Ever since I witnessed aboard a high-speed train sections of the Great Wall crumbling in the Chinese desert, I resolved to go and see this mystery up close and personal. What the wall provokes in me it might not provoke in you, still, it is an ancient wonder, an Ozymandian bedevilment, a gesture of epic proportion meant to close the door on the rest of the world, now eroding quietly except for the well-recognized, carefully preserved portions. How this could even be contemplated and engineered raises all kinds of questions, the least of which is: Why? To answer that question and so many others I boarded an overnight bus to Shandan—an area in which Marco Polo spent a year of his time in China, to try to absorb the residue of the why and the what and the how. An overnight bus is truly a trip. Brand new and gleaming, it had three rows of double-decked sleeper berths, separated by narrow aisles, providing passengers with bedding, a compact mattress, with the head part raised to a 45-degree angle. Surprisingly, it was super-comfortable. I was in the first berth facing forward on the left side, watching the night traffic blink and disappear, blink and disappear. It was like a floating, rolling dream of a China highway at night, indecipherable billboards of sunshine, dark outlines of black hills, cryptic towns gathering and dissolving, so smooth, so light, summer-breezing above the night, like a song you’ve heard somewhere but can only vaguely recall. All of life is like this: this trying to decipher the everything. And the night rolled away, tucking itself into folders where half-remembered memories dwell. I awoke with someone nudging me. As promised, they let me out at a hotel, not a great hotel, but a hotel nonetheless, as dawn sent a gentle wind across the land. I checked in without checking out the room, stashed my bag and headed back out into the morning. In a square where five roads converged, at least a hundred or so field hands had gathered, waiting to be chosen for day work who all seemed to turn at once and regard me with the gentle curiosity of penguins. I followed the smell of something cooking across the east side of the square and came upon a small shop baking what looked like biscuits over a coal fire. I went in and was soon served a bowl of Chinese porridge and six biscuit-like stuffed dumplings for only 4 RMB (approx. $.65 USD). Fortified against the morning I set out in an erratic pattern to explore, and without even trying to I stumbled upon a section of the Great Wall right on a main street of Shandan. It was a mixed blessing, however. While a brown, engraved monument declared the ‘Long Wall’ was preserved and protected, I ran right smack into the Chinese indifference to the Great Wall. Everyone you speak to here takes nationalistic pride in the achievement of the wall (as well they should) and the preserved sections are visited in droves, yet as a practical matter it’s an entirely different story. The eroding sections are viewed as old and of little interest. If the wall is in the way, it is knocked down, or holes are punched through to get to the other side, or it is used as one wall of a dwelling, or a fence, or even to feed sheep—the wall was originally made of mud mixed with straw and the sheep don’t care if it is ancient straw or new straw. When I told people my mission was to visit what was left of the Great Wall, they looked at me curiously, as if to say, “why the hell would you want to do that?” and with subtle Chinese politeness tried to steer me toward other, more notable attractions. How could I tell them the Great Wall confounds me and astounds me? To look at, and pay homage to, and to walk beside it, is like walking back in time. Dialing in to another era. Communing with the ghosts of our collective past. But here, on a main street in Shandan, it was a sad ruin. Garbage, scrap metal, junked and burned-out cars, tiles stacked against it to make a fence, a true Ozymandian melancholy, with sincere apologies to Woody Allen. Still, the remains of the wall shouldered it wearily, knowing it could outlast rust and metal but maybe not plastic and disinterest. Now, I am mindful of the impracticality of preserving something as large as the Great Wall, but shouldn’t it be given the same respect that China gives its elders? The reverence that China bestows upon its ancestors? After all, it is a still-living relative of every Chinese citizen. Later in the day I would visit a longer section of the Great Wall, out in the heaving desert, and have the time to sort out my feelings and write poems of inclusion and poems of exclusion, but for now I walked along seeing the protective monument as a gravestone to this living relic, dying slowly now . . . and going, going . . . gone.
1 Comment
Mary
6/4/2014 07:33:03 am
Great new bus what a fantastic idea to put beds on uncomfortable buses. Looking forward to The Great Wall Poems of Interest and Exclusion Part 2. Interesting trip!
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