Irina Mashinksi
TRANS. BY Maria Bloshteyn
the cave and the horizon
An Essay
A long time ago, while still a student in the Department of Paleogeography, I spent a month living in a cloud over Southern Ossetia. The campsite of our expedition was situated on a small plateau high up in the mountains, the highest spot reachable by the rugged pickup truck with a canvas top, and this bit of flat ground was forever immersed in a suspension of clouds. Every morning we’d clamber up a steep alpine meadow with very familiar-smelling grasses—it took us a while to figure out that this was the exact smell of the popular spice mix khmeli-suneli, and when we finally did, we’d think back every morning to the rumpled paper packages sold in Moscow ice cream kiosks and to the city itself. It was a long climb, and the sun would climb up along with us, so that the cloud would be constantly changing color, until we’d find ourselves at the entrance of the famous Tsona cave, Boubas-Klde.
Our task was to scrape down the walls of the cave and to document the layers that we’d uncover. This was reminiscent of a fresco restorer’s work, except that our tools were much less delicate and more in tune with the conventions of the early Paleolithic era. Not far from our camp was the encampment of the archeologists. Our own interest, however, lay not in the ancient tools that we’d find in great numbers, but in the characteristics of paleoterrain that we’d try to reconstruct based on preserved pollen and other markers. We didn’t particularly care about the fact that the cave was once inhabited by people, Homo Georgicus—the Georgian Man.
You’d think the fossilized remnants of animals and plants, along with the unique patterns of the decal-like layers, should have been able to testify to what was happening in these young mountains, while generations of slouching shadows glided along the cave walls. But these layers, so reminiscent of wallpaper left from the former tenants, with their unexpectedly clear and distinct patterns that we’d carefully transcribe in our field notebooks, were very different from the concentric rings of tree trunks and the even layers of fine deep-water ocean clay—the sequential pastel palette of the benthos zone. Up in the mountains, everything is upended by tectonics—it all glides along the fault lines and flips upside down, much like our own understanding of time, left behind at the base camp. And even though this particular field of scientific inquiry is not merely interested in dating, which is determined by the very approximate radiocarbon method, but makes a cult of it, the notion of time is actually meaningless here. When we were inside the cave, we’d hear the same tinkling of grasses, and the same cloud that waited for us down at the campsite was here as well, leaning against the cliff.
You could take a look outward from the inside of a dust mote or an atom that’s travelling inside the Earth’s layers. Alternatively, you could look inside a point and see everything that has happened to it in a 3D—but only 3D—space. In the first case, you are looking at the terrain. In the second case, you are looking at a landscape. A landscape is free of memory, and even though it can emerge in reminiscences, it doesn’t in itself include any movement and, consequently, is free of events. The landscape only sways—it’s both mobile and immobile. Try to pinpoint a change, and you’ll just find yourself at a different point.
Conversely, a terrain is a realm of constant change and an accumulation of what has already transpired. More accurately, it’s a thin latex glove stretched over the forms of geological memory. The wrinkles of mountains and waters are the result of everything that has happened to it up to that point; every fold tells the tale of the unstoppable movement of the depths of the Earth and of air. If something must disappear within a terrain, it shall. And if the essence of a terrain is a momentary magnesium flash of history, then the essence of a landscape is precisely the lack of any history, and everything within it—the wrinkles of its mountains, the ellipses of its waters—are neither more nor less important that their correlation.
I have a special fondness for vast and open but internally heterogeneous spaces, perhaps because they so strongly express the notion of a beginning. For instance, a watershed—one of the most moving things in the world, or a mountain pass, from which you can simultaneously contemplate two valleys that do not resemble each other in any way. But a beginning does not imply anticipation, because that presupposes a linear flow of time. Standing at a mountain pass, even if it’s a mere viewing platform with a couple of dusty RVs and roadside litter, you see a vast inhabited valley and mountain slopes steaming in the multicoloured sunlit mist, and the sparkling vertical wrinkles within the slopes that look like upended roads glazed by apple wax, and you feel like a trailblazer. That’s because any landscape is an endless beginning, an atemporal Big Bang.
Chinese landscape painting–ink on paper, or watercolor on silk—is called Shan Shui: mountain and water. A view from the mountain pass brings to mind those Chinese landscape paintings: there’s the same floating perspective, the same high horizon line, the same semi-transparent ribbon-like layers with drifting boats.
In the Rocky Mountain range—not the part closer to the middle of the continent, but the part asymmetrically shifted toward the West—there is a watershed of two great oceanic basins: the Continental Divide. Water spilled here begins its path to the ocean, and a difference of a mere half meter determines whether it will end it in the Pacific or the Atlantic Ocean.
To a large extent, that’s what terrain is—the behaviour of water. A river adds in length from the watersheds, a pirate stream ambushes a weaker one and carries it away on its crests and rapids. Water sustains time. An interweaving pattern of streams over a single point at the river bottom, their design, and therefore, their rhythm, around the feet of a heron standing in the middle of the stream, embodies movement. Lake Chad pulses, and as it contracts and expands, it changes the lives of plants and people. The artificial pond that began with a flooding of an unsuspecting village with a movie theater on its main square, and then turned into a gloomy water reservoir, cut in half by a dam, by the rhythm of its counterforces and the wall of clouds above it, will one day turn into a lake with a long Indian name.
And then there was Kunminchi, the enormous artificial pond that is long gone, the one Du Fu would gaze at and see the billowing standards of the Han emperor Wu-ti, and the stone carving of the whale in the water—according to legend, the whale’s scales and fins would move with the wind—he saw them as clearly as he did the black grains of wild rice, zizania, its black mass falling to the bottom on an autumn day, and the River of Heaven above him at night.
But even without external influences—the pressure of rowboats and leaden autumn winds, shifters of the lake-floor—there are events in the life of a lake that lie outside or beneath time and give rise to marks on the surface of the water and on the underside of the ice. The lake has its own dramas, its own classical tragedies, and twists of fate. With all that, the terrain isn’t given to a constructivist esthetic; it conceals within itself its own bridges, tubing, and connecting joints. Stalactite caves are washed out by earth’s solvents, the lithospheric juices, but do not yield to a mechanical interference, dismantling and disassembly.
Still, the terrain is comprehensible and explainable, with its slopes, geosynclines, faults, the gliding of towns towards and past each other. Or take moraine, spread-out and disorderly, with hieroglyph-like marks on its disproportionately enormous boulders, the token of the final stages of an ice age—just like a renter who moves out, leaving everything behind and quickly retreating into another life. So, it is with the escape or, perhaps, the suicide of ice along a sunlit slope—the vernal, diurnal bloodletting of the glacial veins. Icing over, death—the marks and scratches on these boulders that turn lucent by nightfall, are the recordings of a voice made visible.
The pulsating language of the glacier is its very body and this language is as clear as a sparkling day down in the valley. The glacier flows and drags, advances and recedes, scrapes and carries upon itself and within itself all these scratches, cracks, and marks. It builds new plateaus and eskers--low narrow hills that look like abandoned railroad embankments—and excavates long valleys.
The language of the terrain is the material embodiment of memory, its myth, a slow and nonrepetitive tongue twister. The will of the observer or the artist chooses a place and drills ice-holes. Memory then drifts up into them and reminiscences glide by like transparent winter fish. Lake ice resists and breaks off. The shards from the edges of the ice-hole fall into the water. The self-awareness of the terrain does not prevent an observer from becoming a part of it, from interacting with it, and sustaining a conversation with it. The terrain blindly enters the human, and the human blindly enters the terrain.
Not so the landscape. It utterly lacks will and is impenetrable to the efforts of the observer. Herman Hesse once wrote a fable called “Poet,” one of his “Chinese” texts. A young man, whose name includes the hieroglyph fu (“happiness”) is about to marry his beloved. Shortly before the wedding, he walks down to the river and observes the festival of lanterns on the other shore. The rest of the story is trivial: he takes leave of the world and makes failed attempts to write a perfect poem, that is, a poem that has the same effect on the reader as the view it contemplates and, unsurprisingly, experiences the discrepancy between the landscape and its verbal reflection. Finally, the poet returns home only to find out that everyone has died. He walks down to the river and, leaning against the same tree, looks out onto the river, onto the same autumnal festival of the lanterns. He can’t differentiate the lights from their reflections, in the same way that he can’t differentiate between his current self and that young man who once was tormented by a desire for perfection.
This is a rather straightforward stylization, but what’s interesting about it is the confounding—whether intentional or not—of perfection and reflection; what is more, this reflection flips at the end of the story, when the external world becomes a projection of the internal one. Landscape cannot be either penetrated nor imitated; it slips away at an attempt to acquire and master it by words; it turns out to be as unreachable as the receding horizon; and it turns out to be impossible because our very aim is off. A landscape invariably reflects the gaze of the observer and the viewer sees herself in the process of viewing. Light and reflection merge into a mess of shimmering blotches. A word turns out to be just as physical as the tree against which the poet leans. Having gone through a double reflection, a poet again ends up on this worldly plane.
It’s like a mirror that allows you to see itself only when you look at it directly, but every time you do, it turns out that you’re looking at yourself and not the mirror. A lake’s wrinkled surface, an endless colonnade entwined with the hieroglyphics of branches—a nighttime forest along a narrow road that’s lit up by bright headlights—all of that, ultimately, is an expression of the witness’s consciousness. It is our desire to possess a landscape that makes this landscape unreachable, and it is only when we relinquish this desire that a landscape becomes possible. A lithograph of a wrinkly mountain; a conflagration of fireflies in roadside bushes, gathering and dispersing; sparks of light on fresh snow in a forest pierced through by sunshine—they are all independent of any comparisons or meanings, any human inscription. The world is fully packed, and its loci unroll into spirals, swirls of their own meaning, those countless invisible storms on the surface of an evening lake or on the ice cover of that same lake in the daytime—nonexistent but as real as the minute brushstrokes on the river in The View of Delft.
There is no movement within a landscape, but there is a breathing pulsation. Landscape is, in fact, a space for breathing, and that is why, as a breathing space, it cannot be entered by an external force—of the mind, of the imagination, or of mastery—just as it is impossible to enter the breathing of someone lying beside you. Landscape doesn’t differentiate between external and internal. Every one of its points shimmers, grows into a sphere and then collapses back into a point. This silent breathing—its rhythm—is the voice of the landscape. A landscape is a sigh within a sigh, Kabir said about God. Notches—pauses in breathing—are like an exhale. These visible marks in the landscape that are governed by a special rule in Chinese painting, ts’un—“the living dimensionality of things”—are but fragments of invisible notches and lines, conveyors of energies, a truncated fragment of the invisible world. This or any rule works only if the observer and the landscape are separated from one another. Glass is one such separator, as in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, with its encircling, continuous bands of widows, which open on a seemingly endless meadow.
The solid horizon of lake ice separates two spheres: that of eventfulness above it and that of an absence of events beneath it, because the cycling of water is hardly an event. Invisible tension lines criss-cross the ice. Marks and cracks, lines left by skates, or by a sliding stick, that was pushed by the wind toward the middle of the lake, scratch another dimension into it—the third one, but not any more than that. That which stands for myth in terrain, is a ritual in landscape. A myth is linear, a ritual is timeless. The world’s movement is carried out in its own language by the transfer of invisible forces from object to object—as in Japanese and Chinese ideograms.
It is the cycling of ritual that comprises the meaning of a landscape, just like in the house where absence and death have once occurred and continue occurring. Routine helps make sense of an event but the scale of it transforms. Everything small becomes big. In every day there is at least one—but usually just one—unexpected nd always startling advancing point, a dark stain. And just as you can’t look at the sun directly, so, it turns out, you can only look at events through the darkened looking glass of the everyday.
The scars and grooves along the mountainside slightly alter the downward course of the streams, but they continue to flow to the same ocean. The woodstove, the ashes, the snowbank, the threshold, the iridescent glass of the window over a kitchen sink looking out on a snowy slope where wet tree trunks ascend—all of this stands still and continues to flow into the same ocean. Each tree answers for the bit of space that it has been allotted, the Chassids say. Nothing changes either in the house or the valley after happiness and death. Such are the words written on the sides of transparent winter fish—anonymous, without a copyright or the red seal of a watercolourist.
The Coriolis force, imaginary but real, keeps countless centers hollow, and creates whirlwinds—a vortex of rainwater in a zinc sink with two pine needles and an errant leaf, or a cyclone, with its perfect turquoise eye hanging above the mountain pass. Invisible forcefields, the hilly surfaces of absent time—endlessly fill every point.
Irina Mashinksi was born in Moscow. She graduated from Moscow University and holds a PhD in Theory of Landscape. In 1991, she emigrated to the U.S. She is the author of The Naked World: A Tale with Verse (Mad Hat Press, 2022) and Giornata (Cervená Barva Press, 2022), as well as eleven books of poetry and essays in Russian. She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015). Her website is irinamashinski.com.
Maria Bloshteyn is a Canadian literary scholar and translator. She is the author of The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky (University of Toronto Press, 2007), the editor and main translator of Russia is Burning: Poems of the Great Patriotic War (Smokestack Books, 2020), and one of the five translators of the recent anthology of protest poems edited by Julia Nemirovskaya, Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (Smokestack Books, 2023).