A Language older than Words

by Derrick Jensen

  The next reason I can't offer solutions is that the "problem"— whatever that means—is unconsciously though intentionally structured to make solutions impossible. A double bind is defined as a situation where if you choose the first option you lose, if you choose the second option you lose, and you cannot withdraw. Would you like to vote for the Republican or the Democrat? Should you step into the line on the left or the right? Should you fish the puppies out of the pool or get your brother? Should you work for IBM or Microsoft? Try leaving the wage economy. The only way to defeat a double bind is to obliterate it.

  In the seventeenth century the Zen poet Bunan wrote, "Die while you're alive and be absolutely dead. Then do whatever you want: it's all good." We are, of course, already dead. There is no hope. The machine is too powerful, the damage too severe. There are too many child abusers, too many rapists, too many corporations, too many tanks and guns and airplanes. And I'm just one person; I can't do anything. You're dead right, so what the hell are you waiting for? An Irish friend of mine once told me his favorite saying: "Is this a private fight, or can anyone enter?" Give up. Capitulate. Realize there's no hope, then have at it. If you're dead, you have nothing to lose and a world to gain.

  The third reason I can't propose solutions is that to attempt to do so presupposes that solutions exist. But to believe that we can rationally "solve the problems" is to pretend the "problems" are rational, and is to manifest the same megalomania that got us here in the first place. We can no more manage the problems than we can manage a forest.

  The best I can offer is the suggestion that if we are to survive, we must not only begin to learn the difference between real and false hopes, but we must also remember how to surrender. No, not to the destructive forces guiding our culture toward its own collapse, nor even to the despair caused by seeing the murder of so many peoples and so many species and biomes, so much beauty, but instead we must remember how to surrender to the land itself, to immerse ourselves in the implications of the natural and social circumstances in which we find ourselves engulfed. If we do not allow ourselves to attend to our surroundings and what is happening to them, to feel the implications deep in our bones, how can we respond appropriately and deeply to the situation?

  What are the dying salmon telling you, and the dying forests? What lessons are whispered to you by the ghosts of the passenger pigeons, or the ghostly roll of thunder of a mammoth herd of bison? Allow these voices to inform your actions.

  There are some lines from the Tao Te Ching that I dearly love. They are: “Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?"

  None of this is to say that we shouldn't work to revoke corporate charters, revest corporate-claimed lands, file timber sale appeals, vote, write, work at battered-women's shelters, throw pies, blow up dams, or even write letters to Slade Gorton and Larry Craig. All of those actions are necessary to the degree that they arise organically from the situation. If we listen carefully enough I believe our bodies, the land, and circumstance will tell us what to do. If someone were to ask me what to do about the problems we face in the world today, I would say, "Listen. If you listen carefully enough you will in time know exactly what to do."

  Change is coming. We are in the midst of it. Ecological system after system is collapsing around us, and we wander dazed through our days as though we have become in reality the automatons we so often strive to be.

  Often when I awaken I hear the voices of those who will come after, and sometimes I see their faces. They speak to me of hunger, and ask, always, where are the salmon? They speak to me, too, of beauty, and ask again that same question. I have no answer for them. Sometimes I hand them a book or an article I've written. They read it, nod, smile sadly, and ask again about the fish. They do not care so much how deftly we rationalize our actions—and inactions—nor even how deeply we discuss the destruction. What they want, reasonably enough, is an intact and livable world. They ask what we have done to their home.

  They ask not only about salmon, but also about forests, bears, fisher, marten, lynx, cutthroat trout, bull trout, sturgeons. They ask about them all. And there is nothing I can do except hand them my book, and say I'm sorry.

  I sometimes wonder if the other creatures on the planet are doing what they can to shut down the machine. Perhaps salmon are leaving not just because of dams, and not just because they do not like our unwillingness to participate in reciprocal relationships, and not just because we make life intolerable for all others, but also to deprive us of calories; perhaps they are willing to give away their existence in order to stop civilization. Perhaps trees sometimes refuse to grow on clearcuts because they do not want to give their bodies to be used to enrich those in power. Perhaps Eskimo curlews—whose appetite for grasshoppers was legendary—left the planet so we would poison ourselves with pesticides. Perhaps the planet as a whole is now pushing us along in our own headlong rush to self-extinguishment, so that whatever creatures remain behind can at last and again breathe easily. Or perhaps the salmon and the trees are not acting merely physically but also symbolically, and perhaps then it becomes our task to ask them clearly and carefully what it is they are saying through their own deaths, what it is that they are dying to tell us. It becomes our task after that to listen to their stories, and to act upon what they have to say.

  Here is another thought: perhaps the others—the extirpated salmon, the disappearing frogs—have not gone away forever. Perhaps they have only gone into hiding, and will return after civilization collapses, once we learn, or remember, how to behave. When we are ready to receive them, and to give ourselves up to them in relationship as all along they have given themselves up to us and to each other, they will return. Only then.

  At that point we will again see herds of bison stretching from horizon to horizon, the huge creatures eating grasses taller than a human. We'll see flocks of passenger pigeons that stretch also to every horizon, and that take days to pass overhead. Then, too, we'll see so many Eskimo curlews that we could not count them if we lived a thousand years. Salmon will keep us awake at night with the slapping of their tails against the water, and we will have plenty to eat. We need only dip a basket weighted with a stone in order to catch a fish for dinner, in fact enough fish to feed the whole village.

  And at night, we will talk to each other, and talk to the moon, who looks down not quite so sadly, and we will talk to wolves, and to bears and to porcupines and weasels. And they will talk to us. Children will paint the faces of wolf pups. Perhaps women and children will not need to dread the night. Women may walk alone with no fear of rape—rape? I do not know that word—and children will sleep soundly with no worry of nightly visits from their fathers. Fathers and mothers will look at their children and say, "It was not always this way," and the children will listen, puzzled.

  Stars, too, will speak, and will no longer find themselves the holders of memories too painful to be held by children, but will hold other memories, and other conversations, of celebration, of the changing of the seasons, of growing old or perhaps dying young but in any case living within the larger community of existence.

  Or perhaps not. Perhaps the salmon really are gone. Perhaps extinction really is forever, and when at long last we do awaken from our nightmare of plutonium, rape, genocide, and coercion, we will find ourselves finally facing the world we have created. Perhaps we will awaken in an exterior landscape that is barren and lonely enough to match the landscape of our hearts and minds. Perhaps we'll awaken to find that at least one tenet of Christianity is literally true—that hell does in fact exist, and that we are in it. Hell, after all, is the too-late realization of interdependence.

  Several years ago, a few days after speaking with Thomas Berry and a few days before my first encounter with the coyotes, I walked into a cold January afternoon to take care of the chickens. My breath hung white in the air. Dogs danced at my feet.

  I heard in the distanc
e the clamor of geese, then stood speechless to watch a huge v fly low overhead. I opened my mouth to say something—I didn't know what it would be—and heard my voice say three times, "Godspeed." Suddenly, and for no reason I could understand, I burst into tears. Then I ran into the house. Walking back outside later, and staring into the now empty sky, I realized that in speaking not only had I been wishing them well for their journey south but that they, too, had been using my voice and my breath to wish me just-as-well on my own just-as-difficult journey. The tears, it became clear to me, had been neither from sorrow nor joy, but from homecoming, like a sailor who has been too long at sea, and who spontaneously bursts into sobs on smelling land, and feeling those tentative first steps on solid ground, at home.

  It is not possible to recover from atrocity in isolation. It is, in fact, precisely this isolation that induces the atrocities. If we wish to stop the atrocities, we need merely step away from the isolation. There is a whole world waiting for us, ready to welcome us home. It has missed us as sorely as we have missed it. And it is time to return.

  Godspeed.

  Acknowledgments

  MEISTER ECKHART SAID THAT if the only prayer you say in your life is Thank you, that would suffice. This book is, among many other things, a prayer of thanksgiving.

  Long before the first word found the page, many people helped me disentangle my thinking from civilization's sticky web. Without their support and assistance, I do not know whether I would have had the courage to start making sense of what I was experiencing, and later, to follow my experience wherever it led. This book would not have existed without countless long and loving conversations with these friends. Many of them read significant portions of the book, often through multiple drafts. Their suggestions shaped the form and content, and their enthusiasm revitalized me when my energy flagged. These people include Melanie Adcock, Jeannette Armstrong, Paul Bond, Brian Brothers, George Draffan, Molly Eichar, Bruce Hutton, Mary Jensen, Claire and John Keeble, Vicki Lopez, Laiman Mai, Julie Mayeda, Melissa McCann, John Osborn, Laurel Pederson, Carolyn Raffensperger, Royann Richardson, Lee Running, and Bethanie Walder.

  My friend Julie Mayeda line-edited most of the book for me. Her ear never failed, even when mine did.

  George Draffan helped me write a couple sections of the book, as part of our End Game project.

  I am grateful to Sy Safransky and others at The Sun for giving me the opportunity to interview Jim Nollman, Cleve Backster, and Judith Herman.

  Julie Burke did a better job of designing the book than I could ever have hoped.

  I need to thank the members of my family who did their best to protect me from my father's violence: my mother, my brothers, and my sisters. I could not have survived without you.

  The support of my mother has been instrumental in my recovery from the trauma of my childhood. Crucial also have been the many conversations with many of my friends listed above.

  Nor could I have survived without the nonhuman others who have nurtured me all along, even when I did not know it. Stars, bees, the ponderosa pine outside my window, the coyote tree, coyotes, dogs, cats, poultry, the duck who gave me his life, the Dreamgiver, the muse, even Crohn's disease pathogens, and all of the others too numerous even to remember.

  I would not be who I am without your guidance and love.

  Notes on Sources

  None of the information in this book is in any way arcane, or even difficult to find. Many fine researchers have compiled thorough and often devastating histories and analyses of our culture's horrible trajectory and have articulated viable alternatives. I am thankful that these other authors were able to point me toward original sources. I include here the primary sources where I can, otherwise, the secondary sources.

  Silencing

  The epigraph (and all other R.D. Laing quotes) is from R.D. Laing's extraordinary book The Politics of Experience. This book, along with Neil Evernden's The Natural Alien, helped me perhaps more than any others to understand the alienation that characterizes our culture, and to understand also that it is possible to experience the world—to not be alienated.

  For the description of a factory slaughterhouse I unfortunately had to rely on a composite of friends' descriptions and published accounts. My attempts to enter slaughterhouses were met with polite yet insistent refusals. The public relations hacks with whom I spoke «&/provide me lots of nifty literature, none of which mentions death or killing.

  My figure for rates of rape within our culture come from Judith Hermans classic Trauma and Recovery, and Diane E. H. Russel's Sexual Exploitation, Rape, Child Sexual Abuse, and Sexual Harassment.

  "I suppose, then . . ." is from Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy.

  "Let the woman ..." is from First Timothy.

  My source for many of the quotes concerning the European hatred of indigenous Africans is Noel Mostert's comprehensive Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People. He pointed me toward many informative primary documents.

  "extremely ugly..." is from Raven-Hart's Cape of Good Hope, citing Leguat's 1708 New Voyage to the East

  "when they speak . . ." is also from Cape of Good Hope, this time citing Baptiste Tavemier.

  "it is a great pittie ..." is from Raven-Hart's Before Van Riebeeck.

  I have two sources for many of my quotes concerning the European hatred of indigenous North Americans. The first is David Stannard's

  American Holocaust. The second is Frederick Turner's Beyond Geography. Both are invaluable references to the primary documents, both provide wonderful analyses, and both are extremely difficult to read because of the atrocities they detail.

  "animals who do . . ." and "were born for ..." is from Stannard.

  The quote about scientists administering beatings is from When Elephants Weep, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy.

  I became aware of the study by Allport, Bruner, and Jandorf through an article someone handed to me at a reading, entitled "The Psychology of Smog," by Ira J. Winn, from The Nation, March 5, 1973.

  The figure of one hundred and fifty million enslaved children comes from cross-referencing two sources, and then being extremely conservative in my extrapolation. The Anti-Slavery Society finds more than one hundred million enslaved children just in Asia, and the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, which puts the estimate of enslaved children worldwide in "only" the tens of millions, finds that Africa has an incidence of child labor nearly twice that of Asia. The mere fact that I can even consider estimates differing by one hundred million (I think an estimate of two hundred and fifty million enslaved children worldwide would be defensible) disturbs me greatly. Lost in the numbers—in fact worse than lost, but masked—is the misery inherent in each one of these cases. This little girl enslaved to prostitution in Thailand, this little boy enslaved to rugmaking in Pakistan. My source for the Anti-Slavery Society figure was the Spokesman-Review, September 19, 1995.

  Evernden's story about cutting the vocal cords is from The Natural Alien.

  The Okanagan definition of "violation of a woman" is from Jeannette Armstrong.

  Coyotes, Kittens, and Conversations

  "We are the ..." is in Dolores LaChapelle's extraordinary Sacred Land

  Sacred Sex, citing Paula Gunn Allen's "The Psychological Landscape

  of Ceremony." "Since nature ..." is from Aristotle's Poetics. "I perceived it to be .. ." is from Descartes' Discourse on Method. "My only earthly wish ..." is from Bacons New Organon. "I am come .. ." is from Bacon's Temporis Partus Masculus. The account of the robo-roaches is from the Spokesman-Review, January

  10, 1997. The vivisection accounts come from Singer's Animal Liberation, Ruesch's

  Slaughter of the Innocent, and Levin's and Danielson's Cardiac Arrest.

  None of these books are for the faint of heart.

  For information on the Sand Creek Massacre I am indebted to Stannard, who provided an excellent analysis, and pointed me towa
rd three earlier sources, Svaldi's Sand Creek, Hoig's The Sand Creek Massacre, and the U.S. Congressional inquiry volumes.

  Taking a Life

  "Today we took ..." is from Jack Forbes' Columbus and Other Cannibals,

  a short but crucial book. The "conversation of death" materials are from Barry Lopez's Of Wolves

  and Men.

  Cultural Eyeglasses

  "All through school..." is from E.F. Schumacher's A Guide For the Perplexed.

  The incidence study for child abuse is put out by the Centers For Disease Control.

  The headlines "Defiant activist defends guerrillas" and "Mother bear charges trains" are from the Spokesman-Review, Jan 9, 1996, and April 29, 1996, respectively.

  I learned about the levels of alcoholism among einsatzgruppen from Robert Jay Lifton's important The Nazi Doctors.

  I don't remember where I first heard about the "black line" in Tasmania— it must have been when I was a child—but the image had long haunted me. When my dart hit the map there (no, that wasn't a literary device), I headed to the library and Internet. A very good source is Fate of a Free People: A Radical Re-examination of the Tasmanian Wars, by Henry Reynolds. The quote "It was a favourite ..." is from Lehman's The Battle for Tasmanian Aboriginal Heritage, citing Hull's 1850 Experience of Forty Years in Tasmania.