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Chapter 7: Conclusion: The
Empty Vessel
When the Dalai Lama
fled he took with him into exile the core of Tibet's
religious and governmental hierarchy, as well as thousands of ordinary
Tibetans. He left behind a geographical place that suddenly seemed
devoid of immediate spiritual significance for the West. While Western
nations were not completely indifferent to the fate of either the country
or
the 'divine' ruler and his government in exile, there was little urgency
about coming to the Tibetans' aid. This failure cannot be reduced solely
to
political expediency, timidity or caution. As we have seen, Tibet had been
embroiled in Western geopolitical struggles for over two centuries, yet at
the same time it was always representative of something else, something
compelling over and above political pragmatics. It was this erotic,
imaginative compulsion -- or fascination -- that suddenly all but disappeared during the late 1950s, when Tibet became dramatically emptied as
a symbolic vessel. By comparison with its fullness in the past, Tibet as a
place was left vacant of spiritual significance for Westerners -- except,
that
is, for a few devotees.
After 1959 Tibet
once again became closed to Western travelers; this time more firmly than
ever before. It lay behind what came to be called the 'bamboo curtain'.
Accounts of the rampant destruction of traditional Tibetan culture by extremist Red Guards filtered through to a West that, by
and large, was unheeding of Tibet's misery. Closed and despoiled, Tibet
seemed not only to have been emptied of symbolic significance, not just
physically emptied both by the exile of its religious hierarchy and the
wanton destruction of its ancient monasteries, but to have vanished, swallowed
up into China. The
symbolic vessel, so carefully prepared in Western fantasies for over two centuries, had itself been completely shattered
and dissolved.
Initially it is easy
to place total responsibility for this event on the Chinese communists,
who, having firmly sealed the southern and western boundaries of Tibet against the gaze of outsiders, then demolished not
only its monasteries but its national frontiers to the north and east.
Tibet's
symbolic power became diluted, contaminated and lost as the Chinese
invaded and subsequently colonized the country. But on the surface these
events, while extreme, were not so entirely different from those of the
past. Time and again Tibet had been drawn firmly back into the Chinese
Empire, had lost its power, had had its sovereignty diminished, and the
Dalai Lama had been forced to flee, yet it had still held its symbolic
'charge' for many Westerners. But when the Chinese invaded Tibet in
1959, that land was already an almost empty vessel. We have seen that it
was no longer a place of intense sacred power for the West. The transformation of Western fantasies within its boundaries had been completed,
and Tibet seemed to be no longer needed. Therefore the fracture of the
vessel, with the spillage and spoliation of its imaginal contents, should
not be blamed solely upon the Chinese. Such an event was already ripe,
already prepared for, from within the Western imagination itself.
Imaginal Containment
Alchemists
frequently illustrated their works with pictures of a transparent alembic, an alchemical vessel, a sealed jar, its bizarre contents
clearly
revealed locked together in a process of symbolic transformation. In these
illustrations, the alembic is often shown placed incongruously in the
middle of a busy street with people going about their everyday business,
apparently oblivious to the drama being enacted in their midst. [1]
The
whole history of Western imaginings on Tibet is encapsulated in this
image: in the relationship between symbol-containment and its wider
psychosocial context. The phenomenology of sacred place, which has
been the meta-image of this study, found expression in many striking
images, ranging in size from the whole of the immense country itself
down to the city of Lhasa, to the Potala palace, or even to just a
solitary
meditation cell. Within each of these imaginal vessels there occurred a
concentration of imaginative significance, intensity and power.
Within
each vessel a Western sense of the sacred, of both the mysterium tremendum and the simply mysterious
-- as well as anxieties,
paradoxes and
hopes -- were confined, condensed and transformed. But what of the
relationship between the contents of these vessels and the world outside?
In order to understand Tibet's sudden loss of compelling imaginative significance, its relative abandonment by Western fantasy-making, we need
to re-examine this process of symbol-containment, concentration and
contextualization.
From Mystery to
Museum
In chapter 2 it was
claimed that the late eighteenth century saw Europe on
the edge of a fundamental shift in its global fantasies, especially as
regards
nature. The expansive, relatively unbounded surface of the globe seemed
full of opportunities for the confident middle and upper classes of
Europe. Fascination went hand in hand with power. Such places as Tibet
began to represent -- and above all to encapsulate -- such qualities. Within
its vague boundaries were focused and concentrated many European
longings and aspirations. At the same time the natural world was starting
to feel safe for Europeans -- not just politically, but ontologically. Not
long
before Bogle and Turner's visits to the rugged mountains of Tibet, such
places were contemptuously shunned by educated people whilst evoking
deep unease, if not fear, in many others. However, neither of these late-eighteenth-century travelers revealed any signs of such attitudes.
We may recall the
Himalayan traveler, early in the nineteenth century,
who gazed into a mountain torrent:
Those who have brains and nerves to bear the frightful whirl, which
may assail the steadiest head, plant themselves on the bridge that
spans the torrent, and from this point survey the wild and awful
grandeur of the scene, struck with admiration at its terrific beauty,
yet, even while visions of horror float before them, unable to withdraw their gaze.
[2]
Or the early
Himalayan explorer Gerard, encountering a ravine: 'We could
scarcely view [the deep chasms] without shuddering. I never saw such a
horrid looking place ...'. [3] Giegrich astutely points out the
ontological shift revealed in such episodes. These wild places were no
longer a fearful window into an all-encompassing Being, but a relatively safe gaze
from the shores of an ontologically secure world into just that one thing.
Dangerous nature had become surrounded by safety; the unknown by the
known. Such views were islands of intensity, patches of savage
sublimity
surrounded by a relatively safe and comprehensible world. Similarly Tibet
gradually ceased to be a concentrated sign, or representative of the
earth's
mysterious powers, paradoxes and unlimited imaginal potential. Instead
it became set apart from the ordinary world. Its heightened imaginal
significance and mystery became counterposed to the comparative
knownness outside its borders.
It has also been
shown that the imaginative events taking place within
Tibet were themselves located within a much broader, global, context. By
the mid-nineteenth century virtually the entire globe had been basically
mapped. Instead of islands of geographical knowledge afloat on an
immense ocean of ignorance and speculation, there were now only a few
blank spaces surrounded by a global network of known coordinates and
contours. Tibet was one such blank space, one such unknown island, and
into these shrinking blank spaces were concentrated the last remaining
vestiges of Europe's primal relation to geographical unknownness, to
wilderness.
As we have seen,
this situation was subsequently followed, in the late
nineteenth century, by an overwhelming belief in the final and general
scientific comprehension of nature. The systematic theories of Darwin,
his colleagues and their followers seemed to offer a key to nature's last
secrets. Overall mystery was replaced by specific problems awaiting only
time, effort and technique for their ultimate solution. The vast open
spaces that lay protected within Tibet's boundaries no longer came to
exert
the ontological power they had held in earlier times. Although somewhat
unknown in terms of specific geographical, botanical, zoological and cultural features, they were considered virtually known and mapped in
terms of their ultimate comprehensibility.
We have seen that
this intellectual event was by no means an imaginally
negative one. It catalysed yet another revolution in Western landscape
aesthetics: the appreciation of wildernesses as places of complex beauty.
But on another level this aesthetic opening was achieved at the expense
and loss of a deep sense of mystery and awe towards natural landscape.
Indeed, many in the West, prompted by Ruskin and others, set about
aesthetically mapping the last unknown and previously ignored or
rejected landscapes of the earth. It was precisely at this time that the
symbolic power which had previously been spread throughout Tibet
became focused and concentrated into the city of Lhasa, and thence on to
the Potala palace. This process of imaginative concentration eventually
led to the isolated personage of the Dalai Lama becoming the embodiment not only of all Tibet's paradoxical mysteries and forces but of those
of the wider world. It was seen how many came to imagine him as one of
the last remaining vessels of ancient wisdom and occult power in an otherwise disenchanted world.
What then happened
to the rest of Tibet, to the immense spaces within the remainder of the
sacred place, now that signification had been focused so substantially
on to such a small vessel, a mere human frame? As we saw in the last
chapter, the land of Tibet gradually became either substantially
demythologized through social realism, political pragmatics and travel
rhetoric, or else contact was lost with its geographical actuality and
it became a vague location for heightened spiritual, or utopian,
reveries. Hilton's image of Shangri-La was a fitting conclusion to this
dual process of symbolic concentration and geographical abstraction.
In its lost, floating reality were concentrated all the qualities previously dispersed
throughout the whole of geographical Tibet. The intense cohesion of fin-de-siecle Tibet, as a sacred place, was now fragmented into isolated
points
of heightened imaginative significance: the Dalai Lama of course, but also
the yeti, Mount Everest, and remote mystic recluses. The boundaries of Tibet were no longer straining to contain the intense pressure of imaginative transformation;
no longer were the walls of the alchemical alembic
almost bursting under the heat and fullness of its contents. Tibet was no
longer the 'centre of the earth'; the 'global fire' was not to be found
there. [5]
While the boundaries of Tibet were still vibrant and special for travelers,
they simply located and positioned; they did not alchemically
contain.
The fantasy of
Shangri-La was the final chord in one line of imaginative
development. It literally had no-place (utopia) left to go. The 'conquest'
of
Mount Everest also meant that by 1953 these mountain summits had
ceased to be the untouched, mysterious preserve of the gods. The yeti, by
its very nature, lingers on in the twilight realm as either a curious
oddity
or an archetypal mythologem. By 1959 only the Dalai Lama and a handful
of high lamas remained with something approaching the sense of mysterious possibility previously contained within all of Tibet. Surrounding the
Dalai Lama was a land that, while still exciting and curiously different
for
Westerners, was ontologically similar to the world outside. Any mystery,
any sense of being outside time and space that it still possessed had more
the quality of a museum or tourist attraction than of a temenos or sacred
place.
Returning to the
image of the alchemical alembic located in the busy
market place, it can now be seen that in the case of Tibet the reality
inside
the vessel had become substantially the same as that in the world outside.
Whilst both inside and outside still contained their share of isolated
mysteries, symbols of imaginative power, corners for sacred reverie,
nevertheless a sense of everydayness had spread itself throughout both
spaces. [6]
Extremely esoteric
religious practices and powers, as exemplified by the
Dalai Lama, were the only bearer of Tibetan mysteriousness. Previously
Tibetan religion, as we have seen, had been embedded in its landscape;
consistently imagined as belonging to its place. By the middle of the twentieth century this position was almost completely reversed: it was not the
landscape that provided Western fantasies of Tibet and its religion with
coherence, but its esoteric religion that gave Tibet and its landscape
imaginative difference and significance. Even Tibetan religion as a whole
had ceased to be the object of fascination; now only the spiritual masters
and their most advanced techniques excited Western fantasies. [7]
So when the Chinese
communist army finally marched in force into
Lhasa in 1959, it entered a shell that was already substantially empty of
heightened, living, imaginative resonance for most Westerners. Indeed,
by expelling the final concentrated essence of Tibetan occult mystery and
authority in the form of the Dalai Lama and his ecclesiastical elite,
China
inadvertently seeded Western fantasy-making with what could prove a
whole new series of transformations in its imaginings about Tibet. Spiritually and psychologically, many in the West provided fertile ground for
these exiled Tibetan fantasies. But Tibet itself was left abandoned; a
broken shell significantly empty of imaginative resonance except,
perhaps, for a few echoes that grow fainter by the day, or as a memento mori, a sad reminder of loss. Western involvement in that country quickly
seemed like an old dream, almost forgotten. Very soon it hardly seemed
possible that the West had at one point seemed to belong in Tibet, to have
had an extraordinary relationship with that country. This sense of loss has
found one of its most poignant expressions in Harrer's account of his
return to Lhasa in 1985. The former tutor to the Dalai Lama, perhaps one
of the most widely read of modern writers on Tibet, paints a tragic and harrowing portrait of fear, loss and cultural destruction.
[8]
In chapter 6 it was
shown how Tibetan 'travel' writing could be usefully
considered in four groups, depending on its orientation: everyday life,
tourism, mystical religion, or utopianism. In the years after the Chinese
communist occupation each of these styles of approaching Tibet has
suffered mixed fortunes. Certainly, the fantasy of Tibet as a utopian society, a possible exemplary model for a West desperate and in decline, is
rarer than sightings of the yeti. Concern with everyday life in Tibetan
culture has, with the closure to Westerners of Tibet itself, received
abundant coverage by anthropologists working among Tibetan and related communities in the Himalayan regions (India, Nepal" Sikkim and
Bhutan). [9] The exile of high-ranking Tibetan lamas and the subsequent
establishment throughout the Western world of monastic and quasi-monastic communities, well stocked with teachers, instructors, sacred
texts and highly skilled translators, has undermined the traditional need
for Westerners to travel to the Himalayas to search for the truths offered
by
Tibetan Buddhism. Of course such journeys still occur, but with few
exceptions the accounts are cliched, unreflective survivals of a bygone
genre. [10]
Since the mid-1960s
tourism has boomed in the Himalayan regions of
India and Nepal -- particularly adventure tourism, usually low-budget
and involving trekking. Since 1980 Tibet too has been open, albeit in a
tentative and highly restricted way, to Western tourists. It has been estimated that in the centuries up to 1979 fewer than 1,250 Westerners ever
reached Lhasa, and 623 of these were with the 1904 Younghusband expedition. The last ten years have seen the influx of many thousands of
tourists, with China hoping for an even more dramatic increase in the
near future. [11] The literature of the popular, 'mass' adventure tourism has
had a profound influence on the shaping of contemporary images of
Tibetan landscape and culture. [12]
Tibetan Buddhism has
become a tourist attraction. Its monks, rituals,
monasteries and artifacts throughout the Himalayan region -- from Tibet
to Ladakh, Nepal to Darjeeling, Bhutan to Sikkim -- have become the
delight of photographers, trekkers and bargain-hunters. As we have seen,
the genesis of this phenomenon can be traced far back, to the second
half of the nineteenth century. However, despite the fears of some early
travelers, the region had never before been swamped by Western tourists. This
is a complex phenomenon with profound cultural and ecological repercussions: it is far more than simply a question of numbers. Earlier
tourists
viewed their 'sights' against the background of a coherent, 'other' world.
On the other hand,
in the contemporary era, tourist culture (literature,
images, etc.) has to an extraordinary extent created these 'places': the
expectations about them, their representations. The culture of Tibetan
Buddhism is instantaneously appealing, visually dramatic and suitably
archaic for packaged travel. Travel to these regions is now located within
a global smorgasbord of possible destinations, all of which are suitably
exotic. [13]
Places in Process
Nevertheless, as
this study has shown, the image of a sacred place standing in direct opposition to profane space, the one sharply delineated from
the other, is merely one possible movement, one extreme within a range
of less polarized imaginal possibilities. At the other extreme lies
totally
homogenized space, whether envisaged as entirely profane or as entirely
sacred. It seems unlikely that either of these possibilities has ever
existed
in its pure form. [14] However, in the case of Tibet, these extremes were
approximated on two occasions. Then the one seemed quickly to follow
the other: an intensive polarization between sacred and profane worlds,
with the hermetically sealed containment of the sacred, was superseded
almost immediately by diffusion and loss of imaginal concentration. This
dramatic reversal took place within the first half of the twentieth
century.
But even in these cases, the polarization was never complete except in the
fantasies of a few; the containment was never absolute, the threshold was
always porous; also, imaginal concentration was never totally diluted or
lost.
To focus exclusively
upon such extremes distorts the more complex
phenomenology of sacred space -- the fluidity of its boundaries; the shifts
and realignments of its crucial features; its transformations across time;
the often contradictory levels of fantasy-making (political and religious,
individual and social) sliding across each other, contradicting or reinforcing
each other. This study has also shown that the boundary of such a place
can be less of a narrow line drawn across time and space than a complex zone expressing an imaginal gradient. The axis mundi is less a fixed
reference point than a mobile, often pluralistic, series of symbols which
locate themselves according to a complex imaginal ecology that weaves
itself between the sacred place and its wider context. We have seen that
the region inside a sacred place is not necessarily imaginally separate
from
the demands of the world outside -- indeed, there can be continual
dialogue between the two spaces. This can be recognized without collapsing the one into the other, or sacrificing their relative autonomy.
[15] The
rich
and multitextured complexity of Tibet's story has also shown that geographical Otherness is rarely an imaginal unity. Rather, it is a
multiplicity
which echoes Jung's comment: 'The phenomenology of the psyche is so
colorful, so variegated in form and meaning, that we cannot possibly
reflect all its riches in one mirror.' [16]
Imaginal coherence
should not be confused with fantasies of wholeness
or unity. This imaginal archaeology of Tibet has revealed a diversity of
images of European Otherness. There has been a historical sequence of
'Tibets', each related yet also separate, each corresponding both to historical circumstances and also to a kind of internal mythological necessity,
an imaginal momentum. We have also seen that at any one time each of these
big 'Tibets' was in its turn only a temporary coherence of numerous
smaller ones: Tibet as a heroic challenge, as the object of mystical
inspiration or anima-fascination, the source of senex guidance or of puer
aspiration, and so on. Tibet echoed Boon's observations about the
anthropological creation of Bali: a compact profusion of visual-spatial
symbolism. [17] However, we have also seen how an approximate consensus
of imaginal unity was achieved on two occasions: first under the constraints of imperial politics at the end of the nineteenth century;
secondly
under the pressure of a collective desperation and disenchantment in the
first half of the twentieth. But even on both those occasions, Tibet as a
sacred place was always the site of an imaginal struggle. Less socially powerful interpretations, less socially sanctioned imaginal
voices were never completely silenced but rather pushed to the perimeter
of the more publicized paradigm, often to re-emerge later in a more favorable
climate. Tibetan travel
has had its high priests and its bards, its mystics and its wanderers, its politicians and its renegades, its patriarchs and its clowns.
While this study has
followed the process whereby Tibet became transformed from a geographical rumor
into a sacred place, I am not suggesting that such a creation will always follow the Tibetan sequence or
pattern:
an initial, vague feeling of numinosity; then the discovery and establishment of a boundary-zone; followed by the creation of a centre, or series
of
centres, as axis mundi; then its consecration as a fully formed
sacred place or temenos; and finally its eventual decay, degeneration and
abandonment. Even in Tibet, this creative process was not uniform
among travelers, nor was it historically linear. For some early
visionaries
Tibet leapt into their imaginations almost complete, as a fully formed
whole, whilst for others, even over a century later, it still failed to
evoke
deeper resonances.
Sacred places can
rarely be established in a step-by-step fashion, each
phase neatly compartmentalized from the next. There must usually be a
simultaneous intimation, at least, of all its aspects: boundary, centre
and
consecration. However, some aspects are usually emphasized, or
imagined, more clearly and forcefully than others. One could easily envisage -- for example, in the case of a miraculous event -- that the axis
mundi would instantly be established as the very raison d'etre of the
place. In
such cases the mapping of the boundary-zone would come later. A slow
process of geographical, political, economic, religious and mythological
reasoning and negotiation, as well as of the indeterminate folkways of
common habits. But this study has shown that whatever the sequence,
sacred places exist in time; that time is a part of a sacred place.
The Echo of Place
We have seen that
for many in the West Tibet offered a kind of imaginal
continuity, especially at times of social and individual doubt or uncertainty. Such continuity, it has been suggested, is a crucial aspect of a
place. [18] The most obvious form of continuity was probably the almost
mechanical repetition of various discourses -- political, social, religious,
scientific, and so on -- produced by succeeding generations of travelers.
Layer after layer of
organized imagery were placed one atop the other until a well-defined,
overall image of Tibet was confirmed and concretized.
As the climax of this process was reached towards the end of the
last century, travelers increasingly encountered Tibet with well-prepared
expectations. They involved themselves in that country with such
expectations uppermost, even trying to impose such fantasies upon Tibet
and its people. This process offered many a kind of static sense of
identity
and imaginal security. This is the level of continuity alluded to by Said
and
other writers concerned primarily with the overt political repercussions
of
travel writing in its broadest sense.
But this study has
also drawn attention to other levels and styles of
imaginal continuity. There were, for example, vestiges of historical
memory which became actualized in Tibet: the lingering images of Tartars,
the Celestial Empire, the Silk Route, or more recent ones such as Alpine
exploration, colonial wars, gold rushes, and so on. Foucault has called
such things 'memory traces' and discusses them in terms of leprosy's
powerful influence on the way madness was subsequently viewed, handled and physically placed in post-medieval Europe.
[19] In the same way, the
memory traces intersecting in Tibet were not only located in the mind of
the traveler but were embedded in the practices and rituals they
followed.
Such practices included the unwritten and written rules for organizing
and equipping expeditions, the folk mores of expedition life, the genre of
recording, expressing and processing experiences and discoveries. All
these things created a kind of expedition ritual and context which defined
the travelers' attitude towards Tibet as a geographical Other and at the
same time confirmed a kind of historical relationship to the place. Such
rituals were integral to the creation of Tibet. Place and ritual were inseparable. Through them, the traces of the past wove their way through to the
present.
In addition, there
was a kind of spatial memory, rather than a purely historical or temporal one. Frances Yates has shown how memory was
viewed spatially in Classical, medieval and Renaissance times. [20] Memory
was envisaged not as something in the past but as a quality of discrete
interior space. As Corbin writes: 'The past is not behind us but under our
feet.' [21] Within such a perspective, memory has to do with the placing
and organization of images in relation to each other. The process of
remembering then becomes a journey through this 'interior' landscape to reclaim
these images; such interiority being located both within the subjectivity
of
the individual and within the world outside. [22] Memory here becomes a
true re-collection. Such a re-collection, in the case of Tibet, occurred
both
on a mundane level (memories of previous explorers, certain specific discoveries and incidents) and on a deeper level (reminders of existential
hopes and fears, of social duties and expectations). [23] Tibet became differentiated, throughout the nineteenth century, into discrete zones, some
based on geographical features such as the bleak northern plateau, the
Chumbi valley, or the Tsangpo river, whilst others were based upon cultural references such as the area around Lhasa, or Tashi Lumpo. Routes
into Tibet also began to take on imaginal differentiation. Deeply mythological fantasies such as Aryan ancestors, archaic mysteries, the yeti, or
gold
were specifically located within this Tibetan 'memory system'. Also, such
spatial remembering occurred within a fairly well-defined global context
of imaginal places. Tibet, as we have seen, was just one space located
within a well-organized global structure of other complex imaginal places:
the European Alps, the source of the Nile, Egypt, the Arctic, Bali, the
Andes, the gold fields of Australia, South Africa, California, and so on.
However, there was
yet another way in which Tibet offered a profound
imaginal continuity, a way that was perhaps less 'grand' than any of those
discussed above. Instead of the metaphors of archaeology, or memory
systems, memory traces and so on, we could use that of echoing. Places
echo. This echoing is one of the defining characteristics of a place's
placeness. Without imaginal echo there is only geographical location. As we
have seen, Tibet was the site of echoes that reverberated across history
and through changing imaginal landscapes. As Berry writes: 'Echo ... is
not separate from her surroundings.' [24] These echoes and the place of
Tibet were inseparable. Again, Berry reminds us that 'As Echo shapes, she
is shaped by what's around her.' [25] Echoes counter the narcissistic desire,
held by many Westerners, to see a simple reflection of themselves in the
mirror of Tibet. Tibet was never a simple mirror to the West's desires. At
the very least it gave these projections its own specific form, color,
tone
and texture.
This continuity,
through the intangible reflections of apparently marginal images, were no less significant than the grander reorganization of
global space and time. Unlike the other forms of imaginal continuity,
echoes cannot be abstracted from the geographical place, cannot be somehow universalized, systematized and generalized.
Some echoes
reverberated deafeningly -- gold, Egypt, archaic mysteries
-- had sent their sounds around the globe. Some were chased, like Manning's hats, in an attempt to grasp them and transform them into something stable and substantial. Some were very personal and soon faded.
Recent Himalayan travel writing continues this tradition. Matthiesson, for
example, heard his own deep personal doubts and hopes ricochet off
every overhang, evoked by every bend in the path. His 1980 book The
Snow Leopard also records contemporary echoes of a more collective
nature: ecological disregard, the energy crisis, pollution, species extinction, Third World oppression.
[26] In both cases, the personal and the
collective, small details of landscape trigger off associations for Matthiesson which then plunge into imaginal depths, only then to fade quickly.
The details of the
place provide the timing, shape, resonance and
momentum of the associations; this is what makes them echo. Through
echoing, the place almost assumes the role of psychoanalyst. [27] Indeed,
we have seen how the marginal, ephemeral echoes of Bogle's, Fleming's
and Byron's Tibets were overtly used to deepen critical reflection and
understanding of their own culture's fantasy-making. Echoes are not a
horizontal mimicry but the soundings of imaginal depth. Through its
Tibetan echoes the West was occasionally shown a deeper, less conscious
aspect of itself. By listening to its Tibetan echoes, the West could
perhaps
discover its own questions. This procession of imaginal Tibets represented
attempts to complete questions the West was asking about its own identity. Berry writes: 'Echo is not only an echo of something but also a kind
of response that completes the word to itself.' [28] Many in the West came
closer to hearing their questions by listening to the responses from
Tibet.
The metaphor of echo
demands that we listen to the place as it sounds
through the travel texts. It demands an 'acoustic imagination'; an imaginative listening in terms of tone, rhythm, harmony and discord.
[29] Instead of
grand vistas, powerful rituals, well-regulated mystic assemblies or
geopolitics, echoes reveal a more insubstantial and indirect aspect of
place, rather like the incident Maraini recorded of the Maharaja of Sikkim
eating peas. 'Echo's aesthetics', writes Berry, 'occur in the empty
spaces.' [30] Indeed, when one is relieved from the thaumaturgical Tibet and
all the other spaces filled with expectations, openings appear which are
so
suitable for Echo's persistent yet delicate art.
Berry suggests that
echoing is a form of alchemical iteratio, an attempt
at continuity, at concretizing, materializing, at making something take.
'Repetitions', she writes, 'are longings for self-reflection ... Echo
longs for
this beauty of self-reflected depth ... an aesthetic self-longing.' [31]
Perhaps
there was also something in Tibet that wanted to see itself echoed in the travelers' tales.
The fantasy of
Shangri-La can be seen, like all utopias, as an abstracted
memory system, or as a memory trace, perhaps for example of earlier,
idealised, spiritual communities. It can also be seen as the product
of ritual repetition by generations of travelers, the final layer of a
centuries-old archaeological past. But in a sense, too, Shangri-La was the
last great cohesive echo that reverberated from Tibet before it fell into
ruins. As an echo should, it began life well defined, clearly shaped by
its
immediate connection with the place, but as its sound radiated further
from its echoing source, the form became more diffuse and vague. It still
survives as the faintest of echoes, but for most people it has long since
lost
any connection with a specific place. Perhaps it was Hilton's genius to
have gathered up the rapidly fragmenting and vanishing images of Tibet
into one last cohesive echo. As Lowenstein put it: 'Orphean echo impels
mythos'. [32]
The Return of Soul
to the World
This study has been
a contribution towards the return of soul to the world,
to an anima mundi psychology.
The world presents itself in its images. Jung wrote that the alchemists considered the greater part of the psyche
to lie outside the body. [33] And as Hillman warns, 'the more we concentrate
on literalizing interiority within my person the more we lose the sense of
soul as a psychic reality ... within all things.' [34] While there was a
long tradition which located psyche, in one form or another, somehow within both
the individual and the world, to a considerable extent this world connotation has been lost in recent centuries.
[35] Jung was a seminal figure in
reclaiming this world-centred psyche. The primary texts he used were
those of European alchemy, through which he realized the imaginative
power of matter, and hence of nature. Travelers' tales are also a form of
alchemy. As Hillman insists: 'The same imagination, the same soul, that
presented itself in fifteenth and sixteenth century alchemy showed itself
in the extroverted psychology of the explorers seeking gold, the journey
across the perilous seas ... the world as metaphor.' [36]
This study has shown
how many of these travelers to Tibet were searching for the secret which they believed lay in the mysterious unknown.
Like
the alchemists, some chose a somewhat extroverted path of physical
exploration, whilst others were lured into the place in the search for
ideas.
But in neither case was the place simply passive, a mere blank sheet on to
which the travelers could impose their wildest fantasies. The place of
Tibet had a logic and coherence of its own, its genius loci. Tibet
was not a
'silent Other', it was alive, substantial and compelling. It was part of
the
world calling attention to itself, deepening our soulful appreciation of
mountains, of deserts and rivers, of light and color, of time and space,
of
myriad peoples and their cultures, of fauna and flora, of the plurality of
imaginative possibilities.
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