JOHN CONNELL

The Story of the Fifth Peach-Jam Immortal from the Tun Huang Caves

or

A Child’s Book of Particles

            Just quite briefly, the story of the Five Peach-Jam Immortals from the Tun Huang Caves is this:

            In Western China, in a valley along the old Silk Road, the Tun Huang Buddha Caves were being poked into and photographed by an expedition of European savants and spies led by Sir Ariel Stein. Diggers were hired from among the local folk. Five of these work-people were drinking beer in one of the still-unexcavated grottos (cave number 14 in the Ariel Stein catalogue):

“This grotto called The Playground of the Daughter of Chenrazee (or Avolokitesvara)”

And that daughter is our compassionate dear Kwan-Yin. . . .

Description in catalog:

“ . . . And she stood there a clay and wattle girl with no sign of decay, still brightly painted and wearing many necklaces and bracelets, her right hand raised in that compassionate remark, her left holding the little jar of Amrita. Her crown flickered, a flame-like ascending thing, it too spotted with the little winks of stones and fiance beads. . . . and her belly breathed softly. . . .

“All around her, rising to the ceiling in a huge gangly intertangled frieze, were skeletal hungry ghosts with stretched cannibal mouths and Titans and sleek angels with swallows’ wings and fierce serpent clouds with licks of root-like flame descending. . . . And higher and higher, built on these skeletons and ghouls and animal-headed potbellied priapuses and gape-vaginas there rose more and more beatific and powerful and tranquil creatures. And among them the Buddhas and sages sat, and old bulge-head Taoist wanderers leaned on their iron staffs and carried their little loose-tied cloths full of life-giving fruits.   

“And monkeys and cranes flew equally up there, and all this without decay,—or someone had kept it all painted afresh and resplendent, too colorful, too bloodthirsty or benign or powerfully radiating a company. . . .

“And all this leapt in waves from around the mild Dyana-sunk figure of the Kwan-Yin. . . .”

It was night and they were young and frisky and they had the big pot of the local beer. Soon they were drunk. The Kwan-Yin beamed down on them. They began to quarrel. They began to push and remonstrate so. And one of them fell against our Goddess’ up-raised compassion-gesture arm—and the arm, only mud and sticks for bones—fell away.

A scent of peaches was in the air now . . .

The work-kids stopped contending and smelled. From the arm socket of the Kwan-Yin the smell came. One of them—Sien Lu—reached in there . . .

Anyhow, feeling the jar-shapes in there, the working-people got their tools and busted open the torso of the Goddess, imagining something precious lay inside.

But the jars were full of black, sticky unction of some kind. This was the 2000-year-old peach jam, made by Taoist elixir mad people from the Peaches of Immortality.

Naturally one of the bumptious work-folk characters decided to try the stuff. Faster than any kind of digestion, he became Immortal. The other workers waited to see if he would die from it, and then tasted also. They were all suddenly Immortal then. . . .

And The Story of the Fifth Peach-Jam Immortal from the Tun Huang Caves is the tale of one of their adventures after that.

A Child’s Book of Particles

Welcome to Avici

(But the mild-tempered hell, analogue of Dante’s mild Socratic hell with the thought-fields filled with noble peripatetic pagans assigned there by some historical misfortune, etc.)

            Mount Sumaru, Himalaya.

            “I watch for the single proton to decay. I watch the single proton deep in the earth. Immortal, I can afford to watch for the billion trillion trillion years it’s said to take one to decay. Does it suddenly fall into decay? Down here waiting . . .”

            Near the mountain’s base is a giant corrugated iron shed. The road comes up from the town below through sheeny rhododendron scrubland. Way off the dawn Tea Hills still smoke. The men come up the road to the big labor-mustering clearing before the giant corrugated shed. Every day the same men come and every day they’re hired again—newly—to go down into the gold mine. This hole is worked thousands of years deep now, dropping a mile and a half into the foundations of the mountain. There’s a slat-slides elevator that goes up and down now. But formerly, only a few years back, there’d been a thousand wooden ladders that descended, with little resting-eeries or wicker nests along the sides here and again. Feeble-shining lanterns hung on long ropes, the burnt-out ones always being raised up the center of the plummet hole while new-lit ones descended, the darkness sucking them till they vanished in deep obscurity. The ladders went in stiff wickerwork coils to the bottom of the pit, where the old horizontal gold tunnels commenced. . . .

After the Chinese invasion, the elevator was put in. . . .

The shed doors flung open and the night-shift came out. . . . The dawn crew goes in. The high-trestled roof takes light sparks. Up there: monkey families and principalities are already hard at politics. They got big planks between the girders on which they run to socialize. Every now and again a monkey plunges to the floor, broken. The doves go in and out under the eaves. There’s a steady sifting of creature waste and food droppings. Bats chirrup in the elevator shaft and the last of them rise from the pit and roost under the beams high above. Ecstatic brown light floats up there in the stirred dust of the creature jamboree.    

The monkeys scream and gibber. The doves thrum and coo, lighting out for the town then. . . .

Monkey shit and rotten fruit cobs and broken eggs and bird whiting and little creature corpses fallen all around the pounded dirt floor. The sweepers are coming along behind the water boys swinging perforated buckets quenching the dust. They wear broad woven grass hats to shelter them from the rain of filth. The gold mine crews, the night and the dawn crews, pass each other. They’re all wearing their dhotis and torn brown shirts. Two-thousand men almost. The dawn crew loads on the elevator. The plank grate closes on them and they go into the darkness very fast. The elevator cage skidding on the banks of the deep hole, striking sparks. The cage hits the bottom with a quaking clatter of them rickety parts.

There’s a debauching room down there with a ten-foot wide circle of giant lightbulbs in the ceiling. In five directions lightbulb trails go away down the five gold tunnels and there in a curtained niche of hard black shades and rock folds sits the little Kwan-Yin only five inches high standing on a pillar five feet high, her right hand raised in blessing, her left holding a real big gold nugget. Behind her, going up in writhing black smoky coils, is a wreath of deep-earth fiends, norns and bowel critters all twisting and biting and murdering and copulating there—all bound together, fluid and extruded-looking like the natural gut-work from some deep magma-hole. But this is a devotional art work and was not placed there too long ago and in front of the Kwan-Yin stand two large wrastling statues gripped together and tensed forever in the sweat of their perennial combat. These figures come directly from the rock floor, cut from the stone when the pit-room was excavated 4,000 years ago and they are blackened from the oils of a million annointings and the smokes of all these little flames that rise from wicks in oil cups in the floor;—an uneven oval of flames goes around the wrastling figures.       

            “We call these figures Proton and Anti-Proton,” says Chandra Das the physicist. He and a few of his student crew have come down into the hole for a day’s work in the proton decay lab there under the mountain.

Off one of the gold tunnels is the proton lab. It is hot down there, so far in they are close to the molten iron pits below. The veined meat of Mount Sumaru piles over, breathing. And down here can be heard the footfalls of pilgrims going up and down the mountain on the coiled path that leads to the belly-like cave 15,000 feet up on the mountain’s southern face where you look down into India. There is a stone horse in the cave, only that; and a giant slice-like smile painted on the back wall. A forty-foot wide smile. . . . All red and black and containing no teeth. . . .    

            But the gold pits bore far beneath the mountain and down here in the core-rock only the most maverick and wiriest and most unsociable cosmic rays pierce and when one penetrates the water tank it plows a sparkling furrow of blue light. . . .

            Now pretty near two miles down in the root-ends of the pits in the darkest thick of the mountain there’s neutrinos (no charge) which slip and slide down the vacant alleys between all matter. They go right through that deep down water lake there and once in a while slam against a piece of water humming inside itself and they bust it up.

            Once in a while a muon comes blazing in, struck from the atmosphere by falling cosmic rays and each of these particles or particle events throws a blue light track—a cosmic ray striking a water molecule in the imponderable vacancy down there: the blue light track going, the blue light track going as the other things enter the water in the big subterresterial lake down there—it’s just a giant cube of the purest water, a half mile going in each dimension, and along its sides glistening softly are thousands of tubular photosensitive cells hung on wires, and on the lake surface Dr. Chandra is rowing along in a stainless steel rowboat with stainless steel oars—and he drifts—then he sees to the bottom in the perfectly clear water and a blue sputtering track fumes across and disappears down toward the end of the lake. Far off there, someone else is rowing another stainless steel boat, one of his students. They talk to each other on little pocket communicators checking the coordinates of the event that has passed under them on the coordinate ledger that’s propped before them on a stainless steel lectern that juts from the boat bottom. . . .

            Cerenkov radiation, that blaze of blue light when a particle shoots through the water. . . .

            Above the lake, the hollow cavern roof amplifying oar lapping and the soft voices of the tiny men on the lake shore, behind the viewing window, stands the computer room. Men sit at consoles in there, very still and soundless in the aisles of hardware in the clear lethe water another event quickly forgotten as no reverberation or ripple goes out. The photocells record these events as do the physicists in the rowboats.

            They are trying to catch a proton in the act of turning into something else: sort of like an evolutionist trying to find a kangaroo in the act of degenerating into a wombat. A boredom-proof everlasting eye is needed.

            Once protons were thought to live forever, but then they were thought to be eternally shadowed and aped by anti-protons.       

            And then there was the great Manichean battle to extinction between them. They should have killed each other off, abhorring each other and the world, then be self-eaten, but this has not happened yet. There’s plenty protons, enough to make all this out of—this-here stuff.

            So.

            One idea: The anti-protons were shorter lived than the protons. The anti-protons have almost died out by now, only a few grizzly little outlaws living in the remote mountains, maybe the poor few survivors of old Universe battle recorded in so many old cosmologies and now in all these physics tractates (Sokorov, etc.). These little resilient founding father-mother mother-father protons et al. had been enough leftovers to create all this. Jaybird to stardrop. But even so, matter would be rotting. To see it rot,  you watch the billion trillion trillion protons in the lake under Mount Sumaru  year after year, and with that large of an aggregation of protons slowly going down (and I mean slowly) you could see one, with luck, in a year, maybe two—provided all this was so. . . . Even close to so. . . .

            And thus, Dr. Chandra Das or one or more of his grad students, was always there floating on the lake awaiting that one soft blue streak that was not another muon or one of them treacherous neutrinos or one of them pioneer cosmic rays that had struck light from the matter down in there like some heroic sperm-sculptor chipping in the ice fields at what was still potentially some ultimate virginal crystal.

            So so so. . . .

            Dr. Chandra Das followed the path of some probable event coming to pass in some humanly recordable time. . . .

            But crouched in absolute no-body darkness in a little abandoned crouch hole passage not far from Dr. Chandra’s moon pool there was a little guy sitting stark naked on a ragged piece of cloth. He could see nothing and he gazed at it hard, but calmly, as maybe he would have to gaze for a long time. He had his left hand held out palm up and on the palm sat a single proton just kind of humming to itself uncloyed and disengaged from all else. . . .

            And this was the other way: To watch a single proton for a billion trillion trillion years or so, and surely you would see it slump and puff and burst into light as its progeny, which had been it, danced off toward what new debasement.   

            So the little guy sat there watching. No one can see him and he can’t see himself and if he ever sees himself it will be only in the death light of that one proton because he’s stubbornly vowed to sit there till this proton gives up its ghost. But of course the theoretical life span of a proton means nothing. This particular one he’s chosen (it looked no more healthy or sicklier than any other) could live on many trillions of kotis of kalpas beyond the alleged average: like the ancient guy found in Brazil who had no particular age but who remembered seeing Simon Bolivar in 1804. They stuffed him with ice-cream cones and flew him to New York and I think that way they killed him: so at least they could find certainty recording his death day. 

            This was immortal number five: Mr. Natalson, who had started life Chinese but slowly became middle-European, became interested in particle physics and so there he sat with his particle on his palm and he could sit there forever if he had to, he really could. . . .

            Proton decay: who knows if protons decay—what I can say is that very strange things happen inside this iron deep underground.

            And Dr. Chandra says: we use as much imagination to say yes as we do to say no: and I would say, “Yes, I prefer to say yes.” I have seen protons decay. . . .

            Again, the world beginning as light would end as light, so that the generation of darkness is the work of creation: dark is big and fat, lush and plenty, the big juicy fecundating void thing becomes the body and the light is the annihilative nothing, brilliant and sweeping—like a broom with a billion trillion trillion straws of purging electricity.

            That is: bodies—intermediate states—are physical dimmings—more dim or less dim—the denser and more material the dimmer—a neat corny proportionality.

            At the root-end of two gold tunnels are Dr. Chandra Das and the fifth immortal (all alone in there). Bedraggled shallow-breathing ill-paid folk have baskets of dense rock chunks, full lines passing empty to and from the furthest ingoings of the works, where just a few half naked drudges hammer at the mother rock and the whole operation depends on their scrawny fortitude, though of course as individuals they’re endlessly replaced.

            There is another way down under the mountain, though no mining channels, more from Neanderthal times. And there are excavated chambers there, too, and in the deepest room it’s getting hotter every year as the magma water around the earth’s heart is swelling slowly and this room is very hot and close. The room is empty. On the ceiling is painted your thousand-eye Avolokitesvara, just eyes like the night above and in the heat Cerenkov events are happening, crossing the darkness in all directions. . . .