Songs of the Dead Read online

  It suddenly seems clear to me—and I’m embarrassed it took a bumblebee, or anyone, really, to point this out to me—that if you don’t fear life, and instead are present to life, as it’s clear that bumblebees, spiders, sweet clovers, ponderosa pine don’t fear life and are present to life; if you don’t perceive yourself as living in a cage, because you’re not living in a cage, you’ll feel more intensely, you’ll be more intensely, you’ll be more alive. There’s a reason we call them wild, and there’s a reason the ground squirrel chewed her way out of the cage when I was young. Most of us, I think, would have sat down and tried to minimize our discomfort—through drugs, alcohol, relationships, television, sex, jobs, buying, religion, power, and most of all rationalization—and soon would have told ourselves and anyone who would listen that our cage is no cage, that in fact there is no cage at all. And we would attempt to kill all those who try to show us otherwise. Thus the murder of the wild.

  It suddenly seems equally clear to me that if you don’t fear death in the same way we fear death—that is, call death an enemy to be defeated or transcended, rather than someone who walks beside us to the very end and with whom we converse one way or another (and who has much to teach us) for our entire lives—then you will both live and die radically differently. I don’t mean you will never feel terror, never run away, never lose your nerve. But if death is simply (and complexly) death, and if all of your life is an ecstatic (and mundane) adventure, and if all of your life has the significance and vividness of a long and splendid (and sometimes mundane) dream, then you will not spend your precious days and nights in a state of anxiety, but will perceive your own approaching death as a continuation of that lifelong conversation. That doesn’t mean, of course, that you won’t fight or run from those who would kill you, but the fight or flight is transformed from the grim desperation of refugees fleeing some implacable oppressor to a free and wild and willing being encountering a new (and old) challenge, whether that challenge is to fight off and kill (or avoid, or placate) a grizzly bear with your hands, feet, and wits; or to die with the grace and dignity with which you have lived. To encounter a grizzly—or the infirmity of old age— under these circumstances would be not merely terrifying, but now also an exhilarating adventure.

  The question becomes: Can I do it?

  I get up, put on my clothes. I start to leave. I hear a voice. “All that,” it says, “is the barest start.”

  I tell all this to Allison. She smiles big.

  I say, “I kept thinking about that Lakota phrase, ‘It’s a good day to die.’ Until today I always pictured that said with a sort of desperate resolve, but now I can see how that could be said almost with a jubilance. Yesterday was a good day to live. This morning was a good morning to make love. This afternoon is a good day to die. A fabulous day to die. Whether it’s said—and felt—with desperation or jubilation makes all the difference in the world.”

  She’s still smiling.

  I say, “I have no idea how the Lakota mean that phrase, but I do know that’s how the bumblebees live it. They taught me that today.”

  We both sit.

  I say, “But there’s something I don’t understand. What’s the difference between death, and death?”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “Between a bear, or me, killing a fish to eat, and the Starkist or Unilever corporations killing fish to amass a fortune? The fish are just as dead.”

  “One individual fish, maybe, but not the ocean. One difference is that in the former case it serves the community.”

  It’s true. I’ve written about that. A few years ago a radio interviewer said to me that Indians exploited salmon, too. I said, “No, they didn’t. They ate them.”

  “What’s the difference?” he asked.

  I said they give them respect for the spirit in exchange for the flesh, but I knew that wasn’t the whole answer. That afternoon I went to the forest near my home and asked a tree, what is the fundamental predator-prey agreement? The tree gave me the answer immediately: when you consume the flesh of another, you now take responsibility for the continuation and dignity of the other’s community.

  “But there’s another difference,” Allison says, “between a wolf killing a moose or a moose killing a plant, and the U.S. bombing some group of people or a man raping a woman.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “In the former cases the death serves life. In the latter cases it’s not about death or life at all. It’s about control.”

  I nod.

  “What’s the difference,” she asks, “between making love and rape?”

  “There are lots of differences.”

  “Right now I’m thinking of one. Making love serves life. It makes love. It’s about life. Rape is about power. They share the same form, but the meaning and the process—I don’t mean a man moving in and out, but the emotional and spiritual processes, and the memories made—are radically different.”

  I nod again. She can tell that I still don’t quite understand.

  She gets up, walks to the bookshelf, pulls down a book, goes to another bookshelf, pulls down a magazine, pulls down another, brings them back, sits down. She says, “This is from a United States pilot who was dropping napalm on Vietnamese in 1966: ‘We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn’t so hot—if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene—now it stuck like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter,’” she pauses, looks at me, says, “Willie Peter means white phosphorous,” and then she continues reading, “so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it’ll keep burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.’”

  She puts down that magazine, picks up another, thumbs through it, says, “This is what Canadian Minister of Natural Resources John Efford says to those who wish to stop the slaughter of seals by Canadian sealers, ‘I would like to see the six million seals, or whatever number is out there, killed and sold, or destroyed or burned. I do not care what happens to them. The more they kill, the better I will love it.’ Or in the US invasion of the Philippines, soldiers were sent into the field ‘for the purpose of thoroughly searching each ravine, valley, and mountain peak for insurgents and for food, expecting to destroy everything I [found] outside of towns . . . all able-bodied men [were to] be killed or captured.’” Allison pauses, says, “Now here is the point, and remember what the man said about seals. General Jacob H. Smith gave orders that, ‘I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.’ When a subordinate requested clarification, Smith said he wanted all persons killed who were either hostile toward the United States or who were capable of bearing arms. This latter category explicitly included children down to the age of ten.’”

  Neither of us says anything.

  She says again: “‘The more they kill, the better I will love it.’ And, ‘The more you kill and burn the better you will please me.’”

  The more you kill and “My God,” I say.

  “Of course,” she responds. “Who else?”

  “That’s everything,” I say, “isn’t it?”

  “That’s the culture in a nutshell, yes.”

  “The wétiko disease.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re reaching the end, aren’t we?”

  “It can’t go on much longer.”

  “No.”

  “It can’t.”

  I understand, but I don’t. I want to understand better the difference between death and death. And I want to know more what it’s like to be a forest, not just anytime, but now, faced with this culture.

  Allison says, “You can ask me, and I’m glad to make up an answer, but if you want to know, why don’t you ask the forest?”

  Allison comes with me. We’re in the forest. She’s lying on the ground
and I’m on top of her, pushing into her as she pushes against the soil and the soil pushes against her. She wraps around me as the roots of trees reach from beneath the ground to wrap around us both. She comes, and so do I. The earth beneath us comes, as do the stones and trees.

  nine teen

  to be a forest

  I sit, back against a tree. I ask, “What is it like to be you, facing this culture? And what is the difference between death and death?”

  The answer comes immediately, and so clearly I have to look at Allison to see if she heard it too.

  Her face is blank.

  I say, “I’m supposed to go to the river.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I’ll find out when I get there.”

  There are a bunch of reasons I don’t talk much with Allison about my previous romantic relationships, not the least of which is that I’ve found that to talk very much about exes almost never helps the current relationship, or more specifically, the current partner. I can still hear my mother say to me when I was very young, “Help each person—whether grocery clerk or best friend—feel good about themselves, help them to feel like the only person in the world.” I remember her encouraging—even enforcing—this behavior when I was six, seven, eight. This must have been something my entire family learned, because I remember years later asking my sister if she thought I should discuss with my current girlfriend some problems I’d had with an ex, and I remember her saying, “Why would you want to do that? If you need to work through those issues, do it with someone not involved, with anyone other than your new girlfriend. Trust me on this. The questions to ask yourself before you bring up things like this are: How will talking about this make her feel about herself? Will it make her feel special? How will talking about this make her feel about you? How will talking about this make her feel about your current relationship? How will talking about this help the relationship itself? Are there other ways you can get across the same points without planting unnecessary memories?”

  Memories are alive, and once planted they grow. Allison re- members every detail, no matter how trivial, I’ve ever told her about anyone I’ve ever dated. The same is true for me, and the same is true for more or less everyone I’ve ever known. Mention that you once had sex on a train—and just for the record, I’m speaking theoretically— and I can guarantee what your partner will think about when she next hears that lonesome whistle blow. Talk about your hot weekend in Vegas where you were lucky both in cards and in love— once again, I’m making this up—and I’m guessing your partner’s enthusiasm for hearing you talk about poker might dim just a little.

  Several years ago I knew a woman whose boyfriend talked incessantly about previous girlfriends. All roads, she said, led to exes. There was no place they could go without him saying, “Oh, I brought Samantha here on our first date,” or “I used to come here all the time with Hope,” or “I used to date a Vietnamese woman whose favorite soup was pho, and she taught me how to pronounce it. She’s the only Asian woman I’ve ever had sex with.”

  She told me she’d gotten tired of never being alone with him, because he always brought along these ghosts. “It got so I was afraid to talk about anything,” my friend said, “because I was always waiting for him to conjure another woman into every conversation. I should have known something was wrong when right after the first time we were together, even still in bed, he started talking about old lovers.”

  I asked her what happened.

  “I got him to stop.”

  “How?”

  “We were housesitting for some friends who had a hot tub, and he and I were going to get in. Just before we did, I told him this reminded me of the time I’d had sex with some guy in a hot tub. I told him how wonderful it was, and I told him all the details, every last one, blow by blow, thrust by thrust.”

  “Was that true?”

  “Are you kidding me? I’d never even been in a hot tub, much less had sex in one. But my details were evidently convincing because he got very quiet and remembered there was a movie he wanted to watch instead. After a while I went inside and asked him if he liked how that felt.

  “And it worked?”

  “Absolutely. But a few months later we broke up anyway.”

  It is in the nature of memories, if they live, to grow and spread like plants. They can be fed and watered by, among many other things, tangible reminders. This is true of pleasant and unpleasant memories, memories we’d rather see flourish and memories we wish would die. It is true of personal memories, and it is true of memories who live among us collectively. Like plants, like humans, memories wish to stay alive, unless they don’t. And like so many others, they are hitchhikers: they live in humans, in rocks, in trees, in air, in the spaces between all these.

  I have not always understood this. I remember when I was an early teen, the husband of one family friend was caught cheating with the wife of another family friend in the former’s bed. Both marriages ended, and the aggrieved woman threw away her bed. That made no sense to my thirteen-year-old junior scientist mind. The bed hadn’t done anything. And it was just a bed. But I did not understand the nature of memories, how each time she saw that bed would feed and water that memory, how the memory would live not only in her but in her bed, too.

  Memories can spread from place to place, spawn connection after connection. I knew a man whose girlfriend cheated on him in the ski resort of Vail, Colorado with a man named Mike. For the rest of the time they were together, the town of Vail carried that memory, as did skiing, and as, oddly enough, did the Chicago Cubs when he discovered the name of one of their outfielders: Mike Vail.

  It’s easy enough to laugh at the absurdity of someone skipping the sports pages so he won’t be reminded of something he’s trying to forget, but we all do that all the time. For a while I taught writing at a prison, and I was always careful not to talk to my students—unless they asked—about sex, walks in the forest, or anything else they would never again get to do. Many of the guards would intentionally stand near prisoners and talk loudly among themselves about what they were going to do with their families over holidays, thus feeding, always feeding, the memory of where the prisoners were and what they could not do. On the other hand, I once saw a prison librarian apologize profusely for accidentally mentioning to a prisoner that she was going to spend Christmas with her family.

  Now, I know that what’s past is past, and I know it’s not supposed to bother Allison that I told her about making love next to a cemetery—I still don’t understand that, by the way, because I’d still swear that was her, although of course there is precisely zero chance of me raising the issue again to clarify—and I know I’m not supposed to attach mental tags to anything Allison says about an ex either. But I know what I experience, and I know what Allison tells me about her experience, and I know what at least some of my friends tell me.

  I had one friend who was normally as tight-lipped as either Allison or me, who in two consecutive relationships was talked into giving details he soon regretted. In one, his girlfriend asked him if the first time he made love was planned or spontaneous. He said he wasn’t going to tell her. She begged. He said it didn’t matter: it was a long time ago. She pleaded. No. She pouted. No. She swore it wouldn’t make her feel bad. He told her that it had been planned for a couple of months, that they’d made an event of it. She burst into tears. He asked why. She said she felt bad because the first time they’d been together hadn’t been planned, so it obviously had not been as special. Then the next woman he dated, a couple of years later, insisted that in order to get to know him better she wanted to know his past. “I won’t be threatened at all. I just want to know you, and that means knowing all about you. Why don’t you bring out your pictures and we’ll talk about your history?” The idea seemed bad, but she was persistent. He brought out the pictures—“No, all the pictures, not just the ones of you by yourself”—and they had what he said was a very frank and intimate discussion. That wasn’t so bad,
he thought. That’s what he continued to think until the next time he told her he didn’t want to do something with her—she wanted him to go swimming, if I recollect—when she said, “You used to do that with Stephanie, and now you won’t do it with me? You must have liked her better than you like me.”

  I don’t want to make it seem like not talking about exes is some sort of religious stricture that Allison and I have to follow for fear of eternal damnation. Of course we talk about exes when necessary. But the key—and this applies not only to talking about exes, but to everything—is always asking the questions asked by my big sister: How will my making this comment or asking this question or performing this action affect the other person? How will it affect the relationship?

  Of course asking these last two questions applies not only to one’s lover, but to all relationships, including one’s relationship with the land.

  It’s all pretty simple, but not many people do it. Almost no one within this culture asks these questions about their relationship to the land.

  The point is not to avoid all unpleasant memories. The point is to ask yourself whether the planting or feeding of a memory is what you want to do.

  There are those whose avoidance of unpleasant memories causes great harm. One reason my father abused us was that by simply being happy and free children, we reminded him of who and how he was before his parents destroyed him by abusing him. Because he did not wish for that memory—of who he was and what they did to him—to grow (although of course in this case it had already grown to overshadow his whole life, and ours, too) he had to destroy that which reminded him of it, that which fed the memory. Us. That’s one reason God similarly must destroy all life: it reminds Him that He has no body, and that bodies bring great joy, two things He tries desperately to forget. And why do you think so many wétikos spend so much time and so much energy destroying non-wétikos? So they, too, won’t remember. And why was I so afraid of lying naked on the ground? What memories was I trying to not allow to come up? What was I afraid I would learn if I asked the forest what it was like to be a forest, and what was I afraid I would learn if I asked the forest what it is like to face down the wétikos?