A Language older than Words Read online

  Honeybees

  "Happiness is love, nothing else. A man who is capable of love is happy." Hermann Hesse.

  THE EVIDENCE OF INTERSPECIES communication and the fundamental beingness of nonhumans is so obvious as to render my previous skepticism embarrassing. To attempt a proof that non-humans communicate would not only be degrading—imagine a book purporting to prove that blondes can think—it would he silly, like proving the existence of gravity, love, death, or physical existence. It could be written in two words—pay attention—or better, in one—listen.

  One evening last spring I sat on the couch, looking out the window and talking on the phone. The lights were off, inside and out. The window was open. It was that time of day when shapes lose distinct edges, when solid shadows blur into back ground. The dark contour of a dog lay tucked in a hole he’d dug to fit his body. I mentioned on the phone that when I brought in the chicks for the night, one was missing. The conversation flowed on, I forgot about the chick, and barely noticed when the dark form stood and walked around the house. Moments later it returned, walked toward the window, stooped, left behind a tiny black bundle, and walked away. When I realized what had happened I put down the phone to run outside. The dog had brought the body of the chick.

  During the summer I don't put kitty litter in the cat box, relying instead on the cats to go outside. This is fine with two of them, but the third—who had a very difficult time grasping the concept of using the cat box in the first place, often standing in the box to drop her feces on the floor—did not make the transition so easily. She did, however, find a compromise both of us could live with: she defecated outdoors, and urinated in the bathtub. I then unthinkingly and unilaterally abrogated this agreement by putting more chicks in the tub. When I thought about it later, I hoped she would merely use the other shower. She didn't, but just went outside like the other two. When the weather began to cool I forgot to bring in the cat box. Soon I noticed a smell, and saw she was urinating in a corner of the living room. I brought the cat box inside. That first night—and this is really the point of this story—she jumped on my lap as I worked, which each cat often does, sleeping there while I type or sit. That night, however, she jumped immediately back down and ran out of the room. I followed, and saw that she went directly to the cat box, clearly showing me that she, too, could follow the rules, if only I would learn to get them straight.

  Just moments ago I received an email from a friend of Jeannette, who had suggested that she send me the following: "Several years ago, two friends living in Naramata, B.C. observed on several occasions in winter a bald eagle circling over a flock of coots in Okanagan Lake. After some time, invariably one coot would rise and be taken by the eagle. Whether this is done to protect the young or other members of the group, or for some unknown reason, apparently this phenomenon is common knowledge to indigenous and non-indigenous people who live close to the earth. We know that in the complex interaction of all beings on earth, cooperation is an important factor."

  Once having begun to look, one has no choice but to see these incidents everywhere, for that is where they are.

  The neighbors have a new puppy, an Anatolian shepherd the size of a small bear, who only in the last couple of days discovered my walks to the coyote tree, and followed me and the dogs. Today he discovered the chickens, and has delighted in trotting after them to see them scatter, and he discovered too the cats, delighting even more in giving them chase. As I type these words, a cat is up a tree. Time after time I went outside to say, "No. Go home." He ignored me. Sometimes I tried to be more reasonable: "You can stay here if you don't chase the chickens or cats." He still ignored me. Finally, after the cat went up the tree, I lost patience and roughly pushed him toward home. I stomped my foot, and was going to do it again until I realized how silly I must look. Not so much caring—who is the dog going to tell?—I stomped again. He finally left. Now he dozes on the neighbor's porch. I'm sure he'll be back. My point is that the fact that he did not acquiesce to my requests, or that he doesn't yet know much English (I must admit I know very little cat, dog, chicken, goose, duck, or songbird, though I hear them every day), does not mean that conversations between humans and nonhumans do not exist. After years of doubting, I'm finally growing to understand that my skepticism has all along revealed more about my own inability to perceive or even conceptualize fully mutual conversations— and more basically my inability to allow another to have desires distinctly different from my own—than it does about the nature of human-nonhuman relations.

  As you've probably guessed, I've always had an affinity for bugs, and for as long as I can remember I've been especially fascinated by bees, ants, and other social insects. When during the spring semester of my sophomore year in college—the same semester I started high jumping—I saw an ad in the classifieds for a beehive, I called and bought it immediately.

  Soon I found myself wandering down late evenings to the corner of the pasture, to sit next to the hive and listen to the bees' soft sounds as they moved and talked and sang inside their home. Sometimes I rapped gently to hear their buzzing rise in response, but most often I just sat. I put my face to the opening to smell the rich, moist, fecund scent of bees and wax and honey. To this day I know of no smells quicker to soothe.

  I'd go down days, too, to watch the guards pace back and forth on the hive's front stoop; I'd watch as they checked every bee that entered to make sure she belonged. Drones—huge, clumsy, powerful males, never once known to do any work around the hive—would take off or land with a distinctive roar. Sometimes I would stand next to the hive and be surrounded by scores of bees who flew in large or small circles around my head, or zoomed far above to tumble back in what I soon learned are called play fights. I grew to understand that these were for the most part young bees leaving the hive for the first or second or third time, and circling, spinning, rolling for the joy of sunshine and flight and the rush of air over newly extended wings. Older bees—you can tell because young bees have more hair on their backs, which tends to wear off as they get older—usually paid me no mind, but flew around me as they would a telephone pole or any other obstacle to be avoided as they circled to their cruising altitude above the tops of nearby trees. Coming back home they dropped to land on the stoop, where guards greeted them. Many foragers, too tired from their sometimes several-mile journeys, would miss the entrance and crawl the last few inches home.

  Grasshoppers always gathered in front of the hive. I never before knew that these insects ate flesh, but saw now that they often scavenged the carcasses of those bees who died just outside, as well as those who died inside and who were not, for whatever reason, carried away to be deposited elsewhere. So long as the grasshoppers stayed away from the hive's entrance, the bees did not seem to mind. Occasionally a grasshopper would land—most likely accidentally—on the porch, causing the guards to make a quick rush, with a fanning of wings and a raising of abdomens. The grasshoppers always jumped away.

  I bought more hives, and loved to lie on my back to watch the bees—not scores now, but hundreds or thousands—flying crisscrosses through the morning or afternoon sky. I'd watch one circle and rise, then orient herself and fly away, her body growing smaller against the light blue of the summer sky. When she blinked out in the distance, I would pick another to watch, perhaps this one coming home, her body growing larger and taking form as she returned with a stomach full of nectar or saddlebags full of pollen.

  But all was not contemplation. Beekeeping is some of the hardest work I have ever done. That first year I arranged the hives aesthetically, scattering them about a large marshy pasture. I learned never to do that again: at up to a hundred pounds each, boxes of honey are heavy enough when the truck is parked right there. After the first twenty yards, the boxes seem to gain about a pound a yard for the rest of the haul. By a quarter mile, I was cursing bees, cursing the July sun, cursing aesthetics, and wishing I would have taken up needlepoint. Of course that year was the best harvest I ever recorded, at
well over two hundred pounds per hive. I had about fifteen hives by that time. You do the math. Even at this remove, I'm not sure I'm up to it.

  When hives are arranged to fulfill more pragmatic considerations, the work is still hard: there is much lifting, obviously, and you also, at least at first, have to worry about stings. When I was a beginner, I suited up each time I worked bees, wearing the hat, veil, and zipped overalls familiar to most anyone who has evere seen a public television program on the honeybee. As I became more familiar with them, and used to the stings, I began wearing far less protective attire, usually just cutoffs and no shirt, base ball cap atop my head to keep bees out of my hair (they don't like brunettes: brown hair reminds them of bears and skunks), and sometimes leather gloves if the bees were particularly feisty. I switched to this outfit because I had learned several important lessons. The first is that in June, July, and August, the sun can be hot, especially when you're covered head to foot in canvas overalls, and most especially when you're carrying hundred pound boxes over an aesthetic quarter mile. The second is that stings really aren't so bad: they hurt less than a pinch (unless you get stung inside your nose or on your anus, each of which happened once, which is once more than I would prefer to remember), and by now they cause me to swell far less than a mosquito bite. Stung on the wrist, five minutes later I would be hard-pressed to tell you which wrist it was.

  The third lesson ties into everything I've been writing about in this book. It was the bees who—along with high jumping— provided me my first real somatic understanding of cooperation and compliance: work against bees and they sting; work with them as they work with themselves and they reward you with honey, joy, and sore muscles.

  Watching them, listening to them, feeling their stings when they're angry or the delicate touch of their feet (their pretarsi, in entomology-speak) when they contentedly walk across the back of your hand, seeing the queen—long and slender—move slowly from cell to cell of the honeycomb as she lays more than her own weight in eggs every day, hearing the drones bumble from hive to hive, looking closely at the excited tail wagging and circular dances of scouts who've found new food and want to share these secrets with their sisters, you learn in time that beehives have their own rhythms and personalities. If you pay attention they begin to share their secrets with you, too. Cold days annoy them, because they have to stay inside. Some hives are always in a bad mood, others always cheerful. Move slowly, respect them, and don't crush them when you disassemble and reassemble their homes, and they will accept you. It's really very simple. Treat them as you would want to be treated, and the chances are good they will respond in kind.

  A Turning Over

  "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." Abraham Lincoln

  I JUST GOT OFF the telephone with an old friend. We first met in church when we were teens, and stayed in close contact until I left Montana. Since then, our paths have diverged. He has a family, and I do not. He has a wage job, and I do not. He has had to place his art—he's an extraordinary flautist—on the periphery, and daily my art and activism move closer to the center of my life. We only talk a few times a year, but I realized speaking to him that, from different paths, we have arrived at many of the same places.

  Dave said to me, "People never get paid for anything of value. I don't get paid for loving Beth, or the children, and I don't get paid for playing the flute."

  I didn't say anything. He continued, "I'm tired, Derrick. I work three jobs and I can't get ahead. Beth still works retail, and because she stands all day she needs a foot operation."

  A deep breath, and then he said, "I don't know where we'll get the money. I just quit a job that had health benefits, but you know what? Whenever we made a claim, our problem wasn't covered. It all looks so good on paper, but it never works out. I was sorting packages on that job, and carrying them. It was so mind-numbing. I thought I would go crazy. But the other jobs are no better. Remember when I was a courier for the bank? I'll bet I've driven a half-million miles these past ten years. That's 10,000 hours. Or more. And what do I have to show for them?"

  I asked what he wanted to do. "I would love to have access to some land, where Beth and I and the kids could just live. But I don't think that's going to happen."

  Another long pause, and he said, "Beth's not happy." "With you, or the job?"

  "I don't think she's going to bail. But she's just unhappy. She hates her job, and it spills over."

  I wanted to give him a hug over the phone. We had not talked for so long. He said, "I don't know what I'm going to do, Derrick. I don't know what I'm going to do."

  For many years I've been trying to figure out why revolutionary movements almost always fail to materially and permanently help the poor. This is true for armed revolutions such as the Russian Revolution, revolutions of the heart such as the teachings of Jesus, and revolutions that attempt to combine the two. When the revolution is over, the new boss—whether he's St. Augustine, Luther, Washington, or Lenin—is inevitably, as the rock band The Who suggested, the same as the old boss.

  At first I thought the problem was primarily psychological, that having overturned the old social order, revolutionary leaders were unable to release their newfound power to the people. This means, of course, that the supposed revolutionaries never overturned the old social order at all, but merely inserted new names and possibly new mechanisms for the same old dominance and exploitation. At best they may have instituted social programs and nationalized industries, as Castro did in Cuba, but the repression ultimately remains. I say this not to diminish the importance of instituting social programs, but to point out the tenacity of the repression. It is also true that in many cases the revolutionaries—I'm thinking especially of the founding fathers of the United States and the Bolsheviks, but it's just as true for many so-called anarchists, like Michael Bakunin—never intended to break down the hierarchies, but used the language of independence, democracy, and perhaps economic egalitarianism to make their seizure of power palatable to the mass of people, who would as always gain little from this changing of the Praetorian Guard and who would as always suffer the most in the process.

  While psychology explains the failure of many revolutions, it doesn't suffice for all. Even taking into consideration the danger to one's soul of embarking on the path of violent revolution, and considering also that those who preach or foment peaceful or violent overthrow of the established order may not be the best qualified, temperamentally or otherwise, to sustain a new nonhierarchical social order—Jesus was great at railing against the powerful, but had he not been killed, could he have enacted and maintained his egalitarian vision?—I realized there had to be more. People are varied enough in their skills and morals that, given the thousands of historical revolutions, large and small, someone (or more likely some group) somewhere along the line would have been able to pull off a solidly egalitarian revolution. Having been set on this nonhierarchical path, at least some groups would have been able to maintain it. Obviously, many indigenous cultures have been able to construct and maintain relatively egalitarian societies, as have some religious groups, but especially within the mainstream of Western Civilization these groups are despairingly rare.

  My second thought was that any group that through revolution (armed or unarmed) succeeded in establishing a peaceful, nonhierarchical community would not be allowed to survive, for reasons already elucidated. This is especially true if that community contains anything, such as resources, useful to those in power. Voluminous evidence supports this thesis. Still, this answer didn't seem to suffice, because nearly always, even in those communities and especially states or nations, where the egalitarian power structures have been stressed but not demolished by outside forces, the governmental and economic forms have sooner or later reverted once again to the same old pa
tterns of domination. Why is this?

  Perhaps it has to do with the incapacity to attend to our own feelings omnipresent in a severely traumatized people. Perhaps our marvelous capacity to adapt to even the most atrocious situations is the major reason revolutions fail. We're so good at getting along that we do so at the expense of actions that would in a meaningful sense bring a change in those original circumstances that cause our suffering. We shuffle and bow before the established order, knowing that it's better to be alive and humbled— even if we must sell our hours for another's profit—than it is to be dead. Then when some new despot comes along mouthing new slogans of egalitarianism, instead of opposing both the old and new tyrannies, we adapt yet again, perhaps even believing for a time the new slogans. And when the new slogans prove false? Amnesia, that most adaptable of all forms of adaptation.

  There is an image that has stuck in my mind since I first encountered it in a book many years ago. Thousands of Jews, fresh from the Warsaw Ghetto, all stand or sit in a large arena, like a courtyard or stadium. They are led off in groups of five or so. The movement of each group down a corridor leads quickly to a new round of rifle fire from the direction of their disappearance. Why don't the remaining people flee? To try to understand, I've turned the question back on myself: staring straight into the maw of global ecological collapse, why do we follow along, equally trusting, equally complacent, down a corridor we know has only one exit, an exit we anticipate all too well? In a less dramatic though no less inevitable manner, why do we walk down paths of wage labor, toiling away our lives for some chimerical goal of fiscal sufficiency? I remember speaking with my students about the doomed Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, and asking why they thought these people acted, or failed to act, as they did. One of my students gave an insightful answer: "Undoubtedly some were in denial until the end, but I'm sure others realized that even when your external choices have been removed, you at least can still act with dignity." So the mother facing the machine gun holds tight to her child's shoulder, feels one last time the texture of her skin, and in that moment attempts to convey to her daughter an entire lifetime's worth of love. Is that a solution? Not in the larger sense of stopping the Nazis. But it is a beautifully and lovingly adaptive response arising directly out of the circumstances faced by the doomed woman and her family.