|
T H I S+W E E K Gonzo Congo
> Fetishes and fossils
Kidnap my heart
D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet
Mondo Weirdo
Postmark
Readers' Tips and Tales
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K
Tuesday, June 10 Tiger Leaping Gorge
A full list of all
|
 |
BY DON GEORGE | redmond O'Hanlon welcomed me into his room in San Francisco's Huntington Hotel with these words: "What'll it be, wine or champagne?" He proceeded to plunge into the hotel mini bar just as he seems to plunge into everything he undertakes -- with reckless passion. If he were dressed in a tweed suit, O'Hanlon could look positively professorial, but in camouflage fatigues, with jungly vines of gray-spun hair twining here and there, he looked exactly like the kind of eccentric, impassioned British naturalist who would spend months delving into deepest Africa, eating manioc and monkey, sleeping on dirt floors and infested mats, in search of -- something. But what? We popped the champagne and began. You set up "No Mercy" as the story of an expedition to find a dinosaur that's reportedly been seen in a lake in the heart of the Congo -- but did you really think you would find a dinosaur there? No, but I'm afraid I really did think, in a naive Western way, that there must be something in that lake. Maybe there was a big turtle waiting or, perhaps, a huge lizard that might be named after me. But it was not something I told anybody else. Of course, what I discovered is -- the truth is that you don't enter that sort of world just anywhere, not even in Borneo or South America: It's cult biology. It's an incredibly powerful world that really grips you, and it has a real magical side to it. In that world everybody from the president on down believes intensely in fetishes. And I mean the minute the minister's door is shut, there's a different doll produced for that meeting. I wasn't prepared for this and it was immensely disturbing and wonderful at the same time. And at certain moments, I completely forgot about getting the story. And that's really frightening, probably the most frightening aspect, when your reservation is gone. It's like when a photographer has lost his camera, he has lost his audience, his public support, his sense of all these people -- so in that sense a camera is a fetish but also something that works, a working fetish. There were the fetishes and the sorcerers' tales and then there were the sounds of the Congo. You would hear guys playing drums and then you'd see them standing on a platform, and they'd be the most heavily muscled blokes you'd ever seen. And their drums were huge -- they have to be to produce those incredible waves of sounds, the only sound waves deep enough to travel through the forest. It has something to do with the frequency, something similar to a whale's cry through the ocean. You can hear these drums for miles and miles, even through the jungle vegetation. It's not like a chimp's call, which is all absorbed at once. Were you tempted to join in? Well, you want to get into it sort of desperately and that's frightening. I'd say you lose control. At the end of the book, you really do seem to lose control, you come undone. I was tremendously impressed with the way you depicted yourself losing your mind, how you recreated that. How did you write about going crazy in such a convincing way? Let me shake your hand -- and pour you some more champagne. You're probably the first person that has ever said that, and I appreciate it immensely. Well, I felt like I was going crazy with you and wondered how you kept from going crazy yourself. Did you, in a way, relive it? It was really intense and more than a bit frightening. When I was writing it, I had to go back there in my mind, only more vividly and more in reality than the first time I experienced it. It necessitated lots and lots of sleep and despair; it was terrible. It was also exciting -- but I did think I was going barking bonkers all over again. How do you write a massive book like this? Well, this book was quite different from my two earlier books, the Borneo book and the Colombia book. They were healthy books. This one felt like it had to be written from an entirely different part of my mind. It had to be in this trance, and it had to be written at night. It was not a book that I could do during the daytime hours. And there had to be no disturbances, no busyness, no social life. I had to cut off from my friends for about three years. That's the worst thing about it, a book written that intensely, you end up wounding your friends. Why? I just could not have a social life; it's bizarre. It's like pneumonia, which I've just had. You get scars in the lungs -- or scars from writing. It's the loss, well, not the loss of friends, but the loss of intimate contact with friends. And being intensely social, I absolutely adore all that contact -- being on a publicity tour like this is absolute paradise for me. So maybe that's it. In order to be able to write that sort of book, I had to cut that social life off completely, like an alcoholic when he stops drinking. And so it had to be at night, when I didn't feel bad that I was cutting people out. And during the day I didn't have to worry about it because I was fast asleep. When you think about it, every writer has his or her own creative process, and for males I think it's deeply related to a quandary they feel about the whole business of writing itself. They're supposed to be out hunting and instead, they're stuck in the cave with the women. So how do they solve that? Writers like Martin Amis, Philip Roth, John Updike -- they all go to an office. Tolstoy dresses up in his house in full peasant gear as if he's working the fields -- because that's the only way he can write, sitting there in his peasant smock. And it's not just that. Because he's feeling that he is in the cave with the women, he has to work a 12-hour day; nothing else will do. It has to be really macho and punishing. And if you think about it, Dostoevsky, why does he work at night? He works at night because that lets you off the hook altogether because you can't be out there hunting, it's dark. Nabokov is interesting because he was extreme, he never sat at a desk during his later career. What did he do? He wrote standing up at a lectern. If he couldn't do that, he'd like to be writing where it looked as if he was going somewhere. And then, of course, when he got so much money he could have built a house and lived somewhere in it, he could have made himself a cave with women in it, he went to a hotel as if he was about to move the next day. And that's where he lived. I think it's a deep screw-up, and it doesn't apply to women writers. They have this great advantage. Right. Virginia Woolf would just sit in her cave. Exactly, a very good example. "A room of my own," you know, and no man would ever write that, not in a million years. It's absolutely fine to talk about bodily excretion, anything else, you know, when boys get together. But to talk about the pleasures of a room of my own and a little scholarship, that's absolutely taboo. Can I freshen that up a bit? Thanks. Now, changing the subject here -- I can't help but notice that wooden sculpture on your bed, the -- what is it, two-feet-tall? -- human figure with the knotted cloth around its neck. What is that? That's a sorcerer's sculpture , and it costs you a hell of a lot of money, about a half year's salary -- you've really got to hate somebody to have something like this. This is intensely secret and will be produced from its hiding place only very very rarely; believe me, it looks much more impressive in a hut at midnight. The sorcerer will scrape a little wood from the neck -- see how it's been shaved here and here? -- and these shavings will be mixed with herbs and then normally one of the older wives of the sorcerer will drop this mixture into the victim's palm wine. Then the young wife makes a pronouncement -- this is the most terrifying moment -- that the victim's wine has been tampered with. And that's it. From that moment on the victim becomes a non-being. No one will talk to him; no one -- even his former best friends -- will even acknowledge his existence. Each one of these knots -- what are there? 12? 13? -- represents someone who has hung himself after he's been told his wine's been tampered with. There's no theological depth but it gets to you, even to an old evangelical atheist like me. It's very, very powerful. And obviously psychologically spot on because it has been around for 150,000 or so years. At one point in the book a sorcerer gives you a fetish. Do you still have it? No, no. You didn't bring it back? No, no ... Here, catch! Oh, my God! That's it. And I must say I was very pleased to see it recently in an exhibition in one of these museums of mankind. At the exhibition, there were these great sculptures and behind them a pottery bowl. And it was filled with things exactly like this. In fact, they were exactly the same, even with the same bit of blue cloth. And the curator had written in tiny handwriting that these are the real fetishes and, therefore, hidden away in the background because, of course, there's not much to look at. I saw that and I thought, Christ, maybe this thing goes back thousands of years. The awful thing about it, of course, is that it is a child's finger. A child's finger? Well, yes, it was X-rayed at Heathrow, and the girl operating the machine happened to be a Bantu, and I could tell at once that she just didn't want that on her machine. A finger? She let out a yell. It probably ruined her week, actually. You know, all this business of sorcery and fetishes is so powerful. The only explanation I came up with is that to have little fears like that, that are genuine -- well, it protects you from the big fear. You know if you're going to have 10 children, at least six or seven will die. So you've got to be prepared for the big horror. So you hang these little fears around you all the time, so you're constantly in a state of low-grade fear. And when the big horror happens you can say, well, it's because I did the wrong thing on that path, when I walked past that tree last week, which I shouldn't have done. And I think that stops the mind from going into shock and depression. Because you can be absolutely certain that if something like that works almost 100 percent of the time, it locks in. No, please, hold on to it a little more ... And the thing is that you feel the power of this, even though you know intellectually it's nonsense. Actually, I don't think there's any intellectual difference between animism, Christianity and Islam. Think of it: We worship a figure in a loin cloth, draped on a cross. There's the fetish that people feel: the crucifix and the rosary. So I don't think that one can in any way factualize or denigrate or deny the power of these things. Yes, fetishes are a serious matter. Let me refill that for you. But again, it's immediate -- bang, wham, you're into our culture. That fetish you've just so gingerly handed back to me cost 40 chickens. How much does it cost to go and see a psychiatrist? And do you have to pay if you don't turn up? Yes, you do. It's commitment and money. Or in their case, produce. One thing it will never be, however, is sexual favors -- because the minute the sorcerer does that, he's lost his god. And if you sleep with the sorcerer's wife, you're dead on penetration. So this works. He's the only guy in the tribe who has these young uninfected girls as his wives. And he's the only bloke who is going to live to an old age; that's why there are old sorcerers. Everybody else is presenting with syphilis or gonorrhea or some other disease. Now I don't know if that's because they're HIV infected but I suspect it probably is. That's what gets them. Everybody has bleeding sores. That's true. It seems like just about everybody you met on your journey had something wrong with them. And there was this sense of futility when you were dispensing medicines. Yes, it's just gone and then two weeks later they're re-infected. I talked about it when I got back with a professor of tropical medicine at Oxford, two of them actually. Thinking that it might be part of the nightmare that I got wrong. Preparing to write the book necessitated a long period of checking things out when I got back; it was sort of neurotic. It's not like open scholarship; it's slightly bonkers. But he said, yes, he did absolutely understand because he was just back from Nairobi and he'd gone there because he wanted to do some work on the comparison of HIV strains 1 and 2. He thought there might have been an HIV strain 3 in this place. But he never had a chance to do any serious work like that because he was immediately needed as a dermatologist, there were just so many people waiting who needed immediate medical help. What's next for you? Well, I'm going to New York actually. I was there once with my wife, who was selling beautiful, silky dresses at Saks, and then again in 1989 when Gary Fisketjohn, who had just published my South America book, brought me over to do two TV shows. Luckily I had no idea what they were. I thought one of them was called "The Leather Man Show." So I didn't realize what a big deal it was. You mean David Leather Man? That's right! And then I was on the Today Show with Jane Pauly. She's gorgeous, you know. And we were sitting very, very close. And she was rubbing her knee under the table -- I got very excited! All this went to my head. Luckily, I just thought it was local television. And I learned something very important. What was that? I was telling the story about Darwin and Chagas' disease. A little insect with long, long legs will fall on you from the roof of a hut in South America, particularly in the Andes. And if it's got a trypanosome in its brain, the fascinating thing is that it's infected. Once it has bitten you, it swings around, and I should have said it "defecates" on the bite -- but instead I said, "It shits on the bite." And that was it. With 10 minutes still left on the show. Luckily, I didn't know I'd just lost 28 million viewers across all the time zones. It's only in retrospect that I realize how awful it was. And I've been saying "defecate" ever since. I've been practicing. Talk about bird defecation, it's changed my life.
|
![[Salon
Wanderlust Marketplace]](../../wanderlust/logos/marlogo.gif)
![[Fetishes and Fossils]](redmond970617.gif)
Redmond O'Hanlon talks
W A N D E R L U S T | |
A R C H I V E S N E W S L E T T E R T A B L E T A L K M A R K E T P L A C E |