The ‘board’ is the instrument, not the method.
— Christopher Hitchens ‘Believe Me, It’s Torture’ (2008)
And then went down to the minivan,
Set wheels to road, forth on the ungodly way, and
We bore packed lunches aboard, our wearied ears
Stopped with fingers against siren C-pop
Piped amidships through singing speakers
In the rosy-fingered hour before dawn.
Came ashore for petrol, took on long coats
And oxygen bottles, before the queuing
Began for Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.
Came we then to the Visitor Centre,
Our crew of eight oarsmen reduced to three —
One snatched by the Scylla of security,
Four swallowed in the Charybdis of bureaucracy,
And ourselves abandoned, as Odysseus before us,
By a Phoenician pirate purchased as our guide.
And already mariners sucked on oxygen masks
With god-fearing obedience, the same which,
On land, they sucked through surgical masks,
And with as little effect.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXQueued to coaches,
Most uncommunist in the competing rush,
Then drove we up mountain-road switchbacks
To alight at switchback queue, collecting,
Over forty tacks, the pilot of a QR code.
Swept out onto the shoals of a squatted toilet
And the first photograph of the cadaverous day —
Not for security, but for future purchase
Upon return to these shores, superposed
Over sunlit scenes of our dreary journey.
Joined we the narrow stream through rocky straits
Of a facial scan, and, with Zephyr’s breath
In our favour, set sail in the cable-car,
Disembarking, mountain high, into close-webbed mist
Of rain and viewing platforms.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXSpurning which,
We came to the ascending queue, breathing
Bottled air past canteens to dragon-breath top.
There queued we again to stone obelisks,
Crude-carved with antic figures, for an image
Of the cloud-wrapped glacier we could not see.
From whence the dead arose, pale faces masked,
Pitiful spirits. And I cried in hurried speech:
XXXXX“How art thou come to this icy stream?
XXXXX“Wherefore dost thou wander still in robes
XXXXX“Of COVID’s theatre, most farcical
XXXXX“Of tragedies in this Digital Age?”
If answer offered they me, none did I hear
Amid their muffled cries.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXSo went we down
Through rain unbroken by breast-clasped coats
Useless as the face-clasped oxygen masks
But to paint the gloomy backdrop of sickness
For an audience in search of holy terror
On steps mounting to the lens of Olympus.
Lie quiet Ezra. I mean, that is Ezra Pound,
In Canto I, 1925, translating Homer.
Untouched left we the sacred mountain,
Neither tree below, nor snow above,
Nor rock between, to queue again for cable car.
From thence to coach queue and by roadside waited
Among the impetuous impotent dead
For a taxi back to Lijiang. Believe me:
— Lijiang, June 2024
• • • • •
An account of a day-trip up Yulong Snow Mountain in the province of Yunnan, the culmination of our journey across south-west China in the summer of 2024. It was in the queue to the cable cars, when I spotted an open gate in the cattle grid in which we were corralled — and which I later regretted not escaping through — that the first line of Ezra Pound’s Canto I came into my head. At the time it expressed the impetuous spirit of adventure that was being controlled by the conventions of tourism in the People’s Republic of China; but later, as we trudged up the hand-railed stairway to the final viewing platform, I realised that, although an ascent of sorts, this was also a descent into the Underworld of post-lockdown China, and that Homer’s account of the katábasis (descent) of Odysseus, recounted in Book XI of the Odyssey, and which Pound translated from the Renaissance Latin of Andreas Divus in Canto I, was the text through which I could recount our own descent. The epigraph is taken from Christopher Hitchens’ account, published in Vanity Fair, of voluntarily undergoing waterboarding at the hands of trained US torturers.
A Communist in Hong Kong 