A Language Older Than Words (40 page)

And I remember a third night, looking out the bedroom window of a house I rented in Nevada, and seeing the moon so bright it passed in front of any wispy clouds that happened by. I heard the quiet sounds of nightbirds, and beyond that the Humboldt River, soft and slow. I remember that I looked at the green blisters of paint on the windowsill, and I loved them just
for what they were. I saw then the distant headlight of a
train.
carving out a bright helix as it swept toward me on its tracks. With it came its sounds, all the rush and roar and clatter that means a train, and the bumping of couplers straining as the
train
changes speed. It approached, and it held me tight, and then it passed on and left me alone again with the river, the night birds, and most of all, time.

There are some ways in which I'm fucked up, but that's not one of them.

The Plants Respond

"The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence, 'at bot
tom' the psyche is simply 'world.'" Carl Jung

SOMETIMES IT HAPPENS THAT a person can name the exact mo
ment when his or her life changed irrevocably. For Cleve Backster,
it was early morning on February 2, 1966, at thirteen minutes,
fifty-five seconds of chart time for a polygraph he was administering. One of the world's experts on polygraphs, and the creator of the Backster Zone Comparison Test, the standard used by lie-
detection examiners worldwide, Backster had threatened the
subjects well-being in hopes of triggering a response. The sub
ject had responded electrochemically to this threat. The sub
ject was a plant.

Some thirty-one years later, I had the opportunity to ask him
about it.

He said, "I wasn't particularly into plants, but there was a going-out-of-business sale at a florist on the ground floor of the
building, and the secretary bought a couple of plants for the
office: a rubber plant, and this dracaena cane. I had done a satu
ration watering—putting them under the faucet until water ran out the bottom of the pots—and was curious to see how long it
would take the moisture to get to the top. I was especially inter
ested in the dracaena, because the water had to climb a long trunk, and then to the end of long leaves. I thought if I put the
galvanic-skin-response detector of the polygraph at the end of a
leaf, a drop in resistance would be recorded on the paper as the
moisture arrived between the electrodes.

"That, at least, is the cover story. I'm not sure if there was another, more profound, reason. It could be that somebody at
another level of consciousness was nudging me into doing this.
"I noticed something on the chart resembling a human response on a polygraph: not at all what I would have expected
from water entering a leaf. Lie detectors work on the principle
that when people perceive a threat to their well-being, they physi
ologically respond in predictable ways. If you were conducting a
polygraph as part of a murder investigation, you might ask a
suspect, 'Was it you who fired the shot fatal to so and so?' If the true answer were
yes,
the suspect will fear getting caught lying,
and electrodes on his or her skin will pick up the physiological
response to that fear. So I began to think of ways to threaten the
well-being of the plant. First I tried dipping a neighboring leaf
in a cup of warm coffee. The plant, if anything, showed what I
now recognize as boredom—the line on the chart just kept trend
ing downward.

"Then at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds chart time, the
imagery entered my mind of burning the leaf. I didn't verbalize;
I didn't touch the plant; I didn't touch the equipment. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart. The only
new thing the plant could have reacted to was the mental image.

"I went into the next office to get matches from my secretary's
desk, and lighting one, made a few feeble passes at a neighboring leaf. I realized, though, that I was already seeing such an extreme
reaction that any increase wouldn't be noticeable. So I tried a
different approach: I removed the threat by returning the matches
to the secretary's desk. The plant calmed right back down.

"Immediately I understood something important was going
on. I could think of no conventional scientific explanation. There
was no one else in the lab suite, and I wasn't doing anything that
might have provided a mechanistic trigger. From that split-second my consciousness hasn't been the same. My whole life has
been devoted to looking into this."

I had flown to interview him for a magazine. I was glad I had
come. I'd wanted to talk to him since I first read about his work
when I was a kid. I don't think it's too much to say that his
observations on February 2, 1966 changed not only his life but
mine. Through my teens and early twenties, as my perception of
an animate world wavered, a part of me kept returning to what I'd read of his work. He provided experimental verification of what I understood in my heart—that the world is alive and sentient. And it came when I still believed in science.

Backster continued, "After that first observation, I talked to
scientists from different fields, to get their explanations for what
was happening. But it was foreign to them. So I designed an
experiment to explore in greater depth what I began to call pri
mary perception."

I raised my eyebrows at the name. He said, "I couldn't call what I was witnessing extrasensory perception, because plants don't have most of the first five senses to start with. This perception on the part of the plant seemed to take place at a much more basic, or primary, level. Anyway, what emerged was an experiment in which I arranged for brine shrimp to be dropped automatically at random intervals into simmering water, while the plants reaction was recorded at the other end of the lab."

He paused in his rapid-fire talk, then continued, "It's very very hard to eliminate the connection between the experimenter and the plants being tested. Even a brief association with the plants—just a few hours—is enough for them to become attuned to you. Then, even though you automate and randomize the experiment and leave the laboratory, guaranteeing you are entirely unaware of when the experiment starts, the plants will remain attuned to you, no matter where you go. At first, my partner and I would go to a bar a block away, but after a while we began to suspect the plants were not responding to the death of the brine shrimp at all, but instead to the rising and falling levels of excitement in our conversations.

"Finally, we had someone else buy the plants and store them in an unused part of the building. On the day of the experiment, we brought the plants in, hooked them up, and left. This meant the plants were in a strange environment, they had the pressure of the electrodes, they had a trickle of electricity going through their leaves, and they'd been deserted. Because they were not attuned to us or anyone else, they began 'looking around' for anything that would acquaint them with their environment. Then, and only then, did something so subtle as the deaths of the brine shrimp get picked up by the plants."

I asked, "Do they only become attuned to humans, or to others in their environment as well?"

"I'll answer that with an example," Cleve said. "Often I hook up a plant and just go about my business, then observe what makes it respond. One day, I was boiling water in a teakettle to make coffee. I realized I needed the teakettle for something else, and so poured the scalding water down the sink. The plant being monitored showed a huge reaction. It turns out that if you don't put chemicals or hot water down the sink for a long time, a little jungle begins to grow down there. The plant was responding to the death of the microbes.

"I've been amazed at the perception capability right down to the bacterial level. One sample of yogurt, for example, will pick up when another is being fed. Sort of like, 'That one's getting food. Where's mine?' That happens with a fair degree of repeatability. Or if you take two samples of yogurt, hook one up to electrodes, and drop antibiotics in the other, the electroded yogurt shows a huge response at the other s death. And they needn't even be the same kind of bacteria. The first Siamese cat I ever had would only eat chicken. I'd keep a cooked bird in the lab refrigerator and pull off a piece each day to feed the cat. By the time I'd get to the end, the carcass would be pretty old, and bacteria would have started to grow. One day I had some yogurt hooked up, and as I got the chicken out of the refrigerator to begin pulling off strips of meat, the yogurt responded. Next, I put the chicken under a heat lamp to bring it to room temperature, and heat hitting the bacteria created more huge reactions in the yogurt."

"How did you know you weren't influencing this?"

"I was unaware of the reaction at the time. I had pip switches all over the lab, and whenever I performed an action, I hit a switch, which placed a mark on a remote chart. Only later did I compare the reaction of the yogurt to what had been happening in the lab."

"Did the plant respond again when the cat started to eat?" "Interestingly enough, bacteria appear to have a defense mechanism such that extreme danger causes them to go into a state similar to shock. In effect, they pass out. Many plants do this as well. If you hassle them enough they flatline. The bacteria apparently did this, because as soon as they hit the cat's digestive system, the signal went out. There was a flatline from then on." I thought of the conversation of death, of the chickens who offered themselves to Amaru, of the duck who gave himself to me, and also of a story I read about the African explorer Dr. Livingstone being mauled by a
lion. He later said that during the attack, he didn't feel pain, but rather a sense of bliss. He said it would have been no problem to give himself to the other.

I told Cleve this, and he nodded, laughing, then said, "I was on an airplane once, and had with me a little battery-powered galvanic response meter. Just as the attendants started serving lunch, I pulled out the meter and said to the guy next to me, 'You want to see something interesting?' I put a piece of lettuce between the electrodes, and when people started to eat their salads we got some reactivity, which stopped as the leaves went into shock. 'Wait until they pick up the trays,' I said, and see what happens.' When attendants removed our meals, the lettuce got back its reactivity. I had the aisle seat, and I can still remember him strapped in next to the window, no way to escape this mad scientist attaching an electronic gadget to lettuce leaves."

I could well imagine the passenger's shock. Cleve did seem the mad scientist, though with white hair cropped short instead of a tangle, and with a muscular build that betrays the bodybuilding important to him when he was younger, after World War II, when he left the service. His manner was just what I would have expected. He spoke quickly, thoughts tripping too fast for the tongue, and he laughed readily, at his own jokes or those of others. The laboratory, too, was what I would have expected from a mad scientist-type: a jumble of galvanic-response meters, plants (including the original dracaena cane, now grown to cover the better part of a room), cats, lab benches, chemical hoods (leftovers from many years before, when this was a Drug Enforcement Agency lab, only now the hoods were home to
plants, sealed off by plastic screens from the batting paws of playful
cats), a huge aquarium, books, refrigerator, and bunches of closed-circuit television monitors (he receives reduced rent in exchange for providing electronic security to the jewelers in the office building). He works in the lab. He eats in the lab. He sleeps in the lab. It is his life. I admired the dedication.

As Cleve talked, I thought about a story he'd told me soon after I arrived, as he showed me around the lab and also the basement suite where he still teaches lie detection classes to law enforcement officials—"I've got to make a living, and I've never made a penny off the primary perception research." He'd said that when he was young, he'd been envious of high divers, but was himself afraid to dive even off lower boards. So he'd climbed a ten-meter diving tower and asked a friend to douse his sweat pants with gasoline and set him on fire. The bigger fear, consciously chosen, overrode the lesser fear. He ended up doing "fire dives" professionally for two summers as part of a show.

I came back to the present, and heard Cleve talking: "The point is that the lettuce was going into a protective state so it wouldn't suffer. When the danger left, the reactivity came back. This ceasing of electrical energy at the cellular level ties in, I believe, to the state of shock that people, too, enter in extreme trauma."

"Plants, bacteria, lettuce leaves. ..."

"Eggs. I had a Doberman Pinscher back in New York whom I used to feed an egg a day. One day I had a plant hooked up to a large galvanic-response meter, and as I cracked the egg, the meter went crazy. That started hundreds of hours of monitoring eggs. Fertilized or unfertilized, it doesn't matter; it's still a living cell, and plants perceive when that continuity is broken. Eggs, too, have the same defense mechanism. If you threaten them, their tracing goes flat. If you wait about twenty minutes, they come back.