Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain

No longer able to hold back the urge to urinate, I crawl out of the bed, turn up the hurricane lamp, take it down and pull on my shoes. As I remove the branch against the door made from lengths of tree trunk nailed together, the wind blows the door wide open with a bang. Outside the cave is the pitch-black curtain of night and the hurricane lamp only casts a circle of light at my feet. I take a couple of steps, undo the fly of my trousers, and looking up suddenly see before me a monstrous black shadow. I yell out in alarm and almost drop the lamp. The huge form sways along with me and I immediately realize that this is the “demon shadow” I have read about in Record of Fanjing Mountain . I swing the lamp and it also moves: it is in fact my own shadow in the night.

My peasant guide who came into the mountain with me hears my yells and comes running out with his hacking knife in his hand. Traumatized, I can’t talk but just keep yelping, swaying the hurricane lamp and pointing. He also immediately begins yelping and takes the hurricane lamp from my hand. In the pitch-black thick curtain of night, two huge black forms prance wildly along with the jumping and yelping of two people. It is really strange to be terrified and then to discover that one has in fact been terrified by one’s own shadow! The two of us piss as we prance about like children making the black demon shadows prance with us, and also to steady our nerves and comfort our spirits which have been scared out of our bodies.

Going back into the cave, I am so agitated that I can’t get back to sleep, and he is tossing and turning too. So I ask him to tell me some stories about the mountains. He starts to burble away but now speaks in the local dialect and eight in ten sentences are incomprehensible. He seems to be saying that a cousin from a distant branch of the clan had been mauled by a bear and lost an eye because he had failed to pay homage to the mountain god. I can’t tell if he’s saying this to chastize me for having come on this trip.

We get up early to go to Nine Dragon Ponds. There is a heavy mist. He is walking in front. Beyond three paces he is only a faint shape and five paces away he can barely hear if I shout. If the mountain mist is thick like this, it is not at all strange that last night the lamp cast shadows overhead. For me this is a new experience and if I breathe out, a white vapour curls up to fill the gap I have made in the mist. However, before we go a hundred paces from the cave, he stops and turns back to say we can’t go any further.

“Why?” I ask.

“Last year it was also foul weather like this. A group of six went up the mountain to steal medicinal herbs and only three came back.”

“Stop trying to frighten me,” I say.

“You go if you like, but there’s no way I’m going.”

“But you’re here to accompany me!”

“I was sent by the ranger.”

“He sent you because of me.” I don’t tell him I’m the one paying for his porter fee.

“If anything happens, it’ll be hard explaining it to the ranger.”

“You don’t have to explain to the ranger, he’s not my ranger and he doesn’t have to be responsible for me. I’m the only person responsible for me. And I want to see Nine Dragon Lake!”

He says it’s not a lake, it’s just a few ponds.

I say, lake or ponds, I want to look at the gold hair moss there, I’ve come to this mountain to look at the one-foot-high gold hair moss, I want to somersault on the thick gold hair moss.

He says you can’t sleep there, it is all waterweeds.

I go to say that it was the ranger who told me it was softer than tumbling on carpet, but it is pointless for me to try to explain what carpet is.

He stops talking and head bowed walks on ahead. I am therefore on the road again, this is a victory for me, I am capable of unnecessarily forcing my will upon a guide whose legs I am paying a fee for. I simply want to prove I have my own will which is precisely why I have come to this place where even ghosts wouldn’t come.

As soon as I relax and fall a few steps behind, he vanishes in this white miasmic mist. I must hurry after his shadowy form but drawing near I discover it is a mountain oak. I don’t know where I’ll end up if I try finding my way back through this grassy marshland, I’ve completely lost my bearings and I start yelling out to him as loudly as I can.

He finally emerges in the mist, gesticulating wildly at me, and it is only after I come right up to him that I hear he is shouting. It’s this damn mist.

“Are you angry with me?” I ask, thinking I should be apologetic.

“I’m not angry, even if I were I’m not angry with you, it’s you who are angry with me!” He is still gesticulating wildly and yelling but the sound is muffled by the dense mist. I am aware that I am in the wrong.

I’d best follow close behind, virtually treading on his heels. It’s impossible to go very far and it’s very uncomfortable walking like this, and I certainly haven’t come up this mountain to look at his heels. Then why have I come? It seems to have something to do with the dream, the demon shadow, my soaking wet clothing, my not having slept all night and this frustration, that I have a foreboding premonition. I reach into the pocket of my shirt which is clinging to my skin for the medicinal root to fend off snakes. I can’t find it.

“Let’s turn back.”

He doesn’t hear and I have to shout out, “Let’s go back!”

This is all quite ridiculous but he doesn’t laugh and just mumbles, “Should’ve turned back long ago.”

So I end up obeying him. Turning around, I follow after him. He lights a fire as soon as he gets into the cave. The air pressure is so low that the smoke can’t escape and soon the cave fills with smoke and we can barely open our eyes. He sits down in front of the fire and begins chanting, nan-nan na-na .

“What are you saying to the fire?” I ask.

“I’m saying that humans can’t overcome fate.”

He then climbs onto the plank bed to sleep and before long I hear him snoring loudly. He is a spontaneous creature with an untrammelled mind I think to myself. My predicament lies in my always seeking to be self-activated and wanting to search for my soul. However, the problem is if my soul manifested itself, would I be able to comprehend it? And even if I were able to comprehend it, what would it lead to?

I am utterly foolish and helpless in this damp cave and my wet underwear clings cold and clammy to me. Right now I realize that all I want is a window, a window with a light, where it is warm inside and someone I love who also loves me is there. This would be enough and anything else would be an invention. But that window too is only an illusion.

I recall it is not just once that I have had this dream: I am looking for the house where I once lived as a child, looking for those warm memories. Courtyards, one after the other, go deeper and deeper like a maze with their narrow and winding dark corridors, but I can never find a path which is the same so that I can come out by the way I came in. Every time I enter the courtyard in this dream, it is always by a different path. Sometimes my family’s courtyard is a passageway for families living at the front and at the back and I can’t do anything for myself that others won’t know about, I am never able to experience the warm intimacy of just being myself. Even in my own room the partitions either do not go to the ceiling, or the papered walls have holes, or one of the walls has collapsed. I climb up a ladder against an upstairs room and look inside the house — it is all rubble. There used to be a pumpkin patch outside and once when I was climbing among the vines to catch crickets, my neck and arms rubbed on the hairy vines and I itched all over. That was in the sunshine and this is in the cold and rain. The empty lot which used to be all rubble is now full of houses belonging to different families. I have no idea when they were put up but the windows are all shut. Below this half of an upstairs room without any walls, my maternal grandmother is emptying clothes from a red wooden chest which is as old as herself, and she has been dead many years. I should look for warm memories such as my childhood dreams, or more precisely dreams about my childhood. I want to look for the friends I had when I was small, the little playmates whose names I have forgotten. There was a boy with a scar from a fall on his lower lip, he was kind and generous and had a purple earthenware pot for his crickets which he said had been left to him by his grandfather. I also liked his older sister, she was a very gentle person but I didn’t ever speak to her. I know she later married and even if I went to her home I’d certainly come away empty-handed and wouldn’t even be able to meet with that playmate with the scar on his lower lip.