Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain

“Does that mean I am too?” she asks you.

“Why not? Aren’t you a woman?”

“Then you’re a demon!” she counters.

“All men are demons in women’s eyes.”

“Then am I the companion of a demon?” she asks sticking up her chin.

“A demon with a seductress,” you say.

She chuckles and looks happy, but she pleads with you not to go to such a place.

“What could happen?” you stop and ask her. “Will it bring misfortune? Will it bring disaster? What’s there to be frightened about?”

She snuggles against you and says as long as she’s with you she will be all right. But you can tell there is already a black shadow in her heart. You strive to dispel it and deliberately talk loudly.

I don’t know if you have ever observed this strange thing, the self. Often the more you look the more it doesn’t seem to be like it, and the more you look the more it isn’t it. It’s just like when one is lying on the grass and staring at a cloud — at first it’s like a camel, then like a woman, and when you look again it becomes an old man with a long beard, but this doesn’t last because clouds are transforming every instant.

Suppose you use a lavatory in an old house and you happen to look at the water stains on the walls — every day you go there are changes in the stains. First you see a face, when you look again it’s a dog dragging a sausage, afterwards it turns into a tree, there is a woman under the tree and she’s sitting on a skinny horse. After a couple of weeks, or perhaps after several months, one morning, you are constipated and you suddenly find that the stain is in fact still a face.

When you are lying on the bed looking at the ceiling, the light projected onto the white ceiling too can undergo many transformations. If you concentrate on looking at yourself, you will find that your self will gradually separate from the self you are familiar with and multiply into many startling forms. So if I have to make a summary of myself, it terrifies me. I don’t know which of the many faces represents me more and the more closely I look the clearer the transformations become, and finally only bewilderment remains.

You could wait, wait until the stain on the wall again turns into a human face, or you could hope, hope that it would one day turn out to have a particular form. But in my experience, it grows and grows but often not as you wish and moreover, mostly, contrary to what you wish. It is a monster child which you find impossible to accept, yet ultimately it was born of the self and has to be accepted.

I once looked at the photo of me on the monthly bus ticket I had thrown on the table. At first I thought I had a charming smile, then I thought the smile at the corners of the eyes was rather of scorn, arrogance and indifference, all deriving from self-love, self-adoration, and a sense of superiority. But there was also an anxiety which betrayed acute loneliness, and fleeting snatches of terror — certainly not a winner — and a bitterness which stifled the common smile of unthinking happiness and doubted that sort of happiness. This was very scary, it was like a void, a sense of falling without somewhere to land, and I didn’t want to go on looking at the photo.

After that I went about observing other people, but whenever I observed other people I found this detestable omniscient self of mine interfering, and to this day there is not one face it hasn’t interfered with. This is a serious problem, for when I am scrutinizing someone else, I am at the same time scrutinizing myself. I search for faces I like, or expressions I can tolerate, so I can’t get rid of myself. I can’t find people with whom I can identify, I search without success, everywhere: in railway waiting rooms, in train carriages, on boats, in food shops and parks, and even when out walking on the streets, I am always trying to capture a familiar face or a familiar build, or looking for some sign which can call up submerged memories. When I am observing others I always treat the other person as a mirror for looking inwardly at myself. The observations are inevitably affected by my state of mind at a particular time. Even when I am observing a woman, my senses react to her and my experiences and imagination are activated in making a judgement. My understanding of others, including women, is actually superficial and arbitrary. Women I like are inevitably illusions I have created to delude myself, and this is my tragedy. As a result, my relationships with women inevitably fail. On the other hand, if I were a woman and living with a man, this would also be a worry. The problem is the awakened self in the inner mind, this is the monster which torments me no end. People love the self yet mutilate the self. Arrogance, pride, complacency or anxiety, jealousy and hatred, all spring from this. The self is in fact the source of mankind’s misery. So, does this unhappy conclusion mean that the awakened self should therefore be killed?

Thus Buddha told the boddhisatva: the myriad phenomena are vanity, the absence of phenomena is also vanity.

She says she wants to return to the carefree time of her childhood, when she went to school with her hair combed and perfectly plaited by her maternal grandmother, and everyone used to say her shiny long plaits were beautiful. After her grandmother died, she didn’t wear her hair in plaits anymore but in protest cut it short so that it couldn’t even be put into two bunches which was the style in the Red Guard period. At the time a neighbour had reported her father and he was locked up in the building where he worked and not allowed to go home. Her mother took him a change of clothes every two weeks, but she was never allowed to go along. Afterwards she and her mother were forced to go to a farming village as she didn’t have the right qualifications to be a Red Guard. She says the happiest time in her life was when she had long plaits. Her maternal grandmother was like an old cat, always dozing by her side, and she felt secure.

She says she is old, she means her heart is old and nothing can excite her. Before, she would weep copious tears straight from her heart over nothing, it was effortless and soothing.

She says she had a girlfriend called Lingling and that they were good friends from childhood days. She was always so sweet, she would only have to look at you, and a dimple would appear on her face. Now she is a mother and she has become lethargic, talks in a monotone, and slurs her speech like she’s half asleep. But when she was a girl she used to chatter like a sparrow and together they would talk nonsense all day without stopping. She says Lingling wanted to be outside playing all the time. But, she says, whenever it started raining she would become morose and say I want to strangle you: she would press hard on my neck and it really hurt.

One summer night, sitting by the lake, looking at the sky, she told Lingling she wanted to snuggle and Lingling said she wanted to be a little mother. They giggled and jostled one another, it was before the moon came out. She asks if you know the night sky is grey-blue when the moon is about to come out, oh, the moon gliding out of its corona, she asks if you have ever seen it, surging and billowing then spreading flat like a rolling mist. She says they even heard the sound of the moon flowing over the tops of the trees which looked like rippling waterweeds in a flowing stream, and they both wept. Their tears welled up like the waters of a spring, like the flowing of the moonlight, and their hearts felt sublime. Lingling’s hair, she can feel it even now, brushed lightly against her face, their cheeks were pressed together and they were both flushed. There is a type of lotus, she says, not the water lily or the common lotus, it’s smaller than a lotus and bigger than a water lily. It opens at night and its gold and red stamens glow in the dark. The pink petals are fleshy, like Lingling’s ears when she was young but without the fine hairs, and they are shiny like the nails of her small hands, ah, at that time her trimmed long nails were like sea shells. However, the pink petals are not bright, they are thick like ears and tremble as they slowly open.