A magnificent butterfly, I thought,  so eye-catching in its dress uniform of red and black with white flashes, but it’s forewings were long, black and lacy and used for propulsion; only the hind wings were designed for display, like banners or the logo on tail of an airliner with its fuselage  painted the brightest red.   No butterfly this, but a magnificent lacewing, some two inches from wingtip to wingtip.   It flew in figures of eight but always returned to dip its abdomen in the same patch of wet sand and deposit a few more eggs.    

They call them inch worms, but they don’t slither along like most worms, they grab with their mouth parts then bring their nether regions up, folding their body like a paper clip before stretching forward again.  Not that they move very much; they lie in wait in the damp shade under leaves  for months and then drop off and attack themselves to any large mammal (like us), who comes past and brushes against the vegetation.  They are so sticky, wipe them off with your hand and, like burrs, they stick to your fingers.  But most of the time, you don’t know they’re there unless you knock  them and they burst in a pool of blood.  Leeches secrete an anaesthetic and an anticoagulant.  They inch their way into your clothing and secretly latch on to a tender area of naked skin and only detach when they are full and distended, whereupon they seek moisture and shade for their long digestion.

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The durian is a large fruit, like a spiky rugby ball.  It is so smelly that it is banned from airline cabins and some hotels. But the Asians love them; they consider them an aphrodisiac.  There’s a Malay saying that when the durians are down the sarongs are up.

Every morning at Rainbow Lodge, we were served a plate of exotic fruits.  It was an education. 

The Soursop is related to the Durian, only smaller, not spiky, but with an irregular surface. It has a chewy, sweet white flesh with flat black seeds. 

The Custard Apple is like the Soursop.  It has overlapping greenish flesh and is very juicy, sweet yet slightly acid.

 And then there’s the Mangosteen.  These when they are ripe are small, dark purple, round fruits with a rosette of sepals on the top of them.  The flesh is juicy, white and sweet yet slightly acid.  The bark and the skin of the fruit can be used to treat diarrhoea.

But for flavour, I just love the Long yong or Durkin.  It tastes like a lychee, but is softer and sweeter and one the flesh is peeled off, it is in white segments like garlic.

The Pomelo is the largest grapefruit.  It can be used as a salad vegetable or fruit.

The Dragon’s Eye Fruit, is a true lychee but contains a much larger black seed  and has the smooth white surface and disconcerting consistency of an eyeball.

The Rambutan is a hairy lychee.  “Rambut” means “whiskery hairs”.

The Sapodilla is one that I really like.  It’s a brown fruit that tastes like toffee, like a pear flavoured with maple syrup. 

The Snake Fruit looks interesting.  It’s shaped a little bit like an inverted comma or the head of a cobra.  The brown spotted skin also resembles that of a snake. The flesh is milky and sour. 

Then of course there are the sweetest mangos and papayas, (though the Cambodians also like to eat them unripe in strips as a vegetable) and pineapples.  The seeds of the pineapple are arranged in a spiral.  Cut them out in a shallow wedge with a sharp knife for a perfect presentation.

And did you know that the cashew nut nestles into the base of the green cashew apple, which tastes sweet not unlike an apple.

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Deep in the Cardamom Hills, not far from the coast,  Rainbow Lodge is a paradise, Cambodia’s first eco-tourist resort,  a rustic collection of wood and leaf huts, surrounded by dense rain forest and accessible only by boat.   

Janet Newman worked as a barrister in Birmingham before she left to do voluntary work in south west Cambodia.  She fell in love with the country and bought 60 hectares of rain forest.  It was there she built her dream. She cleared the forest and with the aid of a local builder, constructed an arc of  bamboo and rattan bungalows linked by a raised concrete walkway to the central lodge where her guests read from her well stocked bookshelves, play board games, enjoy the delicious local food exchange traveller’s tales over a beer and just sit, watch and listen.   She built a reservoir up the hill and lined it with clay.  She installed solar panels and a converter to change it to AC.  She hired a cook and a guide.  She sourced local materials, goods and produce.  Then just two years ago her first guests arrived.   She can now accommodate up to 20 people in 7 self contained en suite bungalows.   They swim in the warm tidal waters,  explore the river by kayak, trek in the forest with a guide and can even spend a night alone in a jungle bivouac several miles upstream at the rapids.  Janet and her friend ‘G’ offer the essence of adventure,  an opportunity to experience the tropical wilderness in reasonable safety.  But this is not for the faint hearted.  There are tigers here though nobody has seen one for years.  

But the jungle is always encroaching, always threatening to take over.  It is not only the vegetation, but also the heat and moisture and the effects of rats  and termites.  Janet’s little bit of paradise needs constant maintenance. The reservoir needs clearing,  solar panels have to be replaced,  energy and water rigorously conserved,  the bamboo roofs leak and have to be repaired,  the bamboo logs, which support the walkways are rotting and need replacing, a strenuous job that requires removal of the heavy concrete labs, termite trails need brushing away, metal rings must be placed around the hut supports to deter rodents, the waste needs careful monitoring so it can just soak away and not came up to the surface and pollute the jungle and river.  It can seem overwhelming and has to be planned like a military campaign.  Janet looks tired.  Every day, she needs to go to Koh Kong to buy fresh produce.  Every night ‘G’ has to remove the motors of their narrow  boats  and place them under their house to deter thieves with bolt cutters.    

And Eden is threatened. The Chinese have acquired the contract to build a dam above the rapids. An army of foreign labourers will invade the land, pollute the water and poach the hard wood trees.  If the trees are not completely cleared before the land is flooded,  the wood will rot and acidify the water, killing off all the fish and encouraging the growth of toxic algae.  The prospect is appalling, not only to Rainbow Lodge but to the whole fragile ecosystem.  

As night descends on the forest and whistling nightjars  glide on upturned wings in search of moths, Janet reveals herself to be a passionate environmental campaigner.  She stands behind her elevated counter, cigarette held between her fingers, dispensing drink and politics to her guests, while geckos heckle from the eaves.  “ The river system could be poisoned for 70 years,  hardwood trees which take centuries to grow will be carted away,  lines of pylon will march along broad tracks cleared through the forest – electricity is Cambodia’s main export, the hillsides will erode and the diversity of insects and other plant and animal life will be severely restricted.  The gibbons will no longer call from the forest across the river.  The hornbills will fly away.  There will be no kingfishers, no nightjars,  no birdsong.   The environment will die.”   

Janet is not just a hotelier and caterer; she has taken her arguments to Phnom Penh and harassed ministers.  She is a force to be reckoned with.  Taking another swig of her gin and tonic, she comments wryly  ‘I guess I’ve been at the bar one way or another all my life.’

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A poem and instructions written on the wall of Tuol Sleng internment centre,  Phnom Penh.

No chatting

No laughing

No discussion

No answering back

No opinions

No theatre

No music

No poems

No Literature

No Religion

No priests

No doctors

No lawyers.

No study

No glasses

No football

No games

No playing

No running

No schools

No parents

No children

No brothers

No sisters

No house

No friendship

No flirting

No sex

No love.

No life

 Instructions.

1. You must answer according to my questions.  Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts about this and that.  You are strictly prohibited to contradict me, contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool, for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes of electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing.  Sit still and wait for my orders.  If there is no order, keep quiet.  When I ask you to do something you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea in order to hide your secret treachery.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules you will get many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

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What is going on?   My guide explains.  ‘At the new year, we remember our ancestors and we make gifts to appease their spirits and give ourselves good karma.   It’s not real money, but fake paper money.  Some also burn paper models of cars, servants, possessions.  You see, we believe in the afterlife here.  If we can appease the spirits of our ancestors, then we will have a good life too.  It will bring us luck.’

In the Buddhist temples, they sell paper effigies like soldiers in red coats and hats to burn.  Buddhism sits comfortably alongside superstition here.  Many of the tribes in the country are animist, they believe in spirits.  In a wood outside a village in Northern Laos, just a dozen miles or so from the Chinese border, we came across a group of huts on stilts topped by a pole bearing the remains of a flag.  The huts were surrounded by a stockade and a moat.  There was a wooden board in front of it bearing a photograph of the deceased and the dates of his life.   His possessions were stacked under the eaves together with the remains of food and flowers. 

‘When a parent dies, we look after his spirit in death in the same way as we looked after his body in life.  That way we will get good karma and show our children how to look after us when our time comes.’

‘But the people who live in the village, the Black Tai, do not go to the wood after dark.  They are afraid of the spirits.’ 

A few days later, in the Khmer village, we came across an structure that looked like two sets of poles for growing runner beans.  Between it was a table with clay figurines on it. 

”The people here believe that if they touch the body of a dead person, they will die.  So the shaman  builds these arches and covers them with leaves and symbols.  The relatives then pass through the arches three times and leaves a clay model on the table to protect them from the spirits who might take them too.’

We met the shaman, jolly toothless man with a wispy beard, no shirt and a cigarette tucked behind his ear.  My guide left him some indigestion tablets for his wife.  Strong medicine!

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‘Every Good Boy Deserves Favour’ was written at around the same time.  It was Andre Previn’s suggestion that Stoppard write a play for orchestra while he write the score.  Stoppard originally thought of building it around a triangle player who imagined he owned an orchestra.  But Russian dissidents were being imprisoned in mental institutions, so conceived the idea of having two men imprisoned in a mental institution, one, the triangle player, who was really mad and the other, just politically insane.  Madness is always a cultural diagnosis.  If it weren’t, all devout Christians would be considered mad. 

The orchestra becomes a theatrical device, not to say, gimick.  It not only expresses the emotion, but when the musicians are abused and their instruments smashed, it shockingly depicts the state sanctioned assault on feeling and truth; the madness in the system.    Alexander Ivanov is an embarrassment.  He refuses to retract his criticism or to admit that his treatment has worked.  He refuses to save himself, even when his son pleads with him to do so.

Human behaviour is predominantly driven by emotion.  Civilisation and its institutions; medicine, the law, government, protect us against uncontained emotional reactions by setting rules and customs for behaviour.  But what happens when those rules break down into anarchy and when those responsible for maintaining the rules ignore them or commit atrocities themselves?.  Then people become conditioned to corruption and brutality; they cease to notice any more. Terrorism and war can do dreadful things to men.  Remember the SS, Smersh and the guards at Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay as well as terrorists anywhere.  They become brutalized.  The veneer of civilization is scraped off leaving the rust of repression, the erosion of fear.    

My companion at breakfast was from Johannesburg.  I asked her how she survived the constant threat of attack.  ‘You get used to it,’ she said. ‘Very few muggers or thieves get prosecuted.  Many of the police were freedom fighters and they just turn a blind eye when it comes to arresting ‘their own.’   

But strangely, Stoppard’s play failed to shock me – perhaps because the theme seemed too familiar or perhaps because I’ve become too cynical.  I am less easy to shock these days.  .   

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is currently playing at The Olivier Theatre with the South Bank Symphony Orchestra. 

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But there’s more to it than that.  Dogs offer us their devotion.  To them we  are the pack leaders – to be appeased and served. Dogs are attuned to us, they obey our commands, respond appropriately when we point; they can be trained. Chimpanzees, although they have 99% of  our genetic code, tend to do their own thing, albeit intelligently. There is even a dog who has learnt 300 words and can fetch an object from another room, having only just seen a picture of it.  And think of how working dogs can be trained to herd sheep, to retrieve an animal that been shot, to sniff out drugs or explosives.   

Dogs make a deep emotional bond with us.  Studies have shown that when dogs look at images of humans, they are drawn to the left side of the face which expresses emotion more eloquently and has a direct connection with the emotional right side of the brain.  They tune into our emotions and can respond to our feelings.  They know when we are upset or angry. They feel it. And dogs are good for us.  We are more likely to survive a myocardial infarction if we have a dog and less likely to have another heart attack.  

Dogs have evolved an elaborate vocal repertoire to communicate with us.  Most dog owners can recognize at least six types of bark.  These are emotional signals; excitement, anger, aggression, hurt, fear, playfulness.  Brains scans have shown that the same area of orbito-frontal cortex lights up and we release the bonding hormone, oxytocin, when we look at pictures of dogs as when we look at images of children.  Our need to nurture runs deep. Dogs induce the nurturing behaviour in us they need for survival, and they also release oxytocin when they look at their owners and are fondled.  Dogs not only give but they induce unconditional love. 

DNA data has established that our domestic dog is descended from the grey wolf and came into existence about 100,000 years.  But wolves or wild dogs do not acclimatize to humans naturally. They cannot read our emotions and they don’t have the same vocal repertoire.  When wolf puppies are brought up with humans, they revert to wolves at about 8 weeks and become dangerous.  It takes many generations of selective breeding to get an animal that behaves like a dog.  Long term experiments conducted on Silver Foxes in Eastern Siberia has shown that domesticity can only be induced after 50 generations.  Only then do they behave like dogs. The strange thing is that in breeding out aggression, other characteristics change too, like the colour of their coats and the shape of their heads, their ears and their tails.  In fact, they become like puppies.  Selective breeding for domesticity favours juvenile characteristics.

This makes me wonder whether sexual selection in human societies over the many generations since civilization began has also succeeded in breeding out aggressive characteristics?   Are we just all big babies?   Have we bred domesticity in ourselves and with this passivity, laziness, neediness and a predisposition to obesity, heart attacks and diseases related to anxiety, such as Fibromyalgia and Irritable Bowel Syndrome?    

Contrast our open faced, needy population with the hard bitten images of tribal chieftains, warlords who seize and impregnate their women by force.  Such brutal sexual acquisition might perpetuate a much more ruthless typology until such time as civilization suppresses the behaviour that has induced it?  The aggressive no longer rule the earth,  at least outside the strongholds of Afghanistan, but have we become too tame, like the dogs? 

This article was the topic of a Horizon documetary, shown on BBC television last week.

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the sky deeper.  

Steam rises from the falls,

turns grass stems to prayer flags,

trees into wedding gowns. 

The windows of the big house,

shine gold and

Thomas Payne’s excellent bridge

burns like a biscuit     

against moors of palest pink

Crystal deep,

sparkling deer

join cosy sheep

In a warm circuit of silage,

fermenting an uneasy friendship 

in cloven harmony of hunger.

Flashing red, a woodpicker  

pecks at freezing bark

while Titmice forage,  

out of habit, more than hope,

Spying a discarded raft, I climb aboard

and launch myself down the slope until, 

disgorged in a tumble of laughter,   

I get the drift, use my hands,   

like rockets on a space module

to gain stability but no direction.  

A stranger eyes me by the cattle grid,  

‘I’ve only come for my grandson.’  

I smile like sheep in silage. 

And resolve to buy a sledge.

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The opening sequences set the mood, time passing in the ticks and strikes of the clocks, the unrelenting passion of the crimson carpets, walls and drapes.  We see a woman or is it a man; the angular face and lank hair obviate sexuality.  She is lying in bed.  Another woman, plump and beautiful with ringlets of honey blonde hair lies asleep in a chair.  The invalid gets up stiffly and walks painfully across to her bureau and writes in her diary, ‘It is Monday and I am in pain.’ 

Agnes is dying of cancer.  Her sisters, Karin and Maria, have returned to look after her, but it is the peasant Anna with her plump expressionless face and simple faith who loves and cares for her.  ‘In elliptical flashbacks, intended to give us emotional information, not tell a story, we learn that the three sisters have made little of their lives.’ Karin is icily detached, married to an older husband, a calculating, sneering diplomat, whom she loathes. She cannot bear to be touched and in one awful scene lacerates her cunt with a broken glass and smears the blood over her lips to avoid her husband’s attentions.  Maria is beautiful, but corrupt and heartless.  She is married to a weak man, whom she despises and so she consoles herself with other liaisons.  When her husband stabs himself and pleads for help, she turns away.  Maria and Karin were close as children, but are now too damaged to allow any real intimacy.  Agnes always felt isolated, especially from their tragic though beautiful mother.      

Theirs is not a happy house, it’s a place of guilt and repression, cries and whispers.  Nobody can get close enough to draw comfort from anybody else.  Agnes is in agony, her back arched as she struggles to breathe, desperate for human warmth, but her sisters turn away.  Only Anna can console her, pillowing her head in the living flesh of her breasts to ease her terrible transition.   

Cries and Whispers is a disturbing film, a film about life and death.  It’s not only Agnes who is dying.  Karin and Maria are too, and in a way, we all are.  Their lives have no hope, no meaning.  Karin works while Maria plays, but these are evasions.  Theirs is a simalcrum.   Without human warmth, without love, there can be no life.   Paradoxically, it is Agnes,  who finds life  in simple pleasures, the garden, a drink of water and the comfort of  being held.   So Bergman presents us with a contrast, a counterpoint between the hopelessness, defensiveness and meaninglessness of  Karin and Maria’s lives with their compromises, pretences and terror of real contact and the dreadful void of death that confronts Agnes.  

Bergman does not spare us the shock and horror.  Harriet Andersson is not beautiful in death; sweat glistens on her angular face, her hair is lank, her skin pale and grey, her eyes terrified;  she arches her back, she drags air into her damaged lungs with long, tortured stridor, she retches, she beats her fists on her barren, wasted chest. 

The cinematography is superb.  As the critic, Roger Ebert, wrote, ‘The camera is as uneasy as we are. It stays at rest mostly, but when it moves it doesn’t always follow smooth, symmetrical progressions. It darts, it falls back, is stunned. It lingers on close-ups of faces with the impassivity of God. It continues to look when we want to turn away; it is not moved.  Agnes lies thrown on her death bed, her body shuddered by horrible, deep, gasping breaths, as she fights for air. The sisters turn away, and we want to, too.’  We know things are this bad, but we don’t want to have to feel it.  The scene of  Anna embracing the decomposing Agnes has all the soul searching depth of a Rembrandt,  the horror of embracing death but at the same time a moving and familiar reminder of the pieta.   So the death of Agnes  represents the corruption of humanity.  And here again we have the dialectic;  life in death and death in life.   This film gets as close as any film can get to the crimson membrane of passion and sexual disquiet that for Bergman is the soul.  

Cries and Whispers has little narrative.  We don’t know how the major characters arrived there; we are left to fill in the gaps from the darkness of our own experience.  This is the power of Bergman.  He does not attempt to explain; he just shows us what its like.  He communicates on a level of human feeling so deep that defies description – but how well he communicates.

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When they met, they recognized each other immediately.  They perceived the same zest for life, the same desire for the unconventional.  They were different, special, they had found the one they had been waiting for all of their lives.  As long as they had each other, anything was possible. Then children, his job, the nice suburban house on Revolutionary Road closed the door on their enchanted future. There was nothing to look forward to.  Their parents’ past had caught up with them. 

So when April suggested they just give it all up and take off to Paris, it rekindled the passion of their relationship.  But Frank gets offered a promotion.  ‘Such opportunities only occur once or twice in life, you’ve got to grab them by the balls.’, his boss tells him.  How ironic.  April finds out she is pregnant.  Only John, their neighbour’s son who is ill with depressive psychosis, has the clarity of thought to hold up a mirror to themselves. And so, they fail to achieve escape velocity and fall to earth in mutual destruction.  She gives herself an abortion and bleeds to death.  He is devastated and the meaning of his life ends as well.   

Frank and April could not come to terms with the mundane reality of life.  Without anything to look forward to, there was no point.  They had great expectations and now they have great disappointment and that is intolerable. That’s all there is. They realized that the good stuff is just a dream and is unattainable. The only satisfaction was  in themselves, but they were empty and could only look to external excitement to fill them up  Even sex couldn’t rescue them anymore.  They tried other partners but they didn’t arouse them.  They became locked into a meaninglessness, a hopelessness, an existential depression, a living death.  And so the only way out was to kill the thing they had produced and in so doing kill themselves.

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