To a mountain in Tibet
Colin Thubron
Harper Collins, 2010 (GB); 2011 (USA); viii + 171
ISBN: 978-0-06-176826-2
This is an extraordinary piece of travel writing. It does what you expect – telling you the route followed, the sights on the way and a description of most night’s accommodation. At the same time it is almost a continuous prayer. The focus of the journey is Mount Kailas in Tibet, near which four of the great rivers of India rise – Indus, Ganges, Sutley and Brahmaputra. Hindus venerate the mountain as the paradise of the god Siva. Buddhists venerate it as the centre of the cosmos. It is so holy a place that no-one has sullied it by putting a foot on it for at least two – if not three – millennia. The pagan gods of the forerunner to the Bon religion possessed the mountain before Buddha. Kailas is also seen as a ladder between light and darkness – its foundations are in hell. It is a site of redemptive power. In all this time, people have walked round the mountain in the belief that a single circuit expunged the sins of a life-time. Thubron decided to do the journey on account of the deaths of both his parents and his sister who died aged 21.
The journey through the Himalayas takes him through some extraordinary scenery and into extraordinary places. At Tuling he and his guides stay with a widow who lives with eight other members of her family in a three-roomed house. The family is so poor that there is no furniture. Nevertheless, she shares what little coarse rice she has with them. They leave behind some lentils, spinach and biscuits. The adults have had no education at all, but the five children do go to school. Near the house is a white-plastered turret, a family shrine, perforated with little holes for offerings. Thubron guesses it’s probably to Masto, an ancient shamanic god or group of gods. The family gather at the shrine two or three times a year.
The journey started in Nepal and followed a traditional route through the Himalayas up to Tibet. This route, Tibet’s link with the outside world, goes back into prehistory. As they climbed the valleys Thubron thought of Tibet floating in its own time. ‘A land forbidden to intruders not by human agency but by some mystical interdiction.’ The influence of Tibetan Buddhism slowly became apparent through the appearance of cairns decorated with prayer flags. At various points along the way he passed short walls of loose stones. Closer inspection revealed that each stone was carved with a prayer. The passer-by has to circle the wall clockwise to activate all the prayers on them. These walls have been built over generations.
Before they reached the Tibetan border they encountered a monastery founded twenty-five years ago. There are several reincarnated spirits among the 150 monks and novices. They can’t get into Tibet to journey to Mount Kailas. The Abbot asks Thubron to honour the journey he himself cannot make. Before they part he tells Thubron that the poisons at the world’s heart are anger, ignorance and desire.
At a village built on a precipitous slope, there are two temples, one male and the other female. The villagers assemble there two or three times a year to pray for good fortune. They also have an exposure platform for sky burials. At the 15,000 foot high Nava Pass, the last barrier into Tibet, he feels as though he is about to enter a sanctuary. Other travellers – even Tibetans – all feel this. The summit of the pass has a cairn of stones crowned by a tangle of prayer flags.
Once across the Nepal/Tibet border, they join other groups and board a Landcruiser with a Tibetan leader. They are now in Chinese controlled territory. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution everything old was disposed of. As a result Tibet’s 6,000 monasteries and temples were reduced to 113 by 1976. The numbers have slowly crept up since then.
Below the 16,000 foot Thallabong Pass they see a country of planetary strangeness. There is a huge lake, still, that curves out of sight. Beyond it, as though floating, is the cone of Mount Kailas. This is, he says, holy land. The lake – Manasarovar – is sacred to 20% of human kind. It is also the highest lake of its size – 200 square miles – on earth. It is so sacred that no boat may sail on it nor may anyone fish in its waters. In the past, people couldn’t even hunt nearby. Hindu scriptures say the lake was created by the mind of God. It was regarded as the nursery of the gods in the second century AD. By the 6th century AD it had become a full-blown paradise. Buddha’s mother is also said to have bathed in its waters before receiving Buddha into her womb. The lake’s waters are drunk by the dying to usher the soul to paradise and its sands, inserted into a corpse’s mouth, prevent rebirth as an animal. On the lake’s shore there are upright stones etched with prayers.
There used to be eight small monasteries round the lake (six have since been restored) symbolising the spokes of the Buddhist Wheel of Life. Pilgrims circling the lake turned the wheel towards salvation. Sometime in the second millennium BC Shiva was enthroned on Kailas. Tiers of gods and spirits ascended the mountain. Later they were adopted by Tibetan Buddhism.
At the start of the circuit round Mount Kailas is a huge wall of prayer (mani) stones and whitewashed stupas. Sky burial round Kailas was instituted in the 12th century AD. The body is dissected and the limbs amputated. The bones are ground to dust, mixed with yak butter and roasted barley before being rolled into balls to feed he vultures. The skull is smashed and mixed with the brain before being put on the platform.
Thubron comments ‘I have the notion that Tibetans, by repeated holy circuits – of mountains, monasteries, temples – are unconsciously reclaiming their sacred land.’ [I assume he means from the Chinese.]
Tibetans call the mountain Kang Rinpoche (the Precious one of Snow) rather than Sanscrit’s Kailas. While one complete circuit will dispel the sins of a lifetime – even murder – 108 such circuits raise the pilgrim to Buddhahood. Most pilgrims simply walk and pray. Some, though, advance through prostration. They walk three paces, fall prostrate with their arms stretched ahead; they rise, walk three paces and then prostrate themselves again. Buddhist and Hindu pilgrims progress round Kailas clockwise. Surviving Bon (pre-Buddhist) worshippers advance anti-clockwise. The Bon are from the first royal cradle of Tibetan culture (the Kingdom of Shang-shung) min which the priests were the early kings.
Almost every rock has a named spirit or deity associated with it, so holy is the mountain. All but the East face are precipitous, which partly explains why Kailas has never been climbed. Pilgrims walking on holy ground and breathing holy air, look ‘unquenchably happy’. At a plateau once used for sky burial, pilgrims leave personal objects. Some even practice their own death by lying on the ground beside the cemetery.
As the circuit rises to 18,000 feet, Thubron began to imagine a person walking in front of him. At 18,600 feet, the zenith of the circuit, there is a blaze of prayer flags. It is the custom to leave something here and to take something else away. Thubron leaves flags and lights a bundle of incense.
From here there is a deep, steep descent to a valley and the end of the circuit which is where the book leaves us. This is a short but intensely spiritual book that everyone reading will find something in it for themselves. Buy it, read it, and persuade others to buy their own. Never lend it out. You won‘t get it back.
Dr Hackenbush gets a job
Ginger Mayerson
The Wapshott Press, March 2010, 152pp
ISBN: 978-0-9825813-0-8
The heroine of this novel was christened Mabel but, by the time she was a teenager, had decided to call herself Dr Hackenbush. It is as a jazz singer playing the baritone ukulele that we meet her and her band at the beginning of the story. A fight breaks out and the venue where they regularly play is smashed beyond recognition. As a consequence it has go close for repairs and so Hackenbush and the band lose the regular money they get from playing there. Shortly afterwards, her car breaks down and needs expensive repairs. She has no money and so can neither buy a new baritone ukulele or get her car repaired. So there she is, an unemployed pedestrian.
Through an agency she finds work as a temp in a lawyer’s office. The senior partners are typical male chauvinist pigs. However, the girls in the office look after each other. There are any number of entertaining adventures in the middle section of the novel describing her entrapment in the office. During her stay there her father dies and she visits his house and relatives there.
Towards the end of her time in the office a bar offers her a chance to sing. Her office colleagues hear her and arrange for the office senior to hear her. It turns out that Paula was herself a famous jazz singer in the city when she performed under a different name when she as younger. Hearing Hackenbush makes her realise what she’s been missing all these years. She resigns and takes up singing again. Then Hackenbush’s aunt buys her a brand new baritone ukulele and the money she has saved up while working as a temp allows her to get her car repaired. She prepares to get the old band back together so they can perform again. She and Paula, her senior in the office, agree to divide the city between hem, so they get equal shares of the money for jazz singers.
This is a good, well-written story with satisfying end. It’s a pity its not longer. Will Dr Hackenbush make any further appearances in the literary world? I do hope so.
I have read two excellent historical novels this month. One was Susannah Gregory's A bone of contention which required the forensic logic of Matthew Bartholomew, the late 14th century Oxford scholar and physician to solve a murder (or two). The other was CJ Sansom's Revelation in which Matthew Shardlake solved a series of murders linked to a text in the book of the Revelation of St John. Fortunately, Henry VIII was obsessed with persuading Catherine Parr to get into his bed at the time. This novel also describes in some detail conditions in Bedlam at the time and common treatments of the inmates. A modern murder-mystery set in Kansas kept me guessing right to the last pages. It's Charlotte Hinger's Lethal Lineage.
Lethal Lineage
(A Lottie Albright Mystery)
Charlotte Hinger
Poisoned Pen Press, March 2011; xii + 302
ISBN: 9781590588376
The focus of this novel is a plot of forty acres of land which a small Evangelical community has bought and the church they have built there. The first ever service is to be conducted by their regular priest, Mary Farnworth. To make the service memorable, a teenage girl is to be confirmed by Bishop Talesbury (rather than the proper diocesan Bishop Rice). Talesbury preaches a hellfire and brimstone sermon rather than one appropriate to the occasion, which rather shocks his congregation. During communion, Mary Farnworth drops the chalice and spills the wine. She scurries off to the vestry. After the service she is found dead. There are no signs of forced entry or violence. Later, forensic examination establishes that she died from the poison of the South American Poison Dart Frog.
Lottie Albright, Deputy Sheriff, and her twin sister Josie were present during the service. They call in the sheriff. Later the same day coroner says he can find no information about her next-of-kin. Lottie and Josie let themselves into Mary’s office using her keys. Mary has been a social worker for 19 years and, even though they can find huge amounts of social worker papers, they can find nothing relating to Mary at all. While there, Sheriff Irwin Deal of an adjacent county bursts in and, using pretty violent language and behaviour, he arrests them. Josie uses her Blackberry to video his behaviour. They use their obligatory phone call from the jail to contact their sheriff and Lottie’s husband. Josie manages to download her video onto YouTube. Next morning the magistrate frees them immediately and reprimands Sheriff Deal severely. Josie’s husband serves Deal with a write charging him with, among other things, wrongful arrest.
Lottie and her sheriff search Mary’s home and again find nothing about her personal life or about next-of-kin. In fact, all they find out about is her social work. There isn’t even anything about her work as a priest. Nor are there any educational certificates. Lottie contacts her Bishop Rice only to discover that his office knows nothing about either Mary or Bishop Talesbury.
Lottie spends some time each week at the local library collecting peoples’ memories of the area. Chip Ferguson a fairly old, single cowboy has spent his life chasing money and is now probably the wealthiest man in the area. Then Edna Mavey, an old woman, calls in. Over a number of sessions both at the library and using a tape records at home, she tells her story. Her first husband, who lived in Iowa, was a mean man who was cruel to his animals, her and their two children, a boy and girl. She did what she could to protect them. At one point she takes the children to her sister’s house and stays there for a while. Her husband tempts her back. Almost immediately he has her committed to a lunatic asylum where she stays for three and a half years. Her sister and the children write to her from time to time. In the end she manages to walk out of the hospital and catch a bus to Kansas where she starts a new life for herself. She tells her sister to tell the children that she has died but to carry on letting her know what they are doing by letter. She leans that her son died in Vietnam and that her daughter went off the rails and lost contact with her sister. Meanwhile, she has bigamously married a Kansas man and had a son with him. Neither son nor long-dead husband know anything about the first family.
Meanwhile, Lottie has received threatening letters and phone calls. Her husband’s crops are ploughed up and one of his cows is killed cruelly. Her sister and husband are helping the local people get an election to deprive Sheriff Deal of his post. And they are successful. He is also heavily fined for wrongfully arresting the pair of them.
Then Sheriff Deal and Bishop Talesbury are seen at the church. It turns out that Bishop Talesbury has a valid deed of ownership to the land, and, hence, their church. Chip Ferguson unsuccessfully tries to buy the land from Talesbury. Shortly after, he is found dead in his car, having been killed by a dart tipped with poison from an African poison dart frog.
Edna, becoming increasingly frail, has a stroke and has to be put in a nursing home. Before she goes she tells Lottie that Mary Farnsworth was her long lost daughter.
The climax of the story comes when ex-sheriff Deal holes out in the church and threatens to kill Lottie’s husband. She and her sister arrive, she tries to shoot Deal but misses. Then Bishop Talesbury creeps in at the back and, using a blowpipe and curare tipped arrow, darts Deal.
If you think this is the end, you are in for a big surprise! There is an amazing conclusion to this fast-paced well-written novel. I look forward to reading more Lottie Albright Mysteries.
Only one sci-fi novel this month. It's a most entertaining story that has plenty of violence and a hero with two penises. Maree Anderson's From the Ashes will keep you reading to the last page.
From the ashes
Maree Anderson
Red Sage Publishing, Seminole, USA; 2010; iii + 175
ISBN: 9781603105736
There is nothing more satisfying than reading a love story in which boy meets girl, they fall in love, are parted by adverse circumstances, fight to get back together and, in the end do, indeed, get back together in the closing pages. This is just such a novel. And, for sci-fi fans, it is set in some far distant future when our lovers travel between currently unoccupied planets.
Calista inherits a cargo spaceship from her father and carries whatever cargo she can under contract. She loads a large crate, heavily sealed with Imperial seals (Why does there always have to be an Empire?) and takes off for her target planet. Before doing so, she has scanned the crate and established that it is not what it claims to be on the manifest. So she opens it up and finds a large egg at the centre. While she watches, it hatches and a small bipedal creature emerges. Within minutes it has grown to adult size. Her size. It looks a bit like a man with two penises.
After a while she realises she is receiving messages telepathically transmitted from Asher, the creature’s name. It tells her that he is a member of the Phoenicae. Like a duckling he has imprinted himself on her and is her slave forever, which is the characteristic of Phoenicae. In no time at all, Asher has learned that Calista wonders what making love to him would be like. And, of course, she learns shortly afterwards.
Calista and Asher are in the cockpit when they are hailed by a passing trader which is captained by her ex-husband, Nate. Whatever they call themselves in the novel, we would recognise Nate and his evil crew as a bunch of space pirates. Nate tries to soft soap her and take possession of her cargo. She has good reason for not trusting him, as the last time they met she stripped the skin off one half of his face and removed one of his eyes. So we know she is not entirely defenceless. While Nate and his crew try to board her ship, Asher is in the cargo hold. Calista straps herself in and hits the button to escape at incredible speed. Once clear of danger, she goes back to the cargo hold to find Asher very badly injured from being thrown about and dying. He tells her to set light to him and to scrape his ashes together afterwards. He is reborn, more closely imprinted on Calista than ever.
They decide to visit a planet where they are certain they can get an egg about the same size as the original that was loaded in the crate. There are some strange and particularly dangerous, roving defence mechanisms. Nevertheless, they find and retrieve an egg and start loading it on the space ship. But then Nate and his crew board Calista’s ship and capture both them and the egg.
Nate threatens to torture Calista and gets one of his crew to torture Asher. He sells her to the son of the Imperial Governor of a planet. And Asher to the governor’s wife. The son, Leighton, is sadistic to the point of occasionally killing his partners. Nate drugged Calista in order to deliver her. When she wakes she is shackled hand and foot to a table with Leighton in the room beside her. She excites him by telling him how and what she did to Nate’s face. When they learn that Nate is on his way to check on his delivery and collect his money, Calista escapes from the table and she and Leighton tie Nate to it. Leighton then delights in doing to Nate what Calista did before, with addition measures of his own.
She and Leighton attend a party thrown by his father. The height of the evening is to be Asher. Any member of the audience can do what they like with or to him, providing they leave him alive. His execution will be the climax of the entertainment. Perfect for Leighton. From a privileged position in the audience, sitting with the sadist son, Calista is able to communicate with Asher. They plan a surprising escape.
On their way out from the planet they arrange a mass escape of hundreds of slaves kept in inhuman conditions in foul compounds.
And the rest, the satisfying rest, you can guess at for yourselves. This is a well-written, fast-moving love story set in space.
And finally two excellent collections of poetry. Seamus Heaney's Human Chains is enthralling in a way most people don't think poetry can be. it holds you captivated from the first poem to the last. And last, but not least, Robin Robertson's The Wrecking Light is excellent.
The Wrecking Light
Robin Robertson
Picador, London; 2010 (UK); 2011 (USA); 112 pp
ISBN: 978-0330515481
This is a fascinating collection of poems and translations. From start to finish it held my attention. In fact, I could not put it down until I reached the Notes at the end. And then I wished it were twice as long. The collection begins with Album, a poem about looking through albums of family photos, and about how the narrator sees himself as a ghost within them. A very strange idea, that, a living ghost. Or are the other figures in the album dead? And so placing him apart from them, as we normally view ghosts – representations of the dead to the living. Only this reverses that perception.
Signs on a white field is about how the sun’s heat begins to melt ice on the surface of a lake. The poem starts by describing the surface of the lake as containing some unevennesses, about how
….a sudden frost
has caught some turbulence in the water
and made it solid; frozen in its distress
to a scar, or a skin-graft
As the sun works its warming work the poet hears the lake ‘talking to itself.’
And then it comes.
The detonating crack, like a dropped plank,
as if the whole lake has snapped in two
and the world will follow.
But all that happens
is a huge release of sound in a boom
that rolls under the ice for miles.
By Clachan Bridge is a weird poem about a girl who has a cleft lip or palate. She used to cut fish up by the bridge to see how they worked inside.
by morning’s end, her nails
were black red, her hands
all sequined silver.
She dissected all sorts of animals. You wonder whether she is addicted to the cutting up or exploring the variations in anatomy. Later, she claimed that she had sex with the blacksmith’s son. Her belly grew for a year, and she said she had a stone baby.
And how I said her wrists
bangled with scars
and those hands flittering
at her throat,
to the plectrum of bone
she’d hung there.
The Plague Year starts with what I can only describe as the annual cycle of the birth and rebirth of plants, trees, etc.
I am dying
so slowly you’d hardly notice. What is there left
to trust but this green world and its god,
always returning to life?
And then the poem moves onto explore the nature of inner city pollution.
My past stretches from here to there, and back,
leaving me somewhere in the middle
of Shepherd’s Bush Green with the winos of ’78.
A great year; I remember it well. Hints of petrol,
urine, plane trees; a finish so long you could
sleep out under it. Same face, different names.
Everything is different. Everything is the same.
About time explores the idea of feeling oneself aging while watching life events occur (parents’ death; break up of marriage; children suddenly adults). The result is
The skin loosening
from my legs and arms
and this heart going
like there’s no tomorrow.
Fall from Grace, on the other hand, is about shame. He describes his life replacing
Love and trust with nothing, no
light shining back at me, just shame
….
My life a mix of dull disgraces
and watery acclaim, my daughters know
I cannot look into their clean faces;
what shines back at me is shame.
In another poem, the smell of cologne is used to mask the smell of a dead mouse and reminds the person in Going to Ground of thee one used to mask the smell of a friend in hospital with AIDS whose toes and fingers had started to rot and go brown.
In A Gift a woman comes to the poet ‘in a dress of true love …. made of flowers’; Her hair was similarly garlanded.
And she was holding out
A philtre of water lovage,
red chamomile and ladies’ seal
in a cup, for me to drink.
Imagine being in a hotel or B & B. A naked woman leaves your room. In Venery he sees
The whole scut
of her bottom
disappearing
down the half-flight
carpet stair
to the bathroom.
If you want to find out about horrible ways to die, Law of the Island offers one. A man is lashed to a timber and thrown into the sea so that he will float head up.
Over his mouth and eyes
they tied two live mackerel
with twine, and pushed him
out from the rocks.
They waited
For a gannet
to read that flex of silver
from a hundred feet up,
close its wings
and plummet-dive.
And then comes Kalighat which describes the sacrificial beheading of a goat.
The blood
comes out of his neck
in little gulps.
Robertson returns to the idea that everything, even love, is born and dies in a beautiful poem called Lesson. Ambush is about the immense patience of a fox waiting for the moment when a lake’s surface will freeze over and trap duck’s feet in the ice so they can’t escape.
Death strikes again in Grave Goods. The poem starts with ambitions.
He wanted to outlive the grim husbandry
of battle order, outrun
the breath of the damned
…..
to reach a place
of peace and honour,
fresh running water,
a morning of porcelain and lavender
combed by light, folded and smoothed over.
He came instead to a closed silence.
Robertson goes on to describe a grave containing the artefacts of hunting and fishing, a red ochre covered woman seated with a child on her lap, a man wearing a crown of antlers and, between the two, ‘a young child laid down/ into the wing of a swan.’
In 1075AD Adam of Bremen witnessed The great mid-winter sacrifice, Uppsala. He saw a tall tree ‘thick with gifts’. It was ‘decked simply with the dead’. There were nine animals
and nine
that aren’t animals but hang there just the same,
black-faced, bletted, barely
recognizable as men.
And blood soaked the ground under the tree.
During dinner is about how Hawthorn should never be brought into the house because it brings death and bad luck with it.
It was Christ’s crown and the faeries’ bed,
I said to my hostess …..
But ‘Ladies Meat’ is another name
because it smells of sex and it smells of death.
…..
For years I was only able to smell one and
now I can only smell the other!
and so she left the table.
Widow’s Walk is about isolation and loneliness.
Trying to escape myself,
but there’s always
someone
wanting to sew my shadow back.
…
I felt like going in,
there and then,
like a widow
toppling forward at the grave,
going in after myself.
In Hammersmith Winter he remembers as a boy watching snow fall outside.
But you’re not there, now, to lead me back
to bed. None of you are. Look at the snow,
I said, to whoever might be near. I’m cold
Would you hold me. Hold me. Let me go.
This is a collection of poems that needs, calls out for, reading and reading again. It’s no good borrowing it. Buy your own.
No comments:
Post a Comment