Doldrums

I was sick last week, spent most of Sunday bobbing in and out of syrupy slumber, the thick sleep of the infirm. I kept time by the jar of jasmine tea I’d steeped before succumbing to the doldrums, watched it go from pale to umber. By the time I woke up for real it was river-bottom colored, lukewarm and too bitter to drink.

I wasn’t the only one. Of course I remember the old joke, the words of Harold Bloom (on the other end of Ellen’s phone line, smoke-frail and punctuated by wispy little coughs, I assume): “These are dark days for Yale indeed.” Well, these were dark days for CET Harbin, everywhere ashen and trembling Americans, clutching their bellies and sipping at congee . It must have had something to do with our trip the weekend before, the Sunday we spent on Phoenix Mountain. Climbing a mountain before lunch will do that to you, I guess, especially if you’re fed questionable preparations of raw vegetables right after, and the mountain sky rains all over your sweat-drenched clothes just before your homeward journey.

So that was fun.

Not that I regret going. I didn’t even make it to the top. But for someone who's fiercest tussle with gravity was, until two weeks ago, the fifteen-minute trek up Science Hill, I think dragging myself halfway up those craggy steps by the cataracts is good enough. I mean, I’m the most spoiled specimen of suburban princesshood I know. I once brought high-heeled boots and a full complement of makeup to a monastic retreat in the Catskills— imagine my surprise when we ended up picking our way through these tangled paths by Woodstock, me rocking ridiculously on uneven ground with sequined hairbows in my braid. I haven’t had unpainted nails in at least three years.

I'm cool with nature, in theory. I think photos look best when they're not marred by human figures, and my favorite cliché is the sea. But I like to admire it from a distance. Give me painted sweeps of moor, or postcards prepackaging desert for enjoyment without sweat. I’m the kind of person who’d rather read a panegyric to Yellowstone than visit the place myself. No need to experience it, really— someone else, with finer sensibilities, has already done it better.

I wish I could say that Phoenix Mountain changed my mind. It was beautiful. But it was that sort of richly exploitable beauty, more thoroughly picked over by the creators of Romantic canvasses and Hallmark cards than any other iconography, except for the lone rose and the simpering cherub. The heaps of tourists, who shoved their elbows into our photos and punctured the stillness with their chatter—they just furthered my suspicions that the faux-pristine natural vista was so boorishly cliché.

Still beautiful, of course. Universal appeal. I could have been looking at Avalon, or Middle Earth, or… Ithaca. Which is part of the reason I would’ve rather been at the Summer Palace maybe, feeling another kind of anticlimax altogether. My approach to travel becomes, at times, a chain of tiresomely pseudointellectual defenses against disappointment. Someday, I’m afraid I’ll stand in front of the Hagia Sophia and feel nothing.

So maybe Yale has desensitized me to pretty things-- not to the sharp, concentrated charm of a rococo masterwork or a graceful turn of phrase, but to being immersed in prettiness all the time. Just a year of living in this unreal bubble that looks like a snowglobe in the winter and a period piece still the rest of the time. I can't describe beauty except in the most cynical terms.

I’m getting off track. That’s not at all what I meant to say— I’m still a little bit sick, probably, have had non-vegetarian meals only three times in seven days. Maybe part of the reason I didn’t get much out of the mountain on a visceral level was how aggressively I processed the whole experience, filtered it through all these layers of language and self-consciousness and memory-in-the-making. The whole time I was aware of how I would think about it afterward, what I could maybe write about it, how many photos I’d be able to take of the mists and rolling grasses to make all the sweat worthwhile. It’s really weird to ostensibly enjoy nature with an eye on the bottom line, but that’s what I was doing— robotically running the impact calculus, computing the psychological profit.

I just used the phrase “impact calculus”. Yeah.

Of course the whole time I’d shoved the experience back one remove, was watching myself from this insulated vantage point of narrative and disingenuousness. And it was stupid. I kind of forgot to really feel things— the way the glossy cold permeated my skin, gave it the chill smoothness of a river rock. How impersonal the babble of the cataracts sounded, as if we could do anything to the running water and it wouldn’t matter. See, this is the romantic in me, willfully submerged behind layers of hard-lacquered rationality (itself a pose, at least at one point) most of the time. My letting it show here is its own kind of disingenuousness, milking ossified emotion for the rhetorical possibilities. Really, I just like exploiting myself. And the results aren’t even that interesting.