Like all cities in western China, Shandan is covered with Gobi Desert dust. It gets on your clothes, gets in your hair, makes it a challenge to wear contact lenses, which I foolishly tried. Local women cover their heads with long scarves and hide behind big masks as if they were performing surgery. Still, the dust gets in and covers you with fine grit as if it were trying to rub you out or bury you. The day I spent walking along the wall I like to think I was covered with Great Wall dust. An ancient grit of ruin, particles released that attached to me, sharing collective wind stories of the greatest testament to xenophobia that ever existed, melting now in sad dry puddles back into the desert from which it sprang. There is no escaping the melancholy the corpse of the Great Wall incites. It clings to the wind-carved humps, vibrates in the pockmarked shadows, swells like a timeworn sonnet, cradles you gently like the famous lullaby baby in the treetops just before the bough broke, entering you like—yes, like a poem, a panoptic poem of inclusion and exclusion. I walked the line: was I being kept in or kept out? Even now at its diminished height, the wall is a formidable barrier, but you wonder, what exactly was it keeping out? What was it protecting its people from? Ideas? Change? Racial purity? I stood atop the wall and looked out over the bleached terrain wondering why anyone would even try to cross it only to be thwarted by a wall erected to keep them out. What past could they be escaping that would lead them to this? And what about the spent lives of the soldiers guarding it? The force of their weary, mundane focus on these stark plains is an ever-present haunting of this wall. Their moans carry on the wind along with their doomed hopes and dreams. What did they carry with them as they patrolled these walls? What phantoms were they on the lookout for? How did they deal with the monotony? How did they deal, period? The shape of the Province of Gansu has been likened to a long, stretched neck and most of the Silk Road in China passes through it. The part of the wall I stood on was smack dab in the middle of the Hexi Corridor, far away from everything, hemmed in by flinty mountains and broad slabs of desert. The soldiers sent here were all malcontents and misfits, effectively banished, charged with keeping out the barbarians. But were the barbarians without or within? The wall couldn’t protect China from itself, couldn’t protect it from greed, treachery, war, ancient hatreds, poverty, ignorance, all the deadly sins that plague mankind, and the imagined baleful cries of long forgotten soldiers remind me of this as I walk along the sun-struck wall absorbing it all Wondering, besides barbarians, what else did they keep out? Can you wall yourself off from the rest of the planet? If so, what suffers? What dies? What should have happened that did not? Was seclusion a prison or a paradise? Security or a setback? Is it a magnanimous act of protection or a bleak acknowledgement of fear? And how does any wall effect the people who exist behind it? The desert was evasive, the wall mute on particulars, but effluent with speculation. How far will governments go to protect their entitlement? How far will we let them go? And why would anyone think that a wall is the answer to an unstoppable force? The gravity of the Great Wall lies in its elusiveness. It brought a majestic contrast to the dreary landscape that continues to this day. Owls and hawks make it their own, the sun transforms it into a dizzying study of the effect of light on adobe brown, and it is forever opening its arms to dreamers and historians and photographers as well as the wind that is eternally trying to carry it away into the bland parchment of everyday desert. Still, there is a beauty in this desert, in the feel and texture, but you have to turn your color palette way down to appreciate the adobe pinks, the arroyo browns, the exposed wounds of rust, the pale greens of the stubborn tufts of shrub aching for rain, the whimsy of the dust devils, and the way the heat bends light into miracles and mirages and the way its hide bears its roads like old scars, running away into someone else's dreams. Put yourself in the section that is no longer there. Is that a gateway into freedom? Or do we cry out to block it off and enclose ourselves once again? I walked the wall wondering such things as the wind burped against the acid of the desert, the sun melted against faraway hills, and my soul leapt and prowled and commingled with the great . . . crumbling, everything.
1 Comment
Mary
6/11/2014 07:32:42 am
I hope you did a handstand on the Great Wall! What an adventure! I see the freedom beyond the Wall not wanting to be confined by a it. Thanks for all the great thoughts behind the Great Wall as I never would have thought of all those things. That is why you are the writer. Keep up the great work.
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