Soul Mountain (52 page)

When Nüwa created humans she also created their sufferings. Humans are created from the entrails of Nüwa and born in the bloody fluids of women and so they can never be washed clean.

Don’t go searching for spirits and ghosts, don’t go searching for cause and retribution, don’t go searching for meaning, all is embodied in the chaos.

It is only when people refuse to accept that they shout out, even while not comprehending what they are shouting. Humans are simply such creatures, fettered by perplexities and inflicting anxiety upon themselves.

The self within you is merely a mirror image, the reflection of flowers in water. You can neither enter the mirror nor can you scoop up anything, but looking at the image and becoming enamoured of it you no longer pity yourself.

You may as well resign yourself to being infatuated with that physical form and drown in a sea of lust, spiritual need is only self profanity. You grimace.

Knowledge is an extravagance, a costly expense.

You have only the desire to narrate, to use a language transcending cause and effect, or logic. People have spoken so much nonsense, so why shouldn’t you say more.

You create out of nothingness, playing with words like a child playing with blocks. But blocks can only construct fixed patterns, the possibilities of structures are inherent in the blocks and no matter how they are moved you will not be able to make anything new.

Language is like a blob of paste which can only be broken up by sentences. If you abandon sentences, it will be like falling into a quagmire and you will flounder about helplessly.

To flounder helplessly is like suffering and the whole of humanity is made up of individual selves. When you fall in, you must crawl out yourself because saviours aren’t concerned with such trifling matters.

Dragging weighty thoughts you crawl about in language, trying all the time to grab a thread to pull yourself up, becoming more and more weary, entangled in floating strands of language, like a silkworm spitting out silk, weaving a net for yourself, wrapping yourself in thicker and thicker darkness, the faint glimmer of light in your heart becoming weaker and weaker until finally the net is a totality of chaos.

To lose images is to lose space and to lose sound is to lose language. When moving the lips can’t produce sounds what is being expressed is incomprehensible, although at the core of consciousness the fragment of the desire to express will remain. If this fragment of desire cannot be retained there will be a return to silence.

How is it possible to find a clear pure language with an indestructible sound which is larger than a melody, transcends limitations of phrases and sentences, does not distinguish between subject and object, transcends pronouns, discards logic, simply sprawls, and is not bound by images, metaphors, associations or symbols? Will it be able to give expression to the sufferings of life and the fear of death, distress and joy, loneliness and consolation, perplexity and expectation, hesitation and resolve, weakness and courage, jealousy and remorse, calm and impatience and self-confidence, generosity and constraint, kindness and hatred, pity and despair, as well as lack of ambition and placidity, humility and wickedness, nobility and viciousness, cruelty and benevolence, fervour and indifference, and aloofness, and admiration, and promiscuousness, and vanity, and greed, as well as scorn and respect, certainty and uncertainty, modesty and arrogance, obstinacy and chagrin, resentment and shame, surprise and amazement, lethargy, muddle-headedness, sudden enlightenment, never comprehending, failing to comprehend, as well as just allowing whatever will happen to happen.

I am lying on a spring bed made with clean sheets in a room with pale yellow print-patterned wallpaper, white crocheted curtains and dark red carpet. There are two lounge chairs with towelling covers and the bathroom has a bathtub. If I were not holding a stencilled manuscript of farm-work songs,
Gongs and Drums to Accompany Weeding
, I would find it hard to believe that I am in the forest of Shennongjia. This new two-storey building built for a team of American researchers who for some reason didn’t arrive has become a hostel for cadres to carry out investigations. Through the good auspices of the section chief, when I arrive I am again given special treatment and charged the cheapest rates for food and lodgings. Beer even comes with the meals, although I would would have preferred liquor. To be able to enjoy such cleanliness and comfort completely relaxes me and I could stay for a few extra days without any problem. After all, there is no real need for me to hurry on my journey.

There’s a sort of a buzzing in the room. At first I think it’s an insect but looking around there’s nowhere for an insect to hide as the ceiling is painted white and the light shade is a cream colour. The sound continues and hangs elusively in the air. When I listen carefully it is like a woman’s singing and it hovers around me. As soon as I put down the book it vanishes and when I pick up the book the sound is again in my ears. I think my ears must be ringing so I get up, walk around for a bit, and open the window.

The sun produces a glare on the gravel square in front of the building. It is almost noon and no-one is in sight, could all this be in my mind? It is an elusive tune without words but it seems to be familiar, a bit like the sad wailing of women I have heard in the mountain regions.

I decide to go outside to have a look, leave the room, and go through the main door and out to the square in front of the building. The small fast-flowing river at the bottom of the slope is green and clear in the sunlight and the green mountain peaks, although devoid of vast stretches of forest, are nevertheless covered in lush vegetation. A dirt road for motor vehicles stretches for a couple of kilometres down the slope to the little town in the middle of the reserve. On the left, at the bottom of a towering green mountain, there’s a school and an empty football field. The students are probably all in the classrooms: and the teachers in this mountain village wouldn’t be teaching their students dirges. It is quiet and there is only the sound of the wind on the mountain and the lapping of the river. There is a makeshift workers’ hut by the river but there is no-one outside the hut. The sound of the singing has vanished.

I return to my room and sit at the desk by the window, thinking to select and copy some of this folk song material, but again I hear the singing. It seems to be the slow outpouring of irrepressible grief after the pain of excruciating agony has settled. Something odd is happening and I must get to the bottom of it. Is there someone singing or is there something psychologically wrong with me? I look up and hear it behind me, I turn around and it is suspended in the air like a strand of floating silk. A spider web blowing in the wind has form but this is without form, intangible. Tracking the sound, I stand on the armrest of the sofa and at this point discover that it is coming through an air vent above the door. I get a chair and stand on it. The glass vent is spotlessly clean and when I open it the sound goes out into the corridor. I get off the chair and open the door and the sound goes out under the eaves of the balcony. I move the chair out onto the balcony, stand on it, but can’t reach high enough. Below the balcony is the small sunlit cement courtyard where the clothes I washed in the morning hang on a wire. Of course
they
can’t be singing. I can’t see any tracks in the distance but there seems to be a fence along the mountain which cuts off a stretch of thick tangled undergrowth and brambles on the slope. As I come down from the balcony into the sunlight the sound becomes clearer and seems to be coming from the sun. I squint and look up and in the bright light hear the sharp, heavy thud of metal on stone. I can’t see a thing at first, then when the blinding sun becomes a blue-black image and I shade my eyes with my hand, I see small figures moving about halfway up the mountain on a bare cliff face. The metallic sound is coming from far away over there. I walk towards them and make out that they are quarry workers – one seems to be wearing a red singlet and the others are stripped to the waist and are hardly distinguishable from the brown dynamited cliff face. The sound of their singing flies up into the sunlight with the wind and is sometimes loud and sometimes indistinct.

It occurs to me that I can bring them in for a closer look through the zoom lens of my camera so I go back to my room for it. It is in fact the person in the red singlet who is singing in a voice that sounds like a woman’s high-pitched wailing as he swings a big sledge hammer and keeps time to the sound of a rock drill. The bare-chested man wielding the rock drill seems to be harmonizing with him.

Suddenly the singing stops, they must have seen the sun glinting off my camera. They stop work and look in my direction. There is an absence of any sound and the silence is searing, but I am pleased that I don’t have some psychological disorder and that my hearing is normal.

I return to my room and want to write something, but what can I write about? What about something on the singing of the quarry workers? When I pick up my pen I can’t write a thing.

I think, I’ll try and get them to come for a drink and a chat in the evening – it’d be a way of passing time. I put down my pen and head for the small town.

When I emerge from a little shop with a bottle of brown rice wine and a bag of peanuts, I bump into the friend who lent me the stencilled material. He tells me he has also collected many hand-written copies of mountain folk songs. This is just what I want so I ask him to come for a chat. He’s busy at the moment but promises to come after dinner.

I wait for him until ten o’clock. I am the only guest in the hostel and it is frustratingly quiet. I start regretting not having asked the quarry workers when I suddenly hear knocking on the window. It is my friend. He says he couldn’t get anyone to open the main door, the girls in charge must have locked up and gone to sleep. I take the torch and a paper parcel from him and he climbs in. Nervous with excitement I immediately open the rice wine right away and pour out half a teacup each.

I can’t recall his face but I recall that he was thin and not too tall, that he looked timid but once he started talking there was an enthusiasm which hadn’t been crushed by life. His looks are irrelevant, what delights me is this treasure of his which he opens before me. He unwraps the newspaper parcel. Apart from a few notebooks, these are all badly tattered hand-written texts which used to be circulated among the people. I read through them one by one and when he sees my utter delight, he says magnanimously, “Go ahead and copy any that you like. There used to be lots of folk songs in these mountains. If you found an old master singer, he wouldn’t be able to get through them all if he sang for several days and several nights.”

At this I start asking him about the songs of the quarry workers on the mountain.

“Oh, they’re falsetto singers from Badong,” he says. “The forests on the mountains there have been stripped bare so they’ve had to leave to work in the quarries.”

“Are there also different sets of music and words?”

“There are some books of music but the words are largely improvised, they just sing whatever comes to mind, much of it is quite crude.”

“With lots of coarse swear words?”

“These quarry workers are away all year round and don’t have any women, they take out their frustration on the rocks,” he says with a smile.

“Why is the music so haunting and sad?”

“It’s that sort of music. If you don’t listen to the words it’s like resentful wailing and sounds great, but the words aren’t particularly interesting. Take a look at this.” He takes a notebook from the paper parcel, leafs through to a particular page and hands it to me. Under the heading
Record of Darkness
is written:

On a good day at a good hour, Heaven and Earth open.

The filial family has asked us, a drummer and a singer,

To lead the singing at the song square.

One two three four five, metal wood water fire earth.

It is not easy to lead the singing,

And we sweat even before we start.

Deep at night when all is quiet a bright moon and stars,

And we get ready to start the singing.

It is late at night to start a long one,

If we start a short one it won’t last till dawn,