There are several interlocking themes in the following, none of which can be treated coherently here. Meanwhile, I'll put this up as a draft, an 'anthology' of sorts, to return to later. To begin:
There is a chapbook published by Ugly Duckling Press in New York, called Lines of Flight by Madhu H. Kaza, on the theory and practice of translation, where the author invokes and briefly explores the translation of color terms, moving on to consider Greek translation, most famously, translations of color words in Homer:
The ancient Greek of Homer, for instance, famously has no single word that means what we mean by "blue." In the epics, we encounter the bronze sky, the wine-dark sea, violet sheep, blue-haired Poseidon, bright-eyed Athena, the dark eyebrow of Zeus.
Kaza surmises that, "There must be a word in the original that can cover both green and blue." These may not be translation issues per se, but more likely a matter of word choice by the ancient writers. That aside, Kaza returns to the mountains, noting that "If you've spent time with mountains, you might understand that they won't be the same the next time you look." And she follows this with a passage from Dogen:
The green mountains are always walking…Mountains' walking is just like human walking. Accordingly, do not doubt mountains' walking even though it does not look the same as human walking…Because green mountains walk, they are permanent. Although they walk more swiftly than the wind, someone in the mountains does not notice or understand it. "In the mountains" means the blossoming of the entire world.
The above is a translation of the Dogen sutra by Arnold Kotler and Kazauaki Tanahashi. Kaza next quotes a different translation of the same passage, but this time the mountains are "blue". Puzzling over this, Kaza suggests that "there must be a word in the original that can cover both green and blue."
There is, of course, more to the Mountains and Waters Sutra (Sansui-Kyo) than Kaza needs or uses for her purposes. Here is more from that source:
Priest Daokai of Mt. Furong said to the assembly, "The green mountains are always walking; a stone woman gives birth to a child at night."
Mountains do not lack the qualities of mountains. Therefore they always abide in ease and always walk. You should examine in detail this quality of the mountains' walking.
Mountains' walking is just like human walking…
There's an interesting passage in this sutra which may link back to Lucretius (I've momentarily lost the source in Lucretius):
You should study the green mountains, using numerous worlds as your standards. You should clearly examine the green mountains' walking and your own walking. You should also examine walking backward and backward walking and investigate the fact that walking forward and backward has never stopped since the very moment before form arose, since the time of the King of the Empty Eon.
There's also the following, which may also relate to the "koan" about the stone child which opens the sutra:
Yet the characteristics of mountains manifest their form and life-force. There is walking, there is flowing, and there is a moment when a mountain gives birth to a mountain child. Because mountains are Buddha ancestors, Buddha ancestors appear in this way.
Extending this now, to identify correspondences, I want to quote from an interesting interview published in The Brooklyn Rail (May 2025) by Ginerva DeBlasio with the Italian artist Enzo Cucchi. Here, I think, is the relevant portion:
EC: ...Every day, you do the same things. Like walking. If you walk, it doesn't mean the trees in your walk are always the same, right? But every time you see them, it's clear that each time is different for a thousand reasons, you see? There's the wind that changes everything, right? It's like when you said things change. Of course, they much change, right? It's the wind that takes care of that, and the important thing is that it changes them, and that you encounter that change every time.
Cucchi also has interesting things to say about color, and the materials he works with:
Rail: Many of the works currently on view have both ceramic elements and painting, right? Which in some ways makes them both painting and sculpture at the same time —
EC: No — sorry to interrupt you. More than being painting and sculpture, it's not quite like that. These are simply materials that sometimes belong to what we call "sculpture." Because they are material in that sense. In reality, it's simply an additional image: a strong, external projection. It's a mark driven by other marks, so it's still an image, understand? The issue is always related to the image. The materials get involved in this, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm doing sculpture, nor does it necessarily mean I'm doing — I don't know — something else, understand?
Rail: Yes, like painting, sure. You are very attached to ceramics though. Where does your connection stem from?
EC: Ceramic, you know, like all things, being a very ancient and primitive thing, is a material that is really congenial to the artist. Like when you say, "What are you talking about?" — it's like the word for a writer. Ceramic simply has a problem with light. Like when you do frescoes, you're not painting green, blue, pink. That thing doesn't exist; what exists is the light of that thing. The light of the blue, the light of the pink.
Mosaic is the most special tool because it filters this and gives you that type of quality. Ceramic likewise has this type of value. It's a noble material, like a fish — a tuna in the middle of the sea, which is a noble fish — unlike some fish that don't have any particular nobility or selection.
This is interesting in multiple ways, but parenthetically, it reminds me of the fisherman I met in Maine while doing fieldwork there, who lived in a small cottage on a cove somewhere Downeast. I think he might have retired from fishing by the time I met him, and was spending time carving miniature fish and birds, and I think building model fishing boats. At one point he told me that he was especially interested in capturing, in paint, the iridescent colors on the belly of the tuna. This coloration begins to fade as soon as the fish is hauled from the water. He showed me one of his tuna carvings, running his forefinger along the belly of the fish, which made me wonder, was he trying to stoke that color back into the wood?
Meanwhile, there may be something useful here, some sort of adumbration, in the diary notes of Taneda Santokā, a Japanese poet-monk, as translated by Burton Watson:
the deeper I go
the deeper I go
green mountains
And:
I go on walking
higan lilies
go on blooming
And:
drizzly rain
only one road
to go by
And:
all day
in the mountains
ants too are walking
In The Ferryman and His Wife, by Frode Grytten, there's a page or so on mountains, as realized along the Norwegian fjords, with the protagonist, ferryman Nils Vik, reflecting on the experience of an avalanche (landslide), and on coverage of the incident in the American press, where the fjords are represented are characterized as beautiful, but also "most dangerous". As the Ferryman explains,
You had to learn to live with the mountains, to recognize when they're calm and when they're starting to slip and slide and creak and groan. He's stared up at those mountains for so many years. Mountains that can vanish in the fog days before suddenly reappearing. Mountains that change slowly as you sail across the fjord, but which are always worth keeping half an eye on. Mountains that shoot up from the water, to be framed by the virgin snow and glaciers high above. Mountains with their own rules that must simply be respected, with their cracks and crevices, their chasms and voids and murderous intentions. (34)
Here, the color is white, as Nils noted in his logbook after watching the event replayed on television:
All that snow, like watching a white wig come slipping down the mountainside.
How do mountains move? Let us count the ways! The Literary Activism group published a poem recently by the Indian poet Vinad Kumar Shukla, who died last year on 23 December:
'This year too in these plains...'
This year too in these plains
there are no mountains.
For centuries the mountains have stayed in one place;
it's time they moved.
The Vindhyas, for instance, should come closer
to the bus stand and law courts,
and the Satpuras should go behind
the village school or farm.
The Himalayas seem unfair
to a place that doesn't have the Himalayas;
this maidan seems unfair
to a place that doesn't have a maidan;
Tatanagar seems unfair
to a place that is not Tatanagar.
This year let this level ground be displaced
not to the Terai but the Himalayas,
the ground's highest point rising like a Himalayan peak.
Let's have Bhopal this year
near Bakal and Paniajob,
Varanasi on the banks of the Mahanadi,
Gariaband near the Ganges,
Chandigarh near Sanchi,
Nandgaon near Faridkot,
and Madras next to Moradabad.
All places should be displaced
and brought near all other places,
so that every place is near every other place
and not a single person is displaced
because of drought, terrorism, or war
from the village this year.
Translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.
Concluding this rather lengthy meander for now, here's something from an essay by Monika Vrečar, recently published in the online magazine Asymptote:
The conception of reality that most closely resembles the idea of poetry I am attempting to approach here is given by the Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte, in a segment where he discusses the concept of the "ecological imagination" with McKenna. Whyte starts by dismissing Jean-Paul Sartre's phenomenological notion of reality as unknowable in itself: "He put his finger on the tree, and he said, 'Life is absurd because I cannot understand that tree, because I cannot become—I cannot get my soul into that tree.' . . . And you weren't supposed to get your consciousness into the tree. You were supposed to pay such tremendous attention to the tree that it came to find you." And yet, I believe Sartre's own conception of poetry is involuntarily mystical, for in relation to Mallarmé he proclaims that the poet uses words as things rather than as signs. That is, the poet intentionally alienates words from their habitual symbolic uses and meanings, and turns them into a "thing," something—remember Sartre's Nausea—that unmistakably pulsates with being. This shift from words to pure presence of things is precisely what Zen masters call detachment: a mystical state in which deep attention to what simply is creates the portal towards the divine, or the identification with the whole universe. The mountain as nothing but a mountain, unabated by its symbolic significance that is fleeting and unstable, pretentious and context-specific; the river as nothing but the river. And yet it is not the thing itself that is at stake here. It is the fact that the thing acts not only as a portal to existence itself when you pay undivided attention to it, but also as a revelation of the ecology of things in which they are enmeshed.
At risk of crowding this post yet more, I'll give the last word to Basil Bunting, from a 1949 poem:
There they are, you wlll have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!
More later....
...later...
In An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, his novella about the German landscape painter Johan Moritz Rugendas, César Aira offers yet another series of reflections on mountains. First, a brief meditation on Aconcagua, a mountain in the Argentine Cordillera, within the Province of Mendoza:
Yet it was not so simple to capture the form of Aconcagua, or any given mountain, in a drawing. If the mountain is imagined as a kind of cone endowed with artistic irregularities, it will be rendered unrecognizable by the slightest shift in perspective, because its profile will change completely.
Aira then shifts the perspective, from the precipitous peaks of the Cordillera to the eternal spread of the pampas. Aira invokes images of the gigantic carts used to carry goods and people across the Argentine pampas, from Mendoza in the west to Buenos Aires in the east. His description of these carts is provocative, as seen through the eyes of Rugendas, his protagonist:
These were contraptions of monstrous size, as if built to give the impression that no natural force could make them budge. The first time he saw one, he gazed at it intently for a long time. Here, at last, in the cart's vast size, he saw the magic of the great plains embodied and the mechanics of flat surfaces finally put to use…He watched them setting off on their long voyages. Their caterpillar's pace, which could only be measured in the distance covered per day or per week…
Because they only had two wheels (that was their peculiarity), they tipped back when unloaded and their shafts pointed up at the sky, at an angle of forty-five degrees. The ends of the shafts seemed to disappear among the clouds.
Aira extends the metaphor: "And one day, suddenly, the carts set off…A week later, they were still a stone's throw away, but sinking inexorably below the horizon." (ellipsis in original) And yet more: "A bird flashed across the empty sky. A cart immobile on the horizon, like a midday star." Pampas carts like mountains? Leaving Mendoza for the voyage across the pampas, Rugendas and Robert Krause, his associate, had hired an experienced guide and a boy to serve as cook. As they move along toward the east, the land flattens, leaving Rugendas to assume that they must by then have entered the vast domain of the pampas:
A casual remark made beside the campfire provoked a rectification from the old guide: No, they were not yet in the renowned Argentinean pampas, although the country they were crossing was very similar. The real pampas began at San Luis. The guide thought they had simply misunderstood the word.
Rugendas is taken aback:
Were the "pampas," perhaps, flatter than the land they were crossing? He doubted it; what could be flatter than a horizontal plane? And yet the old guide assured them that it was so, with a satisfied smile rarely seen among the members of his grave company…After three weeks of assimilating a vast, featureless plain, to be told of a more radical flatness was a challenge to the imagination. It seemed, from what they could understand of the old hand's scornful phrases, that, for him, the current leg of the journey was rather "mountainous." For them, it was like a well-polished table, a calm lake, a sheet of earth stretched tight. But with a little mental effort, now that they had been alerted, they saw that it might not be so.
Aira shines a light; "flat" can be "mountain" too!