Departure, with all the propulsion of mandatory exile; with mighty winds of resentment, shame, and insanity to fill my sails, and with gravity’s pull from the infinite hurtling me towards senseless mysteries in pointless directions. Sudden shove from the stagnation of inebriation, of chemical and familial embrace; pull towards the far sides of horizons with all the blistering urgency of their setting suns. Escape from the labyrinth and the minotaur, a plunge headlong into this shivering abyss of self, devoid of the life blood of others, the shine of their eyes all turning away from my own transfixed in a gaze of Rasputin intensity. Terrifying bolts of in-sight awaken those feels long tucked in disgraced slumber, in dark folds of pessimism and misanthropy and dread, in that blackened embrace whose periscope peers out beyond all desire of exploring…. Farewell to the degradation of misery’s slow drip, to the slow poisoning of days!
“We have left the land and taken to our ship! We have burned more bridges – more, we have burned our land behind us! Now, little ship, take care! The ocean lies all around you…there will be times that you know it is infinite and there is nothing more terrible than infinity. -Nietzsche
* * *
The vapid spaces across Tennessee and the eastern Ozarks are best traversed by twilight, and the solemn hills of the Mark Twain National Forest should be navigated by the confessional silence of night. The chapped and dusty maw of Nebraska will open with a sigh at dawn and allow your vessel passage, and only with sun overhead should the shade-shifting geometrics of eastern Wyoming’s adobe canals be piloted, passing the continental divide in a diagonal drive toward holy elevations. And yet those first days on the road are marked by a sleepless stupor of pills and booze, leaving me with scant memory worth recording. Still, who wants to read five- or six-pages worth of which roads lead to the others, and what colors were all the sad little towns, and how many the cows were in that thirty-mile pasture past Cheyenne, or what the temperature was on Tuesday October-whenever, or a tiresome recitation of some white man’s history of westward-ho? What’s more, I just can’t stand to gloat and boast and bloat on Kerouacian descriptions from On the Road to Dr. Sax, which still inspire, but also, upon a recent re-reading of Dharma Bums, have left me wishing he had spent a little less time describing what he saw on his adventures, and a little more time describing how he saw. And so, from here on out about my meandering adventures across the West, it is my intention to recount to you how I saw and felt and remembered, from the inside looking out, and as that out looked back at me, in that free-ranging lyricism of Kerouac, from the precision theory of Baudrillard’s high-velocity encounter with his “Astral America,” to the suffocating heights of Cioran’s despair, and the perpetual motion of becoming: becoming-coyote, becoming-tumble weed, becoming-90mph across a thousand plateaus; becoming Deleuze in free-fall—in a final line of flight. In the following pages, you will find traces of style, theme, and theory in erratic zig-zag from one thought to the next, in spontaneous choreography against the gravity of pages where the lines and anxieties of influence converge, repel, multiply and, ultimately dissolve back into a literary flux of intersecting flows. “All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage… when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work.”[i] This assemblage celebrates no one writer in particular, but for those who do show up, I wish to honor their weary souls (hard to imagine the life-long person of letters not suffering chronic insomnia, even in the after-life) by investigating and incorporating some element—poetic, philosophical, experimental, rhetorical--distinct to their genre and worldview and as a carnivalesque reminder that “the Literary”, the book, is an internal act of artistic and ethical responsibility, “exist[ing] through the outside and on the outside.”[ii] Time on the road seems to accelerate once I hit Wyoming—dwindling with the rising flame of anxious anticipation in the shadow of the grandest of all the Grand Tetons and the promise of a stranger who assures me he is experienced enough to belay[1] me while I lead us to its summit. These National Parks curse and bless those lone and lonesome pilgrims who come in a silent seeking of unintrusive communion with the land: providing roads and trails to such theatrical sights that would otherwise require many dangerous miles of hiking-in while simultaneously inviting crowds by the millions and expanding their infrastructure to accommodate such exponential numbers. Supposedly it’s all for the sake of preventing greedy and (in the case of a park as hazardous as The Grand Teton) reckless developers from turning them into shit-shows of theme parks and parking lots… protecting these once pristine places now swarming with fleets of RVs, gift shops, grubby kids with littering fingers and junk food parents who can’t step out of their minivans to another scenic overlook without a wheeze, and little-dick rangers with rifles over shoulders cocked to gun down a curious grizzly ‘too damn stubborn’ to keep from swiping all the little-debbies and oscar myer hoo-hoos outta camp four, these places where without the constant croaks of lost sandals and boasts of a moose ass ogled back at the campground, a terrifying silence would fall on all those hairy greasy ears dripping wax and everyone would go running and screaming to fill it: The National Parks as hot beds of pollution where the polluters come to practice on each other and where the humble beasts and the indifferent evergreens and mountain passes and the wind run directionless across it all.
The Rock Climber’s Guide to Projected-Thrownness-Toward-the-End or, How I Hung With Heidegger
Highway 287 takes me through one-story towns along the Wind River Range with all the impatience of a zipping 80mph speed limit turned 50. Normally I’d rejoice in this chance to slow it down and really have a good look at these unseen surroundings with all the sleepy-eyed reverence of the desert tortoise knowing of no speed other than the one he is capable of traveling, but on this day, I am possessed by visions of fearsome craggy ridges and the thin air of high winds that flush such diversions from my mind. Instead, I’m driven by a state of mortal fear, “an Anxiety in the face of death, in the face of that potentiality-for-being”[iii] which I first experienced at Texas Canyon, a sport climbing[2] crag in the high desert of southern California where my climbing career began four years ago. I fear air travel for a lack of control I face every time I board a plane; I’m afraid of hiking through a forest alone in the springtime as visions of disemboweled bear-maulings get my guts churning with every blind turn into the thickening bush. These Anxieties, however, concern the potentiality of death from afar, from unlikely distances of low-probability and low risk, whereas high risk marks the intentional acceleration of a being’s thrownness towards-the-end, an engagement with a pursuit in which death is confronted most proximally. This Heideggerian anxiety I faced on those early climbs was debilitating: legs shaking uncontrollably, skewing balance in a blind reach for a handhold my fingers could barely reach, friends on the ground a few Pabst Blue Ribbons deep laughing at me? at who? …puny paranoia like the swat of a pesky gnat in the face of this mounting fear most certain, most thoroughly convincing me that, rope or no rope, “draws”[3] or no draws, a fall means death. Stuck there in it and with me as my ownmost, I see my death happening and me being the only person capable of preventing it or experiencing it.... I am immobilized by this death-vision, this pre-vision of my botching the next clip fifteen feet above and careening to my death some gruesome eighty feet below…. But wait, I’ve clipped five bolted protection points already; it’d be damn near impossible for them all to blow out and send me in a so-long swan-dive to the ground, this flash of reason promptly overcome by nauseating death-visions of that very dive. In that moment of free-fall, or falling free of the potentiality-for-Being—whether it’s met by a safe soft catch from the belayer or resulting in an unlikely death—that mortal fear inflamed with the potentiality of death’s vision evaporates, leaving only reflexive tensions in the body, an involuntary mindless reaction void of all thought and vision. The rock climber’s fear, from K2 to the climbing gym, is not a fear of death, but a fear of the possibility of death played out in the persistence of death-visions which vanish in the final falling-towards-death.
As this mortal fear born of latent death visions, on crag or in the alpine, is never present in an immediate and imminent falling-towards-death, and since this falling is easily avoided with enough precaution, the climber seeks a personal glory in pursuing greater heights with higher and higher risks along a razor’s edge ridgeline or the underside of a rock roof 500ft above the ground. Submerged in a sunrise cloud reaching toward the summit’s throne, the climber’s looming visions of death serve to confirm and extend a potentiality-for-Being: Illumination of spirit through reckless acceleration of fallen thrownness; the over-coming of the immediate possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there. Intimate proximity to Dasein in the embrace of that Anxiety which “reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped.”[iv]
Transcendent Futility
Slow dawn at Lupine Meadows parking lot exposes empyrean heights to the west, displacing all of yesterday’s terrors with lofty visions of exposed Exum Ridge traverses. The months in preparation of this day have been made possible by a strict chemical diet, and getting out of the bed in the morning has required at least 70mg of Vyvanse and large amounts of caffeine. Only thoughts of the possibility of standing atop The Grand, my most glorious feat of futility, and the understanding that such a feat will be impossible treading afloat in my chemical vortex, have been enough to curtail my intake of pills and booze. But my mornings now remain deeply obfuscated by their absence, and it takes two hours of embarrassed fumbling through all my gear before the creeping haze of amphetamine, booze and 30 hours on the road fades with the sun crawling over the Bridger-Teton National Forest. We’re ready to hit the trail. Just a year ago in late July, against the foreboding backdrop of a pandemic maturing into an apocalypse, Dad and I held our breath on capacity flights from Birmingham to Nashville to Denver to cram ourselves into a discount rental clown car and make that great insane triangular traverse across Wyoming, climbing the Durrance Route up that colossal petrified tree stump also known as Devil’s Tower, and then taking the same trail that I find myself on today: One year gone by on a maddening attempt on the South Teton’s Northwest Couloir.
You can’t step into the same river twice and expect to experience the identical a posteriori experience: “potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei.” Or “On those stepping into rivers staying the same, other and other waters flow.”[v]But what’s rarely mentioned in subsequent interpretations and criticisms of Heraclitus’ fragment is the undeniable change in the psychological outlook of the induvial who returns to that same river each week, each month, or some years later. The uncanny passage of time, forged through present insight into, and memory of stepping into the river, is almost always “cinematically” skewed by our anticipation of returning to the river. True, Heraclitus, you staunch materialist you, we can never cross the same river twice. But what really happens to the mind when we wade, year after year, into the same river?
Last year, I traveled the same roads with my father to the Grand Teton Nation Park, crossed the same bridges and bodies of water, but now the scars of memory along the way blur, not so much with empirical changes in the color of the sky or with the disturbing shrinkage of glaciers, or with the influx of visitors, but rather with my seat in the theater, in the cab of my pick-up, as I yearn to create a continuity out of every false sameness of road and trail revisited. Who’s to say there is any rational, let alone material, validation behind The Weeping Philosopher’s fragment of the river: "All entities move and nothing remains still" and "Everything changes and nothing remains still ... and ... you cannot step twice into the same stream”[vi]? After all, just as we can never remain permanently anchored to our own beliefs, we tend to confirm Parmenides’ claim that "whatever is is, and what is not cannot be.” It seems that what is best taken away from these ancient philosophers is the very process of skepticism, even as our persistence of vision consolidates a tragic sense of life. When the rare topic of philosophy came up back home in Alabama, I would always emphasize that I was a Process Philosopher, a philosopher of Becoming as opposed to Being, feeling very sure of myself, quoting the likes of Heraclitus, Bergson, and Heidegger, but if there’s one epiphany I have come to (or which has come to me) over my travels, it’s that the continental divides of philosophy and ideology are the shifting and merging shadows of the deep grays and blinding vistas of the Wind River canyons, of the Teton sublime. We are in nature given to the constant pursuit of an incessant shift, to and fro, positrons of skepticism, neutral only in so far as we are subjective and existential, given to packs of unnecessary gear left back at base camp as we assault a path buried in snow 10,000 years before us, but slick as melted ice today.
Dad and I plopped down on a dry scattering of rocks and agreed that no summit could be reached at that time of the day. Dad: “I’m sorry, but I think this’ll be my last climb. I’m getting too old for this shit.” It was a foresight which has, for the most part, remained true to this day, but sitting there sucking whatever bits of oxygen we could find from the tenuous air of 11,000ft just below the Lower Saddle connecting the Middle to the South, a roaring hunger gnawed through all the sadness and guilt I felt for needing him to lure me onwards and upwards into the jaws of those Teton skylines, voracious as ice-age bluebirds. Against my father’s urging that I go on without him (a claim typically honest, but subversive), I pried myself from the spell of something wild and unknown and glorious that must be waiting for me on the tops of those peaks, and I made a silent descent with Dad, solemn with the vow that I would return to find whatever it was we left up there, void and plangent with wonder.
***
Gradual switchbacks, carved for a mile or more into the Teton foothills, direct casual day-hikers and ultra-light car-to-car climbers to Amphitheater Lake or Lupine Meadows at a leisurely pace. Hundreds of those jolly pink faces pass us by every five minutes or so as I pause to double over, throw the weight of my pack off my spindly legs and up onto my sagging shoulders. I turn to Ryan busy looking at something on his phone, “Dude, go on ahead without me… I’ll catch up to you at the meadows…” Without looking up from his phone, he replies, “Naw. We stay together.” To this point I have yet to get a good read on the guy. Outwardly, he’s been kind and considerate, but unlike most folks I’m getting to know for the first time, and for whom I find little difficulty peering past their veils of civility into the belligerence of redneck bigotry, Machiavellian greed, or cancel-cultural hypocrisy, I simply could not see past Ryan’s social front, fortified, I would later learn, by six or seven years in the Army and a couple combat tours of the Middle East. But in spite of (or because of) the “No man left behind” tattooed on his amygdala, it takes a decent enough person to hike six miles and 6,000 vertical feet at a snail’s pace just to keep within ear/eye-shot of some drug-withdrawin’ Alabamian cussing and sucking wind well behind him. Official evaluation: this J. Ryan dude is okay by me.
Those brutal switchbacks break off left at a fork opposite Amphitheater Lake trail in a big flat and sweeping straightaway exposing phenomenal views of Bradley Lake with an undefiled ripple reminding me of childhood trips to Ponce De Leon Springs where, despite ongoing immersion of human-pollution and the material pollution of humans, waters shone hyaline and indifferent. Past the lake, switchbacks return at a mellow grade, and I can finally catch my breath as they lead us into a Garnett Canyon of shimmering-granite boulder. Hopping over and alongside the babbling runoff from the Middle Teton Glacier, I can’t help remembering Kerouac and Snyder’s boulder-hopping Zen practice at the base of Matterhorn Peak in the Sierra Nevada’s:
“The secret of this kind of climbing,’ said Japhy, ‘is like Zen. Don’t think. Just dance along. It’s the easiest thing in the world, easier than walking on flat ground which is monotonous. The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you never hesitate and you find yourself on some other boulder you picked out for no special reason at all, just like Zen,’ Which it was.” … “Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can’t fall when you get in the rhythm of the dance.”[vii]
But, if you can’t manage Snyder’s mystic boulder-hopping routine (a practice I lost years ago) it’s easy to do yourself some serious danger: dangers that lurk in and about those miles of crumbled mountain tops where the breakneck verticality of those summits overhead and the occasional low flying cloud whizzing by between them can stumble a person straight into a break-leg chasm of twenty ton boulders and a pricey chopper view of the Tetons mocking him all the way to Saint John’s Hospital where the commiserate cries of snap-legged backcountry skiers, concussed mountain bikers, and perhaps a pancaked skydiver or two may his foolhardy outcome, having never so much as strapped on a harness at the foot of the mountain. On the descent from a successful ascent of a peak, I run down trails, surf a scree-covered hillside with 150-lb rocks rolling by underfoot, and pull a “Japhy Ryder” over boulder fields with reckless abandon. But on every approach to the start of a big climb, I tip-toe along with second/third-thoughts of each foot placement, for there is no thoughtless Zen experience, there is no moment to live in, only crazed previsions of mountain moments to come and the obsessive attention to safety that might save the following day.
Lupine Meadows: the final oasis before those dagger spires of high alpine lean in closer overhead and you find the white void of glaciers old as time tucked all snugly between their upper reaches. I gaze up the sheer east face of the Middle Teton with as much anxious anticipation for it as it has none for me. I’m rapidly approaching an aphasia born of exhaustion; too tired and too dry to drool all over the beauty that surrounds me. Jay, the stoic, leads my eyes with his to another set of switchbacks across the meadow carved in acute angles steeper and more grueling than before. He signals our departure with a toothy little laugh and a long, forced commiserative sigh before leading us up past a little lonesome patch of trees dangling off the edge of Spalding Falls: the last outcropping of vegetation we’d see for the next two days.
Moraine Meadows (elevation 10,200ft): a climber’s camping retreat beneath the lower saddle which is exposed to nasty weather from all angles, and, as in my case, serves as a pause to acclimatize for a “13er” (climber lingo for a thirteen-thousand-foot mountain). But, as the name of this area accurately suggests, there is plenty more boulder hopping and dancing to be done just to find a campsite tucked away from the worst of the wind, and as we dance along our way, I try to see past my bookish understanding of mountain formings and crumblings and to bare witness to the astonishing “true appearance” of it all.
Husserl claims that adequate intuition “clears up confusion and gives us the thing itself,”[viii] a phenomenon that can be better understood in opposition to inadequate intuition:“In an inadequate representation, we merely think that something appears so; in adequate presentation we look at the matter itself, and are for the first time, acquainted with its full selfhood.”[ix] I experience this adequate intuition fully and suddenly as an immense boulder (no more than chunks of alpine flesh dislodged from the body of a receding glacier) breaks loose midway up the west side of the Middle Teton, where ice meets rock, and comes hurtling down the glacier gathering speed and snow to culminate in an explosion of earth and ice some 100 yards from where Jay and I stand. You certainly don’t have to risk your ass climbing one to become acquainted with the full selfhood of a mountain, nor must this acquaintance be made at the foot of a Himalayan avalanche. But to bare witness to what we believe or perceive as inanimate: the stillness of a forest on windless day, the smooth current of a river, the picturesque memory of a family farm; to be animated by an abrupt and unforeseeable change: a tree fallen against high winds, the bridge to home submerged by the flash flooding of that same low and lazy river, or to return to a childhood farm in ruins, and everything about it gray and diminished… to experience such animate changes against the perceived stillness of the world is to behold, if even for a moment, truth, what is often so absent in spectacle or the public display of what’s real. It is “a specific kind of experience, one in which how the thing appears expresses itself”[x] even as it passes away, or passes through you. All this is to say that I find truth within my ruthless, truthless quest for it, in an experiential drive to summit my own confidence in negotiating the world, to find truth in its essential uncertainty, its risk. This trip is a damnably truthless endeavor, and yet, as hard as I try to avoid the toils of truth-seeking, there is just no turning a blind eye to it when a chunk of a mountain the size of a Smart Car plummets in violent explosion next-to-where-I- stand. Withstanding, life is inextricable from experience, and truth an ever-present, annihilating essence of experience.
Jay makes his bedroll of no more than a sleeping bag encased in 8’ by 12’ Wal-Mart-blue tarp “staked” to the ground by a couple armfuls of ten-pound rocks. He carries on about the virtues of the blue-tarp-bivy[4]: its lightness, cheapness, packability, and “effectability” in below-freezing temps… even snow! He gets it all laid out and tucks himself in for an afternoon until morning? snooze while I’m still fumbling around with fancy-shmancy Outdoor Research bivy (more like a one-man, four- season tent) bought especially for this outing. It’s mighty hard for a cold-hearted man to get sleep below 20 degrees Fahrenheit and within winds that could pick me up and drop me off somewhere in the middle of Alaska. My thoughts are jumbled up from fatigue, altitude sickness…the absence of maximum doses of speed tempered by a 12-pack-a-day diet… and so I’m glad Jay has tucked his face down under his bivy as I fumble with my gear, struggling to give my mummy bag that bright orange liner I’ll need to give me an extra 20 degrees of warmth. I go on to sorting out climbing gear for our big climb, spending ten minutes plotting out how this sorting might go down, then sorting out where I’d put my sort piles before finally compiling the first pile of hardware: cams, nuts, tricams, hexes, locking ‘biners, straight gate non-lockers, ATC (Air Traffic Controller) for belaying, GriGri, also for belaying but auto-blocking unlike ATC, PAS or Personal Anchor System with locking ‘biner and single quickdraw for extension, prusik or length of cordellete?? for backing up rappels, and extras of just about everything; followed by pile of protection—6 quickdraws, 8 alpine draws (two non-locking straight gates clipped to one single-length sling with one running through the other for shortening and ease of stowing), 4 double length slings for anchors to be stowed crisscross over shoulders, 1 twenty-foot length of cordellete? tied in loop with double-fisherman’s knot to be used for 3-piece anchors, Metolius Equalizer—also for three-piece anchors, and 1, 7mm x 30ft length of cordelette? for emergency purposes—into a second pile, followed by essentials—60m dynamic rope, rock shoes, and old beat up helmet into third and final pile. If you find yourself a good ways up a mountain and need to bail because of weather or because the route is harder than you can manage and you left your ATC at camp, chances are you’ll be making that embarrassing emergency rescue call if you have the right cell coverage, if not you’ll have to dangle there until another party comes up and helps you out. Either way you’re stuck there for at least 5-10 hours. There is wisdom and glory to be found even in an early bail (or descent) but only a sorry-assed alpinist puts himself and his partner in danger when he’s well enough experienced not to. So, when I finish sorting and triple sorting our our gear, I’m relieved to believe I’ve left nothing behind. I go ahead and stow it all neat and tidy in my rucksack, ready for an early morning start.
Bibliography
[1] Rock climbing technique where the non-climbing party feeds the rope through a device that creates enough friction to prevent the lead climber from hitting the ground if they fall. [2] A form of rock climbing that may rely on permanent anchors (as opposed to traditional climbing protection) fixed to the rock for protection, in which a rope that is attached to the climber is clipped into the anchors to arrest a fall. [3] Quick-draw, piece of rock-climbing equipment used in sport climbing to connect the rope to bolted protection on the rock. [4] Bivouac, or “Bivy Sack”, a weather-proof cover for a sleeping bag with a breathing hole.
[i]Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2004. Print. [ii] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2004. Print. [iii] Heidegger, Martin, John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson. Being and Time. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1962. Print. [iv] Heidegger, Martin, John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson. Being and Time. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1962. Print [v] Heraclitus, James Hillman, and Brooks Haxton. Fragments. Penguin Classics, 2003. Print [vi] Plato. Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet. Oxford University Press. 1903. [vii] Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1976. Print. [viii] Engelland, Chad. Phenomenology. The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, 2020. Print. [ix] Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, 318. [x] Engelland, Chad. Phenomenology. The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, 2020. Print.
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