A Language older than Words Read online

  Soon after I got him, Amaru began to kill birds. Once every two weeks, or three, or four, I would find a chicken in the yard, uneaten and generally unbruised, with some feathers missing from its neck, but dead. I tried telling Amaru, again and again in that stentorian voice, "No! Don't kill the chickens." Each time he would roll on his back, and each time I would think the problem was solved. Then a couple weeks later I'd find another dead chicken, unbruised and missing feathers from the neck. I asked him to stop, but this time it did no good. The killings continued.

  I caught him in the act several times. It was never so frenetic as I would have imagined, nor even as frenzied as it usually was when I killed a bird. Amaru would be lying calm in the driveway, the chicken's neck in his mouth. He held it, not chewing or biting hard enough to break skin. On seeing him I would yell, "Cut it out." He would turn his face to me, startled, then he would stand and slink away, shooting me a sidelong glance. The chicken, unharmed, would look startled, too, and a bit befuddled. She, or occasionally he, would eventually stand, stretch, and walk sedately away as though nothing had happened.

  Time and again I witnessed these scenes, and time and again I yelled at him to stop. I don't consider myself stupid, and I'm not always such a slow learner. It dawned on me that Amaru might be trying to teach me something.

  I had not yet repeated the experience where I killed the willing duck, and although some animals had seemed to approach their deaths with nearly that level of grace, quite often they scrapped with me for their lives. I remember a big white muscovy who'd been especially rough with females and some of the other males who gave me a sound thrubbing with his wings as I carried him to the block. I have three circular scars where a rooster dug his spurs a half-inch into my forearm as I tried to kill one of his sons.

  Was it possible that the dog was attempting to show me which animals were okay to kill? Or maybe it had nothing to do with me. Perhaps the animals were frightened into passivity by the gaping maw of a creature twenty times their size. This might be possible, but I still thought of the willing duck, and of others almost like him. I have read tales, many of them contemporary, of elk or deer giving themselves willingly to feed traditional indigenous peoples. Is it possible that Amaru was attuned to something I only picked up rarely?

  The coyotes returned about this time, and took a chicken. It was the first they had taken for more than a year, and I must admit that they had kept their end of the bargain better than I had, with my dislike of killing. The day before, I had been writing, and heard a squawk. I looked outside, and saw Amaru chasing a young red rooster. Forgetting any possibility of learning from him, I yelled for him to stop, then continued work. The next day I was again writing, and again heard a squawk. I looked outside to see a coyote trotting away. A quick check of the chickens revealed that the coyote had taken the same rooster Amaru chased the day before.

  At what point do the lenses fall out of your cultural eyeglasses? At what point do mechanistic explanations wear thin? I had twenty-five birds at the time, which means even if we throw away the coincidence of coyotes appearing on that day, we still have only a one-in-twenty-five chance they would take the same bird Amaru had chosen. Four percent. The bird had not strayed particularly far from the house—the coyote came right up outside my window. Nor was he weak. He was young, firm, and healthy. Pushing this further, let's see what we can make of this: mornings when I wake up from a dream about chickens, I know that one has died or disappeared. Am I seeing a pattern where there isn't one? It could be a coincidence. It could also be that there is a mechanistic explanation. I wondered if I might have heard their struggles—if they indeed struggled—in my sleep, and incorporated that knowledge into my dreams. But it has happened, too, that I have dreamt of chickens, then found a dead chick—as happens now and then—in the duck pool, which is far from my bedroom window. Does this mean that I heard the thrashing of chicks no larger than a plum? Once I dreamt of chickens when I was five hundred miles from home. The next day I called my mother, who was taking care of the animals for me, and she said that a chick was missing, and that another was dead. What is the mechanistic explanation for this? There isn't one. Oh, no, here we go again! Crazy Derrick insisting that there are other modes of communication to which we don't pay close attention. It seems possible that Amaru does hear something, and so do the coyotes. Whatever they are hearing tells them it is acceptable, even proper, to kill this particular bird and not another. I hear the same language when I dream.

  I asked Jeannette once where dreams come from and she said, "Oh, everyone knows the animals give them to us." I don't know if I would agree with her, but I do know that her explanation makes more sense than that given by a physicist friend of mine, who states emphatically that they are the meaningless firings of random neurons.

  Amaru finally quit chewing on chickens. The last two times he did it, he left them on the front porch, alive, unbruised, although a little worse for wear. Each time I carried them straight to the chopping block and killed them. I do not know why he quit after this. He may have given up trying to teach me how to listen, or he may have decided I now understood enough to learn on my own. It is also possible that he simply outgrew his puppy-ish enthusiasm for killing chickens.

  Cranes

  "God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to new life." Hermann Hesse

  THE BEST THING THAT happened during my years at the Colorado School of Mines is that I began to fall apart. My high school tears over the death of a puppy didn't mean I was back in touch with my emotions. Emotions are never so simple, rolling like waves, only to recede and return, recede and return, until eventually they can no longer be denied. The walls I had meticulously constructed during childhood began to crack during college and the years after, finally collapsing and taking me down with them.

  One part of this transition involved high jumping. I had always, since I was a child, loved that sport more than all others. In fourth grade I made myself a pit and standards out of inner tubes, an old mattress, packing blankets, two-by-fours, nails, and a bamboo pole that I had begged from a florist. I quit jumping when the mattress rotted, but jumped again in ninth grade, before dropping the sport until college.

  In my sophomore year of college, I took a handball class, because it happened to fit my schedule. There were too many people for the number of courts, so each day the teacher, who was also the track coach, made the others run laps. It didn't take me long to gravitate to the high jump pit. The coach caught me. I thought he would yell at me for not following his instructions, but he asked me to go out for the team. This scared the hell out of me, and I said no. During the next class period I was again assigned to run, and so again I jumped. Again he asked, and again I said no. We repeated this little dance of wooing and retreating until finally I had the confidence to say yes.

  Confidence is central to high jumping. If you believe you'll make it, you probably—unless the jump is very easy—won't. You must know you'll make it, enough that all consciousness of self vanishes.

  After I'd been jumping a couple of years, I noticed a seeming contradiction in my coach's behavior. He routinely yelled at distance runners, and I'd seen him as a football coach slam his clipboard to the ground, but with me he was nothing but gentle, never once raising his voice. I asked why; not that I wanted the other, but simply because I was curious.

  "Everyone knows that if you yell at a high jumper he'll just start crying, and then he can't do anything."

  He was right. Had he yelled at me, I would have become self-conscious.

  The blurring of boundaries between self and other in high jumping probably provides a key to my early love for the sport, a bridge between the walls I erected to protect me from emotions raised by my father's abuse and the dismantling of those walls years later. In both cases—abuse and high jumping—those boundaries disappeared. As a child, they disappeared because I was of necessity hyperaware, always alert to sounds, sudden movements, the slig
htest change in musculature or vibes that might indicate the possibility of an attack, that might give me an additional half-second to prepare for my father's violence by psychically absenting myself. Instead of remaining present to my own experience, I was present to my anticipation of his experience. My own self—whatever that means—was silent and submerged.

  When I jumped, those boundaries between self and other once again became obscure. This time, though, the blurring was accomplished not by hiding the self, but expanding it. On the best jumps, those where I approached that ragged edge of control where instinct and euphoria set me free from time and consciousness, the self grew and dissolved until there was no meaningful separation between me and the rest of the world. The bar and the standards, the pit, the slight breeze in the late April afternoon, the sun, the grass, me, we all worked together.

  Because all sports are artificially separated from life, and because high jumping is especially circumscribed—you jump, you sit for half an hour, then you jump again—it became safe for me to feel my emotions in that area. Moreso even than feeling them, I allowed them to overwhelm me, giving up control until I no longer felt the exuberance, joy, anger, but instead became them.

  I was an excellent jumper, made for the sport both physically and emotionally, but I took to throwing tantrums when I missed important jumps. I'd curse and hurl my sweats, or sometimes pull my shoe partway off and kick it as far as 1 could—thirty yards was my best. Each time I did this, my coach pulled me aside and put his arm around my shoulder. He'd softly say, "Real athletes don't need to do that." What he didn't know, and what I couldn't articulate, was that I was secretly overjoyed to be showing any emotion at all, no matter how unsportsmanlike it seemed to him.

  Maybe I was just growing up. Whatever the case may be, it seemed that the experience of unimpeded emotion when I jumped made it harder for me to ignore my feelings elsewhere.

  Just as the return of warmth makes frostbitten fingers feel like they're on fire, this period of gradual return was in many ways the most difficult of my life, more difficult even than childhood. I was beginning to feel things again. My first new look at the unhappiness I saw blissfully accepted by those around me was shocking. I became at first deeply confused, and then just as deeply convinced that awareness, and feeling, led inevitably to decreased happiness. Scientist that I was, I came up with the following: Happiness equals one over the quantity one plus Awareness. (Yeah, I know, I was a geek.) Trying this equation on my fellow students, I received nothing but confirmation: Thank God I'm a happy idiot; You think too much; Who cares? and the ubiquitous Of course I hate it here, but when I get out I'm gonna get a red Porsche.

  A friend asked, "If increased awareness means less happiness, why bother?" No answer.

  Three or four nights later I had a dream. I was driving. To my right I saw baby cranes—blue-green, all legs, beak, and wings— standing in a field. They took off and crashed, took off and crashed. I stopped the car and got out. "That looks like it hurts. Why do you do it?"

  One of the cranes looked me square in the eye. "We may not fly very well yet, but at least we aren't walking."

  I awoke, happy. From that moment, there has been no turning back.

  This past weekend I taught at a nature-writing workshop. As part of a book signing, I read the first twenty pages of this manuscript. Because I had never before shared them publicly, I was excited and more than a little nervous. Afterward, someone said, "I just really wish a healing energy for you."

  I appreciated her words, and told her so, but was also in some vague way annoyed. I knew that if one week from now, or ten, or a hundred, her impulse were still to feel sorrow for me, and to primarily wish me healing, then either I did not do my job as a writer, or she was a bad listener. Immediately after she left, I wished I had pointed to the sky and repeated to her the Buddhist saying "Don't look at my finger, look at the moon."

  My family is a microcosm of the culture. What is writ large in the destruction of the biosphere was writ small in the destruction of our household. This is one way the destructiveness propagates itself—the sins of the fathers (and mothers) visiting themselves unto the children for seven generations, or seven times seven generations. The death of my childhood may have been dramatic, but in a nation in which 565,000 children are killed or injured by their parents or guardians each year, my childhood does not qualify as remarkably abnormal. Another way to say this is that within any culture that destroys the salmon, that commits genocide, that demands wage slavery, most of the individuals—myself included—are probably to a greater or lesser degree insane.

  I wish that my childhood would have been different. I do not, however, regret what happened. This does not mean that I would gladly go through it again. But mythologies of all times and all places tell us that those who enter the abyss and survive can bring back important lessons. I have no need to merely imagine the unimaginable. And I will no longer forget. I have learned that whether I choose to feel or not, pain exists, and whether we choose to acknowledge them or not, atrocities continue. I have grown to understand that in the shadow of the unspeakable I can and must speak and act against our culture's tangled web of destructiveness, and stop the destruction at its roots.

  The Safety of Metaphor

  "The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality." Hannah Arendt

  ON PLANES AND BUSES, in classrooms, stores, libraries, I began to ask people if they thought it was possible to communicate with nonhumans. They said yes, and yes, and they said My friends think I'm crazy but. . . and they said, It changed my life, let me tell you about it. . . . The daughter of a rancher said her parents gave stillborn calves to coyotes in exchange for the coyotes leaving the rest of their herd alone. A man who worked on the Alaska pipeline said he'd always carried a rifle in the backcountry, and had killed many bears, until one day a native friend said, "Mike, you don't need to shoot them. Apologize to them for being in their home, and walk away." The next time he saw a bear he raised his rifle, then caught himself and lowered it. He said, "I'm sorry," and raised his hand in greeting. Now, I don't know if this account was a cousin of the old fish story, but he said that the bear stopped, squinted, raised one paw in response, then left. Regardless, he never shot another bear. A third-generation pig farmer said that when he picks up piglets to cuddle, they relax silently into his arms; when he picks them up to castrate them, they scream—first to last— even before he reaches for them. Story after story, they pile up, dozens upon dozens of conversations, with or without words, conversations with pets, bears, coyotes, rivers, trees, owls, hawks, eagles, mice.

  A friend said, "That's all very nice, but do you have any scientific verification?"

  I have plenty of empirical data, but that just means I'm relying on direct experience, not abstract theory. Strictly speaking, scientific verification is impossible, because science is by definition the study of objects, and a conversation is an interaction between two or more subjects. In science, you repeat an experiment in a controlled environment, and you eliminate variable after variable until any moderately careful person can make the same thing appear. But conversations only happen once. So try this: "How are you?"

  I'm fine.

  Now say it again: "How are you?"

  I'm tired.

  "How are you?"

  "None of your business.

  Now again: "How are you?"

  The book is green.

  Do you get it? Because I'm a willful subject, my answer could be anything.

  While it's reasonable to expect repeatability from a machine— I'm writing this while flying in another airplane, and I hope that when the pilot manipulates the plane's controls, the rudder and flaps respond predictably—no sensible person would demand strict repeatability in everyday life. I would at least hope not, for the sake of that person's companions
. Similarly, it is scientifically impossible to rigorously verify the subjective existence of anyone other than the experimenter him- or herself: one of the beauties of the Cartesian notion that subjective existence is held only by an elect few is that it's impossible to disprove; just ask my high school friend Jon, who was unable to prove that he existed even when he socked me one.

  So, scientific verification of interspecies communication is out, although results of experiments can of course be factored in, weighted the same as other anecdotal evidence, experiments being merely one form of anecdote, with specific underlying and formative assumptions. If you put me in a cage in a lab, stick needles in me or cut off my body parts one-by-one, then "sacrifice" me when you're through, the conversations we have in the meantime will perforce be different than if we meet in other circumstances.

  I also know that the nature of physical reality is not determined by popular vote. Many people sharing the same delusion does not make the delusion true, whether we're talking about interspecies communication, modern science, Christianity, or capitalism. Think about how many people voted for Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, or Augusto Pinochet, for that matter. Look how many people—including some presumably intelligent ones—spend their lives producing nuclear weapons. Look how many people think money is wealth, and how many believe that land can be bought and sold. It doesn't matter if it isn't true. Remember, this is a game of make-believe. Its a pretty good game, very well constructed; in fact it's so good we've forgotten that it is just a game.