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| Red Mountain Pass, Colorado |
What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. 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.
- Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue
Headed out of Grand Junction to Durango on US 550, the Million Dollar Highway, through the Uncompahgre Gorge to Red Mountain Pass, 11,018 feet above all human concern except one: to not veer one foot to the right and fall 1000 feet.
Considering Lao-Tzu (Laozi) and Yinxi:
The third story in Sima Qian states that Laozi grew weary of the moral decay of life in Chengzhou and noted the kingdom's decline. He ventured west to live as a hermit in the unsettled frontier at the age of 80. At the western gate of the city (or kingdom) [Hankao Pass], he was recognized by the guard Yinxi. The sentry asked the old master to record his wisdom for the good of the country before he would be permitted to pass. The text Laozi wrote was said to be the Tao Te Ching, although the present version of the text includes additions from later periods. In some versions of the tale, the sentry was so touched by the work that he became a disciple and left with Laozi, never to be seen again. In others, the "Old Master" journeyed all the way to India and was the teacher of Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha. Others say he was the Buddha himself. - Wikipedia: Laotzi
Booming thunderstorms as Van Winkle's men of the mountains play at nine-pins. At least, I have the hairpin highway to myself. There are no guardrails. Just a painted line to the right, a few feet and a the precipitous drop into the Abyss. I creep upwards, surprised at the magnetic pull of the steering wheel to the left. There is the overbearing presence of the hovering cliff wall on the other side. The narrow ribbon of the highway seems an optical illusion, hanging insubstantially in the sky.
Finally up on the roof beam if the world, driving through thick cloud, listening (again) to Frank Muller reading Moby Dick. The sublime beauty and terror of the Chapter 36: The Quarter-Deck:
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event-in the living act, the undoubted deed-there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! - Melville, Moby-Dick
Ahead, the highway turns towards Molas Pass, blasts of wind buffet the jeep. A rushing white Cloud River rushes beside the banks of the cliff's edge. The clouds break apart and, for a moment in that brief opening, an enormous mountain stands before me. Then it is gone. I get out of the jeep into a howling wind and wait for another break. Searching for the eye of the White Whale as it passes beneath the ship of the world.