Mongolia 15/7

(*Written when I first travelled to Inner Mongolia on an art and archaeological journey, with a group led by a painter/sculptor/ceramicist and erudite art historian and his wife, around the summer of 2000. It was during moments like this, as described in my journal entries, that I realised that which is the most beautiful, poignant and the most miraculous one can imagine and experience is the nature. How it moves us. How it thrills us. How it compels us to be transported and lifted above our ordinary sense of self-focus and consciousness, whilst our heart is ever so still and our gaze is ever transfixed upon what is all around us, with such tender depths of intimacy and immediacy, such an embrace.)


One day I was looking out from the window of the bus. There were some lilac clouds mingled with the light blue sky, as if a soft piece of lilac silk were being stretched over in an intense nerve. The sky reminded me of Magritte's "The Raw Nerve," though the clouds might be more dimensional through the game played by light and sky. That vast gauzy violet cloud was dripping down to the green earth like waterfalls made of silk. A drip of lilac watercolour got into the pure and white clouds, and then it took over all the beauty and life which formerly belonged to the sky. It was the limpid vibration in a false sense of the ominous. Standing on a plain of the mountain top, my world then was uncharted; another large cloud with amazingly graceful golden embroidery, symbolising an infiltrative omen of glimmerings, was anticipating a miracle that was to come down to earth from heaven.

The lines of the mountains were so tender yet so strong that they resembled the lines of human shoulders. And there was this green mist covering the earth, soft and blurred and silky. Have you ever had this painful feeling when looking at the sunset? It sometimes looks like an enormous wound, a swollen gall, swelling and swelling, spreading all over until it painfully chokes the sky. The world then is only the sky, only the painfully scarlet wound.

René Magritte, The Raw Nerve, 1960