This last week was a hard one for writing. My old notebooks stopped seeming like abandoned treasures and started to seem like old toilet paper I’d been hoarding. I knew that, to draft a book - to draft anything - I’d have to produce far more text than I actually used but I was feeling pretty bad about my decision to pollute this substack, and all your precious attention, with so much stuff that will have to be cut.
A big difficulty is that what I’m trying to write here is essentially a struggle between - let’s say - left brain and right brain. I’ve divided my narrative into three - perhaps four- parts and at the end of part one, left brain wins.
It wins in Nam Đông after I’m told that the spirits were pushed back to the stream sources by the power of the Revolution, and I reach certain conclusions, based on this. I already wrote a huge amount about this last summer and I’ve now almost got myself back to that point.
I’d thought that this week might be the point at which I reworked all that text into a single, clear chronological narrative, shorn of all the anthropological theory (or most of it anyway). Instead, what I have for you is a sort of prologue to that time, in two parts. The first part is about my first trip to Nam Đông, exactly a year earlier. Hopefully this goes some way to laying out the actual geographical stage for the subsequent drama. I begin it by summarizing what I’ve been through so far.
The second part happened after I went back to England in the autumn and secretly started feeding my right brain in the library and - less secretly - listening to anthropologists. It’s about how I start off trying to deal with the challenging fact that the Katu people saw the landscape as haunted by spirits.