Mongolia 16/7

*Dated 16/July/2000 (also some 12 years ago...)

I love the unbounded green fields in Mongolia in particular. Everything was so still, and yet everything was moving and flowing. I could feel the minute, or even delicate, vibration of life within the strong peacefulness. I could feel the rhythm within that silent music. The cattle and horses were beautiful. Their black and brown skin was shining under the sunlight as if it were velvet. The fragrance of grass and the smell of animals; everything came to the smell of stillness in the air. The mountains in a great distance were covered with the greyish-blue silken touch. You can really swim in the vast greenness, swim in the Golden Lotus blossoms and swim in the clean and light sky. So there was this serene beauty in every touch, in the sensuous world belonging both to celestials and human beings. The sunset here began with purely golden shines and then smeared over and dyed the sky and the earth with melancholic pink. Everything was melting together into a pure spark. The sky in Mongolia was not as blue as it sometimes is in London, so blue that it is piercing. The Mongolian sky was light, clean and limpid. Like music. Like a song.


"The poignant song is echoed through all the sky in many-coloured tears and smiles, alarms and hopes; waves rise up and sink again, dreams break, and form. In me is thy own defeat of self."

"It is this overspreading pain that deepens into loves and desires, into sufferings and joy in human homes; and this it is that ever melts and flows in songs through my poet's heart."

"He it is who puts his enchantment upon these eyes and joyfully plays on the chords of my heart in varied cadence of pleasure and pain.
He it is who weaves the web of this maya in evanescent hues of gold and silver, blue and green, and lets peep out through the folds of his feet, at whose touch I forget myself.
Days come and ages pass, and it is ever he who moves my heart in many a name, in many a guise, in many a rapture of joy and of sorrow."

"Keeping steps with that restless, rapid music, seasons come dancing and pass away---colours, tunes, and perfumes pour in endless cascades in the abounding joy that scatters and gives up and dies every moment."

~ from Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore, extracts of verses 71, 84, 72 & 70

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