A Language Older Than Words (34 page)

I have no answers, and feel as though most of the time I don't even have questions. The questions I do have so often seem simple avoidances of what I feel, and of what I am afraid to feel, underneath.

Until the end of my twenties I had nightmares almost every night. A vampire who slashed my face with a razor as I said to him, "You cannot hurt me." A doctor who strapped me seated to a wall, then pulled away the seat and spread my legs to rape me. Dream after dream where I escaped danger, only to find myself back where I began, or to find that those I trusted turned out, too, to be vampires. Or rapists. Or murderers. The nightmares have slowed, to perhaps two or three per week.

I often feel as though I've forgotten how to fall asleep. I can lie there awake for hours. Not scared, always. Just awake. And when I do fall asleep I often reawaken, probably an average of fifteen to twenty times per night. I am likely as not frightened, yet I am able to fall back asleep. I am thankful for that, or I would not sleep at all.

The first woman I ever dated snuck up behind me once to tickle me. Once. I whirled, fists raised, before I even thought, and my own look of horror that reflected back to me in her face has stayed with me ever since. Of course I did not hit her. I have never hit anyone. But no one sneaks up on me.

I sometimes feel as though the tone of this book is not appropriate. I'm not certain the language is raw enough. My language is too fine, the sentences too lyrical, to describe things neither child nor adult should have to describe at all. As for the atrocities that are not mine but are experienced by others—just today I read a report from Algeria that police routinely pump salt water into political prisoners' stomachs until they burst, or have prisoners stand naked before a table, testicles on the flat surface, and.. . . they, too, should not have to be described. But I know also that if I pretend they do not happen by not writing about them, and you pretend they do not happen by not reading about them, the horrors themselves will not go away. Given the numbers, right now somewhere in a torture center in Algeria (or in many other countries) a woman is being gang-raped by guards, and a man is having a hole bored through his leg with an electric drill. Right now in factory farms. . . . It's not the writing that must change, but the reality.

Writing this book is the hardest thing I have ever done, but so long as I allow myself to remain focused on choosing the words precisely, I can keep myself distracted not only from the difficulty but from the feelings. And keeping ourselves distracted from our feelings is the point of so much of what we do, is it not?

This book is as artificial as any other, and is bound by the laws of cultural production. I allow you to know only what I want you to know of what I know. Even I am allowed to know only a small portion of what I know.

I do not know who I am. When my father came into my room, and I went away—poof-—what happened to the part who remained behind? Who is he, and what does he feel? What did he feel? How can I ever make right to him what I put him through by leaving? I know I saved myself, and I do not precisely blame myself, but what of the me I left behind?

I have been splintered into a thousand pieces, and I do not know if I shall ever be whole. I do not even know what wholeness means, and looking around it does not seem that many others do, either.

It should be clear by now that a central belief of our culture—if not
the
central belief—is that it is not only acceptable but desirable and necessary to bend others to our own will. This belief in the rightness of coercion motivates us not only collectively but individually, not only consciously but subliminally.

Coercion is central to our religion, whether we offer those different from us the immediate choice of Christianity or death, or the more eternal choice of Jesus or damnation.

Coercion is central to our scientific philosophy, whether we speak of Descartes' dream of possessing nature, Bacon's storming of nature's strongholds to make her our slave, the suggestion in
Demonic Males
that a woman's safest future may be to bond with a violent man, or Dawkins' pathetic description of selfish genes coercing us to coerce others.

Coercion is central to our applied sciences, whether we speak of dammed rivers, "scientific management" of forests, predator "control" projects, or the exploration of the human genome by self-styled "genetic prospectors" seeking to exploit the chromosomal makeup of often-unwilling peoples.

Coercion is central to our economics, whether we speak of the Middle Passage, the modern-day enslavement of one hundred and fifty million children, the forcing of people to enter the wage economy through the removal of realistic options and more broadly the wage slavery that defines capitalism, or the routine use of police and the military to assist the men atop their boxes to accumulate ever-more wealth.

Coercion is central to our legal system, which presents one face to those in power, and a different face to those who fight this power. In the case of the former, coercion is systematized through a body of lawmakers and interpreters which supports and rationalizes the use of force by those in power to gain material possessions or otherwise bend certain others—the powerless, the silenced, the not-fully-human—to the will of the already powerful. Just as my father never beat anyone without good reason, it is more pleasing to the now-silenced consciences of those doing the coercing to arm themselves not just with weapons and claims to virtue but also with a system of legalistic arguments that justify coercion.

The legal system presents a different face to those who infringe upon the right of those in power to use coercion. Thus the crucifixion of Jesus, and of Spartacus. Thus the slaughter of the Anabaptists. Thus the murder of more than 100,000 in the Peasants' Revolt of 1524, and the torture and murder—purely legal, of course, and fully supported by such luminaries as Martin Luther—of their leader, Thomas Münzer. Thus the torture and murder of the mestizo chief Tupac Amaru, who in 1781 led an unsuccessful rebellion that, until it was crushed, abolished all forms of forced labor in liberated territories around Cuzco. Thus the murder of Crazy Horse. Thus the murder of half the Haymarket conspirators in Illinois. Thus the betrayal of Nestor Makhno and other anarchists after the Russian revolution. Thus in 1995, hot on the heels of the Nigerian military memo stating, "Shell [Oil Corporation] operations still impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken [against the Ogoni people] for smooth economic activities to commence," Nigeria executed writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Coercion is central to our politics, whether we speak of James Madison insisting, during our country's constitutional convention, that the main goal of the political system must be "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," or whether we listen to the words of Adam Smith, godfather of modern economics: "Civil government ... is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all," or whether we read the words of seminal political theorist John Locke, who observed, "Government has no other end but the preservation of property." Or we can listen to Richard Nixon: "The American national psychology has few doubts that reasonable men can settle all differences by honest compromise. But the reality is that force has always been the ultimate sanction at a conference table. Diplomacy by itself cannot be effective unless our opponents know what pressures we will be willing to bring to bear."

Coercion is central to the raising of our children, whether we speak of grades, desks arranged in rows before a central authority, or the wearing out of the belt. Consider in contrast the Semay of Malaya who "emphatically deny" that they teach their children, but insist "our children just learn by themselves." If a parent tells a child to do something and the child responds, "I
bood
[a word meaning "to not feel like doing something]," the subject is closed. To put pressure on the child is strictly forbidden. Children learn most activities through imitative play that in time becomes adult behavior.

Coercion is central to our relations with other species, whether we speak of vivisection, factory farming, industrial forestry, or commercial fishing. All grossly immoral and exploitative, all most often scrupulously legal.

The rates for rape and other abuses of women make clear that coercion is central to our cross-gender relations.

As water is to fish, as air is to birds, so coercion is to us. It is where we live. It is what we drink. It is what we breathe. It is transparent. So deeply inured are we that we no longer perceive when we are coercing or being coerced. Grades. Wages. Jobs. The sale of fingers one by one and the purchasing of sex in seemingly simple monetary transactions. On a more grand, though no more outrageous, scale, napalm, penitentiaries, deforestation: all these manifest this need to coerce others.

I have been thinking once again about rape. Given the geography in which we find ourselves, this habitat in which we are reared, this landscape of coercion that surrounds us seemingly everywhere we look, everywhere our culture has been able to touch and transform, it is no wonder, it occurs to me at last, that the levels of adult rape, child abuse, and child rape are so high. But there is another, and much more powerful, point to be made here: given the degree to which coercion suffuses every person and every action born of this culture, and given coercion's so-often utter transparency, it is a testament to the resilient goodness inherent in each and every one of us that these acts of deeply intimate coercion do not occur even more frequently.

But they do not. There still exist many of us who do not rape, who neither strike nor egregiously coerce others. For the time being, goodness and mutuality have not been exterminated. Like the species still surviving the onslaught of our economics, like the indigenous cultures still surviving our religion, our wars, our guns, our liquor, and our money, like the rivers still surviving our concrete, heavy metals, and pesticides, and like the stars that once again have begun to speak to me at night, or perhaps were speaking all along, I understand now that somewhere inside of each of us—some more than others—still survives that person who would not and will not rape, who would not and will not coerce, that person who understands what it means to be alive and to be a part of a relationship, a family, a community both human and nonhuman. Like the women and children lost after Sand Creek, these lost survivors—or those who at least recognize that they are lost, and who deeply do not wish to coerce—merely need someone—human, star, wolf, bee, or anyone else under the sun—to lead them home.

Honeybees

"Happiness is love, nothing else. A man who is capable of love is happy." Hermann Hesse.

THE EVIDENCE OF INTERSPECIES communication and the fundamental
beingness
of nonhumans is so obvious as to render my previous skepticism embarrassing. To attempt a proof that non-humans communicate would not only be degrading—imagine a book purporting to prove that blondes can think—it would he silly, like proving the existence of gravity, love, death, or physical existence. It could be written in two words—
pay attention
—or better, in one—
listen.

One evening last spring I sat on the couch, looking out the window and talking on the phone. The lights were off, inside and out. The window was open. It was that time of day when shapes lose distinct edges, when solid shadows blur into back ground. The dark contour of a dog lay tucked in a hole he’d dug to fit his body. I mentioned on the phone that when I brought in the chicks for the night, one was missing. The conversation flowed on, I forgot about the chick, and barely noticed when the dark form stood and walked around the house. Moments later it returned, walked toward the window, stooped, left behind a tiny black bundle, and walked away. When I realized what had happened I put down the phone to run outside. The dog had brought the body of the chick.

During the summer I don't put kitty litter in the cat box, relying instead on the cats to go outside. This is fine with two of them, but the third—who had a very difficult time grasping the concept of using the cat box in the first place, often standing in the box to drop her feces on the floor—did not make the transition so easily. She did, however, find a compromise both of us could live with: she defecated outdoors, and urinated in the bathtub. I then unthinkingly and unilaterally abrogated this agreement by putting more chicks in the tub. When I thought about it later, I hoped she would merely use the other shower. She didn't, but just went outside like the other two. When the weather began to cool I forgot to bring in the cat box. Soon I noticed a smell, and saw she was urinating in a corner of the living room. I brought the cat box inside. That first night—and this is really the point of this story—she jumped on my lap as I worked, which each cat often does, sleeping there while I type or sit. That night, however, she jumped immediately back down and ran out of the room. I followed, and saw that she went directly to the cat box, clearly showing me that she, too, could follow the rules, if only I would learn to get them straight.

Just moments ago I received an email from a friend of Jeannette, who had suggested that she send me the following: "Several years ago, two friends living in Naramata, B.C. observed on several occasions in winter a bald eagle circling over a flock of coots in Okanagan Lake. After some time, invariably one coot would rise and be taken by the eagle. Whether this is done to protect the young or other members of the group, or for some unknown reason, apparently this phenomenon is common knowledge to indigenous and non-indigenous people who live close to the earth. We know that in the complex interaction of all beings on earth, cooperation is an important factor."