A Language Older Than Words

A Language Older Than Words

DERRICK JENSEN

Contents

Preface 4

Silencing 6

Coyotes, Kittens, and Conversations 17

Taking a Life 26

Cultural Eyeglasses 30

Cranes 43

The Safety of Metaphor 47

Claims to Virtue 56

Seeking a Third Way 69

Breaking Out 85

Economics 94

The Goal Is the Process 101

Heroes 106

Metamorphosis 115

Insatiability 119

Violence 129

The Parable of the Box 139

Violence Revisited 145

Coercion 157

Honeybees 162

A Turning Over 166

A Life of My Own 174

Interconnection 179

The Plants Respond 188

Death and Awakening 197

A Time of Sleeping 205

Out of Mourning, Play 218

Trauma and Recovery 221

Connection and Cooperation 232

Acknowledgments 240

Notes on Sources 242

Bibliography 250

Preface

THE GENESIS OF THIS book was an event. I used to raise chickens
and ducks for food. After a couple of years, a pack of coyotes
discovered the easy meals, and I began to lose birds. I scared the
coyotes away when I happened to be home, but I knew I could
not forever stand guard. One day, when I saw a coyote stalking
chickens I asked it to stop. I did this more out of frustration than conviction.

The odd thing was, the coyote
did stop,
and neither it nor other pack members returned. I was skeptical about the signifi
cance of this. Indeed, it took quite a long time and many more
interactions with the coyotes before I began to suspect that
interspecies communication might be real. This created a new concern. What I was experiencing went against everything I'd
been taught—at school, on television, at church, in the newspa
per—and especially went against my training in the sciences.

I began to question my sanity, which further piqued my curiosity.

Crazy or not, I soon discovered I wasn't alone. I began to ask
people if they too experienced these conversations, and over
whelmingly they said
yes.
Pigs, dogs, coyotes, squirrels, even riv
ers, trees, and rocks: all these, according to the stories I was hear
ing, were speaking
and listening if
only we too would enter into
conversation. Almost without exception, the people I asked said
they'd never told these stories, for fear that others would think they were crazy.

The path for the book seemed clear: I would document these
stories so that others could learn through the number, variety,
and dailiness of these interactions to begin trusting that their
own experiences of interspecies communication might be real. I
hoped they would learn that just because they speak to their
tabby, or because their cocker spaniel responds to their words
and intents, that they may not be crazy after all. Or at least if
they
are
crazy
,
far from being alone they outnumber the skepti
cal sane.

What promised to emerge from this exploration was a feel-
good book. It seemed to have
New York Times
bestseller list written all over it.

I tried to write that book, and couldn't do it. Not if I wanted to be honest. One reason is that the conversation with the coy
otes was not in truth my first interaction of this kind. It was
simply the most obvious I'd experienced in a long time. I recol
lected that as a child, I had routinely participated in this sort of
conversation, listening especially rapt to what the stars had told
me almost nightly. I remembered in fact that the stars had saved
my life.

Soon it became dear that an honest examination had to be
gin further back than my experience with the coyotes. At the
very least it would need to start with the story of the stars. And
in order to fully tell that story, I would also need to tell the story of my childhood; how I came to listen to the stars, and why their message was important to me.

At that point another storyline emerged, and it became clear
that what I had to write, regardless of my relative youth, was a
memoir: How did I later come to deny my experience in favor of
what I had been taught? How and why does this happen to each
of us as we grow up? Suddenly the book took on epic propor
tions. Question led to question, each one more difficult and dis
turbing than the one before. How and
why do we numb our
selves to our own experience!?
How and why do
we deafen our
selves to the voices of others?Who benefits? Who
suffers? Is there
a connection between the silencing of women, to use one example, and the silencing of the natural world? I wanted to
write a memoir that moved beyond the microcosm of my per
sonal experience to the macrocosm of the world in which we
live.

Thus a second reason I couldn't write the feel-good book. As
a long-time environmental activist, I am intimately acquainted
with the landscape of loss, and have grown accustomed to carry
ing the daily weight of despair. When it comes to our relation
ship with nature, there is little to feel good about. A happy reck
oning of this relationship would not only be dishonest, it would
be unworthy of the subject matter, of the great runs of salmon
we're destroying, of the billions of chickens forced to live miser
able lives, of the beautiful forests our children will never see.

If the salmon or the chickens or the forests could write a book, what would it be like? More to the point, if we were to
take time to listen to what they might already be saying, do you
think their stories would be cheery and bright?

Yet that is precisely what public discourse demands. I cannot
count the number of times I've been commissioned to write en
vironmental pieces, -and the editors have said to me, "Make sure
it's positive." Never once has an editor said, "Make sure the piece
is honest." This unwillingness to face the truth about our time is
another form of silencing. Before we can fix our troubled rela
tionship with nature, we must be willing to look at it.

It became clear that that this book had to be different. If I were to
be honest, it could only be a cry of outrage, a lamentation, and
at the same time a love story about that which is and that which was but is no longer. It would have to be about the potential for
life and love and happiness we each carry inside but are too afraid
to explore. The book would have to be raw and difficult, but it
would also have to offer redemption.

As Franz Kafka put it, you may not destroy someone's world unless you are prepared to offer a better one. But no redemption
can be found in the avoidance of difficult issues. Redemption
comes only after we have moved through the horrors of our
present situation to the better world that lies beyond it. By con
fronting the problem as courageously as we can and at the same
time presenting alternatives, our barriers to clarity, including our
false hopes, may crumble to reveal previously unseen possibilities.

Silencing

"Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed we will have lost our own selves.” R.D. Laing

THERE IS A LANGUAGE older by far and deeper than words. It is the
language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on
trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.

In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a
broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It
is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies
act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary be
cause without them many deplorable acts would become impos
sibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow
self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our
consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We
try to stay out of harm's way, afraid they will go off, shatter our
delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the
world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have
become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths,
and continue the dance of world destruction.

As is true for most children, when I was young I heard the world speak. Stars sang. Stones had preferences. Trees had bad days.
Toads held lively discussions, crowed over a good days catch.
Like static on a radio, schooling and other forms of socialization
began to interfere with my perception of the animate world, and for a number of years I almost believed that only humans spoke. The gap between what I experienced and what I almost believed
confused me deeply. It wasn't until later that I began to under
stand the personal, political, social, ecological, and economic im
plications of living in a silenced world.

This silencing is central to the working of our culture. The
staunch refusal to hear the voices of those we exploit is crucial to
our domination of them. Religion, Science, philosophy, politics, education, psychology, medicine, literature, linguistics,
and an have all been pressed into service as tools to rationalize the silencing and degradation of women, children, other races,
other cultures, the natural world and its members, our emotions, our consciences, our experiences, and our cultural and
personal histories.

My own introduction to this silencing—and this is similarly
true for a great percentage of children as well within many families—came at the hands (and genitals) of my father, who beat my
mother, my brothers, and my sisters, and who raped my mother,
my sister, and me.

I can only speculate that because I was the youngest, my fa
ther somehow thought it best that instead of beating me, he would
force me to watch, and listen. I remember scenes—vaguely, as
from a dream or a movie—of arms flailing, of my father chasing
my brother Rob around and around the house. I remember my
mother pulling my father into their bedroom to absorb blows
that may have otherwise landed on her children. We sat stone-
faced in the kitchen, captive audience to stifled groans that es
caped through walls that were just too thin.

The vagueness with which I recollect these formative images
is the point here, because the worst thing my father did went
beyond the hitting and the raping to the denial that any of it ever
occurred. Not only bodies were broken, but broken also was the
bedrock connection between memory and experience, between
psyche and reality. His denial made sense, not only because an
admission of violence would have harmed his image as a socially respected, wealthy, and deeply religious attorney, but more sim
ply because the man who would beat his children could not speak
about it honestly and continue to do it.

We became a family of amnesiacs. There's no place in the
mind to sufficiently contain these experiences, and as there was
effectively no way out, it would have served no purpose for us to
consciously remember the atrocities. So we learned, day after day, that we could not trust our perceptions, and that we were
better off not listening to our emotions. Daily we forgot, and if a memory pushed its way to the surface we forgot again. There'd
be a beating, followed by brief contrition and my father asking,
"Why did you make me do it?" And then? Nothing, save the
inconvenient evidence: a broken door, urine-soaked underwear,
a wooden room divider my brother repeatedly tore from the wall
trying to pick up speed around the corner. Once these were fixed,
there was nothing left to remember. So we "forgot," and the pat
tern continued.

This willingness to forget is the essence of silencing. When
I realized that, I began to pay more attention to the "how" and
the "why" of forgetting—and thus began a journey back to remembering.