Last week I said I was going to cover the time between being on a Meditation, tai chi and writing retreat in Scotland, through participating a meeting in Vietnam where we decided to go all in on captive breeding, up to the night I had the dream about Penelope in a village in Cambodia. It was remembering that dream that made me think I needed to write.
I didn’t finish it last week but this week I have got there. This week I have got there but I realise I want to go on. I want to go on to talk about Cambodia after that. However this is a really long post already.
This is a really long post because - with the exception of one section - I am essentially adapting my ‘writing practice’ notebooks. The exception is a conversation that I’ve tried to reproduce from memory, and which seems more and more important to the story, the more I think about it.
Broadly, though, this is a record of what was going on with me behind the scenes while I was participating in decision-making for a species. It needs some more detail about what was going on in front of the scenes, but I’m finding it hard to find where we’ve recorded what happened at this workshop. I think we decided to spend less time on minutes. In any case, reworking this material has been enough work for a week.
It takes a lot of reworking because I use a lot of shorthand and I jump around a lot in time. It can also be hard to distinguish where I am using shorthand and where I am just talking nonsense. I frequently do just talk nonsense in order to get the ink flowing. I’ve left in a little bit of what may be just nonsense - word association. I imagine it will be obvious.
Of course, all of this is very dubious. What’s going on ‘behind the scenes’ can also be staged and what seems like nonsense may well carry a lot of meaning. After all this whole thing has started with me trying to interpret a dream. I suppose that I can most easily view dreams in two ways. Either they are pure nonsense - grotesques clustering on the meaningful edifice of my life and work - or they are the messengers of deep truth from the noumenal realm. Or you could also imagine that there are some of each kind, as Penelope herself famously suggested, but there are still just two kinds.
Last week I had a discussion with Dougald Hine in the comments in which he questioned my obscure feeling that I was being told I had to give in to the second kind of story, not only about dreams but about a lot of things. I’ve taken to calling it the ‘right brain wins’ view. Dougald characterized it as a Hollywood view, which it is: Use the Force, Luke, trust me, turn off your targeting computer. However I do think there are plenty of more subtle versions out there.
Someone asked me on Sunday: “did you ever think of just leaving the saola alone in the forest?” It was asked with genuine curiosity, so I didn’t bristle. I have the expectation - from somewhere - that this question is being asked of me aggressively: “why didn’t you realise you were supposed to leave them alone?” I said that, no, I hadn’t ever seriously considered this. It’s not true; I wrote in March about exactly this thought, but in general, the idea of captive breeding - and especially actual capture of wild animals is a very hard sell to conservationists. Nigel, my PhD supervisor, was especially proud of having done his bit to break the power of the captive breeding lobby by showing that it was more cost effective to protect African rhinos in the wild. He was most dismayed when I came out in favour.
Every saola taken into captivity so far has died. That seems like an unassailable point against captive breeding. And it’s good to think of the saola as a delicate creature with a proud and wild spirit that can only survive in the distant misty forests and will pine and die in a cage. It’s less Romantic to hear middle-aged professional zoo keepers saying ‘we’re pretty sure we know what went wrong.’ It’s easy enough not to listen to them if you don’t think about just how many snares there are under that misty canopy on the lost world of our dreams.
04/11/15 Sen II Hotel, Cầu Giầy, Hanoi
From inspired, to tired
The cockerel's cries creak back and forth around each other, calling the dawn up. It’s the same down in the A Luoi forests where the cocks are wild. Hair washes down a rheum-green drain. The receptionist worries about being a good enough receptionist. The student worries about being a good enough student. The city grows. Pyramids rest on our chests. I’m at my desk in the hotel room in the morning. Now we have to actually get through the agenda that we designed yesterday.