roll down the valley, ten hours of rain and the mountain lurks in the whiteout. But you can never forget it’s there. It’s one of Jung’s islands, massive all the way down to his seafloor of collective myths and memories, a weird and vast spirit symbol. The wood nymphs dart and twist and dance between the tree posts on its slopes, flashes of fire and spark silhouette them. I might see the same figures dancing in the Pollock, some trace of Swiss-born Jung, this mountain, my own Zermatt gazing.
the wind rips your cap away, draws the heat from your face and fingers, pull the very breath out of you. It’s close to 4k up and your lungs are tight, you can already feel that dizzy exuberance you remember from other high places, the opium of the upper atmosphere. This is how mountaineers step off mountains, every last bit of heat stolen from them, wind shrieking and hissing, drunk on the air mixture. I totter to a railing and look out at the foaming air below the cable car station, then run for the lift and the rock tunnels. It’s all Doctor Who research station passageways of steel doors and pipe coil, drips and icicles, bumps and groans from the wind beyond. I shelter in the observation restaurant, feeling queasy and jet-lagged and giddy as I chomp on my rosti.
of snow swirl and furling cloud, it only gives me glimpses of its sharp-cut faces. I’ve watched the weather track between the peaks for days, balcony sprawled, the snow bank ridges change from chalk to rose and black streaks break from the mist. This mountain’s a wonder-of-nature tease, a life’s work of gazing, from my five a.m. wake-up sprint to see it almost clear, just a fig leaf of vapour puff over the last nobble of stark, plate-spawned rock, to the late-afternoon black rains and full vanishing act. The mountain looks nothing like any picture or clip I’ve ever seen. No little box can capture it, no scrap of print or flicker. The mountain is cheek-slappingly mountainish, and like no other. I’d been here five minutes when I knew I’d have to return, sweet inestimable world this is, these time-spat scattered treasures.
in Uncharted 4, though I might have missed them in the jungle dash. I’d like to have seen one flutter and settle on Nate’s shoulder, tropic and big as your hand. But I suspect their flight pattern is too hard to render, the figure of eight drop and dart that sets them apart from birds. There are many things the games can’t give you, not even with the headset VR due out in October. Reasons still to head out into the physical world, to seek your own mountain and press a palm against the pressure-sprung plates of this Earth.
to be free? Free not to pay, say or do, free to be alone and without task and a-wandering? Free to bob on the oceans and end up hunched and fossilized by the trade winds over the formica table, plastic tubs of biscuits and the tang of whisky your reward for your dolphin driftings? What freedom is that, more than that longing to step out, run from things? All freedom fantasy is in shadowy contrast to the brash business of living. Freedom might lie in the glimpses and pauses? You can run or stay, there’s no way of knowing who is the greater fool.
at Aristotle, a spate of barge clouts and bridge-rammings I’ve seen this month, after the wild and whirling rains.
to your bones and to every asphalt crack and dimple on your lonesome night ride. Rain sighs through to dawn in a drip and gurgle symphony of gutter demon mockery.
jump me at the bike shed. In jungle alert primal mode I turn to the flash of green and violet on the lawn, but the brown Mallard is prowling on the roof behind me, Ghost and the Darkness style. It bats my helmet with a wing and joins its mate. Foiled by a duck. Why a duck right now, crashing my morning fumblings? Viaduct for deep water. Vy not a chicken? How will they get over the Victorian walls? It’s OK, they’re building a tunnel in the morning. Groucho is fresh on my mind, clear as the first time I saw the grainy black and whites, lost afternoons when the Yorkshire rain was too thick to get out in. Groucho in the crowded ship’s cabin, two perfect minutes pushing the impossible situation ever further…”Did you want a manicure?” “No, come on in.” And you see it in writers, the masters pushing the sense and power of a sentence, building to a great line and then adding even more. Melville’s lashed sea’s landlessness. All in a day’s work.
up on the guttering, as I ram the broomstick into the downpipe, trying to free the pine needle gloop. The junction springs loose and I have to fashion a hook from some door trim and lean out further, while the storm builds its charges. At the first dazzling strike I note my metal pole, a lunatic on the roof with his beckoning rod and each flash a crack in the sky. It can go too far, this caretaking lark. I pause and take stock, retreat for a mug of Monsooned Malabar.
but I’m a romantic. There’s a Portakabin polling booth up in the sports field, under a fine silver sky. Stout Brits are out walking their dogs, dropping in for their inalienable right. And I’m thinking of Marlowe…
What right had Caesar to the empery? Might first made kings…
and Machiavelli finding solace from exile in his study, wandering the corridors of the Library of the Dead.
