cartel, a democracy lacking democracy, a postmodern democracy[in which]all ethical issues were conceded to power struggles and realpolitik. Throughout these years,

however, even though over nine million Nepalis continued to live on less than one U.S. dollar

a day, Nepal experienced one of the largest expansions of its economy ever. / And so as the

rich got richer, the poor continued in their destitution. The communists in government were

roundly criticized for forgetting the people for whom they elected. In February 1996, the

Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) began what it called a Peoples War by attacking

banks in the western district of Gorkha, burning land deeds, attacking police posts in Rolpa,

and exploding a bomb at a soft-drink plant in Kathmandu. Before then, the party was almost


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unknown in the political circles of the capital, and the war they continued to wage until 2006

was a war waged in the poverty-stricken countryside, not Kathmandu. Over the years, the

Maoists continued to gain support from the people in the rural districts (read: everywhere but

Kathmandu), including many women and children, who were armed and authorized to spread

party ideology throughout their towns and villages. Throughout the countryside, the Maoists

liberated the people by forgiving loans, destroying deeds, and distributing land to those

who would farm it; they also instituted their own form of justice, setting up Peoples

Courts that banned alcohol and cards and punished class enemies. The violence continued

to escalate, and by 2005 there were over 13,000 killed, 200,000 internally displaced, and

Maoists controlled 75% of the country. Nepal today has one of the highest numbers of

missing persons in any country in the world.

This trip to Nepal was actually delayed a year by massive protests throughout the country in

2006. Kathmandu was completely shut down, with no food, fuel, or any other necessities

passing in or out of the city. Various factions of Maoists lead much of this, and the country

was not considered safe to move about in, for tourists or citizens. Most of the direct violence,

however, has subsided and as I stand in the main commercial district on my first morning in

Kathmandu, huge parades of motorcycling Maoists are riding the city with huge red flags blowing behind their bikes. Now that the mainline party Maoists have been admitted into

parliament, roving groups of young party members continue radical political action

throughout the city and country, still often peppered with violence. During our six weeks,

there were no fewer than two general strikes throughout the country that brought all

commerce, travel, and industry to a grinding halt, especially in Kathmandu.

There is a certain myopia that accompanies all stories told in the present about the present.

This myopia, moreover, is a privation of perspective that is necessary, ineliminable, and

always already present in every experience unfurling. Speaking for her own experience, as

well as for her fellow Nepalis, Thapa recognizes that those who live in the thick of events

more easily experience than understand them. Here we come to the fact that experience and

understanding, though siblings of a certain sort, are not at all the same. Thapa is pointing out

that our lives are thrown into the world of events, tossed amid times imperceptibly particular,

and therefore often lack the room required for understanding. Thapa is talking about history,

about the events of a narratable past, about the stories handed down, always transmitted, from

one to an other, and from one generation to the next. These narratives give sense by situating

and explaining experience in the present. And whether these narratives are large or small in

scope, whether their sense is grand or banal, does not matter. They are neither and both,

moving in and out, over and above one another in a disparate consistency consisting the

world.

For so many in Nepal, these stories are lost in the interstitial space of events and forces

beyond their control; their history has been narrated to them rather than by them, reinscribingin the Orient Marxs description of the ideology that created the demos in the Occident:

They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.

Escalating Erosions

Alice kept falling down down down the rabbit hole. During her fall she said: I wonder if I

shall fall right through the earth! How funny itll seem to come out among the people that

walk with their heads downwards!


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From Nashville to Dallas to London to Bahrain to Kathmandu, in just over twenty-four hours

I have landed on the other side of the world. Stepping off the plane onto the tarmac,

confronted with humidity, haze, and a gathering confusion. After retrieving my bags and

paying customs dues, I step out onto the street bustling with people grabbing at my person,

offering to take me anywhere I want to go. I am there, I think, but do not know where to go

from here.

My companions have already been in country for a day, spot me through the crowd, and

away we go through a city of 1.5 million people and two traffic lights. We ride through the

streets in the seclusion of a taxi, between and among both petroleum- and human-powered

rickshaws, bicycles and women, men and dogs, motorcycles and cows, chickens and

children, all moving in and out of the streets in the seamless orchestration of Tuesday

afternoon. Horns blowing everywhere: behind you in front of you at you in menace and jest.

There are shops with live animals tied out front, standing ready to be slaughtered upon

request. Goats and chickens loiter with the humans who will soon eat them. Children walk

bare-footed, barely clad, playing in puddles alongside grazing animals, cars whizzing by

them, between them, with ease and speed.

In the last decade or so, the

population of Kathmandu has

more than doubled. This influx

of rural people into the urban

center has rapidly transformed

the capital, precipitating a host

of social and environmental

problems, including a drastic

increase in air and water

pollution, political instability,

and, above all, poverty. Nepal

is one of the poorest countries

on the planet. While some 30% of all Nepalis live below the national poverty line, the

average gross annual income is equivalent to 290 US dollars.

It is a poverty that gets caught at the back of my throat choking, arresting me in my own

experience not because it is especially repelling or violent or even pervasive, but simply

because it is so radically different from the everyday material existences I experience at home

and abroad. In what seems to be an experience of complete incommensurability, I hear smell

taste feel see an arrangement of people particularly placed that I do not understand. My

cognitive compass has lost the attraction of its poles, spinning without orientation along lines

of bodies in motion and at rest.

As my understanding becomes unmoored from my experience, I become unmoored from my

self. To speak of understanding is to speak of material taken in and worked over in the

course of experience. This experience of understanding is so often taken to imply some one

thing, some unity of experience that has or does the experiencing. So as long as I at least

think I understand, my self is protected and contained by my experience. But when

understanding itself begins to unravel, when it begins to disintegrate from the rest of

experience, then it becomes possible for experience and the self that undergirds it to

follow suit.


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There are so many human beings. Here. In the world. Now. More so than there have ever

been in the history of the world combined. There are so many people who are having as fine-

grained an experience as I am now. This fact is obvious, so obvious that we do not speak of

it much because it leaves us breathless and alone, because we do not have time for such

thoughts throughout the trials and tribulations, the hesitancies and gumptions, of each day.

We forget it in the abstractions ofpeople and experience. But when I meditate on this fact,

this fact in its full, radical, irreducible particularity, the depth of the world begins to unfurl.

I am confronted by this radical particularity, and its bowling me over. I do not understand.

What I am experiencing is being seen with a certain sense; I understand to an extentwhat is

occurring. There are mangos, cars, laughs, storefronts, puddles, trees and trash. But in

another sense I simply do not. I do not know where I am, how I came to be here, with these

people on this Wednesday in May, seven years after the second millenia. The edifice of my

presumptive understanding is crumbling before my eyes. My expectations are exploded. In

the very act of expectation, of presuming to forecast what I might see, I unwittingly

perpetuate my own suffering that is the result of an inevitable disappointment: the failure of

understanding. The continuity of my gaze disrupted, ruptured by the unexpected, I begin tocome apart at the joints, unable to speak because I no longer have a voice through which to

see. Through the privilege of my own experience, through my very existence in this place at

this time, I am losing the ground of all possible understanding. Why am I here, and how did I

come into this place? Perhaps it is because when I was young I looked at the map and said,

echoing the Marlow within, when I grow up I will go there.

The map is not incidental. For this place came to be known that is, came to known within

the archive of Western knowledge precisely through a process of cartographical conquest.

India was boxed in and carved up, the Himalaya were conquered with compass and quadrant.

Mapping is the scription of vision, the writing of a place so as to be known and knowable.

Enter Francis Bacon, Q.E.D. Within this mania for maps lurks a certain passion for

knowledge, a certain lust after a first-hand experience with the topography of things, their

classifications, taxonomies, and organized understandings in short, the cataloging of the

world in the archive of understanding. This archive, as I know it, as it has been handed down

to me, contains a principle of narrative continuity that explains the present through the past.

The principle, this arch, is the beginning and origin to a certain temporal sequence that is

also a sovereign power, a first position, and an authority that commands its dominion. The

ones who speak this narrative and continue its transmission have literally owned the world in

recent centuries; they have explored, taken, and catalogued every place in the world so as to

retell the world its own history, a line of knowable events leading seamlessly and inevitably

to the present.

From the center of this story, from the narrative seat, so to speak, emanates greater and lesserdegrees of difference. Identity and negation. Attraction and repulsion. Violence and

consumption. And even the synthesis that may be lurking here, as a third thing, is itself

potentially a consolidating move, a move that might merely reinscribe the dominant force of

the relation at work in understanding.

This incommensurability is a disjunction of meaning and history, of experience and

understanding, arising within the corporeal undergoing of becoming in Nepal. That there are

two global civilizations known as the West and the East is but the simplest formulation


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of this supposed inherent lack of comparability. As Edward Said points out, however, the

West in fact created the East through its anthropological gaze, through its descriptions and

categories of peoples in the scheme of things. But in creating it, the East became necessary

to the West in order for the West, as such, to exist at all. A differentiation that was also an

identity. So while there was no East before the West, neither was there a West before there

was an East. It was only through the grafting of a particular way of knowing to a particular

way of living that these civilizations were born.

When the ethics and the epistemologies of these

cultures collided, it became clear that any attempt to

force cultures and peoples into separate and distinct

breeds or essences exposes not only the

misrepresentations and falsifications that ensue, but

also the way in which understanding is complicit with

the power to produce such things as the Orient or the

West.

This is the dark cloud of my soul, the imperialism of

my flesh and gaze. And it does not matter that thisimperialism is merely an epistemological and

hermeneutical one. By seeking to make

commensurable that which is defined by its

incommensurability, by attempting to fuse the

horizons of far and distant peoples in far and distant

places with my own, I enter into an ethical relation

which, precisely because it is undergone effortlessly, effaces the very difference that is the

sine qua non of the relation itself. This is the schema I was born into; the Weltanschauung I

was educated into. I am Western; I am (mostly) white; I am a man. I live comfortably in

what is, in material terms, the wealthiest nation in the world. Every gesture of understanding

I venture, I fall further and further into a logic of complicity that leaves me no possible exit.

This is the imperialism I have inherited, that constitutes me and is that which I cannot evade.

That I am guilty seems obvious, if slightly self-important; but, on the face of things, still

entirely true. I desperately want to be free of this guilt, free from the sins of my fathers so as

to enter anew into the ethical relationships of understanding in the present. Such sins,

however, are not forgiven simply by being confessed, acknowledged, repented. While I

cannot be judged guilty for what is determinate for every thing actual is determinate I can

be judged guilty of what is determined, and the inevitability of my perspective, the

inheritance of my wealth and thrownness into this particular place and time, is surely part of

the way in which this country and these people have been determined over the last few

centuries. If not me in particular, allow me to represent.

Even if I attempt to reconstruct the present with the past fully in mind, I still fail to exit the

ethical implication. All understanding is a reconstruction involving a certain imposition of

the ideal and a control over the experience of the experience-had. For certainly I experience

things. But there is also the experience of the experience I just had, synthesizing reflection,

memory, and temporality into a structured, coherent understanding of that experience.

Whenever I see anything, by the time I notice that I am seeing it I have already entered into

relation. Every experience of understanding entails a relationship between that understanding

and the world. But here, amid the viaducts of expected discordance, every thing I see I must


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compare to myself. Otherwise, without a common ground, my understanding would spin

frictionless in an Oriental void. Here, I cannot not compare what I see to what I know and

have known, if I desire to achieve an ethical understanding. I cannot begin from where I am,

for that will get me nowhere, as everything I experience I experience as difference. The only

way to understand is to relate what I experience back to the way things are done at home, to

the way the West does things in all its goodness, truth, and beauty.

All abstraction is violence. To think, Borges says, is to forget a difference. To sunder the

concept from the material of experience, to generalize and categorize, to erect a structure

under which particulars fall this is the necessary violence of thought. In this way, the

violence of thought is a violence of forgetting, a disavowal of particularity for the sake of

understanding. For Derrida, however, the question of the archive that is the West is not a

question of the past; it does not concern the question of a concept dealing with the past that

might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive.

It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a

promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. And so to be responsible I do not deny my

past, but simply deny my privilege of understanding in the present. I renounce it. Since I

cannot escape this hermeneutical framework of comparative cultural difference, I suspend myunderstanding of peoples or cultures or histories at all. I turn away and renounce any claim

to knowledge of people, and look instead at those most innocuous, static, and incontrovertible

elements of my current horizon - rocks. I must look at rocks so as to suspend, if but briefly,

this ethical quagmire in which I have landed.

Toward a Himalayan Hermeneutic

The Himalaya are the youngest mountains in the world, arising when the Indian subcontinent

began colliding with what was then south Asia some 55 million years ago. Asia was built by

the accretion of island-arcs and other continental fragments drifting off of Gondwanaland

into the Siberian shield over the last 500 million years. India is but the latest splinter of this

super-continent, coming out of the south, fast and sure, at a rate of 30 feet a century. It

crossed and closed the Tethys Sea, subducting its floor opposite its own northerly movement

and slammed the rest into Tibet. Thus, at the top of Mt. Everest are Mesozoic marine fossils;

the crown of the highest mountain in the world is made of fish bones and sea dust. No shit.

Fish bones and sea dust.

Now there are two versions of this story. The first tells of India as an island continent located

far out in the Tethys Sea. As Gondwanaland began to break apart in the late Jurassic,

roughly 160 million years

ago, India separated itself

from the coalesced crook of

Africa, Antarctica, and

Australia. From then to thetime it made contact with

Asia in the late Eocene,

roughly 40 million years

ago, India existed as an

isolated island continent

that progressively marched

northward for its orogenal

destiny with Asia. The


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second version, however, tells a story of India that remained closer to Africa, in varying

degrees of terrestrial contact. As Gondwanaland disintegrated, India did detach from its

southerly cousins, but it slid along the western side of the African and Eurasian plates,

maintaining an overland communication that allowed various biota to cross the landmasses.

What this overland communication amounts to is a genetic communication, whose history is

written in the fossil archive of late Cretaceous biogeography.

But, either way, India hit Asia obliquely, the northwest corner landing first and the rest of the

island spinning around this initial point of axis. From the initial impact in the west to full,

frontal collision along what is now the 1,800-mile length of the Himalaya took some 30

million years. And once the continents collided, Indias rate of movement slowed by half.

Since its collision 55 million years ago, India has continued to push into Asia for just under

two miles. At the tectonic boundary of this collision the Indus-Suture Line the floor and

underwater mountain ranges of the Tethys Sea were consumed. So while the terrestrial

boundaries of such

collisions result in

mountains, below the

surface huge swaths ofsea floor and

continental crust are

subducted into the

bowels of the earth and

begin to be recycled

into the future forms of

the world.

Given the diachronic

birth of the Himalaya,

then, it is more helpful

to understand the

Himalayan orogeny as a

series of orogenic

events that form the Himalayan-Karakoram-Tibetan orogenic system. This system very well

may be the largest and highest accumulation of the earths crust since the Paleozoic, i.e., in

the last 400 million years, but has been forming and deforming in active geological processes

only since the Cenozoic, the most recent and current era of earth-time.

The Himalayan mountains are still growing today at a rate of nearly a centimeter a year. On

a geological scale, this remains impressive, for if there were no erosion the Himalaya could

push some 30,000 feet further into the sky in just a million years. But, of course, there is

always erosion; there are always forces at work undoing the work already done. So the greatmountains continue to grow despite the relentless forces of wind, water, and time. (Added to

these may be a shift in tectonic activity as well. Some geologists maintain the Eurasian plate

has begun to stretch out, rather than continuing its thrust upward, which would ease pressure

and slow growth.)

Because they are the youngest, the Himalaya also contain some of the most dramatic vertical

changes in all the world's topography. From riverbed to mountain peak, the Kali Gandaki

river valley, running between the Annapurna and Dalighiri Himalayan ranges, forms the


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world's deepest gorge. The Kali Gandaki River named after the ancient and mysterious

Hindu goddess Kali, who at times is taken to be the source of chaos and destruction, and at

others the source of all being herself is what is called an antecedent river. That is, the river

was flowing off the Tibetan plateau and into the Tethys Sea before India collided into it, and

has continued its push through and between the mountains that rose in collisions wake. This

and other large rivers coming off the Tibetan plateau and through the Himalaya account for

25% of the worlds sedimentation budget, though they drain only 4.2% of the land; they have

also formed the worlds largest marine fan the Bengal fan and the worlds largest river

delta the Ganges delta by whittling away the face of rocks over time. Fed by perpetual

snow and monsoon rains, these rivers provide fresh water for nearly one-fifth of the worlds

population and have formed rich agricultural lands sustaining civilizations for thousands of

years.

Giant these rocks. So giant that it is easy to imagine Jurassic dinosaurs roaming these

valleys. But these mountains are too young; dinosaurs never had the great pleasure to munch

on these forests or to copulate in these rivers. Strong that river. So strong that it flowed

across the Tibetan Plateau before Indias collision with the continent, when it continued to

flow through stones determined to meet the new sea.

Alexander von Humboldt once said that the richest and most varied elements for pursuing

an analysis of this nature present themselves to the eyes of the traveler in the scenery of

Southern Asia,where the same subterranean forces that once raised these mountain chains

still shake them to their foundation and threaten their downfall. Orogeny and erosion: two

sides of the same force, dialectically intertwined. As mountains are built, entire sections of

crust are destroyed, consumed by fire in the belly of the earth, while the rest is thrust upward

into the sky. At the highest points of these orogenies water, snow and ice begins to

accumulate. Thus begins erosion. By seeking paths between greater and lesser resistances,

water, snow, and ice are joined by wind, heat, and earth, which begin the processes of

whittling these great mountains into sand. Here, in the crooks of the highest peaks, glaciers

form, pushing and pulling and leaking constant water, eventually forming what is called a

cirque. A cirque is an amphitheatre-like valley formed at the head of mountains by glaciers

and erosion. They carve out a three-sided bowl surrounded by the highest peaks at the head

of a river valley, with but one exit: down.


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These are mountains of our time. I want to know them. I want to know how they came to be

here, exposed in this light and having this face turned to my gaze. From the Eocene to the

present, these mountains are just slightly older than humankind. The Himalaya are

mountains for our time.

The Path of Least Resistance

Today we walk into the mountains. We take a bus

from Pokhara to the end of the road. From there, we

walk up the river Seti as far as possible, until the banks

of the river become completely vertical as the water

plunges from higher altitudes. Once this occurs, we

must go up and around, over the river and through the

woods to reach our ridge. Or so my map tells me.

A boy from the local village came by this afternoon

and sold us four beers from a bucket, the last well

have for a month, as today we push past the lastvillage up the valley. Ahead lie crooked rocks and

calcified timbers. The river has picked up

considerably, grinding these mountains further into

dust. I feel alone here, sitting on this rock, but know

that I am not. There is a town on the cliff above me,

and houses on each precipice. It is the morning of the

second day, and a terrific thunderstorm rolled through

the valley last night, illuminating the night sky with unforgiving light. With our tents

perched gingerly on the side of a cliff, exposed to the electric wind, I sat through the storm

hoping to be singled out by that wonderful rod of particularity that is a lightening bolt. No

one spoke throughout the night, and I imagine that they, too, prayed to become chosen.

At the last village up the river, the local schoolteacher meets us at the bridge with a large

smile and a notebook. He has heard about our journey a few days before our arrival and asks

us to speak for a few minutes so that his students may practice their English. It turns out

that English is the primary subject taught in Nepali schools. Whatever else they may study,

and for whatever length they may be in school for, many Nepalis know at least a little

English. On my way out of the valley, I ride a bus down a gravel highway with a local

college student who tells me this, and says that its a clear signal of the governments

priorities for its people that the first emphasis be placed on learning this very foreign, but

economically beneficial, language. We sit and speak for some time with twenty or so

people, who, in the course of conversation, inform us that it has been more than three years

since the last expedition came this way. The teacher hands us his notebook, which is a recordof expeditions having come up this river valley since the early 1970s. Scanning the column,

I see: U.K., Australia, U.K., Japan, France, U.S., Israel, France, Australia, New Zealand,

South Korea, U.K., U.K.us. Though four different people are speaking at once, the lead

porters face grows severe. Apparently, several people talk of there being only one pass into

the cirque, which the last group could not overcome and had to return to Pokhara to charter a

helicopter instead. We laugh uncomfortably, and already being so far in, press on.


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Were beginning to see why. The river coming

out of this cirque drops dramatically through the

stone, creating sheer vertical walls along the

river for a significant portion, which demands

we take the high way over the saddle to reach

the bowl of peaks. Our eyes are propelled

through the lens of a scope, landing on the belly

of the mountain. Machupuchare, or the

fishs tail, is said (and said well) to be one of

the most beautiful mountains in the world. In

fact, it is so beautiful that the Nepalis consider it

holy and do not issue permits to climb its peak.

My companions talk of alleged poachings,

which the porters acknowledge with a straight-

lined mouth shake of the head. Follow the

ridge along the side, below the ridge itself, over

the crest and up to pass on east side of the peak.

Here, through this saddle, we would make itover the pass, past the stony tail of the fish, and

back into the cirque were Annapurna III lay.

Strung along the mountainside like a trail of ants against a trashcan, the group makes its way

out of the trees and onto the fragile, wet alpine carpet. The tree line is an obvious reminder

that the air is becoming thinner, less dense with the necessities for life. As you approach the

edge of an ecosystem, the edge of a system that contains the conditions necessary for the

possibility of certain forms of life, both the number of species and the number of particular

organisms tend to decrease. There are some ecosystems, though, that exist at the limit of all

ecosystems, namely, those at the hottest,

deepest, highest, coldest places on earth. At

that border, at that thin, ever-moving line that

forms the limit to ecosystems at the extremes,

life itself acknowledges its material limit.

Though many of the porters smoke cigarettes

and have flimsy footwear, they make their

way higher with ease and grace. My

companions are hours ahead of me, rushing to

wait out the afternoon. My head feels light

and Im hungry, so I stop and eat. I doze off

easily and repeatedly, resting often on trunks

of trees and in tufts of tall grass. This is not agood sign, I know, but let my body speak.

When the group finally comes back together,

we are all standing quietly, staring at a path

covered in snow and ice at a very steep angle

leading, it seems, all the way down. As

people wind their ways around and across, I

head straight up to attain some stability on a

flatter traverse above. One of my companions


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chides me for wasting energy, urging that the path of least resistance is always the path

preferred. Easy. Natural. Efficient.

In the mountains, however, the path of least resistance points to the quickest way down at any

one point. It marks the fastest fall into the valley, the straightest line to the center of the

earth, if but for the shape of things. As the water flows, so the crow flies, down gravitys

path carving form hidden in hunks of stone. Times chisel, water reveals the cutaneous

present immanent among the dormant spine of the future. I am reminded of Michelangelos

sculpture being already embedded in the marble, its lines and curves outlined amid veins of

virgin marble.

Here, too, in the earth and on the ground are lines buried beneath the surface, curves that will

rise over time. Unlike the surface of our own skin, the integument of rocks hides their future.

Over time and under water, the future shape of the world lies behind the surface of rocks,

waiting to be revealed by erosion, violence, and chance. Our skin, on the other hand,

presents the surface behind which the past is contained; the boundary of our flesh is a limit

behind which innumerable sets of corporeal histories converge to condition the present. But

this difference in the skins of fleshand stone reveal a similarity, too,

for the future shape of rocks is also

a future fully comprised by the

past. The geological cycle is,

ultimately, a closed one. In the

beginning, gases and particles

joined amid the gathering weight,

around that center that continues to

hold, and things came together here

on earth. Detritus settled, land

accumulated, continents formed.

Weight caused pressure caused

heat, which put all of these

materials into motion on a global

scale. This motion, this cycle, was

the worlds first economy, an economy that was always already global, and whose

coalescence was the transcendental condition for all of us inhabiting this tertium quidever

since. The engine of this economy is the core of the earth, whose heat powers the various

levels of the geologic cycle. On top of the core, the mantle, crust and atmosphere join in

concert to affect the building and taking down of things, the various orogenies and erosions

of the last 4.5 billion years.

So in one sense the forms of mountains are there from the beginning, but this beginning isunderstood as the birth of a particular body of minerals in a particular place in the earths

surface. So the form to come, so to speak, is there from the beginning of the metamorphic

process. For igneous rock, this form comes into being as its materials crystallize into stone;

for sedimentary rock, when organic sediments mineralize into inorganic matter; and for

metamorphic rock, when heat and pressure wrench previous generations of stone into new

life within the geologic clock.


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Form, then, is the product of both orogeny and erosion. Orogeny, or the process by which

mountains are constructed, is a story about he material arrangement of minerals in a rock or a

series of rocks, and how they came to be placed in the order of the earths crust. This form is

not necessarily, but it is not contingent either. As water follows form, accentuating its

features according to the laws of gravity, erosion completes the circuit to carve the surface of

the world at any given moment. Both orogeny and erosion are required, one resisting and the

other hastening the etchings of gravitys blade. In either case, though, it is friction, heat, and

resistance that characterize the movement responsible for the shape of things.

Modalities of Stone

Kierkegaard says somewhere that too much possibility will drive you mad. Yes, indeed,

sure. Choices and decisions, the potential selection of one possibility among many -

combined, of course, with the ever-present risk of being mistaken - can drive you to the

precipice of that unspeakable looseness. This is because at the root of that slack, which we're

ever resisting, is responsibility. It is the unique phenomenon of agency, of self at the cusp of

its own becoming.

But like all truths its opposite is also true. Perhaps we can attribute this thought to Aristotle, perhaps not, but the gist is that possibility isn't the bugbear at all. Rather, it's possibility's

transcendental sibling that is the culprit. The problem, in short, is with actuality. It is the

attempt to comprehend the actuality of the world that will drive you mad, this particularity of

flesh and stone, existing this afternoon. This is what is causing me to come undone.

Actuality and potentiality, siblings no doubt. All potential is based on the actual. There is no

sheer potential, no potential for that which is but solely possible. That would be inane and

empty. What, precisely, would that be the potential of? There must be something before that

thing can become something else. In this way, potential is nothing but the alternatives

available within an actual situation, an actual organism. An egg cannot become a cow.

With this in mind, I'll admit that I've been staring at rocks as of late. I get very close to them,

putting my eye as close to their surface as possible. I want to see their fine grains, their

details, their matter. I've touched them; I've climbed them; I've picked them up and turned

them over in my hands. I've inhaled their dust; I've rubbed them against my skin; I've heard

them fall and crack and speak. Yes, I've even licked them.

The sheer mass of the world

is driving me mad. I cannot

get over the fact - and this is a

fact - that this rock is here, in

front of me now, under my

feet and constitutive of theworld. I cannot get over that

this surface is the surface of

the world, if but for now, one

among as many as there are

layers to its substance. The

entrails of earth have been

forced from below, in what is

describable only as an act of


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originary violence, rupturing the coherence and sturdy semblance of contiguity characteristic

of the state of things.

The irony is that we speak of seemingly permanent things as though they were "solid as a

rock". The truth of the matter is that rocks just have more endurance than our bodies of mere

water and dust, more grit in the face of sustained assault. Endurance aside, it's the actuality

of these rocks that calls out for an understanding of them. I want to know their history,

where they've been before my arrival and what they might do after my departure. I want to

know what they've been through. I want, in short, to be a witness to their facticity, which is

not solid or stable or static, but is very much in motion, in motion as much as you or me. The

fact is this rock is eroding in simultaneous time with our bodies. See this, hear this, think

this, if you dare.

Perhaps it's fair to assume that most people skate over this matter, forget the geological fact

that the world is crumbling beneath our feet. But don't worry, we're in this together, the

rocks and us, here and now, and that's what keeps bowling me over time and again. I can't

get over it, and I don't expect you to talk me out of it. I don't want you to write off this

wonder because this is a wonder you simply can't write off. This is how things are. This isthe sublime shape of the world at present.

Face to face with the exhaustive actuality of the world, I hurtle past the guardrails of

language into the valley of silence below. I am terrified, lost among the grammar and syntax

of stone, unable to speak in the face of such presentations. Kant says that it is impossible to

like a terror taken seriously, and I cannot help but take this seriously. Though it is almost

certain that Kant never saw any mountains, he spoke as if he had. For Kant, to stand before

the face of a mountain is to bring

the mind to the limits of the

thinkable, beyond which is the

experience of the sublime. This

experience, importantly, is not

itself a sensible; it is not the

experience of a thing, strictly

speaking. Rather, the sublime is

what even to be able to think

proves that the mind has a power

surpassing any standard of

sense. The sublime goes

beyond sense, and hence nature

is sublime in those of its

appearances whose intuition

carries with it the idea of theirinfinity. This confrontation with material I am undergoing is precisely the experience of the

infinite interconnectedness, the infinite number of layers and constellations that obtain in the

matter before my face.

I am slipping away between the cracks of a time I cannot comprehend. My hysteria stems

from the fact that the material before me must, in some sense, be finite The world is all

that is the case. and yet I am incapable of thinking this finitude fully. It is the

comprehension of the incomprehensibility of the sum total finite, determinate actualities


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before me that has become my monomania. This trembling before the world agitates my

mind and, to speak with Kant, can be compared with a vibration, i.e., with a rapid

alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same object. I desire that which

is beyond my grasp, precisely because it is beyond my grasp, and this is repulsive. To desire

the impossible is obscene. By inhabiting the incongruous impulses of attraction and

repulsion, my experience is brought out of its usual middle range and educated into

resistance, displaced in its habitual movements through a confrontation of its limits. This

limit is a principle, an arch, which presents the limits of thinking by enabling me to

transgress those limits. This is the arch of the sublime, the principle by which the mind

rises above the seeming impossibility of full finite comprehension. Kick away the ladder.

So I do not like the sublimity of stone, but revel in the failure of reason it occasions, in the

failure of thought beyond an impossibly infinite representation. Here, I let reason and

imagination rest amid the silent becoming of material in geologic time.

In the search of such permanence, such substance, did I come into these mountains, and out I

come a pile of dust, unloosed at the seams and wobbly about the joints. On advice from

Annie Dillard, "I came here to study hard things - rock mountain and salt sea - and to tempermy spirit on their edges. 'Teach me thy ways, O Lord' is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one

I cannot but recommend." But the joke's on me. I can taste these rocks, and their shapes are

cutting my tongue.

Basement Tours

Surrender to the day, settle into the hours. These are the times in which you live.

The moment, for Aristotle, is not a part of time, just as the point is not part of a line. Rather,

the moment is an abstraction from time, already gone before it is grasped. Both points and

moments are in space, while times and lines are always in place, becoming in motion. The

point is not part of the line because the line is the point in motion. Points and moments in

motion, the river puts water and rock into time.

Perhaps this is the well-known river of Heraclitus, where one cannot step into the same rive

twice: all is flux, change, becoming, with each step providing the fixity required for the

experience of motion. There is another river, though the river of Cratylus - which is a river

that you cannot step into even once. Here, becoming is unbounded because it loses all

reference to the fixity against which becoming is measured.

Movement, necessarily, is an aberration. It is the difference from that which you find

yourself at present, comfortable and at home. Topos interruptus: a disturbance of place that

is also a displacement of the commonplace. From place to place, movement is change. And

if you're one of those unfortunate souls that actually fear the banal (as I am), then movementappears to be one response to the dread of the ordinary. In this way, traveling is a particular

form of movement. Its form consists of our bodies being propelled from place to place, with

a knowable velocity, from attraction to repulsion, in an endless repetition of other people's

banalities on the stages of our own lives.

Given travel's propensity to place us in positions where touring other people's basements is

taken as the apex of authenticity, still, I am nonplussed when someone asks me that all-too

inevitable question: Why travel? (Importantly, this is different from the question: why move


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at all?) But whats frustrating about this question is that its answer seems both so patently

obvious and indefatigably clich, yet remains to me almost entirely elusive and largely

unsatisfactory.

As hobby: to see the world.

As escape: to have fun and relax.

As project: to enrich your experience.

As duty: to be a representative for your people.

So.

This time, though, I'm traveling through time. I'm tripping through time, skipping out on

people's lives and looking at the world instead of them. This feels like a safer ethical

environs in which to move and be moved. Perhaps out here I can manage not to bump into

anyone such that they take offense or otherwise become disappointed with my presence. In

these young hills, perhaps my youth can spare me some treachery.

Still, I'm walking. Walking up the river valley and into the mountains, I'm reminded thatwalking up a valley is walking against the grain of time. The anticipation of beauty, the

expectation of the sublime heights to come, inevitably clouds my eyes to the backwardness of

this motion, this scenery in reverse. To walk up a mountain first seems akin to reading a

book in reverse. But I do not want to know the ending before the beginning; I want to know

how it all unfolds as it unfolded. Plunk me into the headwaters, then I can tell you a story.

To really understand a valley, I must walk out of it. Down and out, following gravity down

its least resistant path to the seas of present time. Down, through, and across layers of rock,

traversing Cambrian marshes and transgressing Ordovician seas, I cannot help but lose my

breath. I'm out of breath and cannot keep up. Please, please walk slower; I cannot keep up

with movements so slow.

Walking, I'm still. I hold my breath now, among Silurian silence. As I skirt down and

around a rock face, my face comes close to all this. I blush. I do not know what to do, what

to say in the face of this confrontation of worlds. I demur, for now. And return to traverse

another time, across a time entirely discontinuous from this one. I crawl off this rock, over

cornices of my deep past and around fingers of my inexorable future, and make it back to soft

ground. Ground that bounces with the fecund spring of soil. Sitting now on the safety of

sand, at a distance from the mind-boggling worlds of ancient mud, I look at the rock Ive just

left. I can put my hand on its surface, rising just above the surface of the water, and touch a

contiguous stone to 10,000 feet. I move, and it remains solid as a rock indeed, solid as the

earth. The earth solid, without apparent movement.

So the disruptive experience of stasis and dynamism hits me square in the face. No longeram I lost among discordant time and disparate civilizations. Now I am at a loss how this

mountain moves at all. The only comfort to which I cling is the purported existence of what

is known to geologists as autochthonous rock. Autochthonous rock is, simply put, basement

rock: it is rock that does not move, that has not moved, and that will not move in the future --

ceterius paribus, of course.

But things are hardly ever equal. There are always bodies moving in and out of places,

following the possible paths of resistance and attraction opened up through other bodies in


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actual motion. As the basement, the autochthonous is rock that has not moved since its

structural formation, since its placement in the earths crust or on the earths surface. Auto-

chthon: one earth. When this one block of earth in place is disturbed, when its originary

stasis is interrupted, broken, moved, the intruding block is called the allochthon. Allo-

chthon: other earth. Moving principally along thrust faults, allochthonous material is both

the moved and the mover: it is the other that is moved, sundered from its place of birth, and

thrust into an other place that disturbs yet an other body in its original place. Though always

a resident alien, when the allochthon becomes separated from the terrain that moved it, when

it appears in the middle of a place unexpectedly, it is called a klippe an isolated block of

allochthon amid an undifferentiated autochthon while the body from which it came is called

a nappe. Thankfully, inevitably, erosion works its way through the nappe, through the

overlaying allochthon back down to the originary autochthon, and a window is opened in the

rocks. A window clipping and napping among times ever out of joint.

Though Ive never actually seen such rock it is rare in these mountains of recent time I

believe in its existence. Below all these bodies in motion and at rest, there is something

binding, some place where each material was formed. Though I've never seen such rock, I

know what it looks like: it looks like glaciofluivial sediment against the bottom of the

mountain rising before my face; it looks like pebbles gathered at the bottom of a great stone.

I'm searching for this old rock here, in the young mountains of Nepal, hoping to discover a

base line. I'm hoping to get to the bottom of things.

Atopos

Hot water, sir! It is 6 am. I splash my face with boiling melted snow, roll out of bed, and put on several more layers before meeting in the dining tent for breakfast and talk of

departure. Today we attempt to move a good portion of base camp over the pass to an

advanced camp within the cirque, below the southeast ridge of Annapurna III, and to

somewhere off the glacier and out of the direct line of vertically inclined hazards. A few

years ago, an expedition was camped under the Dablam part of Ama Dablam, a mountain in

the eastern Himalaya. A dablam is a hanging glacier, and in the middle of the night a chunk

of ice broke off and swept through camp killing 14 in their sleep. So even though the porters


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are constantly telling us to rest where you love, wed do well to love where we rest. We

gather enough gear for seven people for one night and three people for ten nights and set off

in the angleless bright light of morning.

Yesterday was the most difficult day by far. We hiked from base camp to the Machupuchare

pass through snow and sleet only to find the pass recently washed out by a combination of

avalanche and rockslide. These mountains are not standing still. Though not a trail per se,

the path through the pass is marked by stone cairns of various sizes, silent traces of a absent

presence. This specified vista, however, came to a clear end, an end to the earth on the earth

itself, dropping precipitously into the craggy corners of sheer rock and its gathering dust.

After a significant amount of scouting and chin scratching, the decision was made not to

proceed with the porters, given their heavy loads, lack of proper footwear and technical skill,

and our general unpreparedness in the face of the unexpected. Intending to return in two

days time, we made a cache in the snow at Mardi Himal, a sub-peak of Machupuchare, and

began the walk back to base camp. We arrived back at various times, each having spread out

along the route after the rout. On the way back, we each passed a dead man on the side of the

trail, a body unmoved and unseen in our early group-inspired haste. A Nepali, he was

peacefully arrayed in a sleeping bag with rocks just covering his body and a basket at hisside. It did not look a violent death, but rather that hed fallen asleep here, in that particular

crook of rock and time, so that his body may be joined with the dust rushing headlong into

the valley below.

A day of rest at base camp, quiet and somber. My climbing companions are inside their

tents, listening to their iPods, trying to expect the unexpected. Having been planning this

expedition for several years, they are disinclined to be easily thwarted. They eschew my

maps, having seen the shape of things for themselves. They fiddle with their gadgets, sleep,

and try to clear their mind for what lies ahead, though it remains unknown.

The clouds are speaking to us. Just two days ago, I sat at the door of my tent, on the belly of

one of the most beautiful mountains in the world. Today I cannot see the dining tent ten

yards away. The clouds have descended upon us,

thick and wet. The entire expedition was planned

around the coming monsoon rains, expected to

arrive in some three weeks or so. But now there is

talk of an early monsoon a misnomer, no doubt

but certainly a satisfactory explanation of what

we are undergoing. The clouds are low and

pervasive. I cannot see the peaks above or the

valley below. I am nowhere and anywhere all at

once. It appears as though I am nowhere in

particular and yet could be anywhere at all. I find myself constantly reminding myself ofwhere, objectively speaking, I am. I am on the side of a mountain in central Asia in the early

Himalayan spring.

I constantly return to the role expectations play in clouding the experience of the present. To

have projected what we would do and how we would do it is, in a certain sense, inevitable.

Kundera reminds me that, though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people

who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment.


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Nothing, I tell myself, is out of order; time is not out of joint; we have not fallen down a hole.

We are here, now, blinded by an all-pervasive whiteness circumscribed by the present.

I walk slowly, low to the ground. Only ever so often, momentarily, can I see far enough

ahead to walk upright. When I can, I run as fast and as far as possible. I see a trail, a path

through this bulge in the earths surface, entirely without context, that is any trail. Without

exception, you can only walk one trail at a time. To be sure, one trail can have two (or more)

names. But in the end it is only one trail, only one path through one place. Singular.

Univocal. Definitive. From this trail, at this moment, the Himalaya neglect their curtains

and I look farther on into the spate blue sky. I see into two separate river valleys, the Kali

Gandaki and the Seti Khola, running northsouth, continually shaping the youngest, most

malleable mountains on earth. Farther on, the Siwak Mountains form rising preludes to the

Himalaya, folding against the central fault that is thrusting them higher. From here, I see

entire ranges of mountains, running parallel in negative space along paths of greater and

lesser resistances, all irreducibly singular and determinate. I see, all at once, how the earth

has moved in the last 55 million years. And with that my vision is again obscure.

It's still raining - from above and within. I notice that the feeling of loneliness that so muchpervades my experience when others surround me especially in large, dense urban places

recedes rapidly against the growing experience of solitude. Never do I feel so alone as when

surrounded by others. Never do I feel so connected to others, so in solidarity as a species, as

when I am away from them in the etiolated light of an inured solipsism.

Crusoes notwithstanding, solitude is not a factual isolation. Nor is it the indeterminacy of a

content of consciousness, nor the incommunicability of a feeling or emotion, nor even the

incommensurability that accompanies an experience of radical difference. Levinas says that

solitude is a comportment that recognizes and responds to the indissoluble unity between the

existent and its work of existing. This work of responding and recognizing occurs in

solitude, in an austere space where the borderline between the material of experience and its

working through is already spectral and always fleeting. This space is a necessary

supposition for every existent thing: that it is itself, self-identical, at the cusp between its

being and its becoming. Solitude is necessary only as a space. No place is necessary, for

place is precisely contingent, here or there, at any given time, determinate. Space is an

abstraction from place; it has no place. It is without a surface, without a topos. Atopos. For

the Greeks, that which has no place is the absurd.

No one is watching, speak low, for giving up on the idea of a spectator is giving up on God,

of not being watched, of not having events recorded in a unified archive to be judged

according to the whole. That no one is watching belies an important meaninglessness no

doubt, but the watched becomes the watcher, shifting to an other that can only catch glimpses

and fragments of what I offer. This offering I make with my body as well as with my words,those corporeal extensions of an ephemeral existence, and the meaning created between us

exists only there, between our bodies and our words.

That no one is watching takes some time to get used to, but a relief as I settle into the grooves

of my self with no name or place. Anonymous, the rocks and I. Without name. Not

renaming, not the clichd remaking by bestowing appellation, not birth by words. But

wholly without name name withheld name interrupted name not given the name of

the un-nameable. Without name, beyond name, and behind the name is that which is not


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named, not known. Again, Dillard: The world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam

gave name.

Paths of Lesser Resistance

The weather is intermittently tolerable and daunting.

Rain, snow, sleet, wind, but mostly clouds. Not clouds

in the sky, resembling terrestrial forms, but clouds on the

ground at 13,000 feet. It has been eight days since our

return from the initial attempt over the pass. Eight days

with our heads in the clouds. We are becoming restless,

irritable, and worried about wasting our time, for time is

running out.

A crack in the surface of silence, faint voices drift into my right ear. I turn to see in the

distance three people making their way up over around, heading my way. They are singing

softly as they walk. I watch them approach, tasting their size against the backdrop of the

mountain. Namaste! When they arrive to camp they stop for some hot tea and

conversation, an unexpected waypoint along their journey. They are from a village down thevalley, coming higher into the hills as the snow makes its reluctant retreat looking for

yarsagumba, or the vegetable caterpillar. But this is no caterpillar at all, but rather a species

of parasitic fungus that inhabits the caterpillar larvae of the moth genus Thitarodes. The

fungus, Cordyceps sinensis, infects the caterpillar under ground, as it feeds on roots, while it

waits up to five years before pupating. The mycelium of the fungus spread in the hosts

body, ramifying throughout its cavity, eventually consuming it completely and replaces the

insects tissue with its own. The caterpillars exoskeleton, however, remains in tact, and in

the spring the fungus fruits, sprouting a long dark columnar body out the forehead of the

mummified caterpillar. Thus, its name: literally, worm in the winter, plant in the spring,

points to the way in which it seems to transform across categories, transgressing essential

differences between animal and plant. First recorded by a Tibetan doctor in the 15th century,

yarsagumba, I am told, is highly prized in traditional Chinese medicine, giving those who

take it vitality, virulence, and endurance. Found only in the alpine Himalaya between 9,000

and 15,000 feet, yarsagumba has recently become an extra-sought after commodity as it gains

currency across the world as Himalayan Viagra, a natural alternative for those with the

privation of that power. During the spring, many villages are emptied as people fan into the

high hills looking for the plant. I learn that if they are successful they can make several

months wages in a few days time, each specimen being worth a handsome sum. Over the

last decade, the Maoists have used their control over the poor, rural mountainous districts to

manage the collection of yarsagumba, levying taxes on its sale in exchange for transporting it

to distribution centers, which has been a major funding source for the Peoples War.

The weather is clear this morning. It was clear throughout the night, as the bright light of awaning gibbous kept us up in anticipation. At first light, one of the climbers instigates a

conversation about making another attempt at the pass. We are all in favor, gather our affects

quickly and begin another push into the interior of the cirque. Pushing toward the center,

driving, relentlessly to the end. Always yet open to a change in the weather, pushing further

into the looking-glass world. By noon the clouds descend en masse. By one its raining. By

two, snowing hard and sticking. By three, a strange thunder and low-hanging lightning

flashes between lower-hanging snow, the light is purple green pink. By four we are back in

our tents, wet, scared, and laughing.


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I am sitting on a rock at the end of a crustal fin in the middle of nowhere. I am listening to

the wind carry the mountain away. My head is touching the bottom of clouds, warm sun

below on my face. The deepest canyons are now revealed, from peak to trough, the longest

in a respective horizontal distance. The perspective is off, and I urge no lines or words in its

place. There is thought outside of language, and the silence of this time, this place, this ridge

in the ribs of a time unknown and unknowable, stands as a stark reminder of the diminutive

place of words in the order of things.

Another attempt at the saddle begins today. Just the climbers this time, who leave at dawn,

light and fast. They plan to make it to the cache at Mardi Himal, stay a night, and traverse

whatever terrain they must, as far as

they are able, setting ropes where

necessary and possible. I stay behind

this time, lacking the confidence of

success and the technical skill to

move over of the rocks ahead in a

quick enough manner. No matter. Ilack the skill and care required to

move over the rocks even here, lost

among the young forms of this

hillside.

Another five days of waiting. In the

clouds, mostly, quiet amid Devonian

granites. Before the climbers left, we

decided that if they had not returned in two days time I would begin to make my way down

the mountain and out into civilization again. I would go to Pokhara and begin trekking the

Annapurna circuit, one of the worlds great walks that circles the place where we have been

sitting.

The question of wasting time: is there a difference that makes a difference between the

experience I am having camped out on this cloudy mountainside in Nepal, the experience I

could be having on the bustling streets of Kathmandu, or the experience I would be having at

home walking the dog at two on a Tuesday? I am inclined to answer in the negative. All

experience is as equally fine-grained; all I have to do is attend to the particulars as they are

presented. While I think this, the three particular yarsagumba hunters crest the top of the hill,

whistling the sounds of success. They get to camp and report happy fungus hunting,

collecting enough to head home earlier than anticipated. Ignoring the upshot of my previous

conclusion, I ask if I can accompany them down to the nearest village. They agree, and down

down down I go, traversing in one day the terrain it took five to attain.

Understanding In The Present

Now this is it. Here, below my feet and in between my toes, among the rushing waters of a

glacial river, lay the Himalayan Mountains. To think this thought, and think it in its sheer

facticity, is but the starting point of understanding. From here, the aim is go back through

time and understand how this fact could possibly be. But I get caught here, among the

confines of the present, and cannot seem to escape. The brute materiality of all that is in

front of me literally takes my breath away; it pulls the air from my lungs in a beauty


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exasperated by its astonishingbewilderingblazingactuality. If I put my right foot on the

ground I can hear the pulse of the earth, I can feel its breath heaving in with orogenal gasps

and out with erosional sighs.

From the point of this actuality, one must traverse back so as to envision the conditions that

gave rise to this present. This is understanding, which is not so much grasped as it is

pursued. It is understanding as an activity undergone, as a process and engagement with the

world in the form of a question that is constantly imploring why and where-to-fore? Such an

inquiry is geological insofar as it seeks the

various layers of the past, layers that have

been shifted about, thrust through the skin

of the earth and worn down through the

organs of soil and stone, attempting to

reconstruct their various lineages in

connection with the present. In this way,

an understanding of the present involves an

active inquiry into the material

arrangements of the world, here and now,from every possible time extending to this

very moment.

Begin again.

As activity, understanding is motion

through time. Thus, the starting point, the

arch for understanding is that of present

actuality, which is forever already

receding, forever requiring you to begin

again once again and always. And just as

this beginning is ever recurring, the

material into which you inquire, too, is

ever resisting inquiry. This, because the particular is always already breaking free of the

universal; it exceeds the grasping of the universal through its unequivocal singularity. While

simultaneously motivating inquiry and thwarting its completion, this resistance of the

particular demands attention anew, it taunts from afar by daring comprehension of its face.

To speak with Gadamer, all experience is hermeneutic, that is, all experience is a process of

interpretation, of working through the material of experience so as to understand it. The

activity of this hermeneutic involves fusing the horizons of various actualities to understand

the relevant connections and conditions in the present arrangements of things. To attend to

these arrangements, connections, and conditions is to engage in the relationship ofunderstanding. What this understanding amounts to, in the end, remains up for grabs. I

cannot say precisely where and why and how these understandings get deployed in the world,

as there seems no one way to state this. But certain knowledges and certain understandings

do make their way in the world; they are not outside the world in some non-material or non-

earthly sense, but are rather wholly of this world, co-extensive with and co-constitutive of the

boundaries of the intelligible.


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Philosophers have a bad habit of speaking of understanding as though it were one thing,

located in one faculty, and operative in one way. But understanding, like being itself, may be

said in many ways. One such way is to speak of the understanding as always being

relational, and thus the activity of understanding is always the activity of forming a relation.

On the one hand, we might say that in order to understand we first have to experience, that

experience is where understanding begins. But this immediately draws us up against the

counterfactual of those times when we understand or think we understand

letter from nepal 3.23.08

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