I promise you this will not be a short entry, and that is all. It will be the first, and it will be lacking in more dimensions than it will be fulfilling. I hope only there will be something told. This part of the story begins with photos...
These are just two examples of photos taken by classmates standing on some mountain in Zhejiang Province, China as the sun rose. Zhejiang Province is on the eastern coast of China, just south of Shanghai, and the Zhejiang capital of Hangzhou hosts the C.V. Starr-Middlebury School in China where I will be spending my spring semester.
Before then, however, I must pass the ever-shorter, ever-darker, last days of autumn in Vermont. When I am done here, I will spend my break in Memphis--home, visiting friends and family and preparing for China. On January 8th, I begin the long journey through the night that lands me in far away lands with inverted time zones—The Wild East. The land of 21st-century opportunity, adventure, and politics. I don’t plan to wear a revolver on my hip, nor a pancho over my shoulder, but a camera and wind-resistant soft-shell might evoke a similar image stepping off the train.
But, for now, there are mountains. I fell in awe, and I fell in love with these pictures. It spurned again in me emotions and sentiments that I had set aside for sometime. They hold in them the orientalism of which I am warned and to which I am drawn. These pictures are proof, though, that there exists some magic and some great, cloudy remnant of the ancient world I have studied for the past few years.
My classmates stayed at a Daoist (Taoist) monastery on this mountain, and I at once recalled a book I had skimmed some this past January in Middlebury. I was taking Elizabeth Morrison's "Food and Eating in Asian Religions" (no, there was not that much eating), in which the professor mentioned in passing a story about Bill Porter (aka Red Pine) searching for hermits in 1989 China. Porter supposedly met a hermit in the mountains that said he was 200-or-something years old, and responding to Porter's surprise, the hermit replied that the foreigner should meet his 400-or-something year old master. Though I've tried to read Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits twice now, I've not discovered this story.
The magic, however, remained. In Hangzhou, one of my classes is a one-on-one class for which I choose a topic, and the staff hires an expert for me. In theory, it’s a very attractive dimension to the program. I decided I wanted to work with what I called “mountain poetry,” tracing the fascination of traditional Chinese culture with mountains through traditional Chinese poetry. Throughout my study of Chinese literature, mountains have pervaded works as holy places, referenced literally as divine altars as well as the more symbolic use by poets in their “in search of a sage, but unable to find him, I write this…” poetry.
From time to time, I find myself bored from work in the library, searching the Chinese poetry section. I had at the time, a nagging lure to read a bit of the most famous of “mountain poets,” Hanshan—Cold Mountain. But on the shelf, my scanning eyes fell about a handwritten spine “When I Find You…” This was a homemade hardback in which they sheath paperbacks. Cracking it, I found the true cover: an ink painting of misty Chinese mountains stretching tall, stained an emerald green. The true title was When I Find You Again It Will Be in Mountains: Selected Poems of Chia Tao (pinyin: Jia Dao). After repeated visits, I at last found this ‘monk-poet’s’ title work.
SEEING OFF A MAN OF THE TAO
When I find you again,
it will be in mountains;
this morning, I lose you
once more to farewell.
Free of attachment
in heart and mind
is it why you can go
ten thousand li alone
to places with such
little human warmth,
where, when you meet someone,
they speak an ancient tongue?
Traveling without disciples,
you have only
a white dog
for company.
Though I’m certain you will hear from me again before there are mountains, we still have farewell—for now.
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