The Museum of Modern Love(59)



She could have flown back to New York to see the last days of The Artist is Present. But it was too late to get it organised now. She had a shareholder meeting next week for a company in which she had invested quite a sum. Still, she felt more restless than she had ever felt in her life.

‘Maybe I need to walk like Marina. Maybe a walk would help. What do you think of going walking, Karl? But not towards each other. Let’s both go in the same direction,’ she said, regarding his face in the photograph on the desk.

‘How about that walk in Spain that is so popular? You remember—I told you about it last weekend when there was that program on the television. We could do that. I could be a little Catholic again after all these years. Maybe a walk would do us both good.’

Would it be crowded at this time of the year? And was she fit enough? Maybe she should wait until September, when the weather cooled. She’d have to go halfway around the world. She’d need a travel agent and a passport. And was a walk in Spain what she really wanted to do? Yes, she decided. I think it is. It would be a year since Karl had died. A sort of anniversary then.

With such concerns occupying her mind, she wished Karl a good night and blew out the candle in its glass jar next to his photograph.





MARINA BEGAN AT SHANHAIGUAN, IN the east, where the Chinese said the dragon’s head rested in the Yellow Sea. It had been a marriage walk, but now, after thirteen years, it had come undone, this thing that had bound them so intensely.

It had been eight years in the planning. Letters and permits, visas and money, diplomacy, the Netherlands and China, international cultural exchange, itineraries, reissued itineraries, squabbles, bureaucrats, flights and trucks, government hotels and no camping.

They had wanted silence and solitude. Nights under the stars like they’d had in the desert in Australia, a minimal crew that would not interfere with their private, meditative walk. But there was so little time to be truly alone. Only when she walked, when the camera crew was ahead or behind, in the tracts of film they managed to capture when each day they finally arrived at the wall, driven in vans from some obscure location where it had been essential to stay. Then she had time to connect with herself, with this ancient place, with this land. And in those moments the sky and the path and the sense of scale humbled her and sometimes released her.

Ulay began at the tip of the dragon’s tail, at Jiayuguan, in the barren Gobi desert. She had no way of knowing if he too was experiencing the chaos of Chinese bureaucracy that corroded the days. She had no contact with Ulay or his crew.

Once she had thought of Ulay as her perfect hermaphroditic union. Her creative and spiritual union. Walking towards each other, they had originally planned to be drawn closer by the magnetic power of each other. Now they walked against the current that had pushed them apart.

Still, they both felt that it was the fitting thing to do. To walk this route of mythology, of dragons and gods and wild men. The Chinese said the dragon connected earth and sky. And the wall was constructed in mirror image to the Milky Way. So they were walking the stars too.

Coming from the east, Marina had to walk the sections of the wall most popular with the tourists. They had little interest in her, being more concerned with snapping each other against the giant stone backdrop. She carved her way through clicking cameras. She climbed the winding wall, the relentless steps, the ancient escarpments. She passed through the towers with their brass bowls for purification. She walked the chakra points of the earthbound and celestial dragon, and the way of human life gone long into the past.

Every day the Chinese bureaucrats and officials who accompanied her, or who joined them in each new province, insisted that paperwork be signed off in triplicate, and that each day begin with meetings and end with meetings. This exhausted her and she retreated to whatever bare concrete cell she has been assigned in yet another bare communist hotel and allowed the discussions and arguments to go on without her.

By day she measured the landscape with her body. Feeling the scale, the beauty, the poverty beyond the wall work upon her, soaking into her eyes. Step by step. Her legs each morning were stiff with yesterday’s work. Marina started as early as possible, wanting to catch the sunrise, to have those moments of pure surrender, prayer and reflection, that she yearned for.

Soon the crowds diminished, the tourists evaporated, and she was a lone figure on the wall. She wore red. Ulay was in blue. Red dragon, blue dragon. They had dressed for the film, but also for their characters, for their own personal mythology, for the mythology of duality that they had played out all these years. As the days passed she felt like she lost track of who he was, what went wrong and even why they were walking. Some days she was more tired than she could remember ever being.

She wanted to see him walking towards her. She wanted him to hold her. She wanted duality but there was only singularity. Each step she took moved her closer to him, and to the end of together, the end of partnership, the end of connection, to the end of love.

She thought sometimes only step, step, step. Every step harder than the last. She tried to climb quickly but on the rough parts of the path, where the wall had crumbled, she groped for handholds, slid and slipped.

Marina and Ulay, red dragon, blue dragon, walked on. Now they were twelve hundred miles apart.

Marina was in the middle of nowhere familiar. She felt the fear of that, and the happiness. This was what she loved. To be in the unknown. To be on the other side of fear where everything became possible. She was emptying herself. The irritation of bureaucracy, the hours of boredom as she endured long car rides and nights on hard beds after bad food—it all released her. Her body went on without her feeling attached to it. She might have been the wind or one of its riders, she did not know. Or perhaps the wind rode her.

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