The Book Called Thibet

44 the minnesota review David James The Book Called Thibet Imagine all things that you desire as horns growing on your head. If you meditate in this way you will see a light like that of an emerald. Guru Nagarjuna It is said that in the foothills an old man was found, starving and almost dead with cold. He was taken to the nearest village, wrapped in blankets, and hot tea was forced between his lips. But all attempts to revive him failed and he died in the night. Before he became silent forever, he murmured a few words, which the people who found him turned into a song. It has long been forgotten and only the refrain remains: In the morning we see your footsteps In the dew on the grass And in the evening your shadow Strides over the cold rocks Thibet, Thibet, oh when Will we see your face? Like all narratives, The Book Called Thibet is about change. But in it time runs in reverse and the closer you get to the end, the younger the characters become until in their youth they walk down the slopes of the last chapter, through the foothills and eventually as dawn is breaking they come to the edge of a wide valley. As the sun burns the mist from the river, The Book is closed. They hear children laughing and they see themselves leaving the small villages to go to their work in the fields. Most readers find The Book Called Thibet initially perplexing since the Tibet it seems to invoke is so different from the land we now know. The fine hotels overlooking the ski slopes, the mixed drinks, the regular airline connections to the fashionable capitals of the world, and the limousines to downtown are conspicuously absent, as indeed are the native girls waiting in the bar. Even those readers who recognize that their historical moment insistently defines them as tourists rather than travellers are, in their search for the land above the clouds where the windblown James 45 snow stretches in a flat line as far as the eye can see, disconcerted by the absence from The Book of stores where they can buy film for their automatic, self-focussing cameras. The images, now peaceful, now terrific, seem to jump up, alive before your eyes, to crowd on you like ghosts and to engrave themselves mercilessly into the bottom of your subconscious so as to haunt your dreams as well. You would think that the painters have by some wizardry conjured up living fires and driven them into their work, and that these could float out of the walls, force their way into your soul and take possession of it by a magic spell. The religious spirit underlying those works is worlds apart from our own. Those are visions evoked with primordial fire from the pit of a soul who had no eyes for anything but mystery and the darkness of abysmal depths, by a people still bent on chaos, on the indiscriminate bottom of things whence evil and good, hell and heaven, the lustful will to live and death's withering wings leap up still firmly clinging to each other. On one side the smile of Lord Buddha, suggesting unruffled peace and triumph over the conflicting opposites of life—on the other side, or rather side by side with it, the sneer of the demon reflected in the senseless turmoil of the human subconscious. —Tucci "People explain Aretha to each other, each feeling that he hears something that nobody else does." So they do with The Book Called Thibet. Many of the sections of The Book Called Thibet are prefixed with the phrase, "It is said that. . . " This disclaimer may be merely a convention, a literary trope characteristic of the period in which it was transcribed, but nevertheless the relocation of final authority from itself to some previous source is entirely appropriate to the fact that The Book does not speak; rather it is spoken. In the manner of a copper bell, a telephone, a flute, or the reeds by the side of a small lake high in the windswept mountains , The Book itself is...