Saturday, February 8, 2014

This is Blue




The waves roll in nicely.  I should savor this view.  Wave after wave crashing and receding.  Shore birds racing along, pausing, digging.  The Pacific Ocean in malted blue, hints of yellow, depth of green.  This is not far from where perennial oceanic mirages have been sighted, up near Penglai, which we may not get to see today.  You just have to keep looking, long, broadly, 天空[1].  Was there really a sea serpent seen off Gloucester that stayed for days?  Was the sea serpent real in Iris Murdoch’s “The Sea, the Sea?”  Keep looking and eventually the motion can mesmerize you into seeing anything you like or need. 

We’ll be repulsed back to drier ground soon.  No crashing or rolling or much of any moving water at all, there.  Just a choice, to live where, despite whatever other benefits there may be, it is dry.  In New York, where I’m from, one can live a two-hour’s drive from the sea but it never feels this far.  Beijing’s aridity, the absence of any estuary, it is a completely different climate.

So many simultaneous expressions of movement out there in the sea.  It almost tempts you and your field of vision to take in as much of it as you can at any one moment.  Where does your brain stop?  With the crest of this wave, the roll of that new one forming?  Broader still white caps further out and crests further in, together for a single vertical line to the horizon.  Then gaze more broadly to try to render the breadth of your vision’s capacity and hold it all in at once, just for a moment.  Beguiling.  More so than watching all the people on a crowded street, or all the cars speed around from the top of a building.  The sea coordinates many, many more unfathomable discrete notes into a recondite musical expression. 



Wonderfully, one can never focus on all of the sea.  But it’s fun to try.  Invariably your eyes it seems must train in on something and then the rest is background.  Perhaps the exercise is to see two lines of activity at the two extreme goal posts of your visions breadth and try to hold those two pieces at once, and then feel the center move in spite of your trying not to let it pull you in by command.  But it doesn’t really work.  The oculus it seems, needs to zero in and identify something.  A small, new wave breaks in the middle and, in noticing, you are drawn to it, from the peripheries you’d set yourself to hold on.  How much motion can the brain conceive, at once?  I just tried it now with my younger daughter.  She’s not sure if it’s possible. I’m not either.

 I just went out from this sixth floor window on to the beach itself.  What to listen to?  Of course, Claude Debussy, “Le Mer.”  But is it on my iPod?  ‘tis.  I always think of porpoises when and the Mediterranean when I hear this elsewhere.  However, I just looked on line and Claude apparently wrote this when he was crossing the English Channel, which evokes more the evacuation of Dunkirk more than it does a dolphin dance.  But no matter, a sea’s a sea.  Azure, cobalt, turquoise, chalk, the vast watery brine circulates everywhere.  All the great oceans are connected.  All colors are possible.

Listening on the beach, the symphony, alas it began to sputter.   I thought, perhaps the data was damaged?  On to the symphony’s next movement.  Again?  Ahh.  The batteries in my noise-cancellation headsets are on the brink.  So much for the beachfront soundtrack. 

Later in the car, I played it for my gals.  Thrilled, they were, I assure you.  But this was the theme, how do you manage to have the whole sea rendered in music?  Everyone agreed, it is impossible.  But what could you do, what sounds could you make, if you had fifty or more instruments to command.  Imagine looking out broadly at the orchestra, one eyes edge to the others, and coordinating their sound.  I warned my little one that there would be a section soon, where sharks come.

Now, we are back in the car after seeing the famed “Penglai Pavilion.”  We made it after all.  It was cold.  It was rather expensive at a cool $60.00 for the family.  And, having entered it became clear that it was quite far off.  Still, no matter.  Baxian guohai, gexian shentong.  八仙海,个仙神通。(Eight immortals cross the sea, each one has a magic power.)  The grounds are probably stuffed to the gills in the summer.  We plodded along for a kilometer essentially by ourselves.  Up ahead, the famed outcropping  of temple towers set against the cliff bluff that had been imprinted in my mind when I’d done a Google Images search for “Penglai.”  The character “peng” in Penglai has quite few brush strokes for the assignation “simplified.”  I’ll have to look it up later, but it will be revealed to you in seconds. [2]  "fleabane?"  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penglai_Pavilion

 Entering the temple complex, my wife pays for joss sticks at the first temple we visit.  She and my daughter light them and walk around to pray.  My wife, I think probably witnessed her own mother do this at some point.  The first temple is a Buddhist temple and the second is Daoist shrine.  The temple to Gao Guan is arguably Confucian.  But incense is burned and kowtow offered at each alter, regardless.  Now my daughters learn this enigmatic solemnity from their mother.

At one plateau, my wife is, fortunately, prompted to enter a temple’s base building and view a movie about the mysterious, sporadic mirages that periodically appear out at the horizon and which I mentioned at this posting’s outset.  A film begins, showing their appearance from the prophetic year of 1988.  The mirages appear again in 2005.  I’m now resigned to seeing this, hokey though it may be.  I would have absolutely blown off the gruff tout, if I’d bumped into him first.  But my wife had already struck a deal.  I coughed up thirty yuan and we entered.  At least we were out of the wind.  And, there it was.  The mirage of 1988, from the time, when my wife carried my stepson in gestation, not far from here.  I enjoyed looking at the crowds of local people from that time, and seeing their cherubic faces and simple clothes, and remembering a China just emerging just about to test the limits.  http://paranormalportal.wordpress.com/2011/07/30/the-mirage-cities-of-penglai/

Finally, I passed through a door that said, “do not enter” and went up a flight of steps to a peak from which one could see the sea.  It was cold, fresh and stunning.  The tops of the temples and what I later learned was a lightening tower, all stood out before me on the corner.  And everywhere was the sea.  Rolling in, crashing.  I’m a simpleton perhaps, but I loved to stand there and imagine Qin Shi Huang occupying the same ground.  Reckoning with something he couldn’t master, perhaps for the first time in his life.



I found Penglai somehow and extreme manifestation of oceanic China.  The sea dominates.  It’s the end of an enormous continental protrusion and thrusts out ot the sea.  The lore exclusively concerns engagement with the sea:  immortals who set out, pirates who landed and rulers who sought to bend it to his will.  The sea, the sea.

And then my kids were very, very cold.  And it was a race back to the car. My younger one and I chatted long the way about cold.  Thoughts turned to Jack London and the short story from the Klondike where the hapless, frozen trekker tries to light a fire with his last match sitting beneath a pine tree.  The fire lights.  He carefully tends it.  It grows.  He is saved.  Then, the snow above, from the pine branches melts and falls down into his fire with a clump, dousing it.  And listening to the hiss of the fire gone, it dawns on him, that he is doomed.

I was glad to say that my younger daughter wouldn’t leave it at that.  “Just rub some sticks.”  “He should just keep walking.”  “Look for another match.”  I reckoned that this quality, this “there must be a way” would probably stay her well, and encouraged it.  She’s related to my daddy, I believe. 

Now it’s the G18, back to Weifang, back to The Farrington.  It’s pleasant countryside, yellow, dry winter mostly, but vineyards and apple orchards and mountains and, well, yes, quite a few towns.  Let me ask you something:  Have you ever heard of Laizhou?  Well, with a gun pointed to my head our ago I would have absolutely come up short.  But have a look at the map, on the road, the G18, between Penglai and Weifang.  It’s a secondary town, along the coast.  There must be nearly 1M people.  Town after town, after town with incredibly dense packing of humanity.  People, everywhere.  Traditional villages, that extend on and on and on, after every kilometer.  Every person, waiting for their ticket to a high rise.  Every town, waiting to be destroyed.   This endless roadside density explains how this peninsula can have more people than Germany.

One more night and day left on our journey through my wife’s home province, which should really be understood as a country.  Shandong.  Mighty, mighty, Shandong Province. 




[1] hǎikuòtiānkōng:  wide sea and sky (idiom); boundless open vistas / the whole wide world / chatting about everything under the sun.
[2] péng:  fleabane (family Asteraceae) / disheveled / classifier for luxuriant plants, smoke, ashes, campfires: clump, puff

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