Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain

In the vast silence, there is a tinkling, a faint tinkling which is barely audible, like ice crystals colliding. You think you hear it.

A purple cloud haze appears on the mountain top, showing that the wind storm is swirling at high speed. Wisps of cloud on the edges show the force of the wind.

The tinkling becomes clearer and causes your heart to palpitate. You see a woman riding on a horse. The horse’s head and the woman both appear above the snow line, against the background of the gloomy ice ravine. You seem also to hear singing accompanying the tinkling of the bells on the horse.

Woman from Chang’an,

Hair plaited with silk ribbons

Jade earrings

Silver bracelets

Sash of many colours…

She seems to be a Tibetan woman you once saw on a horse next to a road-marker 5600 feet above sea level on a snow-covered mountain. She was looking back at you and smiling, enticing you to fall into an icy ravine. At the time you couldn’t help walking towards her…

These are all memories, this tinkling which sticks in your mind seems to be a sound in your brain. There is an agonizing, searing pain in your lungs and stomach, your heart pulsates wildly, chaotically, and your brain is about to explode. When it explodes, the blood will clot, it will be a soundless explosion. Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.

You open your eyes, the light hurts, you can’t see anything but you are aware that you are still crawling, the tinkling bells have become distant memories, indistinct longings, like sparkling ice flowers, fragmented, ephemeral, glistening on the retina of your eyes. You strive to discern the colours of the rainbow, you swirl around upside-down, float backwards, lose the ability to control yourself. It is all futile striving, vague hope, refusal to be extinguished, pitch-black cavern, skeleton’s eye-sockets seeming to go deep inside, nothing there at all, a cacophony splits asunder with a blast!

… a never before experienced limpidity, a totality of purity and freshness. You perceive a barely discernible subtle, almost soundless sound, it turns transparent, is carded, filtered, clarified. You are falling and while falling you float up, so gently, and there is no wind, no physical burdens and no rashness in your emotions. Your whole body is cool, your body and mind listen intently, your whole body and mind hear this soundless, billowing music. In your conscious mind this thread of gossamer becomes smaller but increasingly clear, appears right before your eyes, delicate like a strand of hair, and also like a crack of light. The extremity of the crack fuses with the darkness, loses its form, expands, transforms into faint, minute points of light, then boundless countless particles, enveloping you in this cloud blanket of distinct particles. Minute points of light form clusters, drift into motion, turn into a mist-like nebula, keep slowly transforming, gradually solidifying into a dark moon tinged with blue. The moon within the sun turns grey-purple, instantly spreads out, but the centre further condenses, turns dark red, gives off bright purple rays. You close your eyes to cut the glare but can’t. Trembling fear and hope rise from the depths of your heart, at the edge of the darkness you hear music, this solidified sound gradually expands, spreads and sparkling crystals of sound penetrate your body. You can’t work out where you are. The particles of bright crystals of sound permeate your body and mind from all directions. As a mass of long notes take shape, there is a vigorous middle note, you can’t catch the melody but can perceive the richness of the sounds. It links up with another mass of sounds, intermingles, unfolds, turns into a river which disappears and appears, appears and disappears. A dark blue sun circles within an even darker moon, you hold your breath enraptured, stop breathing, reach the extremity of life. But the force of the pulsating sounds becomes stronger and stronger, lifts you up, pushes you towards a high tide, a high tide of pure spirituality. Before your eyes, in your heart, in your body oblivious to time and space, in the continual surge of sustained noise, of reflected images in the dark sun within the dark moon, is a blast exploding exploding exploding exploding explo- explo- explo- explo- ding — ding — ding — ding — then again absolute silence. You fall into an even deeper darkness and again feel your heart pulsating, discern physical pain. The fear of death of the living body is concrete like this, the physical body you failed to abandon recovers its sensitivity.

In the darkness, in the corner of the room, the line of bright red lights on your tape recorder is flashing.

In the snow outside my window I see a small green frog, one eye blinking and the other wide open, unmoving, looking at me. I know this is God.

He appears just like this before me and watches to see if I will understand.

He is talking to me with his eyes by opening and closing them. When God talks to humans he doesn’t want humans to hear his voice.

And I don’t think it at all strange, it is as if it should be like this. It is as if God is in fact a frog. The intelligent round eye doesn’t so much as blink once. It is really kind that he should deign to gaze upon this wretched human being, me.

His other eye opens and closes as it speaks a language incomprehensible to humans. Whether I understand or not is not God’s concern.

I could of course think maybe there is no meaning at all in this blinking eye, but its significance could lie precisely in its not having meaning.

There are no miracles. God is saying this, saying this to this insatiable human being, me.

Then what else is there to seek? I ask of him.

All around is silence, snow is falling soundlessly. I am surprised by this tranquillity. In Heaven it is peaceful like this.

And there is no joy. Joy is related to anxiety.

Snow is falling.

I don’t know where I am at this moment, I don’t know where this realm of Heaven comes from, I look all around.

I don’t know that I don’t understand anything and still think I know everything.

Things just happen behind me and there is always a mysterious eye, so it is best for me just to pretend that I understand even if I don’t.

While pretending to understand, I still don’t understand.

The fact of the matter is I comprehend nothing, I understand nothing.

This is how it is.

Written from 1982 to September 1989

Beijing and Paris

I have no way of knowing whether it was fate that has pushed me onto this dais but as various lucky coincidences have created this opportunity I may as well call it fate. Putting aside discussion of the existence or non-existence of God, I would like to say that despite my being an atheist I have always shown reverence for the unknowable.

A person cannot be God, certainly not replace God, and rule the world as a Superman; he will only succeed in creating more chaos and make a greater mess of the world. In the century after Nietzsche man-made disasters left the blackest records in the history of humankind. Supermen of all types called leader of the people, head of the nation and commander of the race did not baulk at resorting to various violent means in perpetrating crimes that in no way resemble the ravings of a very egotistic philosopher. However, I do not wish to waste this talk on literature by saying too much about politics and history, what I want to do is to use this opportunity to speak as one writer in the voice of an individual.

A writer is an ordinary person, perhaps he is more sensitive but people who are highly sensitive are often more frail. A writer does not speak as the spokesperson of the people or as the embodiment of righteousness. His voice is inevitably weak but it is precisely this voice of the individual that is more authentic.