nicholas in vietnam

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I am sleepy this morning, and stormy. Almost at the end of Moby Dick, the second day of the chase. Last night we met with people of village 6, a meeting organized by Thuy. It was very jolly, really. And Thuy told me that, in the old days, Saola weren’t in the higher areas but in flatter ones but now all those areas were logged and hunted. That was the news I had been hoping not to hear. Yes, people agree that the more remote stream sources are the places to find them.

And an old woman told us also, yesterday, that the spirits too had been driven up to the stream sources by the government who declared them superstition. The monster snake, the sight of whom is death, still lives in the river and has been taking more victims since the sacrifices have tailed off – whether those were to him or to those spirits who would protect people from him, I am not sure. Nikolas finds that an important question.

Nikolas, in his attempts to describe, even perhaps to storify, the situation of contest over wild animals, has described the urban multitudes who crave wild animal products for their own greater potency or health as ‘industrial animists.’; We conservationists he calls ‘monotheists’, though he doesn’t really know why. A friend gave him the name and he thinks it oddly appropriate. He cites in support our ability to rank everything – species and places – in terms of some mysterious quality.

But I think this monotheism is a sham, a mask for protection in a monotheistic world. Just the same as our constant appeals to the rhetoric of human wellbeing as the ultimate goal. But we are pagan in our souls. And I know what it feels like, though I’m only 29, to have your gods cut up for lumber and sold to buffoons with big egos and big cars. The devouring of that which is full of meaning by that which seems all empty noise. And every time I journey down here on the train I pass mountains which have stood all the ages of several cultures, proud above forests and fields, gnawed entirely away to feed the cement works which have sprouted by them.

Captain Ahab is painted as a picture of demonic human pride – fatal pride it is called by the author. And there is a legendary horror, a, a deep thrill, in contemplating the fall that pride will bring. And that is why I love the legend of the Monkey King face to face with the Buddha in the high courts of Heaven.

What horrifies me is that the pride might be justified – that human appetite ego-boosting irrelevancy might roll on to the ends of the universe and beyond the end of time, subjugating or devouring all in its wake with a lazy, smug confidence that remains forever unharpooned.

And my position is simple: I am on Moby Dick’s side. For all that I do cry when I think of Ahab and Starbuck’s wives and children back home in Nantucket. That is not the point. If, in reverence, they left the whale then that would be good, but if they should pursue it, then it should destroy them and that I believe this is shown in any story I wrote at primary school where anacondas swallowed headmasters – always arrogant and overblown – and the spirit of Nature, huge and roaring, red in tooth and claw simply pounded the skinny, cackling spirit of man-made things. I was rooting for Him – I still am – but I have less power to live only in the world I want to live in. And that thought – that’s what places me in the hard, hollow little whale boat – like a seed husk on the ocean with something monstrous rushing up directly from beneath.

Hooray for Moby Dick! Even then I support him and would press his bible and be his prophet though he would not care. Only I would not want to see the face he has reserved for me. Now that sounds monotheistic. I suppose the habit is deeper in me that I think. After all I’ve always thought myself a hedgehog, not a fox, my mind fixing on one great thing alone – or one great thing at a time.

And another thing – old style pagans, or animists, didn’t need to be on anybody’s side. They had no gospel to preach, no tub to thump, things just were that way – isn’t that so? Now I know that there were, and are, heroic pagans who have forged their own old ways into vehicles which will carry them even into the turbulent swells of world religion but that is a phenomenon evinced by that religion, is it not? But I have no choice. Is my conviction the certainty of denial?

Denial is a river in Africa as Lucy used to say…

I mean

I’ve seen a picture of a leering, tipsy, snake-faced businessman from China, about my age, pounding a tiger with his fist as that tiger sits naked on a slab in a compound of a zoo. The tiger is drugged, of course, and I savour the thought, as a slated lemon, of what that tiger would do to that man were it not drugged and there is something in me which believes that that is what the man deserves. – believes it sudden as a lash. A kind of justice that could be called vengeance. Is that not pagan?

No. Because I have the reality of always seeing that justice undelivered. Were the laws in place I might fear and dodge them like everyone else but the laws are gone and I’m become furious, railing at the logic of the modern gods but only in my heart because the language I speak is theirs.

And I’m luckier than some because I’m clever enough and trained enough to ride that language a little and govern it a little . And I’ve had the time to wrestle with it in this way and some conviction that this is worthwhile, though I am frequently lost and unsupported. And still I can’t really say the world needs more tub-thumpers!

And yet there’s one more mystery. Why is it that, though as a child it was the great predators which fascinated me most and the awesome power of volcanoes and storms (please don’t let them work out how to stop volcanoes) – why is it that those cereatures which have sways me most are gentle:

The Sea Cow

The Passenger Pigeon

The Saola.

There’s a mystery here I can behold. There’s a silent goddess I could say: a dark-eyed one. And I have given names to her – no I have not given them but I know she can be called Martha, and I know she can be called Mwanamizi. And I know that, writing like this, I can explain nothing about her.

The world can kindly rope you down, you know? It doesn’t have to crush you in its jaws. Yes and the world can slaughter innocents and those innocents can look at you, unblinking as they recede.

And they are not angry

And they are not resentful

And pain, for them, is something greater than a song but to you might be best expressed as a song. And for them might not even be called pain.

And this can only be written from a great dampened distance because those two arms reach directly into the shadows at the base of your brain, right through your furrowed forehead inviting you into a dance where Death, you know, will be in attendance, will be a dancer too and not the only one.

And I draw back form that proffering, into the world where things can be done and as soon as I’m back in that world of rational thought, the thought that asserts itself is:

“They killed them. They killed them all.”