Leaving the Crystal Mountain

On the summery shores of a placid Lake Michigan, still and clear except a wandering sailboat close to the horizon, a friend brought up The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. I had been searching for accompaniment on the impending journey. I didn't know much of the book, only that it was nonfiction and slightly Zen. Later, walking home with the setting sun, gentle lacustrine wind kissing my shoulders, I looked deep into my reading list--there it was written, with a message next to it: (read when u get to Chi). 

When and why I left myself this note I cannot recall. My reaction was more suspicion than satisfaction, for validated foresight brings about a strange sensation. What is random coincidence, and what is inevitable? How dominant is my instinct, my blanketed subconscious? Something about this book called to me before my arrival. It spoke again in the early days. I have learned to listen. 

The Snow Leopard is a travelogue of an expedition to northwestern Nepal in 1973. The impetus was GS, a biologist, wanting to study the autumn mating practices of Himalayan blue sheep. Matthiessen joined for the journey rather than the destination. Aside from the sheep are the Buddhist monasteries he hoped to pilgrimage and, notably, a potential glimpse at the elusive snow leopard. At that time few outsiders had ever seen one; the solitary predators stalk the most high, most remote swaths of Asia, supremely camoflagued and adept and shy. They are a silent phantom on which wonder can be projected--an incarnation of the unknown, the omniscient, the unattainable. 

GS, Matthiessen, and their sherpa porters set out in late summer for the glacial slopes of Dolpo. The narrative is chronicled by daily entry--I began reading near the end of September, so the days aligned almost exactly with mine 50 years later. The air grew colder and the burdens grew heavier both here and there. Our rhythm synchronized as I, before concluding my day, would read of the splendors and tribulations my distant companions had lived, and reflect on mine from this small corner of the world. 

Before long I could hardly separate the story on the pages from the story in my mind. The overlap was uncanny--like I was opening a portal that transported me to my own thoughts and memories. The physical landscape, its jagged cliffs and sparse villages and endless sky, enmeshed with that I had passed in Ladakh years ago. Talk of the snow leopard, that specter cloaked in spotted mystery, was a manifestation of my personal fascination. The highs and lows, the tortuous yet hypnotizing voyage of novelty, suffering, growth, fear, snowy passes and shaded crevices, it all blurred in an enigmatic familiarity. The words eerily echoed the murmur of my spirit. 

Much of the book wrestles with peace and tranquility. This may be found--but can it be kept? Retaining harmony is a formidable task in the face of our constant turmoil. The onrush of sedentary problems, gaining in magntitude as Matthiessen departed from Shey Gompa at the foot of Crystal Mountain, prompts a regret for not holding the prior moment, for moving on to imminent distractions. This is a difficult reality to swallow. Was the journey not to gain something everlasting? The apparent futility of permanance, of solidifying a fleeting essence, burns alongside the unquenchable longing for answers.   

Aldous Huxley writes in Brave New World that "feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation." The world is trending towards instant gratification--eliminatation of the discomfort of waiting. After months of sleeping on frosty earth, after miles through the harshest, most inhospitable terrain, Matthiessen never does see the snow leopard. We can strive, but there is no guarantee of satisfaction.  

If understanding is transitory or, worse, illusory, what does the journey accomplish? What justifies the slow, opaque, moiling process? What is the snow leopard? 

I search for a central force to gravitate around. The push is the purpose for now, I think. As Matthiessen and company trudged onward, chasing goals overt and not so much, I too drive forward into unseen territory. Matthiessen wrote: "God offers man the choice between repose and truth: he cannot have both." I was drawn to this book of bodily and spiritual travail by some power, for some reason. There remain mountains to cross during the long journey home. I'm not sure how it ends. 

Signs from Above

The first page of The Unbearable Lightness of Being rubbed me the wrong way. Milan Kundera, Czechoslovakia-born Paris resident until a few weeks ago (RIP), is mulling the impact of an event were it to happen once compared with if it were to eternally recur. He says a one-off life is as non-notable as a 14th century war between African kingdoms, "a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment." The long European tradition of viewing everyone else's history (and lives) as inconsequential rides on. I fail to see how Kundera's precious Prague Spring had any notable impact on "the destiny of the world" either. Getting off on the wrong foot, I was hardly consoled by his continuation of the metaphor--that were the African war to happen over and over, it would take a different form; "a solid mass, permanently protuberrant, its inanity irreparable." 

I think this book is characterized by toeing the line. Set on the boundary of the Iron Curtain, its passages shift between objective observer and impassioned participant, mind and body, empathy and disgust. Actions are rationalized and embraced raw. As the title suggests, Kundera explores the fleeting nature of existence, the Lightness, plus its heavy flipside that ripples across relations and generations. 

Such a novel fits this phase of my life. It is present in every direction I turn--on the shelves of close people, in articles I read, even in the news. Whether this prevalence is frequency illusion or a sign from above I'm not certain, but I think it prudent to listen when called to. In this time of sorting, a human story unveiling our heterogeneity soothes.   

Through the pages runs a singularity; the lives lived, by dreamers and lovers, their mistakes and triumphs and even what's out of their control, it all happens blindingly fast and only once in an unending onward direction, a ceaseless march with all the time to look and reach back just far enough to graze with the fingertips, always perfectly out of reach. It's Unbearable. 

Part of accepting Being as irrevocable is to simplify, overcommit, generalize, and sacrifice. Though this is well-crafted literature written by an insightful man, I think it contains an acknowledged failure to capture the wholeness. In the narrative too, we go down a path with no hope of return, descending into the only universe here. Kundera taps in and relinquishes control. There is no attempt to answer what any of this is about. It goes on, amazingly. 

Beethoven's motif "Es muss sein!" translates to "It must be!" This take on fate embodies the philosophy of the first-person narrator, the author: there's one transient chance to make a decision, and there's no way to validate whether it was right or wrong, good or bad. Some of the characters commit to love, some to ideas, some to freedom. Who is to say which is better? In the subjectivity lies the beauty. 

My initial annoyance was assuaged at the end. A group of European and American intelligentsia travel to the Cambodian border to demand Vietnamese occupiers let humanitarian aid in. Amid a backdrop of commentary on kitsch and leftism, the bickering, righteous marchers reach the border and are met with silence. Their grand statement, built on the perceived importance of Western writers and doctors and actors and professors, is spat on by power, humiliated under lack of attention, destroyed. Sooner or later we're all humbled as mere Beings; weightless, burdened, passing our way through the Earth.

GSG

Every spring, in San Antonio, bunches of loquats appear on the branches of broad-leafed trees. The fruits pull each arm downward under their weight, as if beckoning a sun-tanned hand to reach up and twist them free. The tree grows tall, and many of the bunches have taunted me from towering heights where only the birds and beetles brave enough to climb can reach them. One time, my cousin scaled far up the tree in our neighbors' yard to retrieve a bounty. I'm not sure how he found footing in the dense thicket, for the loquat tree is not truncated but is instead bushy, shrub-like, layered--full of life. 

Personally, I prefer tangy to sweet. Over the course of the season the loquat turns from bright yellow, sour and firm, to a soft, sweet orange. By eating them during the first few weeks of spring I'd usually be the first one there. Sometimes small holes where a worm or insect had already started feasting pocketed the skin, but most were still up for grabs. 

In those weeks the tart, refreshing juice would run down my forearm after I bit through the skin. I would eat them straight off the tree, you know. None of this pre-washing or skinning. As I child I snacked on them while playing basketball, and I cleaned my sticky fingers by combing through the thick St. Augustine grass. 

I heard a story that the Portuguese first brought the loquat tree from China. Upon reaching the Forbidden City, the sailors offered a rose bush to their royal hosts, a thorny, ligneous gift that offended rather than flattered. In return, the Chinese gave their visitors a sapling they knew would yield a bitter offspring, acidic and nearly bile, plus a smattered mess underneath its canopy. 

But when the rose bush bloomed, the imperial court was in awe at the beauty and smell of the flowers. And the loquat tree, with newfound rigor from the Iberian sun, produced fruit that matured beyond the premature into a delectible, succulent sweetness (I tasted these plump specimens in late May in Spain--sweetness they truly were). I assume the Spaniards or Canary Islanders brought the tree to San Antonio during their settlement in the 18th century. The South Texas climate has the same effect on the fruit as was first seen in Portugal. 

In those spring days of the loquat, when San Antonio celebrates Fiesta, the end of the school year, and the sparing weeks before oppressive heat, Spurs playoff basketball would infect the town. The 2000s Spurs of my childhood were a legendary squad: consistent, lethal, always in the fray to win it all. And win they did. The two decades led by Tim Duncan's stoic excellence constituted an unprecedented streak atop the basketball world, with 22 straight playoff appearances and five championships to show. The players in the show seeped into the heart of the city: Tony Parker with his speed and soft touch, Manu Ginobili's obdurate boldness, the sage Coach Pop. 

I would imiate the dribbles and pirouettes I saw on TV in our backyard ad nauseam. The titanic clashes between giants and sharpshooters and slashers were the stories I recreated. I rehearsed myself finishing in a whirl around the rim, swishing jumpshots at the buzzer.  After tiring from sprinting corner to corner, I'd pick a few loquats and cool off under the shade of a floruit tree. Life revolved in this way. 

Since I left San Antonio for college, the Spurs haven't played much playoff basketball. I aged and so did our team. I haven't been there when the loquats emerge--I haven't eaten one off a tree in many years. I understand. Things change. 

But this spring, the Spurs struck gold by winning the top pick in the 2023 NBA draft. Who knows what prompted this blessing from the universe. Maybe it was in return for the years of service to the pure game. Awaiting is an otherwordly talent from France, Victor Wembanyama. 7-foot-5-inches tall, 8 feet from outstretched finger to outstretched finger, a shooter and shot blocker with Gen Z skills and that eternal unteachable skill, height. His impending arrival to the Spurs is widely viewed as a perfect fit; for the team, a chance to recapture the glory of sustained dominance; for the raw diamond of a prospect, a home to polish and refine into greatness. The pieces are fitting together. The people sense it. 

Sports has a way of infiltrating the lives of its dedicated followers. This has been on my mind in the days since the Spurs landed the #1 pick. I have hesitated to write about basketball before given the tabloid-esque quality of sports media these days, but I've also serendipitously come across some stellar sports writing recently: Roger Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace, the first half of The Patch by John McPhee. How the promise of a lanky 19-year-old over 3,000 miles away can send thousands of people into ecstatic fervor in an instant, how it can tap into the soul of a boy who adored his team, is nothing short of special. There's really nothing like it. 

With the resurgent aura of the Spurs rising, and the sun finally surfacing from under winter's cloak, I can taste the loquat on my tongue once more. 

The Last or First Day

"We can always come back," my friend said as we walked towards the car. In a sense he's right, I guess. I just couldn't bear to leave. The sun shined across a cloudless sky that day, not hot enough for any discomfort, cool and gentle wind keeping the skin clear. The chatter of birds drifted through the air. I was shown once again how idyllic the neighborhood can become. Its charm is brightest under the quiet Sunday aura of blossoming trees. The colors of the houses seem more radiant, the bricks and cobblestone of greater character. For a while I had traveled to another slice of space and time. The whiplash left me sore. 

I've heard the peculiarity of humans is our propensity to narrate. We frame existence as a continuous story, self-idealized protagonist at the fore, structure and rhythm layered onto the eras that pass. In these liminal moments the connecting thread surfaces--what once was returns once more. All the little things that add up over time, mounting into big things, are as if they never happened. The magnolias and cherry trees emerge from their winter slumber to a life never lived. 

Maturity seems to mean many things, but one aspect of it must be the ability to organize. The sentiments of one instant cannot rule every instant. Growing responsibility demands a level of competency, professionalism. Someone needs to hold things together.  

But at what point does compartmentalization go too far? When are the demarcating walls built too high? Maybe a dam is a more apt metaphor to consider, and a more appropriate barrier. Instead of deep, expansive, permanent divisions between the growing complexities, maybe a more responsive construct is useful. One with a valve to maintain the flow. 

We quietly drove east into the darkening horizon, together still after all these years. We rolled miles and miles and miles across the familiar pavement. The end of an old day ushers the birth of a new one, one that can be filled with the love of the past and the joy of the unknown. The partitions are more like fluid boundaries than anything else--I think I've learned how to cross over, for I know the linear path is all a matter of perspective. I can put the times gone in a box, and I can leave it unsealed for when I need them again. 

A Story of Migration (Uganda 1962- )

Manafwa Road, in Mbale, bustles under the equatorial sun. Boda bodas swerve around cratered potholes and empowered pedestrians, ferrying shoppers from errand to errand. A shiny TotalEnergies gas station is conveniently adjacent to the taxi park, where drivers loiter by their vans and hawkers push corn, sugarcane, plastic, to anyone around. Activity on the street is frenetic even in this relatively small town.

We came here to see the site of my father's birth. Fifty years of separation means the memories are mostly overridden, but the building my grandfather constructed remains standing. The street was much quieter back then. Same with the Kampala corner my grandmother grew up on--Uganda's population has exploded since they left. Amidst the change, however, there remain signs of what once was. Many of the shops lining Manafwa Road are still South Asian-owned. 

My mother struck up conversation in Urdu in one of these businesses, to check if maybe someone had stayed through Idi Amin's regime, if maybe someone remembered when this was our home too. She found the ears of a more recent arrival, Ahmed, who came from Pakistan a few years earlier. With great hospitality he offered food, drink, shelter, anything of service to fellow speakers of his native tongue. Very Ugandan of him--the culture is communal, exuding a jovial tolerance evident in how the people drive and gather and laugh. 

Ahmed told us he initially hoped to live in the US. In 2017, he flew from Punjab to Brazil, where he had landed a visa. This man subsequently traversed the length of the Americas towards the allure of a better future. Our exhaustion from tracking mountain gorillas for a few hours in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest just days earlier was now shameful: Ahmed had crossed the Darien Gap, the jungles of Central America, the Andes. He reached the US-Mexico border at Tijuana months later. After jumping the wall, he was swiftly detained. He shivered and despaired in detention for an entire year before deportation back to Pakistan. 

A home is left, I thought, and becomes home for another. Movement, that defining trait of humanity, is our foundation. Where we are, how we got here, where we will go. What is the destination of our never-ending journey?  

I sensed perseverance in the bones of Uganda. Humans have walked there longer than almost anywhere else. Strength, and perspective, comes with such old, deep roots. There is a general calmness flowing from the shared certainty that life goes on. I stood at the grave of my great grandfather, in the soil my ancestors once came to, and was connected. 

I have no doubts that people will dot those fertile, rolling hills until the end of time. 

Life Snippet

The setting sun sent pink rays shooting eastward. The backdrop to the towers morphed from cotton candy to sorbet clouds, magenta and streaking blues, a lightshow on the ceiling of the world for all to enjoy equally, far below. The sky over the river was darker but brilliant, too. It was the latter stages of a grand finale: the Sun's reign. 

Collective witness has a way of bringing people together. The experience is shaped by the presence of those also there, reveling in the undeniable realization that something bigger, something special, is at hand. An unexpected break in the way of things--an inbetween, liminal moment, I guess. Someone turned the music up, and the waves pumped in on a detectable frequency. My phone buzzed with footage from across town. A street corner bathed in cherry blossoms. The stuff of creation, dreams. 

The hierarchy is of no consequence here. Anyone can stop to see, to feel. The lucid colors wash time into a new phase. For an instant we were finally one. If we know anything, we know another instant will come. 

Historical consciousness

I've been grappling with how to approach Absalom, Absalom! for weeks now. It seems every time I look away it's still there, connected to the entirety, somehow escaping the eternal struggle to simultaneously define itself separate from and within the group. Faulkner personified shared emotions into individual beings--ideas into human essence. John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote in the introduction, which is the best one I've ever read (I read it after finishing the novel as I tend to) and a most challenging undertaking to be assigned, that Faulkner aimed "to dramatize historical consciousness itself, not just human lives but the forest of time in which the notion of human life must find its only meaning."

What is so unnerving about the whole thing, for me, is how clearly the way the group and the individual influence each other is shown. People embody the spirit of a larger force, crafting it and carrying it on. We act as we should in the medium of past and future, killing and dying for the responsibilities shouldered. For the way things are done. We find the path that led us here, and we sow the seeds of where the path goes on. 

Our intelligence mandates an explanation. Heritage orients existence. I visited the Temple of Dendur on a fall day, its sandstone blocks transported across seas to lie in this cavernous hall. Augustus commissioned it in Upper Egypt over 2,000 years ago in the style of the then-ancient pharaohs. It was an ode to a great lineage, a landmark in time signaling the proper order was in place. 

Historical consciousness can hold us hostage to the lofty goals set by our predecessors. As much as this may be reflected in grievances, power grabs, hierarchy, it can also be reflected in peace and gratitude, too. The Samai people of Malaysia carry a nonviolent dogma with them from their distant past. They have an expectation of benevolence and agreeableness, respect and free will. They are likewise oriented by tradition in time. Why theirs developed in this manner, as compared to the imperial ambitions so common in our species, leaves me wondering. Once we define ourselves on the basis of our group, is that who we are forever? 

Mahicannittuk

The fall colors along the wide Hudson River glimmered like a peacock's tail. The forest whirred by the train windows, flashing a gradient orange and yellow and green. What little human settlement subsists is nestled under the canopy or on the shoreline--brief outposts amidst a more dominant feature. Large boulders and cliffs line the rocky banks. The scene is so grand at times it seems an alpine lake more than an ambling river soon to freeze over. 

Painters came to this valley in the early 19th century to capture a slice of its beauty. It embodied the potential, the inherent goodness of this land, and on their canvas they imbued this serenity with national visions of destiny that rested upon man's relation to bountious nature. They made portraits of the past, present, and future of our nation. Carrying the identity of the young country, the Hudson River School expanded beyond this river to show romantic, sometimes mythical vistas from across the hemisphere that inspire an awe unearthed only by our environment. 

I find myself drawn to landscapes, especially of this kind. Ambling through the Smithsonian American Art Museum one winter day, I became engrossed by Albert Bierstadt's Among the Sierra Nevada, California. I was lost in its layers, its awaiting and inviting tranquility. The Hudson River movement had been adapted to the rugged features of the American West. It strikes me as a depiction of Eden; in Bierstadt's image, a placid, life-filled lake ringed by towering peaks and pines; in the image of stylistic peers, a deciduous forest or winding river or idyllic farm. 

Beyond context and time, the feeling that emerges when presented with a beautiful scene of nature is retained in these works. There is a physical reaction in this moment, an upwelling of peace and harmony with the surroundings. In these busy days of ceaseless motion, my mind grasps for the creativity that blossoms in calmness. I sensed the energy those painters did nearly two centuries ago, the pure limitless force, in the Hudson River valley. It was invigorating. It is comforting to know something bigger exists out there. 

Kingdom Animalia

An owl stood under the oak as I passed. His wide eyes and swiveling head followed my movement, but he did not flee. I paused across the church courtyard, admiring his layered feathers and silent aura. He perfectly camouflaged into the darkening background; I'm not sure how I spotted him to begin with. We faced each other for a good minute. Not a breeze disturbed the quiet summer evening. I continued on in the twilight.  

Under the streetlamp blocks away, a gangly young fox trotted across the end of Main Ave. He stopped in the front yard on the corner. I slowed as I walked under the tube of light. The fox rose to its back legs, studying me in stillness like the owl. I paused again, gazing across the yard at its perceptive face. Ears piqued, crepuscular eyes focused and curious. We looked at one another. The world was calm. I traveled onwards. 

Humans have lived alongside the owl and the fox since the beginning. We found them, solitary hunters of the night, on every landmass we settled. They thrive in cities and wilderness--unsurprisingly, for their intelligence is apparent from mere moments of interaction. Some cultures find this astuteness unnerving, a bad omen. Others revere the natural wisdom.    

Like angles of the dusk, apparitions communicating beyond spoken language, the owl and the fox came in trusting peace. There was no fear between us. Maybe they accept me as one of their own.

いさむ

The textured, rough boulders expertly littered around the Noguchi Museum are inherently weatherproof. Aside from smooth ridges carved into their surfaces, rows and ovals and geometric designs in sharp contrast to their eroded and ancient medium, the complacent stones are indistinguishable from those in a granite quarry, or in a canyon below steep dry mountains. The concrete floor of the open-air exhibit has puddles from the just-finished downpour; the courtyard pebbles are damp and tinted with moisture. 

Once the train crosses the river it rises above ground. That's when we notice the rain. It falls from the sky in dense, loud sheets. The distant towers poke through storm clouds as we move north, and the water runs off miles of hard impervious surface in torrents, matching the aggression of the land it drenches. 

We wait for the deluge to pass under overhanging metal. Throngs join us standing outside the station. Everyone has a place to be. For only some is their purpose vital enough to sacrifice the comfort of dryness. My friend sees the rain as a cleansing force, a refresh. A place like this, trodded upon by countless soles, a living whirlpool, needs that every so often. 

One of my favorite sculptures at the Museum is Sun at Midnight: a polished, hypnotic black ring for Goliath. Circles, pure and endless, are of divine nature to me. I couldn't tell you the first thing about the artwork's technical nuance, but I can feel the turning of existence when I see it. "Faith is believing that the future holds good things," whispers in my ear. Whether it is spoken or imagined I know not. 

We return to the island amidst ambassadors and devotees. Its lights flicker on as the sun bows out, pulsating radiance drawing in masses like a mile-high magnet. So much is raised above the ground, floating high in the mash of raindrops sliding towards the center of the Earth. Defiance, that original human sin, embodied and maintained by the sparks of millions. We look over the countless concrete tubes peckering the moonlit sky, each stacked with precious cubes holding entire sagas. 

This time is different than before. My senses are heightened, I suppose. I feel I better understand what is happening. A scholar plays the piano, a melancholy tune I can hear but not remember, and I see myself decades into the future, a man in the world that I know but have not yet met. I snap back into the present and am not afraid.