I’ve moved from the house by the sea to a table on a hill in a wood. I came here yesterday with two children, one of whom was mine and found the ground littered with sweet chestnuts, a gift from the terrible heat. We roasted a tray of them this morning and they were very good. Since grey squirrels were released here, humans on these shores will never again be able to turn to the hazel to sustain them but perhaps the chestnuts will stand if our civilization falls. Trees have been cut for a viewpoint and I can see turbines turning, away on the sea.
The sun is sinking now and I have spent too long on theories. Pine, oak, holly rowan stand around me. Chestnut, of course, and birch. For all my talk of species being unreal, for all their diversity of form, I name them all easily enough. When I came back from Vietnam, I remember putting my hands to the trunks of trees like these and saying these names with deep delight. I didn’t need to call them anything else; or I did not think I did.
In this wood, a sign tells us to stick to the official trails to avoid disturbing wildlife. We must walk imperial, like tigers, on the paths that have been cut for us but we do it to be kind. We do not want to stink the whole place out with the terror of us. We want to let the little beings have some gentle space to do whatever it is they do.
I am bitter, I lash out blindly. Lash out blindly on my laptop in the golden light.
On this emperor’s path I find a minotaur beetle, a male. A creature I don’t think I’ve seen before outside a book. The males have two forward-pointing horns that they use to guard their hoards of precious dung. This one is stumbling, burrowing his head into the earth as my son used to burrow his head into my stomach. Then, like the world’s worst yogi, the beetle pushes his abdomen upward and pitches over. His legs play in a pattern as he lies on his back. He is dying and it will take a long time, there’s such a chunk of him for the death to get through. Once upon a time, when I wrote off stories about declining windscreen-splatter because surely some biologist was checking, once upon a time I would have felt safe in a wood like this. I would have felt that my wonder was safe, I mean, away from the roads and the lights. By contrast, when following Katu guides down an Annamite stream I had to rein in my delight. I knew that if I saw a green viper or a horned agamid, then the machetes would be out if I let my face betray it. It was miserable to do. Darwin said once that, in the English countryside, someone interested in natural history could always find something to interest him on a walk but, in the rainforest it was difficult to actually walk. I couldn’t do that in the Annamites; I’d chosen not to be a gentleman. I longed even for England where, despite the low diversity, I didn’t fear to see a beautiful creature being killed on the path before me unless another beautiful creature was doing it. Now I know I’m not safe here either. My phone says that minotaur beetles emerge in the autumn, so he isn’t dying with the wasps at the end of the summer, this should be the prime of his life. All sorts of things might account for his madness but organophosphates are definitely among the suspects. I can’t brush it off. Nor, of course, can he.
Back in 2005, I was sitting in another high place: the sixth floor of the North Front of the Cambridge University Library, reading the only book I could find there with anything about the Katu. The internet hadn’t been helpful; I found only three sites with any information and one was a missionary site exhorting the reader to give generously so that they could save the Katu from the demons that had them in thrall.
In the UL there weren’t any walnut veneers or spiral staircases or chained books but there were green lamps and tin stacks and volumes of journals which filled their whole shelves top to bottom. The whole place was just thick-packed books with no fripperies. C.S Lewis, visiting from Oxford, imagined demons were using it to invade from another dimension. I liked it. Once I imagined a Diplodocus wandering lost on the other side of the shelves - in a place like the one which exists in Interstellar, if you’ve seen that film. Outside of time.
The book I had come for was called “Shattered Worlds” by an American anthropologist called Gerald Canon Hickey. It described the devastation wrought on the mountain peoples of Vietnam when the modern world poured in on them as sudden and terrible as it ever has on anyone, demanding they take sides. I had already heard from Nikolas about the ‘blood hunts’ of earlier times, raids against enemy villages whose purpose was to appease the spirits. The men would sing and dance and talk all night and in the morning mists a band selected by the head man would set out in silence, wearing blue mantles and armed with long spears. If the hunt was successful, they would bear themselves with greater pride thereafter; their speech would gain new inflections, be ribbed with prowess. The women would sing lullabies to their daughters promising them such brave men as husbands. All this I already knew. In Hickey’s book I read descriptions of a typical hunt.
When the hunters arrived at the enemy village, Hickey said, they would expect to encounter a child. The spirits would send a child towards them; one too young, I supposed, to know what the hunters were. The hunters would abduct the child and take him or her back down the forest paths to their own village and, when they arrived, the child would be asked to clutch a dagger. If they refused, then the hunters would squeeze his or her hands to the blade of the dagger until the drops of precious blood fell. It is the blood that the spirit required. Then the hunters would spear the child, whooping, and slice off its head to be hung up with the others.
Yeah.
Hickey saw such heads, as well as warmasks and the skulls of sacrificial buffalo on the walls of Katu houses where, when I first went, there were painted wild animal skulls and now perhaps nothing at all. The book stayed on its shelf in the UL through all these changes.
Perhaps it wasn’t really so. Certainly it was not exclusively so; blood hunts definitely did not exclusively target children. Maybe they only mainly targeted children for a short period, or not mainly at all. Perhaps Hickey was too uncritical of his sources; as Oscar Salemink suggested in the ‘stylish meticulous and insightful’ book I found a decade later, roosting on the same shelf in the UL. Maybe blood hunting, in its entirety or in some aspect, really was some kind of response to the “destabilising influence” of French colonialism. It’s pretty hard to believe this though. And - well - it’s not the fault of French colonialism when tigers kill their enemies’ children is it? Why should humans be so special? There, I said it; nasty unreconstructed Darwinist that I am.
I read the Katu section of Shattered Worlds in 2005 before I ever went to Vietnam and then I read it again while writing the introduction to my PhD in December 2015 after I’d come back, I thought, for good. In 2005, I thought “hey, maybe the missionaries have a point.” How could I not think that? In 2015 I look at the fantastical, boastful warriors with their spears and gongs and loincloths and find it hard to connect them to the hospitable, humble, ordinary people I think I met. An old man, gap toothed and shrunken in his military uniform, who posed for a photo. Before the war poured in and he found other ways to win glory, had he ever abducted and murdered a child? And been proud of that once and ashamed of it now as society told him to be?
I looked out of one of the tiny windows at Cambridge against a purple December light. The churches glowed and I couldn’t name the colour. When I look at King's Chapel I might just see the splendour but mainly I see a giant microchip of the kind made for DIY circuit boards. This is the kind of brain it seemed that I have now and I thought how I would never be able to shake that association, i would always see a microchip. Suddenly the chapel looked like a dead sow with her legs in the air. Was that better? In between my two visits, peregrine falcons had taken up residence on the tower and dropped little anthropocene-ready artworks made of bits of pigeon onto the steps outside but none were visible that day. Still, the demons and their army from the other dimension had so far failed to pour through the walls. I still liked the place. It also has a tearoom, by the way.
I’ve been saying ‘spirit’ a lot but the Vietnamese and Katu words I’m translating from are less neutral, less Linnean. “Ma” generally means ghost though perhaps some other meanings have run together, “quỷ” is more like '“bogey” or “boggart”, something creepy and unclassifiable. The Katu word “abhuy,” on the other hand, seems to carry the connotation of someone who is higher in the food chain than humanity. Not the Great Chain of Being but specifically the food chain. Nikolas thinks that being able to eat people was the defining quality of the abhuy. That is why the tiger arguably is one and Komorrbarr arguably is not, though nothing in that Katu world is set in stone (bar some transformed sinners). What neither language really has, I think, is a word meaning ‘demon’, although Vietnamese Christians, of course, can find words they can use.
“Demon” itself was originally a neutral word like “spirit” and acquired its present meaning in a Christian context. With Jesus in our corner we could go round calling things inimical and unacceptable and refuse to have anything to do with them if we could help it (though of course we never could). We still do this a lot, I think. If I was truly sick of dealing with the nonsense and the bureaucracy and the corruption in Vietnam then, for all my mooning after the saola, I could still just leave and come back to Cambridge. Back to the stability and sense of England. This was 2015.
Yeah.
I’m still pretty damn comfortable, though, no good pretending I’m not. But there is also a part of me which is still there among the leeches with that maybe-one-last-snare-caught saola whose fear is literally an acid burning through the tissues of her heart. Some part of me, also, that is with the seething branch or towering icon that we call a ‘species’ which is being pinched off at eight million years by one million, thousand, hundred, ten and finally just one loop of wire. And that part of me, however small and pathetic, however dulled by comfort and good sense is desperate for there to be something higher up the food chain than us. The terror of such a monster is played against the horror of a cosmos that we, de facto, rule. That’s the attraction, you see, of all of this. That’s why I’m talking about spirits, gods, fairies, even vampires and demons. That’s why I thought I was in love with Moby Dick and would be his prophet though he would not care. I don't want us to be in charge.
I’d be the first to tell you food chains are silly. Very much a man’s, or a warrior’s view. There isn’t any ‘top’ to the tangle we’re in, that’s obvious. Sit in an Annamite forest and watch those little gold and green eyeless dragons stand up on the leaf tips, the stripe-legged mozzies fill up the clouds of your scent. You don’t need any second sight to understand that the woods want your blood. Food chains aren’t really about the flow of energy, they’re about who has the power to kill. That’s what we care about and not without reason. And, well, walk through an Annamite forest and you’ll be walking down a trail worn by human feet along the knife-backs of the ridges where the feet of tigers used to walk. You can take that road because you won’t meet a tiger and everyone else has to be careful because they might meet you. I think I’m repeating myself.
You won’t meet any bands of blood hunters either, or Viet Cong. In peacetime we can all get back to enjoying life. Eating wild meat, for example. Who’s going to stop us?
“Now the spirits have been pushed back to the stream sources by the power of the Revolution.” I remember the man who said it, tousled black hair, booze-tempered cheeks, expansive hand gestures and bristly beard. His eyes bright as he held forth over the map while Nikolas nodded and Sơn looked so bored. “He is just going on about how great the Revolution is;” it was exactly the stuff that he would have had to be bored by at school, the ‘Marxist-Leninist Theory’ that all Vietnamese of his generation had to parrot and take the piss out of.
In my notes, I can’t find anything of this meeting - perhaps it’s in there somewhere. I can find only a woman who told us on the 17th of July that the government (rather than the revolution) had pushed the spirits back - although the snake-thing whose gaze meant death still haunted the river as she would have us know. Still, things were much easier for them now that they didn’t have to conduct all those tiresome rituals. Government agencies, Nikolas said, seemed to have replaced the spirits.
“Ontological flattening” is the imperialism you don’t know you’re doing, according to some of the authors I’ve been reading this year. If you try to translate and believe your translation, for example if you say that Katu people express realities about soil fertility with stories about spirits, you are setting bulldozers loose in the roosts and the ranges that keep the worlds apart. You're letting rabbits loose in Australia. Or rather you are trying to squeeze the duck and the rabbit into the same body because they have the same head, and in the end it will just be a duck or just be a rabbit. In the end it will just be a human, will just be a humanist, will just be a capitalist, will just be a resource, will just be a part, a part of the one vision, the one machine. The inspiration for political ontology comes from the Zapatista declaration: we want a world where many worlds fit (and not one world to fit them all). That’s my understanding, anyway, of a subtle and bristly literature that I haven’t been schooled to read.
But our informants, the man and the woman who told us of the spirits being pushed back to the stream sources, had done our ontological flattening for us. They had not done it in the way I would have had to; for them, the old powers still existed. They had also not, I am sure, done it by themselves. However they were doing it for themselves. Because the Modern World existed in the same landscape as the spirits and had won that landscape from them. From the spirits who demanded not only tedious and time-consuming rituals but also the blood of murdered children. Whose side would you be on?
But just to take the logic through, let’s say that ‘The Revolution’, the government, the modern world is a spirit among spirits. Taking the first page out of Joel Bakan’s book where he asks what kind of person a corporation would be, then what kind of spirit is that? A hugely powerful one, of course. Also one which requests allegiance, which promises good things in return for that allegiance. It may or may not deliver those things but certainly its promises are not empty. If it does deliver, however, you will have the sense that something which never seemed particularly important has receded, faded from the world, been pushed back to the high sources. It is, perhaps, something which never figured in your plans for success or happiness or was part of the supporting architecture of your cosmos. Nonetheless its departure will make the world that much emptier, and it will only be the first such thing to depart. If you refuse the deal this spirit offers then you may be threatened with death and you may be killed. Therefore, by the simple power of the Darwinian ratchet, this spirit owns the future, owns the world. There is no reasonable escape from it. I do not believe the Katu and Vietnamese languages have a name for a spirit like this. But our own language very much does, does it not?
Saw your comments on Beasts and Vines and have been reading along. Seems like the snare is aortic for you, in the heart space. I don't have any cheap one liners to offer, just wishing you an unexpected respite, a slip of the wire and a signal fire in the night to navigate by. Some of thoughts in the woods the last couple days regarding Melville's intent, exctinction, and suffering. Mostly hard to translate or trust to be welcome but I hear you out there.