The Rain Is Slow

The clouds on Cangshan don't climb. They lie sideways, wound around the mountain's waist, like a sash someone laid over themselves for a nap and then, falling asleep, forgot. The locals call it the jade-belt cloud. A few times a year, they say, and the day you see it is sure to be fine.

That day we happened to see it. Sitting on a rock halfway up, the cloud below us and across on the far slope, not moving, and yet somehow moving so slowly you couldn't catch it staring. Don't stare, squint. I narrowed my eyes and the mountain's outline dissolved, the line between cloud and slope gone, a wash of green, a wash of white, blurred together — and somehow alive.

You have to look at these mountains the way you look at a painting. Too close, and you see the brushwork; step back, half-close your eyes, and you see the whole. Monet meant the same. He wasn't painting water lilies, he was painting the one instant of light landing on them and being broken by the water. An instant. A blur. The half-second before you've made it out.

Toward evening, a little rain. So light that on Erhai you couldn't see it fall — you only noticed, all at once, the still water filling with countless small pits, one against the next, flattening as fast as they came, as if someone were tapping from underneath. This rain's like no rain at all.

The man with the guesthouse was gathering chairs, heard it, laughed. Dali rain is all like this, he said. You complain it isn't falling, and it's been falling all along — all afternoon, you only see it now.

By night, everything still. The mountain black, the lake black, no moon, no telling where the water ended and the sky began. We sat in the courtyard with the light off and put on Debussy. A soft piano, the notes falling one by one, and at the end not resting on any note but spreading out like ripples on water, slowly, dissolving.

And I understood what he'd said. The unseen things are happening all along. The rain falls, the stone soaks, the blue lives in the vat, the notes spread out in the dark. You think it's all gone still, and it's all ripples — only slow, slow enough you take it for nothing.

They say this piece is like travelling. Travelling where. Somewhere by water, by the sea. Then again — maybe not. Maybe a very still lake, blue, lifting one small ripple, no one there.

Which is just now. Only the sea traded for the dark, the lake for this stretch of Erhai we can't see.

Neither of us said anything more, afraid that a word would sharpen the blur we'd finally arrived at.

The Dali on film is something like this. A feeling that has to be somewhere in the East, that no single place can ever quite account for. It's in the cloud, in the slowed rain, in a vat of living blue, in the reason a man who came home won't quite say.

Everything still. Only the feeling left.