A Language older than Words Page 11
The belief that men own women continues to permeate our culture. Even today politicians and others cite the Bible frequently to support their view. Recently the local newspaper ran a multi-page profile of a young woman who, according to the profile's first sentence, is a "role model for the entire city." This is not only because as a Christian she decided to abstain from sex until she married, but because she decided until that time never to be alone with a man. When the man who eventually became her husband asked her father, a Christian pastor, for permission to court his daughter, her father refused. The suitor took her acquiescence to her fathers wishes as a positive sign: "I knew that how she respected and honored her father was how she would respect and honor me." He asked again in six months, and this time her father agreed to turn his daughter over to the clearly like-minded suitor. After the article ran, the newspaper received many letters praising this woman and her family. Not a single letter commented on the woman's ownership by successive males.
More recently, a drunken woman was raped by two men after having danced an impromptu striptease at a party. The newspaper responded with an editorial entitled, "Act provocatively and you provoke," with the subtitle, "Sometimes, women lead men into temptation." The primary author of the editorial was a self-described fundamentalist Christian. The editorial's last line is, "If a woman demands the right to be a promiscuous fool. . . she shouldn't expect society to embrace her as a victim when she gets burned." The newspaper also published a rebuttal by a solitary dissenting member of the editorial board. Although his editorial did not ascribe blame to the woman (hedging bets, however, by stating that "ultimate accountability for this woman's behavior occurred when she was raped by the men she teased"), he did state that "because two men couldn't control themselves, a rape occurred," implying that rape is a crime of sexual passion, not violence and subjugation. Taken together, the editorials, both written by men, reinforce the Biblical notion that a woman's body is not her own, to do with as she pleases, and also that for men, rape is desirable, a temptation.
How does this come about? How is it that Jesus was a fair feminist for his day—treating women with a deference remarkable for his immersion in a deeply patriarchal culture—yet the religion that bears his name shows no such respect? How is it that pagans, Jews, Muslims, heretical Christians, Indians, Africans, Polynesians, Asians, women, men, children, salmon, forests, have been murdered by the millions in the name of a man who said that people should love their neighbors and love their enemies?
At least part of the answer is that the words of Jesus are ultimately irrelevant to the course of historical Christianity. Far more important to this course are deeply hidden urges that grope not only for expression but also for sufficient pretext to allow fulfillment without acknowledgment, and hence without accountability.
Few people would be senseless enough to believe that my father beat my sister because she found dead puppies in the swimming pool, or for any reason other than those emanating from my fathers damaged psyche. He blamed it on the dead puppies simply to confuse us all, himself especially, and to drown out the horrific experience of beating his own child.
Few would be ignorant enough to believe Hitler's justifications for murdering millions of people in Europe and Africa. We can see—probably more easily than he—through and beyond his words to his intent, made deathly clear in the showers at Treblinka and on the stone cold killing fields of the Soviet Union.
By the same token, it isn't difficult to honestly evaluate the insanity and hatred that characterized the witch trials, that conceptualized, then created a suitable political, social, philosophical, and theological context for the torture and murder of women because they were alleged to "do marvellous things with regard to male organs."
How then do we so blind ourselves to the same impulses that surround us today, that are central to, and propel our culture? Do you think today's destruction of the salmon is so much less than last century's destruction of the passenger pigeon? Do you think the enslavement of 150,000,000 children is so much less than the race-based slavery of not-so-long-ago? Is the ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples so much less than the Final Solution, so much less than Manifest Destiny? It is safe to speak of Hitler because he is dead, and because you and I were not there to participate. My father is safely out of my life. None of this emerged in the midst of the beatings.
This fear and hatred of life, shape shifter that it is, stays always one step ahead of our discernment, slipping each time we nearly understand it to faster, more efficient ways to control and then destroy the objects of our hatred, and with them ultimately ourselves.
The patriarchal family gives rise to a patriarchal God, who can be internalized to wield Fatherly control even when the father is absent. When threats wear thin the patriarchal God sends a Son to prove His love. My father always knew exactly how far to push with violence before relenting to confuse with signs of affection, and to get us to agree that our suffering, compared to his own, was nothing. So, too, with Christianity. And now what? Christianity—by now entirely divorced from the teachings of its nominal founder—inevitably gives way to science, an infinitely stronger tool to control and destroy not only humans but the entire planet.
Those who wish to destroy will do so. It really is that simple. Remove the words, and the acts are there. Beatings, rapes, enslavement, sanctified murders in autos-da-fé, or industrialized death-dealing with Zyklon B, chainsaws, driftnets, mink coats, time cards, clocks, protein drinks, satellite surveillance systems, and the soul-murder of lives wasted in quiet desperation.
In the beginning is the urge. In the people who would destroy it is always there. Like poisoned water, it is heavy; like poisoned water, it is ungraspable; like poisoned water, it always seeks for cracks to seep through, to exploit, to wear away, to open; like poisoned water it emerges, and when the vessel breaks, as so often it does, like poisoned water it comes out raging its mantra of death.
Seeking a Third Way
"For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work—or, if working, produce deviant effects—there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for 'meaning.'" Joseph Campbell
THE MESSAGE FROM THE stars that sustained me as a child—that the cruelty we take for granted is not natural—sustains me to this day. For I know that beneath the fear and hatred, beneath the urge to control and destroy, far beneath the scarred shells that protect and define us, people are good. Deep down our needs are simple: apart from food, shelter, and clothing there are the needs to love and be loved, for community, to be open to the world at large and for it to be open to us, to affect and be affected, to understand and be understood, to hear and be heard, to accept and be accepted. It is only when we fear that these needs won't be met that we grasp at them, and in the grasping lose any chance of satisfying them. Love controlled is not love; just as sex demanded is rape and acceptance expected is subservience. But if we fear, then demand we must, for to fear these needs will not be met is to fear for our lives as surely as if our lack of love and acceptance were instead the absence of food and water. With these deep needs unsatisfied we waste away, shrivel, and die as from hunger or thirst. We die, but we go on surviving. The search for that which should have been there all along continues, but we can no longer receive it, nor even recognize it.
And so we grasp all the more recklessly, demand all the more strenuously, never now slaking thirst nor sating hunger. The circle of necessary control grows wider, the hold grows tighter, until the objects once loved are hated for the shreds of their remaining independence, the perceived unwillingness to conform to the precise and impossible accommodation of our ever-changing wishes which could grant us satisfaction, give us peace. We sense that this control of others is futile, perhaps, and yet we act
upon the unacknowledged belief that to realize this control and quiet our fears we must affect all those we encounter that do not reflect our imagined dominance, silence them, deny their subjective existence, and ultimately, kill them. At this point there can be no respite for the hungry and thirsty save death, which will come too soon for those controlled and never soon enough for those who control.
Fearing death, fearing life, fearing love, and fearing most of all the loss of control, we create social rules and institutions that mirror our fears and reinforce our destructive behaviors. Having surrounded ourselves with images of ourselves, and having silenced all others, we can now pretend that the false-front world we've created is instead the world we've been given. We can pretend the world is a very dangerous place, where dogs eat dogs, where children and others must be beaten into submission, where a fierce struggle takes place in which only the strongest, meanest, most unethical and hateful survive, and ultimately where we die alone and afraid. Any threat to this illusion must be annihilated before it reminds us of what we've lost, what we've destroyed, and of what could have been. And so we kill all witnesses: the vast flocks of passenger pigeons; the islands of great auks; the massive herds of bison; the great forests; each and every nonhierarchical and peaceful indigenous culture; each and every new child, wild and beautiful and free and creative as she is; even our own consciences and direct experiences of the world.
No matter how we try, we cannot eradicate every vestige of life and love. Each new child—human, plant, animal, stone, or star—offers a new possibility, and each new encounter an opportunity for communion, however great or slight. Just yesterday I drove to the grocery store to pull boxes of scraps from the dumpster. As I worked I noticed a man sitting on a curb, watching. His clothes were old, ill-fitting, and torn, his shoes falling apart. I couldn't tell his age; the bottle, in a brown paper bag, from which he drank may have aged him ten years, or maybe twenty-five. I finished the boxes, and got in the truck. We made eye contact, and nodded. He stood and walked toward me. "Do you get food out of there?"
Homeless people ask me that all the time. Had I pulled anything of value, I would have given it to him. "Sometimes. Today I just got lettuce leaves." He thought for a moment, looked away, then looked back to me. He reached in his pocket and said, "Can I donate a couple of bucks so you can get some food?"
Communion. "No thanks," I said, "The lettuce is for my chickens." I smiled, and he smiled back. "Thanks," I said, "Thanks so much."
Things don't have to be the way they are.
It's two days later. Two young chickens died the night before last, most likely from cold and damp. I was awakened near dawn not by dreams of chicks, but by the barking of my dogs. I stumbled to the window and pulled the drapes in time to see them chasing a slender slip of reddish-tan through deep grass and into the woods. I went back to sleep, and they awoke me again not long after. Again I looked outside, and this time saw the dogs not running, but standing and barking. I followed their gaze to see a coyote—I assume the same one because it had the same reddish coat—standing twenty feet away, not moving. We made eye contact for one long moment, and still dopey from sleep I could think of nothing more profound to say than, "Hey, why don't you stay away from the chickens?" The coyote continued to stare, as now did the dogs, perhaps all three stunned by the brilliance of my morning wit. My mind slogged through mud as I tried to assemble another comment. Finally the coyote turned and walked slowly into the trees, and the dogs, too, turned to mind to their morning. I crawled back into bed.
When I awoke for the day I went outside and into the rain. The chicks were huddled, trilling, under a makeshift shelter that keeps them dry, and normally warm as well. Closer inspection revealed two dead chicks far underneath the mass. I took them to the coyote tree, and returned to my desk. A little later I heard Narcissus give his battle cry, taken up now by Amaru, who is learning the same pitched yell. Running outside I saw again the same coyote, again standing to stare. Again I called the same feeble question, "Why don't you stay away from the chickens?" This time the coyote turned, walked to a fence post, lifted his leg, then trotted into the bushes.
I have a strong suspicion of what the coyote may have meant by this, but I
don’t know for sure. I do know that my efforts at interspecies communication are doomed so long as I expect others - by which I mean everyone else on the planet - to learn my language, and I remain unwilling to learn theirs. In the ways of these other languages I remain embarrassingly ignorant. Though I own no television I know commercials for products I will never use better than I know birdsongs I hear at dawn and dusk. Play me three notes of Stairway to Heaven or Freebird (or even, embarrassingly enough, the theme songs to Green Acres or Gilligan's Island), and I can name that tune, but play me a symphony of bird songs I hear each day, and I've got no clue as to their origin or meaning. How could I possibly expect to integrate myself as a citizen into the community I at least call home if I can't be bothered to learn even their spoken or sung languages? And if I can't be bothered to discover who is speaking when the birds of morning begin their song, how can I expect to understand the language of gesture, or, beyond that, intent? How can I hope to grasp, accept, or appreciate what may be said by trees or grass or stones?
I had another dream of fishing recently, this time fishing from a boat on a rolling ocean. Once again I caught a huge fish, and once again it rushed me. This time, instead of leaping next to me the fish wrapped the line—strong as steel cable—around the boat, and then dove. It began to pull me down. I awoke, moaning and frightened.
Perhaps this dream, too, is about what we must do. We need not only eat whatever fish the Dreamgiver and the world offers, but we need to let it eat us as well. We need to let the world hook us as we have hooked it, and to let it play us and reel us in. Perhaps in taking the world into our bodies we also need to dive into the body of the world, to dive down deep and let it pull us deeper still, until at last we not only consume but are consumed, until at last we are no longer separate—standing alone and lonely on the darksome heights to which only men aspire—but instead, simply living in commune with the rest of the world.
Only recently—especially after teaching at a university for a few years—have I come to understand why the process of schooling takes so long. Even when I was young it seemed to me that most classroom material could be presented and assimilated in four, maybe five, years. After you learn fractions and negative numbers in first or second grade, what new principles are taught in math until algebra in junior high? It's the same with science, art, history, reading, certainly writing. Nearly everything I learned those years—and this was true for my friends as well—was gleaned through books and conversations outside class. It's true to the point of cliché that most of the "crap" we learn in high school, as Simon and Garfunkel put it, is a bland stew of names, dates, and platitudes to be stored up the night before each test, then forgotten the moment the test is handed in.
During high school, I believed the primary purpose of school was to break children of the habit of daydreaming. If you force them to sit still long enough, eventually they tire even of sinking turn-around fadeaways at the buzzer to win NBA championships. Having sat in the back of the class lining rockets over the left field fence for the better part of thirteen years, I was ready to move on.
I've since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years. It takes that long to sufficiently break a child's will. It is not easy to disconnect children's wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure. Less time wouldn't do it, and in fact, those who are especially slow go to college. For the exceedingly obstinate child there is graduate school.
I have nothing against education; it's just that education— from the Greek root educere, meaning to lead forth or draw out, and originally a midwife's term meaning to be present at the birth of—is not the primary function of schooling. I'm not saying by all t
his that Mrs. Calloway, my first-grade teacher, was trying to murder the souls of her tiny charges, any more than I've been trying to say that individual scientists are necessarily hell-bent on destroying the planet or that individual Christians necessarily hate women and hate their bodies. The problem is much worse than that, it is not merely personal nor even institutional (although the institutions we've created do mirror the destructiveness of our culture). It is implicit in the processes, and therefore virtually transparent.
Take the notion of assigning grades in school. Like the wages for which people later slave—once they've entered "the real world"—the primary function of grades is to offer an external reinforcement to coerce people to perform tasks they'd rather not do. Did anyone grade you when you learned how to fish? What grades did you get for pretending, shooting hoops, playing pinball, reading good books, kissing ("I'm sorry, dear, but you receive a C"), riding horses, swimming in the ocean, having intense conversations with close friends? On the other hand, how often have you returned, simply for the joy of it, to not only peruse your high school history textbook, but to memorize names and dates, and, once again for the joy of it, to have a teacher mark, in bright red, your answers as incorrect?