At the World's End Multiplex

You should see the films Take Shelter and Melancholia. Just don't make the mistake of seeing them in the same week, as I did. Double downer. These are movies about the apocalypse, each focusing on the human drama, and neither relying (much) on special effects or cgi for their impact. More on these soon; first I will recount my earliest experience with the genre: Roger Corman’s B-movie from 1955, The Day the World Ended. It is not an exaggeration to say that no movie has affected me more. I saw it after school on television—probably third or fourth grade. I wish I could pinpoint the moment and contextualize it among the Kennedy assassination and the Bay of Pigs. In my life they were all of a moment, but the connections among them are lost to me now.

About The Day the Word Ended: the central facts are there had been an atomic war, which I knew was possible; there were mutations caused by radiation, which I also knew was possible. Thus these two “facts” weighed heavy on my mind. I was convinced that our family needed a bomb shelter. One family in our neighborhood had built one. These people were the only sensible folks among us, in my view. I knew that hiding under our desks at school was not going to cut it. And yes, they really had us perform such drills, just as schools will practice fire drills today. In any case, I consulted my father with the issue of a family bomb shelter. I explained my reasons. He said, simply, “Don’t worry about that.” Easy for him to say. He hadn’t seen Roger Corman work his magic, based on true facts! This film occupied my late childhood until replaced by the usual drama of adolescence.

While I’m at it, I think I’ll mention The Day After—early 1980s. This is another film that bummed me out (dude). The actual firestorm was dramatic and the after effects were dramatic, to the point of national conversation. Unfortunately I saw this right before a ski trip to Mammoth, and I remember thinking, bizarrely, that skiing wasn’t that much fun, if outside of the ski area the world was ending. But I couldn’t then, and still can’t now, figure out how skiing depends at all on what is happening off the mountain. One of the whole points o skiing is to live in the moment and let the outside world drift blissfully away. But this film would not permit me this illusion.

This brings me to Take Shelter. At center of the film is the tension created by the main character wondering if he’s going crazy or if something BIG really is about to happen. It’s actually a rather quiet film in most ways, but the sense of impending doom is palpable, if subtle. There’s hint of the coming storm as the result of some kind of human mucking up of the environment—the main character is a miner of some kind. And the literal shelter of the film is the good-old fashioned bomb shelter of my childhood—so it resonated in that way for me. Probably the most effective element of the film for me was its Midwestern setting. In both its exteriors and interior scenes I felt like I was right back in Macomb (it’s set in rural Ohio). And the characters were good working class folks—the apocalypse as brought to us by Raymond Carver. I suppose this film works because, despite Mr. Eastwood’s steely-eyed, firm-jawed hope that “the second half” is upon us and that things will get better, most of us don’t believe it.

I know my son’s generation is scared, as they should be. Currently 85% of college graduates return home to live with their parents. The average debt of college graduates is $27,000. Of course, they’re scared.

If you’re naysayer, your anthem is, well, take your pick), but I was thinking of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall.” That’s the theme of this film.

Melancholia has similar concerns but the sensibilities couldn’t be more different. Foremost: this is film about really wealthy people. They are as isolated on their estate as Corman’s 1950s survivors were in the shack they use as a fallout shelter. The movie is linear but it opens with a collage, a sequence really, of moments from the film that work as staged pieces. Probably most of the frames of this film could stand as single image set pieces of nearly surreal beauty. It’s a hard movie to describe: it opens with a lavish wedding that ends in spectacular failure and moves on to a second part in which the would be bride is nursed back to mental stability by her wealthy sister—this in the fore––in the slowly surging background is the possibility that a newly discovered planet will collide with earth.

Melancholia is radically different from Take Shelter in that is doesn’t pretend to present any kind of mirror to the way “we” live today. At least, I don’t think it does. If Take Shelter was Carveresque in its sensibilities, it’s hard to conjure up a counterpart influence for this one. Breughel perhaps, who is invokes here, if he lived in the 21^st century and had cupboards full of prescription drugs and inexhaustible wealth. It’s beautiful, but hard to know what to take with you when you leave the film. Which of course, is a different sense altogether to most Hollywood films, after which you are not expected to take anything with you. The best you can hope for is not to be bored in the actual moment of viewing.

Denial is a thematic concern in both visions. And sometimes I wonder: if its death that’s being denied, what’s the harm? These films are a reminder just how watered down our popular cinemas today is; both are exponentially better than any of the films nominated by the academy for best picture. (Non sequitur: see Margaret by Kevin Lonergan; what a brilliant mess!).

So Dylan’s been warning us for years, like the ubiquitous bearded guy in the new Yorker cartoons who carries the “the End is Near” sign on a street corner. But let’s not forget Sam Cooke, who foretold “A Change is Gonna Come.” These songs have more in common than their “gonnas.” One is a glass half empty and the other a glass half full. And yet poor Sam Cooke was shot and killed before that song was even released. The change came a bit faster than he had imagined. And old Bob, he just keeps on keeping on. The hard rain hasn’t fall on him, yet.

Cold

Cold, a seventeen minute film by Anson Fogel and Cory Richards is an amazing evocation of human achievement, self-induced suffering, and, well, cold. Filmed by Richards on his and Simone Moro and Denis Urubko’s winter ascent of Gasherbrum 2, this film lives up to its title. This was the first winter ascent of the peak and the first winter ascent of an 8,000-meter peak by an American, Richards. The thing about climbing films is that almost no one can keep their finger on the shutter when things turn dire. But Richards did, mostly. It won the grand prize at Banff this year and the reason is not far to seek: the film delivers. For some virtual coldness it ranks up there with Cherry Apsley-Garrard’s The Worst Journey on the World. I don’t know when this will become widely available, but keep on the lookout for it. You can have a taste here:

http://coldunited.com/2011/05/cold-documentary-trailer-video-simone-moro-denis-urubko-cory-richards-anson-fogel/

Last winter I red Dan Simmons’ The Terror. Yet another winter sufferfest, here Simmons tells the fictionalized story of the infamous 1848 Franklin Expedition. Necessarily fictional, because no one really knows what happened to them. In Simmons’ version the arctic is so cold that men’s teeth shatter. It is an astounding feat of research, and it’s utterly compelling, and mostly convincing. I mean, something happened to those guys.

Which reminds me of my friend Jon Waterman’s solo arctic venture over two seasons recorded in Arctic Crossing: A Journey Through the Northwest Passage and Inuit Culture. Jon once confided in me that he had probably discovered the graves of some of Franklin’s party. But, for now, he has kept this private. Oh, and by the way the line between the theme of “cold” and the theme of “sufferfest” is blurry indeed, as Jon, perhaps inadvertently, has pointed out. Actually, Jon was probably colder when he did the Cassin on Denali in the winter.

And speaking of “The Terror” (the name of one of Franklin’s ships) Jim Shepherd has also tried his hand with a speculative fiction on the subject, published this fall in Zoetrope’s horror issue. Do you know Shepherd? He is the ultimate in-your-face answer to the old “write what you know” platitude. Every story arises out of a different world, one which the author has not literally lived, yet pulls off as if he had. His list of acknowledgements at the end of his books gives us as many as ten sources per story. His story “Poland Is Watching,” from his new story collection, You Think That’s Bad: Stories, describes a Polish winter Himalayan expedition. It’s hard to believe he hasn’t himself been a Polish Himalayan climber in winter, but, hey, that’s fiction, right? You can actually find a video of Shepherd reading this story aloud here:

http://jimshepard.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/video-jim-shepard-reads-poland-is-watching/

This brings me somewhat full circle to Bernadette McDonald’s story of the actual Polish climbers who pushed the limits of the human achievement in the actual, not literary, Himalayan winter, in her recent book Freedom Climbers. The achievements she recounts are astounding, but equally astounding is the service McDonald does both to the climbers and her non-Polish reading audience. Most of these exploits were for years confined to Polish language reports. To write the book McDonald had to commission translation of several books, and basically conduct first-hand interviews (with the survivors). The result is a testimony to, well, as I said, full circle: suffering, cold, and human achievement. The book has deservedly won the Banff Grand Prize for Mountaineering Literature (which is not too surprising because McDonald was a prime force in the Banff Mountain Center Festivals for many years before she retired [I think this is her fourth book since “retiring”]). She has also won the coveted Boardman-Tasker Award, which is more surprising as the British only rarely bestow the honor to non-Britains. Well-deserved on both counts.

I’ve been cold. And the 7 degrees Fahrenheit outside the door right now here in Anchorage doesn’t even earn a blip on my radar screen. I used to say that the coldest I’ve been in my life was delivering the Detroit Free Press through three Michigan winters. That was cold. But my single coldest moment actually occurred in southern California. I entered myself in a cross-country ski race in the mountains north of Los Angeles, off I-5. The course wound through a hilly forest and I was quickly dropped by the pack and lost in the loops of trails. Knowing how to ski probably would have helped. Then, my ski tip broke. I was wet and colder by the minute, postholing and plunging my cotton-gloved hands into the drifts over and over again. Only blind dumb luck allowed me to get out of there in the fading daylight. By the time I got back to the parking lot, not only was the race over, but everyone was gone. My hands were so cold I couldn’t get them into my pocket to find the car key. Once I found the key I couldn’t hold it in the block-o-ice fingers. After I finally managed to get the key in the lock and open the car, I had to repeat the maneuver with the ignition. Then I sat there screaming as warmth and feeling inched their way back into my hands.

A few weeks later the race results arrived. I had actually finished the race, but since no one knew it, I expected to see my name at the bottom of the list with the inglorious DNF, Did Not Finish, following. But despite the fact that the race organizers had my address, my name did not appear on the list of participants. It was as if I hadn’t been there at all.

Stay warm, my friends!

C-notes, and I don't mean hundred dollar bills

When I see the subtitle, or mere descriptor, “a memoir of cancer” or “a memoir of survival,” or “addiction” or, and perhaps worst, “recovery,” I figuratively run like hell.

I was not devastated by the news that I had cancer “again.” “Again” is the operative word. To say that my cancer is “back,” would have been wrong. This is, they tell me, completely unrelated to my earlier cancer. Aside from telling my wife about it, and my parents, I think I was pretty calm about it. I tried to adopt a Dylanesque view: “It’s life, and life only.” I heard the words in my head in his voice.

On the second day after my surgery, still two days out from hearing the biopsy results, one of our students, an international caliber runner from Kenya, “went missing.” He was last seen Sunday evening, lightly dressed. He did not have his car keys or cell phone with him. It has snowed almost steadily since then with nighttime temperatures approaching the single digits. His roommates reported him missing on Monday morning. Also: his former roommate, another world-class runner from Kenya, killed himself here in Anchorage last spring. I am thinking about this guy and his long strange trip.

I have alluded, somewhat elliptically, in a couple pieces of writing to my experience (now experiences) with cancer. But even though it has taken up a disproportionate space in my psyche, I tend to prefer to write about the things that have always interested me, namely my love of the literary world and my love for the mountain life, each a deep well that I have yet to exhaust.

That aside, here are a few cancer notes written on the morning after I heard that the biopsy report on my melanoma and lymph nodes has come back negative (which is, of course, positive).

I noted that Steve Jobs’ cancer was discovered in a routine CT scan for kidney stones. Exactly how my kidney cancer was discovered. This would be about the only thing I have in common with Jobs, so far as I can tell.

When I first met Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, a Yu’pik elder, in the summer of 2008 he was walking on crutches and already in his mid-seventies. I asked him about his crutches and he said that it started with kidney cancer, but that he never doubted it would come back at him. At the time of our conversation he had lived about ten more years since his kidney cancer was first diagnosed and he lived three more until his death earlier this year. He knew it would kill him, but we talked mostly of the terrible problem of suicide of young men in the native villages of rural Alaska. He was among a handful of persons I have met in my life who I felt have possessed wisdom.

Last summer I met Richard Rodriguez. Among our many commonalities was a Catholic upbringing in a shared historical moment, a love of books from an early age, and kidney cancer. Richard became aware of his through night sweats and various actual physical problems. I experienced none of these. “Ah,” he said, “you were asymptomatic.”

I don’t much care for the language of cancer or even the word itself. Or even talking about it in a round about way. My cousin Terri said, “Mel is a bad ca.” I know, that’s about all the letters I wish to use too. I never liked Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor.” I always thought that her objection to the metaphors people use to describe cancer was purely personal, as if what she really objected to was other people talking about it at all, as if what she really objected to were people talking about her, as a “victim.” I object to that, too. But it’s hard to object to the aptness of war as a metaphor for cancer. A more timely analogy now might be zombification, the process by which the self is not the self, but is taken over by this other life-force which is a death force. I think I have vowed to never use the word “zombie” in my writing. At least, I meant to do so. So that’s my one and only transgression.

This melanoma that they found a few weeks ago was odd. It had no melanin in it. It was, the surgeon said, “amelanomic.”

My friend Tama, a melanoma survivor herself, said, “You are a two-time cancer survivor (how weird is that?).” Well, it’s pretty damned weird. Because this cancer, too, was without symptoms. My suffering, such as it has been, has been mostly not physical. And weird too because, though aging, I am more active and more fit than ever. The weekend before my surgery I skied to Rabbit Lake, a twelve-mile plus roundtrip on sketchy snow with about 1200 feet in elevation gain. Then, the next day I made my weekly visit to the summit of Flattop in gnarly winter weather. I felt great every minute of those outings.

When the surgeon called Tuesday night, long after office hours, to report the good news of my negative tests, I was flooded with relief, but it is a calm relief. By the time I fell asleep, the runner from Kenya had not been found.

Since my last cancer (2005) I have tried to move forward, keeping in mind that every day is a gift. Last night, when my friends heard my good news, many used the word “celebration.” Oh, I’ll celebrate, (writing this is a celebration, I promise) but the celebration I have in mind is simply to return to my “every day is a gift” philosophy. I am celebrating every day, believe me.

I can return to my work, my writing projects, my skiing life. I can return to training for the Tour of Anchorage and the Alyeska Town League. I can train with Aisha for her triathlons, and keep doing yoga. Hit Alyeska with my sons. Enjoy the holidays. I can return to planning a climbing trip to the Alaska Range in the spring and a trip to the Himalaya in the fall.

“You are alive,” Richard Rodriguez told us, “And you have your pen in your hand.”

The runner from Kenya was found, alive (against all odds, in my opinion). He appeared, severely hypothermic, in the lobby of the hotel on campus at 3:30 a.m. this morning. I am wishing the very best for him, and would love to hear his story (though not entitled to it).

“It’s life, and life only.”

If someone had said to me, six years ago, “”Every day is a gift,” I would have been polite, but inwardly dismissive. But I believe those words today. I hope you hear me.

Airports, the Monkey Egg, Missoula

For the most art we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an

infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence

are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.

––Henry David Thoreau, Walden

When I am on my computer, particularly when I am on-line, where am I? Oh yeah, I’ve already answered that: on my computer. So, this morning I was sitting in the Sea-Tac Airport and where was I, Oh yeah, on my computer. But then I got to thinking, where am I really?

Seattle is a city that has enormous emotional resonance for me. I lived here for three years in my early twenties and these were heady days, intense days somehow disproportionately more formative than any other three-year period n my life. I started a business, made life-long friends, climbed, met my wife (Note: this list is chronological, not otherwise hierarchical), climbed, finished school, and climbed. I launched myself, right here in the Pacific Northwest. But Sea-Tac Airport? I’m not feeling it. The Seattle vibe: it’s not here, even if there is an Ivar’s (keep clam!). There are two problems: first of all, the airport is in neither in Seattle or Tacoma; secondly: it’s an airport. An airport isn’t really a discrete place. It’s like an embassy of the country, Airport. When you’re in an airport, the word airport can easily be interchanged with the word nowhere. You’re in the waiting room for the next non-airport place.

Reading is not dissimilar, except that it’s generally pleasing as opposed to disconcerting, although sometimes reading is disconcerting, but in a good way. You’re in the book, but usually you’re in the world, too. In fact the measure of greatness in writing is the proportion of you it occupies: 90% in the book 10% world is a very good ratio (for the book). A book is good if we are absorbed by it and the time during which we read it we have been transported from our quotidian world. “There is no frigate like a book . . . “

Then there are stories that themselves occupy two worlds. I’m thinking of the Kelly Link story, "House on the Hill," in the new Tin House that I just picked up at the airport. A new Kelly Link story is endorsement enough to pick up a copy of Tin House, even though Tin House is reliably good in general. In this, as in many, Kelly Link story we begin in the real world, that is, a linguistic representation of the everyday world. On the middle of page two: “He held it out on his palm; one of Fran’s old toys, the monkey egg. ‘Now you know I don’t like these. I wish you’d put ‘em away.’”

We don’t have to know what a “monkey egg” is to continue reading. We know it’s a toy that hasn’t been put away, and structurally that works . . . for the moment. We’ll read for six more pages (big Tin House pages of about 500 words) firmly, we think, rooted in Fran’s world, new to us but recognizable, until the monkey egg reappears and Ophelia, an outsider, like the reader, is welcomed into the strange world that makes a Kelly Link story a Kelly Link story. As a reader you occupy two worlds simultaneously within the story. In a Kelly Link story this balancing act is pleasing.

When you’re in an airport—not so pleasing––the environment is so conspicuously manufactured and the air is stale. The best thing you hear in there is the question: “Add a shot to that for three bucks?”

I like small airports, like Missoula’s. When the plane lands, a staircase is wheeled to the airplane door and upon exiting the plane you descend to the ground. You’re in one place. You’re in the world.

"Where Do You Buy Your Books?"

“Where do you buy your books?” Sweeney was asking this in the context of a longer rant about the state of publishing. This post is accompanied by a photograph of Sweeney taken on “the happiest day of my life,” in June 2010 at the bar at the Land’s End, in Homer, Alaska. Sweeney had just read his story “Over the Mountains” to a highly supportive and enthusiastic crowd at the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference. By the way I strongly recommend Sweeney’s book, The List, available from the publisher :

http://www.vpdhouse.com/

It will set you back to the amount of about three glasses of Fairweather IPA, and is, actually, more satisfying (which, if you know how much I like Fairweather IPA, is saying a lot).

Anyway, his question is a good one and, though I claim to prefer independent booksellers, is that really how it boils down, in practice? So going back to my last post about summer reading, I am tracking here the scenes of purchase for those titles.

The Atlantic Summer Fiction issue: Barnes & Noble, Anchorage (the only place I could think of to get it).

Jim Harrison, The Farmer’s Daughter: Tidal Wave Books, Anchorage. This is my go-to bookstore. The place I most wish to stay a vibrant business forever.

Dan Simmons, Drood: Mecosta Book Gallery, Mecosta Michigan, about midway between Mt. Pleasant and Big Rapids on M-20. A shockingly awesome used bookstore in the middle of nowhere. I would have bought more books, even had the titles picked-- but would have had to ship them home—too much of hassle.

Fermor, A Time of Gifts: B&N, Grand Rapids, MI. Surprised to see it, had been searching.

Woman In White, Wilkie Collins A generic bargain books joint in a dying Grand Rapids mall. Saw a lot of remaindered books, more than a few I had paid full price for in years past (always the way!).

The Herzog and the Japanese graphic novel came from Amazon, where I had a massive coupon.

The Roskelly and Murch/Ondaatje came from independent booksellers through Amazon.

The first edition Teton Guide by Leigh Ortenburger came from Tidal Wave.

What does all this mean, besides the fact that I have an out-of-control book buying jones?

I’m not sure.

I want all these places to keep doing business—even Barnes and Noble. I actually miss Borders—which happened to be the nearest bookstore to my current home. And I want writers to continue to be able to get their work published, and I want publishers to keep publishing. What’s the best way to operate to ensure all those ends?

Wish I knew.

I don’t think anyone does know the answer to that question.

I’d buy every book I could directly from the author selling it out of the trunk of her Ford LTD, if I could. If the hypothetical she could. But most of us, whether consumer of books or writer, can’t operate this way. Although, now that I think of it, the aforementioned Sweeney has given it one hell of shot.

Next: a couple cases about publishing: BlazeVOX & the curious case of Kiana Davenport and the Big 6.

Photo disclaimer: Sweeney actually looks a lot less goofy in real life than he does in attached photo. Sorry about that , Jim!

Summer Reading: August 2011

For me summer reading takes place in the month of August. June and July are by most hectic working months and, up here, September is not really summer.

I started with the Atlantic Summer Fiction issue, which I read cover-to-cover. That fact alone is an endorsement. Stuart Dybek was a highlight (when isn’t he?”) back in “Hot Ice” territory with “Vigil,” and a guy named Jonathon Walter, whose bio reads “Jonathon Walter lives in Wisconsin,” does the dust bowl in “the Great Zero.”

Then I read Jim Harrison’s The Farmer’s Daughter, another set of three novellas, one featuring the recurring character, Brown Dog. I never get tired of Harrison. And, am astounded that he seems to be writing a book a year, even though he looks like someone who has come back from the dead (if not from liver failure). He has a new novel coming out soon, and is one of the few writers whose work I buy sight unseen. If he wrote it, I’m reading it.

Then, influenced by Jonathan Rosen’s article in The New Yorker on Wilkie Collins, I picked up a used copy of Dan Simmons’ Drood, about Collins and Dickens. I worshiped Simmons’ The Terror when I read it last winter and I think I’d follow him almost anywhere, so why not to Victorian England, where he already was more or less when he wrote The Terror? But having acquired Drood I remembered (duh!) that I’ve never actually read Collins, so I snagged a copy of The Woman in White. Which was surprising in its rhetorical sophistication. (Note to self: do not lightly dismiss them Victorians.) I loved it and which took up a lot of “lake time” up in Michigan, Labatt’s in hand.

At this point in the month I shifted from lake country to mountain country and began reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts - On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977). I hadn’t known about Fermor until alerted to him by my long-time climbing patrtner John McInerney, who was also reading Fermor. Fermor had died early this summer at the age of 96; he was widely regarded as England’s greatest travel writer. The book is astounding for two reasons: its erudition and its innocence. The three year journey he writes about took place in the early 1930s, before the Nazi stranglehold on Europe. The book ends mid-journey and I can’t wait to read the next installment, primarily because I did not have a dictionary at hand and the man’s vocabulary is staggering.

I finished Fermor in the airport in Denver and picked up a paperback copy of Charles Wu’s How to Live Safely in Science Fiction Universe. It’s more Calvino-ish than Niffenberger-ish, if that means anything to you. I am reading this now, but was distracted over the Labor Day weekend by 55 ways to the Wilderness in South Central Alaska by Helen Nienhauser and John Wolfe Jr. We spent the weekend in Seward where the steady downpour did not prevent us from exploring no fewer than four of the 55 ways. An awesome time.

In the month of August I formulate my writing plan for the fall, my most productive time. Check. But I tend not to speak of such plans: bad juju. I also find that I am compelled to acquire set of books that for whatever reasons have been swirling around my mind in the weeks prior. Thus, one of my first orders of business upon returning to the real (non-vacation) world is to place a few orders.

The first thing I ordered was The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje. Why? Am I interested in editing film? No. Nor writing it. I am, however, interested in writing scenes. Two different writers at Kachemak Bay recommended this book, which came to me out of the blue. I love Ondaatje, of course. I had known nothing of Murch. Turns out that he edited The English Patient for the film version and also, won an academy award for sound on Apocalypse Now. Sold.

I had an Amazon coupon for $30, so I bit on the third volume of Jiro Taniguchi and Yummajura Baku’s Summit of the Gods. These are graphic novels set in the mountaineering world. I loved the first two volumes and am pre-committed to the next three—can’t wait for the third to arrive. They’re gorgeous books, by the way.

For a long time I have wanted to read Werner Herzog’s Walking in Ice-Paris 23 November to Munich 14 November. Fermor’s story of travel in Europe on foot has pushed me to explore Herzog’s story. I had just read Herzog’s Conquerors of the Useless about the experience of making Fitzcarraldo, which I watched again recently to see if it was as crazy as my memory told me it was. Confirmed. The new book has already arrived. It is an elegant and very simple paperback. Can’t wait.

Dang. While researching a new mountaineering title I noticed that there are at least a dozen climbing books with the word “last” in the title. Why this preoccupation of climbers with “last” things? So I ordered a used copy of Roskelly’s Last Days for further exploration off this topic. I’ll get back to you on this.

Yesterday I found, quite by accident, a mint hardcover copy of Leigh Ortenburger’s Climbers Guide to the Tetons. 1956. I had never seen such an edition (I own three later editions, including the colossal posthumous edition published with Rennie Jackson.) Ortenburger, by the way, survived a life of mountaineering, only to perish fleeing the great Oakland fire, in the late 1990s (I think). They were almost literally giving the book away. Had to have it.

We were warned long ago (Ecclesiastes, I think) that “of the making of books there is no end.” Nor of the reading (or, gulp, acquiring) of them. If you've read this far, you're probably as daft as I am!

Notes on Daumal's Mount Analogue

If there’s a more often-cited remark or passage about mountaineering than Mallory’s famous “Because it’s there” it may be René Daumal’s

You cannot stay on the summit forever: you have to come down again . . . So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above . . . . One descends, one sees no longer but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

If my opening observation isn’t true, it should be. Daumal’s lines come from his “novel,” Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures, a book well known to cultish group of hippie-mountaineers in the early 1970s. Intermittently hard to find over the years, today it’s a few clicks away in a relatively new translation by Carol Cosman in a Tusk Ivories paperback.

If the book retains a cultish following, it’s due to its eminently quotable prose as well as to the cult of personality following Daumal himself. Daumal died of tuberculosis in 1944 at the age of 36 and the story is that he was working on Mount Analogue the day he died. It’s a better excuse than Coleridge had, but one has the sense that it would have been a hard book to finish. The text proper ends in mid-sentence:

“Without them [wasps!], a great many plants that played an important role in stabilizing the shifting earth, . . .”

Undoubtedly here Daumal was to deliver an early lesson in ecology and species interdependence, which is not what one might expect from a tubercular Sanskrit scholar on his deathbed in the waning days of World War II in German occupied Paris.

I used the term “text proper” because many of the memorable lines about mountaineering, including the lines cited above, are from a postscript including an outline that his wife Véra appended to the novel. The reader is left with the sense that if only Daumal could have finished! We would have become so enlightened! Not likely, but isn’t it pretty to think so? Which reminds me that Daumal translated Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon into French—worth another look in his light.

It’s said that Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 cult film The Holy Mountain is based of Mount Analogue; maybe so, but tempered with massive quantities of psychedelics. They’re both allegories I suppose, but you’ll have better luck synching up Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon to The Wizard of Oz.

The premise of the story concerns a group of seekers who believe that there is an unknown mountain on earth that is higher than Everest and which connects earth to heaven, a symbolic mountain like Mt. Olympus, that they must find and ascend. Most of the extant five chapters describe the organization of the expedition and travel to the peak. We never get to the actual, make that symbolically authentic, mountaineering.

The prose is somewhat reminiscent of the great French alpinist Gaston Rébuffat who wrote gorgeous romantic (i.e. purplish) prose extolling the fraternité de la corde–brotherhood of the rope–at about the same historical moment. In fact, structurally, Rébuffat’s Starlight and Storm resembles Mount Analogue in that its appendix lays out the author’s philosophies in more exacting and memorable prose than does what precedes it.

Daumal included a few simple drawings, not unlike yet another great French romantic, Antoine St. Exupery. I’m particularly fond of the cosmos portrayed in chapter two and pictured above.

The last chapter was to be titled “And You Reader, What Do You Seek?” Maybe it’s a cheap rhetorical trick, but I’ve always fallen for these moments of direct address by great artists, such as Melville: “What are you reader but a fast and loose fish too?” or as appended to the famous eponymous Gauguin painting, “Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”

Mount Analogue is at once sweet and wise and enigmatic. When I first read it many years ago it appealed to me because I liked to think that mountaineering was in fact a spiritual pursuit. I suppose I still do. But I love more than ever that the story ends in mid-sentence and we are left forever wondering not only how the story might have ended but, as Daumal has asked, what is it that we seek?