A Language older than Words Read online

  I do not know the interior nature of the universe, nor the essential truth about evolution. But if there is one thing I know about natural selection it is this: creatures who have survived in the long run, have survived in the long run. It is not possible to survive in the long run by taking from your surroundings more than you give back, in other words, one cannot survive in the long run through the domination of one's surroundings. It is quite clearly in the best interest of a bear to make sure that the salmon return and that berries ripen. They can eat them, but they cannot hyperexploit them and still expect to survive. Insofar as competitors enrich and enliven the natural community in which they live, it is in the bear's best interest to see that they, too, thrive, which it does by doing nothing—by simply being a bear. The same can be said for deer, who couldn't survive without wolves or other predators, and for wolves, who couldn't survive without deer. The same can be said for all of us—human and nonhuman alike—that we cannot long survive unless we cooperate with those around us.

  It seems likely that no one living today will ever experience a fully natural interaction with either another human or nonhuman. All observations, including my own, are made as through a glass darkly, because we now live in a world of refugees.

  The Yanomame Indians are a violent and misogynistic group of people, but how much of that violence has developed in defensive response to marauding Europeans? We shall never know what they were like before, nor will we know anything about peaceful groups. After encountering the Arawaks, Christopher Columbus wrote: "They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they capable of using them, although they are well-built people of handsome stature, because they are wondrously timid.... [T]hey are so artless and free with all they possess, that no one could believe it without having seen it. Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or of small price, at once they are content with whatever little thing of whatever kind may be given to them." The Arawaks were exterminated for their kindness.

  These are some observations that are worth our consideration. We know that groups of Yanomame who were better hidden from European influence are less misogynistic and less violent than their troubled cousins. Our violence has reversed the rule of cooperative natural selection, such that those who fight possibly survive, and those who don't fight will most likely die. The inverse is true as well: those who survive learn how to fight, or more precisely, those who survive learn by painful experience to deafen themselves to their own suffering, and the suffering of others. The deafness facilitates the perpetration of extreme violence since extreme violence and survival are now associated. The violence leads only to further deafness, each furthering the other in a spiral of attenuated feelings until at long last we mimic "beast-machines"—horribly frightened, and not so very rational after all.

  I do not know what my brothers would have become without exposure to my father's violence. Nor do I know the same about my sisters or my mother. Nor also do I know what it would have been like to have a father whose parents had not transformed him through their own violence. With no notion of what a peaceful family or a peaceful culture might have to offer, I am now a refugee from my own childhood. The millions of rape victims around the world are refugees from a worldview that was not inevitable, but chosen. We all—human and nonhuman alike—are refugees from the war zone that is civilization.

  We would not expect studies made of Russians fleeing the advance of Nazi panzers in World War II, or later suffering under the eyes of Einsatzgruppen, to adequately reflect ordinary—nonstressed—human behavior, so why do we assume that anthropological studies—by definition performed by members of the dominant culture or those at least partially assimilated, under rules devised by the dominant culture, for the benefit and perpetuation of that same culture—reveal any more about the ordinary—nonstressed—state of humans? The same can be asked about studies of nonhumans. What makes us think, as we systematically destroy their homes and exploit them, that they will act around us as they ordinarily do—perhaps fearlessly, perhaps cooperatively—or even that they are any more capable of acting as they would have before?

  What happens to those who are so stupid—or perhaps so principled—that they do not modify their behavior to protect themselves in this war zone? The dodos, a product of their benign environment, were fearless when they first encountered Europeans. We cured them of that fearlessness by destroying them, as we cured the Arawak people, the passenger pigeon, the Eskimo curlew.

  The violence of civilization provides us with two options. We can distance ourselves from the world of experience, sense, and emotion, or we can die. I've tried the first, and I'm not ready for the second. We need a third option.

  Breaking Out

  "The world of the concentration camps . . . was not an exceptionally monstrous society. What we saw there was the image, and in a sense the quintessence, of the infernal society into which we are plunged every day." Eugene lonesco

  I’M NOT SUGGESTING THAT there is no selfishness in the world, nor that the world would be a better place if we'd "stop acting so selfishly." We would be better off if we were to act in our own best interest. No one benefitted from my childhood. No one benefits from rape. Hitler benefited no one, not even himself. Who benefits from the production of plutonium? Who benefits from the production of weapons of mass destruction? Who benefits from the use of pesticides? Who benefits from the eradication of indigenous peoples? Answer: no one you know, or would care to meet. To believe we're acting out of self-interest would be to buy into the presumption that our way of living serves us well, and that the destruction is merely an unfortunate by-product, a grotesque trade-off made by the rest of the world.

  There's a sense in which the last part of this equation is true: the hyperconsumerism that marks our way of life is predicated on the exploitation of human and nonhuman "resources" worldwide who pay with their own misery—remember the 150,000,000 children enslaved; the billion chickens per year crammed into metal cages—to create monetarily cheap consumables. But the second half does not equal the first: the consumer lifestyle does not lead to living well, and it is not in anyone's best interest. This is not to say that, all other things being equal, and remaining snugly within the constricting framework of our culture, I would rather be poor than rich. But that is part of the problem: by systematically eliminating alternatives— try to withdraw from the cash-and-wage economy and live in the United States as a hunter-gatherer—we've confined ourselves in a kind of prison.

  Just as at Auschwitz, or in other situations of perpetual trauma, circumstances can be created in which people are so oppressed and their options so narrowly circumscribed that it pays to exploit others, to make certain that they themselves get the easier job or the last scrap of potato, to make certain they can hop like a frog longer than the people who must be killed that day (or in our case, receive a pink slip). In a concentration camp, it is better (in terms of maintaining physical life: spiritual life is an entirely different question) to be the killer than the killed, better to be a collaborator than a resister, a guard than a collaborator, a supervisor than a guard, and better still to be the boss. But of course it would be better to not be in the camp at all.

  Our way of life presupposes that it's in our best interest to coerce others into doing what we want them to do. This presupposition is manifested in our economics—by definition, the purpose of capitalism is to amass enough wealth to put others to work for you—and it's enshrined in our scientific explanation of the world. As the influential sociobiologist Richard Dawkins puts it: "Natural selection favours genes which control their survival machines [survival machines and lumbering robots are, sadly enough, two terms Dawkins uses for humans and other living beings] in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species." B
ut this presupposition—that it's in our best interest to exploit others— is valid only for the extremely confining and specific circumstances of people living under constant threat of trauma, those who cannot afford to build and maintain relationships. Do we "make the best use of” our friends? If so, what does that say about our friendships? I remember once hearing an economist speak about "the way people are." He evoked his teenage years when he shared milkshakes with friends, two straws to a glass, and each would pull on the straw for all he was worth, trying to get the most shake. My own teenage experience was far different; my friends and I would generally insist the other take the last of whatever we were sharing. The relationship, and my friend's feelings, were always more important than the material at hand. To take more than my share would have meant the end of a friendship.

  Part of the reason we've been able to convince ourselves that by exploiting others we're acting in our own best interest is that we've accepted a severely constricted definition of self. My father may have gotten off during his visits to my room late at night, but what did that do to his soul and to our relationship? Is it in a father's best interests to terrorize his son, to establish control through a hierarchy based on size and strength? It's all very well and good for the authors of Demonic Males to theorize that "it could pay the woman to acknowledge the rapist s power and form a relationship that, while initially repellent, she comes to accept," and that "a demonstration of power implies that the female’s safest future is to bond with the violent male," but in the real world, where real men rape real women, where real fathers rape real children, where the real activities of our culture are destroying the real world, who are the real beneficiaries? "Like successful Chicago gangsters," Richard Dawkins has written, "our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior." How pathetic this is, that in an attempt to rationalize our actions, we have at last given up claims that our destructive, irrational, behavior is even in our best interests as human beings, and have sunk to redefining our very selves as nothing more than "survival machines," "lumbering robots" driven to insane action by the "selfish" desires of our genetic material. The Christian hatred of the body merges here with Cartesian solipsism to conjure ourselves entirely out of subjective existence.

  It is time to return to the real world. If my brothers were to die, I would feel pain and loss: they are a part of me as surely as my hands, my fingers, or the hours of my life. If my mother were to die, or my sisters, I would feel pain. Each of my friends is a part of me, connected by bonds at least as strong, though not so visible, as skin.

  I love the land where I live, the trees—the coyote tree, the grandfather ponderosa, and others—the dogs, cats, birds, coyotes, spiders, ticks, even the mice. How can we be so poor as to define ourselves as an ego tied in a sack of skin, or worse, as lumbering automatons pressed into service by gangsterish genes? We are the relationships we share, we are that process of relating, we are, whether we like it or not, permeable—physically, emotionally, spiritually, experientially—to our surroundings. I am the bluebirds and nuthatches that nest here each spring, and they, too, are me. Not metaphorically, but in all physical truth. I am no more than the bond between us. I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet.

  The boundaries of the concentration camp are not made up of landmines and electrified wire. There are no guards posted to shoot us if we stray. We need not take the whip from the hands of the guards, nor use it to strike those beneath us. It's all much simpler than that. We need only walk away, and re-enter the world in all its unity.

  No one emerges from trauma unscarred. Having been severely traumatized, it becomes the work of at least a lifetime to denormalize the trauma—-to recognize it for the aberration it is—and to begin to reinhabit your body, your senses, your mind, to reinhabit relationships, to reinhabit a world you perceive as having betrayed you.

  Only recently have I learned that not everyone awakens in the night to listen for the sound of the door creaking open, or at four in the morning stares hard into the darkness of a room intentionally blackened, searching for the black-on-black of a silhouette. Throughout my twenties, I checked the room each night, and though I never found anyone hiding under the bed, or in the closet, I continued to enact the fear I learned as a child. Even now I often put my clothes hamper in front of the door, not expecting it to stop anyone, but instead mechanically manifesting my childhood prayer: Do not let him come for me when I sleep. Do not let him catch me unready. Let me be awake always, so when he comes, I can go away. A few nights ago I dreamed my father was raping me, saying again and again as he interminably came, "I am going to make you like me. I am going to make you normal."

  I have my poison; you have yours. Name it. Walk away from it. But it's terrifying. There are landmines. I can see them, having grown up with them. There is barbed wire. I do not like this concentration camp, but I believe the world is no different.

  ....

  Having passed through trauma, we have a choice we must revisit for the rest of our lives: attempt to denormalize the trauma, or try to make the trauma feel normal. If the barriers are too frightening, the landmines too real, we can try to rationalize, to normalize what happened to us. This also helps rationalize what we're doing to others. This process of normalizing is central to the fabrication of claims to virtue. It is also central to the way Western science and religion manifest themselves.

  Examples of this normalization are as near as todays paper. A local couple is on trial for animal abuse. After receiving complaints for a number of years, sheriffs raided their puppy mill. The officers found a dog with exposed bone where a fractured jaw had healed, several with protruding intestines, and several more with neck lacerations from constricting collars. There was one mother trying to feed nearly forty puppies. Thirty-five of the adult dogs had to be killed. The couples defense in court? They owned those dogs. They cited Psalms 8: "Thou madest him [man] to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passes through the paths of the seas." The emphasis—that beasts of the field are things—is in the original.

  The judge evidently had no choice but to find them guilty of some of the charges. He then delivered an attack which the newspaper called blistering. He did not attack the defendants but instead "overzealous animal rights activists" who called for justice in the first place.

  What do you do, how tired do you get, when each day you struggle against an entire culture based on the normalization of trauma-inducing behavior? There is no sanctuary.

  Last winter, ice came in a rain that froze the instant it touched any solid surface. Then more rain, more ice, until the night shone, every blade of grass, every needle on every pine tree a prism for the moonlight that eventually poked through the clouds.

  A crust covered the snow and an inch-thick sheath of ice dressed trees, wires, and rocks. Branches fell. Entire trees snapped under the weight, cracking like rifle reports in the deathly-still night. Cars couldn't negotiate the black-ice. Power failed all over town. When clouds returned, the night was as dark as dark can be, as night was before the dawn of our culture. Then the moon reemerged, its light refracting through the thousands of tiny spears.

  It was cold. I sat near the fire until something—someone— called me outside. I felt the same urgency I'd felt the day I first looked out to see the coyote sneaking up. I knew this call was not from the coyotes, though I didn't know who it was.

  I began to walk toward the mailbox, but my feet carried me in the opposite direction, into the forest. I was walking toward the coyote tree. I wal
ked faster, each step making two sounds as first I broke through the ice, then packed the snow underneath. Doubled grasses swayed or snapped as I brushed against them, and trees were breaking, perhaps four to the minute, like a desultory firefight. I began to run.

  I got to the coyote tree. The break was jagged and fresh, no ice. I kissed and stroked the wound, then put my arms around the standing trunk, pressing my face into its smooth coldness. I kissed it. I didn't know what else to do. Stroking the ice-covered bark, I said, "It will be all right. You'll be okay." I didn't know if this was true. I also said, "I love you."

  What is the appropriate response to a friends injury, when to remedy the injury or even ameliorate the pain is beyond your power? I held the tree that night, and held others, and tried to give back at least a little of what over the years they have given me.

  During the massacre at Sand Creek ("I can hit the son of a bitch. Let me try him") two women and their children were able to escape, but they soon realized that they were lost. They took refuge in a cave too shallow to hold off the cold. Late at night a large wolf entered the cave, and lay next to them. At first they were frightened, but at least they were warm. The next day the wolf walked with them, resting when they rested. Finally one of the women said, "O Wolf, try to do something for us. We and our children are nearly starved." The wolf led them to a freshly killed buffalo. They ate. Walking with them for the next few weeks, the wolf found food for them when they were hungry, and protected them from both humans and nonhumans. At last he led them to their people, the Cheyenne, and after receiving food, he disappeared.