Soul Mountain Chapter 3

On departing do not forget to heed the duckweed waters
Turn back to gaze in wonder at Lingshan amongst the phoenixes

Paradoxes and Themes

Chapter 3 seems to contain two paradoxes regarding time and memory:

1. If memory is intangible and occasionally fictitious, why does it affect us so much?
2. If the past, unlike the future, is definite and concrete, why does it take so much effort to understand?

From these, I can synthesize two themes established in this chapter:

1. The power of imagination
2. The instability of the present moment

Chapter Summary

The narrator arrives in Wuyizhen, which gives him flashbacks to a possibly imagined childhood of living in a small town in southern China. He checks into an inn, has a brief discussion with his roommate, a timber buyer, and then goes to a pavilion by the river, where he notes some interesting writing on the columns.

As with the last chapter, there’s not a whole lot of action but some important groundwork is laid.

The image in your mind

The chapter opens with the narrator, walking the single-grooved cobblestone roads of Wuyizhen¹, tossed in and out of a flashback to some imagined childhood, filled with bicycles and pedestrians swearing colorfully at them, smells, thousand year old shops, restaurants, photographs of beautiful women, and a chilling north wind, among other phenomena.

You can’t really tell where the flashback it begins and ends, what’s real and what’s not. Gao’s narrator (back to second-person perspective) refuses to tell you what’s your past vs what’s your present, what’s real vs what’s imagined. This is all by design. You don’t get explicit direction regarding what’s real, but you do get directed to what’s important. In one of the liminal spaces between flashback and reality, the narrator states, “It doesn’t matter if you’ve never run barefoot, what is crucial is this image in your mind.” Upon reading the verses above, engraved on the columns of a pavillion, he says, “you’re intrigued.” Are you?

Finding the audience

I suspect that the you to whom the narrator addresses himself must not be a generic reader but rather a specific type of person who’s willing to go on this sort of journey. It’s not a journey for everyone, and as with other chapters the narrator finds himself a bit of a misfit. When he asks the clerk at the inn about Lingshan, she refuses to answer; presumably her minimum-wage state pay doesn’t cover chitchat with customers. Similarly, his roommate at the inn is a businessman who’s primarily concerned with how much timber he’ll be able to buy. When he thinks that narrator² has information about timber he perks up; otherwise he reads his pulp kung fu novel and ignores questions about Lingshan.

When he encounters the engraving on the columns of the pavilion, the narrator asks an elder, in an excessively deferential manner, who wrote the verses. The elder contemptuously mocks the narrator’s (your?) dearth of knowledge about the scholar who wrote those verses one thousand years ago.

In Chapter 1, the narrator, seemed to be trying to establish a cool distance from his identity as a tourist. Here, he’s maybe unwittingly embracing that identity–too precociously curious to relate to those who are not seeking anything, while ignorant of all the matters the locals deem important. And that really is the sort of person who reads a novel, isn’t it? Intelligent enough to be curious but not someone who is confident in their knowledge of all things. It’s strange that Gao has to spell it out, but then maybe from time to time we need to be reminded that we’re reading a novel.

Song Stories

The roommate at the inn, a timber buyer with no interest in Lingshan, tells the narrator about a pavilion with a good view of the river.³ At the pavilion a verse in inscribed on the columns: “Sitting at rest know not to discuss the shortcomings of other people.” Some people are not interested in these sorts of novels and stories and the column seems to be preemptively condemning any judgment of people who are more concerned with timber prices than with spiritual struggle.

The pavilion, an ancient official building of some sort now housing a farmers’ market, is filled with farmers whose speech reminds the narrator of ancient Song dynasty stories. These stories, known as huaben, are noteworthy for being written in a style closer to the vernacular than to classical literary Chinese. As has happened many times around the world, these “low culture” folk stories contributed to the rich Song dynasty legacy, a high water mark for traditional Chinese culture. Who’s to say the roommate’s Flying Fox novels won’t be what matters a thousand years from now? Anything we encounter on the way to Soul Mountain could be more meaningful than the journey or the destination.

Indifference and Irreverence

Part of the narrator’s fugue-like traversal of his imagined past includes the full text of a bawdy children’s song, which I think captures the spirit of the novel thus far fairly well. The song, which as with many children’s songs, consists of a rolling procession of folk characters, animals, and lewd imagery. After some setup, a crab, perhaps attempting to escape an unpleasant marriage, treads on an eel, who complains to a monk, who prays to Guanyin⁴, who pisses on a boy and hurts his belly. An exorcist is sought to heal the child; his expensive dance doesn’t do anything.

If you’ve ever embarked upon a project that’s deeply meaningful to you, you’ve probably encountered the sort of resistance that says, “Why are you even doing this? Nobody cares. This is dumb.” It typically rears its head in some combination of negation and indifference. What you’re doing sucks; it would suck more but nobody cares enough for it to even matter that it sucks. One response to this sort of resistance is self deprecation or irreverence towards your work and interests–Sure it sucks, but it’s not supposed to not suck. Look, here’s something beyond criticism: Guanyin peeing on a child. And it’s telling that cultural repression, as discussed in the last post, tends to focus on the dirty and the obscene; irreverence leads to artistic freedom. And yet the irreverence isn’t really the purpose; the narrator didn’t arrive in Wuyizhen just to remember lewd songs; no amount of contrast or distinction or indifference or obscenity can overshadow the fact that he’s looking for Soul Mountain. And he’s reminded of that at the pavilion.

You are where you’re supposed to be.

Here’s the full verse on the columns of the pavilion. Front:

Back:

Under the eaves, the pavilion bears a design of a dragon and a phoenix, which, during the Song dynasty (when it was constructed, according to a vermillion inscription on the top beam), would have indicated official or ritual use. This was, at some point at least, a place of importance.

A couple things going on with the verse:

• As noted, the advice is to not discuss the shortcomings of other people when sitting at rest. Presumably, when one is not at rest, one has better things to do than talk trash.
• Similarly, a person on a journey may be focused on their destination; the second line implores the traveler to appreciate the beauty of their surroundings.
• The third verse is doing the heaviest lifting here. Duckweed has a long history of imagery and associations in Chinese literature.

Cao Cao, a warlord and poet from the Three Kingdoms period, wrote:

The trees’ roots are deeply embedded,
The duckweed has no roots.

Duckweed is a small wetland plant that floats just below the surface of the water. Without fixed attachment, it is carried through its existence by forces beyond its control, and a colony of duckweeds can be scattered easily by a strong breeze. It’s one of those things that’s small and easy to miss, but you know to look for it you see it everywhere.

It makes for a good contrast with the dragon river and the mountain amongst the phoenixes, this prosaic transitory omnipresent weed which is still in the way of all living things a wonder of the natural world. The humility imposed in this chapter hits home when Gao’s narrator, rootless and adrift, unnoticed and insignificant, in search of Lingshan, identifies more with the duckweed than with the mountain.

In western mythology, the phoenix is associated strongly with fire. The Chinese “phoenix”, really the Fenghuang, mostly bears only superficial similarity to the Phoenix of Greek mythology, but both creatures do tend to be strongly associated with fire and the sun. The dragon, on the other hand, is strongly associated with water in Chinese mythology.

There’s an interesting echo of the previous chapter here. My last post ended by connecting fire and water imagery, and these verses do the exact same thing, with the dragon river and the mountain among the phoenixes. The concept of Ling in Chinese, here used as a translation for soul, denotes a cluster of concepts around spirit, soul, efficacy, divine power, and the animating force in things. Recall the smoke-filled mountain hut–that was a place full of Ling. And it was not a peaceful place, but a place filled with transformative energy–the domain of the dragon and the phoenix. The narrator, however, is neither the dragon nor the phoenix, but rather a piece of duckweed.