An American in Mongolia: Part III

A Horse Released Can be Caught, a Word Never. -Mongol Proverb

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Conveyance is a means of travel (to define it very broadly.) Simulacrum is a representation of a representation of something perceptible by someone. Feuneur is the act of gazing through windows or cameras or lenses of our own creation, rather than immersing oneself fully into the at times painful reality of the other; the other her/his self being an important concept to grasp because if one is going to travel one will come face to face with the other and have to grapple with why she is so similar or different from one’s self. Liminality is betwixt and between time and place, and even sometimes one’s understanding of the world’s existence. Utopia is nowhere, a magical fantasyland just out of grasp, or the ideal somewhere. Impersonality is the product of a lack of communication, either intentional or unavoidable because of verbal/non-verbal language differences/disparate articulation techniques, or lack of effort or care. These are all concepts necessary to understanding the mindset and experience of any adventurer, foreigner, tourist, or traveler. I’ve described my own recent experiences traveling as a student in Mongolia last spring within the context of these terms.

Conveyance for me was limited to horses descended from the Тахь (or if you prefer, Przewalski’s wild horse), a camel or two, motorcycles driven by my host father or brother and his neighbors, Russian Jeeps driven by the bag doctor with multiple layers of humans per seat. Microbuses arriving in a rush and leaving just as quickly, occasionally skidding on ice or falling though slightly; jalopies in Ulaanbaatar driven by men who have left their families in the country side in search of work, finding nothing but taxi-driving and vodka instead and nearly crashing into me and each other, and constantly breaking down, leaving a trail of assorted casualties (at times) including puppies, children and old women balancing too many water jugs and buckets of milk. Range Rovers driven exclusively by the SIT staff, usually Ulzii Ach (brother Ulzii); trolleys at 100 tugrogs (about 7,800 tg =$1) each with the most absurd juxtaposition of Mongolian music videos on state of the art silicon flat screens but no integrity of engineering or safety of design with huge gaping holes in the wooden floors (and also forever breaking down.) Trains I took and missed and sometimes dreaded would take me to China without papers if I fell asleep. For the shamans who I observed, the chosen conveyance of spirit was drums and mouth-harps, song calling forth the ancestors, and ecstatic dance.

Unconsciously, I created my own simulacra; my own block prints were created with the help of photo-references of shamanic representations of ongod (ancestral spirits.) The originals were only created to try to fill the abyss of human craving for the tangible answer to the disembodied answerers, but they certainly outshined my shallow mimicry—my meta outweighed my merit. Amusingly, there was an artist at the Mongolian Artists Union with esoteric leanings who made paintings depicting shamanic artifacts done with a surrealist slant for he only believes in surrealism—“realism is the death of art.”

I was forever watching, removed, a feuneur. Hopelessly, earnestly, honestly, intentionally, consciously, cautiously, excitedly watching because despite probable blood-ties I am never a “real” Mongol (though jokes implied otherwise, that I was a Mongolian man—smoking/sniffing tobacco, drinking airag (fermented mare’s milk) and ayrahk (vodka distilled from airag) sitting on the floor cross-legged, wearing a masculine hat, spitting, drinking enormous quantities of sudtai-tsai (boiled milk tea) so as not to be rude, decent horsemanship, teasing.) Not eating meat (mutton, yak, horse, fat, blood sausage, entrails, etc.) makes me a voyeur into the life processes that the maintenance, production, slaughtering, and consumption of meat so integral to the life of the Mongolian family involve, and also uniquely removed, separate, and different.

In observing the ritual of the shaman, I was shown a whole new creative liminality. There was my own, being between my world and a foreign one, not knowing where I fit or what I was doing, not recognizing the usual signs of being in a place that I could call home or even staying in any one place long enough to imagine such a thing, mirroring the patterns of the nomadic culture that I was immersed in. Then there was a reality created by the ongod and shaman, while they were traveling together to other dimensions of reality that I could never comprehend despite continued observation or bulking up on my reading. For the Mongolian shaman, the necessities of liminal travel are costume, headdress, and boots (all alive) necessary to guide and protect one’s spirit while traveling betwixt worlds, an ongod, a drum, and symbolic climbing of sorts.

For years I had it in my mind that I must visit Mongolia, my fantasy wonderland, my Utopia that I hardly believed really existed. I had done some reading, watched some movies, and gazed at the photographs of my maternal grandfather’s parents, and wanted to go to one of the cradles of romantic nomadism and shamanic journeying. I thought that if I went I Would Be In Touch With My Roots. I Would Push Myself Beyond My Own Limitations. I would experience hardship, and I would grow. Some kind of transcendental awakening. Some kind of adventure seeking. Some kind of academic appetite and taste for the outlandish. I got there and discovered that the evidence that others before me had collected was correct, there is far more land than people. And livestock outnumbers the few humans inhabiting the basically unchanging landscape in the short recollection of humans (but for desertification due to shifting livestock ratios.) Seemingly endless white or tan steppe, semi-steppe and desert, occasionally populated by a herd of goats, cows, yaks, camels, horses, or sheep, and one lonely herder.

My first day living with a family everything sounded so foreign I couldn’t distinguish laughter from yelling. It was the ultimate experience of impersonality, but I soon discovered that not sharing a mother tongue didn’t need to bar communication, and that verbal communication is often just a source of confusion (and farce) anyway.