The Snow leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

  Beyond a bridge over the Danga stream is a steep slippery ascent; soon the worst of the climb is past. A pine forest drifts by in breaths of mist, and on the mountain face just opposite, seen through shifting clouds, ribbons of water turn from white to brown as they gather up soil in the fall to the roaring rivers. On a corner of the trail is a weird shrine where horns of many slaughtered goats are piled in a kind of altar, with red ribbons tied to branches of the trees. At this time of year, people pay homage to Durga, a dread demoness of ancient origin, who emerged again in the first centuries a.d. as the black Kali, the dreadful female aspect of Lord Shiva and embodiment of all horrors of the mortal mind.

  A bird note and the water rush command the stillness. Even in rain, this landscape is hallucinatory— gorges and waterfalls, the pines and clouds that come and go, fire-colored dwellings painted with odd flowers and bizarre designs, the cloud-mirrors of the rice paddies in steps down the steep mountainside, a flock of vermilion minivets, blown through a wind-tossed tumult of bamboo.

  We walk on in mud and gloom and cold. At the mountain village called Sibang, to the beat of tomtoms, a buffalo is slowly killed for Durga Puja and its fresh blood drunk, while children stand in a circle in the rain. These mountain children have the big bellies of malnutrition, and though they seem no less content than the children of the valleys, they are quiet, and do not sing out to us; one of the blood-drinkers has the loveliest face of any child that I have ever seen.

  OCTOBER 4

  The rain increases by the early morning, and with trails impassable, we shall remain in this old cowshed. Good Dawa in his orange knee socks—he is a big strong fellow but so shy that he cannot look a sahib in the face—has scraped the bulk of the manure against one wall and bridged the deepest pools in the mud floor with stepping stones. We live on an isle of canvas tenting spread between the lines of leak, and spend most of a dark day in sleeping bags, propped up against the wall.

  Recently we have lived almost exclusively on a white diet of rice or chapatis (unleavened bread) accompanied by dhal (small lentils) and cracked corn or potatoes. A few guavas, papayas, cucumbers, and plantains were available in the villages along the rivers, but as the train climbs north and west, and autumn deepens, these are seen no more. Yesterday, Phu-Tsering bought some silver fish caught in wicker traps in the stream eddies, as well as fresh meat from the slaughtered buffalo, and so we celebrate the Durga Puja. Some arak, or rakshi—white spirits distilled from rice or maize or millet—has been located, and an old one-eyed porter dances to the harmonica of Jang-bu, whose hands gleam with finger rings as he plays. The head sherpa is boyish, even for twenty-four, but he is intelligent and personable, and commands respect

  We are not really in the mood for celebration. GS is off somewhere in his own head, and I am wondering about my children. Rue, Sara, and Luke are away at school and college; only the youngest is at home. Last summer, GS sent word from Pakistan that if Alex were of happy and adaptable turn of mind—he was and is —Kay Schaller would be glad to take him into her household in Lahore, where the two Schaller boys attend an American school. But since he is only eight it seemed better in the end to forego this generous invitation and leave him in our own house, which had been lent to a family of his friends. And for the moment, at least, all was well. Just before leaving Kathmandu, I received the following communication:

  Dear Dad,

  How are you. I am fine. I was very sad, I was even crying, because I didn't write to you. But I feel a lot better since I'm writing to you now. The cat and the dog are great, but Tm going to be sad when they die. School is doing pretty well. I hope you can make it back for Thanksgiving. Did I spell that right Yes No

  I hope your mountain boots are still good. I hope you are having a very good time.

  Love,

  Alex

  Save my letters and bring them home so I can see if they got to you. Hugs and kisses. By By a millyon times for now. Love

  Your sun

  Alex

  I think of the parting with my sun on the day that school had opened, just a month before, a clear morning of September, of monarch butterflies and goldenrod, late roses, shining pine needles, of flights of cormorant headed south along the coast in a dry east wind. Alex asked how long I would be gone, and when I told him, blurted out, "Too long!" I had driven him to school, and he was. upset that he might be seen in tears. "That's much too long," he wept, and this was true. Hugging him, I promised to be home before Thanksgiving.

  OCTOBER 5

  We set off at daybreak in light intermittent rain that lasts all morning. The monsoon's end is now long overdue.

  At Mima, the path turns away from the Magyandi torrent, far below, and follows a ridge for several miles above the valley of the Dara Khola. At this altitude, near 7000 feet, the trail passes among oaks. The mountain lacks all sign of people or planting, and GS is ecstatic. We look for sign of forest animals, such as the Asiatic black bear (called the moon bear) and the yellow-throated marten and the beautiful red panda. This cloud forest—who knows?—may hide a yeti. At the wood edge, alder and ilex, viburnum, barberry, and rhododendron, daisies and everlasting, wild strawberry, sphagnum moss and bracken all appear, and pale lavender asters much like those that would be abundant now in woods and fields at home. In the autumn trees, the flicker-like cry of a woodpecker, the chickadee voices of the tits seem wistful, and bring back my uneasiness about my children.

  In a dark grove of mossy oaks, wet camp is made at 9000 feet. Through the ragged treetops, skies are clearing. There is a moon, and cold.

  How strange everything seems. How strange everything is. One "I" feels like an observer of this man who lies here in this sleeping bag in Asian mountains; another "I" is thinking about Alex; a third is the tired man who tries to sleep.

  In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for near an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying, birdsong and sweet smell of privet and rose. The child was not observing; he was at rest in the very center of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginnings, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through. Ecstasy is identity with all existence, and ecstasy showed in his bright paintings; like the Aurignacian hunter, who became the deer he drew on the cave wall, there was no "self" to separate him from the bird or flower. The same spontaneous identity with the object is achieved in the bold sumi painting of Japan—a strong expression of Zen culture, since to become one with whatever one does is a true realization of the Way.

  Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of deaths must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free-swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.

  Compare the wild, free paintings of the child with the stiff, pinched "pictures" these become as the painter notices the painting and tries to portray "reality" as others see it; self-conscious now, he steps out of his own painting and, finding himself apart from things, notices the silence all around and becomes alarmed by the vast significations of Creation. The armor of the "I" begins to form, the construction and desperate assertion of separate identity, the loneliness: "Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern."8

  Alex is eight, and already he has shut away the wildness of the world. I lost it, too, in early childhood. But memories would come on wings of light—a shining bird, high pines and sun, the fire in a floating leaf, the autumn heat in weathered wood, wood smell, a child, soft lichen on a stone—a light-filled imminence, shimmering and breathing, and yet so fleeting that it left me breathless an
d in pain. One night in 1945, on a Navy vessel in Pacific storm, my relief on bow watch, seasick, failed to appear, and I was alone for eight hours in a maelstrom of wind and water, noise and iron; again and again, waves crashed across the deck, until water, air, and iron became one. Overwhelmed, exhausted, all thought and emotion beaten out of me, I lost my sense of self, the heartbeat I heard was the heart of the world, I breathed with the mighty risings and declines of earth, and this evanescence seemed less frightening than exalting. Afterward, there was pain of loss—loss of what, I wondered, understanding nothing.

  Most poets know about these pangs of loss, and here and there in my prose readings, strange passages would leap like unicorns out of the page. "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn"9 was an early example, and a description of singing fishes in a novel by Hamsun, and a passage in Borges, and another in Thoreau, and many in Hesse, who wrote of little else. Hamsun's characters tend to destroy themselves, and Hamsun and Hesse, with the authority of failure, warned of the fatal spell of the mystical search—so did Kierkegaard, who declared that too much "possibility" led to the madhouse. But when I came upon these cautionary words, I already had what Kierkegaard called "the sickness of infinitude," wandering from one path to another with no real recognition that I was embarked upon a search, and scarcely a clue as to what I might be after. I only knew that at the bottom of each breath there was a hollow place that needed to be filled.

  In 1948 in Paris, a disciple of the late mystic-philosopher George Gurdjieff introduced me to "the Work," in which (as in so many disciplines) great emphasis is placed on "self-remembering"—paying attention to the present moment instead of wandering the ephemeral worlds of past and future. I continued in this work after returning to America, though briefly; it seemed to me that Gurdjieff's methods were too esoteric, that despite an evident deep strength among the leaders, too few among the rest of us were meant to follow. I went back to reading and began to write, and my confused state is plain in my first books.

  In 1959, in the jungles of Peru, I would experiment with yajé or ayahuasca, a hallucinogen of morbid effect used by shamans of the Amazon tribes to induce states that we call "supernatural," not because they transcend the laws of nature but because they still elude the grasp of formal science. (Most hallucinogens are derivatives of wild plants—mushrooms, cactus, a morning glory, many others—used for sacred purposes the world over; the ancients' soma may have been made from a poisonous mushroom of the genus Amanita.) Though frightening, the experience made clear that this family of chemicals (the phenol alkaloids ) might lead to another way of seeing, and not in the slow labor of ascetic discipline but in cool efficiency and speed, as in flight through air. I never saw drugs as a path, far less as a way of life, but for the next ten years, I used them regularly—mostly LSD but also mescaline and psilocybin. The journeys were all scaring, often beautiful, often grotesque, and here and there a blissful passage was attained that in my ignorance I took for religious experience: I was a true believer in my magic carpet, ready to fly as far as it would take me. In 1961, in Thailand and Cambodia, on my way to an expedition in New Guinea, I experimented with a raw peasant form of heroin (sold to me as "opiirni") that frightened me to death, or a point close to it, one hollow night in an ancient hotel at the edge of black jungle and the silhouetted ruins of Angkor Wat. After a first ecstatic rush, I was stricken, paralyzed, unable to get my breath; with no one to call to, unable to call, I imagined that the End had come in this dead silent room under slow fans. Returning home a few months later, I treated drugs with more respect, working seriously with a renegade psychiatrist who was making bold, early experiments in the use of the hallucinogens in therapy. My companion was a girl named Deborah Love, who was adrift on the same instinctive search.

  The search may begin with a restless feeling, as if one were being watched. One turns in all directions and sees nothing. Yet one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness; and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home. ("But you are home," cries the Witch of the North. "All you have to do is wake up!") The journey is hard, for the secret place where we have always been is overgrown with thorns and thickets of "ideas," of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions. The holy grail is what Zen Buddhists call our own "true nature"; each man is his own savior after all.

  The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing. . . . He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. . . . There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no different from anybody else," they will chorus, or, "there's no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid." ... He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. "His own law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law. . . . The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization— absolute and unconditional—of its own particular law. ... To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being ... he has failed to realize his life's meaning. The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way "Tao," and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one's destination reached, one's mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things.10

  This passage from Jung was the first hard clue to the nature of my distemper. I was sitting in a garden in the mountains of Italy when I read it, and I was so excited that for the first and only time in all my life I actually yelled and jumped out of my chair; this searching was not morbid after all!

  Not that D and I considered ourselves "seekers": we were embarrassed by such terms, and shied from people who employed them. We read and talked and read again, but what we needed was a teacher and a discipline. In those days, instant gurus were turning up as thick as bean sprouts, but true teachers were very hard to find. Finally D asked me to introduce her to the hallucinogens. I gave her mescaline on an autumn night of wind and rain.

  On her first drug trip, D freaked out; that is the drug term, and there is no better. She started to laugh, and her mouth opened wide and she could not close it; her armor had cracked, and all the night winds of the world went howling through. Turning to me, she saw my flesh dissolve, my head become a skull—the whole night went like that. Yet she later saw that she might free herself by living out the fear of death, the demoniac rage at one's own helplessness that drug hallucinations seem to represent, and in that way let go of a life-killing accumulation of defenses. And she accepted the one danger of the mystical search: there is no way back without doing oneself harm. Many paths appear, but once the way is taken, it must be followed to the end.

  And so, with great courage, D tried again, and sometimes things went better. I remember an April afternoon in 1962, when we had taken LSD together. She came out onto the terrace of a country house and drifted toward me, down across the lawn. D had black hair and beautiful wide eyes; in the spring breeze and light of flowers, she looked bewitched. We had been quarreling in recent days, and recriminations rose, tumbling all over one another in the rush to be spoken, yet as we drew near, the arguments aired so often in the past rose one by one and passed away in silence. There was no need to speak, the other knew to the last word what would be said. Struck dumb by this telepathy, our mouths snapped shut at the same instant, then burst into smiles at the precise timing of this comic mime of our old fights; delighted, we embraced and laughed and laughed. And still not one word had been spoken; only later did we discover that all thoughts, laughter, and emotions had been not similar but just the same, one mind,
one Mind, even to this: that as we held each other, both bodies turned into sapling trees that flowed into each other, grew together in one strong trunk that pushed a taproot deeper and deeper into the ground.

  And yet, and yet . . . an "I" remained, aware that something-was-happening, aware even that something-was-happening because of drugs. At no time did the "I" dissolve into the miracle.

  Mostly D went on long, gray journeys, plagued by fear of death. I had bad trips, too, but they were rare; most were magic shows, mysterious, enthralling. After each—even the bad ones—I seemed to go more lightly on my way, leaving behind old residues of rage and pain. Whether joyful or dark, the drug vision can be astonishing, but eventually this vision will repeat itself, until even the magic show grows boring; for me, this occurred in the late 1960s, by which time D had already turned toward Zen.

  Now those psychedelic years seem far away; I neither miss them nor regret them. Drugs can clear away the past, enhance the present; toward the inner garden, they can only point the way. Lacking the temper of ascetic discipline, the drug vision remains a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life. Old mists may be banished, that is true, but the ahen chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the "I" from true experience of the One.

  OCTOBER 6

  Daybreak brings pink-copper glow to aerial ferns along the oak limbs, but as we climb, the ferns give way to graybeard lichens. Near 10,000 feet, the oaks die out, and clouds close in again, with fitful rain.

  At Jaljala Ridge, GS's altimeter reads 11,200 feet. The dark foundations of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri are both visible, and a shadow between them is the gorge of the Kali Gandaki, far away eastward and below. All peaks are cloud-hidden, and just beneath the swirling clouds is a white stillness; the descending snow line is no more than a thousand feet above the ridge where we now stand, and far below the high passes we must cross. Unless the monsoon ends while the weather is still warm enough to melt high snows, there will be trouble in the weeks to come.