'I had written in substance that in the mythic tradition the Mountain is the bond between Earth and Sky. Its solitary summit reaches the sphere of eternity, and its base spreads out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. In this the way by which man can raise himself to the divine, and by which the divine reveals itself to man. The patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament behold the Lord face-to-face in high places. For Moses it was Mount Sinai and Mount Nebo; in the New Testament it is the Mount of Olives and Golgotha. I went so far as to discover this ancient symbol of the mountain the pyramidal constructions of Egypt and Chaldea. Turning to the Aryans, I recalled those obscure legends of the Vedas in which the Soma--the "nectar" which is the "seed of immortality"--is said to reside in its luminous and subtle form "within the mountain."'
'...Enter Heaven on feet of clay. Was not this the same endeavor as that of the builders of the Tower of Babel, who, without renouncing their many personal ambitions, aspired to attain the kingdom of the one eternal Being?'
'After having surveyed the best-known mythologies, I went on to a general discussion of symbols, which I divided into two classes: those subject to the law of "proportion," and those subject to the law of "scale" as well. This distinction has often been made. Nevertheless I shall restate it: "proportion" concerns the relations between dimensions of a structure, "scale" the relations between these dimensions and those of the human body. An equilateral triangle, symbol of the Trinity, has exactly the same value no matter what its dimensions; it has no "scale." On the other hand, consider an exact model of a cathedral a few inches in height. This object will always convey, through its shape and proportions, the intellectual meaning of the original structure, even if some details have to be examined under a magnifying glass. But it will no longer produce anything like the same emotion or the same response: it is no longer "to scale." And what defines the scale of the ultimate symbolic mountain--the one I propose to call Mount Analogue--is its inaccessibility to ordinary human approaches. Now, Sinai, Nebo, and Olympus have long since become what mountaineers call "cow pastures"; and even the highest peaks of the Himalayas are no longer considered inaccessible today. All these summits have therefore lost their analogical importance. The symbol has had to take refuge in totally mythical mountains, such as Mount Meru of the Hindus. But, to take this one example, if Meru has no geographical location, it loses its persuasive significance as a way uniting Earth and Heaven, it can still represent the center or axis of our planetary system, but no longer the means whereby man can attain it.'
'For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue, I concluded, its summit must be inaccessible but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The door to the invisible must be visible.'
'
A diagram of a plant cell, Mendeleieff's periodic table of the elements, a key to Chinese writing, a cross-section of the human heart, Lorentz's transformation formulae, each planet and its characteristics, fossil remains of the horse species in series, Mayan hieroglyphics, economic and demographic statistics, musical phrases, samples of the principal plant and animal families, crystal specimens, the ground plan of the Great Pyramid, brain diagrams, logistic equations, phonetic charts of the sounds employed in all languages, maps, genealogies, everything in short which would fill the brain of a twentieth-century Pico della Mirandola.'
'All of us keep a fairly extensive collection of such diagrams and inscriptions in our heads; and we have the illusion we are "thinking" the loftiest scientific and philosophical thoughts when, by chance, a few of them fall into a pattern which seems neither too conventional nor too novel. It happens as if by the effect of drafts or cross currents or simply by the result of their own constant shiftings, like the Brownian movement, which displaces particles suspended in a liquid. Here, all this material was visibly outside of us; we could not confuse it with ourselves. As a garland is hung from hooks, we hung our conversation on these little images and each of us could see the mechanism of the other's mind and of his own with equal clarity.
As in all his outward appearance, there was in this man's manner of thinking a singular combination of vigorous maturity and the freshness of a child. But above all, just as I was aware of the action of his restless and untiring legs, I was also aware of his thinking, like a force as palpable as heat or light or wind. This force seemed to consist in an exceptional faculty for seeing ideas as external objects and for establishing new links between ideas which appeared totally unrelated. I heard him--I'd be prepared to say I saw him--treat human history as a problem in descriptive geometry, then a moment later speak of the properties of numbers in terms of zoological species. The fusion and division of cells became a particular instance of logical reasoning, and language obeyed the same laws as celestial mechanics.'
'Life dealt with me a little the way an organism treats a foreign body: it was obviously trying to either encyst me or to expel me, and for my own part I yearned for 'something else.' After a time I believed I had found that 'something else' in religion I entered a monastery, a very strange one. Its name and location make little difference, but, to say the least, it belonged to a distinctly heretical order.'
'ROUGH-HEWN WITH BABY BLUE EYES'
'THE SOFT PILLOW OF DOUBT'
'My son,' he concluded, 'I see that there is in you an incurable need to understand, which must prevent you from remaining in this house. We will pray God to call you to him by other paths.'
'In the whole show there's nothing but mystery and error. Where one ends, the other begins.'
'WHEN YOU WAKE UP YOU'RE DEAD'
Still, a voice remains which is not completely muffled and which cries out every so often--every time its gag is loosened by an unexpected jolt in the routine. The voice cries out its great questioning of everything, but we stifle it again right away. We already understand each other a little. I can admit to you that I fear death. Not what we imagine about death, that fear itself is imaginary. And not my death as it will be set down with a date in the public records. But that death I suffer every moment, the death of that voice which, out of the depths of my childhood, keeps questioning me as it does you: 'Who am I?' Everything in and around us seems to conspire to strangle it once and for all. Whenever that voice is silent--and it doesn't speak often--I'm an empty body, a perambulating carcass. I'm afraid that one day it will fall silent forever or that it will speak too late--as in your story about the flies: when you wake up, you're dead."
'Experience has proved, I told myself, that a man cannot reach truth directly, nor all by himself. An intermediary has to be present, a force still human in certain respects, yet transcending humanity in others. Somewhere on our Earth this superior form of humanity must exist, and not utterly out of reach. In that case shouldn't all my efforts be directed toward discovering it? Even if, in spite of my certainty, I were the victim of a monstrous illusion, I should lose nothing in the attempt. Apart from this hope, all life lacked meaning for me.'
'But with all of them it came down to the same dilemma: maybe yes, maybe no.'
'I had thought of examining myself like a transparent foreign body, I should have discovered one of the laws which governs the behavior of "featherless bipeds unequipped to conceive the number π"-- Father Sogol's definition of the species to which he, you, and I belong. This law might be termed: inner resonance to influences nearest at hands. The guides on Mount Analogue, who explained it to me later, called it simply the chameleon law.'
'Moreover she is the only true painter of high mountains that I know. she understands that the view one has from a high peak is not registered in the same perceptive range as a still life or an ordinary landscape. Her paintings admirably express the circular structure of space in the upper regions. She does not consider herself an artist. She paints simply to "have a souvenir" of her ascents. But she does it in such a work-like manner that her pictures, with their curved perspective, vividly recall those frescoes in which the old religious painters tried to represent the concentric circles of the celestial universe.'
'Benito Cicoria, about thirty, a ladies' tailor in Paris. Small, stylish, and devotee of Hegel.'
'The analogy becomes a bit too crude now, so let's put it aside. However, I imagine you know that a body does in fact exercise a repellent action of this kind of rays of light which pass close to it. This fact, predicted by Einstein, was verified by the astronomers Eddington and Crommelin on March 30, 1919, during a solar eclipse. They established that a star can be still visible even when, in relation to us, it has passed behind the solar disk. Doubtless this deviation is minute. But may there not exist unknown substances--unknown for this very reason in fact--capable of creating around them a much stronger curvature of space? It must be so, for it is the only possible explanation for our ignorance of the existence of Mount Analogue down to the present day.'
'WE'RE SMEARED TO THE ELBOWS WITH HONEY'
'THE NEVE'S ALREADY TURNED YELLOW,
IT'S ALREADY RAINING PEBBLES'
'AND YOU STARE TWO PACES INTO SOLID WHITE'
'The path to our highest desires often lies through the undesirable'
'In any logical sequence of division or progression, you will run into the same phenomenon. That's why we're constantly mistaking accident for substance, effect for cause, means for end, our ship for a permanent habitation, our bodies or our minds for ourselves, and ourselves for something eternal.'
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'At high altitudes,' he said, 'there's no place for the fantastic, because reality itself is more marvelous than anything man could imagine. Could anyone dream up a gnome or a giant or a hydra or a catoblepas to rival the terrifying power and mystery of a glacier, the tiniest little glacier? For glaciers are living creatures; their substance renews itself in an unfailing periodic process.'
'The glacier is an organized being, with a head or neve through which it gulps snow and rock debris, a head well separated from the rest of its body by the rimaye, or crevasse; then an enormous stomach in which snow is transformed into ice, a stomach riddled with crevasses and internal passages for expelling excess water; and, in its lower portions, it secretes its wastes in the form of moraine. Its life follows the cycle of the seasons. It sleeps in winter and comes to life in the spring with deep creakings and boomings. Certain glaciers even reproduce themselves, by means which are little more rudimentary than those of unicellular beings--either by conjunction and fusion, or by division which gives birth to what are called regenerate glaciers.
'I suspect,' He replied, " that what you're giving us there is a metaphysical definition of life not a scientific one. Living beings nourish themselves by chemical means, whereas the mass of a glacier is maintained by physical and mechanical processes: freezing and melting, compression and churning.
'That's all very true,' He answered. 'But you scientists who study crystallizable viruses, for example, in hopes of finding the intermediate stages between the physical and the chemical and between the chemical and the biological, you could learn a great deal from observing glaciers. Perhaps nature made them in a first attempt to create living beings by exclusively physical processes.'
'Perhaps," He said. 'Perhaps has no meaning for me. What remains certain is that a glacier contains no carbon, and that therefore it cannot be an organic substance.'
He interrupted, 'Either way, he is right about our reactions to mountains. Victor Hugo, coming down from the Rigi, which even in his day was considered very high, remarked that the view of the world from high peaks does such violence to our visual habits that the natural takes on the appearance of the supernatural. He even asserted that the average human mind cannot bear such a wrenching of its perceptions, and that was his explanation for the large number of mental cases in mountainous country.'
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My commentary which is neither here nor there, as this writing above is about specific things, which I do not know in the way that the writer composed it. So it may not be faithful to the writers understanding, but it is just my ideas, which was evoked by hearing and writing the above as a task, word by word. So my commentary, will be an attempt to put into words what I derived personally from the story, with the Work that the writer engaged in and what I myself know about scripture.
Mo and Ho is the divided form of “Homo”, which is the latin word for “Man”. Man, in this story taken as a full embodiment of harmonious function and harmonious segregation, a whole that is no longer divided against itself. In the gospel, Yeshua says, “A kingdom divided can not stand…” and in another place he says, “If your eye is single your whole body will be full of light… but if it is evil it will be full of darkness,” evil taken here as a point to division and separation. On the second day, God did not say it was good — division, although necessity, creates friction and suffering, as the dichotomy between the two finds its character or expression in the existence of its opposite. Undoubtedly, like a form seeing its reflection, it is drawn into what is its likeness in relation to something else. And what assumes after is a dual condition of yes and no, or that which affirms and that which denies… that which acts/moves and that which reflects/reposes/repels.
So you have a ground for conflict, suffering, and friction. But like the tree of knowledge of good and evil, growth only takes place when such a dichotomy exists, as there is no growth without context of “i” or “It” in relation to something else. And this dichotomy in man exists, because for anything to be truly whole and compete, there must be inner agreement, made perfect through a medium of exchanges, since a change from one side can not truly be a possibility without a change in the other. Growth must take place from both ends of the spectrum — or else fullness is an impossibility, since the product that is fullness, is an vertical element which is developed, nourished, and expanded, based on the developmental process taking place between the two.
Young Ho and Mo are twins, functions of different characterizations in a man in question marks. Young Mo deals with theories, it deals with the map, the concepts. It can know of a way, but it can only intellectualize that way — imagine about it, which is not the same as walking it — and trapped in the voids and emptiness which comes with the trappings of having knowledge introduced into you that is not yet your own. In the gospel, before the rich young ruler could follow Yeshua he had to give away all he had accumulated in this world, this was referring to the philosophizing and mindsets that come with the education that this world imposes upon the mind, it’s limitations and its failings. That part of us becomes an Hollow-man, or has always been one, only know that we try, do we realize the predicament of our organic nature. Young Mo, on the other hand, has the boat, the practicality. Knows the motions, and through the work, has made his intellectual voids have real form — and now with his mind and body, he can now obtain a real conscience, and live in a state of consciousness towards his own inner workings and manifestations.
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LONG EXPECTATION OF THE UNKNOWN LESSENS THE FINAL EFFECT OF SURPRISE.
PERADAM
There is found here rarely on the lower slopes and more frequently as one ascends, a clear and extremely hard stone, spherical and of variable size. It is a true crystal and--an extraordinary instance entirely unknown elser on this planet--a curved crystal. In the French spoken here, this stone is called peradam. He is still puzzled by the formation and the root meaning of the word. It may mean, as he sees it "harder than diamond," as is very much the case, or else "father of diamond." And some say that diamond is in reality the product of the disintegration of paradam by a sort of squaring of the circle or more exactly cubing of the sphere. OR else the word may mean "Adam's Stone," and have had some secret and profound role in determining the nature of man. This stone is so perfectly transparent and its index of refraction so close to that of air, in spite of the crystal's great density, that the inexperienced eye barely perceives it. But to any person who seeks it with sincerity and out of true need, it reveals itself by a brilliant sparkle like that of a dewdrop.
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In the beginning the Sphere and the Tetrahedron were united in a single inconceivable Form: Concentration and Expansion mysteriously fused in a single Will, which willed only its own being.
There came a separation, but the Unique remains unique.
The Sphere became primordial Man, who, wishing to realize separately all his desires and possibilities, scattered himself into all the animal species and men of today.
The Tetrahedron became the primordial Plant, which likewise engendered all plants.
Animals, closed away from exterior space, hollow themselves out and ramify internally, developing lungs, intestines, and other organs to receive nourishment, conserve energy, and sustain life. Plants, spreading out into space, ramify externally in order to penetrate their nourishment with roots and leaves.
A few of their descendants wavered, or tried to belong to both camps. They became the animal-plants which populate the seas.
Man received breath, and the light of understanding; he alone received this light. He wished to see his light and delight in its changing shapes. He was driven out by the force of the One. He alone was driven out.
He went out then to people the lands Beyond, toiling, dividing against himself, and multiplying in the desire to see his own light and enjoy it.
Sometimes a man humbles himself in his heart, submits the visible to the power to see, and seeks to return to his source.
He seeks, he finds, and he returns to his source.
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This is how I sum up for myself what I wish to
convey to those who work here with me:
I am dead because I lack desire ;
I lack desire because I think I can possess ;
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing ;
Seeing you have nothing, you try to give of yourself ;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing ;
Seeing you are nothing you desire to become ;
In desiring to become, you begin to live.
