A somewhat belated happy new year to all. Hope you all had a good one and a good Christmas too, if you celebrate that. I’m glad to say that I had a good break myself. In the weeks before Christmas our house became a real rookery of viruses. I went into the festive period exhausted, wrapping remote controlled vehicles with one hand with my mind hanging empty and dessicated over the bed. I went to Midnight Mass alone in our village church and that was all the Christianity I did. I have been out birding to see the cranes and the wild geese and swans but that’s all the wildness I did also. Well, maybe a bit of dreaming, but I don’t remember that. But we had a great Christmas day and a wonderful week afterwards just lazing around with kids and in-laws, eating and drinking and playing board games. Healing for the kids and healing for all of us. A big wodge of nothing.
I got very stuck at the end of last year with this substack. I was trying again and again to re-write a last post in the series that I’d been working on since July. The series was about a field trip in Nam Đông and a conference in Paris . I intended a summary of the previous eight posts to tie the threads together. I tried to keep it lean but whenever I took my hands off it, it sprouted so much hair, and the hair grew back twice as thick when I cut it. At some point in the series I wrote that there is something fundamentally sticky about the world; sticky and ravenous. Of course that feeling has to do with the title of this substack. Writing anything really brings it up for me.
This substack was intended as a short, intense log of what would probably be my last search for the saola. And, for March and April, that’s more or less what it was. Then something happened which I didn’t feel able to write about. Not a big event but something that stuck its horns into a knot of hope I’d been holding onto and twisted them there. At the same time, there were a lot of things not happening: the paperwork for this ‘emergency’ initiative took an entire year. There are stories in there I haven’t worked out how I can tell yet.
Still, I did get some of it down. This first piece is about a drinking session in a national park office. That is the quintessential experience of ‘doing conservation’ in Vietnam but, for once, I actually enjoyed it. Having let my guard down, I got snagged by a nasty question (and by SARS-CoV-2) and ended up dreaming about tigers eating people and vice versa. (Vice versa, by the way, is the normal state of affairs).
This last piece is a little more emotional and tells of a night alone in a hotel room looking over the mountains where the saola was first discovered by science and where it seemed rather unlikely any would ever walk again. I was also going to write regular pieces for the Homeward Bound website run from Dougald Hine and Anna Björkman’s School Called HOME. As it was, I have only written two, and one of them was a different version of a substack piece. The other, though, called “snow leopards and the bad things they make me think,” is partly about the way my education has taught me to see the world, for better or for worse. “Biology,” I wrote, is mostly horrible ideas about beautiful things.” That’s a keeper. That’s a theme. Eden, to put it another way, is a very long way away.
Now, interview surveys have started again in Vietnam. I’ve been getting What’sApp messages over Christmas from villages where I remember chewing gristle back in my evaporated 20s. Many of those messages are photos of beans scattered over white maps. We are still using the methods that I developed with Nikolas Århem in Nam Đông in 2008. This week, possibly, I will finally be paid. And in February, once the year of the cat/rabbit starts, I may be going back to Vietnam again.
However, the second part of 2022 found me back in the Europe, wondering where to put my brain and how to earn my keep. I’d been back in touch with Nikolas Århem, an anthropologist now at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala. I went with him to Nam Đông exactly 14 years earlier but we hadn’t seen much of each other in the intervening decades. We met up suddenly middle-aged, having failed to revolutionize or save anything much in the intervening period. We presented our paper and had some good conversations and some good galettes but, over the English autumn, Paris faded in my mind while the cords that stretched from Nam Đông stayed strong as I returned and returned to my notes. It took far longer than expected to write the posts about Nam Đông and the draft article coming out of our conference paper is still - well - draft.
At the core of all this, for me, is dim memory of a chubby, bearded, animated face and hands making bold gestures over a map that was spread on a bamboo floor1. Our assistant’s voice was bored as he helped translate the stream of zealous, breathful, praise: “Now he’s just talking about the great power of the Revolution. The spirits have been driven back to the stream sources by the power of the Revolution.”
We’re familiar with the idea of the Christian Church doing this kind of thing. In Vietnam, the implementing partner was the Marxist-Leninist state. Marx would have been pleased to hear this man say that his people had been released from the tiresome restrictions placed on them by the spirits. However Marx would presumably have been disappointed to hear him insist that real spirits had ever been responsible for those restrictions in the first place.
Right?
I’m going to assume that’s right.
Anyway, I wanted to tell this as a story which started from that point, although there was always going to be some artifice in that attempt. A linear story would need to move from ignorance to revelation whereas it seems more like I have housed a cacophony of internal perspectives which were maintained over time. I’m a parliament which hasn’t suffered any permanent revolutions. I’m not sure if my perception was ever really changed or if I’m just using events from life to illustrate a certain perception that was in me all along. Anyway, in the substack series, I ended up telling the story backwards.
In the first post, I wrote about reading Moby Dick, and about how a power like a whale, or a mountain, seemed horribly puny in this Anthropocene age.
In the second, I spoke about goddesses and ask what happens if there isn’t any apocalypse, revelation or vengeance. A lot of mess and misery but winners and survivors who are never particularly humbled. It goes back to things I wrote in Vũ Quang in May about the End of the Animal World. I was asking then if there is actually then no justice, and I think I can see a slightly different answer to before. This second post should maybe have been the last.
The third post is about conservationists getting warned off from their work by dreams. This is important to me because it happened to me. But I’m noticing that my dreams weren’t rooted in the myths of the lands I was in, or in British myth, but in Mediterranean ones. This post also describes a Christian dream which I found, to my surprise, recorded in my notes from Nam Đông but I’m not very sure what to make of it. Slightly more idea now, perhaps.
The fourth was about the tension, back in 2008, between thinking ‘I must respect local people’s beliefs’ and thinking ‘these people literally believe in fairies.’ I talk about ten different modes of belief or non-belief in fairies. These are probably a distraction but pointing out that they’re a distraction is part of my story.
In the fifth post I planned to ‘cut through the crap’ and promptly got tied up in anthropological theories, particularly from ‘political ontology’. Do they really find a way of dodging the ‘fairies’ problem from the last post? Still I think I wrote some of this post fairly well. Also here was where I explained why I think ‘Anthropocene’ and not any other ‘-cene’ is the right name for our age. Something I probably have to come back to.
The sixth post was about demons. Here’s where it starts coming together. That Katu man spoke of ‘the Revolution’ as if it were a spirit among spirits. Well what kind of spirit is it? Maybe this is the one to read if you just want to read one.
In the seventh post I start actively trying to tie it up. I spoke a bit more about what Katu people actually said about the spirits, particularly a class of spirits we can call the Masters of the Hills, and I talk about political ontology and Moby Dick again and who, if anyone, can protect or punish us.
In the eighth, I try and make my conclusion. I talk about seeing things as alive or not; as people or not. I talk about a choice between fighting a god or fighting God and where the option of fighting neither took me. It took me, apparently, to the place where I can say creepy things like “an object is simply a subject that has no means to resist” and where, as referenced above, I have a dream that shows my work as a calculated gang-rape and have to proceed with it nonetheless. I have felt rather unsatisfied with this conclusion to the story although, reading back over it, I think it holds up better than I recollect.
I began describing the story in this series as a trap. I mean that I am trying to describe or recreate a trap that I am caught in myself. The purpose of all this is supposed to be to see if there is a way out of it. At least I believe that is the purpose. I can’t entirely be trusted, being human, and I can’t be 100% sure I am not just looking for reassurance that the trap is strong. That would justify my own immobilization. So, you know, you’re reading something on the internet, take care - but bust the thing if you can. Anyway, I now want to see what the trap looks like if I pull it out of the scenery a bit, shake off some of the leaf litter from Paris or Nam Đông. That might make it easier to escape or harder; it could go either way.
Now I keep trying to properly cover my bases and acknowledge my debts. I’m constantly freaking out that I’ve either missed some crucial line of thought, or failed to properly acknowledge all the faces, voices, readings, chats and dinners that I have been granted and all the struggles behind them. But I just have to steer clear of those hillsides for now, they’re just too sticky to traverse. Anyway, it doesn’t feel like I’m referring to neat ideas at all; I’m after great hanging haunting things which harbour whole ecosystems of mutually vicious intellectual life within them. Here, I think, are the ghosts I want to take aim at:
“At its base, the problem of our relationship with the not-just-human world is one of perception. Changing our perceptions can be the first step to saving the world.”
“There is something in ‘traditional’ or indigenous cultures that provides some hope or model for where we ought to be going for a better, saner future.”
“There are, in fact, two possible futures; one of apocalyptic destruction and another where we re-develop respect for the wider non-human world.”
and, a somewhat tighter mental formation:
“Mainstream, science-led conservation is rooted in, and/or allied to, the very whatever-it-is that is causing the problems it aims to solve. If we need ‘conservation’ at all, it must be rooted in, or allied to something quite different.”
I want to tell the story of why I cannot really profess faith in any of these statements. That doesn’t mean I want to show you why they are wrong and should be rejected. I want to show you why they are hard for me to believe. I’m not an atheist of this faith but I’m not a believer wrestling with doubts either; I’m an agnostic. That said, I’d be lying to pretend my attitude to believers is entirely benign. There is something down there inside me waiting to tear chunks out of people who can hold onto hopes I’ve lost. That’s the truth. My education, formal and informal, seems mostly to have been about having to accept unpleasant truths.
OK I’m going to start with proposition one on Saturday, and cover one a week. I’ve already drafted the posts so I should be able to let the machine handle a lot of this from here-on out.
After that, if things go as planned (heh!) I’ll be back in Vietnam and can talk about more imminent things.
Anyway, if you’re reading this, do reach out and tell me if you have any idea what I’m talking about.
actually, I think the floor might have been concrete.