A Language Older Than Words (45 page)

The first statement points out to me why there must always be a death for there to be a meaningful transition—one that sticks. We do not easily give up our acquired ways of being, even when they're killing us. Although when I sat on the couch as a child, or lay in bed feeling my father's flesh against mine, it had been unspeakably crucial for me to control my emotions and body, I could not later quit manifesting that same control until it had very nearly killed me. That level of consciousness had to play itself out to the end, or rather to
an
end. Only when that mindset had, like a plant in a too-small pot, exhausted its own possibilities did I begin casting about for another way to be; only when I no longer had any real choice, far past the time when what little choice there was—death or change—had become all-too-painfully obvious, did I begin to reject the earlier mindset. This is why I don't think our culture will stop before the world has been impoverished beyond our most horrifying imaginations.

The second statement reveals to me why the period of hibernation takes so long. We do not stand in front of a tree, shouting, "Grow, damn you, grow!" and we recognize the futility of wishing a broken foot to heal in a day. But in myself and in so many of my friends I've encountered an unwillingness to acknowledge that even having sloughed off an old level of consciousness, it takes a long time to grow a new one.

It could be argued that my own railing against the culture exhibits the same blindness to process as that of a person yelling at a broken foot: the culture is broken, and shouting ain't gonna fix it. But there are two differences.

The first is that if a person continues to pretend against all evidence that his foot is not broken, he may rebreak it, as I did high jumping. Had I allowed my foot to heal through the fall during my last year jumping, I could have jumped in the spring. I may even have fulfilled my potential as a jumper. I will never know. It might have been appropriate for my coach just that once to yell at me. Not at my foot, but at me for not listening to my foot.

The second difference is that there is a distinction to be made between shouting from frustration, and shouting because a house is being destroyed and no one is paying attention. Another way to say this is that given enough time—perhaps ten thousand years—even my father could probably heal, but what about the people whose souls he murders in the meantime? And what about the secondary damage caused by those whose own destructiveness had its genesis in the violence he did to them: my siblings, for example, when they pass on damage to their children. In contrast to the Buddhists on the panel who blew the question about compassion, my loyalty lies with the innocent, and I need to do whatever I can to stop the damage.

It's a fine line to walk, that of waiting for the arrival of understanding—for
kairos
—and the need for action. I am active now. In my twenties I was not. I believe my present level of energy is a result of having fallen deeply into my lethargy then. Had there been no time of sleep, there could not now be this time of awakening, but instead I would still be as I was before, turning most of my energy inward to maintain the imprisonment of my own emotions.

I need to now step away from much of what I've just been saying. To believe for a moment that what I was doing in Nevada and after constituted "lazing about," or "inaction," makes plain another form of silencing, once again of the unseen. Hidden here is the absurd presumption that to flip burgers or repair televisions is more important and difficult than to shake off the effects of a coercive upbringing and education, and insofar as possible to vomit out the internalized voices of a coercive and deeply violent culture. This is but one more way we value production over life.

We do what we reward, and we reward what we value. All fancy philosophy aside, we value asking someone if they would like fries with their burger more than we value a rich and healthy emotional and spiritual life and a vital community. Of course. The former does not threaten the foundations of our culture.

All choices involve the loss of unembraced opportunities. The time I spend trying to understand and stem the pervasive destructiveness of the culture cannot be spent shoveling fries, and were I to mix milkshakes I could not spend that time learning how to listen to coyotes, trees, aphids, dogs, the Dreamgiver, or my disease.

Just as Cleve Backster can name the moment when his consciousness forever changed, I can name the time when I began to be reborn. It was 1987. I had moved to north Idaho, because in driving around with my two dogs, it was the prettiest place I had seen. Presumably they agreed. I had by that time regained my weight and lost it again to Crohn's, then regained it and lost it again, and gained it once more: learning the lessons of the disease took time, and did not guarantee freedom from relapses. I had been in a dreadful car accident with my mother, hitting an overturned semi load of plywood at fifty-five. I walked away; she shattered her arm, broke her neck, and was made functionally blind by paralysis of the nerves controlling eye movement.

I was living in a small town called Spirit Lake. I was poor. I had not yet received a settlement from the trucker whose lack of refrigeration had killed the bees, and so was unable to buy new bees to start over. I was not very happy.

I did not have a telephone, and used to walk to the grocery store to use the pay phone outside. I remember an evening in early September, dark gray sky growing darker by the moment, bats swooping circles around the lights overhanging the parking lot, finding their meals of daily bugs. I was on the phone to an old friend. He lived in California, and we'd not talked for a couple of years. Craig said, "I'm worried about you, buddy. I always thought you'd do something, go somewhere."

"I'm here."

"Where the hell's that? The back side of Idaho, living in a dinky apartment doing nothing? You have gifts, man, and with any gift comes responsibility. You can't just walk away. If you don't give back to the universe what the universe gives you, then you really aren't worth shit. I hate to say it, but I hate even more to see you like you are."

I didn't say anything. What could I say?

"I'm not saying you have to get some fucking job at PayLess, not at all. What I'm saying is that if you are ever going to succeed at anything, it has to become the most important thing in your life. What do you value, Derrick? Where do you live? Can you answer that?"

Had he said these things a year, or maybe even a day, before, they would have hurt and upset me. But because the time was right, they helped. Later that night, hours after we'd hung up, and hours after I'd taken a walk to Spirit Lake and sat quietly by the shore, I began to realize that I'd long since answered Craig's questions. I'd begun answering them by refusing to follow the path blazed for me by my father, and by his father before him, and his before him, and later by refusing to remain in the wage economy, and later by doing nothing at all, and by taking the time to begin my own life. Now it was time to get on with it.

That American settler was right when he wrote, "As long as we keep ourselves busy tilling the earth, there is no fear of any of us becoming wild." So long as we keep ourselves busy removing spindles from our kingdom and building dams to block rivers, taking notes in boring classes and counting hours in tedious workdays, there is no fear of any of us becoming wild. Nor, and this is much the same thing, is there any fear of us becoming who we are.

I began again with bees. I spread the hives around the Hoodoo Valley in north Idaho, and driving to drop sites I often saw the abandoned ruin of a partially constructed church. The builders were wise, I thought, in discontinuing their project: what could be more ludicrous than building a house for God amongst all these trees and hills and meadows full of grasses? The wood frame would serve only to separate those inside from those out. But I guess that's been the point all along.

My last summer in Idaho I lost a stand of hives to bears. I arrived at the site to see boxes scattered and honeycombs torn and tossed, as though the bears had sampled their way through colony after colony, selecting only the most delectable foods from this buffet. Frightened bees clustered in clumps down among the deep clover.

Contrary to what we were taught by A.A. Milne in
Winnie The Pooh,
when bears rip apart a beehive, they aren't so much interested in honey as they are in baby bees. I'd heard old-timers (beekeepers, not bears) say the grubs are sweet, which only made sense, considering their food. After I cleaned up what hives I could and put what bees I could find back into their homes, I had several honeycombs full of brood left over. I knew the babies chill quickly, and that the bears had been to this site at least a day before, so the babies were either dead or dying. What's good enough for bears, I thought, is good enough for me, so I started munching on bee grubs. I'm not sure why the bears bothered; while succulent, the grubs were disappointingly pasty and not so very sweet at all.

I moved to Spokane, to go back to graduate school, this time to study writing, and I brought the bees with me. I placed the hives in fields of alfalfa around eastern Washington, and kept some at the house just to watch. I remember once I saw a hive throw a swarm: tens of thousands of bees swirling in a cloud three times the size of a house. I couldn't follow the flight of any individual bee—they were too many, flying too chaotically— but after a time I noticed the cloud's center of mass begin to shift, at first subtly and then substantially, toward a tall pine. The tree shimmered with bees. It was alive with humming. Slowly the seething mass coalesced on a limb—high up, of course, later necessitating a hard climb—shrinking, shrinking until they formed a tight bundle the size of a basketball.

One summer I noticed that each night a long line of ants ran single file back and forth thirty yards from the barn to the nearest of the beehives. I'd seen ants kill hives before, overwhelming the guards by numbers, standing six to a bee and clasping fur or legs in mandibles while she furiously maneuvered her stinger to jab at them again and again, then more ants, and more, until the bee is covered. Having overrun the colony, the ants carry honey and grubs back to their nest. So I presumed these ants were up to no good.

Having grown up in a coercive culture I find it sometimes hard to rid myself of all vestiges of the desire to control (Vestiges? Who am I kidding? It's hard to rid myself of vast unbroken stretches of
that
territory). I tried to sweep the ants away with a broom. After that I stepped on some. I placed blocks of wood in their way as barriers. Finally it occurred to me to simply watch them. They weren't hurting the hives at all. The ants, like the grasshoppers so many years before, were simply carrying away the bees' trash. I looked more closely, and more closely still, and saw that though the hive was full and healthy, the guards merely checked the ants as they walked in and out, then waved them through to continue about their business.

When I returned to school in 1989 I began to teach. Or rather not to teach but to participate in classes. I knew from my own experiences in school that I wanted the classes to be different than what I had been put through. I knew that the most important words any instructor had ever said to me were, "Never believe anything you read, and rarely believe anything you think." I knew that the best teacher I ever had was that excitable cocker spaniel. I knew I was somehow supposed to be helping students become better writers, but I knew also that the best writing springs from passion, love, hate, fear, hope. So by definition the class had to be as much a class in life—in passion, love, fear, experience, relation—as in writing. I knew also that we teach best what we most need to learn, so thinking of the lessons of Crohn's disease I knew I'd have to strive my hardest to get members of the class, including myself, to begin to feel, and to express that feeling through writing, and perhaps even our lives. And finally, the night before I was first to enter a class, I encountered words by Carl Rogers, in his book
On Becoming a Person,
that seemed to speak to my experience as a learning human being: "It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior. ... I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning. Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another. As soon as the individual tries to communicate such experience directly, often with a quite natural enthusiasm, it becomes teaching, and its results are inconsequential. . . . When I try to teach, as I do sometimes, I am appalled by the results, which seem a little more than consequential, because sometimes the teaching seems to succeed. When this happens I find that the results are damaging. It seems to cause the individual to distrust his [or her] own experience, and to stifle significant learning. Hence I have come to feel that the outcomes of teaching are either unimportant or hurtful. When I look back at the results of my past teaching, the real results seem the same—either damage was done, or nothing significant occurred. ... As a consequence, I realize that I am only interested in being a learner, preferably learning things that matter, that have some significant influence on my own behavior. ... I find that one of the best, but most difficult ways for me to learn is to drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand the way in which [another's] experience seems and feels to the other person. I find that another way of learning is for me to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have. ... It seems to mean letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience." Of course I did not accept Rogers's words merely because he said them, but I fit them to my own experience of learning, and soon, of "teaching." I walked in that first day of that first class, and the first thing I did was to change the name from "Principles of Thinking and Writing," to "Intellectual, Philosophical, and Spiritual Liberation and Exploration for the Fine, Very Fine, and Extremely Fine Human Being." Many of the students reached for their class lists to make sure they were in the right room. As I took role, I asked each person what he or she loved. At first suspicious, they began to open up within minutes.