A Language Older Than Words (39 page)

As observed earlier, hives, too, have personalities—some are gentle, some friendly, some short-tempered, some sickly—and it is not unfair to consider the hive as a whole a creature in its own right. Hives maintain a constant body temperature of about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, lowering it if necessary by bringing in water to evaporate in currents through their home, or raising it by metabolizing honey and clustering. They make community decisions, such as when to make a new queen (queens are made by feeding normal babies a special food: no one knows how they decide to make a new queen, or which grubs to so feed), when to kill an old queen, and so on. And they reproduce, throwing swarms in which some percentage of the bees move out, taking with them a new or old queen, to find a new home. Thus a new hive is born.

When bees swarm they almost never sting. This fact has been used by countless beekeepers to impress upon others their ostensible courage at virtually no risk. When I was staying with Glen and Susan, they received numerous calls from around town requesting they pick up swarms. If my friends were busy, I was always glad to go, in part because it meant a free bee colony, and in part because it meant the opportunity to show off. I went once on a call to a motel at a main intersection of Modesto. It was near noon, and hot. The street was crowded with cars, but no pedestrians went near the basketball-sized bundle of bees that hung from the branch of a waist-high bush. It should have taken me less than five minutes to pick up the swarm; I only needed to put a box beneath it, give the branch a hard shake to dislodge the cluster, cover the box, and go. But as I approached, wearing cutoffs, no shirt, and baseball cap, and as the loose bees at the edge of the swarm started to fly around my head, people began lining the plate glass at the front of the motel's office, and traffic started to back up as drivers rubbernecked to see this death-defying young man step into a cloud of crazed bees. I made it take a half an hour. When I got back to my friends' house, Glen asked what took so long. I said, "There were a lot of people there.'' Smiling, he said, "Showtime."

Twice, though, I have been stung while collecting swarms. Once was nothing but an accident, the other was my fault. Bees often swarm high in trees. This makes sense, because when they leave their old home, they rarely have yet a new one in mind. So they hang, from a bush, rock, eave, tree limb, until scouts find a suitable new cavity they can call home. If they're going to cluster for a couple of days, and not sting much in the meantime, I can
see why they would gravitate toward the tops of trees: less predation.
Often I've found myself shinnying up a pine, heavy canvas bag stuck into my waistband. The problem comes after I've got bees in the bag. For obvious reasons I no longer want to put the opening inside my pants. But only rarely have I been able to climb down one-handed, so I took to clamping the top of the bag between my teeth. This worked beautifully every time but once, when I accidentally bit down on a bee, who, understandably enough, stung me on the inside of my upper lip. It's hard to swear with a canvas bag of bees between your front teeth.

The other time was stupid on my part, and unforgivably rude. The bees taught me a painful lesson in return. The swarm was about sixty feet up a pine. The tree's lowest branch was twelve feet up, so I propped a ladder next to the tree. I started climbing, and when I reached the swarm, I saw the bees were six or seven feet out, at the end of a limb probably three inches in diameter: too small for me to crawl on. I climbed back down, and stapled two long, slender pieces of wood to the lip of the bag. I climbed back up, carrying this contraption, plus another long piece of wood: I would hold the two pieces in one hand, and position the open end of the bag beneath the swarm while I used the other to scrape bees off the bough and into the bag. Good idea, I thought, except how was I going to keep myself from falling? I left the equipment in the tree, climbed back down, got a rope, returned to my perch, wrapped the rope several times around the tree's trunk and my own, tied it off, and began to scrape. It didn't work. I tried for a couple of hours before I came up with an even worse idea: I would saw off the limb and allow it to crash to the ground. Sensing themselves falling, the bees would break their cluster and reform, I hoped at a place more conducive to their capture. Down again for the saw, and back up. The limb cracked, tore, and fell, right onto the next limb down, about five feet below. The bees remained clustered. I climbed down, tied myself in, and patiently began again to scrape away. I'd been working less than ten minutes when the bees finally lost patience. The whole time I'd been in the tree, bees had been flying about my head, seemingly more curious than anything, but suddenly they decided they'd had enough. Their mood turned angry, and in that one moment I had scores of bees burrowing into my hair, stinging my scalp, with more bees stinging my face and hands (because pine bark is rough I'd worn long pants and long sleeves). I started to climb down, only to realize I was tied to the tree. For one instant I pictured myself hanging there, dead of bee stings. I'd had catastrophes before, where bees suddenly turned angry and stung me forty, fifty, eighty times, but always before I could get away. I pushed hard against the rope, and because I'm terrible at tying knots the rope loosened enough for me to shimmy out. More bees in my hair, on my eyebrows, in my nose, on my eyelids. I pushed out from the tree and did a controlled fall, slapping my arms and legs against whatever limbs came my way to slow myself enough that when I hit the ground I wouldn't break a leg. I landed, rolled, and ran for the house. Inside, I turned on the water in the bathtub, cold and hard, and, moaning, put my head underneath.

After turning off the water, I began to pull soaked bees from my hair, and to scrape stingers from my scalp. Now that I was no longer in danger, I discovered I had a headache.

It didn't take long for me to realize what I'd done wrong.
Wu Wei.
I had attempted to force it. I was no longer working with the bees, helping them into a new home, but instead, I was determined to capture these bees no matter their desires. And I was willing to saw a perfectly good limb from the tree for no unselfish reason. No wonder the bees got mad. The tree was probably cheering them on. The whole incident seemed to me a tangible manifestation of the consequences of an unwillingness to listen, of disobeying fundamental rules of neighborly compliance, and on the bees' part, of reasonable resistance to insanity. I apologized to the swarm, and to the tree, and let the swarm go wherever it wanted.

There is another kind of revolution, one that does not emerge from the culture, from philosophy, from theory, from thought abstracted from sense, but instead from our bodies, and from the land. It, too, is a part of this language older than words. It is the honeybee who stings in defense of the larger being that is her hive; it is the mother grizzly who charges again and again the train that took from her the two sons she carried inside, and that mangled their bodies beyond all but motherly recognition; it is the woman who submits to her rapist, knowing it's better to be violated than murdered, but who begins to fight when he reaches for the knife, or the hammer; it is Zapatista spokesperson Cecelia Rodriguez, who says, "I have a question of those men who raped me. Why did you not kill me? It was a mistake to spare my life. I will not shut up . . . this has not traumatized me to the point of paralysis." It is the indigenous Zapatistas, who declare, "There are those who resign themselves to being slaves. .. . But there are those who do not resign themselves, there are those who decide to be uncomfortable, there are those who do not sell themselves, there are those who do not surrender themselves.. . . There are those who decide to fight. In any place in the world, anytime, any man or woman rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes that resignation has woven for them and that cynicism has dyed grey. Any man, any woman, of whatever color in whatever tongue, says to himself, to herself, 'Enough already!"' It is Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, murdered by the Nigerian government at the urging of Shell Oil, whose last words were, "Lord, take my soul but the struggle continues!" It is the U'wa people of South America, a part of whose community committed mass suicide 400 years ago by walking off a fourteen-hundred-foot cliff rather than submit to Spanish rule, and whose living members today vow to follow their ancestors if Occidental Petroleum and Shell move in to destroy their land. It is the U'wa woman who says, "I sing the traditional songs to my children. I teach them that everything is sacred and linked. How can I tell Shell and Oxy that to take the petrol is for us worse than killing your own mother? If you kill the Earth, then no one will live. I do not want to die. Nobody does." It is anyone who dares to think and speak for him- or herself. It is Nestor Makhno fighting for his Ukrainian homeland and for the autonomy of those who work the land, against the Germans, the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Bolsheviks again, the Whites again, and again the Bolsheviks. It is the men and women who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and it is those who rebelled at Treblinka. It is Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the temple. It is the women and men who lock themselves down in front of bulldozers. It is the Chipko movement in India, begun by women who clung tight to trees so the woodmen's axes would bite into their own, and not the trees', flesh. It is Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo. It is the salmon battering themselves against the concrete, using the only thing they have, their flesh, to try to break down that which keeps them from their homes.

It is not the attempt to seize power or the industrial "means of production," but it is actions based upon the instinctual drive to survive, and to live with dignity.

This is not political theory. It is not philosophy. It is not religion. It is remembering what it is to be a human being—an animal. It is remembering what it means to love, and to be alive.

It is to learn the power of the word
no.
No more clearcuts. No more tumors on turtles. No more genocide. No more slavery, neither our own nor others.

So long as we, or I, continue to discuss this in the abstract, we, or I, still have too much to lose. Presumably the mother grizzly did not find herself paralyzed by theoretical discussions of what is right or wrong, and presumably the same is true for the woman who takes the weapons from her attacker's hands. If we only begin to feel in our bodies the immensity of what we are losing—intact ecosystems, hours sold for wages, childhoods lost to violence, women's capacity to walk unafraid—we will know precisely what we need to do.

Any revolution on the outside—any breaking down of current power structures—with no corresponding revolution in perceiving, being, and thinking, will merely further destruction, genocide, and ecocide. Any revolution on the inside—a revolution of the heart—which does not lead to a revolution on the outside plays just as false.

Anton Chekhov once said that he would like to read a story about a man who squeezes every drop of slave's blood from himself. That is first what we must do. For when a slave rebels without challenging the entire notion of slavery, we merely encounter a new boss. But if all the blood is painfully squeezed away, what emerges is a free man or woman, and not even death can stop those who are free.

I've been thinking about what I wrote before, about me being fucked up, manifesting in part by scenes of ecstasy and intimacy involving nonhuman others, and I've come to the conclusion I was wrong. Oh, I'm still fucked up in some ways: my sleep patterns are disturbed, confrontation is not always easy for me (not that you'd know it from this book), certain scenes remind me overmuch of my childhood (to this day I hate beans because I forced them down my too-tight throat, and only recently have I gained the ability to wash dishes when another is in the room). But I don't think that experiencing intimacy and ecstasy with nonhumans is a sign of mental illness. Rather it is the opposite. To experience these scenes
only
with nonhumans might be reason for concern, but one of the great losses we endure in this prison of our own making is the collapse of intimacy with others, the rending of community, like tearing and retearing a piece of paper until there only remains the tiniest scrap. To place our needs for intimacy and ecstasy—needs like food, water, acceptance—onto only one species, onto only one person, onto only the area of joined genitalia for only the time of intercourse, is to ask quite a lot of our sex.

I'm not suggesting we remedy this by having more sex with more partners, or with trees, high-jumping pits, or sheep. Sex is not the point at all. That's one of the problems of our mechanistic perspective. Because our science cannot measure and quantify existential loneliness, and because love, too, deigns not to be put on the rack and relieved of its secrets, we talk too much about that which we can comprehend, photograph, reproduce, commodify, which we can see: sex. But like an iceberg, or the entrance to a cave, or like the ocean itself, there is so much more beneath only hinted at by the surface.

I remember a midnight some ten years ago. I was walking through the late spring snow and looking at the sky. Suddenly, lightning began to dance from cloud to cloud. Billows and curves reflected purplish white behind the blinding glare of the bolts themselves. Opening my arms I fell into the clouds, then stood back in the snow, laughing, then finally moaning with delight as I saw for the first and only time in my life a lightning storm with snow on the ground.

I remember another night when northern lights coincided with the Perseid meteor shower. I carried a blanket into the dark, wearing only shoes. I spread the blanket, then took off those last bits of clothing. Lying in the cool August night, I watched the rhythmic pulsing of the Aurora, the sudden glint of meteor. I stayed there, naked, nearly till dawn. The feeling was not precisely sexual, but neither was it devoid of sexuality.