nicholas in vietnam

Sorry not to have written anything for ages. Those butterflies were a hard act to follow.

A couple of weeks ago my family were here and we had a wonderful trip down south. Unfortunately my camera battery drained away so I’ll wait for them to send me some photos before I post anything about our trip.

Some things which have happened since we got back:

Me and Hannah have been swimming a lot. We also went up to Sapa in the mountains for a beautiful weekend. We went to the silver waterfall and the golden waterfall and we found that the golden waterfall was really gold – like the colour of the stream at Kindrogan in Scotland but even more so. Mist was always moving over the mountains.

I have been working very enthusiastically. I have turned back to coffee and, in the mornings I have been going to cafes near us and taking out my notebook and writing about how I see my project at the moment and then planning out my day.

One time after we went swimming, I had coffee at a cafe in a little park, near a potted Araucaria and under the fierce gaze of the peasant emperor Quang Trung.  Police cadets were practicing self-defence moves on the grass and one dropped his mobile phone. Two older policemen were playing chess at the cafe table behind. I realised that I was happy, that I loved Hanoi again.

I met a Frenchman who is ready to go home. He says that the director of the national park where he is working stole nearly all the money from his project. He doesn’t believe any international projects in Vietnam are working and those who say they are are deceiving themselves.

 I have downloaded a programme called Stretch break which stops you every half hour and encourages you to stretch.

I got really into the statistics of my project and finally read and understood stuff that I’ve been meaning to read for ages. I want more – but it also burns me out. I keep telling people I’m avoiding going to the field; that next time I want to be sure of what I’m doing before I go.

In the first week I felt that all my bad habits about working came out one after the other and I had to avoid their traps. One was to work really enthusiastically and hard and then collapse on the sofa. Another was to just continue to go down to the kitchen and eat things. A lot of these habits stem from insecurity about what I’m doing. Or at least they are reinforced by it. But that’s not all, as I think I discovered today. In any case I am doing whatever I’m doing with much less anxiety about whether its the right thing to do, which is pleasant.

On Wednesday evening I was supposed to host a creative writing group but no-one came. I was quite upset about that and had a long argument with Hannah.

Today I was supposed to do a lot of work as I have a meeting with Barney on Monday which I think will be an important meeting about this project. But, fairly suddenly, this morning I found my energy was very low. Like other mornings since I’ve been back I got up early and went to sit in a cafe. But instead of ordering a coffee, I ordered a milkshake and instead of re-thinking my project in my Saola notebook and planning my day’s I read Rumi and wrote in my other notebook.

I wrote some odd stuff, inspired by Rumi. For example I wrote:

“Each step you take is cradled to my chest – Yet I never knew you. I don’t want to let you go.”

and:

“go on, stretch your legs – but you will come back.

Your hoofprints and hers – soon no-one will be able to tell them apart.”

I don’t know whom these lines are addressed to or refer to.

This morning I felt much happier; I’ve been feeling down for weeks. We’ve been talking with friends about children and we’ve found that we’re not the only ones who feel like, with the world going the way it is, having children might be wrong. Lots of people think the same – westerners I mean; Vietnamese certainly don’t think that way and that is the most depressing thing of all.

Last night I played a lot with a little girl at Trish’s house, a Vietnamese girl adopted by an American mother. She pretended to be a cat and then a dog.

Francis said that the family is the basis of society, that if we give up on the family we might as well give up completely. That was an opinion we could have argued with but, when we pushed him further, Francis said he prayed he would always fear God more than he feared environmental catastrophe. That made me feel uneasy: was I returning to a simplistic idea of doing good in the world in order to escape spirituality? Was the violence of my fear and anger just a front against something even worse or even closer to home? Was I even forgetting what was really important – does the Saola really matter?
It reminded me of something a monk at Plum Village once said: “You want to save the rainforest? See if you can look after a pot plant first, then see about the rainforest.”
‘Very spiritually correct,’ I thought from a darker place, ‘but do we really have time for that?’

This morning I wanted to write and I did, before sitting or anything else, while Hannah lay in bed reading her book. I wrote about the wind-up radio on my desk and about its personality. Suddenly I decided that, in order to develop my writing, I ought to try and describe it properly, including all the electric innards I could see because it was transparent. Suddenly I felt there was an emotional gulf between me and the radio. A minute ago we had been conspiring together in writing; now I was writing about it. It seemed to me that maybe the idea of developing my writing wasn’t really the point, that maybe my voice wasn’t just my own. And when I started writing about Hannah, still in bed reading, I felt from the little objects something that was almost jealousy. I remembered how my friends, who want to ordain as monk and nun, said they felt their love should be free of all attachment. Suddenly the idea didn’t scare me any more.
I began to feel hungry for breakfast, and to think about breakfast with my family in Ellerton Rd. I suddenly realised how wonderful it was that we always had a proper breakfast together – not a pull things from the fridge breakfast. Cappucino and croissants and the table laid. It was a wonderful achievement, and the most wonderful thing about it was that it was never a battleground, we never questioned it.
Yesterday I said I was alone in the house with the computer, a book of short stories, some dried ginger and my work ethic. I was quite wrong, our children are also in the house and they are really with us, no matter what we’re doing and no matter what we decide. Francis said that having children was not a choice like having a car and I think he’s right. The question is no longer whether to have children, but how to look after them.

we must get a new calendar before it gets round to May.

I’m alone in the house, it’s just me, the computer,  a big book of short stories I bought Hannah for her birthday, some candied ginger, and the Protestant work ethic. I try to avoid being in the same room as the work ethic.

This morning I went birdwatching with John. It was heavy drizzle but we saw what might have been a Pechora pipit. After that I went and had a hot chocolate and a carrot cake in a cafe called Puku. I thought about cycling over to the pagoda to find out some stuff for the Hanoi sangha but I remembered what a very long way it was and was worried I might catch cold. I went home instead and went back to bed. I had been looking forward to sending some emails and to planning my parents trip. I didn’t do either and I didn’t manage to call home because I haven’t got any Skype credit yet. I did mean to buy some honey but I couldn’t find the shop.  I feel like the lamest creature on God’s earth.

I’ve been having a lot of weird dreams lately and would probably enjoy it if I start writing. I had a sort of insight into a dream I had about a year ago which scared the living daylights out of me at the time. I was thinking about a time on my last survey when me & Đức went swimming in the Hữu Trạch river, in a wide pool above some rapids. He said ‘can you swim to the other side?’ I was a little downstream of him. I should have tried to swim diagonally upstream but I aimed for straight across and so went diagonally down instead. I can remember thinking – in just the same way I think about approaching deadlines – OK I can’t make it to the rocks, but there’s a thick stem of a water bush just there, I can just grab on to that – Oh no I can’t. I remember somebody from BirdLife telling me a story of how he crawled out of the jungle with a broken leg fuelled only by the great desire to live which Jack London talks about. I remembered afterwards how I didn’t feel any of that, just the faint surprise that my swimming strength, in which I’d trusted like a tourist, wasn’t going to be enough to keep me out of the rapids.

I was reading a book recently by a Burmese freedom fighter who described being pleased to be swept away by rapids because they were carrying him out of enemy fire. He probably remembered not to exhaust himself trying to swim and instead to put his hands behind my head, protecting it with his elbows, and wait till he was through. Perhaps if I’d done that it wouldn’t have seemed like very long and all I’d have had to deal with would have been the inescapable reality of being in the hands of the river.

But things like that, which you read in books, don’t necessarily come to you at the time. In fact I have read that same sentiment in books as well and I tend to dismiss it. I was thinking of other examples and I remembered a time when I was with my parents on a wildlife holiday in Botswana. Normally we were in a truck but one day we did a walking safari somewhere in the Okavango. Our guide was a very good guide, totally cool in the bush and he told us that, no matter what we ran into, we weren’t to run because running attracts attention and makes you look like prey. As our party rounded into a scrubby clearing he announced calmly ‘OK the lion cubs, let’s get out of here.’ Afterwards he chided gently ‘You ran, I told you not to run.’

Nothing about it is burned in my memory except his words. The way the emphasis in the first sentence was on ‘cubs’, not ‘lion’ and how after the second I felt a bit ashamed and shown up. But how can that possibly matter in such a situation? Perhaps that dream five years later of being alone in a room with an invisible big cat was my acceptance of the fear from that moment which I never truly felt at the time. No chance in that moment to think what to do, to see your fear in anything other than its full splendour, no pontificating about immortal hands or eyes. Not stressful, not disturbing just plain old-fashioned terrifying. But that was in the dream. In real life the thoughts didn’t stop and the world went by as blurred as always.

This was horrible. Extracted more or less from my notebook on the 29th of Jan.

Bồ Hòn village, Thừa Thiên Huế.

My tongue still tingles from the touch of another. We were in the house of an oldish man who handed us a saola horn to hold. This one was worn smooth towards the tip and a cluster of tiny mahogany stars, the end of some deep grain, showed in the onyx-shined surface.

Rượu (rice spirits) came in plastic bags and was transferred to a big plastic jar stuffed with old black leaves and a rubbery thing which, we were told, was the penis of a serow. From there it was served into tiny cups for us to drink. We groaned, having only just escaped from a wedding party. We groaned, having just escaped from a wedding party and I thought it was the last thing I wanted.

It was a long interview and our host seemed glum. He said at first he’d only seen the one saola but much later admitted to having caught two in 2000. We went to see the saola head in his son’s house and, when we returned, we were served food. A frilly little plastic plate was placed on the floor bearing what I thought at first was the head of a dog. With some relief I noticed the herbivore’s molars and heard them tell me it was a goat. The black flesh crisped off the kid’s white bone like the skin on the 30 year old saola head next door.

 I’d already eaten more meat at the wedding than I ever want to eat in a day ever again – although truth be told I quite enjoyed most of it, especially the little peppery-acid nem chua sausages all wrapped in banana leaves. This was different, though and this was going to be one time when I wasn’t going to be polite, where I would think of some excuse – my stomach was protein-strained – and refuse the food. I was thinking this until the young man wrenched apart the skull and jaw, ripped out the little goat’s tongue, trailing grey gristle, and handed it to me with a smile.

I sat for a long time with the rubbery little thing in my hand, wondering if I could slip it into my pocket unnoticed but there was an odd little man sitting on the concrete floor outside our circle. He was never introduced and never fed but he directed an unwavering grin obliquely across the space infront of me and would see whatever I did. I put the goat’s tongue into my mouth. It went from one cheek to the other via an experimental chew or two; it was nothing if not chewy. The seeping juices tasted how meat tastes. I was mostly angry, feeling that these people had no right to make me eat this; but then I hadn’t known how to say no. 

Then, when I was changing cheeks, the tongue in my mouth rolled over and the dead little papillae brushed over my own. It was a horribly familiar feeling – a kiss. For a moment the animal I was eating wasn’t dead. And then, for some reason, my mouth had to bite and I felt my incisors slice through the other tongue. [I can still feel it when I look back]

Eventually Nam threw a bone out the door and a dog materialised from nowhere and snarfed it up. Gratefully I took the tongue out of my mouth and tossed it after, hoping the people would think it was just some final unchewable residue I was throwing away.

I made sure they bought me peanuts to eat in the forest after that but it’s not possible to be vegetarian (or teetotal) in the villages. When I feel that I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing Buddhist friends often reassure me saying that this work is about compassion. But the fact is that the number of animals which will be killed to feed me over the course of this work will probably be greater than the total world population of the saola.

I suppose that I have to come to terms with the fact that I’m not going to write one supercharged post laying out everything I felt about my third survey. It was intense and, more than a week after getting back and relaxing over the Tet holiday, I still don’t feel near an official statement of any kind. I suppose it will come out in dribs and drabs.
We have two new prospective housemates, Nathan and Vi, who are also raring to set up a creative writing group. The group – just four members so far – met for the first time on Wednesday in our ludicrous pearl inlay and sausage curlicue Chinese living-room. Understanding Nathan and Vi’s approach to poetry is a bit of a headshift for me. They are fresh out of studying it in the States and Nathan, at least, is deeply into meter and stuff which I like the sound of but am clueless about. Basically what strikes me is that they have been writing about funny, absent, imaginary or nonsensical things, writing a poem a week about whatever.
It’s liberating to write nonsense with a rhythm and I do so, sitting at the big wooden desk, working through the unruly tower of scrap paper created by redundant saola datasheets. Some cool-sounding lines emerge.
To start with it’s gibberish:

Moon is sailing in the egret water
People in the shallows follow after
Brains are seeking silence in the garden
Elves remain ecstatic in the arbour

Then later:

Hawk that grasps the wire and falls away
Falls into the closure of the day
Endless rides of mist and broken trees
Memory returns to what it is.

Which kind of sounds like something

And I start getting fired up. It doesn’t take long before I’m full of emotion and I can’t write just anything any more. Facing me on the desk are two pictures, one on the computer screen and one on the wall. They are beautiful pictures which I selected for their beauty and their meaning and somehow the fact that they’re both there, and that they’re both pictures seems to demand of me something. Well, not demand, that long avocet-smile on what looks like an ultrasound screen, is somehow welcoming…
But I’m not able to write a poem about these pictures, or to do anything other than describe them and make bland statements. And I think that perhaps I should have written a poem a week about nothing at all, perhaps that would have – bit by bit and as things surfaced – given me the capacity to hold the force that would come later. I wish I could go back and say to myself ‘Write now while you have nothing to write about in preparation for the time when you have too much!’
Anyway here are the pictures. We need more pictures on this blog.

It was our very last day. Me and Đức (the student from VNU who was with me) were sitting on the steps of the traditional K’Tu stilt house where we stayed. The house was built during the Quang Nam year of tourism but who had been the last person to stay in it I have no idea. Two Australian girls did turn up for a few minutes on day 2 while we were making paper planes for the kids but they just stopped for a minute or two.
Đức and I were feeling rather discouraged; we hadn’t been able to go to the forest for more than a day because people said it was too rainy. We had a strong feeling that people in the village were being very secretive about their current hunting activities and we didn’t know whether to trust any of the information we’d got. Different people told us different things and the same people had given contradictory answers to the same questions at different times. Neither of us had done more than a little interview work before, both of us were pinning our theses plans on the belief that it could provide useful data and neither of us had had very much sleep for the last three nights. The fact was that we were getting paranoid. I’d developed an elaborate conspiracy theory based on, it turned out, a complete misunderstanding. I remember Đức saying that a cow was looking at him strangely.
An elderly man who we’d never seen before. suddenly turned up on a motorbike and said that, in a house across the river they’d killed a serow and would we like to see. We would indeed; he gave us a lift
It turned out to be a muntjac, a young male of the common species Muntiacus muntjak. Two men were roasting it whole over an open fire in a little stilt house. The very nice Catholic lady who’d had us over for lunch was there and the headman turned up halfway through and grinned a lot which meant we probably wouldn’t get much information. One wall had a modest display of muntjac and pig skulls, a few porcupines and bamboo rats and a civet’s tail. Nothing spectacular; either they’d sold the rest to traders or, more likely, they only set traps in scrub near the village. The muntjac’s tongue was hanging out and turning blue and the men were scraping hair off the cracking flesh of the body. As the legs and the tail were still unroasted I asked for a sample and they cut off the tip of the tail for me.
“What do you think about this?” Đức asked me in English. I said I didn’t have time to think anything just then; I was working. Later, as we walked back across the bridge, I asked “do you want to know what I think or what I feel?”
“What you feel.” said Đức
But, although I had some thoughts, I still had nothing to say about my feelings. All I knew was that I didn’t like to see the animal’s head being sliced off but I didn’t say that. I said that, as this was a common species with a high rate of reproduction and as they caught it near the village where rarer animals seldom go I didn’t think it was a matter of conservation concern. Also hunting, despite being technically illegal, is the traditional way of life of these people for all that they are now part of the wider Vietnamese society.
Đức is truly passionate about saving the natural heritage of his country. Listening to him talk gives me the kind of hope I’d been looking for ever since I arrived and saw the endless paddyfields empty of birds, read about the rampant trade in everything that breathes in every inch of forest. The hope slides away into that same secret place as my feelings about the butchered muntjac. I know it’s there, I just don’t know if I will ever see it. But it’s being there makes a difference.
And just as we’re preparing to leave someone else suddenly tells us that someone in the next village has some saola horns in his house. So far we’ve only seen one pair and the rest have been sold which is, in itself a very worrying development. We set out down the road, prepared to miss the bus for this.
The hunter is fishing in the pond by his house; he’s in his thirties, younger than anyone else we’ve interviewed. It’s clear I unnerve him but, as we’re accompanied by a friendly old man from the village, he invites us in for tea, served in glasses on a coffee table decorated with pictures of singers from magazines. The saola horns are not hung in the rafters above a smoky fire but are set in a glass display case in the sideboard with some other prize possessions. He gets them out for us – they are an impressive pair and very sharp. I’ll post a picture when I can. Đức gets him talking and in the end he’s very open. I sit silently understanding the gist of the Vietnamese conversation. I intervene via Đức as translator but occasionally because I see the man getting nervous as I’m about to speak. He tells us where he caught the saola, that he has caught one other and that someone else in the village also caught one but sold the horns.
“People keep asking to buy these horns from me,” he says “but I won’t sell them.”
That flicks a switch in my question list. “Who asks to buy them?” I ask.
He does answer: someone from Hue always comes past. He can’t remember his name. What happened to the horns of the other Saola he caught? He has lost them.
At the very last minute of our trip we have struck lucky – this is excellent information. As we leave I want to shake Đức’s hand. The old man is still with us, though. That evening, at the Catholic lady’s house, we have stewed leg of muntjac in a black sauce of spices. It is delicious. We are motorbiked back to Đà nẵng and stay in a cheapo guesthouse for a six o’clock bus the next morning but it was worth it for that interview.
Thinking back on it, in the car up to Huế, I realise that there was something about that hunter I liked. He had a gentle manner and worried eyes that wanted to be honest. But I think the reason I liked him is that he seemed to love the Saola. He spoke about its hair being soft like our own hair, not shaggy like that of the serow. Its meat, he said, was better than that of any other animal, even sambar deer. He said it’s chin curved ‘like a goat’ but his eyes seemed to show a kind of enthusiasm as he showed the shape of the chin with his hand in the air. I’ve only seen photographs but, come to think of it, there is something really beautiful about the curve of the animal’s chin; something in line with its quiet nature, perhaps.
Maybe part of the reason why working gets in the way of thinking and thinking gets in the way of feeling is that working is more certain than thinking and thinking is more certain than feeling; after all I don’t know that any of this is true. I have a series of glimpses: a description of the behaviour of one captive animal in Lao, the words and expressions of people who may have good cause to deceive me, the movement of a hand that describes a slight curve in the air. Perhaps the truth would laugh at the way I feel, perhaps all that matters is that people need to eat and like to eat well and have fun. I don’t want to stick my neck out and say something stupid. And I don’t really know what to say, it is, after all, rather complex.
I think I want phrase a question about living with hidden things.

What I really wanted to do was post these. I read once that a haiku is supposed to be written in a moment of enlightenment. That’s a lot of pressure, I think, not to mention the whole 17 syllables thing.

My eye a clear lake
A fly is taking a long drink
It really is a very long drink.

I just thought 
It was quite a nice flower, OK
Excuse me for breathing!

Right that was fun
Right then now what?
Oh yeah.

Back in Hanoi. We spent a week in a Thai temple, a fantastical place of gold and sprawling dragons. We were wearing white and not talking, looking downwards and not making eye contact. Sitting and walking meditation for six hours on the first day and upwards from there.

In the evening I would practice by the Bodhi tree, bare feet on bubbled black basalt flagstones as the shadows of bamboo faded into the shadows overall. Walking very slowly: lifting, moving, putting, lifiting, moving, putting. Whistling ducks wheeled in the evening sky and mosquitoes circled around my elbows. Four gold images of the Buddha faced the four points of the compass around the trunk of the huge tree. I remember beauty though most of the time I sat with a frown and felt nothing.

I always imagined Vipassna was hardcore: just sit for hours and hours, everything else is forbidden. If you feel agony, sit with the agony. I put up a lot of resistance to going. The introductory session seemed to confirm my opinion but by then I was in and I swallowed it all – I would do it, sit for days stiff and frowning and keep the rules strict as I could. But I secretly hoped that my pain was so great, because in me somewhere rolled up was all the pain of the dying earth and in the end it would prove too much for me as it would have proved too much for anyone and, in the middle of meditation I would suddenly scream out and collapse  and it wouldn’t have been my fault at all. Kind of childish.

But the teacher kept telling me to go easier on myself. I don’t want to start telling stories about the meditation and any insights I supposedly had (although of course I already am in my head). But I do now see that, if even from the Vipassna angle (which I thought was the most severe) I am doing myself a mischief for no good reason then, really, I clearly need to be a bit softer.

I feel this post is very inadequate. I’m not even really sure I should have written it. It’s kind of an apology for the last one.

Murray, one of our dharma teachers at Cambridge, once said to me (about environmentalism) that I had to put aside my anger because my anger would only alienate people. At the time I just felt numb but then, as I started saying angry things, his words began to come back to me but I didn’t really seem able to change what I was saying.

I think I’m tired, I’m still proud of saying sad things and sad of saying proud things. Nothing has really changed except that everything changes all the time. I still take this blog far too seriously.

Happy new year everybody.