A Miniature Mountain Manifesto
Nothing is larger than an autumn hair and Mount Tai is small
Zhuangzi
Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness
Gaston Bachelard
The mountain looms in the imaginary of both West and East, casting a shadow across the plains of the mundane. Impossibly remote cloud-hidden peaks, scorched escarpments and wind contorted pines, poised precariously above the dizzying abyss, speak directly to the soul of those servants of the imagination: poet, painter, adventurer, dreamer, mystic. Standing aloof from the frenetic activity of the ‘world of dust’, the mountain remains a patient reminder of other, wilder perspectives – elevated, enlarged, expansive, eternal.
With honourable exceptions it was not until the advent of the Romantic movement that the European mind embarked on its love affair with the mountain. Previously they had commonly been regarded not with admiration and yearning but rather a blend of horror and suspicion, as ugly spoil heaps – residuum of creation, marring otherwise harmonious and benign vistas. In contrast the Chinese have always held a special regard for the sacred mountain, long identified as possessed of a powerful qi, 气 rising as it does toward the heavenly realm and so acting as a connecting conduit to the skies. Chinese painters and poets have long celebrated the ‘Shanshui’ 山水 (rivers and mountains), delighting in the endless beauty and poetry in their forms.
And over a millennia ago it was in China that the ancient Daoist mystics began to harness and concentrate the power of these vast landscapes within the perfect miniature world of the Gongshi 供石 (scholars rocks), the Penjing 盆景 (or tray landscape) and the Penzai 奔仔 : ancestor of the better known Japanese Bonsai tradition. Such small worlds were not merely ornamental, but meditative portals to the eternal Dao 道 : the way of nature – the emptiness underwriting the free and spontaneous expression of all beings. The cultivation of the miniature world was a magical act, invoking and cultivating the power of the imagination in the service of harmonising with the principle of Dao: part of an alchemical project to transform and refine the practitioners energy in order to live well and perhaps even attain immortality.
Small mountain wandering or drifting is a related if somewhat less ambitious endeavour. The magical and concentrated power expressed in the miniature is gathered and sequestered in hopes of a transformation in the imagination – that mysterious and immense force powering the human (and perhaps every) life-way. If successful, the wanderer can enter an alternate world, one usually unobserved in our haste for action and achievement. Having shrunk to the size of an ant, the wanderer can journey deep into mysterious and exquisitely beautiful micro-worlds which reveal themselves to be no less majestic and sublime than their macro cousins, for no lesser purpose than purposeless enjoyment and wonder.
Is this in the last analysis then a self-indulgent and escapist project? Perhaps to some degree it is and harmless enough it would be for that. But our current political and environmental crises are nothing if not a failure of personal and collective imagination. Understandable enough since the beneficiaries of any status quo are hardly likely to encourage the losers to suppose that the world might be arranged differently. So begins the war on the imagination. This is one of those areas where, loathe as we may be to do so, we can learn a great deal from children. Indeed the Laozi suggests (Chapter 55) that we might do well to cultivate a reprise of the simplicity and rawness of the uncarved block (pu 朴) as embodied explicitly in the child. Not only does this align with the activity and movement of Dao in Laozi’s view (Chapter 40), returning us to source and so preparing us for the next great transformation of death. It also allows us to utilise some of the phenomenally powerful engines for learning, integrating and consolidating knowledge and experience and for development characteristic of the healthy child.
We may eschew such territory since it remains associated with some more troublesome aspects of childhood which we are eager to put behind us. But developing capacities to shift perspectives of scale more easily and effectively allows us to think more clearly about our situation, both individually and collectively and so perhaps arrive at more informed choices that may be made holistically and within an appreciation of wider context. Unless one is to become lost in the parallel micro-universe, one must be able to zoom out radically too. Armed with enhanced capacity to zoom out, we can zoom out further still in our imagination and so navigate our lives and our surroundings with reference to a higher perspective. Thus is the capacity of spatial travel strengthened and with it the powers of the personal imagination, ones found in abundance by the child with her riches of curiosity and wonder, (and her sheer proximity to the ground) but progressively atrophied by her induction into a workaday world of instrumental values which has little time for idling and for dreaming.
Such is the stuff of a worthy manifesto but let’s not forget – wandering is precisely the absence of any conscious goal or destination – purposelessness par excellence. In response to the hectoring critic who begs to know the “social function”, I answer that there need be none. As much as anything this is a playful and purposeless activity devoid of goals which is its own fulfilment. Paradoxically there is of course usefulness in this uselessness in that it lights, like all art, a beacon for something radically outside of our current instrumentalizing paradigm.
So I commend that you do as William Blake suggests and attend the minute particulars. Small mountain wandering won’t add to your carbon footprint or dent your wallet, there are no queues at the summits of these peaks and thus far, no fatalities. No special abilities are required besides a willingness to loosen the constraints of perspectival chauvinism. So dig out the hiking boots and the magnifying glass and let’s wander ‘far and unfettered’. Untold treasures await…