I binned the remains of my “dinner” and drove quickly back to Woburn. I told the housekeeper I was leaving that night, left a note for Lord H on the guest-wing table, and drove off.
When I got home I was really pleased to see my son and hardly noticed that he woke us up four times that night.
CONSCIENCE
NOW I’D done with Woburn it was time to think about America and China. Callum had hinted that I could go along to an exotic game hunt at Woburn later on in the year. This was when rich, usually American clients came and shot older Pere Davids at five thousand pounds a time. These were also deer that had to be culled (culling is spread right across the age groups). I thought this would be just as good as the ranch in Texas.
To square my conscience (i.e., so that I could tell Klaudia I’d tried to get a commission to go to the United States), I rang up an editor I know at Bollux!, a relatively new men’s magazine. The editor was keen on the idea of killing things, but he wanted me to accompany Ted Nugent, the heavy-metal rock star, who’s really into bow hunting.
“I think you have to shoot these deer with guns,” I said.
“Do they have lions?” he asked. “Or tigers! … Or … elephants! Shoot me an elephant with tusks and it’s a deal!” he shouted, hoarse with excitement.
Forget America, I told myself. The last time I went there I got the distinct impression no one gave a toss about what I was saying. New York is OK, all that energy, etc., except there can’t be many Pere Davids waiting to be shot in downtown Manhattan. American men seem to have deeper voices than Brits, and even the real basket-cases talk more confidently and fluently than us. You really have to learn a whole new body language to get anywhere in the States, and there wasn’t enough time to do that OK, OK, I think I’ve generated enough feeble excuses for not shooting yet more of the highly endangered Pere David’s deer.
CHINA
NEXT ON the list was China. I bought the Lonely Planet guide to Beijing. Hmm. The thing that really caught my attention was that there was a shooting range outside town where you could shoot rocket-propelled grenades and bazookas. For some reason the rest did not seem very enticing. Lonely Planet guides often have useful stuff in them, though any town about which they say “Not worth a visit” is always worth a visit. Often the reverse is true too. The deep premise of Lonely Planet is a stu-denty concept of consumer tourism. Instead of consuming expensive things, LP directs people to cheap things, cheap hotels, cheap drinks.
I admit I probably sound bitter and twisted about something as innocuous as a guidebook, but to me the whole backpacking phenomenon is deeply off-putting. In my experience, most backpackers are narrow-minded, tightfisted people with suntans and Lonely Planet guidebooks. I used to be a backpacker so I know what I’m talking about. I was the original tightwad—going into carpet shops for free cups of tea, paying only for my share of the taxi, arguing over I Op on the restaurant bill. Backpacking should be illegal. All Lonely Planet guides should be burned. People should travel with Herodotus or Caesar’s Gallic Wars instead.
REASONS
MY WIFE advised me to call Klaudia. I dialed her number with some trepidation. We had not spoken for a while, and after the usual remarks I gambited:
ME: Is it absolutely essential for me to go to China?
KLAUDIA: Yes. Do you have a problem with that?
ME: Er, no, not really.
What I found hard to weave into the phone conversation was a premonition I’d had that I should not go. That would have segued very nicely into a story about Robert Capa, the great war photographer, who reluctantly went to Vietnam just to earn some money to pay bills. He was through with war and he just didn’t want to go. Within a short time of arriving he was dead, having stood on a mine in a paddy field.
I thought about Capa’s last picture, not nearly so well known as his famous (probably faked) picture of a man being shot in the Spanish Civil War. This last picture, though, is much more haunting. It is a blurry, out-of-focus shot of a lot of sky and some trees at a crazy angle. It is the picture he took just as he stood on the mine, pressing the shutter exacdy as he was being blown up.
When you don’t want to go, you really shouldn’t go. That’s what this part of me was saying.
TURNED DOWN
BY NOW the world Milu expert, Maja Boyd, had shared her thoughts about the project with Lord H. He passed the letter on to me. She had read my proposal and was not pleased. After a page listing my “errors,” she wrote:
Twigger calls the Milu “freakish”—actually the Milu is the least freakish ungulate. As you know, you can approach them very close and they stand and look at you as if they were a little dumb True, he has read some books, but he does not distinguish reality from fiction … if you give him permission to write his book, you need to have final rights to make changes in order to make sure that facts are accurate and, as important, that the tone of the book is “fair,” as you would not like our Chinese friends to be upset whenever they read the book.
I wrote explaining why my proposal was so full of craven errors. I wrote begging for assistance. There was no reply.
EDEN’S PRICE
NOW I fell into a frenzied depression. I’d been snubbed by the worlds expert on Pere David’s deer! And I was supposed to be writing a book about PERE DAVID’S DEER! I began to panic. Maybe I would not be able to write the book. My wife advised that I call Klaudia again. I asked her whether we had spent the first part of the advance. Maybe we could return it and forget the whole thing. Killing the deer, or watching them being killed, hadn’t been such a good idea. Despite an attraction to guns and the like I was a softie, urban despite my affectations of country sensibilities. I was fed up with killing, and every time I made contact with Pere David’s deer there was always some killing to be done. I wasn’t prepared to pay Eden’s price.
I sat at the computer and wrote MILU in big letters. Then I altered the font several times. Usually I write in Courier (i.e., normal typewriter type), but Courier needs courage. I tried Helvetica, then Times Roman; even Palatino, the most confident of fonts, failed me.
It was time to get radical.
EXTINCTION II
BUT NOW I was beginning to understand at least one small thing about extinction. Extinction does not start with starvation. Extinction does not start with illness and disease. Extinction starts with the absence of the will to go on. In the grand scheme of things my writing was not important. But it was important to me, and what kept me writing was very important to me. I saw my will to keep writing as a specialized minor form of the will to keep living.
Take the great auk, which became extinct about 150 years ago—unlike the Pacific snail, its extinction cannot be dated precisely. About thirty inches high, with a giant beak and black-and-white plumage, the great auk (or garefowl) was like a Northern Hemisphere version of the penguin. Although the beak of the great auk was weirder than any penguins, more like a hornbill.
It is tempting to ascribe at least partial responsibility for the great auk s demise to its extreme oddness. If any bird was going to be picked on, the big-beaked auk is an obvious choice. One specimen was executed on Saint Kilda as a witch because it was said to have caused a terrible storm. Another was kept as a pet and allowed to swim at the end of a piece of string in the filthy waters of the River Clyde.
Unlike the dodo, the great auk inhabited a wide geographic spread of habitats—rocks, skerries, and islands along the inhospitable northern coasts of the Atlantic. That it was hastened to its death by hunting is indubitable, but it is not quite correct to suggest that overhunting was the sole cause of its extinction.
Many birds are hunted until there are only a few breeding pairs left. Ospreys and peregrine falcons, though enjoying a healthy comeback, even breeding in London, were so persecuted by prewar gamekeepers that they all but disappeared from Britain. But the big difference between the great auk and a bird of prey is that the auk likes company, lots of company.
It shared with its fellow exti
nctee, the passenger pigeon, a predilection for living in large, highly visible groups. On Funk Island, off Newfoundland, the original colony numbered over ten thousand. For three hundred years it was used as a convenient source of meat and feathers by fishermen sailing that coast, and despite regular pillaging (there are still little stone compounds where great auks were kept alive until needed) the birds did not choose to go elsewhere. They were excellent swimmers. There were plenty of places to go if only the colony had decided to move.
But the great auk seemed to need a certain threshold number to survive. Colonies that dipped below a certain level did not split up, could not split up. It was as if the great auk did not exist when its group went below a certain high number.
Biologists have observed this in bacteria and call it quorum sensing—below a certain number, a colony of bacteria is “unintelligent,” cannot cooperate in order to repel attackers. When it attains quorum numbers, intracellular communication takes place. One result is the formation of a self-protective biofilm.
The great auk is also quorum sensitive. Below a certain very high number, the population just acts dumb, waiting for the ax to fall.
This sounds silly, hard to believe. In our own age, where the fantasy of the individual is at its strongest, an unexplained need for others seems somehow weak. We forget that prehistoric man wasn’t a loner. He divided up basic tasks among a viable group. In most places where man has chosen to live, life is too hard for not only one man alone but even one small family alone. At the barest functional level, people need people.
Ray Mears runs an advanced survival course, where participants have to survive with only a knife and a cooking pot for three days. But they are not alone, they act as a group—and while some hunt, others forage for mushrooms, and others tend the fire.
In everyday life, however, the practical need to belong to a group in order to survive no longer exists. But other needs remain. Humans are quorum sensitive too. When we operate too much on our own, we lose something vital that can only be got from being in a certain kind of community. I hazard a guess that this kind of community should feel necessary and meaningful on several levels to the individual. There is a lot of talk about “community,” but what is often promised is a level of interaction so banal and unchallenging as to make one want to laugh, or scream.
In a purely economic sense, the lone individual is now a viable unit. Lonely, but viable. We may cluster together in cities, but communities that are anything more than sleeping arrangements are increasingly rare. Quorum sensitivity, however, is a part of our hardwiring that we ignore at our peril. I think the warning signs are all around us: increasing feelings of meaninglessness, pessimism, depression, suicide.
All of these are “unintelligent” responses to loneliness. But perhaps bacteria and great auks have something to teach us. These primitive organisms are “stupid” below a certain number. Maybe we too find it increasingly hard to think clearly about meaning in life when we slip below a certain number of genuine human connections, when the “real” community is not maintained.
The great auk didn’t need to live in a colony of thousands to survive. It was just programmed to do that. It didn’t like living in any smaller numbers. Even when the numbers were constantly being reduced by hunting, the great auk stayed put.
Psychologically, the great auk was maladjusted when it came to survival. But aren’t we all a little like this?
The last great auks were killed on the islands around Saint Kilda in 1844. It seems significant to me that they died out in such a desolate spot, a place where men eventually chose not to live.
I had been in deserted villages in the Pyrenees, just over the border from where Père David was born. To come down to a deserted village in spring sunshine is a disturbing experience. The little roofs catch the light, and from a distance things look normal. Even a dog can be heard barking. But as you approach you see the holes in the roofs, the absence of glass—only a rimey ridge of hoarfrost in a window frame. And the barking dog is wild, thin as a wolf and endlessly circling the decayed houses. No one wants to stay around such a place.
YELLOW JUMPER
MY WIFE reminded me that I now had a wife and child to support, so there could be no question of giving up and returning the advance. The following month she was taking our son to Egypt to visit his grandparents, and someone had to pay for the flight. She even offered to write the book herself if necessary, or at least type it up from my rough notes.
On the same day she winkled out of me that I had, in my indecent haste to leave Woburn, left behind in a drawer in the guest wing a rather fine, not inexpensive canary-yellow sleeveless sweater. My wife told me to ring up the housekeeper and ask her to send it back. For some reason I kept putting this simple task off. I didn’t want to get in touch with Woburn again. Though it was a really nice canary yellow. And sleeveless sweaters are my favorite sweaters.
Other things I had “lost” were remembered and served as evidence against me: the boat I’d bought, which was last heard of in a boatyard that was demolished to make way for the Millennium Dome; the computer I had abandoned when I took a dislike to the irremovable margins on the desktop page. Crimes of responsibility, only of relevance to marriage.
The lost yellow jumper became a symbol of the project—there for the taking, but ignored, heedlessly cast aside.
Paranoid imaginings started to cloud my decision-making mind. What if the Chinese had been tipped off by Maja Boyd that I was a dodgy character, not to be trusted? I could be apprehended at the airport and bundled into an interrogation center, cross-examined about my belief in the significance of the McDonalds in Tiananmen Square. Even my interest in deer could be treated as suspect—what if I was there to infect them with a killer virus? Maybe I would be onto the pandas next. Spending time with the Major had given me a guilty conscience.
China, the yellow jumper—I was getting careless.
EXTINCTION III
WE KNOW we are at risk, living, as we do, in a time when the extinction of life on this planet is a widely held possibility. Yet knowing this does not always help us, since there is also a widespread feeling that “nothing can be done.”
To avoid this paralysis, one must understand that what is possible is not the extinction of the human race in the way that the Polynesian snails became extinct—precisely, on the dot—but extinction great-auk style—bit by bit, individual by individual, without us really reacting.
It starts with how we think, this endless inner landscape of ours, laid out in our minds, vast cities of cogniscence and sentience. And inside our heads, don’t cities fight against cities? And as we fly over our inner domain, don’t different personalities compete for the pilot’s seat, and don’t we, in the end, conclude that the controls are mostly set, the door to the flight deck is locked?
The twentieth century saw a vast increase in the complexity of what it means to be an individual. We have become mysteries to ourselves, containing within us a secret civilization, until now hardly suspected.
No wonder man calls himself proudly a survivor. Having survived the shrinking of his outside world and the stripping away of his traditional tools of life determination, he is, at the same time, having to survive the exploitation of his inner world by those who would control his moods, states, desires, promoting greed to obscure his real needs.
The plane flies in low, swooping haphazardly over cities at night, lights and buildings and roads twinkling as far as the eye can see. The observing self flies in and knows that once it lands, it too will become only part of this vast inner landscape. Lost in whatever part of the mind it finds itself in.
And the inner landscape remains alive because we are flying over it. If we remain on the ground too long, then it starts to die. If we stop being able to take a step back from things, we begin to die.
Shopping malls and cars and widescreen television are all very well, but in many ways they are totally unnecessary veils that encourage us to sleep and forget we are h
uman beings put on this planet in order to gain some wisdom about life. And it’s not even the number of things we own that’s important, it’s our relationship to them, how much they own us rather than we owning them.
Every group suffers from “the desire to persist in itself.” Our society is no different, it persists through economic growth. Even if individuals are quite happy with life, there is a need for expansion in modern society, just as there was an innate need for war in most ancient societies. Further expansion is most easily fueled by individuals becoming extinct.
In many ways the individual is more at risk now than he has ever been. His ability to think is overwhelmed by useless noise. He is encouraged to become a passive consumer, supporter, viewer. He has to go outside the mainstream to find opportunities for his inner powers of self-reliance to develop.
Hope, self-belief, natural wonder: all these can be switched off, year by year, and slowly the individual becomes extinct. The lights in those vast cities grow dim, flicker, go out, plunging the inner world into a paralyzing darkness.
An extinct individual will consume, party, work, and die—all that the modern world requires of him—and he will do it willingly. The unwilling ones can be persuaded with further economically useful products such as tranquilizers, antidepressants, sleeping pills, recreational drugs, television.
And there is something phony in our concern for animals. We distract ourselves by worrying about animals, yet continue blindly to trample wherever the money, the goods, the lifestyle take us.
If a human skill is lost forever, isn’t that just as sad as losing a type of insect or a variety of plant? If truths about humanity are killed off, isn’t that worse than losing your country’s population of deer?
The Extinction Club Page 16
