|
8. Dependent Origination On my last visit to this valley I felt the urge to go walking beyond the reach of humankind. The hill rose as a steep green wall, pathed like a mythical pilgrimage, and the clouds peering over its ridge seemed to be calling me upwards: Climb... ...to our slipping silence.
The day before I had walked part of the same way with my Friend-migrant and the children, two boys and the little
heartburied princess I'd brought with me. We'd not gone far when the older boy turned and barred our way, feetfirm on the
hard track, to demand with all the passion of his six years:
___Be horses! Be horses!
Be henchcreatures with me, of honest kind. Not people.
My friend transformed with fluid ease into a white, longmaned horse, neighing and pawing the ground impressively. The
most I could manage was the plod of a self-conscious donkey.
At a certain height, after the canny stonepiles beside the track have drawn back to mark the Roman edge of safe
enclosure, air becomes the dominant element, and the few discernible sounds and movements that rise from below have
a marine slowness, delayed and dreamlike.
Why doesn't she bring her gentle eye up here and paint these heather-rough hills, scattered like benches in some
nursery of infant gods?
It takes so little to draw my soul to the door of its house; the tactile whispering of windword, brushing the graingranny
surface of an old bare rock; a tiny wild flower whose purity is exact counterweight to the might of the hill on which it grows.
Might she not, with her diffident fingers, catch something of this silence? Of the way the cloudshadows swim like
subtle fish through these petrified waves of emptiness?
On my solitary walk I was overcome with a nervous exhilaration and lay down to contain it. Though the ground was hard
and cold under my back, still I felt I was floating. Tilting my head back I could see the blind muscles of cloud tipping the
uncomplaining hillbed over and endlessly over, and when I looked past my feet I could see the distant river, distilled and
sparkling, disappear beneath my shoe. The sunlightened wind visited my clothes with a passing disinterest and I felt I was
weathering like a rock.
Or like a sheep I had seen, lodged in a crevice between two boulders. At first I thought it was a third boulder because of
its greyish fleece and patches of what looked like lichen, and because of its absolute immobility. Deadstill, vacated, lying
in perfect patience while being slowly unstitched, nibbling at the wind with complicated lips of bone.
Could she not with her supple wrist weave here a work in line and shade that sang out with lifewealth heaped hillhigh
and lasting?
Still needing to vent excess energy I decided to leave the track and clamber directly up to the crest of the hill, but how
unnervingly formless and shifting these old mothermountains are! After only a few minutes of climbing I looked back to
find that both river and track had disappeared and behind me were only unfamiliar armies of heather and spiny grass,
releasing their cold, sturdy cleanvapour into a different sky. A sense of prudence, aware that only one curving degree of
error might mean hours of wandering, called me back down. I ignored it, climbing and climbing on, breathing heavily,
grasping at tussocks and the splayed branchlets of heather and gorse, till the muscles of my legs were crying with the effort
and there was only the most tenuous thread of orientation linking me to that safeself far below.
Break it! Break even that. Fly.
At such times I feel the urge to climb until nothing of Man is visible because it takes only a glimpse of the commonplace to
conjure the entire mental paraphernalia of the human world, the great tyranny of its conventions and necessities, the
imprisoning power of its images. I want, rather, to drown in nature; to climb up, up, until I am the only selfbound thing
remaining and then let the imperious mountain wind snuff out even the deepest of words.
When I felt the ground levelling I thought I had triumphed
___heart bursting and lungs grabbing at air
___but I'd been fooled, the
real summit was still a long way off. I had thrown myself upward like a flea charging a bull and those cunning old hills had
simply stepped aside. Even so I had gained admittance to a rare and secret land where the hills floated poised and
weightless in a sea-haze of distant blue, calling to each other and to the cloud-young clinging to their long backs.
As I stood there, high on the flanched earth, flying over huge distances like an unseen flag, I became aware of a faint,
piecemeal grumbling in the sky and with it a tiny black dot, suspended and emanating like a malarial insect. The noise
spread and thickened in a rapid, onrushing bore of sound, rolling and clapping among the hills, while the spot divided like
a dark cell into two, each of which developed into jet fighter-bombers, sweeping low and ferocious along the length of the
valley. Their noise was deafening, a merciless howl pressing downward like an iron weight, producing in me an equal rage
so that I was jumping up and down with my hands over my ears, screaming into their scream in order to withstand it. When
they were squatting directly over me on their cumulus of compressed and brutal thunder I could see every detail of the
dangerous dogdick missiles slung beneath their wings and, as they banked into a climbing turn, the tubercular glow of
afterburn in the ports of their engines. They flew, finally, out of my sight across the spine of a hill but their growling echoes
stayed hunting among the sky's hollows for a long, slowly-decaying time.
No, she won't come up here with her fine softhaired brushes. What? Tear that precious silk with such metallic slashes of
fury? That's asking too much. The old Masters of Intricate Ikons may have known every gesture of skull-bedecked
demons and similar rattlers of medieval bones, but the lineage of evil that informs those planes
___and all our technologies of destruction___
is of another order altogether. The Ten thousand perfect Buddhas will flare like gnats in a flame-thrower when
my demon opens its mouth to talk. There will be nothing, not even...
these memorised eventrails, stirring in the wind like scraps of fleece, stone-snagged and abandoned.
I like Alie at once. She has an unforced humility which makes her easy to approach. A quietly generous person, she is
somewhat self-effacing and automatically takes a back seat in the presence of others. Once we are alone, though, she
opens out, answering even challenging questions with an air of candour.
She explains about thangkas: how the resident Tibetan Drawing Master, the last of his line, is already old and unsteady;
how this esoteric art should not be allowed to become extinct lest a spiritual resource be lost when there is most need of it;
and how both work on, and contemplation of, these scroll paintings are excellent spiritual discipline.
Painted onto silk with
ornate, mace-ended poles top and bottom on which they can be rolled, interwoven borders of coloured silks sewn with gold
and silver threads, and hung with tassels, these incredibly lush creations depict figures from Tibetan tantric cosmology
___Buddhas, bodhisattvas, benign and wrathful deities,
spirits and elementals. The style is a hybrid of sensuous Hindu mythological art and Chinese alchemical diagrams. The
Tibetan contribution was a framework of geometric interlacing and an extravagant energy, formalised over the centuries
into mere abundance of detail.
Most thangkas depict the spiritual achievement of a particular guru or bodhisattva and consist of a large central figure and
any number of smaller, subsidiary ones. These subsidiary figures represent the various incarnations of the main figure,
(extension through time), his particular spiritual abilities or 'transformation bodies' (extension through non-material space), or
perhaps the various deific qualities, tamed and assimilated. The principal figure, royally accoutred and ringed
___both head and body___
with saintly aureolae, will be shown seated cross-legged on a lotus-flower capitulum in the foreground of a rather sketchy,
paradisal landscape consisting of delicate tropical cliffs, a timid waterfall or two, and the occasional languorously couchant
beast. In the sky around the principal figure, the subsidiary figures float with bubble-like detachment on crisply perfect
cloudforms. They, too, will be contained within a radiant nimbus and demurely seated, if benign or realised, or else ramping
furiously from a bed of bones if wrathful.
The picture is already complex, with the main figure holding contemplative ground within a remote mountainous region
whose cloud-invested sky seems to be packed with interdependent beings, all echoing each other like thoughts in the wind,
but add to this the fact that every fold and turn of a robe, every lock of long hair, flicker of flame or puff of cloud, every
ribbon, sash, lace, leaf, flume of falling water or flower of tree has to curl and coil, twist and twine, scallop and loop, and that
___further___
every figure is always holding or wearing or has arranged before them, ornamento, bells-elaborate, crowns jewelled and
pinnacled, incense bowls with curleye waft, staffs of office and instruments of spiritual potency, and you see how stultified
and symbolically prolix the thangkas have become. The colours, flat and graphic as they are, neither relieve nor clarify the
intricacy but only contribute further to the overall effect of self-satisfied, episcopal ormolu. The wrathful deities, alone, have
managed to retain an engaging mania, but even this has been fiddled and fretted into nothing more alarming than top-heavy
petulance.
As well as being devotional ikons in the usual sense, the thangkas are also aids to visualisation. In this exercise, as Alie
tells me, the spiritual trainee learns to re-create one of these images by visual recall, taking every detail into memory by force
of repetition in order to realise a mystic identity with the deity or guru in question. Painting them is part of the same process
and is done on a hierarchical basis. Beginners are confined to filling in simple, single-colour expanses, the Advanced
entrusted with the gilding of fine detail, but this is only after the Drawing Master has himself drawn all the figures in
traditional and unquestionable fixity of line, as his master did for him, as successive masters have been doing for hundreds
of years. Perhaps in remote times, when consciousness was less divorced from dream and the air of every moment was
plastic with semblance, they really did embody someone's spiritual vision. Now, it seems to me, as I watch Alie applying
colour within a tracery of lines, all they represent is ideas; ideas, and a condition of harem-conformity. I feel the same distaste
for the mental self-violence required to ingest such images that I felt when seeing on television armies of young,
fundamentalist Muslims beating the blood from their own heads, for God.
|
| Continue to..next..section | Return to..previous..section | back to..Contents..page |