A Language older than Words Read online

  Things don't have to be the way they are.

  The story I've recounted is merely an anecdote told by a nonscientific people. Who are the witnesses? They are irrational people making nonscientific observations.

  If we decide the story is a metaphor, we need not call them liars, but we also need not reconsider our worldview. The women and children took on the qualities they observed in wolves, huddling together in a shallow cave, perhaps even finding an old wolfskin to wrap around themselves to stay warm. They stalked buffalo, and found a fresh kill. Maybe they even chased away wolves. They avoided white men as the wolves, too, had learned to avoid them, and eventually found their way home. Our perception of physical reality must be based on solid scientific evidence, not fairy tales.

  I once asked a scientist friend of mine what it would take to convince her that interspecies communication is real. She said, "If an animal were to act against its nature after you asked it to, I'd reconsider."

  Leaving aside the question of what defines an animal's nature, I asked, "Like a pack of coyotes not eating chickens?"

  "Not good enough."

  I suppose that was a polite way of saying she didn't believe me. I told her how the Chipewyan Indian children frequently found wolf dens in order to play with the pups, and told her that we don't even have to take the Indians' word for it: the eighteenth-century explorer Samual Hearne, the first white man to explore northern Canada, described it: "I never knew a Northern Indian [to] hurt one of them; on the contrary, they always put them carefully into the den again; and I have sometimes seen them paint the faces of the young wolves with vermillion, or red ochre."

  She didn't say anything, so I pulled a book off the shelf and told her about an incident at a wildlife refuge in New Jersey. A population explosion of whitetail deer prompted managers to allow hunting there. Many people opposed the hunt, so some areas of the refuge remained off-limits. "A funny thing happened," stated a manager, "and I would not have believed it had I not seen it happen. For a couple of days prior to the hunt, we spotted numerous deer leaving the area to be hunted, swimming the Passaic River into the area that was closed to hunting. It was as though someone had tipped them off. And hunting season hadn't even begun." I told my friend that every experienced hunter I know often witnesses this same thing: bucks feed openly in fields a few days before the season opens, then disappear before the shooting begins.

  She continued to look at me, her face blank, and I could tell she was losing patience. I pushed ahead, and told her about the Gaddy Goose Refuge. In the mid-1930s, a North Carolina farmer named Lockhart Gaddy began feeding Canada geese at his farm. Soon, there were so many that tourists began to visit. The geese felt safe: at neighboring farms they wouldn't allow anyone within a quarter-mile of them, but at Gaddys they allowed tourists to touch them. Both birds and visitors continued to increase until there were nearly 30,000 Canada geese, and as many human visitors. In 1953 Gaddy died of an apparent heart attack while feeding the geese. His wife, Hazel, said there was silence among the 10,000 birds there at the time. Gaddy was buried on a mound fifty feet from the goose pond in a grove of trees. Witnesses commented that on the day of the funeral the geese were silent. After it was over, they paraded to the grave, walking all around and over it time and again. The number of geese visiting the refuge continued to increase until Mrs. Gaddys death in the early 1970s. A relative of the Gaddys' took over, but the geese apparently communicated to one another that the Gaddys were no more, and by 1975 the refuge had to be closed because the geese were gone. Although large V-shaped formations continue to fly overhead during their autumn migration, they never land anymore.

  "Nice story," she said. "What's your point?"

  I closed my eyes and thought, then told her the story of the wolf taking care of Indians after Sand Creek.

  Exasperated, she said, "This is not evidence. These are just stories. They don't mean anything. Give me hard science. Give me something reproducible." A long silence between us. She crossed her arms and looked down. She reached with her right hand to stroke her chin. Finally looking back up, she said, "You know, there is nothing you can say that would convince me."

  I was exasperated, too. I was angered by her dogmatic faith masquerading as skepticism. I thought about saying a lot of things, but instead grabbed some other sources, and said, "Okay, I'll give you the only sort of reproducibility our culture can create with regard to human-wolf relations. 1630: 'It is ordered [in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay], that there should be 10 shillings a piece allowed for such wolves as are killed.' 1645: 'Mr. Bartholomew, John Johnson, Mr. Sprauge, Mr. Winsley, & Mr. Hubbard are chosen a committee to consider the best ways and means to destroy the wolves which are such ravenous cruel creatures, & daily vexations to all the inhabitants of the colony.' 1854: 'All hands were preparing meat in pieces about two inches square, cutting a slit in the middle and opening it and putting a quantity of strychnine in the center and closing the parts upon it. . . . One morning after putting out the poison, they picked up sixty-four wolves. . . . The proceeds from that winters hunt [sic] were over four thousand dollars.' 1872: 'Before proceeding to skin the dead wolves, the Mexicans [hired by an outfit in Kansas] captured this old fellow [a wolf "who was exceedingly sick"] and haltered him, by carbine straps, to the horns of the buffalo carcasses, near which he sat on his haunches, with eyes yellow from rage and fright. . . . Man never appreciates the wonderful command that God gave him over the other animals until surrounded by the wild beasts of the solitudes, in all their native fierceness.' 1871: 'Not far above this [temporary village built by wolf and buffalo hunters] was a road going thro the swampy creek valley, about 75 yards wide, and this had been artistically and scientifically paved with gray wolf carcasses.' 1900: 'I can not believe that Providence intended these rich lands, broad, well watered, fertile and waving with abundant pasturage, close by mountains and valleys, filled with gold, and every metal and mineral, should forever be monopolized by wild beasts and savage men. I believe in the survival of the fittest, and hence I have "fit" for it all my life. . . . The wolf is the enemy of civilization, and I want to exterminate him.'"

  We stared at each other for a long moment, then she looked away. I should have stopped, but I didn't. I told her that after killing all but one of the pups in a den, government officers would chain the last one to a tree, and then shoot all the adults who tried to rescue the frightened pup. After being trapped, wolves would be collared with a leather belt, tied to a stake, and—jaw wired shut—either left to die of dehydration or to be dismembered by the hunters' dogs. Wolves were lassoed and then dragged to their death. I told her that even today, wolves are shot from airplanes, poisoned with strychnine, cyanide. Killed.

  Is it any wonder, I asked my friend, that we do not observe them coming to us in the dark, that they do not feed us, care for us, and lead us home? Is it any wonder they run frightened from us?

  It should be clear by now, I said, after all these years, all these extinctions, all these lost opportunities for redemption and community, that somewhere along the line, to switch from Latinate to Anglo-Saxon roots, we fucked up. And today? We're still fucking up. We still believe we stand alone atop the world. But it has to stop. At some point we will finally have to look around and see if anyone is still able, and willing, to lead us home.

  She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. I wondered if I had said too much.

  I majored in economics at graduate school. The main lesson I learned was about the primacy of process, that when I act from indirect intentions, roadblocks arise, requiring force of will to maintain my course in direct proportion to that course's distance from my heart.

  Here's what I mean: I went to graduate school not because I particularly cared about economics, but so I could continue high jumping. When I'd graduated from college, I'd felt as though a part of me had died too soon. I'd only jumped for two and a half years, and with just another year I thought I could qualify for, and maybe even win, the Division II national champ
ionship.

  But even that possibility didn't motivate me as much as the unfettered joy of the sport. I loved the utter loss of self-consciousness as I stood up, the glide of the approach, the softness of takeoff—more an inevitability, a falling upward, than a thrust—the eerie, erotic smoothness of clearing the bar. The sport was a perfect fit for me. This doesn't mean I didn't work at it, for I did, but there is a difference between work for the sake of love, which provides its own motivation, and work for the sake of another end.

  There's a Chinese term that encapsulates my high-jumping experience: wu-wei, which means not doing, not in the sense of doing nothing, but of not forcing. Not only were my best jumps unforced, but the flow of high jumping—from accidental discovery by the handball teacher, to his patient nurturance, to winning our conference championship—contrasted painfully with the larger, and largely forced, process of schooling.

  The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote of a similar process of assistance or resistance: "The fates guide those who will; those who won't they drag." If earlier the fates had guided me into jumping, they now began to drag me away. Soon after signing up for classes, I discovered that the School of Mines had switched athletic associations, and the new association did not allow graduate students to compete. On hearing this I considered dropping out, but because I'd already jumped high enough to qualify for many regional and national meets, I kept attending school with the thought of jumping independently.

  The fates didn't allow this, either. A few weeks later I injured my jump foot. Neither the trainers nor school doctors could find anything wrong, so I dealt with the injury the way I dealt with all pain, by walling it off. The positive form of the self's disappearance in jumping returned to its shadow as I forcefully separated myself from my body signals. I hopped to my mark on one foot, turned off the pain, ran the approach, jumped, allowed the pain back in, and hopped out of the pit. I kept hoping that if only I could deafen myself sufficiently to the pain, I could will myself over the bar, and was surprised at how poorly this worked. I kept jumping, and, as I later found out, kept rebreaking my foot—for X rays later revealed it to be broken—with every jump I forced myself to do.

  Nor did classes work out. I majored in economics because it was the easiest thing offered at the School of Mines, and because I'd enjoyed the half-dozen or so classes I'd already taken. I could only enjoy them, though, because I didn't take them seriously. While the goal of economics—as is also true of physics—consists of equations ostensibly created to describe real-life events, it does so poorly. In order to make equations manageable (thus allowing the pretension that life is manageable) economists must disregard or fudge variables that may be difficult or impossible to quantify. Thus today I can look in an economics textbook and see that Wh = B + M, which means that wealth by definition equals bonds plus money, because, as the authors state, "bonds and money are the only stores of wealth." This example is not unfair: corporate accountants do not factor human happiness into their bottom lines, or the suffering of enslaved children. The voices of wild wolf and caged hen do not enter these equations. Like our science and our religion, corporate economics deafens us to corporeal life.

  What's more ludicrous is that the equations fail to describe even our economic system. The equations I learned were based almost exclusively on the model of something called "the free market." It was hard for me to waste time learning equations based on something that doesn't exist: even Dwayne Andreas, former chief executive officer of the agribusiness transnational Archer Daniels Midland, admits, "There is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians." You see the same thing in economics classes.

  For our economics textbooks to have been accurate, they would need to be printed in blood. The blood of indigenous peoples destroyed so their land could be taken, bought, and sold. The blood of salmon, beaver, and buffalo commodified and killed for the money they have come to represent. The blood of all of us whose lives are diminished in the act of commodifying others. The blood of slaves and wage slaves who spend their lives toiling so their owners may have the leisure that is the birthright of every living being. The blood of the land itself, poisoned by "externalities," those cumbersome details too dark or difficult or inconvenient to take their place in the economic equations that guide so much of our lives. The blood of everyone who is silenced by economic theory. In the same vein as our science and religion, the most obvious function of our economics is the erection of a sociopolitical framework on which to base a system of exploitation.

  I hung on through fall semester, and bailed in early spring. High jumping was a bust. The classes were meaningless, and were no longer fun. I remember a class in managerial economics, the textbook for which was Machiavelli's The Prince. The instructor told us our grade would be based on presentations, and because the business world is, as he put it, "a world of cutthroat competition," students were encouraged to sabotage other students' work. He gave the example of someone stealing the bulb from a slide projector when the presenter had left the room. Because the presenter had another bulb in his pocket, he received an A. I did not last the day; after hearing that story I packed away my notebook, slipped out the door, and went to the registrars office to drop the class.

  Economics

  "The theories of Milton Friedman gave him the Nobel Prize; they gave Chile General Pinochet." Eduardo Galeano

  THE WORD economics comes from the Greek ta oikonomika, which means the science of household management. It is how one takes care of one's house. The word has suffered devaluation, and now means the management of money.

  The word ecocide comes from Greek as well, oikos, meaning house, and cidium, meaning to slay or destroy. Ecocide is the destruction of a house.

  It doesn't make much sense for me to raise chickens. Why should I go to the trouble of incubating chicks, keeping them in my bathtub, dumpster diving for food, and conversing with coyotes, when I can go to Albertson's and buy a package of drumsticks for less than a buck a pound?

  Not much that we do in our personal lives makes much economic sense, just as most things we do for money make no sense in personal terms. It makes little economic sense for me to write this book: my pay will probably hover around a buck an hour (enough, at least, to buy a pound of chicken). From a fiscal standpoint, I'd be better off working at McDonald's. High jumping didn't pay. Friendships don't pay. It makes no economic sense to make love: it takes time, uses calories, and costs money if you use condoms or pills.

  I suppose if we stretch the definition, making love can be made to fit into certain economic categories: my friend tells me the price for sex on East Sprague here in Spokane is fifty bucks for a lay, forty bucks for a blow, and a hundred for the woman to do whatever you want for an hour.

  It could be argued that by moving swiftly from lovemaking to buying sex I am blurring distinctions that shouldn't be blurred. But that's what happens to any process when we turn it into an economic exchange, whether we're talking about a trick on East Sprague, a pound of chicken at Albertson's, or a book at Hastings or Borders. The complex and often murky processes—lovemaking in the first place; the gathering, raising, or killing of food (as well as more broadly our relations with other species) in the second; and in the third the process of exploring and articulating what it means to be alive and human—have been telescoped into commodities that can be quantified and transferred. Id like three books, two packages of chicken McNuggets, and a blow to go, please. That which it is possible to reduce to a commodity and sell, is. That which can't, is either (by definition) devalued, ignored, or simply destroyed.

  Let's get back to East Sprague, and to what must be lost in transition from intimate to commercial. Love is certainly lost, but what else? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps the transition merely demystifies—removes the shroud of projection, of unnecessary and cumbersome mystery—to reveal what, at base, is really there: friction on skin, stimulation of nerve endi
ngs, lubrication, seminal emission. Nothing else. Perhaps our economics reduces it as surely and cleanly as does our science to what is reproducible and quantifiable in any laboratory to what is real: we have time of erection, cubic centimeters and chemical content of semen, chemical content of the woman's lubrication (if you pay fifty). With the right equipment we could track the chemicals in the man's brain as he comes, and those in the woman's brain as she thinks of something else.

  Here's the problem: in this tidy world of economic categories, there's no room for love, joy, mystery, for the sometimes confused and confusing, sometimes clear and clarifying, sometimes beautiful, sometimes magical suction of body on body, skin on skin, soul on soul. The process of lovers entangling and moving together figures little in the exchanges on East Sprague.

  But I suppose even within the context of a relationship we could twist sexuality to make it fit within economic categories: I give pleasure in order to receive an equal amount of pleasure. It's an economic exchange as surely as if money changed hands, with the currency now caresses. But as was the case for the two friends sucking on straws, this description of economic selfishness does not describe the process as I experience it. My experience—and this is true not just about sexuality—is quite the opposite of what our economic philosophy would suggest. The purpose—and this, too, is true for all of life—is in the giving, sharing, and receiving wrapped inextricably into a single thread.

  Our economics, as is true of our science, represents the triumph of product over process, and form over content. It is the triumph of selective deafness and blindness over conscience and relationship. I don't care how miserable was the chickens life nor how poisonous the hormones, just give me cheap and juicy drumsticks. I don't care that the prostitute is probably poor and was sexually abused as a child, nor that the encounter will be devoid of emotional content, just get me off. My shoes were made in an Indonesian sweatshop? I don't have the money to buy socially and ecologically friendly shoes that cost twice as much. It doesn't matter that the production of my toilet paper came at the expense of clearcut mountainsides, sedimented streams, and rivers poisoned with dioxin; I cannot afford, once again, to buy the unbleached and recycled stuff that goes for fifty cents a roll.