one morning.
Trying to help Hannah out the gate with her motorbike I see a little old lady on a high stool picking green starfruit over the wall. I ask if I can help.
‘Just the biggest ones,’ she tells me as I get up on the stool. At least I think that’s what she’s saying. Like my great aunt Gilda she talks very fast in a steady stream and I have only the vaguest sense of what she’s on about. I give her six of the largest fruits which she then pushes into my hands, amkes me unlock the gate and bundles me inside. ‘Don’t worry, go home.’ she says. ‘Lock the gate.’
So now I have six unripe starfruit. Any ideas, anyone?
I walk through the market, looking for breakfast. I reject an enthusiastic offer of live eels and plump for xôi khúc instead. Xôi is sticky rice and khúc is an orange bristly gourd like a teenage pumpkin. I go and eat it on the piers of the steps into the lake, sitting under a willow tree and watching the little grebes out on the grey water. It’s good, but to be honest pumpkin is not one of the classic breakfast flavours; it needs a little sesame salt IMHO.
As I leave a kingfisher streaks out from the bank and bolts away low, leaving a wake of terror in the fish-packed water.
By the rules of nanowrimo I now have 2 days to write 25,000 words, effectively doubling my total in the last 28 days. Some hidden part of my psyche loves getting into this sort of situation.
The sacred mountain of Yên Tử
This is my third trip to the sacred mountain and I am here with the
Hanoi community of mindful living, our sangha. At the flower of peace pagoda we sit among the tombs in some sunshine. Clouds hold the mountain peak. After a few minutes those in attendance kindly turn off the tinny recording of chanting that plays forever round the tomb of Trần Nhân Tông.
Winds comb the bamboos and boulders at the summit of the sacred mountain. Three squirrels with red bellies and bedraggled tails do backflips in a tiny cage. ‘Those are very good to eat.’ someone says. Someone always says that.
In our new living room, the furniture is wide enough for a rhino’s bum and harder than tarmac. The backs of the chairs are cared into curls and gills and shells and roses and parrots. On the legs of the chairs goblin faces vomit leaves. There is a shield shaped like a vase in the back of the chair bearing a picture inlaid in mother of pearl of a twisted tree with blousy flowers blooming over boulders.
White blousy flowers lie on the granite steps down the sacred mountain, petals bruised by the feet of tourists. From Vân Tiêu pagoda I carry a moon moth, its wings traced with deep white wood marks. Everyone admires its beauty. I’m not really able to because I’m thinking about always about night after night returning and returning to a bare and burning lightbulb which you think is the face of the moon and the more you try to escape from it the more you are sure to return until you tire or starve or sleep yourself to death. The moth is very beautiful, though, and I let it go onto some lush green bamboo far away from the pagoda. Its tapered body and fat legs are covered in beige fur and its antennae are feather-shaped. It is about as big as my hand and is sleeping in the cold and light. There was a whole beaded panoply of moths clustered over the wrought metal shrine at the pagoda.
The top of the sacred mountain is a building site and whirs with cables. A man asks for a cigarette. They have taken down the old shrine and Buddhas of all ages cluster smiling in the corrugated iron shelter. Cement clogging the gaps between the boulders supports a flat floor of red city tiles. We chant the heart sutra in the green shelter and I watch a black leaf moth shelter in the lee of a big boulder. Its wings quiver with the constant wind pouring over the sacred mountain and combing every boulder, every breeze block, at its summit.
Two people sat drinking tea in the restaurant which serves the squirrels and the ranger who runs it is talking into his mobile phone. He sounds like a happy man. I try to fit things together in my mind. The caged squirrels, the concrete animals in the forest, the ostentatious furniture carved, I’m sure, from forest trees, the imminent extinction of the species I came here to study. So I get in a bad mood between the caged squirrels and the displaced buddhas and do not want to talk to any other human beings. I’m tired, though, from our housewarming party last night and disturbed by a dream I had a few days ago so perhaps that’s all it is, really and I’d like a better reason. That old chestnut again.
On the way down someone notices a tiny shrub with magenta berries. Daisuke exclaims its beauty which would have passed me by.
The sun in the morning is as white as the moon. The moon in the evening lies on her side. At home and on the mountain nothing seems to work.
old house, new house
we’ve just moved.
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Our old apartment was a way south of town in the foreign language university compound. We were a clean little world on the fourth floor with a starfruit tree way below. It was a very little world with 2 rooms, no kitchen, and two single beds shoved together. There was an excercise ground in the middle of the campus, it was peaceful away from the main road. |
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Our new house is down a warren of streets (OMT) closer to the centre. Hanoi is really an agglomeration of villages; there’s a communal courtyard out back with a well, dogs & chickens (4am wake-up) and a fruit tree whose name I don’t know. It’s a three floor house (!). We have one housemate, Joey. |
Our first night was not so restful. A family in the block out front were having a four-hour long argument. But last night we moved to a room at the back of the house and it was less noisy. Some mysterious ladies just delivered some microbial drain cleaner. Things are looking up. All we need now is a mosquito net.
reasons for environmental inaction
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I’m reading a book called ‘The Love of Nature and the End of the World.’ The general worldview is very similar to Joanna Macy’s Deep Ecology although the ideas are expressed in a different way.It got me thinking about different explanations I’ve heard for why we aren’t doing enough about ‘the environmental crisis’ These, in patronisingly simple form, are the ones I could think of.
Can anyone else think of any others? Does anyone prefer one over another? |
1) Because we can’t bear the pain and so are in denial (this is the Deep Ecology argument I know)
2) Because we don’t have a gameplan for solving it so we might as well not know (a political revolutionary’s view)
3) Because powerful people (who aren’t threatened as much as the rest of us, or don’t think they are) deceive us into thinking that there is no problem
4) Because powerful people deceive us into thinking that, even if there is a problem, we are powerless to solve it [and maybe they're right].
5) Because of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ – an economic argument. If I don’t kill this whale, burn this forest, drive my car, somebody else will. So my sacrifice will be for nothing and otherpeople will get benefits which I am denying myself so I might as well not bother.
6) Because our minds just aren’t big enough to cope with the complexity, scale and diffuse nature of the problem (and perhaps our minds never were big enough and never previously needed to be). This is a psychological argument which may or may not have an evolutionary slant.
7) Because it’s just not done to talk about that sort of thing in polite society. It puts a damper on the conversation (this may be tied to ideas about the mania of consumerist society)
8.) Because, in an urban/ technological/ humanist society ‘the environment’ just isn’t part of what we care about any more, emotionally or practically. (I met someone on the train the other day who found out that Indonesian fishermen continued to destroy the reef, not because they didn’t care about their children and grandchildren but because they wanted to liquidate the reef’s capital in order to send their children to college so they didn’t have to be fishermen any more.)
9) We are doing enough/There is no crisis
I’m not rejecting number one by any means, but I’m just realising that it’s not the only one I’ve heard. Of course they aren’t all mutually exclusive. Number six, in particular fascinates me right now. I know I’m being cold, dispassionate and weird about this – I’m not quite sure what to do about that right now.
[old?] new leaves – try again
I’m back in Hanoi and I’ve resolved to keep this blog going. Unfortunately it’s not the only thing I’ve promised to do. Following Hannah’s example I’ve signed up to the National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org). It’s Americanly national, not Vietnamese but actually it’s international, just that inanowrimo sounds bad.
Well I’m not really sure I want to write a novel and I’ve been kind of scratching at things for the last week in England, even while I was zipping about between the towns I know seeing people and libraries and feeling fine. But writing on the train didn’t really work. Writing on the plane was an even worse idea.
But, novels or nursery rhymes, writing brings out something in me – a need to take things in. The vibrancy of the world matters when you’re writing. I began, back in England, to find again that strong simple joy in trees, in the flight of birds, in the things which gather dust and sunlight which I associate with my first flush of Buddhism. And I had a lot of joy, too in seeing my friends and family. I ought to say I allowed myself a lot of joy because I wasn’t able to always refer instead to the important things I was doing. I couldn’t evaluate each hour in their terms. I knew the most important reason for being in England in October – even though I wasn’t starting a PhD – was to see my grandmother.
The things I’m doing do seem important, and they’re also unstructured – or rather they’re not currently structured by anyone else – which makes it easier to feel guilty about them. But thinking I had to explain my aim of being here in Vietnam was the reason I stipped this blog before. I’ll leave it for now.
Sticking within the city, I realise how hard Hanoi can be. When I went to meet Tim out of the Underground in London, I watched all the people coming up the stairs. Though they were all so wonderfully various they all had the exact same serious expression. In Hanoi, I remembered, it is the opposite. But in Hanoi I still feel uncomfortable. The big trees, the shadows of wrought ironwork on the evening walls, are beautiful. So are the people beautiful – from a distance. But I know that, on a short walk around the square, anyone might stop and talk to me and I find that hard. When you step out into the street in Hanoi, you are a participant, not a customer. It sounds good doesn’t it? But there are millions of us!!
