A Language Older Than Words (44 page)

I did not die for only one night, but for the several years it took for the lessons of that night to travel to every cell of my body,
and for the layers of old skin—formed in an earlier time of trauma,
when I had different requirements for survival—to scrape away or slough off and be replaced by new ones.

When we imprison another we must also place one of our own in prison as a guard. Likewise when we imprison a part of ourselves, other parts must move into that same dungeon. Prisons—whether made of steel, razor wire, floodlamps, and observation posts, or a steel will holding emotions and flesh in check—consume a tremendous amount of energy. When as a child I vowed to no longer feel anger, to no longer feel anything, not only did I lose access to banished feelings but I lost also the energy it took to keep them at bay. Where did those emotions go, what did they do? They did not vanish into the psychic equivalent of thin air. How did they twist and turn to find their way out, as ultimately they must? How do frustrated emotions make clear their need for expression, and how, in the end, are they expressed?

The collapse that night in the hospital taught me the inefficacy of attempted control: diarrhea was an embodied manifestation of a lesson I needed to learn, and Crohn's disease was a teacher.
Let go, Derrick. Let go.
If I could not control my bowels, how could I hope to control my emotions, and certainly how could I ever hope to control any other? If I could no longer cope with physical pain by simply walling it off, what made me think that process worked any better for psychological pain? That night made clear that my attempts to ignore pain were killing me, both physically and psychically. It also made clear that control was a dead-end street.

I still have a notebook from that time in which I wrote a tentative declaration of this new direction: "All my life I have trained myself to be guided intellectually by intuition [I always did well on tests, standardized and other, because I'm a good guesser], and emotionally and practically by will. Now I wish to begin training my intuition to govern those other aspects of my life, tempered by will." That was as far as I could say at the time. I hadn't yet realized I didn't need to "train" my intuition so much as I needed to quit trying to impose my will upon it, and to instead begin listening to it. I hadn't yet learned well enough the lesson the disease was bringing to me.

By speaking of Crohn's disease as a teacher—both literal and metaphorical—I'm not suggesting that everything in our lives is a result of our having called it forward to teach us what we need to learn. Napalmed children do not call fiery death into their lives, nor do salmon call into existence dams to teach them about extinction. The notion of all calamity being in some measure self-inflicted is just one more attempt to deny accountability to perpetrators, one more means to silence victims. It insults not only the victim but also objectifies the agent of calamity, diminishes it to just another resource to be consumed, this time for our education. But the agent may have a lesson to deliver, and it may not. That's up to the other, or sometimes to chance.

I got a lot of that "blame the victim" stuff soon after I came down with the disease. All through the summer of 1985, and over the next couple of years, perhaps a dozen people approached to tell me the disease was my responsibility, that somehow I had brought it on myself. This was annoying enough the first time; by the fourth or fifth I lost patience and began, exasperated, to ask, "Would you tell me to take responsibility for getting hurt in an earthquake?" I am not certain whether it was the question, or the vehemence with which I asked it, that usually shut them up. One person didn't shut up. I was on a plane, stuck for hours on a runway at Chicago's O'Hare while the pilots waited for a break in a blizzard. My row-mate was a psychologist. We exchanged histories, and at some point I told her I had Crohn's. We talked of it for a while before she made what I had come to view as the inevitable reference to my responsibility. I responded by rote with my rhetorical question: Without hesitation she answered
yes.

She didn't have to say anything else, for suddenly I understood. There is a difference between assigning causal responsibility to someone—I
caused
this
Crohn's disease, the napalmed baby
caused
the atrocity—and someone becoming responsible (that is, capable of responding) to the events which engulf them. In other words, Crohn's disease had arrived, which meant it was now my responsibility to learn how to respond to it, enter into a dialogue with it. Obviously, in many cases—the napalmed baby; myself as a child; all of us, I fear, faced with the monumental momentum of our culture's death urge—the circumstances of any particular calamity can be so overwhelming as to disallow reasonable response. But so long as we are capable it is our duty and our joy to remain as present as we can to our circumstances. At that moment something shifted inside. I was no longer simply a person afflicted with Crohn's disease, but instead a person with a new companion for life. This companion was not always going to be pleasant, and in fact could kill me if it so chose, but from now on our lives were inextricably bound. For better or for worse, I was accountable to this other, which (or who) was also accountable to me. Just as it would behoove me to learn to listen to the friends and family with whom I plan on maintaining any sort of relationship and to learn to speak honestly to them as well—hearing what they need and making clear what I need in order to continue—sitting on that plane I realized that if I were going to survive this disease, I had better learn to listen. I realized, too, that learning to listen to the disease might not only keep me alive, but might also help to release me from the prison of my own steel will, which I had built as a child to keep the world out, but which I now was finding kept me locked in even more firmly.

The psychologist Rollo May retells the story of Briar Rose, modifying the emphasis so that no longer is she a mere sleeping beauty waiting unchanging to be awakened by a kiss, but instead she— or rather her primarily unconscious processes of maturation— now runs the story. Far more important than the kiss is the time of sleeping—the hundred years of death—and it is now she and not the prince who determines the moment of reawakening. The lucky prince merely happens to be in the right place at the right time with the right attitude.

The story, if you recall, runs like this: A king and queen were unable to conceive, until one day when the queen was bathing a frog crawled onto land and said, "Before the year is out you shall have a daughter."

The daughter, named Briar Rose, was born, and the king gave a great feast. Because he hadn't enough golden plates, he was able to invite only twelve of the country's thirteen Wise Women. On the night of the feast, each of the first eleven Wise Women granted gifts to the princess: virtue, beauty, riches, and so on. Then the thirteenth, the uninvited one, showed up unannounced, and to avenge herself said that in the princess's fifteenth year she would prick herself with a spindle and fall down dead. The twelfth Wise Woman, who had not yet granted a boon, stated that while she could not undo the words of the other, she could soften them; instead of dying the princess would sleep for a hundred years.

Her father responded by removing every spindle from the kingdom, trying to protect his daughter from the death everyone knew must come. But it is no more possible to cheat fate than it is to resolve the nonrational through the purely rational. One day in her explorations the princess found an old woman spinning in a deserted room in the castle. Briar Rose "pricked" her finger on the spindle and began to bleed—the sexual imagery here is not tremendously subtle—and fell asleep.

The sleep extended to everyone in the castle, and round the castle grew a hedge of thorns so high as to hide even the flag on the roof (in the cocoon, the caterpillar must give up its former identity so that when the time is right it may assume another). For the next hundred years many princes tried to awaken this sleeping beauty with a kiss. But they never succeeded, because before they could get to her the hedge's thorns grabbed and killed them. Finally, at the end of the allotted time, another prince, really not so very different from the ones who came before, made the same attempt. But because the time had come for Briar Rose to rewaken, the thorns turned to flowers, which parted of their own accord—once again, the sexual symbolism is so obvious as to almost make me blush—and let him in. He kissed her, and you know the rest.

Rollo May calls this moment when Briar Rose grew ready
kairos,
or
the time of destiny.
It is that moment when her pupating is done, and she is ready to emerge an adult. It is the moment when her purpose begins to be fulfilled (and let's hope her purpose in life is far more than to be a simple helpmate to her handsome prince). She is at last receptive to stimuli to which, in the time before, she was insensate. Because of internal changes she is ready for external change, ready to be reawakened with something so simple as a kiss.

The notion of
kairos
is important not only to sleeping princesses in fairy tales and to their suitors, successful or dead. It applies to anyone who undergoes any death and who must then await the necessary rebirth, and I believe it applies just as surely to cultures, which too must die to a way of living so that when the time is right they may reawaken mature, ripe, and ready to enter into fully mutual, adult relationships.

Every creature on the planet must be hoping, at the very least selfishly, that our cultures time of awakening comes soon. Perhaps someday the salmon and the rest of us will hurl ourselves against the dams expecting to feel the impermeability that has met us all along—the obstinate resistance that murdered Jesus, Spartacus, Tupac Amaru, and Thomas Münzer—and we will find at long last and instead the wild river that lay hidden there all the time.

I don't believe it would have been possible for me to undergo a meaningful death and rebirth had I been working a wage job. There would not have been time. No one expects a caterpillar to spin a cocoon, pop in for ten minutes, then emerge a butterfly, and at least my mother understood it would take me months or years to recover even physically from my episode of Crohn's disease, yet not many of us are willing or able to make the time necessary to begin asking the right questions about who we are, what we love, what we fear, and what we're doing to each other, much less answering these questions, and much much less living them.

I don't always know what the right questions are; I only know that they reside in my body, and that in order to discover them— or better, remember—I need to be still. In that sense the disease did me an immense favor; had I at any time been tempted by poverty, rampant deficit spending, and social pressure to get a job, my body would have killed me.

At the time, through my twenties, I did not know what was right, only what was wrong, and I didn't know what I wanted, only what I didn't want. I didn't know how to live, only how not to live. I knew a job wasn't what I wanted or needed.

We did not evolve working for others forty hours or more per week. We evolved, and one need only look at nonhumans or at remaining indigenous peoples to see this is so, spending a great deal of time doing not much of anything (or once again in the lingo of bee research, "loafing"). As the Dane Frederick Andersen Boiling said of the Khoikhoi of South Africa, "They find it strange that we, the Christians, work, and they say, that we are all mortal, that we gain nothing from our toil, but at the end are thrown underground, so that all we have done is in vain." Another colonist noted of these same people that "their contempt for riches is in reality nothing but their hatred of work," and a third remarked that "the principle work of the men is to laze about."

Had I encountered these comments in my twenties, they would have encouraged me by helping to blunt the voice inside:
What's the matter? Lazy?
Looking back, I can put a positive spin on my activities—or lack thereof—of those years by calling it a period of pupation, or saying I was undergoing a death and rebirth, or calling it my own forty days in the wilderness. But the truth is that for the next few years, living first in Nevada and later in Idaho, I didn't actually do much of anything. I felt guilty about this, but I couldn't find anything to do that interested me more than nothing. I certainly wasn't going to go back to physics, or to any other means of selling my hours. I called myself a writer, but didn't write much: what was I going to write? I didn't have anything to say, because I didn't know who I was. To discover that takes long, slow, uninterrupted time. Time enough to get bored, and then to move beyond boredom, which is really just another screen to deflect our attention away from the arduous yet delightful, joyous though painful process of allowing ourselves the stillness to remember what we feel and to begin assuming responsibility for our lives.

Nearly every day I walked the railroad tracks to the Humboldt River, then climbed down to the concrete footing of a bridge.
There I sat in the sunlight and read, or more often just watched the river. I walked the banks, and in spring saw a mother bird feign a broken wing to distract me from her nest. I saw beetles crawling in and out of a beaver dead on the tracks, and I saw the beaver's teeth, orange as carrots. I saw plenty of trains.

Albert Einstein once observed that "the significant problems of the world cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness at which they were created." I think he's right. I believe Carl Jung was onto much the same thing when he wrote, "All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. . . . They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This ‘outgrowing’ proved on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the patient's horizon, and through this broadening of his or her outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms but faded when confronted with a new and stronger life urge."