A section of the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rockies, seen west of Cochrane, Alta.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Amal Alhomsi is the author of Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies.
In the journals of James Monroe Thorington, an early American explorer who ventured into the Canadian Rockies, there is an entry about a sunset that Thorington described using what are perhaps some of the most common phrases found in mountaineering literature. Thorington was passing through Icefield Parkway, a series of mountains and glaciers that connect Banff and Jasper, two of Canada’s most popular national parks, when he lifted his head and saw slanting lines of light colouring the remote peaks. He took his journal out and desperately attempted to record with words what his eyes hoped to hold forever. Thorington, after some creative effort, wrote of the scene: “beyond all words: no description does justice.”
There is no shortage of imagery in Thorington’s journals. He writes of rough horses, heather-carpeted meadows, men with axes, and smoke-like trees that lace the forests – but when faced with the mountains, Thorington lowers his gaze like a shy lover, or a pious monk. In his journals, the mountains are always far, vague, shapeless, “ethereal and baffling,” “momentary illusions.” They are presences that appear with “a subtle mystery,” where form is “denied by space,” making the very idea of mountains “exasperating and trying to the imagination.” To Thorington, mountains were “things that one wanted to see and could not.”
Among the numerous early writings on Banff National Park, Thorington’s was perhaps the most descriptive and prolific, but his inability to speak about the mountains was not unique to him. James Outram, another pioneer of the Canadian Rockies, wrote helplessly when arriving at Lake Louise, “words fail to conjure up the glories.” Ralph Connor, an early visitor to the park, left behind these words: “There are no words to paint these peaks.” Morley Roberts, returning from a trip to Banff, denied the mountains altogether: “They were not real. I, or someone else, had imagined them.” While reading mountaineering literature, one is left with the impression that terrain was not the only thing early mountaineers had to discover; they also had to find a language for that terrain. Writing about mountains was a more trying endeavour than climbing them, an embarrassing problem considering that mountains are the sole subject of mountaineer writing. It is difficult to imagine those helpless explorers who – after a day of pushing against gravity and gravel, over pinnacles and precipices, proud, pleased, fulfilled – fail to push the limits of a language that can be gathered in a dictionary lighter than a shoe.
The issue is not restricted to the American or European mountaineers. Across cultures and histories we find that the same rhetoric prevails. In the 7th century, a well-known poem from the Manyoshu, the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry, speaks of the Japanese mountains as such: “It baffles the tongue, it cannot be named/It is a god mysterious.” And in the Puranas, ancient works of Hindu mythology, the religious text is only able to describe the Himalayas as indescribable: “I could not describe to you the glories of Himachal.” Throughout different traditions, mountains were seen as unsayable landscapes, as unfathomable presences, but what causes such ineffability? What is it about a mountain that immobilizes language?
Mount Fuji seen from Lake Kawaguchiko, Fujikawaguchiko, Japan.Carlos Perez Gallardo/Reuters
The late Japanese critic Sanari Kentaro explains that “the reason why there are curiously few fine poems in Japanese or Chinese, or fine paintings about Fuji, is that the subject is too overpoweringly splendid.” What Kentaro means by splendid is what we typically call “the sublime.” The sublime is something that we find simultaneously within and outside of ourselves. It is a word we give to things that inspire both beauty and terror, both desire and revulsion. The sublime is something we can conceive, but never in its entirety. Like light that we see but never hold. That is why the sublime has always manifested itself in ideas of deities who are distant yet close, invisible and real, loving and vengeful.
However, although God has most vividly played the role of the sublime, He is by no means alone in the designation. Alongside the gods, and just as mysterious and unattainable, there have always been two other subjects equally revered. Nowhere in literature do writers become inept except when describing gods, mountains and love. Which is why, if we were to believe the English critic and poet I.A. Richards’s claim that metaphors blur our conception of different terms into a singular idea, we find divinities as mountains, mountains as divinities, love as a god, and gods that are all loving.
Mount Rundle of the Rocky Mountains, along the Trans Canada Highway.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Almost every single major religion began on top of some mountain. Moses received his Commandments on Mount Sinai; Jesus delivered his sermon on a mountain and overcame the devil on another; Muhammad was spoken to on Mount Hira; the Greeks built an abode for their gods on Mount Olympus; Odin dwells on a high hill called Hlidskjalf; Buddhists know the Himalayas as the home of their gods; and the Stoney people of the Bow Valley sought the peaks for divine visions. Humans have always tethered their gods to the heavens above, and mountains are the closest things we have to reaching them. Mountains are the meeting places between mortals and gods; we ascend, and they descend. Mountains, unlike meadows and rivers, force us to look up – a practice we reserve for praying.
When comparing religious texts, love letters and mountaineering literature, we find that the divine, the lover and the mountain share the same designation in the language of the speaker. Thorington wrote that the mountains “can never mean to the reader quite what they mean to those who took part of them. You must go yourself to comprehend.” Pope Francis echoes the sentiment when preaching that “God is a mystery that cannot be understood, but only encountered and lived.” The influential Chinese poet Du Fu wrote, “With what can I compare the Great Peak [of Mount Tai]?” The Quran similarly tells us that “there is nothing comparable to [Allah].” In the Book of Psalms, the verses sing: “I look up to the mountains – where does my help come from?” Poet Percy Shelley sings: “I look on high; Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl’d.” To the Stoney people of Treaty 7, or what we today call the area around Banff, mountains functioned as tabernacles.
In his book These Mountains Are Our Sacred Places, the late Nakoda-Wesley Chief John Snow attests to the spiritual significance of the Canadian Rockies to their first inhabiters: “These mountains are our temples, our sanctuaries, and our resting places. They are a place of hope, a place of vision, a very special and holy place where the Great Spirit speaks with us. Therefore, these mountains are our sacred places.” Most notably, the most quoted words in mountaineering history resemble a Christ-like answer. When asked why he wanted to ascend Mount Everest, George Leigh Mallory replied, “Because it’s there.” Isaac Rosenfeld, in an article for the Times, commented on Mallory’s answer that “the distinguishing characteristic of Mallory’s words is that they are primarily religious in nature: their exact equivalent in meaning is to be found in the sacred writings of the Hindus, in our own Holy Bible, and no doubt in similar texts. In the Sanskrit it is written, Tat tvam asi, which means, ‘That Thou art’; and the Lord says to Moses, ‘I am that I am.’ All three statements are alike in being ontological – they make the assertion of existence, that it is … Mallory was speaking the language of theology.”
Last October, while climbing the Tower of Babel over Moraine Lake, Alberta’s most famous lake and the face of the old Canadian $20 bill, I was startled by a nearly naked man dangling from the ridge of the mountain who began playing the flute to the sun as it rose. When I questioned him about why he would risk his life on a rope to play the flute, he responded, “I can’t just disrespect the sun and have it rise without greeting it.” He, however, vehemently denied any religious affiliations and told me that he never prayed in his life – but the sun, like Moses’s burning bush, demanded worship.
I have lived in Banff National Park for six years, and to this day I find it difficult to distinguish the climbers I encounter from the Sufi monks that I grew up around in Syria. Ascetic and reclusive, both groups desire nothing more but a merging with the beloved, or, in extreme cases, a death by it. To Shakespeare’s Juliet, a life away from her lover is “the horrible conceit of death and night.” Love is often seen as sappy precisely because it is. Both sad and happy, Juliet finds joy in her love and tragedy in its unfulfilment. Love, like God, promises us nothing less than eternal grief or eternal joy, a bargain we never question as ridiculous. And if we compare Thorington’s journals with that of other writers’ love confessions, we find a striking similarity. Richard Steele wrote to Mary Scurlock: “Methinks I could write a volume to you: but all the language on earth would fail in saying how much, and with what disinterest passion, I am ever yours.” Anais Nin wrote to Henry Miller: “All the mountains of words, writings, quotations have sundered.” Dylan Thomas wrote to Pamela Johnson: “There is torture in words, torture in their linking and spelling, in the snail of their course on stolen paper, in their sound that the four winds double, and in my knowledge of their inadequacy. With a priggish weight on the end, the sentence falls. All sentences fall …”
It is somewhat alarming to witness our greatest poets fumble for words when writing of love, our learned priests unable to translate the divine, and our experienced mountaineers unprepared to overcome a flat sentence. Why are we unable to speak about God and love and mountains?
One answer, which I am unwilling to defend, is that the ineptitude is deliberate. Yahweh, whose name Jewish people avoid writing, commands the Israelites in Exodus, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing.” When we speak about something, we kill its essence – we morph it from an eternal idea to a rigid image. In his book Sacred Mountains of the World, Edwin Bernbaum explains that we are drawn to the sublime because it is “something that remains mysterious even when we are in its presence.” Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani wrote to his wife, “If I stand before your beauty silently, then silence in the face of beauty is beautiful. Our words in love will kill our love, for letters die when they are spoken.”
Who would want to believe in love the way they believe in gravity? The thrill is in the mystery, in the uncertainty. We stand in silence in front of mountains because we wish them to remain unaltered by sentences that fall – otherwise, we would easily speak of them the way we speak of the universe that holds them. So we choose silence, because silence, perhaps, is the most eloquent form of worship.