Letter from Nepal

C.J. Sentell

We are civilized generation number 500 or so, counting from 10,000 years ago when we settled
down. We Homo Sapiens generation number 7,500 counting from 150,000 years ago when our
species presumably arose. And we are human generation number 125,000, counting from the
earliest Homo species. Yet how can we see ourselves as only a short-term replacement cast for a
long-running show, when a new batch of birds flies around singing, and new clouds move? Living
things from hyenas to bacteria whisk the dead away like stagehands hustling props between
scenes. To help a living space last while we live on it, we brush or haul away the blown sand and
hack or burn the greenery. We are mowing the grass at the cutting edge.
- Annie Dillard
 Letter from Nep al

As on my self, on my shelf are six months of dust. Collected through the square light of day
and gathered among the lonely warmth of quiet wood, dust mixes two primordially opposing
forces, earth and air, calling into question the latter's independence. Substance suspended,
earth clinging to corporeal air, weighing down and capturing it, if but briefly, between the
equally austere auspices of time and distance. And yet to wipe this dust from my shelf
requires another primordial element, water. Water and work, really, just some moisture in
motion through time. For work, for movement, fire is added. This dust no doubt has layers,
sections that can be dissected. And thus to Szymborska's archeology I add geology: a
geology of dust that extends as far as the rise and fall of the world's largest mountains. "Show
me your whatever and I'll tell you who you were," she says. Inhale my substance, and show
me what I am.

Here are all the ingredients - earth, air, water, and fire -
needed to make work possible. Could the ancients have
gotten this one right, thereby lending impetus to the
transcendental impulse? Before the world is possible,
there must be something rather than nothing. Only then
can you have the elements necessary for motion, for
velocity and force, for work. Perhaps. But such
questions almost invariably put matters the wrong way
round, ignoring Alice's insight just before landing in
Wonderland. “Do cats eat bats?,” she asks herself
dreamily, “Do bats eat cats?” But since neither question
had an answer, it didn’t much matter how it was asked.

So instead of demurring, I’ll declare. There are but two

forces in the world: orogeny and erosion. The work of air
and water against earth and fire, the subtle and not-so-
subtle violence with which the earth rises and then, without fail and only with gravity's
slightest invitation, declines inexorably into the sea. Orogeny and erosion: the building and
the taking down of things. Constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed: the earth born and
reborn time and again through time, for the time being, here, revealing the shape of things as
they are, without hesitation. Bodies in motion and at rest. The world without end amen.

Oriental Orogenies
I have come to this country as part of a mountaineering expedition. Yes, in fact, such things
still exist, and they exist in much the same way as they began in the late-nineteenth century.
The group of which I am a part intends to climb Annapurna III, a peak just shy of eight
thousand meters in the Annapurna Himalaya range, west of Kathmandu. The ridge by which
we will summit – the southeast ridge – has never been climbed, and has claimed around
eleven different lives in the process of moving out of that quasi-insulting and ever-taunting
category of unclimbed.

When I say “we,” however, I speak loosely, for I was going to do no such thing. I'm not a
climber, you see, I'm a walker, having long ago subscribed to that rather curmudgeonly idea
that the only places worth going to in the world are places to which you can walk. If you
have to strap teeth to your shoes or pull yourself up with axes pitched into growing ice, if you

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have to crawl, dig, or swim your way to the summit, perhaps, Edward Abbey suggests, you
ought to carefully reconsider the means to your end. So, in truth, my two companions mean
to climb Annapurna III, and I am to accompany them as the expedition chronicler, naturalist,
and friend.

In addition to these duties, I am also slated to help ferry the expedition gear to an advanced
base camp directly below the ridge they hope to climb. But, as I quickly discovered, such
services as these would not be needed, as the term "expedition" actually now denotes
something very far from carrying-your-own-gear-through-the-rugged-mountains. This,
because eco-tourism is now Nepal's primary source of economic throughput; this, because an
only slightly exaggerated transitive for "expedition" is "vacation". (One of my companions
assures me that there is an important difference between travelers and tourists, but I strain to
locate the difference that makes any difference.) To outfit and arrange a 45 day
mountaineering expedition in Nepal today requires just as many, if not more, people than it
did when Sir George Everest began to survey these hills in the 1830’s or when Maurice
Herzog climbed Annapurna I, the first of the 14 eight-thousand metre peaks to be conquered
by man, in 1952. To get us up the river, over the ridge, and to the camp from which the ridge
would be climbed will take 19 porters, 4 kitchen staff, and two guides. For an expedition of
three. And don't forget the return journey, if such a thing is required at all.

This is my first experience outside the

comfortable familiarity of Europe or the
ambient cultures of South America. This
is my first time to Asia, to the East. And
so a trip to Nepal lands me at the
crossroads of this vast continent-concept,
lying at just about the geographical center
of Asia: to the north, Tibet and China; to
the south, India; to the west, Pakistan and
the Middle East; and to the east, the
Indochinese peninsula and beyond.
Crossing from China and Tibet through
Nepal into India and Pakistan, people
have walked the ways between these mountains, between these ancient and venerable
civilizations, for thousands of years. Containing the birthplace of the Buddha, present-day
Nepal was in 566 B.C.E. the Sakya kingdom where Siddhartha Gautam was born. The
tourist brochures will tell you that Nepal is the world’s only Hindu nation and that, before
1990 when the People’s Movement began to demand democratic reforms, the people of
Nepal worshipped their king as an incarnation of Vishnu. This exotic allure – or, as a guide
told me, this “eternal attraction” – of Nepal is further bolstered by the fact that Shangri-La is
reputed to be within its borders and Sagarmatha, or “the mother goddess of the earth,” stands
to the north as the highest point on the globe.

Kathmandu lies within the centrally located Nepal Valley, which as far back at 700 B.C.E.
was one of the wealthiest settlements along the Himalayan belt. From even before this time,
though, the Valley was the geographical junction of trade routes stretching from Tibet to
India, cross-pollinating the religions, customs, and politics of so many ancient cultures
through trade and the movement of goods, that civilizational sine qua non. So until the mid-
18th century, present-day Nepal was actually a widely heterogeneous mixture of tiny hill

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kingdoms, tribes, and regional cultural groups that were shaped by local topography and
economy, that spoke a dizzying array of languages of both Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman
origin, and observed religious practices ranging from Hindu to Buddhist to Muslim and every
local variation in between. Given all these differences of identity and place, then, it is not
surprising that all these groups were, on most everyone’s account, constantly at war with one
another from the beginning.

Like almost every state on earth, present-day Nepal is the conglomeration of many different
peoples under the unitary, nominal form of the nation. The state is the occlusion of
difference for the sake of unity. As an institutional consolidation of bodies, the state
abstracts a national space and identity from a geographical place and difference, and effaces
that difference in the name of “its people” so that they may find a place in the triumphal
course of nations and history. Under the aegis of a power relinquished or taken, the state
becomes the repository of political power through the alienation of the authority experienced
in the course of each life moving through place and time. So even today, Nepal finds itself a
country of many faces, of many religions and languages, of many hopes and many pasts.
Today there are roughly 60 ethnicities and over 125 different languages spoken in a
landlocked country just slightly larger than Arkansas. Yet every particular inevitably falls
under the universal, Nepal.

Manjushree Thapa, among others, now sings the song of Nepalese history, one with so many
threads from so many disparate but interlocking histories that stretches some three thousand
years. Nepal is a country whose history is largely forgotten, its facts lost through the cracks
of time and conquest. The few facts that do remain, however, comprise a national narrative
that struggles to find voice outside of the political consolidation of state power. Its particular
histories, as the histories of lives, loves, and labors over time, have been ground into the dust
of history, much like it mountains that have been shed into the sea.

Of what remains, Nepal’s national narrative begins in the mid-18th century, when the British
East India Company was beginning its rule in Bengal and was breaking apart what remained
of the Mughal Empire in present-day Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Around 1743, a
minor ruler to the west of Kathmandu, Prithvi Narayan Shah, began to consolidate power in
his home kingdom of Gorkha and then turned his gaze eastward. By 1768, Shah had unified
the various kingdoms under marital fiat and consolidated them into the nation-state of Nepal.
While the traditional historical narrative of Nepalese history takes pride in the fact that Nepal
has never been under direct foreign, colonial rule, it turns out that Shah’s expansionist
ambitions were largely inspired by the ascendancy of the British. (Oh, and they gave him
some weapons and money, too.) After unification, Shah expelled all foreigners and moved
his court to Kathmandu. We might politely call this homegrown colonialism. / By the 19th
century, the Raj was at its height in India, and the Rana family, as the caste that controlled
the military, had come to a power-sharing agreement with the Shah line of kings. Through a
bloody exchange at the country’s central armory, the Rana’s forced the Shahs into
establishing them as maharaja (roughly equivalent to hereditary prime ministers) who would
advise the king on matters of state. But rather than diffusing central authority and stabilizing
the state, this in fact simply established a monarchy within a monarchy, doubling the problem
of tyrants. In 1850, the new Rana maharaja made the first ever voyage of a head of state
outside the Nepalese kingdom to pay a visit to Queen Victoria, who, in exchange for the
conscription of the Gorkha soldiers into the British regiments governing the burgeoning
empire, promised both her financial and political support. This arrangement lasted through

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the First World War, before which around 1,500 Nepali men served in British regiments, but
after which involved up to 100,000 Nepali men serving the Allies in India, France, Egypt,
Palestine, and Africa. / These experiences of the world beyond the landlocked borders of
their country must have had a dramatic effect at home. As India stood up to the British,
politics was variously radicalized across Southeast Asia. The Rana rulers attempted to stem
the tide of political consciousness coming out of India – especially the Indian colleges – by
establishing one of their own in Kathmandu in 1919; they attempted to appease the reform-
demanding masses by building bridges, roads, and hospitals. In 1923, for the first time ever,
the government granted farmers ownership rights to land (who theretofore had only the rights
of tenants) and signed the Treaty of Friendship with Great Britain, which promised to respect
Nepali sovereignty in exchange for the sole right to import goods into the country. After
being carried over the hills and into the valley on the backs of porters, the first automobile
appeared on the streets of Nepal shortly thereafter. / Since then, Nepal has vacillated between
autocratic rule and democratic struggle. With land rights and the ever-increasing influence of
Western economies, a small section of the population was transformed into bourgeoisie, who
agitated for political reform and yearned for a national identity of which they could be proud.
In the 1930’s members of this nascent class established the Mahabir School in Kathmandu,
which became a “hotbed of bourgeois revolution” through
a curriculum that aimed at cultivating a certain political
consciousness in its students. By the 1940’s, a movement
had arisen to do away with the monarchy and maharajas
altogether, and aimed to establish a democratic state.
One dramatic incident during this time involved Yogmaya,
considered to be Nepal’s first woman poet, returning from
exile in India and organizing for a government free from
religious influence. Yogmaya and many of her followers
were of the priestly Bahun caste, and so when they
threatened to immolate themselves in protest the
government dispatched troops to arrest them, as such an act
would destroy the moral and religious credibility of the
maharajas. After their release, however, Yogmaya and 69 of her followers walked into the
Arun River and drowned themselves in protest. / The first airplane landed in Nepal in 1942.
With the advent of the Second World War, Nepal now had upwards of 200,000 men fighting
for the Allies in lands as distant as Iraq, Tunisia, Burma, and Greece. Upon their return,
many brought back experiences of the world’s social, political, and material progress, which
sparked yet another movement for government reform. Political parties formed, mostly in
India due to the dangers of doing so at home, and political consciousness arose in the midst
of a rising popularity of socialist and communist thinking. One of leaders that quickly gained
prominence was B. P. Koirala, a novelist and activist who served as Nepal’s prime minister
during its first short-lived experiment with democracy in 1959; since then, Koirala has
attained almost legendary status in Nepal’s struggle toward democracy. A year later,
however, the Shah king arrested Koirala, suspended the government, banned political parties,
and reassumed direct power. Exactly why he did this is widely disputed, but one persistent
reason given was the interminable bickering of the political parties that weakened the
government and raised the spectre, present even today, of a state take-over by India. Yet
another reason given was that it was in the name of economic development; without the
centralization of power, the argument went (and goes) such development could not occur, or
at least not occur fast enough. But whatever the reason, the king then established the
Panchayat system – a “one-party democracy” much in the style of communist countries but

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controlled by the monarchy – which governed the country throughout the 1970’s and created
an atmosphere of secrecy, intrigue, and fear. / The first television came to Nepal in 1985, and
though its programming was by all accounts crude, it did serve to connect the still-growing
bourgeoisie to the wider world. Throughout the 1980’s, while the Panchayat system became
destabilized from within by members of the outlawed political parties, the government
campaigned to sell Nepal to the world as a poor but happy mountain nation, the birthplace of
the Buddha, a non-aligned nation that was branded as a “Zone of Peace” to gain entry into the
United Nations. But in the winter of 1989, a widespread popular movement began that led to
riots across the country, thousands of arrests, hundreds of deaths by state actors, all in the
name of democratic reform. And, in April 1990, the king announced that political parties
were once again legal, that parliamentary elections would be held, and that a new constitution
would be drafted. This announcement came, of course, from the television, and Kathmandu
exploded in celebration. / But as the reforms got underway, the competitive framework of
parliamentary democracy began to reveal its darker side. The small but ambitious business
community began to buy influence with the new parliamentarians. Corruption became
rampant. Governments dissolved and formed anew under prime minister after prime
minister. By 1994 vote buying, ballot stuffing, and intimidation at the polls marked the new
Nepalese democracy. In the same year, Man Mohan Adhikari led a minority government as
the first “democratically elected” communist prime minister in the world. With programs

such as “Let’s Develop Our Villages Ourselves,” which gave money to local committees for
grassroots governance, Adhikari tried to reconcile free market reformism with communist
revolutionary ideas, but corruption continued apace, with some communist party leaders
building extravagant houses in the heart of Kathmandu. Over time it became clear that the
democratic reforms of the early 1990’s were not working out so well. As Thapa recounts,
“what resulted was a democracy that looked like a democracy, but that functioned as an elite
class and caste cartel, a democracy lacking democracy, a postmodern democracy…[in which]
all ethical issues were conceded to power struggles and realpolitik.” Throughout these years,
however, even though over nine million Nepalis continued to live on less than one U.S. dollar
a day, Nepal experienced one of the largest expansions of its economy ever. / And so as the
rich got richer, the poor continued in their destitution. The communists in government were
roundly criticized for forgetting the people for whom they elected. In February 1996, the
Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) began what it called a “People’s War” by attacking
banks in the western district of Gorkha, burning land deeds, attacking police posts in Rolpa,
and exploding a bomb at a soft-drink plant in Kathmandu. Before then, the party was almost

6
unknown in the political circles of the capital, and the war they continued to wage until 2006
was a war waged in the poverty-stricken countryside, not Kathmandu. Over the years, the
Maoists continued to gain support from the people in the rural districts (read: everywhere but
Kathmandu), including many women and children, who were armed and authorized to spread
party ideology throughout their towns and villages. Throughout the countryside, the Maoists
“liberated the people” by forgiving loans, destroying deeds, and distributing land to those
who would farm it; they also instituted their own form of justice, setting up “People’s
Courts” that banned alcohol and cards and punished class enemies. The violence continued
to escalate, and by 2005 there were over 13,000 killed, 200,000 internally displaced, and
Maoists controlled 75% of the country. Nepal today has one of the highest numbers of
missing persons in any country in the world.

This trip to Nepal was actually delayed a year by massive protests throughout the country in
2006. Kathmandu was completely shut down, with no food, fuel, or any other necessities
passing in or out of the city. Various factions of Maoists lead much of this, and the country
was not considered safe to move about in, for tourists or citizens. Most of the direct violence,
however, has subsided and as I stand in the main commercial district on my first morning in
Kathmandu, huge parades of motorcycling Maoists are riding the city with huge red flags
blowing behind their bikes. Now that the mainline party Maoists have been admitted into
parliament, roving groups of young party members continue radical political action
throughout the city and country, still often peppered with violence. During our six weeks,
there were no fewer than two general strikes throughout the country that brought all
commerce, travel, and industry to a grinding halt, especially in Kathmandu.

There is a certain myopia that accompanies all stories told in the present about the present.
This myopia, moreover, is a privation of perspective that is necessary, ineliminable, and
always already present in every experience unfurling. Speaking for her own experience, as
well as for her fellow Nepalis, Thapa recognizes that “those who live in the thick of events
more easily experience than understand them.” Here we come to the fact that experience and
understanding, though siblings of a certain sort, are not at all the same. Thapa is pointing out
that our lives are thrown into the world of events, tossed amid times imperceptibly particular,
and therefore often lack the room required for understanding. Thapa is talking about history,
about the events of a narratable past, about the stories handed down, always transmitted, from
one to an other, and from one generation to the next. These narratives give sense by situating
and explaining experience in the present. And whether these narratives are large or small in
scope, whether their sense is grand or banal, does not matter. They are neither and both,
moving in and out, over and above one another in a disparate consistency consisting the
world.

For so many in Nepal, these stories are lost in the interstitial space of events and forces
beyond their control; their history has been narrated to them rather than by them, reinscribing
in the Orient Marx’s description of the ideology that created the demos in the Occident:
“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented”.

Escalating Erosions
Alice kept falling down down down the rabbit hole. During her fall she said: “I wonder if I
shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that
walk with their heads downwards!”

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From Nashville to Dallas to London to Bahrain to Kathmandu, in just over twenty-four hours
I have landed on the other side of the world. Stepping off the plane onto the tarmac,
confronted with humidity, haze, and a gathering confusion. After retrieving my bags and
paying customs dues, I step out onto the street bustling with people grabbing at my person,
offering to take me anywhere I want to go. I am there, I think, but do not know where to go
from here.

My companions have already been in country for a day, spot me through the crowd, and
away we go through a city of 1.5 million people and two traffic lights. We ride through the
streets in the seclusion of a taxi, between and among both petroleum- and human-powered
rickshaws, bicycles and women, men and dogs, motorcycles and cows, chickens and
children, all moving in and out of the streets in the seamless orchestration of Tuesday
afternoon. Horns blowing everywhere: behind you in front of you at you in menace and jest.
There are shops with live animals tied out front, standing ready to be slaughtered upon
request. Goats and chickens loiter with the humans who will soon eat them. Children walk
bare-footed, barely clad, playing in puddles alongside grazing animals, cars whizzing by
them, between them, with ease and speed.

In the last decade or so, the

population of Kathmandu has
more than doubled. This influx
of rural people into the urban
center has rapidly transformed
the capital, precipitating a host
of social and environmental
problems, including a drastic
increase in air and water
pollution, political instability,
and, above all, poverty. Nepal
is one of the poorest countries
on the planet. While some 30% of all Nepalis live below the national poverty line, the
average gross annual income is equivalent to 290 US dollars.

It is a poverty that gets caught at the back of my throat – choking, arresting me in my own
experience – not because it is especially repelling or violent or even pervasive, but simply
because it is so radically different from the everyday material existences I experience at home
and abroad. In what seems to be an experience of complete incommensurability, I hear smell
taste feel see an arrangement of people particularly placed that I do not understand. My
cognitive compass has lost the attraction of its poles, spinning without orientation along lines
of bodies in motion and at rest.

As my understanding becomes unmoored from my experience, I become unmoored from my

self. To speak of understanding is to speak of material taken in and worked over in the
course of experience. This experience of understanding is so often taken to imply some one
thing, some unity of experience that has or does the experiencing. So as long as I at least
think I understand, my self is protected and contained by my experience. But when
understanding itself begins to unravel, when it begins to disintegrate from the rest of
experience, then it becomes possible for experience – and the self that undergirds it – to
follow suit.

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There are so many human beings. Here. In the world. Now. More so than there have ever
been in the history of the world combined. There are so many people who are having as fine-
grained an experience as I am now. This fact is obvious, so obvious that we do not speak of
it much because it leaves us breathless and alone, because we do not have time for such
thoughts throughout the trials and tribulations, the hesitancies and gumptions, of each day.
We forget it in the abstractions of people and experience. But when I meditate on this fact,
this fact in its full, radical, irreducible particularity, the depth of the world begins to unfurl.

I am confronted by this radical particularity, and it’s bowling me over. I do not understand.
What I am experiencing is being seen with a certain sense; I understand to an extent what is
occurring. There are mangos, cars, laughs, storefronts, puddles, trees and trash. But in
another sense I simply do not. I do not know where I am, how I came to be here, with these
people on this Wednesday in May, seven years after the second millenia. The edifice of my
presumptive understanding is crumbling before my eyes. My expectations are exploded. In
the very act of expectation, of presuming to forecast what I might see, I unwittingly
perpetuate my own suffering that is the result of an inevitable disappointment: the failure of
understanding. The continuity of my gaze disrupted, ruptured by the unexpected, I begin to
come apart at the joints, unable to speak because I no longer have a voice through which to
see. Through the privilege of my own experience, through my very existence in this place at
this time, I am losing the ground of all possible understanding. Why am I here, and how did I
come into this place? Perhaps it is because when I was young I looked at the map and said,
echoing the Marlow within, “when I grow up I will go there.”

The map is not incidental. For this place came to be known – that is, came to known within
the archive of Western knowledge – precisely through a process of cartographical conquest.
India was boxed in and carved up, the Himalaya were conquered with compass and quadrant.
Mapping is the scription of vision, the writing of a place so as to be known and knowable.
Enter Francis Bacon, Q.E.D. Within this mania for maps lurks a certain passion for
knowledge, a certain lust after a first-hand experience with the topography of things, their
classifications, taxonomies, and organized understandings – in short, the cataloging of the
world in the archive of understanding. This archive, as I know it, as it has been handed down
to me, contains a principle of narrative continuity that explains the present through the past.
The principle, this archê, is the beginning and origin to a certain temporal sequence that is
also a sovereign power, a first position, and an authority that commands its dominion. The
ones who speak this narrative and continue its transmission have literally owned the world in
recent centuries; they have explored, taken, and catalogued every place in the world so as to
retell the world its own history, a line of knowable events leading seamlessly and inevitably
to the present.

From the center of this story, from the narrative seat, so to speak, emanates greater and lesser
degrees of difference. Identity and negation. Attraction and repulsion. Violence and
consumption. And even the synthesis that may be lurking here, as a third thing, is itself
potentially a consolidating move, a move that might merely reinscribe the dominant force of
the relation at work in understanding.

This incommensurability is a disjunction of meaning and history, of experience and

understanding, arising within the corporeal undergoing of becoming in Nepal. That there are
two global civilizations known as “the West” and “the East” is but the simplest formulation

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of this supposed inherent lack of comparability. As Edward Said points out, however, the
West in fact created the East through its anthropological gaze, through its descriptions and
categories of peoples in the scheme of things. But in creating it, the East became necessary
to the West in order for the West, as such, to exist at all. A differentiation that was also an
identity. So while there was no East before the West, neither was there a West before there
was an East. It was only through the grafting of a particular way of knowing to a particular
way of living that these “civilizations” were born.
When the ethics and the epistemologies of these
cultures collided, it became clear “that any attempt to
force cultures and peoples into separate and distinct
breeds or essences exposes not only the
misrepresentations and falsifications that ensue, but
also the way in which understanding is complicit with
the power to produce such things as the ‘Orient’ or the
‘West’”.

This is the dark cloud of my soul, the imperialism of

my flesh and gaze. And it does not matter that this
imperialism is merely an epistemological and
hermeneutical one. By seeking to make
commensurable that which is defined by its
incommensurability, by attempting to fuse the
horizons of far and distant peoples in far and distant
places with my own, I enter into an ethical relation
which, precisely because it is undergone effortlessly, effaces the very difference that is the
sine qua non of the relation itself. This is the schema I was born into; the Weltanschauung I
was educated into. I am Western; I am (mostly) white; I am a man. I live comfortably in
what is, in material terms, the wealthiest nation in the world. Every gesture of understanding
I venture, I fall further and further into a logic of complicity that leaves me no possible exit.
This is the imperialism I have inherited, that constitutes me and is that which I cannot evade.

That I am guilty seems obvious, if slightly self-important; but, on the face of things, still
entirely true. I desperately want to be free of this guilt, free from the sins of my fathers so as
to enter anew into the ethical relationships of understanding in the present. Such sins,
however, are not forgiven simply by being confessed, acknowledged, repented. While I
cannot be judged guilty for what is determinate – for every thing actual is determinate – I can
be judged guilty of what is determined, and the inevitability of my perspective, the
inheritance of my wealth and thrownness into this particular place and time, is surely part of
the way in which this country and these people have been determined over the last few
centuries. If not me in particular, allow me to represent.

Even if I attempt to reconstruct the present with the past fully in mind, I still fail to exit the
ethical implication. All understanding is a reconstruction involving a certain imposition of
the ideal and a control over the experience of the experience-had. For certainly I experience
things. But there is also the experience of the experience I just had, synthesizing reflection,
memory, and temporality into a structured, coherent understanding of that experience.
Whenever I see anything, by the time I notice that I am seeing it I have already entered into
relation. Every experience of understanding entails a relationship between that understanding
and the world. But here, amid the viaducts of expected discordance, every thing I see I must

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compare to myself. Otherwise, without a common ground, my understanding would spin
frictionless in an Oriental void. Here, I cannot not compare what I see to what I know and
have known, if I desire to achieve an ethical understanding. I cannot begin from where I am,
for that will get me nowhere, as everything I experience I experience as difference. The only
way to understand is to relate what I experience back to the way things are done at home, to
the way the West does things in all its goodness, truth, and beauty.

All abstraction is violence. To think, Borges says, is to forget a difference. To sunder the
concept from the material of experience, to generalize and categorize, to erect a structure
under which particulars fall – this is the necessary violence of thought. In this way, the
violence of thought is a violence of forgetting, a disavowal of particularity for the sake of
understanding. For Derrida, however, the question of the archive that is the West is not a
question of the past; it does not concern “the question of a concept dealing with the past that
might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive.
It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a
promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.” And so to be responsible I do not deny my
past, but simply deny my privilege of understanding in the present. I renounce it. Since I
cannot escape this hermeneutical framework of comparative cultural difference, I suspend my
understanding of peoples or cultures or histories at all. I turn away and renounce any claim
to knowledge of people, and look instead at those most innocuous, static, and incontrovertible
elements of my current horizon - rocks. I must look at rocks so as to suspend, if but briefly,
this ethical quagmire in which I have landed.

Toward a Himalayan Hermeneutic

The Himalaya are the youngest mountains in the world, arising when the Indian subcontinent
began colliding with what was then south Asia some 55 million years ago. Asia was built by
the accretion of island-arcs and other continental fragments drifting off of Gondwanaland
into the Siberian shield over the last 500 million years. India is but the latest splinter of this
super-continent, coming out of the south, fast and sure, at a rate of 30 feet a century. It
crossed and closed the Tethys Sea, subducting its floor opposite its own northerly movement
and slammed the rest into Tibet. Thus, at the top of Mt. Everest are Mesozoic marine fossils;
the crown of the highest mountain in the world is made of fish bones and sea dust. No shit.
Fish bones and sea dust.

Now there are two versions of this story. The first tells of India as an island continent located
far out in the Tethys Sea. As Gondwanaland began to break apart in the late Jurassic,
roughly 160 million years
ago, India separated itself
from the coalesced crook of
Africa, Antarctica, and
Australia. From then to the
time it made contact with
Asia in the late Eocene,
roughly 40 million years
ago, India existed as an
isolated island continent
that progressively marched
northward for its orogenal
destiny with Asia. The

11
second version, however, tells a story of India that remained closer to Africa, in varying
degrees of terrestrial contact. As Gondwanaland disintegrated, India did detach from its
southerly cousins, but it slid along the western side of the African and Eurasian plates,
maintaining an “overland communication” that allowed various biota to cross the landmasses.
What this overland communication amounts to is a genetic communication, whose history is
written in the fossil archive of late Cretaceous biogeography.

But, either way, India hit Asia obliquely, the northwest corner landing first and the rest of the
island spinning around this initial point of axis. From the initial impact in the west to full,
frontal collision along what is now the 1,800-mile length of the Himalaya took some 30
million years. And once the continents collided, India’s rate of movement slowed by half.
Since its collision 55 million years ago, India has continued to push into Asia for just under
two miles. At the tectonic boundary of this collision – the Indus-Suture Line – the floor and
underwater mountain ranges of the Tethys Sea were consumed. So while the terrestrial
boundaries of such
collisions result in
mountains, below the
surface huge swaths of
sea floor and
continental crust are
subducted into the
bowels of the earth and
begin to be recycled
into the future forms of
the world.

Given the diachronic

birth of the Himalaya,
then, it is more helpful
to understand the
Himalayan orogeny as a
series of orogenic
events that form the Himalayan-Karakoram-Tibetan orogenic system. This system very well
may be the largest and highest accumulation of the earth’s crust since the Paleozoic, i.e., in
the last 400 million years, but has been forming and deforming in active geological processes
only since the Cenozoic, the most recent and current era of earth-time.

The Himalayan mountains are still growing today at a rate of nearly a centimeter a year. On
a geological scale, this remains impressive, for if there were no erosion the Himalaya could
push some 30,000 feet further into the sky in just a million years. But, of course, there is
always erosion; there are always forces at work undoing the work already done. So the great
mountains continue to grow despite the relentless forces of wind, water, and time. (Added to
these may be a shift in tectonic activity as well. Some geologists maintain the Eurasian plate
has begun to stretch out, rather than continuing its thrust upward, which would ease pressure
and slow growth.)

Because they are the youngest, the Himalaya also contain some of the most dramatic vertical
changes in all the world's topography. From riverbed to mountain peak, the Kali Gandaki
river valley, running between the Annapurna and Dalighiri Himalayan ranges, forms the

12
world's deepest gorge. The Kali Gandaki River – named after the ancient and mysterious
Hindu goddess Kali, who at times is taken to be the source of chaos and destruction, and at
others the source of all being herself – is what is called an antecedent river. That is, the river
was flowing off the Tibetan plateau and into the Tethys Sea before India collided into it, and
has continued its push through and between the mountains that rose in collision’s wake. This
and other large rivers coming off the Tibetan plateau and through the Himalaya account for
25% of the world’s sedimentation budget, though they drain only 4.2% of the land; they have
also formed the world’s largest marine fan – the Bengal fan – and the world’s largest river
delta – the Ganges delta – by whittling away the face of rocks over time. Fed by perpetual
snow and monsoon rains, these rivers provide fresh water for nearly one-fifth of the world’s
population and have formed rich agricultural lands sustaining civilizations for thousands of
years.

Giant these rocks. So giant that it is easy to imagine Jurassic dinosaurs roaming these
valleys. But these mountains are too young; dinosaurs never had the great pleasure to munch
on these forests or to copulate in these rivers. Strong that river. So strong that it flowed
across the Tibetan Plateau before India’s collision with the continent, when it continued to
flow through stones determined to meet the new sea.

Alexander von Humboldt once said that “the richest and most varied elements for pursuing
an analysis of this nature present themselves to the eyes of the traveler in the scenery of
Southern Asia,…where the same subterranean forces that once raised these mountain chains
still shake them to their foundation and threaten their downfall.” Orogeny and erosion: two
sides of the same force, dialectically intertwined. As mountains are built, entire sections of
crust are destroyed, consumed by fire in the belly of the earth, while the rest is thrust upward
into the sky. At the highest points of these orogenies water, snow and ice begins to
accumulate. Thus begins erosion. By seeking paths between greater and lesser resistances,
water, snow, and ice are joined by wind, heat, and earth, which begin the processes of
whittling these great mountains into sand. Here, in the crooks of the highest peaks, glaciers
form, pushing and pulling and leaking constant water, eventually forming what is called a
cirque. A cirque is an amphitheatre-like valley formed at the head of mountains by glaciers
and erosion. They carve out a three-sided bowl surrounded by the highest peaks at the head
of a river valley, with but one exit: down.

13
These are mountains of our time. I want to know them. I want to know how they came to be
here, exposed in this light and having this face turned to my gaze. From the Eocene to the
present, these mountains are just slightly older than humankind. The Himalaya are
mountains for our time.

The Path of Least Resistance

Today we walk into the mountains. We take a bus
from Pokhara to the end of the road. From there, we
walk up the river Seti as far as possible, until the banks
of the river become completely vertical as the water
plunges from higher altitudes. Once this occurs, we
must go up and around, over the river and through the
woods to reach our ridge. Or so my map tells me.

A boy from the local village came by this afternoon

and sold us four beers from a bucket, the last we’ll
have for a month, as today we push past the last
village up the valley. Ahead lie crooked rocks and
calcified timbers. The river has picked up
considerably, grinding these mountains further into
dust. I feel alone here, sitting on this rock, but know
that I am not. There is a town on the cliff above me,
and houses on each precipice. It is the morning of the
second day, and a terrific thunderstorm rolled through
the valley last night, illuminating the night sky with unforgiving light. With our tents
perched gingerly on the side of a cliff, exposed to the electric wind, I sat through the storm
hoping to be singled out by that wonderful rod of particularity that is a lightening bolt. No
one spoke throughout the night, and I imagine that they, too, prayed to become chosen.

At the last village up the river, the local schoolteacher meets us at the bridge with a large
smile and a notebook. He has heard about our journey a few days before our arrival and asks
us to speak for a few minutes so that his students may practice their English. – It turns out
that English is the primary subject taught in Nepali schools. Whatever else they may study,
and for whatever length they may be in school for, many Nepalis know at least a little
English. On my way out of the valley, I ride a bus down a gravel highway with a local
college student who tells me this, and says that it’s a clear signal of the government’s
priorities for its people that the first emphasis be placed on learning this very foreign, but
economically beneficial, language. – We sit and speak for some time with twenty or so
people, who, in the course of conversation, inform us that it has been more than three years
since the last expedition came this way. The teacher hands us his notebook, which is a record
of expeditions having come up this river valley since the early 1970’s. Scanning the column,
I see: U.K., Australia, U.K., Japan, France, U.S., Israel, France, Australia, New Zealand,
South Korea, U.K., U.K….us. Though four different people are speaking at once, the lead
porter’s face grows severe. Apparently, several people talk of there being only one pass into
the cirque, which the last group could not overcome and had to return to Pokhara to charter a
helicopter instead. We laugh uncomfortably, and already being so far in, press on.

14
 We’re beginning to see why. The river coming
out of this cirque drops dramatically through the
stone, creating sheer vertical walls along the
river for a significant portion, which demands
we take the high way over the saddle to reach
the bowl of peaks. Our eyes are propelled
through the lens of a scope, landing on the belly
of the mountain. – Machupuchare, or “the
fish’s tail,” is said (and said well) to be one of
the most beautiful mountains in the world. In
fact, it is so beautiful that the Nepalis consider it
holy and do not issue permits to climb its peak.
My companions talk of alleged “poachings,”
which the porters acknowledge with a straight-
lined mouth shake of the head. – Follow the
ridge along the side, below the ridge itself, over
the crest and up to pass on east side of the peak.
Here, through this saddle, we would make it
over the pass, past the stony tail of the fish, and
back into the cirque were Annapurna III lay.

Strung along the mountainside like a trail of ants against a trashcan, the group makes its way
out of the trees and onto the fragile, wet alpine carpet. The tree line is an obvious reminder
that the air is becoming thinner, less dense with the necessities for life. As you approach the
edge of an ecosystem, the edge of a system that contains the conditions necessary for the
possibility of certain forms of life, both the number of species and the number of particular
organisms tend to decrease. There are some ecosystems, though, that exist at the limit of all
ecosystems, namely, those at the hottest,
deepest, highest, coldest places on earth. At
that border, at that thin, ever-moving line that
forms the limit to ecosystems at the extremes,
life itself acknowledges its material limit.

Though many of the porters smoke cigarettes

and have flimsy footwear, they make their
way higher with ease and grace. My
companions are hours ahead of me, rushing to
wait out the afternoon. My head feels light
and I’m hungry, so I stop and eat. I doze off
easily and repeatedly, resting often on trunks
of trees and in tufts of tall grass. This is not a
good sign, I know, but let my body speak.
When the group finally comes back together,
we are all standing quietly, staring at a path
covered in snow and ice at a very steep angle
leading, it seems, all the way down. As
people wind their ways around and across, I
head straight up to attain some stability on a
flatter traverse above. One of my companions

15
chides me for wasting energy, urging that the path of least resistance is always the path
preferred. Easy. Natural. Efficient.

In the mountains, however, the path of least resistance points to the quickest way down at any
one point. It marks the fastest fall into the valley, the straightest line to the center of the
earth, if but for the shape of things. As the water flows, so the crow flies, down gravity’s
path carving form hidden in hunks of stone. Time’s chisel, water reveals the cutaneous
present immanent among the dormant spine of the future. I am reminded of Michelangelo’s
sculpture being already embedded in the marble, its lines and curves outlined amid veins of
virgin marble.

Here, too, in the earth and on the ground are lines buried beneath the surface, curves that will
rise over time. Unlike the surface of our own skin, the integument of rocks hides their future.
Over time and under water, the future shape of the world lies behind the surface of rocks,
waiting to be revealed by erosion, violence, and chance. Our skin, on the other hand,
presents the surface behind which the past is contained; the boundary of our flesh is a limit
behind which innumerable sets of corporeal histories converge to condition the present. But
this difference in the skins of flesh
and stone reveal a similarity, too,
for the future shape of rocks is also
a future fully comprised by the
past. The geological cycle is,
ultimately, a closed one. In the
beginning, gases and particles
joined amid the gathering weight,
around that center that continues to
hold, and things came together here
on earth. Detritus settled, land
accumulated, continents formed.
Weight caused pressure caused
heat, which put all of these
materials into motion on a global
scale. This motion, this cycle, was
the world’s first economy, an economy that was always already global, and whose
coalescence was the transcendental condition for all of us inhabiting this tertium quid ever
since. The engine of this economy is the core of the earth, whose heat powers the various
levels of the geologic cycle. On top of the core, the mantle, crust and atmosphere join in
concert to affect the building and taking down of things, the various orogenies and erosions
of the last 4.5 billion years.

So in one sense the forms of mountains are there from the beginning, but this beginning is
understood as the birth of a particular body of minerals in a particular place in the earth’s
surface. So the form to come, so to speak, is there from the beginning of the metamorphic
process. For igneous rock, this form comes into being as its materials crystallize into stone;
for sedimentary rock, when organic sediments mineralize into inorganic matter; and for
metamorphic rock, when heat and pressure wrench previous generations of stone into new
life within the geologic clock.

16
Form, then, is the product of both orogeny and erosion. Orogeny, or the process by which
mountains are constructed, is a story about he material arrangement of minerals in a rock or a
series of rocks, and how they came to be placed in the order of the earth’s crust. This form is
not necessarily, but it is not contingent either. As water follows form, accentuating its
features according to the laws of gravity, erosion completes the circuit to carve the surface of
the world at any given moment. Both orogeny and erosion are required, one resisting and the
other hastening the etchings of gravity’s blade. In either case, though, it is friction, heat, and
resistance that characterize the movement responsible for the shape of things.

Modalities of Stone
Kierkegaard says somewhere that too much possibility will drive you mad. Yes, indeed,
sure. Choices and decisions, the potential selection of one possibility among many -
combined, of course, with the ever-present risk of being mistaken - can drive you to the
precipice of that unspeakable looseness. This is because at the root of that slack, which we're
ever resisting, is responsibility. It is the unique phenomenon of agency, of self at the cusp of
its own becoming.

But like all truths its opposite is also true. Perhaps we can attribute this thought to Aristotle,
perhaps not, but the gist is that possibility isn't the bugbear at all. Rather, it's possibility's
transcendental sibling that is the culprit. The problem, in short, is with actuality. It is the
attempt to comprehend the actuality of the world that will drive you mad, this particularity of
flesh and stone, existing this afternoon. This is what is causing me to come undone.

Actuality and potentiality, siblings no doubt. All potential is based on the actual. There is no
sheer potential, no potential for that which is but solely possible. That would be inane and
empty. What, precisely, would that be the potential of? There must be something before that
thing can become something else. In this way, potential is nothing but the alternatives
available within an actual situation, an actual organism. An egg cannot become a cow.

With this in mind, I'll admit that I've been staring at rocks as of late. I get very close to them,
putting my eye as close to their surface as possible. I want to see their fine grains, their
details, their matter. I've touched them; I've climbed them; I've picked them up and turned
them over in my hands. I've inhaled their dust; I've rubbed them against my skin; I've heard
them fall and crack and speak. Yes, I've even licked them.

The sheer mass of the world

is driving me mad. I cannot
get over the fact - and this is a
fact - that this rock is here, in
front of me now, under my
feet and constitutive of the
world. I cannot get over that
this surface is the surface of
the world, if but for now, one
among as many as there are
layers to its substance. The
entrails of earth have been
forced from below, in what is
describable only as an act of

17
originary violence, rupturing the coherence and sturdy semblance of contiguity characteristic
of the state of things.

The irony is that we speak of seemingly permanent things as though they were "solid as a
rock". The truth of the matter is that rocks just have more endurance than our bodies of mere
water and dust, more grit in the face of sustained assault. Endurance aside, it's the actuality
of these rocks that calls out for an understanding of them. I want to know their history,
where they've been before my arrival and what they might do after my departure. I want to
know what they've been through. I want, in short, to be a witness to their facticity, which is
not solid or stable or static, but is very much in motion, in motion as much as you or me. The
fact is this rock is eroding in simultaneous time with our bodies. See this, hear this, think
this, if you dare.

Perhaps it's fair to assume that most people skate over this matter, forget the geological fact
that the world is crumbling beneath our feet. But don't worry, we're in this together, the
rocks and us, here and now, and that's what keeps bowling me over time and again. I can't
get over it, and I don't expect you to talk me out of it. I don't want you to write off this
wonder because this is a wonder you simply can't write off. This is how things are. This is
the sublime shape of the world at present.

Face to face with the exhaustive actuality of the world, I hurtle past the guardrails of
language into the valley of silence below. I am terrified, lost among the grammar and syntax
of stone, unable to speak in the face of such presentations. Kant says that it is impossible to
like a terror taken seriously, and I cannot help but take this seriously. Though it is almost
certain that Kant never saw any mountains, he spoke as if he had. For Kant, to stand before
the face of a mountain is to bring
the mind to the limits of the
thinkable, beyond which is the
experience of the sublime. This
experience, importantly, is not
itself a sensible; it is not the
experience of a thing, strictly
speaking. Rather, the sublime is
“what even to be able to think
proves that the mind has a power
surpassing any standard of
sense.” The sublime goes
beyond sense, and hence “nature
is sublime in those of its
appearances whose intuition
carries with it the idea of their
infinity.” This confrontation with material I am undergoing is precisely the experience of the
infinite interconnectedness, the infinite number of layers and constellations that obtain in the
matter before my face.

I am slipping away between the cracks of a time I cannot comprehend. My hysteria stems
from the fact that the material before me must, in some sense, be finite – “The world is all
that is the case.” – and yet I am incapable of thinking this finitude fully. It is the
comprehension of the incomprehensibility of the sum total finite, determinate actualities

18
before me that has become my monomania. This trembling before the world agitates my
mind and, to speak with Kant, “can be compared with a vibration, i.e., with a rapid
alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same object.” I desire that which
is beyond my grasp, precisely because it is beyond my grasp, and this is repulsive. To desire
the impossible is obscene. By inhabiting the incongruous impulses of attraction and
repulsion, my experience is brought out of its “usual middle range” and educated into
resistance, displaced in its habitual movements through a confrontation of its limits. This
limit is a principle, an archê, which presents the limits of thinking by enabling me to
transgress those limits. This is the archê of the sublime, the principle by which the mind
rises above the seeming impossibility of full finite comprehension. Kick away the ladder.

So I do not “like” the sublimity of stone, but revel in the failure of reason it occasions, in the
failure of thought beyond an impossibly infinite representation. Here, I let reason and
imagination rest amid the silent becoming of material in geologic time.

In the search of such permanence, such substance, did I come into these mountains, and out I
come a pile of dust, unloosed at the seams and wobbly about the joints. On advice from
Annie Dillard, "I came here to study hard things - rock mountain and salt sea - and to temper
my spirit on their edges. 'Teach me thy ways, O Lord' is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one
I cannot but recommend." But the joke's on me. I can taste these rocks, and their shapes are
cutting my tongue.

Basement Tours
Surrender to the day, settle into the hours. These are the times in which you live.

The moment, for Aristotle, is not a part of time, just as the point is not part of a line. Rather,
the moment is an abstraction from time, already gone before it is grasped. Both points and
moments are in space, while times and lines are always in place, becoming in motion. The
point is not part of the line because the line is the point in motion. Points and moments in
motion, the river puts water and rock into time.

Perhaps this is the well-known river of Heraclitus, where one cannot step into the same rive
twice: all is flux, change, becoming, with each step providing the fixity required for the
experience of motion. There is another river, though – the river of Cratylus - which is a river
that you cannot step into even once. Here, becoming is unbounded because it loses all
reference to the fixity against which becoming is measured.

Movement, necessarily, is an aberration. It is the difference from that which you find
yourself at present, comfortable and at home. Topos interruptus: a disturbance of place that
is also a displacement of the commonplace. From place to place, movement is change. And
if you're one of those unfortunate souls that actually fear the banal (as I am), then movement
appears to be one response to the dread of the ordinary. In this way, traveling is a particular
form of movement. Its form consists of our bodies being propelled from place to place, with
a knowable velocity, from attraction to repulsion, in an endless repetition of other people's
banalities on the stages of our own lives.

Given travel's propensity to place us in positions where touring other people's basements is
taken as the apex of authenticity, still, I am nonplussed when someone asks me that all-too
inevitable question: Why travel? (Importantly, this is different from the question: why move

19
at all?) But what’s frustrating about this question is that its answer seems both so patently
obvious and indefatigably cliché, yet remains to me almost entirely elusive and largely
unsatisfactory.

As hobby: to see the world.

As escape: to have fun and relax.
As project: to enrich your experience.
As duty: to be a representative for your people.

So.

This time, though, I'm traveling through time. I'm tripping through time, skipping out on
people's lives and looking at the world instead of them. This feels like a safer ethical
environs in which to move and be moved. Perhaps out here I can manage not to bump into
anyone such that they take offense or otherwise become disappointed with my presence. In
these young hills, perhaps my youth can spare me some treachery.

Still, I'm walking. Walking up the river valley and into the mountains, I'm reminded that
walking up a valley is walking against the grain of time. The anticipation of beauty, the
expectation of the sublime heights to come, inevitably clouds my eyes to the backwardness of
this motion, this scenery in reverse. To walk up a mountain first seems akin to reading a
book in reverse. But I do not want to know the ending before the beginning; I want to know
how it all unfolds as it unfolded. Plunk me into the headwaters, then I can tell you a story.
To really understand a valley, I must walk out of it. Down and out, following gravity down
its least resistant path to the seas of present time. Down, through, and across layers of rock,
traversing Cambrian marshes and transgressing Ordovician seas, I cannot help but lose my
breath. I'm out of breath and cannot keep up. Please, please walk slower; I cannot keep up
with movements so slow.

Walking, I'm still. I hold my breath now, among Silurian silence. As I skirt down and
around a rock face, my face comes close to all this. I blush. I do not know what to do, what
to say in the face of this confrontation of worlds. I demur, for now. And return to traverse
another time, across a time entirely discontinuous from this one. I crawl off this rock, over
cornices of my deep past and around fingers of my inexorable future, and make it back to soft
ground. Ground that bounces with the fecund spring of soil. Sitting now on the safety of
sand, at a distance from the mind-boggling worlds of ancient mud, I look at the rock I’ve just
left. I can put my hand on its surface, rising just above the surface of the water, and touch a
contiguous stone to 10,000 feet. I move, and it remains solid as a rock – indeed, solid as the
earth. The earth solid, without apparent movement.

So the disruptive experience of stasis and dynamism hits me square in the face. No longer
am I lost among discordant time and disparate civilizations. Now I am at a loss how this
mountain moves at all. The only comfort to which I cling is the purported existence of what
is known to geologists as autochthonous rock. Autochthonous rock is, simply put, basement
rock: it is rock that does not move, that has not moved, and that will not move in the future --
ceterius paribus, of course.

But things are hardly ever equal. There are always bodies moving in and out of places,
following the possible paths of resistance and attraction opened up through other bodies in

20
actual motion. As the basement, the autochthonous is rock that has not moved since its
structural formation, since its placement in the earth’s crust or on the earth’s surface. Auto-
chthon: one earth. When this one block of earth in place is disturbed, when its originary
stasis is interrupted, broken, moved, the intruding block is called the allochthon. Allo-
chthon: other earth. Moving principally along thrust faults, allochthonous material is both
the moved and the mover: it is the other that is moved, sundered from its place of birth, and
thrust into an other place that disturbs yet an other body in its original place. Though always
a resident alien, when the allochthon becomes separated from the terrain that moved it, when
it appears in the middle of a place unexpectedly, it is called a klippe – an isolated block of
allochthon amid an undifferentiated autochthon – while the body from which it came is called
a nappe. Thankfully, inevitably, erosion works its way through the nappe, through the
overlaying allochthon back down to the originary autochthon, and a window is opened in the
rocks. A window clipping and napping among times ever out of joint.

Though I’ve never actually seen such rock – it is rare in these mountains of recent time – I
believe in its existence. Below all these bodies in motion and at rest, there is something
binding, some place where each material was formed. Though I've never seen such rock, I
know what it looks like: it looks like glaciofluivial sediment against the bottom of the
mountain rising before my face; it looks like pebbles gathered at the bottom of a great stone.
I'm searching for this old rock here, in the young mountains of Nepal, hoping to discover a
base line. I'm hoping to get to the bottom of things.

Atopos
“Hot water, sir!” It is 6 am. I splash my face with boiling melted snow, roll out of bed, and
put on several more layers before meeting in the dining tent for breakfast and talk of
departure. Today we attempt to move a good portion of base camp over the pass to an
advanced camp within the cirque, below the southeast ridge of Annapurna III, and to
somewhere off the glacier and out of the direct line of vertically inclined hazards. – A few
years ago, an expedition was camped under the Dablam part of Ama Dablam, a mountain in
the eastern Himalaya. A dablam is a hanging glacier, and in the middle of the night a chunk
of ice broke off and swept through camp killing 14 in their sleep. So even though the porters

21
are constantly telling us to “rest where you love,” we’d do well to love where we rest. – We
gather enough gear for seven people for one night and three people for ten nights and set off
in the angleless bright light of morning.

Yesterday was the most difficult day by far. We hiked from base camp to the Machupuchare
pass through snow and sleet only to find the pass recently washed out by a combination of
avalanche and rockslide. These mountains are not standing still. Though not a trail per se,
the path through the pass is marked by stone cairns of various sizes, silent traces of a absent
presence. This specified vista, however, came to a clear end, an end to the earth on the earth
itself, dropping precipitously into the craggy corners of sheer rock and its gathering dust.
After a significant amount of scouting and chin scratching, the decision was made not to
proceed with the porters, given their heavy loads, lack of proper footwear and technical skill,
and our general unpreparedness in the face of the unexpected. Intending to return in two
days time, we made a cache in the snow at Mardi Himal, a sub-peak of Machupuchare, and
began the walk back to base camp. We arrived back at various times, each having spread out
along the route after the rout. On the way back, we each passed a dead man on the side of the
trail, a body unmoved and unseen in our early group-inspired haste. A Nepali, he was
peacefully arrayed in a sleeping bag with rocks just covering his body and a basket at his
side. It did not look a violent death, but rather that he’d fallen asleep here, in that particular
crook of rock and time, so that his body may be joined with the dust rushing headlong into
the valley below.

A day of rest at base camp, quiet and somber. My climbing companions are inside their
tents, listening to their iPods, trying to expect the unexpected. Having been planning this
expedition for several years, they are disinclined to be easily thwarted. They eschew my
maps, having seen the shape of things for themselves. They fiddle with their gadgets, sleep,
and try to clear their mind for what lies ahead, though it remains unknown.

The clouds are speaking to us. Just two days ago, I sat at the door of my tent, on the belly of
one of the most beautiful mountains in the world. Today I cannot see the dining tent ten
yards away. The clouds have descended upon us,
thick and wet. The entire expedition was planned
around the coming monsoon rains, expected to
arrive in some three weeks or so. But now there is
talk of an early monsoon – a misnomer, no doubt
– but certainly a satisfactory explanation of what
we are undergoing. The clouds are low and
pervasive. I cannot see the peaks above or the
valley below. I am nowhere and anywhere all at
once. It appears as though I am nowhere in
particular and yet could be anywhere at all. I find myself constantly reminding myself of
where, objectively speaking, I am. I am on the side of a mountain in central Asia in the early
Himalayan spring.

I constantly return to the role expectations play in clouding the experience of the present. To
have projected what we would do and how we would do it is, in a certain sense, inevitable.
Kundera reminds me that, “though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people
who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment.”

22
Nothing, I tell myself, is out of order; time is not out of joint; we have not fallen down a hole.
We are here, now, blinded by an all-pervasive whiteness circumscribed by the present.

I walk slowly, low to the ground. Only ever so often, momentarily, can I see far enough
ahead to walk upright. When I can, I run as fast and as far as possible. I see a trail, a path
through this bulge in the earth’s surface, entirely without context, that is any trail. Without
exception, you can only walk one trail at a time. To be sure, one trail can have two (or more)
names. But in the end it is only one trail, only one path through one place. Singular.
Univocal. Definitive. From this trail, at this moment, the Himalaya neglect their curtains
and I look farther on into the spate blue sky. I see into two separate river valleys, the Kali
Gandaki and the Seti Khola, running north–south, continually shaping the youngest, most
malleable mountains on earth. Farther on, the Siwak Mountains form rising preludes to the
Himalaya, folding against the central fault that is thrusting them higher. From here, I see
entire ranges of mountains, running parallel in negative space along paths of greater and
lesser resistances, all irreducibly singular and determinate. I see, all at once, how the earth
has moved in the last 55 million years. And with that my vision is again obscure.

It's still raining - from above and within. I notice that the feeling of loneliness that so much
pervades my experience when others surround me – especially in large, dense urban places –
recedes rapidly against the growing experience of solitude. Never do I feel so alone as when
surrounded by others. Never do I feel so connected to others, so in solidarity as a species, as
when I am away from them in the etiolated light of an inured solipsism.

Crusoe’s notwithstanding, solitude is not a factual isolation. Nor is it the indeterminacy of a

content of consciousness, nor the incommunicability of a feeling or emotion, nor even the
incommensurability that accompanies an experience of radical difference. Levinas says that
solitude is a comportment that recognizes and responds to “the indissoluble unity between the
existent and its work of existing.” This work of responding and recognizing occurs in
solitude, in an austere space where the borderline between the material of experience and its
working through is already spectral and always fleeting. This space is a necessary
supposition for every existent thing: that it is itself, self-identical, at the cusp between its
being and its becoming. Solitude is necessary only as a space. No place is necessary, for
place is precisely contingent, here or there, at any given time, determinate. Space is an
abstraction from place; it has no place. It is without a surface, without a topos. Atopos. For
the Greeks, that which has no place is the absurd.

No one is watching, speak low, for giving up on the idea of a spectator is giving up on God,
of not being watched, of not having events recorded in a unified archive to be judged
according to the whole. That no one is watching belies an important meaninglessness no
doubt, but the watched becomes the watcher, shifting to an other that can only catch glimpses
and fragments of what I offer. This offering I make with my body as well as with my words,
those corporeal extensions of an ephemeral existence, and the meaning created between us
exists only there, between our bodies and our words.

That no one is watching takes some time to get used to, but a relief as I settle into the grooves
of my self with no name or place. Anonymous, the rocks and I. Without name. Not
renaming, not the clichéd remaking by bestowing appellation, not birth by words. But
wholly without name – name withheld – name interrupted – name not given – the name of
the un-nameable. Without name, beyond name, and behind the name is that which is not

23
named, not known. Again, Dillard: “The world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam
gave name.”

Paths of Lesser Resistance

The weather is intermittently tolerable and daunting.
Rain, snow, sleet, wind, but mostly clouds. Not clouds
in the sky, resembling terrestrial forms, but clouds on the
ground at 13,000 feet. It has been eight days since our
return from the initial attempt over the pass. Eight days
with our heads in the clouds. We are becoming restless,
irritable, and worried about wasting our time, for time is
running out.

A crack in the surface of silence, faint voices drift into my right ear. I turn to see in the
distance three people making their way up over around, heading my way. They are singing
softly as they walk. I watch them approach, tasting their size against the backdrop of the
mountain. “Namaste!” When they arrive to camp they stop for some hot tea and
conversation, an unexpected waypoint along their journey. They are from a village down the
valley, coming higher into the hills as the snow makes its reluctant retreat looking for
yarsagumba, or the vegetable caterpillar. But this is no caterpillar at all, but rather a species
of parasitic fungus that inhabits the caterpillar larvae of the moth genus Thitarodes. The
fungus, Cordyceps sinensis, infects the caterpillar under ground, as it feeds on roots, while it
waits up to five years before pupating. The mycelium of the fungus spread in the host’s
body, ramifying throughout its cavity, eventually consuming it completely and replaces the
insect’s tissue with its own. The caterpillar’s exoskeleton, however, remains in tact, and in
the spring the fungus fruits, sprouting a long dark columnar body out the forehead of the
mummified caterpillar. Thus, its name: literally, “worm in the winter, plant in the spring,”
points to the way in which it seems to transform across categories, transgressing essential
differences between animal and plant. First recorded by a Tibetan doctor in the 15th century,
yarsagumba, I am told, is highly prized in traditional Chinese medicine, giving those who
take it vitality, virulence, and endurance. Found only in the alpine Himalaya between 9,000
and 15,000 feet, yarsagumba has recently become an extra-sought after commodity as it gains
currency across the world as “Himalayan Viagra,” a natural alternative for those with the
privation of that power. During the spring, many villages are emptied as people fan into the
high hills looking for the plant. I learn that if they are successful they can make several
months’ wages in a few days’ time, each specimen being worth a handsome sum. Over the
last decade, the Maoists have used their control over the poor, rural mountainous districts to
manage the collection of yarsagumba, levying taxes on its sale in exchange for transporting it
to distribution centers, which has been a major funding source for the People’s War.

The weather is clear this morning. It was clear throughout the night, as the bright light of a
waning gibbous kept us up in anticipation. At first light, one of the climbers instigates a
conversation about making another attempt at the pass. We are all in favor, gather our affects
quickly and begin another push into the interior of the cirque. Pushing toward the center,
driving, relentlessly to the end. Always yet open to a change in the weather, pushing further
into the looking-glass world. By noon the clouds descend en masse. By one it’s raining. By
two, snowing hard and sticking. By three, a strange thunder and low-hanging lightning
flashes between lower-hanging snow, the light is purple green pink. By four we are back in
our tents, wet, scared, and laughing.

24
I am sitting on a rock at the end of a crustal fin in the middle of nowhere. I am listening to
the wind carry the mountain away. My head is touching the bottom of clouds, warm sun
below on my face. The deepest canyons are now revealed, from peak to trough, the longest
in a respective horizontal distance. The perspective is off, and I urge no lines or words in its
place. There is thought outside of language, and the silence of this time, this place, this ridge
in the ribs of a time unknown and unknowable, stands as a stark reminder of the diminutive
place of words in the order of things.

Another attempt at the saddle begins today. Just the climbers this time, who leave at dawn,
light and fast. They plan to make it to the cache at Mardi Himal, stay a night, and traverse
whatever terrain they must, as far as
they are able, setting ropes where
necessary and possible. I stay behind
this time, lacking the confidence of
success and the technical skill to
move over of the rocks ahead in a
quick enough manner. No matter. I
lack the skill and care required to
move over the rocks even here, lost
among the young forms of this
hillside.

Another five days of waiting. In the

clouds, mostly, quiet amid Devonian
granites. Before the climbers left, we
decided that if they had not returned in two days’ time I would begin to make my way down
the mountain and out into civilization again. I would go to Pokhara and begin trekking the
Annapurna circuit, one of the world’s great walks that circles the place where we have been
sitting.

The question of wasting time: is there a difference that makes a difference between the
experience I am having camped out on this cloudy mountainside in Nepal, the experience I
could be having on the bustling streets of Kathmandu, or the experience I would be having at
home walking the dog at two on a Tuesday? I am inclined to answer in the negative. All
experience is as equally fine-grained; all I have to do is attend to the particulars as they are
presented. While I think this, the three particular yarsagumba hunters crest the top of the hill,
whistling the sounds of success. They get to camp and report happy fungus hunting,
collecting enough to head home earlier than anticipated. Ignoring the upshot of my previous
conclusion, I ask if I can accompany them down to the nearest village. They agree, and down
down down I go, traversing in one day the terrain it took five to attain.

Understanding In The Present

Now this is it. Here, below my feet and in between my toes, among the rushing waters of a
glacial river, lay the Himalayan Mountains. To think this thought, and think it in its sheer
facticity, is but the starting point of understanding. From here, the aim is go back through
time and understand how this fact could possibly be. But I get caught here, among the
confines of the present, and cannot seem to escape. The brute materiality of all that is in
front of me literally takes my breath away; it pulls the air from my lungs in a beauty

25
exasperated by its astonishing…bewildering…blazing actuality. If I put my right foot on the
ground I can hear the pulse of the earth, I can feel its breath heaving in with orogenal gasps
and out with erosional sighs.

From the point of this actuality, one must traverse back so as to envision the conditions that
gave rise to this present. This is understanding, which is not so much grasped as it is
pursued. It is understanding as an activity undergone, as a process and engagement with the
world in the form of a question that is constantly imploring why and where-to-fore? Such an
inquiry is geological insofar as it seeks the
various layers of the past, layers that have
been shifted about, thrust through the skin
of the earth and worn down through the
organs of soil and stone, attempting to
reconstruct their various lineages in
connection with the present. In this way,
an understanding of the present involves an
active inquiry into the material
arrangements of the world, here and now,
from every possible time extending to this
very moment.

Begin again.

As activity, understanding is motion

through time. Thus, the starting point, the
archê for understanding is that of present
actuality, which is forever already
receding, forever requiring you to begin
again once again and always. And just as
this beginning is ever recurring, the
material into which you inquire, too, is
ever resisting inquiry. This, because the particular is always already breaking free of the
universal; it exceeds the grasping of the universal through its unequivocal singularity. While
simultaneously motivating inquiry and thwarting its completion, this resistance of the
particular demands attention anew, it taunts from afar by daring comprehension of its face.

To speak with Gadamer, all experience is hermeneutic, that is, all experience is a process of
interpretation, of working through the material of experience so as to understand it. The
activity of this hermeneutic involves fusing the horizons of various actualities to understand
the relevant connections and conditions in the present arrangements of things. To attend to
these arrangements, connections, and conditions is to engage in the relationship of
understanding. What this understanding amounts to, in the end, remains up for grabs. I
cannot say precisely where and why and how these understandings get deployed in the world,
as there seems no one way to state this. But certain knowledges and certain understandings
do make their way in the world; they are not outside the world in some non-material or non-
earthly sense, but are rather wholly of this world, co-extensive with and co-constitutive of the
boundaries of the intelligible.

26
Philosophers have a bad habit of speaking of understanding as though it were one thing,
located in one faculty, and operative in one way. But understanding, like being itself, may be
said in many ways. One such way is to speak of the understanding as always being
relational, and thus the activity of understanding is always the activity of forming a relation.
On the one hand, we might say that in order to understand we first have to experience, that
experience is where understanding begins. But this immediately draws us up against the
counterfactual of those times when we understand – or think we understand – before we
actually experience the subject of the understanding. The expectation of understanding is
thus disrupted by the experience of incongruity, of movement out of joint with anticipation.
We are disappointed, interrupted in a habitual movement of mind, which is why the failure of
understanding is also where experience begins.

Mr. Palomar, in thinking about whether his lawn is one thing or the sum total of all its blades
of grass, determines that “there is no point in counting them, the number does not matter;
what matters is grasping in one glance the individual little plants, one by one, in the
individualities and differences. And not only seeing them: thinking them.” Like Mr.
Palomar, I struggle to keep my gaze “alert, available, and free from all certitude” so as to
understand every actuality in my field of experience and to think its history in all its
variegation. This rock: when was it born?
How hot was it when this material joined,
formed, and cooled? When did it emerge from
the bowels of the earth into the visible life of
day? How many lightening storms, glacial
maulings, earthquakes, and avalanches did this
rock sustain before breaking free from its
home and come tumbling down into the
valley? How many mornings has water rushed
over its edges, taking one particle at a time
down the river into the sea? How many
creatures have dwelled under its lip? How
many organisms are here right now, at home
and happy, on this rock’s cool surface?

Mr. Palomar, imagining himself a bird, concludes that, “it is only after you have come to
know the surface of things…that you venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface is
inexhaustible.” Like Mr. Palomar, I imagine myself this rock and try to think fully the past
outside me and the future within. I go back over all the days of my stony life, think them,
stopping to wonder how the undulating ground felt each day, what direction the wind was
blowing, what it was like to fall from the face high above into this river far below where I am
now becoming disassembled under water and over time.

Mr. Palomar, finding himself in the cheese shop, lost amid a system of names and categories
and things, determines that “learning a bit of nomenclature remains still the first measure to
be taken if you want to stop for a moment the things that are flowing before your eyes.” Like
Mr. Palomar, I find myself lost amid these layers of stone and time, searching desperately for
names and classes and dates so as to slow, if but briefly, the confusion streaming through my
body. Quartzite, phyllite, amphibolite; slate, limestone, granite; dolomite, schist, and banded
gneiss. Fluvial deposits, debris flows, moraine scars. Wind ripples, wave ripples, over
sandstone and shale.

27
The Face of Rocks
I stumble over a stone and am brought face to face with its surface. This stone has no name,
though it has a face. It calls to me. I respond. I understand only in fits and starts.

Levinas says that it is in taking account of the Other’s face that we enter into ethical relation.
He says the expression of the face “manifests the presence of being, but not by simply
drawing aside the veil of the phenomenon. It is of itself presence of a face, and hence appeal
and teaching, entry into relation with me – the ethical relation.” The face calls out for
recognition. It pleads to be taken into account. Through its face, the other entreats me to
respond to its expression that appears gradually or all at once. This expression, Levinas
continues, “does not manifest the presence of being by referring from the sign to the
signified; it presents the signifier. The signifier, he who gives a sign, is not signified.” That
is, through the medium of its appearance – by its expression – the face gives place to that
which signifies, to that which gives name but is not named in the naming.

But for Levinas only humans have a face. In the face of the other – the Other that is human –
I recognize my self and so re-cognize my unique comportment to that part of the world that is
the Other precisely because it is self-same. In the face, I see my self; I see the Other’s
contiguity and identity as my own. Only through the face can this responsiveness occur.
Thus, without the self there is no Other and without the Other there is no self. Mutually
constitutive, hanging in a necessary tension between the poles of the ethical, I and the Other
respond according to our faces.

Through the face, then, I and the Other are bound. Whether it is by making the I discernable
as Other, or whether it is by making the Other discernable through the I, the appeal to enter
into relation turns on cutting the boundaries of each from the other and their relatedness
through sameness and difference. Herein
lies the rub. Again, Levinas: “Identity is
not an inoffensive relationship with itself,
but an enchainment to itself; it is the
necessity of being occupied with
itself…Its freedom is immediately limited
by its responsibility. This is its great
paradox: a free being is already no longer
free, because it is responsible for itself.”
Absurdly, the work of each existent being
occupied with its existence occurs in the
self-same space of solipsism. Here, in
this space, identity is not predicated on an
other, but in the recognition that being is
always becoming, that matter is always in motion, and that the existent is always already
existing in place, in situ. This is “the place of solitude in the general economy of being.”
Freedom turns, then, on the recognition of self-identity in the space of possible solitudes,
which, precisely because it has no place, makes freedom vacuous. It is empty and inane.
Freedom, for Levinas, is absurd in that the responsibility it entails remains merely reflexive:
in being able to respond to myself, I become responsible for myself. Because I am free, I can
speak for myself and represent myself.

28
Levinas speaks well, however, when he says that identity is not an inoffensive relationship;
indeed, by arresting the self in place, by chaining itself to itself, the self accomplishes an
inaugural violence against itself in order to create itself. But this will not do, for identity
without difference is like generals without particulars (or soldiers, for that matter), like
concepts without intuitions, like potentiality without actuality: it is utterly empty. Identity is
created by difference that ruptures its skin, transgressing the borders of semblance by
disrupting its presentation. A particular claim is made through the face of an other by its
interrupting the motion of sameness that would have continued without it. In this way,
difference emerges in the becoming of bodies in motion and at rest. Differences and
identities play out in the movement of attraction and repulsion, in the submission and
resistance of matter in motion.

So when the face of an other confronts, a face that in its presentation affirms the existence of
each pole of the relation, the nature of the attending work necessarily shifts from space to
place. Here, responsibility becomes the ability to respond not to myself, but to the other.
Responsibility is the ability to respond to the face that presents. The question, then, is not
whether I respond, but can I respond? Am I able to respond? I am. I must. I must respond
insofar as I cannot fail to respond. I must take account of the actuality of this rock upon
which I have stumbled. At least until now, I have not been able to avoid responding, which
is not to say that I have been unable to be irresponsible, but only that the movement at work
in any understanding demands that I respond in some way. The ability to respond, then, is
the condition without which understanding could not be.

Crucially, the ability to respond is not exceptional. Rather, it is a habit characteristic of the
solidity of all things. Acting and reacting, material demands accounting. Through
presentation experienced, the various materials of the world clamor for recognition. In
various ways and to differing degrees, matter solicits a response by presenting a face that
resists assimilation and opposing the untrammeled movement in time and place. Though the
material of a mountain may very well seem incapable of a response, it would be imprudent to
accept this claim as prima facie true. Though the voice of the mountain often goes unheard,
though its face is often effaced in the violent exclusion of identity, it is foolish to forget that
the mountain is ever ready to smite you with its harsh and angled reality. Beware: the
mountain indeed responds.

In this way, the ethical relation is an aesthetic relation. It does not turn on the type of face
that I encounter, but on the encounter itself, on the possibility of recognizing and responding
to a face that appears. This appearance is an appearance for me. Perhaps it is or can be an
appearance for others, but this elides the scope of my concern. Only that it is concerns me at
present. From the Greek ethôs, meaning a habit or custom of action, ethics is an inquiry into
how the habitual and customary actions of a particular human being affect other bodies in a
particular place and time. Ethics is always in place – never in space – and so whatever
normative force it may have is always immanent within a context of concurrent actions.
Thus to be ethical is to be habituated or accustomed to acting in a certain way, while to be
unethical is to act outside of this habit, to disrupt the custom out of ignorance or intention.
Ethics is an education in action; it is an education in the motion, movement, and effects of
one’s body in place. As John Llewelyn points out, “ethics is unethical unless it is
simultaneously undergoing and transmitting an education, hence an education about its own
name.” And so ethics is always an education into certain habits of motion in context, a
process by which actions are instructed according to their consequences. The educative force

29
of ethics turns, then, upon accounting for the ways in which certain habits of action bump up
against and affect other bodies in motion and at rest.

Speaking with Aristotle, there is

nothing outside of phusis –
nothing outside of nature, physics,
growth, becoming; there are only
bodies in motion and at rest.
Heraclitus’ river dries up;
Cratylus’ floods. Ethics is a form
of physics, then. It is the phusis
of a particular genus of organisms,
namely, human beings, that
accounts for the habits and
customs of acting in a place. But
though ethics may be the
particular phusis of human beings,
it is in no way limited to the
relations between humans. This
would be absurd; it would be to
say that habits and customs occur
only between people, between faces of a particular variety. Humans have but one face
among many; human bodies are but one body among many. The picking out of faces and
bodies is a work that is always at hand. The face is a surface of a certain type, and the
surfaces of things confront us continually. Though while they are not arranged in the same
manner, the face of a rock is of the same material as the face of a human. To be able to
recognize your face in the face of a rock requires only the slightest provocation from the
imagination: dare to compare the fundamental isomorphism of all matter in motion.

Geophilosophology
Geological time is cast in terms of eons. The first, the Hadean Eon, began some 4,600
million years ago (give or take a few years) when the earth was too hot for even crusts to
form. The second, the Archean Eon, began 4,000 million years ago as the earth cooled
enough for materials to begin sorting themselves out into more and less dense accumulations
of matter. It is during this time that the first parts of the continental shields formed, adding
the necessary firma to the terrra through the formation of the geomagnetic field. The Arche-
an: in the beginning indeed. Then, land itself formed and the sun’s energy was harnessed
into the photosynthetic cycle of blue-green algae. After this auspicious beginning, sometime
around 2,500 million years ago, the Proterozoic Eon, or the “Age of Former Life,” saw the
Precambrian basement coalesce alongside aerobic life. Within the first three of these eons,
eighty-eight percent of the world’s history is written. We are now in the Phanerozoic Eon, or
“Age of Visible Life,” which began some 540 million years ago, and only from this vantage
point can we read the history that has been written, erased, and written again in the archives
of the material world.

To be sure, geologists have a name for this rock over which I stumbled. They give it a name
that immediately becomes lost in space among types and eons and metamorphoses. The
manifest absurdity of geology rests in the fact that a general name is no name at all. A
general singular is not a name; it is a category. And so instead of giving name myself, I

30
demure, touching tasting seeing smelling listening to its history in the resonant silence of the
present. I catch its meanings only in parts, but am alert, attentive, and free of certitude. I
attend to the stone’s face, to its presentation. I take account of it by allowing, however
briefly, the sayable things to pass between us and cheerfully bereave what must remain
unsaid.

When all is said and done, even the names geology provides amount to categories of essence
and difference under which particular rocks are placed. These categories are then connected
to one another, constructing a story of birth, life, and death in the scale of geological time. In
this way, geology is a narrative science, a science of history whose subject is the material of
the world. Though not in exactly the same way as, say, cultural anthropology, geology is a
science of interpretation that constructs a narrative in which matter gains meaning. Like all
narratives, geology’s has an arc, or, I should say, an archê, that begins with the beginning of
the world and works its way through the narratable events of the last 4.5 billion years.

Given the scope of its story, geology’s

history is somewhat sparse, each event
marking the waypoint between becomings
of matter that range from the patently visible
– indeed, solid as a rock – to the
conceptually necessary to the merely
feasible. While geology aims to fill in as
much of this topography as possible, this
aim, in the end, is undertaken in vain. After
all, nature does abhor a vacuum, but a
vacuum is only possible in space. So not
only is the aim of completing geology
undertaking in vain, the aim itself is vain.
For no amount of knowledge will ever
account for all the matter in the world. That
would be to speak every thing that has ever
been, to ascribe to every singular a name
that is inscribed on the archive of time. This
would be a perfect science: a science of
particulars, an episteme of individuals. Like
Funes, the Memorius – institutionalized.

No matter. To make possible its peculiar understanding, to account for the systems and
networks of its stony bodies, geology divides the things of the world and conquers them
through categories. Geology is both an economy and an ecology of matter. And while this
matter is generally taken to be inorganic, it is nevertheless very much in motion. Geology is
simultaneously the ecology of orogeny and the economy of erosion. Each from the same
root, oikos – house, home, domicile, or dwelling place – ecology joins to logos – accounting,
reckoning, measuring, considering, relating, explaining, reasoning, speaking, naming; or, the
word, that by which thought is expressed, a condition, the power to speak, a principle.
Oikos-logos: accounting and relating things in a place; or, naming the things and speaking the
principles of a place. Economy joins to nomos – law, use, possession, or that which is in
habitual practice. Oikos-nomos: the habitual practices and laws within a place of dwelling.

31
Bodies in motion and at rest, geology accounts for the arrangement of matter. Geo-logos: an
accounting and relating of things in the world; or, naming the things and speaking the
principles of the earth. There are 92 elements on earth that occur by nature. Of these, eight
account for 98% of the weight of the earth’s crust, with the two nonmetals – oxygen and
silicon – comprising three-quarters of that weight. Most of these elements occur as minerals,
i.e., as natural substances that differ in chemical composition and atomic structure, which are
usually formed when fluids solidify and arrange their matter in the fixed geometrical form of
a crystal. From lines passing from the center of the crystal, each mineral is categorized
according to its distinctive symmetry, around which its material is arranged in what is called
a habit. The habits of minerals thus include (but are not limited to) the cubic, tetragonal,
orthorhombic, hexagonal, monoclinic, and triclinic. Material tends to move along these lines
of axial symmetry, shearing, breaking, and bending in various degrees under various
conditions. Along with these crystalline structures, how these minerals get arranged in the
crust has everything to do with how they will move and change over time.

The face of the earth is in motion. Moving along tectonic boundaries, the surface of the earth
is comprised of plates, which involve a slab of oceanic or continental crust (or both) coupled
to the rigid upper mantle.
Together, this is the
lithosphere, which rides upon
the asthenosphere, a dense
plastic layer of the mantle.
The flowing matter and intense
heat of the earth’s lower levels
generate electromagnetism,
which moves the tectonic
plates along boundaries
constructive, destructive, and
conservative, and make the
earth’s magnetism like that of
a self-existing dynamo. Earth
moving over flowing fire, the
skin of the world covers its molten organs. Layers of crust folded broken thrusted tilted on
top of itself, the roots of mountains reach through the crust, anchoring them to the moving
plates, themselves without roots. A rooted rootlessness characterizes this horizon of rocks.

I hear avalanches through the snow, rocks falling from the face of the mountain. Lanes of
moraine and veins of granite, bleeding through the belly of the cirque down a river of rocks.
Over and out this orogenal block of stone, erosion carves the negative space of a positive
place. Matter moving along habits of greater and lesser reliance. Orogeny and erosion: the
building and taking down of things. Matter moving into a place of privation; desire moving
from a place of repulsion. Together, in the cool time of stone, the places of orogeny and
erosion couple to form the erogenous zones of the earth. The rock angular, falling off into a
depression of its own shards, never cleanly or neatly, always obliquely and erratically,
balancing against each other long enough for moss to grow over a crack or a marmot to build
a burrow inside. A rootless rootedness characterizes this horizon of rocks.

Experience is too often located in an organism, in a seat of experience said to be alive. So

rather than speak of experience-had, I speak of experience-taken, of experience as the

32
resistance of particular material that demands to be accounted for in the economy of matter
and the ecology of motion, all in place. Experience is the transaction of material as it is in
motion, a transaction that acts across barriers of life and non-life, human and animal; it is not
the experience of some thing, but the experience that some thing presents a face that demands
a taking into account. This face is a sur-face, a face above the face, beyond the face that
limits recognition of the wide diversity of bodies in motion and at rest in the world. This is
an experience of material accounting, which is shared through a common material world.

This common world is itself a place; the world contains absolutely no space. This place is
any place and so it is also no place. This time is anytime and so is also no time. Watch out
Cratylus, I’m jumping in! It is in this sense that we are always at home in the world; the
world is our place of origin; we are always autochthonous. In this sense, there is a global
ecology and a global economy; there is economy of global erosion and an ecology of global
orogeny. But in another sense, this simply will not do. The place that is the world is the
philosopher’s and the geologist’s place. Here, names are too loose to provide the traction
required for motion; here, to speak with Teilhard de Chardin, “the history of the living world
can be summarized as
the elaboration of
even more perfect
eyes within a cosmos
in which there is
always something
more to be seen.”
That is, the places
that matter are seen
from this cosmic
place, but not from
the place that actually
matters, namely, the
place of particular
matter in motion.

So instead this global place must be deterritorialized, disintegrated from the whole into its
particular parts. The autochthonous must be abandoned, resisted, interrupted. Deleuze: “the
earth constantly carries out a movement of deterritorialization on the spot, by which it goes
beyond any territory...The earth is not one element among others but rather brings together
all the elements within a single embrace while using one or another of them to deterritorialize
territory.” Intrusion. Disruption. Resistance. Each element opposes the others, demarcating
a boundary, a territory that is soon transgressed in the always already motion of the earth’s
becoming. Again, Deleuze: “What is in the process of coming about is no more what ends
than what begins.” Or, better, Thoreau: “The world is wider than our views of it.”

Memory and Mélange

Trekking, I encounter many different others who move me in various directions. Four claims
have struck me silent. First, someone suggested that a particular part of the Annapurna
circuit “had more culture” than the previous sections on which they had trekked. Second,
standing before the face of Annapurna I, the highest of the range, someone wondered aloud
about how they’re going to explain this to all the people back home. Third, someone said
that a forest they trekked through recently was so normal that “you wouldn’t have known you

33
were in Nepal if you didn’t know you were in Nepal.” Finally, my climbing companions
cannot stop grumbling about how “boring” trekking is.

Kundera speaks of the “plausible plastered over the forgotten.” Memory, he says, “is only
capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and
not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or
our interests. We won’t understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the
most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be
reconstructed.”

The times they are a changing. Yes. But this place is changing, too, and at a very high rate,
barely keeping up with itself in the race upward and downward. The face of a mountain
sheers away, at an oblique and necessarily efficient angle, the shortest way down, gravity’s
preferred modus operandi. In relationships, too, the path of least resistance ought to be
resisted. Motion requires friction and resistance, and all things are in motion.

Being constantly with others makes us

less attentive to the world and our
experience in it. It pulls us into a
peopled world, full of peopled thoughts
and after thoughts and side thoughts.
We lose focus, become high-strung,
self-important, and only seldom do we
become more reflective. I remember
Eric Hoffer: “The most important point
is - and remains - not to take oneself
seriously. There is no past, and,
certainly, no future. There are but a
few years - ten at the most. You pass
your days as best you can, doing as
little harm as possible. Let the desires be few and treat expectations as weeds. You read,
scribble as the spirit moves you, hear some new music, see every week the few people you
are attached to. Again: guard yourself, above all, against self-dramatization, a feeling of
importance, and the sprouting of expectations."

Still sore from the plunge down the mountain. And quiet. Looking at the world and getting
continually bowled over by it. The particularity of the day, the nitty-gritty singularity of
people’s lives, the rooster crowing and the dogs barking in the syncopated stillness of
Thursday afternoon. Listen look feel hear smell taste. Closely. Right. Now. To think is to
forget a difference, to forget by passing over the difference that sits at the bottom of every
thing. The paradoxical structure of this claim, i.e., the performative contradiction involved in
any general formulation of a radically singular thesis, is bothersome only to some. Its truth
remains.

Climbers and philosophers have a similar inclination to speak and think in extremes. Both,
perhaps, are what Lionel Terray once called “conquistadors of the useless.” Krakauer says
rightly somewhere that “climbers, as a species, are simply not distinguished by an excess of
prudence.” This is largely true of philosophers as well.

34
Or, mountaineers and naturalists move through a place at entirely different speeds and for
entirely different purposes. The mountaineer wants to cover ground, gain elevation, and
attain the ridge so as to then see. The naturalist is just as interested in the river valley as the
mountain ridge, perhaps more so. She walks slowly and with care. She attends attentively to
the world around her and the relations that reveal themselves.

I am of the opinion that one should walk as slowly through the mountains as possible, and, all
things considered, this is good advice outside them as well. When you walk fast you pass
entire worlds by at the speed of your feet.

Walking up the valley toward Annapurna I is like walking across continents on a single trail.
Every two hours I enter a new ecological zone. From tropical riverbeds to bamboo forests,
across barren hillsides and over cultivated terraces, I walk up the slow incline amazed at the
sheer plurality of places along this singular path. There are white orchids hanging from
gnarled rhododendron trees, spread along the hillside in an ancient forest said to be the
dwelling place of a local deity. Perhaps, I think, this is one of the first conservation areas,
protected by god with the assistance of the troupe of white-faced langurs moving through the
trees. Further, there are large collard doves, extraordinary schists, hidden waterfalls, and
elegant but deadly plants that have a large hood with a long tongue. There are messages left
in trees, hot springs, and humans talking along the trail.

My eyes are propped open with matchsticks, nausea rising. I cannot decide whether to
scream or faint. I want to cry so often for the beauty of the world, its reality and actuality, its
presence and present-ness. How. Can. This. Be.

I wake this morning to find that the group had already left. Good. Alone, I can walk as
slowly as I want, and today is Sunday, the day for walking alone. I am walking quietly
along the trail, the sweat at the small of back gathering to make me slightly cool, when I
cross a small bridge and decide to stop for a break. The first of three boys I am to encounter
today pops over the bridge, silently, surprising me as I smoke in the shade. Of his being a
mild surprise he is well aware, and shoots a mirthful glance over his shoulder in my direction.
No more than six or seven years old, he follows ahead of
me, stopping as I stop, looking back at me in a gaze that
translates: follow me, I’ll show you the way. It’s been an
emerging custom of my people to lead people through
these mountains, and though I’m young, I’m aware of this
and will begin now, with you, if you’ll only follow me.
This continued for some time when he finally stopped in
the middle of a village, sat on a bench with a smile and a
nod down the trail. Hands together at my chest, I thank
him and continue walking. The second boy, somewhere
around nine or ten, appears shortly thereafter. He was
sitting above the trail, to the right, jumping down as I
pass. He immediately asks me to take his picture,
snatching a tuft of grass to hold properly before him. This is funny. Eyes cast down, I shoot.
Oh. Eyes cast aglance, I shoot. Rupees?, he asks with open hands. I open my pocket and
give cheerfully, moving on down the trail. The third boy – actually, a young man in his mid-
tens – appears sometime later. The day has warmed considerably and I stop to shed some
layers. Just as I finish redressing, he makes a corner and comes into appearance. He’s

35
coming down and I’m going up but he’s still drenched in sweat and has no water. He asks
timidly for some water and I give boisterously. Careful not to touch his lips to the rim, he
pours water down his throat on his face. We talk for a short while about where he’s going,
what the weather’s like higher up, etc., and part.

Rocks help us keep things – most notably ourselves – in perspective. They help us take
ourselves less seriously, the momentary blip of our lives on the radar screen of the world.
(Does the image of a radar screen imply a watcher of that screen? Perhaps not, as a movie
screen can play to an empty theater and planes can fly without an air traffic controller.)

If you sit, but do not look, you will see. I am sitting 20 yards off the trail, alone. The sun is
behind me, warming my back and burning my ears. A bush to my left rustles ever so
slightly, and out steps a full-grown male Impeyan Monal Pheasant, iridescent in the afternoon
sun. Still and silent, the national bird of Nepal glances at me casually and continues its
foraging, slowing working its way across the meadow into a stand of tall, dark conifers on the
other side.

We arrive at the village of Sinuwa in the early afternoon, exactly seven minutes before the
afternoon downpour begins. Close to the river but high on a cliff, Sinuwa boasts three hot
springs on the river 2,000 feet below. As the rain ends an hour or so later, clouds and fog
begin to fill the valley. The sun lowering and dinner digesting, I inquire as to whether
anyone would like to accompany me down to the springs for a bath. Everyone demurs as the
humidity is high and things are extremely wet, which is the perfect environs for the Nepali
land leech. Moving like an inchworm but looking like a slug, the leech dangles on the edges
of plants waiting to latch onto whatever warm-blooded creature may pass by. While the
Nepalis don’t seem to pay them much mind – some even claim that they are good for you,
sucking the bad blood out of your body – foreigners almost universally detest them. So no
one wants to venture to the springs because of the leeches, and the rumor of an aggressive
monkey along the path. I set out alone, down the hill with my pants tucked into my boots to
guard against the leeches, past the monkey who screams at me from her tree, down into the
warm hard water of the spring. The sun setting, I set back on the path up the hill. Just as the
sky was visible over the crest, the white blue light of gathering darkness illumined a
shimmering plume rising from the hillside. I approach to find thousands of moths alighting
from their day’s resting spot into the night air. Up, up, up, they rise in a column winding a
hundred feet into the air, their silver wings glistening in the rising moonlight.

“When the death of your civilization precedes you…”

Outside of Kathmandu, Nepal remains a place
where a significant portion of goods still move
about the country on the backs of donkeys,
yaks, and human beings. It is an economy
where labor matters, where strained sinew
remains the arbiter of cost, and where value
tracks the distance of the walk from the
nearest road. It is relatively striking that there
are still economies that rely, not upon silicon
and credit, not even upon petroleum and the
exploitation of the machine, but upon that all-
too-American idiom "sweat equity".

36
For some, including myself, this makes it especially easy to slip into a nostalgic mode,
seduced by the idylls of agriculture and authenticity that Nepal presents: terraced fields up
and down hillsides, hand and animal drawn implements, low impact farming techniques, and
relative food sustainability; about a people living close to the land, in touch with a place,
largely free from the day-to-day trappings of global capitalism. While only 17% of its land is
arable, agriculture accounts for some 40% of the national economy, competing only with the
service sector (read: tourism) for equal significance. But subsistence agriculture remains
common. People are moving in waves out of the rural agricultural villages into the cities.
Through the television and the internet, influences from without are changing the character of
young Nepalis, and Nepal is a country of young people. Between a third and a full half of the
population is under the age of 25.

But, like all things, the habitual actions of this place are in the process of becoming. A
massive road project stretching from China to India – and right through the middle of Nepal –
has been in the works for a few years. If China finances some of Nepalese portion, as is
expected, construction could begin within the next decade to pave a highway directly on top
of a large portion of the Annapurna circuit, a path through the mountains from Tibet to
central Nepal that has been traversed for centuries and is the economic life-blood of the entire
region. To a typical foreigner, especially of my inclinations, this is easily seen as a potential
tragedy, a paving of paradise for a parking lot. It very well may be. But many Nepalis
welcome such a prospect. The circuit can be moved over a river valley or two, the towns
losing the tourist traffic will gain in road traffic, while existing networks of villages to the
west will stand to undergo dramatic development. Or so the story goes. And when you add
to this the seemingly obvious benefits to people and their bodies in motion and at rest, it
becomes, as they say, a slam-dunk case: I read that the former king of Mustang, a Buddhist
region on the northern border to Tibet, fully supports the road so that his people – especially
children and the elderly – can get access to adequate healthcare. Indeed. But I cannot help
but think about the future of roads and cars and highways, and whether one day soon…

Until 1949, Nepal was an almost completely isolated kingdom at the heart of Asia, its borders
effectively closed to all foreigners. Since then, a steady stream of trains, planes and
automobiles have transformed it into developing nation-state. As capital spreads unevenly
and slowly, as influences and powers shift from this place to that, people have been moved
about country in various directions. Many have gone to Kathmandu, a city of 600,000.
Many have gone to the Terai valley, a fertile plain in the south, poorer and more radical than
elsewhere, but where half of the nation’s population resides. But many have left altogether.
As I board the plane to leave the country there is not a single seat available on the flight, nor
is there an opening for some three weeks. Huge numbers of
Nepalis, mostly men, are leaving the country to find work
elsewhere, usually in the Middle East. The Nepalis leaving this
place – their place – with me today are going to Bahrain and
Dubai for jobs in construction, domestic service, and industry.

And for Nepal and every other place, the consequences of

increasingly diverse influences tend to work to disrupt stasis.
When our bodies are put into motion, moved from resting in
their habitual place, our common modes of action are also put
into motion and do not remain what they were. An apparent

37
paradox emerges here. Traveling, above all, is about being at home, while being at home
begs the question of the place beyond the home, beyond the habitually known. By saying
that traveling is about home, I mean that all you experience in traveling must be related to
what you experience at home if it is to be understood at all. By moving from where we are to
where we were not, understanding becomes possible only through the active relation of place
to place. But that which moves bodies from place to place is itself of the utmost importance.

All bodies come into becoming in a place. They germinate and form happen somewhere in
the place that is the world. Like rock that has not been moved from its original place, people
too are able not to move far from the place of their birth. Ethically, an autochthon is a human
being sprung from the soil of a particular place; they are sons and daughters of the soil,
inhabitants habitually moving in their place of birth. The allochthon is a traveler, then, a
foreigner in a place that is not their place, a stranger among those at home. But in a world
where places overlap, where the borders between places are fluid and ever changing, the
autochthon and the allochthon too become relative designations based on a rootless
rootedness (or is it a rooted rootlessness?) in a soil contingently adopted. If it is only through
a particular place that a body comes to know the customary habits of motion – habits that
give sense and meaning and understanding to experience – then whenever that body moves
from one place to another it must struggle to gain a new sense of motion in place and time.
As Deleuze notes, in a such a world “the Autochthon can hardly be distinguished from the
stranger because the stranger becomes Autochthonous in the country of the other who is not,
at the same time that the Autochthonous becomes stranger to himself, his class, his nation,
and his language: we speak the same
language, and yet I do not understand
you.”

Everywhere the banality of poverty and

wealth pervade experience. With
everyone supposing to benefit from the
rising seas of global economies, the
fact that wealth cannot exist without
poverty evades substantive address.
Without poverty there would be no
wealth; inequality and exploitation are
the conditions without which wealth could not exist. When Deleuze remarks that “the market
is the only thing that is universal in capitalism,” he is pointing to the fact that the form by
which bodies become moved and are made to rest has become universal. This form of the
market is the archê of the global place, its beginning the source of motion, its principles the
teacher of habit. This archê makes certain habits customary, while displacing other habits
into no place. In this way, the archê gives pride of place to some movements and necessarily
displaces others, moving them out of place, making them absurd.

But when motions that are destructive become habitual, ethics is in constant crisis. Actions
that destroy themselves eventually run out of place. They are absurd because they destroy
the conditions that make them possible. One of the central roadblocks to ethical inquiry
today is that we are unaccustomed, unable, and unwilling to account for the innumerable
relations and habits of action that are always already affecting ours and other bodies in
motion and a rest. We think that the human face is enough, and yet fail so often even there.
We seem incapable of attending to the ethics, economics, and ecologies of our home places,

38
to the habits that characterize the relations established to ourselves and between others. This
inability, perhaps, is actually a fear of the everyday, a certain dread of the banal that causes
us to turn away from habits and seek principles that stand to bring particular actions and
bodies under general rules and concepts. But Arundhati Roy argues that “we have to lose our
terror of the mundane. We have to use our skills and imagination and our art, to re-create the
rhythms of the endless crises of normality, and in doing so, expose the polices and processes
that make ordinary things – food, water, shelter, and dignity – such a distant dream for
ordinary people.” Roy suggests that by revealing the conditions by which everyday
necessities are determined in a particular manner, the habitual motions, forces and stories of
human life can be disrupted and redirected in new and potentially more fruitful paths.

This is why ethics, in order to be ethical, must have a critical relation to itself. This critical
relation is one that works to disrupt the archê of ethics, to displace the habits of a particular
place in a way that educates the action with respect to that place. By interrupting habits, by
disrupting the rhythms of normality, ethics is but the habit of an-archê, the habit of resisting
principles through the practice of disturbing customary modes of motion. In this way, ethics
ceases to be simply a description of the habits of a particular place and becomes a
transformative praxis whose interruption of principle takes the form of a question: Why is this
habit in practice? Where did it come from? What body put it into motion? What ends does it
serve and how well does it serve them?

If ethics is an inquiry into the phusis of certain bodies in motion and at rest, then it is an
inquiry into the attraction and repulsion of those bodies, both near at hand and far at a
remove. These lines of motion are vectors of desire and privation, which become ingrained
and habituated through repetition. And, to be sure, repetition breeds a certain form of
intimacy: an intimacy of the home place, if nothing else. But if these repetitions are not
interrupted, intimacy quickly turns into complacency. While in the face of intimacy, ethics
grows ill, weak with repetition and comfort, it is in the face of complacency that ethics is
already dead. In all
relationships – experienced,
understood, or undergone –
familiarity breeds contempt,
dullness, and neglect. In a
familiar place, we pass bodies
time and again through time,
each time failing to account for
the relation at hand. In a novel
place, though, our senses are
alert, available, and free from
much of our habitual certitude.
By being out of place, the novelty of resistance moves us in unexpected ways; our brains
eyes noses tongues ears become trained to hear the unheard, see the unseen, and expect the
unexpected, assimilating them all into a wider understanding of the present.

The Shape of Things to Come

Eating a bit of cake, Alice said anxiously to herself, “‘Which way? Which way?,’ holding
her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing; and she was quite
surprised to find that she had remained the same size. To be sure, this is what generally
happens when one eats cake; but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing

39
but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in
the common way.”

Understanding in the present is permanent hermeneutic revolution. It is ever beginning again

and never ending, even if it could stop beginning. Saleem Sinai taught me this economy of
orogeny and erosion; he taught me this ethics of a ecological hermeneutics: “And there are
so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places
rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a
swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as
well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me…now, seated hunched over
paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am.
Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I
have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-
the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which
would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter;
each “I”, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I
repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.”

The question of understanding in the present, then, is not so much a question about what is
right or wrong in the present, as it is a question about how the present has come to be
configured. The first question concerns the current arrangement of powers, resources, and
habits that stand in need of reconstruction in light of experienced consequences. The second
question concerns how these
powers, resources, and habits
came to be distributed in the
present arrangement of
materials. That is, what
influences, forces, and necessary
violences must have occurred to
give rise to the mountains of
present experience?

As the subject matter of geology

is the arrangement and relations
of the earth, so the subject
matter of politics is the
arrangement and relations of bodies. In this sense, there is a political geology that concerns
the arrangement and relation of bodies on the earth, the classification of corporeal material as
it is found in certain places on the surface of the earth. It is to this arrangement that the
ecological and economic ethics of an-archê directed. There is no principle available to guide
every relation in every place. The archê that this ethics suggests is an archê to be sought and
employed at every turn, with every relation. It does not truck a division of the world into
living and non-living, nor does it truck a division of the world into the plant – animal, the
animal – human, the individual – community, or the nation – world. By demanding attention
to each relation, to each surface of material in its presentation, an ethics of an-archê attempts
to maintain difference in the face of identity and to cultivate with care the activity of each
body in motion and at rest.

40
The surface of things is all that is needed to take account of the face. Behind the face there
are innumerable levels of time and material. Only to some are we able to respond, but the
effort must be made anew each time if the ethics is to be genuine. Llewelyn says rightly that
“it is our responsibility to make ourselves responsive…Only then do we open ourselves to the
eventuality that the maxims to which we appeal as guidelines or rules of thumb may be
adjusted, to be made more just, from time to time, from place to place, in one valley section
or another.”

In physics, an archê is a principle of motion, a beginning point that establishes the habitual
way in which bodies tend to move and interact in place and time. To be sure, there are
always exceptions, but it is precisely in their exceptionality that they prove the rule that habit
is customary. To avoid a certain complicity with this archê in my relations with particular
bodies in Nepal, I turned to rocks to inquire whether by encountering things so seemingly
inanimate, dead, inert, I could avoid responsibility. This is not possible. Understanding
seems irreducibly relational, always calling into question both the one who speaks the
understanding and the bodies or systems of bodies that form the content of this
understanding. In the end, I found that rocks, mountains, stones, boulders, even pebbles, are
able to present themselves. They do not need to be represented; they always already are
presenting themselves for all the world to read. In my suspension of the motion of
understanding, the question of the response was put into play. And like with their
presentation, rocks, mountains, stones, boulders, even pebbled, are able to respond. Through
their movement and materiality the stolidity of stone responds, if a bit firmly.

Habit of movement. Routines are the essence of institutionalization. Institutionalization

prefigures slavery. Upon receiving an honorary doctorate from Harvard, Andrew Jackson
raised his glass in a toast to the nation: “E Pluribus Unum, my friends. Sine qua non.”
Indeed, the condition without which the state and, by extension Jackson himself, could not be
is the consolidation of many into one. This move from the many to the one is the barbarism
at the heart of democracy, the fascism of representation. It declares that the many cannot
represent themselves and that they must be represented. Let all bodies present themselves
and take account of their place and motion with respect to other bodies.

Derrida’s democracy to come. “Becoming is always double, and it is this double becoming
that constitutes the people to come and the new earth.” As one of my Nepalese friends told
me, “democracy is good, but not too much democracy.”

In what Emily Dickinson calls “this brief tragedy of flesh,” I wait. I wait for the orogeny of
my body to be eroded by the water and wind of corporal time. Like Derrida expecting the
unexpected, waiting for a future to come, I await the next go round. The next time I am faced
by a body from without that demand an accounting, an accounting for which I have no
principle, I will respond and respond in kind.

Like all places, I leave Nepal. I fly back over India Iran Iraq Egypt Cyprus Spain France
England. I fly back over Gondwanaland and the Tethys Sea. I move back into my place, the
place I belong, by returning to the place that gave rise to my habits and customs. Moved
from this place, disrupted in my experience, I return home a resident alien.

41