Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind: The History of a Fascination


Review essay in Biblio, A Review of Books, September 2003


Death at high altitudes is easy:

‘I remember hearing of one man... he went blind in one eye. Click! Just like that—blackness. Like turning off a light. His retina had gone. A couple more paces and click! The other one went too. Both retinas ripped off by the pressure. They led him for a while, but he could never get down with no eyes. Finally, he just sat down on the snow to die...he’s still up there. That’s how it is at height.’


Apart from dying blind, you could die by falling. You could die of heart attacks, brain haemorrhage dysentry, frostbite, pneumonia or just plain exhaustion. You could be buried in an avalanche or lost in a blizzard. You could, like Somervell in 1923, almost choke to death on a piece of your own frozen larynx. When British climber Chris Bonington added up what he called his ‘catalogue of deaths’ he realised that 15 of his 29 climbing companions had died because of just plain climbing.

Death apart, physical discomfort at high altitudes is acute. At Everest Base Camp, says Jon Krakauer, in Into Thin Air, ‘Walking to the mess tent left me wheezing...If I sat up too quickly, my head reeled and vertigo set in. [My] deep, rasping cough... worsened. Sleep became elusive...Cuts and scrapes refused to heal...my appetite vanished...and my body began to consume itself for sustenance.’


Why do mountains continue to call out, siren-like, often luring climbers to their doom when the dangers of climbing are common knowledge? Robert Macfarlane’s book attempts an answer in an eloquent blend of cultural history, travelogue, memoir and old-fashioned nature writing. Even as he takes care to enumerate the sensible reasons for staying safe on the flatlands, Macfarlane writes with an infectious passion which seduces us towards glaciers and snows.


Mountains were not always so seductive: Macfarlane suggests that when we view piles of rock and see spectacular landscapes, we are viewing the rock through spectacles coloured by centuries of tradition. In the West, in the seventeenth century, mountains were thought of as ‘ “warts”... “excrescences” ... “Nature’s pudenda”.’ The tops of mountains were thought to be infested with dragons. In 1702 Jacob Scheuchzer, a professor of Physics and Mathematics at Zurich University, classified ‘sighted’ dragons into ‘cat-faced dragons, serpentine dragons, inflamable dragons and non-combustible dragons...fliers and slitherers; malodorous dragons and cacophonic dragons, scaled and feathered, bat-like and bird-like, crested and bald, fork-tailed and fork-tongued’. In the historian Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, we find that while medieval monks sought out the fastness of mountains for solitary meditation, mountain tops were mostly given a wide berth. Descriptions of paradisal lakes and ambrosial gardens on mountain tops tended to be fiction—allegorical depictions of good pilgrims triumphing over evil dragons and finding hilly Edens. Travellers and pilgrims preferred the safety of passes to the uncertain pleasures of the summit. It was only around the sixteenth century that detailed, factual description of mountains began to replace myth and conjecture.


Tradition, Schama comments, ‘made landscape out of mere geology and vegetation.’ Macfarlane, it might be said, takes off from Schama’s magisterial history of landscape to wander the mountains in particular. Where Schama traces the invention of tradition mainly via works of art, Macfarlane relies on textual clues from a range of sources—starting with geology, which had a great deal to do with the altered way in which the West began to view mountains.


In 1681, the cleric Thomas Burnet published The Sacred Theory of the Earth which accounted for the Biblical flood by proposing that the Earth, at the time of Creation, was as smooth as an egg, filled with a yolk of fiery matter and a white substance which was water; the egg cracked open at the Flood, inundating the Earth and Noah. When the waters receded, Burnet said, the Earth was left ‘lying in its Rubbish’—gorges, oceans and mountains. Burnet’s book took England by storm. His prose was so stirring that Coleridge planned to turn Sacred Theory into blank verse.

What Burnet’s book did, according to Macfarlane, was turn mountains from ‘ terra firma into terra mobilis’ ‘..where rocks liquefy and seas petrify, where granite slops about like porridge, basalt bubbles like stew...’ Geologists came to be known as ‘knights of the hammer’ and the earth a ‘great stone book’ that was beginning to reveal its secrets. By the nineteenth century, geo-tourism was a ‘growth industry’ and fossil-collecting was as competitive as growing prize chrysanthemums. A succession of natural historians proposed different theories of the formation of the earth until, in 1912, Alfred Wegener, a German scientist, told the world about plate tectonics—that the continents moved around and gave rise to mountains. This is currently accepted scientific ‘fact’.


Even as mountains were being transmuted from magical, dragon-infested landscapes to living monuments of ‘deep time’, Edmund Burke was exploring a theory of the Sublime: why certain sights and experiences, like standing on a precipice watching a thundering waterfall, produced that frisson, the delicious pleasure of a terror that ‘does not press too close’. Soon, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats were all on the quickest routes to the Alps, seeking out their Romantic highs from altitude. Even the bulky Dr Johnson had, some years earlier, bullied a reluctant Boswell across Buller of Buchan Rock in Scotland, claiming that ‘terrour without danger is only one of the sports of fancy, a voluntary agitation of the mind that is permitted no longer than it pleases.’ This ‘pleasure to be had from vertigo’, says Macfarlane, ‘ would over the course of 300 years, blossom and amplify into our era’s headlong pursuit of danger—people flinging thelmselves off cranes attached to rubber bands,off mountainsides attached to ropes, and out of planes attached to nothing at all.’


The anthropologist Sherry Ortner, in a fascinating work called Life and Death on Mt Everest, points out how perfectly climbing captures ‘the Romantic ideal of transcending the limits of the self’, glorifying nature while testing the human spirit against it. Mountains provided a pastoral retreat from the evil of the smoky city—mountain landscapes and people being considered ‘unspoilt’ and Edenic. Returning from the mountains to the plains, travellers describe feeling unable to relate for a while to familiar people and routines. In proximity with peaks, people became more truly themselves. Courage, comradeship, sacrifice: everything could be tested in the mountains. Victorian ideas of self-improvement could be perfectly deployed on precipices: danger, said Ruskin, made you come out ‘a stronger and better man.’ Soon enough, climbing personified Brit Grit.

Naturally, the Empire found its potent symbol in mountaineering—as well as more mundane uses for it, like claiming territory. Maps had to be drawn, altitudes fixed, summits claimed. Tellingly, it was Francis Younghusband, misguided General of Britain’s bloody incursion into Tibet, who recruited the doomed George Mallory for the first of his Everest expeditions.

Macfarlane’s account is too focused on mountaineers’ motivation and costs to count the ‘collateral damage’, but it is worth pausing with Kenneth Mason of the Survey of India as he revisits a Survey observation post in the Karakoram to find, alongside the intact post, a ruined stone shelter with a skeleton—of a Survey khalasi—seated in it. Ortner reminds us that it is still not known how many peaks poorly paid labourers such as the unknown khalasi climbed to map the Empire, and how many perished on them.


Younghusband thought Sherpas had neither the ‘desire’ nor the ‘spirit’ for climbing. Later anthropologists, and repeatedly the Dalai Lama, have pointed out that mountain tops are thought in Eastern religions to be the abode of gods. Easterners thus did not need to prove themselves by conquering nature, for they respected it, and the idea of conquest was at odds with veneration. Of course mind and body, East and West, cannot be polarised quite so easily. Milarepa meditating on the slopes of Everest surely conquered his body, as much as Ed Hillary his mind, to get to the summit. Even so, deep cultural and economic differences—mountaineering is expensive, there are few workingclass mountaineers—have ensured a Western dominance of mountaineering as well as a certain Western arrogance in attitudes to nature. At Mount Rushmore in the USA, the architect-sculptor who thought nothing of carving up a mountain into presidential faces received public funding and support. In much the same spirit, a commercial ‘tour’ climber reassured Jon Krakauer before his Everest attempt: ‘We’ve got the big E figured out, we’ve got it totally wired. These days...we’ve built a yellow brick road to the summit.’ (Ironically, this 1996 expedition had among the highest fatalities ever. The Dalai Lama may have uttered a gentle told you so.)


This is precisely the kind of statement that embitters Macfarlane, who mourns the Everest of today as a ‘tawdry, frozen Taj Mahal’. He is unashamed in his idealisation of mythic, ‘real’ climbers of the past: Maurice Herzog and George Mallory, whose climbs were grounded in a deep aesthetic appreciation of peaks, and respect for them. His own narrative is punctuated by codas in which he breaks off to describe landscape, including frozen forests of icicles in glaciers, and the effects of light on snow, in precise, lyrical detail. He pauses often to savour the exactitude and flair with which a writer has described a feature of landscape, drawing from a vast range of writers to illustrate his points. It seems natural therefore for this cultural descendant of Mallory to close his book with a reconstruction of Mallory’s Everest climbs — though his language here sometimes shades dangerously close to purple.


British mountaineers in the 1920s and 1930s were usually middle class and highly educated. Leisure activities in Tilman’s 1938 attempt were playing chess and reading seventeenth century verse, Montaigne’s essays and Don Quixote. Perched on the precarious, icy shoulder of Everest, buffeted by blizzards, Mallory’s party cheered themselves up reciting ‘Kubla Khan’ and Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’. Describing the approach to the Straits of Gibraltar, Mallory says, ‘We had only to pop through the hole like Alice through the garden door to reach a new kingdom or kingdom of adventures.’ The summit of Everest is to him ‘like Keat’s’ lone star’. When he was not climbing, Mallory was an idolised schoolteacher at Charterhouse, where Robert Graves was part of his student fan club. Muscular and strikingly handsome, he made Lytton Strachey exclaim, ‘My hand trembles, my heart palpitates...the body of an athelete by Praxiteles and a face—oh incredible.’


To Macfarlane the almost ‘mythic simplicity’ of Mallory, the obsession that thrice takes him away from family and finally kills him, embodies the argument in this book. ‘He was the inheritor,’ Macfarlane says, ‘of a complex of emotions and attitudes towards mountainous landscape, devised long before his birth, which largely predetermined his responses to it...’ In this tradition, mountains challenge the human sense of power by their far greater force; they reshape our ‘interior landscapes’ making us aware of our capabilities and our smallness. To the author, mountains are not for dominating, they ‘return to us the priceless capacity for wonder which can be...leached away by modern existence.’


In High Adventure, his account of climbing Everest, Edmund Hillary despairs during one long, dangerous night: ‘The harsh reality of our situation flooded my mind...I felt a terrible sense of fear and loneliness. What was the sense in it all?’ Faced by a furious bereaved woman whose cousin has died in a climbing accident, Macfarlane acknowledges that ‘there is nothing inherently noble...[and]something atrociously wasteful’ about climbing deaths. Yet one gets the feeling that this sense of waste, is for this author, largely academic. Deep down, he is as obsessed as any mountaineer seduced by the siren. Reading Annapurna, a book which Herzog had to dictate—he had lost all his fingers to frostbite—Macfarlane remarks: ‘For what...were fingers and toes compared to having stood on those few square yards of snow? If he had died it would still have been worth it...the finest end of all was to be had on a mountain top—from death in valleys preserve me, O Lord.’


Communicating this inexplicable desire while searching out its cultural roots is what Mountains of the Mind brilliantly achieves. This is not an account of modern mountaineering. Here you will find Shelley but not Shipton, and Bronte is present while Bonington is not. Macfarlane’s interest is in the prehistory of a modern obsession with altitude, which he narrates with the erudition of a scholar and the ease of a natural story-teller. The romantic intensity of his passion will make even the die-hard plainsperson yearn for the peaks ‘gleaming through the cloud, beneath a cavernous sky...’


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