A swan song of scenery
A desolate beauty, an untamed beauty, a majestic beauty.
Hundreds upon hundreds of sandstone peaks stand towering in stark solitude, forming a spectacle beyond compare. Among the peak forests, shafts of sunlight slant quietly, wisps of mist rise quietly, streams and waterfalls flicker quietly in and out of view, waves of forest murmur quietly, and strains of nature's music linger quietly...
The vastness is a vastness that stretches to the horizon's end.
The solemnity is a solemnity without beginning or end.
Facing a scene so towering, a picture so resplendent, an atmosphere so solemn—these thousands of peaks and myriad ravines—facing this unique grand landscape on Earth, this unrestrained and boundless masterstroke beneath the heavens, all words and writing seem pale, feeble, even superfluous. Better to be like a wild bull, an old wolf, a fierce tiger—to stand at the cliff's edge and let out a long howl! Let the sound sweep across peak after peak, ravine after ravine, surging toward the far distance where peaks meet sky, letting the whole world ring endlessly with echoing howls—rough, ancient, masculine, and wild echoes!
Wave-like ridges surge and recede into the distance...
Billow-like clouds and mist pour in...
I linger on the precipice of the West Sea Heaven's Terrace. A year ago, an elderly gentleman in a long robe and cloth shoes sat upright beneath this very ancient pine beside me. The guqin resting on his knees overflowed with music of celestial beauty, reverberating through thousands of peaks and ravines
without cease. The guqin master had been invited by a Taiwanese producer to come here and film an outdoor scene of him performing the ancient piece "Misty Rivers and Clouds of Xiaoxiang." Green waves stretching vast, misty vapors swirling, sky light and cloud shadows, atmospheres rising in abundance—once the scenery of the great sandstone peak forest merged with the profound art of guqin performance, you could not help but be intoxicated, could not help but lose your soul. Just as the famous Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa
years ago sat cross-legged on the ground in meditation, remaining silent with bowed head long after the music ended, and finally uttered just one haunting phrase: "How deep..."
Time rewinds to two years ago. In May 1992, two blue-eyed officials sent by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee came to inspect. It was from this very viewing platform—where my mind now soars to the eight extremes and races across ten thousand fathoms—that they wound their way up to the open heights of Moon Pass. Facing the magnificent momentum of the great peak forest and the splendid spectacle of the great cloud sea, they exclaimed again and again, overwhelmed by the sheer wonder. Along the way, monkeys swung to and fro among millennia-old vines, fledglings in their nests sang melodiously at passersby with innocent bewilderment, trees felled by floods lay naturally across mountain streams, toads without inhibition hopped onto the blue-eyed officials' insteps, the wind lay resting with narrowed eyes in the hearts of flowers, little squirrels nibbled freely on sunlight... An utterly vivid, utterly harmonious, utterly natural tableau of pristine ecology left the two doctors—whose standards were by no means easily pleased—nodding in admiration, confirming this as a natural scenic area possessing natural phenomena, geological strata, and landforms of the highest quality. Its magnificent and jagged stone peaks, lush vegetation, clear lakes and streams, and incomparably beautiful karst caves and underground rivers could rival the Grand Canyon and several other national parks and monuments in the United States, as well as the prominent sandstone peak region of the Bungle Bungles in Western Australia; and in terms of scale, quantity, variety, as well as vegetation, active water volume, and the verticality of stone peak silhouettes, this place respectively surpasses all the aforementioned areas and all comparable areas within China.
Clearly, this is the authoritative conclusion written by the two experts standing at the pinnacle of the world's natural landscapes. Oh, great peak forest, great peak forest—you are unmistakably a peerless masterpiece that stands alone at the summit of the ages...
Like a butterfly silently resting on a flower, I silently rest upon a giant boulder on the viewing platform that thrusts like a tongue into the hundred-fathom canyon. The kiss of sunlight presses close to my lips from the eternally jade-green sky. The great peak forest gathers its vital breath in its dantian, stealing into my palm from unfathomable hidden valleys. The sunlight is pure, exquisitely pure. The air is pure, exquisitely pure. "Sound has not been cut by machines, color has not been altered by brushes, order has not been prescribed by ideology." No noise. No neon lights. No convoys biting each other's tails. No trademarks, no kidnappings, no stock market crashes, no revolving restaurants, no Gulf War, no World Cup, no Reichstag fire, no venereal disease, no AIDS, no heroin, no...
Only the great peak forest exists alongside the primordial.
Only the sense of the primordial exists alongside humankind.
Only this—soaked by ancient oceans and rocked by ancient sea waves billions of years ago, slowly rising and gently ascending together with the sandstone plateau, carved, hewn, and sculpted by thunder, lightning, and blades of ice and frost along with the great sandstone peak forest—this ancient yet youthful white sun and its landscape.
Sunlight is everywhere. The everywhere-present sunlight is the most intimate shadow of the rock peaks born of primordial impulse; it is the most radiant canopy of leaves of the trees and shrubs undisturbed by worldly din; it is the most beautiful foam blown forth by fish and the shimmering scales of light on algae in streams untouched by industrial civilization; it is the unadulterated folk songs and dances unseized by urban winds; it is time that seems to be falling asleep; it is the ink-wash-painted desolate vastness of space; it is a mood and state of mind transcending time and space; it is a rhythm and evolution through which humanity and the cosmos breathe as one.
I am immersed in the grandeur and power of the "Grand Canyon Symphony." The cold and profound Grand Canyon—a Grand Canyon that gestates and radiates infinite vitality and energy, a majestic spirit—no, a majestic soul—that comes near and far, rises and falls, surging and echoing in the Grand Canyon! Within its mystery lurks an inviolable dignity; within its composure emerges a steadiness, a magnificence, a grandeur that leaves you awe-struck, leaves your soul departing your body, leaves you bowing your head in worshipful submission, subdued and captivated by the eternal charm it lavishly reveals before us. And the peerless masterpiece that resounds between heaven and earth—the scenery of the great sandstone peak forest—also encompasses a dozen or so grand canyons distributed in branching patterns. Their Eastern-style eternal charm and mystery, their soul-stirring majesty and character, are enough to fill us with heroic spirit and let us survey the world with pride. Only—only I wonder when we shall ever possess a Great Peak Forest Symphony that belongs to us in the East and to all humanity as well?
A goshawk circles above my field of vision and within my mental space. In my mind, birds are the freest form of life and the most liberated life phenomenon in Earth's biosphere. When my gaze and thoughts follow that goshawk with a whistle into the vast clouds and sky, soaring above the great peak forest in the graceful posture of a raptor, I suddenly realize this is truly a paradise and kingdom for birds. Nature without birds is a nature of dead silence. And when I sense that every bird here is a note in this peerless landscape symphony, an irrepressible aesthetic emotion arises, vivid and splendid, animating the entire sky and earth.
Yet I must say, the birds here have no sense of history, no classical lingering bookish refinement. They never cried "guan-guan" in the "Book of Songs" by the "islet in the river"; never roamed freely as the Peng bird whose wings hang like clouds from the sky, soaring ninety thousand li; never were fed by Wang Mojie into Tang poetry or by Li Qingzhao into Song ci. From the dawn of life on Earth until the late 1970s—over billions of years—and from the beginning of human activity on this land until the late 1970s—over thousands of years—this place was not like Mount Tai, Mount Hua, Mount Song, or even the unassuming Mount Li and Fragrant Hills, which gained glory from emperors' visits; not like Mount Emei, Mount Jiuhua, Mount Putuo, or even the nearby Tianmen Mountain and Wulei Mountain, which flourished from pilgrims' worship; not like Mount Lu, Guilin, the Three Gorges, or the neighboring Peach Blossom Spring and Yueyang Tower, which spread their fame through poets' verses. Qu Yuan in exile did write the line "The Yuan has its angelica, the Li has its orchids," but alas, he passed by and missed this hidden beauty nestled in the Li River watershed. The poet Liu Yuxi—that Liu Yuxi who wrote the widely celebrated Bamboo Branch Lyrics—was exiled to Langzhou, present-day Changde, merely a stone's throw from here, yet unfortunately he too never had the fortune to set foot in this wondrous landscape. And so, this well-preserved pristine biosphere, this great sandstone peak forest landscape tucked away in a remote corner, could only be—as people say—discovered and appreciated by a modern civilization equipped with automobiles, trains, airplanes, photography, and artificial forest cultivation and management. The scenery of the great sandstone peak forest, like the blue-glowing ice continent of Antarctica, like the sea of clouds seen from an airplane, like the spherical Earth seen from a spacecraft against a backdrop of stars, like the silent mysterious spherical mountains gazed upon from the Moon, and like the spiral, elliptical, crab-shaped, and dumbbell-shaped nebulae viewed through astronomical telescopes millions of light-years away—all belong to our era. Some attribute Zhangjiajie's long obscurity—"raised in the depths of the boudoir, unknown to all"—to the numbness of people's aesthetic awareness and the shallowness of their aesthetic taste; others blame its being buried and overlooked on its remote location and inaccessible transportation, which kept generations of literati from setting foot here. These views are not without merit, but in reality, Zhangjiajie's discovery was perhaps destined to be a matter of the 1980s. This is not only because of the completion of highways and railways, but even more because modern people's spiritual vision has been reconnected with nature. Scientific progress and increasingly developed industrial civilization have brought people ever-growing material comforts, but at the same time have also brought environmental pollution, spiritual alienation, human alienation, and other things people call "urban civilization diseases." Having lived too long in a domesticated cultural atmosphere, people yearn all the more for the edification of a wild culture, allowing the natural, simple, and authentic human nature to return and expand. And precisely, Zhangjiajie answered and satisfied this psychological need. Therefore, the beauty of the great peak forest is at once the most primordial and the most modern, and should by rights receive humanity's most unstinting recognition and praise in emotion and writing.
The most ancient primeval scenery and the most fashionable modern scenery are so vividly and perfectly united in the great sandstone peak forest—this is truly a miracle, a gift of creation, a decree of heaven. It reminds me of a phenomenon in art history: Andrew Wyeth, America's most renowned contemporary painter, has always lived in the countryside with its qualities of quiet and freedom, and is called by the outside world a "modern primitive"; yet his works, full of abstract excitement, are classified as modernist, and the landscapes he depicts take one back to an America of a bygone era—desolate, devoid of modern transportation, yet possessing a mythical transcendent charm. Furthermore, Paul Gauguin, one of France's three great Post-Impressionist painters, resolutely bade farewell to "civilized society" in Paris and long resided on the "primitive paradise" of Tahiti, creating a series of brilliant works full of modern consciousness. As for Picasso, the most influential great painter of the twentieth century worldwide, who synthesized the primitive and the modern and drew nourishment from Eastern folk painting with boundless astonishment—his fame is even more universally acclaimed. As a writer and poet myself, in these days of intimacy with the great peak forest, in these days filled with aesthetic pleasure both primordial and modern, filled with the strange sensation of being half flame and half seawater, I have yet to spread out a sheet of plain paper...
A foreign film titled "The Last Note" once left me sighing endlessly. The heroine was a woman of peerless beauty who lost her sight in an unexpected accident. Her lover, who loved her to the utmost, to demonstrate unwavering fidelity, resolutely blinded his own eyes. The abruptly silenced strings plucked out a swan song of love that made even wind and clouds pale. For a long time, I found the male protagonist's extreme behavior incomprehensible. Only now, when my love affair with the great peak forest has developed to the point where I am in you and you are in me, merged like salt dissolved in water, do I feel an endless admiration and emotion for those who, for the sake of unforgettable love, would resort to self-torture and self-mutilation.
In the days to come, I will cherish emotions more, and cherish nature more.
1994