Last week I ended up with a time at a retreat in Scotland, when I was both trying to work out what the saola meant to me, and trying in general to calm down. I said I might try and write through from that retreat to the dream in Kati village in Cambodia, a few weeks later. I didn’t make it even halfway!
This writing is mostly revising my notebook stuff which is very introspective and sometimes very odd. Sometimes I just write to get ink flowing and I don’t think it means anything at all.
However, looking closely into this stuff, I see how I laid out all the pieces, once again, before pulling them down on top of me. First, though, a little thought that came out of the discussion in the comments last week with Dougald Hine, where I found myself wondering what I had got so angry about.
The misuses of mystery.
There is a National Park in Vietnam called Cuc Phuong; one of the easier ones to get to from Hanoi. I saw a tree there once filled with hungry thrushes from the north, I saw shining millipedes and moon-green snails curled in the eaten places of the stone, old, old, ripples in their shells. I saw giant flying squirrels, real tea trays in the sky, black for an instant on a river of the galaxy’s white, and I saw an Endangered box turtle once. I never saw any animal larger than a palm civet because there are none there.
Along the road into the central station at Bong, the park put up ‘crossing’ signs to warn drivers not to hit the clouded leopards, bears, serow and other such beasts on the road. I don’t know if it convinces any adults. Vietnamese are, on average, more understanding than we are of how things can continue without their central mystery. Vietnam’s parks are all like this: nothing ever gets crossed off their list. We all know it and we long-nosed biologists rant or sigh depending on temperament.
The saola will never be crossed off either. It is always potentially out there. Like the reassuring sayings of Jesus that must exist in the books which were censored from the Bible, the books which we maybe haven’t read yet but surely must prove we were right. The forest is dense and our surveillance is still pitiful; there are plenty of gaps for our gods. Measurement is offensive to things of the spirit, they will not stoop to be caught in our snares; and cameras are just another kind of snare. The way we are looking repels them. If we have new eyes, we will see.
This may be true, but it’s also a really convenient excuse for doing nothing while they die.
The opposite argument to this is the one called Pascal’s wager. I suppose that which one makes more sense depends what you think about your own power.