A Language Older Than Words (47 page)

I once asked the Dreamgiver what sort of relationship it wanted with me, and what sort of relationship we had. I fell asleep and soon dreamed I was bobbing up and down far from shore in a deep and warm ocean. I was happy. A huge creature swam up from below to rest just behind me. I did not turn around, nor was I scared. The creature began to play with me, and reached to touch my genitals. Suddenly I was standing on the shore, using a shovel to pick up dog manure and put it in trash cans. I awoke laughing. The Dreamgiver would like nothing more than to come up from the depths to play intimately with me, but, unfortunately, both of us have to spend most of our time cleaning up other people's shit.

It occurred to me not moments later that this is the relationship with the world at large into which most of us have been forced. It would be nice to simply be able to play intimately with and in an old growth forest, as humans have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years, without having to worry that next year or the year after you will learn that the trees have been murdered, the forest has been cut.

As usual, I walked outside to feed the chickens this afternoon. Because it is now winter, and snow covers the ground, songbirds gather to eat the bread and vegetables I set out for the chickens. After feed time I walked to the coyote tree, carrying my daily offering of bread. I know now that it is coyotes who eat it, and not deer or magpies, because I can see the small prints of a dog in the fresh snow. My own dogs scamper ahead of me. I shield my eyes from the sun's reflection: it's the first time the sun has broken through the clouds in a week.

I placed the bread at the base of the tree, touched its trunk in welcoming, and began to walk home, passing the still-standing stakes the surveyors left behind: tomorrow I will pick them up. Then I passed a rock outcropping onto which also I daily place a piece of bread. A few times I've seen a chipmunk standing atop the rock, and I've got enough bread to share. After the outcropping I followed the trail down a gentle slope that winds among trees to eventually open out at my home. Today, as I stepped beneath the first tree, it chose that moment to unload its burden of the last few days' snow directly atop my head.

It is not true that for the last few hundred thousand years it is only humans who have played with forests. Forests, too, have been playing with us.

Trauma and
Recovery

"The struggle of man against power is the
struggle of memory against forgetting."
Milan Kundera

EARLY ON I ASKED what level of violence it will take to make the destructiveness of our way of living obvious. That's not a fair question, because the relationship between the perpetration or even receipt of violence and the awareness of that violence is not linear. As violence becomes more ubiquitous it also becomes more transparent. If one woman out of four is raped within her lifetime, and two out of five are either raped or fend off rape attempts, is the condition of having been sexually assaulted now normal? Is the condition of being capable of, or even having committed, sexual assault also now normal? Add to this the isolating effects of trauma—the erection of internal walls to keep a dangerous world at bay—and the way these walls later facilitate—at least make possible and in some cases make inevitable— the committing of further violence (emotional, spiritual, and physical), and the result can be no other than a constantly expanding sphere of traumatized, isolated individuals. Those on the inside—the already traumatized—will consume those at the frontier (the new children, the newly contacted indigenous peoples, the newly discovered reserves of exploitable human and nonhuman resources), never once seeing the damage they cause nor the isolation they engender. To see the damage would be to revisit their original insult. If they did that, where would they be, and what would they do?

Recall the monkeys made permanently insane by their artificial removal from the social embeddedness in which they evolved. These creatures were too fearful to interact normally with other beings, and became the best "monster mothers" the scientists could devise. Isolation leads to psychopathology. Isolated from the rest of nature, isolated from each other by walls of fear, isolated from our own bodies, and isolated most of all from our own horrifying experience, is it any wonder that we are all crazy?

If we have become so inured to the coercion that engulfs, forms, and deforms us that we no longer perceive it for the aberration it is, how much more is this true for our ignorance of the trauma that characterizes our way of life? Salmon are going extinct?
Pass the toast, man, I'm hungry.
A quarter of a million dead in Iraq?
Dammit, I'm gonna be late for work.
If coercion is our habitat, then trauma is the food we daily take into our bodies.

I spoke with Dr. Judith Herman, one of the worlds experts on the effects of psychological trauma. I asked her about the relationship between atrocity and silence.

She said, "Atrocities are actions so horrifying they go beyond words. For people who witness or experience atrocities, there is a kind of silencing that comes from not knowing how to put these experiences into speech. At the same time, atrocities are the crimes perpetrators most want to hide. This creates a powerful convergence of interest: no one wants to speak about them. No one wants to remember them. Everyone wants to pretend they didn't happen."

I asked her about a line she once wrote: "In order to escape accountability the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting."

"This is something with which we are all familiar. It seems that the more extreme the crimes, the more determined the efforts to deny the crimes happened. So we have, for example, almost a hundred years after the fact, an active and apparently state-sponsored effort on the part of the Turkish government to deny there was ever an Armenian genocide. We still have a whole industry of Holocaust denial. I just came back from Bosnia where, because there hasn't been an effective medium for truth-telling and for establishing a record of what happened, you have the nationalist governmental entities continuing to insist that ethnic cleansing didn't happen, that the various war crimes and atrocities committed in that war simply didn't occur."

"How does this happen?"

"On the most blatant level, it's a matter of denying the crimes took place. Whether it's genocide, military aggression, rape, wife beating, or child abuse, the same dynamic plays itself out, beginning with an indignant, almost rageful denial, and the suggestion that the person bringing forward the information—whether it's the victim or another informant—is lying, crazy, malicious, or has been put up to it by someone else. Then of course there are a number of fallback positions to which perpetrators can retreat if the evidence is so overwhelming and irrefutable it cannot be ignored, or rather, suppressed. This, too, is something we're familiar with: the whole raft of predictable rationalizations used to excuse everything from rape to genocide: the victim exaggerates; the victim enjoyed it; the victim provoked or otherwise brought it on herself; the victim wasn't really harmed; and even if some slight damage has been done, it's now time to forget the past and get on with our lives: in the interests of preserving peace—or in the case of domestic violence, preserving family harmony—we need to draw a veil over these matters. The incidents should never be discussed, and preferably should be forgotten altogether."

I asked her a question that has bothered, entranced, and terrified me since childhood: "To what degree do perpetrators and their apologists believe their own claims? Did my father really believe he wasn't beating us?"

Her response made clear what I understood as a child: that I'll never know. She responded, "Do perpetrators believe their own lies? I have no idea, and I don't have much trust in those who claim they do. Certainly we in the mental health profession don't have a clue when it comes to what goes on in the hearts and minds of perpetrators of either political atrocities or sexual and domestic crimes.

"For one thing, we don't get to know them very well. They aren't interested in being studied—by and large they don't volunteer—so we study them when they're caught. But when they're caught, they tell us whatever they think we want to hear.

"This leads to a couple of problems. The first is that we have to wend our way through lies and obfuscation to attempt to discover what's really going on. The second problem is even larger and more difficult. Most of the psychological literature on perpetrators is based on studies of convicted or reported offenders, which represents a very small and skewed, unrepresentative group. If you're talking about rape, for example, since the reporting rates are, by even the most generous estimates, under twenty percent, you lose eighty percent of the perpetrators off the top. Your sample

is reduced further by the rates at which arrests are made, charges are filed, convictions are obtained, and so forth, which means convicted offenders represent about one percent of all perpetrators. Now, if your odds of being caught and convicted of rape are basically one in one hundred, you have to be extremely inept to become a convicted rapist. Thus the folks we are normally able to study look fairly pathetic, and often have a fair amount of psychopathology and violence in their own histories. But they're not representative of your ordinary, garden-variety rapist or torturer, or the person who gets recruited to go on an ethnic cleansing spree. We don't know much about these people. The one thing victims say most often is that these people look normal, and that nobody would have believed it about them. That was true even of Nazi war criminals. From a psychiatric point of view, these people didn't look particularly disturbed. In some ways that's the scariest thing of all."

"Given the misogyny, genocide, and ecocide endemic in our culture," I said, "I wonder how much of that normality is only
seeming"

"If you're part of a predatory and militaristic culture, then to behave in a predatory and exploitative way is not deviant,
per se.
Of course there are rules as to who, if you want to use these terms, might be a legitimate victim, a person who may be attacked with impunity. And most perpetrators are exquisitely sensitive to these rules."

I wondered out loud, "Why is our behavior so predatory? What are the common factors among predatory cultures?"

"It's interesting," she responded. "The anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday looked at data from over a hundred cultures as to the prevalence of rape, and divided them into high- or low-rape cultures. She found that high-rape cultures are highly militarized and sex-segregated. There is a lot of difference in status between men and women. The care of children is devalued and delegated to subordinate females. She also found that the creation myths of high-rape cultures recognize only a male deity rather than a female deity or a couple. When you think about it, that is rather bizarre. It would be an understandable mistake to think women make babies all by themselves, but it's preposterous to think men do that alone. So you've got to have a fairly elaborate and counterintuitive mythmaking machine in order to fabricate a creation myth that recognizes only a male deity. There was another interesting finding, which is that high-rape cultures had recent experiences—meaning in the last few hundred years—of famine or migration. That is to say, they had not reached a stable adaptation to their ecological niche. Sadly enough, when you tally these risk factors, you realize you've pretty much described our culture."

If words alone could bring down our culture, I would write them. If actions by themselves would stop the atrocities, I would commit them. If a change of heart would bring back the salmon, I would change my heart again and again and again.

It is not enough at this point (necessary, as they say, but not sufficient) to merely right ourselves from trauma, to dismantle the walls we've so laboriously and necessarily constructed to constrict our broken hearts, and then to try to pick up the shredded and scattered fragments of our experience to reassemble like a precious vase that won't quite go back together no matter how we try, or better, like the lifeless body of a loved one who is never coming back.

The dog going blind, with whom I traveled in my truck so many years ago, eventually was hit by a train. Focused only on me, her friend, farther along the way, she never knew what hit her but merely tumbled off the tracks into the tall weeds by the side. I ran to her, found her, picked her up and could not believe she was dead until I saw the gash that split her, back to belly, white flesh that never had time to bleed. There was nothing I could do except hurl sobs at my stupidity for taking a blind dog for a walk on railroad tracks, and to wish that just this once I could go back to before and this time do it right.

In our case, too, seeing the mistake after it is done is not enough. Nor is wishing it away. Nor, especially in this case, is grieving.

When I took her for that walk, I found myself wandering far ahead of this ancient, arthritic, overweight pup. I worried about a train, but not overmuch, because we were in the midst of a long straightaway, at the far end of which, beyond the dog, was a tight curve. When I saw a train round this corner, I began to run toward the dog. Not because I needed to run, but for the joy of running. Then I saw the train had more speed than I had anticipated, and I ran faster than I ever had. And then I saw her tumble into space.

What do you do—what do you feel—when you see destruction rushing down steel rails toward someone you love, and you see that nothing you can do will stop it? You may be a fast runner, but you cannot outrun a train.

I have read that while every culture has invented comedy, tragedies are the unique invention of civilizations. A hero, doomed, stupid, blind to his own faults, falls quickly—or more accurately inexorably—toward a fate he can neither comprehend nor avoid.