123 ~ A cure for blindness

Greetings, dear readers! Please forgive my recent radio silence. I was away in Laos for more than a month, and returned home just in time for the early May confluence and crunch of trout, morels, the main season opening of Taliesin (where I pick up some fun and extra cash as a tour guide), and gardens (with the approach of today's rain, yesterday I spent more than 6 hours with the soil, and planted leeks, multiple varieties of onion, carrots, beets, red cabbage, green cabbage and kale; I'm a bit sore this morning(!), but some good eating has its start...). 

I'd like to share some reflections from my recent trip to Laos. I posted another version of this essay on my Saola book Substack page, so some of you may have seen something like it there.

            The capital of Laos, Vientiane, is one of the smallest, gentlest capital cities among the otherwise general chaos of urban centers in Southeast Asia. It’s a river city, and stretches along the left bank of one of the great watercourses of the world, the Mekong.  And as rivers do, the flow of the Mekong lends an added a sense of steadiness and calm to the cluster of humanity along its bank.

            Something much valued by Vientiane's residents, and which reflects the gentle pace of the city, is massage by the blind. Small establishments for blind massage (nuad ta bot in Lao language) are scattered throughout the city. They are simple and unpretentious affairs, typically housed in spaces of modest rent, with ten or so blind masseurs and masseuses on duty.  No fancy massage tables, just mats on the floor, where clients remain clothed during their sessions. Nuad ta bot is very much a local thing - I've never seen another westerner at a blind massage, in contrast to more upscale massage salons that cater in part to the tourist and expat crowd.

            Vientiane’s citizens are fond of blind massage for two reasons. First, they believe that the masseurs and masseuses, by virtue of their blindness, are more attuned to feeling tension in the body and soothing it out. And second, customers appreciate that their patronage supports the livelihood of fellow Lao with disabilities (and also that doing so might add some Buddhist merit to the client's karmic ledger).

            Soon after landing in Vientiane recently, I headed for a blind massage to relieve the knots and knurls after 30 hours of 'planes, buses and automobiles' from Wisconsin. At an establishment in the old part of the city, I drew a young masseur named Nee, a good-looking lad of 20 who, it turned out, is from a village not far from where I have done a lot of my wildlife conservation work in the Annamite Mountains. As he worked out my kinks we struck up a degree of rapport, and I ventured to ask if he has been blind since birth. "No", he replied, "Only since Covid. One morning I was given a Covid shot, and by evening I was blind."

            Ugh.

            Nee is afflicted with a physical blindness, his optical physiology is insensitive to light, and his path through life is as a blind masseur. Yet many of us are burdened with other types of blindness: sensitive to light, but blind to other aspects of reality.

            The Mekong River offers an example. The river is second only to the Amazon in terms of fish diversity, and in the Mekong swim the two largest freshwater fish in the world, the Mekong Giant Catfish and a giant freshwater ray. Specimens of each have been caught that weighed more than 600 pounds. These and many other Mekong fish migrate long distances up and down the channel, responding to urges to feed or spawn, in rhythms sustained for millions of years by the alternation between rainy season and dry. But a recent trend of slicing up the Mekong and its tributaries with hydropower dams has disrupted these migrations, to the significant detriment of fish life in the river (and thus also to the livelihoods of fisherfolk along the river).

            Late one afternoon several years ago I was sitting along the Mekong bank on the edge of Vientiane with an American friend. Alan is an in-your-face, loud-mouthed, big-hearted, conservation-passionate gadfly and environmental consultant, who has been fired from more than one consulting gig for simply telling the truth. Loveable if you take him the right way. He was a hippie in one of his earlier lives, which led me to affectionately nickname him the "Kozmik Konsultant". 

            So Kozmik and I were enjoying bottles of cold Lao beer and solving the problems of the world, as we watched Grandmother Mekong flow beneath the setting sun. There came a pause in the conversation, a rarity with Kozmik. Then he swept his hand out toward the river and said, "You know, as we sit here, animal migrations are going on there as great as anything on the Serengeti. But we don't see them, because they're a few feet below the surface".

            It was one of the most poignantly astute observations I've heard in my decades of nature conservation work in Southeast Asia. Alan's point was that the sort of destruction being heaped on the Mekong from large infrastructure projects would be unacceptable, would not stand, on the Serengeti, because we humans could see the impact on the wildebeest, the lions and the other natural treasures of that great plain. But we are insensible to the losses in the broad, quiet Mekong, and so the loss goes on. Call it another form of river blindness.

            If we lose the Mekong Giant Catfish, one of the great creatures of this Earth, it will be a quiet extinction, a loss without witness. In fact, in this age of biodiversity decline, most extinctions go unnoticed by the species principally responsible for the losses, Homo sapiens. 

            There is nothing young Nee can do to restore his sight, but perhaps we can remedy some of our blindness, our myopia to the beauty and wonder of the world. This is where art and artists come in. The role of an artist is to reveal to the rest of us that which we don't see. Art translates hidden reality and neglected beauty into tangible inspiration for all of us.

Arguably the two most important works of the 20th Century for inspiring humans to care about wild nature were not published scientific papers, they were works of literature: A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (and thus far in this century we have Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer). Granted, these authors brought the learning of science to their works, but it is the eloquence of these books - their art - that gives them power and influence. Similarly, what more do we need to know about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War beyond Picasso's painting Guernica?

            I have two degrees in zoology, and so I understand the importance and value of science to generate information. But while science is essential, it is not sufficient. In the end, the best hope to course-correct humans from killing our planet and thus ourselves, may be art.  

           Unlike for Nee, our blindness may be fatal, and art may be the only cure we have. And so this biologist offers an encouragement and a plea: Keep painting, keep sculpting, keep writing, keep composing, playing and singing.