The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage
The last tourist has disappeared around a bend in the road and I can finally breathe for a moment. Sometimes there are simply too many people – and here in the Giant Mountains, this is doubly true. I sit on a coarse-grained granite boulder between the Czech Republic and Poland and try not to think about anything. My back is leaning against another boulder, similarly large and rough, covered on one side with lichen, a geographical mapmaker. It is the mapmakers who are responsible for the bluish-green hue of the local rocks and stone seas, visible to the naked eye from great distances. Behold, the color of eating.
Below me, landscapes I don't know spread out, distances drowned in a bluish haze and somewhere beyond them the Baltic Sea, lakes in the taiga, the Arctic Circle, nights without nights, days without days, salmon and selkies and the fleeting transformations of people into polar bears, arctic foxes, belugas, icebergs. The sun stands high and burns the back of my neck and face. The sun that never stands still. But I don't mind. Today I welcome such attention.
After a long moment, I pick up the binoculars and try to guess the nearby mountains – Dívčí and Múžské kameny, Vysoké kolo, Jizerské Smrk with the lookout tower. I relive impressions of the grave silence that I experienced exactly a year ago on the Jizera Pytlácké kameny, the hazy cobalt cloud that covered the peak of Smruk, the peat bogs and springs silent like shadows under a stone, now watch out, hobbits, or you will go down to the dead and light your own swishes.
Sometimes a stray breeze blows into the surrounding meadow, it hums like a swarm of bees swaying in bliss. A kestrel flies through the stark, white-burnt sky. The loudest sound: the thump of Gore-Tex soles on stones, the clink of plastic buckles and metal zippers on backpacks, the mechanical female voice of the navigation system running, music from a mobile phone. When this subsides for a moment: the buzzing of thousands of butterflies and flies, here and there a rare mountain grasshopper or locust in the grass and fruiting blueberry bushes. There are surprisingly few planes flying over here, let's praise the silence in the skies.
I try not to think about anything, but I still think about something all the time. About my son (Is he resting right now? Is he about to let Mole go?). About the feeling of my own unanchoring in human patterns, which are never just human. About Ukraine torn apart by war. About the language that war has silenced. That it has stolen for itself. About the fires in Canada and the Mediterranean. But most of all, forgive the fish in me, about the water.
From the moment I got off the bus in Pec pod Sněžkou to head up the crowded ridge of the Giant Mountains via Obří důl, water has been my company: I am climbing, she is descending, but we share the same path, Heraclitus is nodding. Water from hundreds of springs rushes over paths and stone walkways, streaks form ribbons, ribbons deepen ravines in dust and clay, ground stones. A distant waterfall fills a wide valley with a white noise, which at first I consider to be a spruce tree in the wind (half dead, half alive). The water here has so many forms and voices, it foams in so many different positions that there is no point in trying to find a concise description. It is concise to be (here).
Water, the future sea, which is decreasing year by year, whose voice changes due to drought, but also due to human intervention. What would the Úpa River sound like today if it weren't for the fact that wood was once floated down it? A single stone can change the tone of a stream. What will a weir or dam do to the voice of flowing water?
Up here, in front of all the dams and reservoirs, the water flows and finds its own way. I tune in to that ease. I want to walk through the world just as easily.
I put my ear to the ground to listen to the whispering gurgle of a moss-lined stream, the drops flowing through the mossy tangle. I scoop water into my cupped hands and let it fall back to the ground, slapping into the dust. I dip my palms in the water, pour it over my arms, the back of my neck, wash my face and drink, gulping it thirstily with my mouth, through every pore, every dying and reborn cell. I am like a sponge that turns the moisture into the determined fire of walking.
The Giant Mountains have never been my mountains (I am a lowland, pelvic creature), but I understand their water, the future sea.
The fellow travelers I have been patiently waiting for, while they are climbing from the Polish side, from the glacial lakes of Wielki and Maly Staw, finally arrive, warm embraces, a reunion under the blazing star. They are said to have slept in the forest near Karpacz and at night the Czech side was flashing wildly, but the rain did not come. The mountains there form a monumental wall, it is a must see. We set off and talk as we walk. Soon, because thoughts have no fixed channels here, no artificial conduit, they just spring up and merge fleetingly into something, we end up with the pre-Socratics and the Tao Te Ching.
In the evening we spend the night in a mountain hut, where the sound of the spring flowing under the windows enters the room through the open window. Is it possible to escape the water here?
Water springs from the mountain. From the water, dreams arise. From dreams, a new world is born.
A warm morning, no wind. Dewy grass, recently mowed and raked into piles resembling anthills. Cows chew their cud in the meadow, the fence ticking. I photograph the gliding light of dawn as it flows along the slopes of Luční hora, climbing to Kozí hřbety. A buttercup flies into my frame.
A week later I sit at home, mountains in my mind, details long since blurred. Two nights in a row I dreamt about mountains. They were and were not the Krkonoše Mountains. In the second dream I encounter a fast mountain river flowing uphill, over rocky ground. Whose dream was it?
Early in the morning we set off in the direction of the Snowy Pits. That palpable silence on the ridge, where I am one of the first people-non-people that morning. Silence like in the mountains in the morning. From the kneeling position, I catch the movement peripherally, a kind of stocky black and white bird flies out, then immediately disintegrates again, illusion and smoke. Maybe it was a magpie, maybe not. I think of shy grouse, shifting territories covered by human geography, bluish edges.
I can hear human voices hundreds of meters away. No shouting or shouting, just normal speech. It makes you think about every little sound you make with your movement, every step you take on the bell-shaped body of the mountain, every breath that is too sharp or too light, every swaying of your knees. But the quieter you try to be, the worse it gets, there's no escape from this cycle.
To play the tympanum of the world by walking, to get a little entangled with each other.
Walking is harmony, a dynamic interplay of dynamic competing bodies. By being here, am I developing something greater than my own life – a hyperobject of tenderness? Are there limits to union? All they say is that you only need to stroke a cat, purr (with it), and that vibration will unite us in music, in the Sun. But what do I know? I am just a person who was never just a person, a future sea, a howling ocean.
Joy and terror in a single caress. Maybe our bodies will penetrate and it won't be pleasant. Maybe we'll influence each other. Maybe we won't be able to do without each other anymore.
A lonely grasshopper chirps in the grass. A lonely locust chirps on a stone. As if loneliness were possible in this world.
We become entangled, me and the crooked world, without which I am nothing.
Those who relate tenderly to the inhuman co-create a world where the inhuman does not exist. outside human: a world where Man, who was never just man, finally died. Like Nietzsche's emptied God.
Don't forget the alarm clocks in my lap, I make a mental note as I walk, I keep a notebook or my mobile phone in my pocket, I don't want to waste this moment in words. They are so careful and inconspicuous, as soon as they appear, they dive headlong into the needles again, they don't sit still for a while, the monsters, but I can't forget them. Like other birds at this time of year (the second half of August), they don't sing, but that doesn't mean they are silent - a whistle here, a whistle there, a single pure-blooded tone that is never pure, but frayed and trembling. My mere presence draws me into a tangle of bird conversations, the real content of which is a mystery to me, just like my own life in the body of the Earth. Something is happening. Something is happening to me/us. Something is growing through us.
A numerous flock of curves flies from the Czech Republic to Poland and back, followed by a curve of numerous voices, like pine cones falling or popping. They have no such beautiful parrots anywhere. A sentence that none of us, an eternal pity, uttered.
The movement that most often describes human life: Again and again we arrive at the same thing, but each time with a different readiness, from a different perspective or immersion angle. Here again it strikes me that one must surrender to the world. Not to bend it to one's will, but to be able to adapt to the world, to bend oneself, to stoop if necessary.
No threats. No violence.
There is no single path that can be imposed on the world. Streams and brooks merge into rivers: it is impossible to say exactly when they begin to be rivers. And it is equally impossible to say where the boundaries of the individual (individual?) seas into which they creep are.
I saw streams straightened into long lines, shallow, stale and murky. Drained fields. Highways with nowhere to cross, which rumble for miles. Half-mined mountains. Deserted villages, moved churches and towns, flooded valleys. And I saw that it could be the other way around.
I look back, but I don't see anyone. I've gained an advantage over the others. There's so much I'd like to tell others, so much I'd like to hear. But secretly I long for the silence that I don't have in my everyday life, even though I don't know what to do with it, what to open it to. Every now and then I stop at a boulder or rockery, with a heavy backpack on my back I kneel down by lichens whose names I don't know, and I search their creeping patterns with my eyes: there are maps of thousands of unexplored worlds, one at every step, there is no human map with which to navigate this diversity. If I were a chameleon or a cuttlefish, I would take on their patterns, and, pressed against the stone, disappear into the color transitions, the bluish edges. But I'm just a person who is never just a person, and I have no choice but to tune in and be eaten by what feeds me at the same time.
I know I should wait, but it drives me on, up the bare stone flank of the High Wheel. I climb quickly, with a wide mountaineer's stride and soft jumps. Somewhere there I see two kestrels chasing away a young hawk, it's a game and at the same time it's not, the claws and beaks are real, sharp as the equatorial sun. He is persistent, the hawk, but after enduring several falcon attacks he leaves the scene, the path ahead of me is clear, the stone path curves around the mountain, the sky above it.
The world slips (flows!) through our fingers – and that’s a good thing. Thanks to that, we know that it’s still okay. It’s always too wide, too shaggy and mottled, too curled up in the blueness of its own edges. Our response to this elusiveness should not be to tighten our grip, but rather to loosen it. To loosen the screws of control, to be able to give up control at the right moment and to accept that the world is ambiguous and unpredictable, in other words, wild, and therefore just as unique.
Everything here is inviting and dangerous at the same time. Slippery stone, tumbling in the spring. Wet rocks glistening in the scorching sun. In every reflection, a slip unfolds, a fall into the depths, a last gasp for breath.
Contradiction is the manifestation of the beauty of the world, that which establishes and enables its beauty: the contradiction of life growing out of death, bleeding, and horror, the contradiction of water giving and taking life (because it is pliable, because it is powerful). Does not the Sun, caught between the forces of collapse and expansion, also radiate the same contradiction?
The rhythm of the mountains is different. It forces us to turn over our shoulders not with fear, but with trust in the uncontrollable, in anticipation of being immersed in the arms of something great.
Finally I reach the Snowy Pits, where I look into the depths and observe the little birds that live above that height without dizziness, but my stomach sways a little at the railing, the dark water below. There are surprisingly few people here, who are never just people, who all live in the bodies of countless others. How different it was in the saddle under Sněžka, which I honored by not climbing it.
Is it possible to exist without violence? Is it even a manifestation of violence when I pick a cherry, blueberry, rowanberry, or mulberry? Does it make sense to ask this question?
We direct our steps where they are needed. For example, into the mountains. For example, into the mouth of a volcano. We think that it is our own decision; where and where I will go, whether alone or in a group, is something that grows out of my well-recognized, concentrated, neatly measured self. But if I am never just a human being, if human history is never just human, but also corn, apple, nutmeg, humpback, and so on, isn't it rather that the mountains decided with me, that the mountains offered me the way, pulled me onto it?
When I long for the mountains, who actually does?
A raven sits among the heather flowers, partially hidden behind a gentle undulation of the terrain, and in the sky above it, seemingly out of nowhere, like so many things in this world, rolling rain clouds are slowly forming. Yesterday, the signs in the clouds could already be read that rain, thunder and lightning were coming, and now it is starting, like foam forming in a pot of boiling water and jumping eggs, yes, seemingly out of nowhere. I stand there for a while and wait, maybe my fellow travelers will run out, and I will at least say a quick goodbye, but no, I don't see them anywhere. So I set off on my journey, so that I can get down to Špindlerův Mlýn in time and hug my son as soon as possible.
I give the raven (is it a she or a he?) a nod and set off down the descending path to the Elbe Valley, only to turn off after a few paces to a spring that I can't resist. I greedily swallow the icy water, the future sea, the loose hair, the mountain itself. With each sip I wake up a little more: I, foolish me, slept the whole way.
When I set out again, the mountain goes with me, cavorting over the rocks, descending into the valley, winding its way down, searching for the best possible path, the best setting. I catch it silently watching the waterfall crashing against the stone steps, thinking of America or Canada, the great and majestic landscapes where this one would dissolve like a drop in the sea, of the winds that bring seeds and pollen to the mine from afar, of how the water from above irrigates and nourishes everything. I'm with her when she eagerly takes off her shoes and dips her tired and sore feet in the choppy current, puts them on and continues to the bus, sits on a numbered seat, the air conditioning only whispers intermittently, it can't be adjusted, and finally sets off, completely stunned by the sudden contraction of space, to Prague, in the metro she looks at her mobile phone with her head bowed, no different from the others, only more tanned by the sun, momentarily elated until it passes again, and she tries not to think about how easy it was up there, there by the bluish edges of the future sea.
All this happens so quickly that there is a strange split, a crack. The matter has moved, but the mind remains immersed elsewhere. I am still the soft body running on the rocks, the future sea, today's refreshment, the omella and gentian, a temporary shape in the background that was never the background. I am still the body that calls itself aha, so this is the world, all within reach and beyond, sometimes jagged, sometimes falling into the depths, sometimes soft as gray snow, here on the path and beyond it, in small veins, softly resonating, merging into an ever-maturing stream that eats through the rock as if it were a breadcrumb, the one who sucks and is sucked, the beast that bites, the being that is exposed. I am still that body, torn and lifted, aching in several places at once, moving and motionless, spinning in a circle of colorful feelings. I am still that body that is here and is not.
But everything settles down after a while, the mind wanders, the swirling mud settles briefly (before it is rearranged by a new upsurge), sadness is replaced by joy, another wave of harmony. Home! Back to my son and my sweetheart! Back in the wildest (both soft and difficult) love! Back to the spring!
Words are powerful, but they are ultimately just words. They do not have beaks strong enough to knock down a mighty mountain spruce. They do not emit the woody scent of cherry resin.
It is not a mistake to say that birdsong is music. It is a mistake to say that it is not.
The mistake is not to believe the bluish edges.