V.

BECAUSE IT’S NOT THERE:

A VISION OF CLIMBING AND LIFE

Figure 4: Meher Baba, chart from Beams on the Spiritual Panorama.

Imagine a great shining chain hanging downward from the

heights of heaven to the world below. We grab hold of it with
one hand and then another, and we seem to be pulling it down
toward us. Actually it is already there on the heights and down
below and instead of pulling it to us we are being lifted upward
to that brilliance above, to the dazzling light of those beams.
– Pseudo-Dionysius

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which
God sees me.
– Meister Eckhart

The horror is that we know that we see God in life itself.

– Clarice Lispector

This essay explores the interface of climbing and life through the three-
fold theory of vision developed by St. Augustine in commentary on St. Paul
rapture to the ‘third heaven’ (II Corinthians 12. 2). As Augustine’s theory
concerns at once the structure of ordinary perception and the scale of ecstatic
124 On the Darkness of the Will

experience, I investigate the mystical analogy between climbing and life in

terms of the problematic of vision as a primary expression of life’s will to
ascend. Like Paul’s rapture, which takes place in the topological aporia of
a radical unknowing – ‘Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do
not know’ (II Corinthians 12. 2) – the experience of inner and outer elevation
found in climbing is one that fundamentally alters the sense and meaning
of environment, curving perception around the void. Over and against the
nostalgic affirmation of natural place found in both humanist and anti-humanist
environmental thought, the visionary experience of climbing, ascending the
very scale of seeing, exposes the too-actual impossibility of life’s location,
its being somewhere that is both space and place, and neither. At the crux of
climbing as a way of seeing and seeing as a way of climbing is glimpsed the
unitary utopia of life, its divine height and depth, at once local and universal,
somewhere and nowhere. Climbing touches the ungraspable location of vision.
The seam between life and climbing is the invisible way of seeing – a line
descending and ascending an absent reality, something that is not there. Where
modern alpinism and environmentalism are both characteristically married to
the human-dwarfing presence of nature as an essentially external fact, life’s
imperative to climb urges the inevitable and ancient counter-intuition, that the
universe is within oneself. The magnetic there-ness of the mountain which
per Mallory’s famous answer, ‘Because it’s there,’ inspires one to climb is
suspended by a fact more wondrous still, that it is not.
The life of climbing is the climbing of life. Let us see what this means by
looking at vision, by posing the mutual question of life and climbing as a
matter of seeing. Where does life take place? Before itself, to the one who sees
it. Where is that? There, where it is, in its own being, wherever anything is,
somewhere in the heart. As Augustine says, ‘cor meum, ubi ego sum quicumque
sum’ [my heart, where I am whoever I am].1 For who will dare to draw a line
between life and being, to say that is but only this lives? Climbing concerns in
a special way the openness of this line. As golden-age alpinist Leslie Stephen
put it, ‘Where does Mont Blanc end, and where do I begin? That is the question
which no metaphysician has hitherto succeeded in answering’.2 At least this
is how I am seeing it: that life, soul, is the inescapable taking place of being to
itself, the miracle of its own visibility, the unbounded whole of one’s seeing-
being-seen in the first place, at once middle and all. But to see things so –
via the principle that whatever exists finds itself simply by virtue of its own
existence – demands seeing beyond our eyes. As Ibn Arabi says,

1 Augustine, Confessions, X. 3.
2 Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe, (London: Longman, 1894), pp. 260–262.
Because It’s Not There: A Vision of Climbing and Life 125

The whole world is intelligent, living, and speaking […] But the People of
Reflection say, ‘This is an inanimate object (jamâd); it has not intelligence’.
They stop with what their eyesight gives to them, while we consider the
situation differently […] the mystery of life fills the entire world.3

And this is precisely how life sees, by seeing differently, beyond the
seen, raising and rising itself upon the shining chain of vision, climbing
through the contradiction of its own sight. As Nietzsche says,

Life itself wants to build itself into the heights with pillars and steps; it wants
to gaze into vast distances and out upon halcyon beauties – therefore it needs
height! And because it needs height, it needs steps and contradictions between
steps and climbers! Life wants to climb and to overcome itself by climbing.4

Likewise, to see climbing, to envision what it is and touch its life,

requires holding on to it, in all the endless moves of opposition and identity
between seer and seen, as a form of vision. To start, this means feeling the
gravity of climbing as a wrestling with the blind grip of matter, a struggle
with the body as mirror or angel of vision. So Thoreau, reflecting upon
climbing Mount Katahdin, says,

I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so

strange to me […] Talk of mysteries! […] The solid earth! the actual world! the
common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?5

To climb is to touch and fail to grasp – like missing a hold that proves
the route goes – the location of vision, a place which, as far as I can see,
is nowhere. Such is the living idea (from idein, ‘to see’) that this vision of
climbing will attempt.
The supra-alpine ‘altitudes of human contemplation’ which Petrarch
remembers with each descending step that he is forgetting to climb in the
Ascent of Mount Ventoux... René Daumal’s non-Euclidean Mount Analogue,
accessible but unsummitable, the visible door of the invisible... George
Mallory’s missing camera, lost somewhere on Mount Everest – that the
modern destiny of climbing is entangled with premodern forms of visionary
desire is obvious.6 I hope not to explain one with the other, much less confuse

3 Ibn Arabi, The Meccan Revelations, I, 36.

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 78.
5 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), p. 71.
6 See Francesco Petrarca, Prose, ed. G. Martellotti (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi,
1955), p. 842; René Daumal, Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidian and
126 On the Darkness of the Will

them – maybe just a little, as all vision is, between its eyes, somewhat crossed
– but point the gaze toward a higher bewilderment, one that, before the
totally awesome fact that there is climbing, unknows all the more what it is
that climbing really climbs. What matters above all, given that life is already
tumbled into the grip of climbing’s all-too-human fact, is less to critically and
theoretically sort climbing out than face its life as the crux of itself – a term
whose originally spiritual and hermeneutic meaning are worth bearing in mind.
By poetically mirroring climbing through a mystical prism, one may perhaps
glimpse something of the new that ever remains, in the words of Meher Baba,
‘to be climbed with the eye of consciousness now fully open’ (see Figure 4).7

Figure 5: Gustave Doré, Illustration of Inferno 5.8

Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures, trans. Kathleen Ferrick

Rosenblatt (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2004), p. 51; Jochen Hemmelb and
Eric Simonson, Detectives on Everest: The 2001 Mallory & Irvine Research
Expedition (Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 2002), p. 18.
7 Meher Baba, Beams on the Spiritual Panorama (San Francisco: Sufism
Reoriented, 1958), p. 80.
8 Public domain image, source: < https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Gustave_Dor%C3%A9_-_Dante_Alighieri_-_Inferno_-_Plate_14_
(Canto_V_-_The_hurricane_of_souls).jpg>.
Because It’s Not There: A Vision of Climbing and Life 127

The word ‘route’ derives from rumpere, to break. In the Divine Comedy,
the passage to paradise, descending through hell and ascending through
purgatory, is literally that, a rupture. As Virgil explains to the pilgrim, after
climbing down-up through the center of the cosmos upon Satan’s body, the
inversely formed abyss and peak were generated by Lucifer’s fall when
the earth ‘left this empty space [lasciò qui loco vòto] in order to escape
from him, and fled upward’ (Inferno, XXXIV. 125–6). The void-space of
hell then becomes passable, crucially, by means of a series of ruins (ruine),
‘alpine [alpestro]’ (Inferno, XII. 2) landslides of ‘ancient rock [vecchia
roccia]’ (Inferno, XII. 44) which occur at the time of the Crucifixion
darkness when, as Virgil explains in the seventh circle of Inferno, ‘this
deep, foul valley trembled so that I thought the universe must be feeling
love’ (Inferno, XII. 40–2). Accordingly, this rupture is the site of despair
for the souls damned for lust (see Figure 5): ‘When they come before the
landslide, there the shrieks the wailing, the lamenting; there they curse
God’s power’ (Inferno, V. 34–6)
Now consider this – the connection between rupture and the vertical
path of visionary adventure – as an allegory for the vital interface between
climbing and vision. As climbing holds are paradigmatically comprised
(literally, in the motional moment of prizing them) of fractures, fissures,
and similar features in an otherwise blank face, so vision ascends itself by
means of essential breaks, enraptured interruptions which are synthesized
into the whole loopy movement of living awareness in a world where,
as Merleau-Ponty says, ‘Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is
wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself’.9 Similarly, demonstrating
the ecstatic continuity between seeing and grasping (see Figure 6), the space
where one already is where one is going and there is always dissolving
into here, Heidegger describes the reach of human spatiality as one of de-
severance: ‘“De-severing” amounts to making the farness vanish – that is,
making the remoteness of something disappear, bringing it close’.10

9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith

(New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 474.
10 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 139.
128 On the Darkness of the Will

Figure 6: Philippe de Champaigne, Saint Augustine (detail).11

The vital link between climbing and vision is seen clearly in Augustine’s
influential theory of vision. Commenting on St. Paul’s rapture to the ‘third
heaven’ (II Corinthians 12. 2), Augustine shows how sight shines through
the simultaneity of three already-scaled steps of intensifying presence and
proximity: the corporeal, the spiritual (or imaginal), and the intellectual.
He illustrates this order of experience with the perfectly literal example
of reading the second half of the double law of charity, as if broken off
from the ‘great and first commandment’ (Matthew 22. 38), namely, to love
God ‘with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’
(Matthew 22. 37):

When you read, You shall love your neighbor as yourself, three kinds of
vision take place: one with the eyes, when you see the actual letters; another
with the human spirit, by which you think of your neighbor even though he is
not there; a third with the attention of the mind, by which you understand and
look at love itself.12

11 Public domain image, source: < https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/

File:Champaigne,_Philippe_de_-_Saint_Augustin_-_1645-1650.jpg>.
12 Augustine, On Genesis, trans. Matthew O’ Connell (Hyde Park, NY: New City
Press, 2002), p. 470.
Because It’s Not There: A Vision of Climbing and Life 129

The way in which each level both coincides and breaks with the others
becomes clearer if we consider their topological aspects. Corporeally, one
senses an object, that is, something that seeing does not see through, a
thing which is indubitably there. Spiritually, one senses an image, that is, a
transparent medium perceivable between and across objects, a thing that is
both here and there. Intellectually, one senses an idea, that is, an immediate
truth or principle, a form that is simply here, or as Augustine spells it out,
one of the ‘things which do not have any images that are like them without
actually being what they are’.13

Figure 7: Giovanni Bellini, The Ecstasy of St. Francis.14

Far from separating ultimate seeing – the vision of God – from ordinary
seeing, Augustine shows how mystical vision of the divine reality is
continuous with a general phenomenology of experience and perception, as
captured in Bellini’s Ecstasy of St. Francis (Figure 7), wherein the saint’s
being inside and outside the world are aesthetically coincident. Or as

13 Ibid.
14 Public domain image, source: <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giovanni_
Bellini_-_Saint_Francis_in_the_Desert_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg>.
130 On the Darkness of the Will

Francesco Tomatis says of the experience of mountain ascent, ‘The return

to the world is one with the flight from it, in alpinism as in mysticism’.15 To
accentuate the connection between visionary ascent and climbing, we may
overhear in Paul’s words the breathless expression of one who has just sent
a difficult route, in this case, on-sighting Paradise,16 a term whose Sanskrit
analogue, paradesha, means ‘height’ or ‘high land’:17 I don’t know how I
did it, but I know that I did, ‘whether in the body or out of the body I do
not know’ (II Corinthians 12. 2). Rather than being something impossible,
the inexpressible elevation of such spontaneous rapture is simply the actual
summit of vision’s natural elevation, through which all seeing climbs.
Likewise, according to Bonaventure, the ‘most pure being [purissimum
esse]’ of God is the first image of all intellectual vision, the presence which
the mind, in its blind habituation ‘to the darkness of things and to the
phantasms of sensible objects,’ willfully disregards, ‘not tak[ing] note of
that which it sees first, and without which it can know nothing’.18 In light
of the traditional figure of vision as ‘a ladder [klimax, scala] on which there
is a perpetual going up and down’,19 this blindness is inversely equivalent
to not seeing the ladder, the hierarchical scale of things, by failing to
recognize, through the principle of reflection or specular awareness, that
the first step is a step, that it is not all there is but more truly a mirror
and memory of other steps before and beyond it, a scale one necessarily
descends in order to be here, in this actual living form, in the first place.
Seen differently, the deep solidity of the sensible, the inevitable scandal
of matter (from PIE *skand- ‘to leap, climb’), is a sign that it is to be
ascended, or as Bonaventure invites us to do in the Itinerarium, stepped
upon as through a mirror: ‘let us place the first step of our ascent at the
bottom [in imo], putting the whole world of sense-objects before us as a
mirror through which we may pass to God, the highest creative Artist’.20

15 Francesco Tomatis, Filosofia della montagna (Milan: Bompiani, 2008), p. 49, my

translation.
16 In climbing parlance, to ‘on-sight’ a climb means to succeed at the ascent without
any prior knowledge.
17 Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, VT: Inner
Traditions, 1998), p. 113.
18 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, p. 115.
19 A. K. Coomaraswamy, “The Inverted Tree,” in Traditional Art and Symbolism,
ed. Roger Lipsey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 390.
20 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, 53.
Because It’s Not There: A Vision of Climbing and Life 131

Figure 8: Nicolas Dipre, Jacob’s Ladder.21

Significantly, in the account of Jacob’s dream, the ladder also bears

a conspicuously liminal relation to stone (see Figure 8), fulfilling its
status as ‘l’oree du songe’ [the shore of dreaming], in Caillois’s beautiful
formulation.22 ‘Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his
head and lay down in that place to sleep […] So Jacob rose early in the
morning, and he took the stone which he had put under his head and set it
up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it’ (Genesis 28. 11–8). Forming
the sacred threshold of his dream of the ‘angels of God […] ascending
and descending’ a ladder ‘set up on the earth’ (Genesis 28. 12), Jacob’s
stone, the initiatory step of sleeping and waking life, shows forth the
material ground of vision’s elevation, indexing the hyper-solidity of the
superessential, a reality who dreams in minerals. The pillow’s becoming
pillar symbolically intimates the inversive or paradoxical ascent of
individualized consciousness via descent into unconsciousness, the soul’s

21 Public domain image, source: < https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_

Dipre._Le_songe_de_Jacob._c.1500_Avignon,_Petit_Palais..jpg>
22 Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville:
University Press Virginia, 1985), p. 8
132 On the Darkness of the Will

climb into truth via illusion, or paradise through hell, whose last step
mirrors the first. As Meher Baba explains,

The process of perception runs parallel to the process of creation, and the
reversing of the process of perception without obliterating consciousness
amounts to realising the nothingness of the universe as a separate entity. The
Self sees first through the mind, then through the subtle eye and lastly through
the physical eye; and it is vaster than all that it can perceive. The big ocean and
the vast spaces of the sky are tiny as compared with the Self. In fact, all that
the Self can perceive is finite, but the Self itself is infinite. When the Self retains
full consciousness and yet sees nothing, it has crossed the universe of its own
creation and has taken the first step to know itself as everything.23

‘And Saul arose from the ground; and when his eyes were opened, he
saw nothing’ (Acts 9. 8). Correlatively, stone typifies the first of the three
worlds or kingdoms (mineral, vegetable, animal) out of which life is made
and through which love flows in degrees turning it back towards its own
superessential reality via the chain of being. As Vossler says, summarizing
the medieval view, ‘The stone that falls to earth obeys the amor naturalis;
the beast that seeks its food or continuance of its species, the amor
sensitivus; man who uplifts himself to God, the amor rationalis’.24 Or
Augustine: ‘Pondus meum amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror’ [My
love is my weight. By it am I borne wherever I am borne].25
Yet as experience per force proves, this continuous and ultimate flow of
life, the visionary climb and gravitational flight of the cosmic storm that
has us all in its fatal grip, takes place only through great impasse, by means
of the ruptures, aporias, and ruins of love that lead onward through despair,
over and against the non-options of madness and self-destruction. So the
climber, countering the force of gravity only by means of it, must evade
and pass through the alter-gravity of love’s opposite, fear,26 above all the
temptation to freak out and/or fall to death. Such is ‘the moment of divine
desperateness, when everything seems to give way, [and] man decides to
take any risk to ascertain what of significance to his life lies behind the
veil’.27 As love is the highest law, the law beyond law binding all laws, so
does it correspond, within the ontological chain of vision’s descent-ascent,

23 Meher Baba, Discourses, II, 98.

24 Kurt Vossler, Medieval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and His Times, Volume
1, trans. William Lawton (New York: Frederick Unger, 1958), p. 302.
25 Augustine, Confessions, XIII. 9.
26 ‘There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear’ (1 John 4. 18).
27 Meher Baba, Discourses, II, 14–5
Because It’s Not There: A Vision of Climbing and Life 133

not only to the force of synthesis that binds the chain together, but to the
separations and breaks through which one link in the order holds to the
next, the ruptures whose too-actual inexistence, like the rungs of dreams,
hold the truth and sense of the chain in the first place. The fact that it goes,
that reality is real and its shining chain of vision – or as Kierkegaard calls
it, this ‘bridge of sighs’ we all must walk28 – unbreakably holds from here
to eternity, is realized through one’s being broken upon it, via visionary
ruptures in one’s corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual being, among the most
painful of which, as climbers know, is the experience of being cut off from
the ability to climb. But as Heidegger says, ‘severing also is still a joining
and a relating’.29 Climbing is the climbing of climbing, a moving seizure
of its own weight and upstreaming of the first fall, the originary irruption
of time or ‘number of motion in respect of “before” and “after”’,30 that
somehow still never stops streaming out of eternity through the spheres. As
Sanford Kwinter observes, capturing also the cinematic and extra-cameral
perspective of climbing’s visionary body,

for it is not enough to prevail over gravity but rather be able to make it
stream continuously through one, and especially to be able to generalize this
knowledge to every part of the body without allowing it to regroup at any time
[…] as a spatialized figure in the head. Thus the body too must be broken apart
into a veritable multiplicity of quasi-autonomous flows […] the climber’s task
is less to ‘master’ in the macho, form-imposing sense than […] to engage the
universe’s wild and free unfolding through the morphogenetic capacities of the
singularity.31

Furthermore – and here the link to the question of life, and life as the
spontaneous question or individuating whim of itself, comes more closely
into view – the three-fold order of vision corresponds directly to the three
surchaotic leaps of cosmic evolution, as described by Quentin Meillassoux
in The Divine Inexistence:

28 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: Part I, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna
Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 471.
29 “[A]uch das Trennen ist noch ein Verbinden und Beziehen” (Martin Heidegger,
“Logik: Heraklits Lehre vom Logos,” in Heraklit, ‘Gesamtausgabe,’ Bd. 55
[Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970], p. 337).
30 Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random
House, 1941), Physics IV. 11.
31 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in
Modernist Culture (Cambridge. MA: MIT, 2002), pp. 29–30.
134 On the Darkness of the Will

Such cases of advent […] can be divided into three orders that mark the
essential ruptures of becoming: matter, life, and thought. Each of these three
appears as a Universe that cannot be qualitatively reduced to anything that
preceded it.32

Yet, if one finds oneself adhering to the intuition that climbing and
life are more intimately and universally related, so that such advents are
intelligible, not only as unaccountable irruptions but as veritable moves
upon the vertiginous and invisible axis of the eternal, then the vista becomes
ever less concerning and ever more interesting. Now one climbs through
vision and enters a universe where being is not only something witnessed
by precarious epiphenomenal eyes but is seeing itself, ad infinitum. Here
the ‘created world,’ as Thomas A. Carlson (who also happens to be a rock
climber) affirms in The Indiscrete Image, ‘is the vision of God – in both
senses of the word’.33 From this perspective, according to which ‘the gross,
subtle and mental spheres’ are not discrete domains, but ‘interpenetrating
globes’,34 the perilous and singular evolution of vision, everywhere
climbing over itself, is revealed as the endless and unfinishable expression
of the fundamental unity of reality. As de Chardin writes,

One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing […] To be more is to be
more united […] But unity grows […] only if it is supported by an increase
of consciousness, of vision […] To try to see more and to see better is not,
therefore, just a fantasy, curiosity, or a luxury. See or perish. This is the situation
imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence.35

But what, someone asks, am I to do with this vision? Wrong question.

Or rather, the question of vision at the heart or interface of climbing
and life is to be answered tautologously, in a manner befitting the
inherent purposelessness or whylessness of this ‘mysterious gift’.
‘Purposelessness is of Reality,’ says Meher Baba, ‘to have a purpose
is to be lost in falseness […] The Goal of Life in Creation is to arrive
at purposelessness, which is the state of Reality’.36 Similiarly, Tomatis
emphasizes the essentially renunciatory movement of mountain

32 Quentin Meillassoux, quoted in Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux:

Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 187.
33 Carlson, The Indiscrete Image, p. 94.
34 Meher Baba, Beams, p. 11.
35 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, trans. Sarah Appleton-
Weber (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2003), p. 3.
36 Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing, p. 62.
Because It’s Not There: A Vision of Climbing and Life 135

climbing: ‘True alpinism is empty-handed’.37 Climbing is the way of

seeing – physically, imaginatively, intellectually – the living truth of this
purposelessness, namely, that as Meister Eckhart says, ‘Only that which
is without a principle properly lives [Hoc enim proprie vivit quod est
sine principio]’.38 ‘At these peaks,’ writes Evola, ‘just as heat transforms
into light, life becomes free of itself’.39 As the mountain, as object of
ascent, recedes from view in the process of summiting it, so the truth of
Mallory’s famous answer to the why of climbing, ‘Because it’s there,’
lies in the seeing the fact that it is not. Such is the groundless ground of
the one who lives, as Eckhart says, ‘without Why’.40
Were Augustine as passionate a reader of climbing problems as he
was of Scripture, he might have said that when you read X (the crux),
three kind of vision take place: one with eyes, when you see the actual
holds; another with the spirit, by which you imagine the movement or
pattern of energy you will perform; a third with the mind, by which you
see the ascent itself, beyond the means of realizing it. Seeing that these
three levels of vision are at work in all activity and experience, this
correspondence per se is neither here nor there. What more matters more
deeply is the element of climbing that is discoverable within the process
of vision, specifically, how the operations of seeing work gravitationally
through-against the negativity and therelessness met with between and at
each of its levels, namely, that of 1) seeing, in bodies, what seeing cannot
penetrate, which reflects an essential blindness of vision, the inability
to see what one is looking at; 2) seeing, in images, what is not actually
there, which reflects an indiscernible subjectivity, the projective force
of vision that only sees things by looking into itself; and 3) seeing, in
objects of intellect, what is here without really seeing anything at all,
which reflects an essential senselessness, the darkness of the mind to
itself. This darkness, as Eriugena explains, is the pure, invisible, yet no
less factical mark of divinity: ‘the Divine likeness in the human mind is
most clearly discerned when it is only known that it is, and not known

37 ‘Il vero alpinismo è a mani vuote’ (Tomatis, Filosofia della montagna, p. 44).
38 Quoted in Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 286.
39 Evola, Meditations on the Peaks, p. 5.
40 ‘If a man asked life for a thousand years, “Why do you live?” if it could answer it
would only say, “I live because I live”. That is because life lives from its own
ground, and gushes forth from its own. Therefore it lives without Why, because it
lives for itself. And so, if you were to ask a genuine man who acted from his own
ground, “Why do you act?” if he were to answer properly he would simply say, “I
act because I act”’ (Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 100).
136 On the Darkness of the Will

what it is […] what it is is denied in in it, and only that it is is affirmed’.41

Climbing and seeing coincide in the dark heart of vision, its reach out of
nowhere through the placeless place of its taking place before itself.

Figure 9: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.42

Because it is not there. In other words, it seems that vision only ever
occurs via a series of cryptic or hyper-intelligent moves between the breaks
within its own continuity. This is why, in the vertiginous intensities of
experience, one often appears quite clearly to see and feel and think almost
headlessly, as if witnessing the action from some proximate yet non-present
place. Likewise, Tomatis finds that the liminal ‘experience of void’ provided
in climbing and which constitutes the proper ‘mysticism of the mountain’
is one that ‘reopens our eyes to the simple depth of true dimensions […]
[and] purifies us of the dreams of reason and its consequent nightmares’.43
In other words, climbing reveals to vision the suprarational vertiginousness

41 Eriugena, Periphyseon, IV, 73.

42 Public domain image, source: <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_
David_Friedrich_-_Wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog.jpg>
43 Tomatis, Filosofia della montagna, p. 45, 47.
Because It’s Not There: A Vision of Climbing and Life 137

of its own structure, the dimension wherein vision climbs upon and through
something or someone that is present without presence. The paradoxical
place of such an empty presence is like the somewhere (or someone)
embodied in the gaze of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea
of Fog (Figure 9), an awareness hovering as if apart from and nearer to
the human than himself, close by a passing figure who stands in the air of
intellect, above the mists of spirit, upon the rock of matter, taking in the
selfsame view. Here I envision Augustine quoting and confessing himself in
the margins, near the edges of the painting you are not seeing, ‘look upon
me and see me […] in whose eyes I am become a question to myself’.44
Who will turn to face this inevitable gaze, the impossible look of life
itself? Who will meet the gaze of that which is ‘taking me away from behind
by back where I had put myself when I was preferring not to see myself’?45
Who may endure to the summit this pure will of vision, the living abyss
of oneself that looks out at the world for no reason at all? ‘The unitarian
Beyond is an indivisible and indescribable infinity. It seeks to know itself.
It is of no use to ask why’.46 Nothing to be done, there is nothing else to
do. As Meher Baba says, paralleling the popular imperative to climb now,
‘Spiritual progress is like climbing through hills, dales, thorny woods and
along dangerous precipices to attain the mountain top. On this path there
can be no halting or return. Everyone must get to the top […] All hesitation,
sidetracking or resting in halfway houses, or arguing about the best route,
only postpones the day of final fulfillment’.47
I’m off.

44 ‘[R]espice et vide […] me, in cuius oculis mihi quaestio factus sum’ (Augustine,
Confessions, X. 33).
45 Augustine, Confessions, VIII. 7.
46 Meher Baba, Beams, p. 8.
47 Meher Baba, Listen, Humanity, ed. D. E. Stevens (New York: Harper Colophon,
1967), p. 186.