W a y m a r k s ~: May 2023

The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place by Ian Baker (Penguin, 2004)

This is a good, pacey and engaging travelogue, which – in the tradition of ‘an American abroad’ – reminded me a little of Peter Hessler’s River Town.

F.M. "Eric" Bailey & Frank Kingdon Ward

I read The Heart of the World primarily because I am interested in the lives and travels of Eric Bailey and Frank Kingdon-Ward (who could almost be this book’s co-author, given how often he is quoted throughout!). And also because I am interested in how the Tibetan Buddhist concept of ‘beyul’ (sBas yul) has been co-opted and adapted into the Western idea of ‘Shangri-La’ – for which this book offers a number of interesting insights and points to other literary works which it might have been hard to find or trace otherwise. The journeys made over several years which Baker recounts are tough trials of stamina, both physical and spiritual, with obstacles which are both natural, seemingly supernatural, and, of course, bureaucratic. However, I do agree with the comments (made on GoodReads) regarding the authorial persona; which, perhaps ironically for someone who presents himself as an aspiring Buddhist practitioner, comes across at times as somewhat egocentric. Similarly, while Baker is often at pains to stress that he is not a privileged white-man of the old explorer mould – this is exactly what he is at most points in the text, especially when, towards the end of the book, he and his companions are attempting “to close the gap” on the “last unexplored” five-mile stretch of the Tsangpo, utilising indigenous labour to enable them to do so (not that there would be any other option, of course).

There is a clear desire to complete (or exceed?) the endeavours which Bailey and Kingdon-Ward failed to achieve themselves; and, in the closing pages of the book, there is an equally palpable desire to beat a large Chinese expedition to find and measure ‘the last’ major waterfall on the Tsangpo. Although Baker is very evidently self-aware of these particular flaws, and perhaps understandably circles around them uneasily and inconclusively. No matter how well informed he is about the region, its spiritual geography and local traditions, he cannot escape the fact that he is an outsider. However deeply he manages to enter this remarkable place in all its forms, he always has to reconcile himself with the fact that he must ultimately leave again at the end of whichever trip it is he is narrating. Naturally, the reader is drawn to empathise. But the book does also indulge time-and-again in poetic and spiritual flights of fancy which skate a little too close to cliché in places (e.g. – to give but one example, how often it seems that the weather brightening up is attributed to the possible intervention of divine favour, or a lama happening to appear on the scene at the moment the sun comes out), which, for me at any rate, raised a bit of a barrier between reader and author.

That said though, I have read a particularly mind-numbing Chinese book (in translation; The Yarlung Tsangpo Great Canyon: The Last Secret World, by Zhang Jimin) about the enormous Chinese expedition (that features in the closing chapters of Baker’s book), which mangles all its references to Kingdon-Ward, including something as simple as getting his name right. Baker is by far a much better guide. But both books give rise to complicated and seemingly unresolvable feelings. One can’t help but sympathise with the local Tibetans’ conflicts of interest in wanting Pemako to remain unviolated by outsiders, whilst also being acutely aware that they need to make a living in such an ‘out-of-the-way place’ by acting as porters to comparatively affluent external interlopers. No matter how difficult or sacred the terrain, in the covetous eyes of such outsiders (Baker as much as the Chinese), the lure to conquer and possess these ‘unknown realms’ – real or imagined; physical or spiritual – in the end amounts to the same outcomes.

All too often, it’s simply a matter of time until others encroach and transform a place into something other than what it once was to those who have gone before, and even moreso to those who have always called such places home. Perhaps in this sense, Baker is an eloquent witness to the completion of a process which was begun long ago by those whom he has sought to emulate (i.e. – Bailey, Kingdon-Ward and Cawdor). Hence, one can’t help but feeling both forlorn and perhaps vicariously a little complicit too (having very much enjoyed the narrative of Baker’s journeys), when closing this book after reading its concluding chapter. – The truth of ‘Shangri-La,’ perhaps, is both its mutability and its transience; because even here change is the only constant thing.