Love (of 'nature') might actually be a valid concept.
Look, that's as far as I'm going with this, OK? Don't hate me
Since the 15th of July, I’ve been working on what I think of as ‘Part 2’ of this project. These posts have been called: Barrie’s Story, Uncertain Ground, Envisioning Success, Rangers and Strategies, the Universal Solvent, the Passengers, and Praying on unstable ground. Some of these titles are better than others but I’ve started dividing my titles into two categories: those which could refer to the saola and those which could not. All of these are in the latter category except ‘The Universal Solvent.’ So I’m left trying to explain the rather insane assertion that the saola, an animal rather like a cow, constitutes a mystery so profound that it can seep into and dissolve any system designed to contain it.
In listing my posts, I should also mention
’s piece about the Oxford Lacuna, which started out as a response to my first two listed posts above. Caroline says that, in the Oxford men she knows - though the phenomenon probably doesn't apply only to Oxford and only to men - there seems to be some indefinable thing that is missing. I feel I am on unstable ground, but she talks of something more like an organ being plucked out.I suppose that relates to the idea of gut feeling which is what Caroline and I were talking about. There's a post I just read by
called “Why you don’t know what you want," about how gut feeling is likely to just be relaying your conditioned beliefs back to you, through familiar reassurance and fear. The article seems very sensible and correct, and therefore reassuring to me, but of course that probably means it is relaying to me my conditioned beliefs. The things Caro is saying are more disturbing… although I've also been conditioned to think that disturbing things are more likely to be true... It's all very confusing.I began this writing project with
’s statement that it was about what happens when a scientist starts listening to their dreams. I know how the story is supposed to go: the scientist is supposed to realise that dreams contain a deeper truth and turn away from his dead world of cold facts into a living, right-brain cosmos. And I am left having to explain why that isn’t necessarily what happens. Or why, if it does happen, it isn’t necessarily happy ever after.Writing these weekly posts has been much harder than I expected. I was aiming for writing similar to my Field Trip Diaries from earlier in the year and I was getting those out every day or two while actually on a field trip. However, I was writing then about things that had just happened, and I was writing, from the beginning, for an audience that wasn’t just myself.
From around 2007 until around 2016, I did a lot of writing, in notebooks but not only was the writing just for me, it was also divided into two separate notebooks. One for automatic ‘writing practice’ and the other for work. The story from the work notebooks - or rather some of it - went into my PhD. I’m now trying to tell the other story, but it doesn’t make much sense without the first one.
The writing practice notebooks are unpredictable. They may function as straightforward daily diary for a while and then switch, without warning to recording only dreams for months. At other times, dreams are ignored. On the 14th of December, 2010, I wrote that “my dream last night was more disturbing - when recovered - than any other dream I've had,” but then don’t write down what it was. Instead I describe the fairylights round the window in the cafe where I was sitting.
Now, of course, if you ask me what the most disturbing dream I ever had was, I’d be likely to say it was the 2015 dream in Kati. I would like that to be the most disturbing dream I’d ever had because it would suggest both that the saola is really important to me, and that what I’m most scared of is hurting someone else. However there are other contenders. I will talk about one of those below.
Also, in this week’s instalment, I find myself talking about Hamlet. I wasn’t expecting that, but it makes sense in retrospect. I guess - this point must be done to death - but I guess you could see Hamlet himself as an ordinary person dropped into a myth (his dad’s left big toe is arguably the morning star, after all). We’re all moaning at him to stop angsting and get on with the plot, and there is an original plot from the Gesta Danorum which Shakespeare’s character derails. But…
I’m very ready to listen to friends tell me that they were given instructions for life by spirits; and if they truly reorder their lives in accordance with those instructions, I’m liable to feel admiration and envy; especially if they seem happier afterwards. But, so far, none of the reported spiritual instructions have involved murdering people.
Audiences are dicks. And if you’re an audience to your own story - and Hamlet is - you’re going to be a dick too, to yourself and the other characters. And that’s worse for ‘characters’ who aren’t automatically part of your story; who you went out and sought. That’s why it’s toxic to love an idea of someone and not their real person, and how could love for a species - especially a species of an animal you’ve never even seen - be anything else than love for an idea - a fake love.
That’s actually what I want to talk about here. That’s the shadow of the story. The story of my PhD is about uncertainty and its shadow is about love. It’s a shadow because it’s about uncertainty about love.
This is a piece with several chronologically-separated sections again, so I’ve given them each little titles: The Professor, Demon-summoning with Joanna Macy, Reaching parts that other uncertainties can’t reach, Lame Millennial addictions and The straight path out to the world of peace and shadow. First, though, it seems I still haven’t finished talking about passenger pigeons.