Hymn of the Big Wheel

A misty haze settles over the Mekong River Valley every evening; it begins to gather as an almost imperceptible smoke around sundown, the mountains begin to look farther away, less distinct and then it builds through the night reaching its apex somewhere in the “Bible black predawn” as Jeff Tweedy put it.

The fog burns off by midmorning, noon at the latest, but for those of us already stirring, perhaps seated at breakfast, bundled in sweaters, the mist has a chill that seems to work its way through any number of carefully layered clothing. When the midday sun finally breaks through the last of the fog and is replaced by a shockingly sudden and intense heat, the sweaters and jackets are quickly shed in favor of short sleeves.

I have been traveling with, as mentioned previously, Robin and Ofir, as well as a Scottish couple Phill and Lorraine, and an Austrian man named Harry, none of whom have left any inclination toward temples and stuppas, which I sympathize with and understand, once you have seen a couple of temples you have essentially seen them all, and yet I feel compelled to see them still.

So I set out alone to see some of the many temples dotted throughout Luang Prabang. As I could have predicted, the temples of Luang Prabang are more or less the same as the others I have seen in Chang Mai or Bangkok or Nepal or India or, well, visit enough temples, shrines, synagogues, churches or any other place a culture calls holy, and you’ll quickly realize there is only one thing, call it what you will, only one thing, that dwarfs our existence. For some it may be god by any number of names, but for me it simply wonder, wonder that any of this could have happened, wonder that anything exists, let alone me and wonder that I and the rest of it continue to exist.

After spending the better part of the morning at a few temples basking in this sense of wonder it seemed only natural to set aside the manmade and head to the natural, the source as it were.

Robin and I teamed up with a fellow American, Ed, to rent a songthaew out to Tat Kung Si waterfall. The limestone riverbed below the main falls creates series of smaller cascades and the river lacks much in the way of banks; instead it spreads out and flows almost arbitrarily over the whole area wrapping around the trunks of trees and dodging obstructions on its way down to the Mekong. I don’t know if it’s the stone in the area or some mineral in the water, but the deeper pools that form beneath the falls were a brilliant turquoise color and perfect for swimming.

After a very steep, abrupt and very pointless climb to the top of the highest falls which in the midday heat quickly reduced Robin and I to panting, sweat-soaked misery, we returned to the crystalline waters which had never looked so inviting. We swam for a while in the lower pools and I chatted with Ed, a semi professional photographer, about various photographic geekery which I hadn’t thought about since I dropped my art major ten years ago.

As luck would have it the pool we swam in had a nice tree extending out over it which allowed for excellent jumping and being the sort that still finds infinite pleasure in the simple act of hurling my body out into space, I made several jumps off the tree into the pool which did nothing to help the headache I already had.

Later, after drying off, I sat at a picnic bench and ate lunch while the package tourists wandered by cameras dangling and with much pointing enthusiasm. I had heard so much about Luang Prabang before coming, everyone raved about it, but I have been somewhat disappointed. I imagine five years ago Luang Prabang was probably alright, but with the paving of highway 13 and the advent of an airport capable of international flights Luang Prabang has turned to yet another touristy trap, which is unfortunate, but seemingly unavoidable.

I decided to take an amphibious walk through the trees to see if perhaps I could clear such negative thoughts from my already overworked brain. It was slow going because of slickness of the limestone, but I managed to work my way downstream to an old water wheel now in a state of disrepair and obviously not used in ages. What struck me most though was that the water no longer flowed beneath the wheel so that even if it weren’t falling apart it still wouldn’t be able to turn. Lower down the stream I had taken a picture of another wheel, also not working, but still surrounded by water. I started to take a second picture of this wheel but for some reason I stopped. Instead I sat down on a small stone and watched the water swirl past me on either side, still thinking about the sense of wonder that arises whenever I stop to think about anything really.

But this word wonder is not really what we’re after is it? Too nebulous and vague, it could even be something like nostalgia, a failure of feeling, Wallace Stevens called it. No, what we are after is more specific than wonder, perhaps awe or amazement would be closer, perhaps it’s a word that doesn’t exist, perhaps Jewish mysticism is right after all, we have forgotten the true name of god, or possibly we never knew it. It may well be something that exists before language or beyond language or outside and removed from language altogether. And of course we know language has is shortcomings, the cynical like to remind us that the words are not the things, that words cannot express anything really, that they are a delicate web fabricated and sustained by nothing other than more words, but what else have we got?

It could also be that the language is in fact that very thing that severed us from this lost word, perhaps language was once something other, not words that conveyed meaning, but sounds that made objects, a language not a reflection, but creation. Jose Saramago writes in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis that the gods “journey like us in the river of things, differing from us only because we call them gods and sometimes believe in them.”

Sitting there in the middle of the river listening to the gurgle of water moving over stone and around trees I began to think that perhaps this is the sound of some lost language, a sound capable of creating mountains, valleys, estuaries, isthmuses and all the other forms around us, perhaps this is the sounds of what we feel, gurgling and sonorous but without clear meaning, shrouded in turquoise, a mystery through which we can move our sense of wonder intact.