Deeper Dive: The Call of the Mountains

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Announcer: This is a Getty podcast.

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Lilit Sadoyan: Hello, I’m Lilit Sadoyan, the host of OMMM, Our Museum Mindfulness Meditation podcast—Getty’s first video podcast. Welcome to this Deeper Dive, where we explore the themes of our weekly episodes with experts in everything from gardening to the history of colors.

Katie Ives: It’s something that people have struggled to put into words, that climbers have struggled to put into words, that lovers of mountains have struggled to put into words. There’s just, there’s something that’s elusive and essential about mountains.

Sadoyan: This week, we did a mountain meditation inspired by Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld’s View of the Bridge and Part of the Town of Cava, Kingdom of Naples. I spoke with Katie Ives, who lives a balanced life of writing about mountains, editing stories about mountains, researching about mountains, and climbing mountains, all while living on a mountainside. We discussed the draw and power of mountains and what we can learn from them. Now let’s dive in.

[On video call] Hi, Katie. Thank you so much for joining me.

Ives: Oh, thanks so much for inviting me. It’s wonderful to be here and wonderful to get a chance to talk with you.

Sadoyan: Thank you. So in this week’s episode, we explored a painting of a mountain and practiced a mountain meditation, and I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into the significance of mountains with you. But to start, why do you think some people, myself included, see a mountain and just feel this urge to climb it?

Ives: I think it’s a really common urge, and I think it’s there just, like, among people who are climbers and also among people who aren’t climbers. Um, in cultures around the world, mountains have long symbolized thresholds between the Earth and the heavens, and they’ve been seen as a way to approach the divine, however that’s understood.

And I think a lot of that early religious significance has persisted even in more secular literature, this idea of… This idea of ascent as being something that’s psychological, emotional, and potentially spiritual, as well as physical. Um, the idea of mountains as a symbol of human aspiration, as a symbol of desire for connection with something larger than the self, um, and of ascent itself as a form of longing. Like, you see a mountain, you long to climb it, and climbing then becomes an enactment of that longing.

Sadoyan: Mm-hmm. Yeah, there’s a real powerful metaphor of the mountain there.

Ives: Yeah. Doug Robinson, who’s a rock climber, um, often described the feeling of ascent as that of sort of pursuing the, what he called the elusive essential feeling. And I always love that term because it’s–it’s something that people have struggled to put into words, that climbers have struggled to put into words, that lovers of mountains have struggled to put into words. There’s just—there’s something that’s elusive and essential about mountains.

Sadoyan: Definitely. Um, so actually I would love to hear about your personal connection and personal experiences with mountains and their emotional resonance. Why do you head to the mountains and what do you hope to accomplish in doing so?

Ives: Well, ever since I was a child, um, long before I even knew about climbing, I used to have vivid recurring dreams of mountains. And at some point in my childhood, it became a dream of a very specific mountain.

I grew up in the lowlands of Eastern Massachusetts, and the only remnants–that are–remain of the ancient mountains are… you see striations in the rock of glaciers that retreated during the Ice Age, or you see hollows in the landscape or hills that are called drumlins that are... All of these are remnants of ancient alpine landscapes.

So I think I was haunted in a way, both, you know, sort of visually and emotionally by the absence of mountains, um, around me. And so I started dreaming about a mountain that rose in my backyard. And I grew up in Lincoln, Massachusetts near the border with Concord. So I was… and in my dream, the landscapes of low hills and farmlands and hemlock trees and maples and oaks would sort of burst open and these–this mountain would arise from the earth, and there would be rock, a rocky ridge, and then there would be snow and clouds on top of it.

What astonished me was many years later, I found out that Henry David Thoreau, who back in the 19th century lived about two miles away from my house, um, had a very similar dream about a mountain that he saw arising east of Concord, which would place it near where I lived. [laughs] And to him, it was this symbol of aspiration, of some perfect state of being that he had not yet attained, and he would climb it again and again in his sleep. Um, and he has this wonderful line near the end of his description of this in his journals where he says—he talks about dreams as being real. And, you know, and I think that that’s—In a way, so the mountains become symbolic of that because they are, you know, what we experience when we experience a mountain, it’s not just the physical space as people like Robin MacFarlane have described. It’s also the many layers of human dreams associated with mountains, and those are very real even if that reality is a largely, you know, internal one.

Sadoyan: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and to your point about dreams becoming real or being real, what about the tangible physical experience of climbing or scaling a mountain, feeling into those uneven surfaces, uh, with your feet or the temperature and the texture of the rocks in your palms, of course all the sounds in the environment. Um, can you speak to that a little bit more, and how does one…how does someone become one with a mountain?

Ives: Yeah. All of that was what drew me deeper into climbing when I was in grad school. Um, I was getting my MFA in Fiction at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I knew that I wanted to write. I didn’t really know what I wanted to write about, and it was around the same time that I was really getting more serious about learning how to rock climb.

Climbing is an incredibly visual, tactile, auditory experience. Engages all the five senses. [Sadoyan: Mm-hmm.] And there’s a heightened awareness to detail when you climb because for very practical reasons [laughs] you know you need to be able to notice the small indentations in the rock or the, you know, or if you’re ice climbing, the textures and colors of the ice to know what will hold your weight. You know, how can you find a pathway up this vertical cliff that’s safe? And uh, there’s a Scottish poet named David Craig who put this, I thought, very beautifully that for writers who climb that cliffs are seed beds for creative expression because you are very close to the kinds of details that you’ll be writing about.

And yeah, all those aspects that you talked about, all of that can then enters into your work is... Another thing that writers, climbing writers, often talk about is that climbing itself creates a heightened sense of perception, that details appear more crisp, more sharp, more radiant, um, you know, suffused with their necessary existence for survival, but also with a sense of beauty and connection.

And I think for me and a lot of other climbers, there’s a sense of when you’re climbing and when you’re engaging with the rock, with the ice, with the snow, with the mountain, with all your five senses, that you are in fact weaving yourself into the cosmos that this mountain [Sadoyan: Mm-hmm.] and its surroundings represent, that you feel physically and emotionally and potentially spiritually part of this, um, of larger communities and ecosystems of being. You know, whether that’s the, the rock, that’s the stone, the snow, you know, the trees around you, the birds above you. Um, you know, a quartz crystal that you reach for in order to keep yourself from falling. [Sadoyan: Yeah.] You know a deep shade of blue ice that gives you the confidence that it will hold your ax. The particular sound that an ax makes when solid ice that tells you that you’re safe. Um, you know, all of that becomes a necessary part of your being. Um, and there’s a sense of—another thing that climbing writers often talk about is a sense of the boundaries between self and surroundings fading and really feeling part of the mountain.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist of “Flow”, was also a climber, and that was an experience that he talked about, a sense of kinship developing between the climber and the rock. Um, a sense of sort of fading of boundaries between them.

And then Nan Shepherd, Scottish author who wrote a famous book called The Living Mountain, her entire idea of ascent was not to climb any one peak, but rather to experience the totality of the mountain, which was the… You know, it was a form of climbing that could be infinite, because the more that she knew about the mountain, the more that there was to know. [Sadoyan: Mmm.] And her goal was to sharpen all of her senses until she felt as if she’d entered into the totality of the mountain’s life.

Sadoyan: Mmm. So it sounds like on the one hand, it’s a very mindful activity, obviously, because your survival depends on it. And on the other hand, the mindfulness component comes in when you really get to know, um, the mountain through your experience of, through your sensory perception and awareness of it. So it becomes a very specific, uh, kind of knowledge that you carry in your body.

And yet what I find so intriguing is that you’ve written that there is really no real definition of mountains. [laughs] So how do you even find a mountain? And can you please speak to why they are unknowable in many ways?

Ives: Yeah, to get back to Thoreau, um, in his journal description of his dream of the, the mountain of Concord, he talks about, like at some point in his dream, he writes he crossed this sort of invisible line that divides a hill, mere earth heaped up, as he says, from a mountain.

And the mountain itself is something—it’s something transcendent. It’s something that’s beyond just a hill. But he, you know, it’s not—at the same time, it’s not fully describable. And I think one thing that was really interesting to me when I was researching my book on imaginary mountains, um, I set out to find out what the definition of a real mountain was, and I discovered that there is no universal, commonly agreed-upon definition of a mountain that is true for all regions of the world.

People, geographers will have different ideas about altitude, about prominence, about auto- um, how autonomous a land form it is. They’ll have different opinions about how steep it has to be to be a mountain. And I think I decided that my favorite definition of a mountain is one from Roderick Peattie, an American geographer in 1936, where he says, “A mountain is a mountain because of the part it plays in the popular imagination.” And he goes on to say that, “A mountain enters into the imaginations of the people who live within its shadows.”

So that means that you have things like, you know, there's a hill in my hometown that’s—I think it’s 280 feet, and it’s called Mount Misery, because of the role that it has played in the imagination at the time. It has persisted as a mountain on a map even though, you know, you’d look at it today and it would barely even register as a hill.

Sadoyan: Hmm.

Ives: You know, conversely, you have 10,000-foot hills in Nepal that are just called hills, not mountains. [Sadoyan: Hmm.] So, yeah, it becomes a, it’s a very cultural definition.

Sadoyan: Mm-hmm. And so why do you think so many people, including yourself, want to get so close to this unknowable, ineffable thing?

Ives: Well, I think it’s, I mean, I think it’s an—a natural human desire.

Um, and I think what’s interesting when you look at the history of mountaineering literature, there’s so much devoted to, you know, why do people climb? And I think, you know, it’d be easy for somebody to say like, you know, it’s because like, you know, why do people wanna brave these hardships or put themselves through suffering or experience risk? But I think it’s more a part of the fact that readers are trying to understand themselves, you know, whether or not they’re climbers. You know, why does this longing exist? Why do we want something beyond the horizons? Why do we want something that we see in the distance that we need to rise upward to?

You know that it's deeply embedded, I think, in human consciousness. And of course it means something different to different people. I think if mountains become symbols of aspiration, to one person that might mean something very different from somebody else. You know, one person might look at a mountain and have dreams of conquest. Another person might look at it and think of it more in terms of veneration and communion with nature.

Sadoyan: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you spoke about the role of imagination in mountain climbing. I’m wondering too, what about the historical imagination of the 18th century, which is when Bidauld, the artist, painted, uh, the mountain painting that we’ve discussed.

Ives: Yeah. So I think that’s what’s really interesting is, of course, you know, the first ascent of Mont Blanc was in 1786, which is around the same time of the painting. And, um, a lot of people see that as... Some people will pick that as the so-called beginning of mountaineering. You know it, of course, was not the beginning of people climbing mountains. People have climbed mountains as long as human beings have existed around the world for, for many different reasons. Um, but there was a sort of particular attitude that arose around the time of the ascent of Mont Blanc. Uh, and Peter Hansen talks about this in his book, Summits of Modern Man, that after the climb, one of the things—there was this big controversy about who got there first, and he sees that sort of argument of who’s first as part of what he calls a kind of summit position of modernity and, uh, modern mountaineering, this idea that a sort of wanting to kind of dominate the mountain, of being there alone, of being there before anybody else. Which is very different from other ideas about mountains in which, you know, reaching the summit isn’t as important. It’s about more experiencing the landscape, or maybe it’s about studying the, the plants and wildlife there, or maybe it’s about hunting or prospecting for crystals, or maybe it’s about trying to become close to God as a, as a pilgrim, or having adventure or seeing a beautiful view.

But none of that necessarily means, you know, recording oneself as the very first ascensionist. So there’s this, there’s this tension, uh, that arises and, you know, again, around surrounding Mont Blanc. It was around the time that people were becoming very fixated on the elevations of mountains. And during the first ascent of Mont Blanc, they brought a barometer and tried to measure it. Um, later on, Saussure went back and brought a whole huge number of scientific equipments and measured all kinds of things, including the blueness of the sky. [Sadoyan: Hmm.] And so there was this beginning, you know, this idea of wanting to quantify mountains, of wanting to categorize them, of wanting to determine their elevations, put them on maps, versus other ideas about mountains that are more about mountains as something immeasurable, as something unquantifiable, um, as something that exceeds human ability to understand.

And this is something that Veronica della Dora talks about in her book. She talks about this tension as being fundamental towards people’s understandings of mountains, and I think it’s also fundamental to our interactions with, um, the natural world. You know, this idea, you know, is it something that people can measure, calculate, conquer, or is it something beyond—beyond human understanding, something that has a life of its own, um, that exceeds our particular ways of comprehending the world, that exceeds calculation. You know, that has more to do with dreams and intuition and also with its own existence as, you know, something that’s potentially sentient in its own right in some religious traditions.

Sadoyan: Mm-hmm. Wow. Well, you’ve certainly given me so much to think about next time I go on a hike, and I’m really grateful for that, Katie.

Thank you so much for joining me on this episode.

Ives: Oh, thank you.

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Sadoyan: To find the related meditation and see images, transcripts, and additional resources, visit our website at getty dot edu slash ommm. That’s O-M-M-M.

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