What Does the Dragon Want?

Years ago, when I still used air transport, I was flying home from Canberra at sunset early one evening. I was gazing out the window as the plane passed over snow-powdered alps. The mountains stretched on and on to the curved horizon, unpeopled, the ribbon of a rare road showing up only now and then. The landscape was wrapped in pink haze, deepening to a glowing rose around the edges of the world, without any line at all between land and sky. I gazed and gazed, in nameless reverie. Feelings I could not identify moved in me, a sense that the presence I was forever seeking yet which remained just out of sight, just out of reach, was there. In my reverie I imagined that the wild vista on which I was gazing was populated by dragons and sages in caves – that mystery still dwelt down there. I imagined that I was separated from that mystery, or its larger source, only by an invisible veil. There lay the enchanted world, as real and beautiful as it could be, but I was looking at it from within the bubble of modernity, the aeroplane with its packaged food, plastic cups, glossy commercial magazines along with its cargo of trussed-up moderns.

Thinking about it today, I wonder if the question that architect, William McDonough, did not quite ask offers an opening through that veil: what do those mountains and the rivers running through them and the rosy fields of light in which they float want from us? Imagine the river-dragon slipping down from its alpine sources towards the sea, its tail trailing out into the Milky Way. Imagine it lifting its long neck and looking about as it streams along. It sees peaks and gullies sculpting the fields of energy through which it swims. There are tall trees and riparian groves and upland cress-fields and pastures drinking up dragon water and breathing out plumes of atmosphere, cascades of weather. Birds as bright as berries light up the woods, greeting one another from the little sanctuaries they have spun in the trees on the dragon’s flanks. Furred creatures sleep and wake, climb and hop and yearn as the dragon passes.