A Language Older Than Words (11 page)

I must admit I wasn't sure that Nollman would be able to contribute much to my overall sense of mental well-being (remember, we're still talking about
talking
with
animals). The first major public performance of his work was a Thanksgiving Day radio broadcast of the folk song "Froggy Went A Courtin'," recorded live at a factory farm, with thousands of turkeys gobbling simultaneously at each refrain. The
Washington Post
called him "a harmless crank." Nollman claims the turning point of his life came while performing a duet with a turkey in southern Mexico. I was beginning to feel better already. Perhaps instead of gaining understanding I would find the two of us sharing the same asylum. I was looking forward to my interviews with Napoleon Bonaparte, Jesus Christ, and Marie Antoinette.

Since Nollman lives on an island in Puget Sound, I flew to Seattle to work with my friend George first. When George was driving me to the ferry, we talked about interspecies communication, and he told me about a woman who has extended conversations with wild ravens in their own tongue.

"I've seen it for myself," he said. "It's really unnerving to be talking to her in English, and all of a sudden have her step aside and caw to a raven. It was weird. The bird cocked its head, sat there, then cawed back at her. She changed her inflection. Then the bird, then her."

"What'd they talk about?" "I don't know. I never asked."

We also talked about intraspecies communication. He said, "These days I can't talk to environmentalists anymore than I can talk to industrialists. They're both playing the same game. Industrialists lie by diminishing the severity of the situation, pretending against all evidence that there isn't a problem. 'We can keep cutting down the forests,' they insist, 'I don't see any damage.' Meanwhile, environmentalists also diminish the severity by pretending the problem can be solved. 'If we just revoke Boise Cascade's charter, or Plum Creeks, we can save the old growth. If we can just reform the Forest Service, if we can just take back
Weyerhaeuser's illegally gained lands, the old growth can be saved.'
Well, the old growth is
gone.
We've killed it coast to coast. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous."

I nodded, and we drove in silence. The silence lengthened. I didn't know what George was thinking about. I often don't. I looked outside, to the grass off the interstate's shoulder, then back to George. I told him that while I had once seen a newspaper report that humans are causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet, it had been relegated to two-column-inches on page twenty-four of the B-section.

"We should be happy the paper mentioned biodiversity at all," George chimed. "I mean, a newspaper is a corporation, and it's foolish to expect corporations to do what's best. No one expects it from Union Carbide or Westinghouse. Isn't it a bit naive to expect the corporation known as
The New York Times
to be different? ‘All the News That's Fit to Print’? The function of a corporation is to make money, whether it manufactures bulk industrial chemicals (most of them toxic), or bulk industrial opinions (most of them just as toxic). And ethics just don't fit."

He had a point. Newspapers lying to serve their own interests go back as far as newspapers themselves. The turn-of-the-century historian Henry Adams put it as clearly as possible: "The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved."

Newspapers manifest the culture as a whole. Just as it is true that any father who would crush a child's will would not be able to speak of it honestly, so, too, a culture that is snuffing out life on the planet would necessarily lie and dissemble to protect itself from the truth. Environmentalists lie, industrialists lie, newspapers lie. Parents lie, children lie. We all lie, and we are all afraid. Afraid to not know what is going on, and even more afraid of finding out. The opposite is true as well. Honest discourse is the first and most important step in stopping destruction.

George and I had lunch, and he dropped me off at the ferry before continuing northward to give a talk in Bellingham. "It's for a Christian television show," he said, "and that's a hopeful sign. Ten years ago you had to put on an owl suit to get mainstream media to pay attention. Now, all I had to do was write a book, and I'm having rational discourse with Christians."

The ferry ride to Friday Harbor was chilly, and a cold headwind brought the blood to my cheeks. As we weaved between islands, I stood to watch the waves roll beneath the ferry, went inside to warm up for a while, then returned to stand behind the railing above the ship's square bow.

Jim was waiting for me near the dock, and he drove me in his old yellow pickup to the home he shares with his wife and their two daughters. He showed me his garden, a beautiful patchwork of herbs, fruit trees, berries, and vegetables, set off from the pathways that weaved through them—like the Sound through the islands—by small boulders he'd moved for borders. He took me to a one-room cabin across the garden from his house.

We talked about his garden, how every day he walks the paths for an hour or so, stands in front of the bushes and talks to them. He observed that whenever his family leaves, the plants look listless on their return, even if they've been well taken care of.

"The plants know when we're here," he said, "or when we're not here. How do you verify something like that? It's
pointless to even
try."

He continued, "I know this about my garden in the same way
I know my hat is made out of cloth. To be able to surrender to the knowledge that the garden and I are connected nurtures my soul. I wish more people could know this connection more often, and I believe people did know it before we became so dependent on machines and jobs and time."

Away from the Sound, the afternoon grew warm, and in the sunny cabin, with its wide windows and the line between sun and shadow sliding slowly across the floor, it became warmer still. Jim said, "People laugh up their sleeves at anything that defies the industrial explanation of our lives, anything that is spiritual. But these experiences are grace. Interacting with nonhumans doesn't have anything to do with gathering information; it has to do with being blessed. And wanting to be blessed. It has to do with that intersection of communication and communion."

I nodded in agreement, and then changed the subject. "Do you ever wonder if you're projecting?"

"There was a time, when I was thirty-five or forty. I was working intensely with orcas, alongside scientists, and I worried about that all the time. But I don't really care anymore. I'm content to set up situations where 'those things,' whatever they are, are likely to happen. The meetings themselves are so remarkable—whether they involve 'interspecies communication' or not—they justify themselves."

The tape recorder hummed and ticked on the table between us. Jim continued, "I couldn't do what I do if I had to count on results, because too often I don't have any, in terms of what our culture or magazines or editors would believe. In the late 80s I was doing a film every summer, and we'd have these incredible interactions with whales, but the filmmakers never got them. It's like they never happened. Finally I had to walk away."

I looked at him, puzzled, and he continued, "I had to find a new reason for my work, for my art, or I would have had to stop doing communication with nonhumans. Then I realized that art doesn't really need to have a reason to exist. It's like what John Cage said, 'Art is whatever you can get away with.'"

I liked so much of what he’d said earlier, but I found myself on a slippery slope of damp squib. I tried to pin him down. I had to know if he thought these experiences were as real as the hat on his head.

"Being an artist, everything is just metaphors." He paused. "It's safe. If I came out and said these things as pure energy, Id get in trouble. That doesn't happen if you talk about them as metaphors."

"But are they true?"

"It doesn't matter. It just matters if they're interesting. If you're going to last, you can't take any of it very seriously, yourself, the universe, anything."

"Why not?"

"You won't have a voice. I wouldn't be able to publish. I wouldn't be able to speak. This summer I get to work with some world-famous marine biologists; we'll be doing stuff with humpback whales. Ten years ago these guys wouldn't have touched me with a ten-foot pole, and now they'll work with me straight on. And you know why? Because I've never made any sweeping statements. I've never said that whales are intelligent. I've never taken a stance."

I guess,
I thought,
I’ll
have Marie Antoinette all to myself: this guy isn't going anywhere
I
want to go.

"Everything we're talking about here," he continued, "is very threatening, to the culture, and to people's basic ideas about how the universe works. The trick is to talk about it without shutting people down. How do you breach their defenses? What is your schtick to be able to get them to listen, and to make it so you can continue? I'm trying to change the culture, trying to change the way people perceive their place in the world, but I'm also trying to make a living. How do you do that? It would be very easy for me to get lumped into a box, as somebody who just plays music with whales. And I don't want to get lumped there."

I understood where he was coming from, but the same phrase kept popping into my head:
We're screwed.

I stepped away from the conversational fire, and asked, knowing well the answer, why the notion of communicating with coyotes, whales, plants, is threatening to the culture.

"If the Earth is dead, it feels no pain. If the Earth weren't considered dead, we couldn't build the Empire State Building, because we couldn't bring ourselves to hurt the planet so much just to make a big building. The entire culture is based on the belief that the earth is inanimate."

I stepped even further away, and, because the seminal experience of his life
had
come
in a barnyard in Mexico with a turkey,
asked what has caused him to continue to listen to the natural world,
at least metaphorically.

"We need to distinguish between listening and hearing. I believe I listen better than many people, but I still don't hear very well. I have a lot of friends around the world who are able to actually
hear
the natural world. Still, whether or not we hear, listening is important. Until we start to listen—and, I hope eventually hear—the natural world for ourselves, nonhumans will be regarded as objects. Just the act of trying to listen can change a lot of our perceptions about nature, and that can change the way we live."

We talked through the afternoon, and eventually I turned off the recorder. After dinner, and after going with him and his wife to a reading in town, I returned to spend the night in the cabin. There, I fell asleep listening to the rustling of the stalks in his garden. About three, a cock began to crow. I shut the window and covered my head with a pillow to stifle the noise, then fell back asleep.

The next day, riding the ferry back, I stood on the bow and watched the houses float by on islands like so many pieces of beached wood. I wondered how much this trip had really helped. I had no need to be convinced of the metaphorical efficacy of listening to the natural world. The mess of houses, seaplanes, and boats—never mind the floating styrofoam and tiny oil slicks—were sufficient evidence that we’re not listening. But this had more to do with listening to our own detritus.

None of this is to diminish the importance of listening as metaphor. Nor is it to diminish the importance of listening to our trash, which clearly is just as crucial to our survival. If we were paying any attention, would we be making plutonium, jet skis, mink coats, protein drinks, breast implants, satellite surveillance systems?

The problem with viewing this metaphorically is that metaphors don't take down dams. Metaphors are not inescapable. "That's a nice metaphor," says the vivisectionist, the politician, the factory farm owner, the scientist, "but you're wrong."

"It's a nice story," say the rest of us, "but now it’s time to get back
to work."

I went inside the ferry and sat down. I was no longer that interested in the question of my own sanity. Compared to what we've done, and what we continue to do, even to this little corner of the planet, the whole notion of making a deal with coyotes no longer seemed so crazy. Questioning my own sanity amid all the unspoken insanity of our culture seemed like the craziest idea I'd
ever
heard.

Of course I also realized I was making an unfair leap of logic: the fact that some people make satellite surveillance systems doesn't mean coyotes understand a damn thing. They might, but there's no connection.

I went back outside, and found the fins of orcas gliding above the Sound's smallish waves. At first only a few people saw the black triangles, but more and more noticed, until virtually everyone was leaning against the ferry's railings, gasping in unison as we saw the black and white and black of their bodies, all of us straining to see this bit of nature gliding through the pollution of this well-traveled stretch of water.

Most everyone I know speaks openly about the clear and present collapse of industrial civilization in one-on-one conversations. This is true not only for my friends, who are mainly writers, activists of one sort or another, or revolutionaries, but also for people I encounter on buses or planes, in airports, and so on. It's also true that almost without exception the people I know most intimately speak of the certainty that unless it is stopped, our culture will destroy every living being on the planet. Once again, they say this only in private.