is that it suddenly struck me tonight, as I have been watching youtubes of Spiti
this is actually a crappy introduction, badly edited etc. but it's reasonably short so...
--anyway... looking at this desert landscape--using the original meaning of 'desert' as in 'deserted' or 'not habitable' (hence some jungles are actually deserts!)--looking at this desert landscape and hearing the Tuva singers, the Tibetan Chanters, the Nepalese Monks and Nuns... thinking about my friends working in Dolpa Nepal - a region the size of Pennsylvania with maybe 20,000 people in it--i heard some dim echo of--or rather 'in'--heavy metal music, so popular on the 'what are you listening to now' thread. Yeah, I have some metal, and some i even play in rotation as it were... but, having spent some time--months on end--in true deadly solitude in the high country, where a serious cut or a minor broken limb (hand, ankle) might well be fatal, where food is as simple as nature and your backpack make it--there is, in that high country, that alien, somewhat divine, definitely inhuman stillness a cold, deep, deep sense of patience, of the mountains themselves waiting for the folly of humankind to spin itself out at last--at what to a 50 million year-old mountain amounts at most to an amuse-bouche, a little bite of nourishment... in that cold, impersonal, enduring world, region, the darkness and hopes of the city are nearly indistinguishable for their brevity, myopia and manufactured urgency... real urgency is walking along a trail at 12,000 feet in spring and hearing cannons go off.. a WHOMP WHOMP BOOOOM that signals something many don't even know exists: a snow thunderstorm. that sucker can drop a foot of snow in an hour, three feet in two hours, and if you are not sure of your landscape, of the whereabouts of your base camp, you are in all kinds of deep shit. The last time this happened to me, in the mountains around Taos in April a few years ago, we were walking in shorts and sandals, as such was the temperature that day. When i heard that thunder-crack I screamed RUN RUN RUN! to my companions and the others on the trail. Within 30 minutes that trail was gone, our feet and hands were starting to redden with frostbite and we were running for our toes if not our lives. We made it... but it took some time to get out of the parking area, because there was three feet of fresh wet heavy snow where before there had been clean gravel... so yeah, that kind of urgency trumps the urgency of getting back to the boss on that thing, of getting the right gizmo for your honey or your home... and there is something so extraordinarily simply honest about the high country... about the biting indifference of Nature in Her Home that renders us something far more alive, more human than all the group yakking in the world. ... some decades ago there was a man who wrote some books on how to be a man (Iron John, Fire in the Belly were the titles i think)... i happened to be in the Orkneys and heard him interviewed on the Edinburgh radio... he was complaining that hardly anyone came to his group workshops (which were crowded as fuck in California)... Well Mr. Bly said the interviewer, we Scots find our manhood alone in a boat in the North Sea, not sitting in some bloody church basement on folding chairs... ... so here's to those who dare to fold up the chairs, turn off the noise, and confront the loudest sound of all___________silence_________
