Ce N’est Pas Ushba
This is not Ushba. Inspired by Rene Magritte’s painting of a pipe, called Ce N’est Pas Une Pipe.
Oh, Mountain, the things you put me through... I was back in Becho again yesterday for my twice weekly school work, teaching English. I have already decided to take my camera with me every time I go there, because you just never know if The Mountain will deign to reveal itself. Or not.
That day was Not. But it was also a beautiful fall day, so after my lessons and lunch I walked up a track I’ve found near the village’s first mineral water spring, to get a bit of altitude and see if The Mountain might cooperate after all, because you never know. On the way, sun-backlit yellow leaves glowed on their trees, and I crunched through those which had already fallen while photographing the former. I found a piece of rotten wood so lovely I wanted to take it home and varnish it, as frequently I want to do, but it was a bit large (nearly as big as I am) and might not go well into the minivan which is usually my ride. So I marked its location in my memory and resolved to save it as a possibility for later.
The fallen leaves reminded me that if I had some porcelain slip on hand (clay’s thin liquid form) I could dip them in it, carefully dry them, then fire them in a kiln at over 1000 degrees C. The leaf inside would burn to nothing, leaving its precise impression in the translucent white porcelain for posterity. But I don’t have any such slip on hand, or the kiln, so that’s just a thought to muse on in a melancholy way.
But The Mountain... refused to cooperate. Which got me thinking of a story idea. You see, this is a special Mountain. If at any time it is not being observed, or thought about, two things will happen. One, Ushba will contort itself (out of view) into literally any shape or series of shapes instantaneously, returning to its true form only when someone is looking at it; this process itself is never observed. A cube, a huge funny face, a real or imagined animal, anything whatsoever. Sort of a Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle with a twist.
Two, something will befall the last person who thought about or looked at Ushba and then stopped, causing the hiatus. They will suffer a bout of insanity for the amount of time that Ushba is unobserved or not thought about. Recovering from this, they will remember nothing of it, although they may have done anything at all while crazy. They are not to be held accountable for their actions, although the fault for the hiatus was theirs.
People know this, and so there is always someone watching or thinking about The Mountain (or, in my case, writing about it). It has obsessed people here, quietly but forcefully, with terrible consequences if ignored. Even if it can’t be seen because, like today, it has hidden behind clouds of its own making, it’s the thought that counts.
(If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it actually make a sound? My take is yes, because sound is sound, heard or not; it still travels through a medium if there is one, vibrating that medium and affecting the surroundings in however small a way. An exception would be in a place where there is no medium to carry the sound, such as the vacuum of space in which No One Can Hear You Scream, as a now-classic space horror film had it some decades ago.)
This needs to be fleshed out into a proper story, which I may do sometime as a way of explaining the hold that Ushba has had on locals’ and visitors’ imaginations for millennia, even perhaps inspiring the Svans’ original religion, animism, before it was partly displaced but never erased or replaced by Orthodox Christianity many centuries ago. Really, The Mountain has a presence all of its own, along with its reputation as a killer of mountaineers. One must cooperate or suffer the results.
This is not to say that I believe that the universe is infinitely absurd or lawless. But even so, I might just write this thing, because Ushba does tend to get under one’s skin after a while living here. Try it, you’ll see what I mean.
Tony Hanmer runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1250 members, at
www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:
www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
Tony Hanmer