Lately a few people have asked me why the blog is called "The Blue Mountain?" What does it mean, they ask, and what has it got to do with the blog? There is a tale to it I suppose, which, to borrow a line of Bill Bowerman's from the film Without Limits, "Like Plato in his tale of the world's creation, I won't say absolutely this is the truth, but...it is a likely story."
In most respects the blog has always been called "The Blue Mountain." It began with a German rendering of the name (die blauen Berg, which is incorrect, and should be Der blaue Berg), and became English after I found most readers confused by the title.
Outside my own imaginings, I believe I encountered the term "Blue Mountain" years ago when reading about Zen Buddhism. Many centuries ago the zen master Tozan wrote:
"The blue mountain is the father of the white cloud. The white cloud is the son of the blue mountain. All day long they depend on each other, without being dependent on each other. The white cloud is always the white cloud. The blue mountain is always the blue mountain."
To this day I still don't know what those lines mean, but they've always struck me as simple, interesting, and somehow expressive of human understanding at its limits.
Generalities aside, another likely source of the name comes from what can only be described as a great recurring myth from my younger days. It involved an imagined society of little people who used to occupy my thoughts, hours of play outside, and a corner of my backyard. For many years I thought of them as great warriors, renowned for their strength and martial exploits. They fought many wars among their rivals, and never lost. In celebration they dug an enormous pit (a small hole by the patio) and within placed a rare stone (quartz from the local stream) as a monument of excellence.Their exploits became my myth, and making up ("discovering" as I called it at the time) their history became a great source of pleasure and thought.
In fifth grade, however, things took an abrupt turn. Hurricane Floyd was on the way, and I worried the pit would become a lake, and from there overflow and drown all the people of my imagined civilization. This great catastrophe-in-waiting was "revealed" to the little people by an elder who spent all his time watching the clouds, and could therefore tell of coming storms. The warning proved a wake-up call to the warrior culture, who decided in the moment to become a nation of builders rather than soldiers. Appointing Guillaume as "Master Builder," the little people constructed a dome over the pit they had previously dug, and after covering it with moss and insuring its strength, took shelter within from the hurricane.
The dome saved the people, and thereafter they called it "the magic Mountain," which is also the title of a Weimar-era bildungsroman ("novel of education, or formation" in German) by Thomas Mann. Called "the Mountain" for short (and because Guillaume and the subsequent builders didn't believe in magic), the place became a great library and place of learning, thought, and research. Later when Guillaume fell through the ice while constructing the Ice Canal (winter of sixth grade), the Mountain became a mausoleum of the great builders (a work completed by Guillaume's successor, Pierre).
Soon preoccupation with the dead replaced interest in learning, and the magic Mountain lost its library and became a tomb only; called the "Mountain of Tears" by some, and the "Blue (sad) Mountain" by others. This happened at the conclusion of the Builder Epoch (the reigns of Master Builders Guillaume, Pierre, and François), and marked the end of the mountain people in my backyard, for some time after the death of Master Builder François my dad unknowingly stepped on the Mountain, crushing the dome and leaving a ruin in its place. The exposed pit soon filled with water, and in time became indistinguishable from the surrounding soil. Naturally the people fled from so calamitous a disaster and ended the Builder Epoch. It also marks the start of the long epic of the Prince Alain and the sword called Bering (a tale for another day perhaps).
In any case, the name "Blue Mountain" appears to have been a part of my thoughts for most of my life, with different connotations prevailing at different times. It has at times suggested history, legend, creativity, philosophy, and the life and death of peoples and people, which somehow seems fitting for a blog with no central purpose, open to the sky. Of course I didn't think of all these things when I sat at a computer in the Ursinus library two years ago puzzling over what to name the new blog I was creating. But for those interested, the above is my attempt at answering that question of "Why the Blue Mountain?"
Happy Thursday, friends :)
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