A Language Older Than Words (49 page)

"It's only after safety is established that it becomes appropriate for this person to have a chance to tell the trauma story in more depth. There we run into two kinds of mistakes. One is the idea that it's not necessary to tell the story, and that the person would be much better off not talking about it."

"It's over. Just get on with your life."

"That may work for a while, and it might be the right choice in any given circumstance, but there comes a time eventually where if the story isn't told it festers. So one mistake is suppressing it, which comes back to the silencing we spoke of earlier. These are horrible things and nobody really wants to hear or think about them. The victim doesn't, the bystander doesn't, the perpetrator certainly doesn't. So there's a very natural tendency on everyone's part to say, 'Let's forget the whole thing.'

"The other mistake is to try to push people into talking about it prematurely, or when the circumstances aren't right, or when it isn't the person's choice. If the timing, pacing, and setting isn't right, all you're going to have is another reenactment. You're not going to have the integrative experience of putting the story into a context that makes meaning out of it and gives a sense of resolution, which is what you're really aiming for. You don't want just a simple recitation of facts, you want the person to be able to talk about how it felt, how she feels about it now, what it meant to her then, what it means to her now, how she made sense of it then, how she's trying to make sense of it now. It's in that kind of processing that people reestablish their sense of continuity with their own lives and connection with others."

"This seems to be tied to mourning what was lost."

"Part of the motivation for the idea of 'Let's not talk about it' is the belief that you can go back to the way you were before the trauma, and what people find is that's just not possible. Once you've seen up close the evil human beings are capable of, you're not going to see the world the same way, you're not going to see other people the same way, and you're not going to see yourself the same way. We can all fantasize about how brave or cowardly we would be in extreme situations, but people who've been exposed know what they did, and what they didn't do. And almost inevitably they failed to live up to some kind of expectation of themselves. There has to be a sense of grieving what was lost. It's only after that mourning process that people can come through it and say, 'That was a hard lesson, and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, but I am stronger or wiser.' There is a way that people learn from adversity. People will say, 'I had a crisis of faith and I found out what's important, what I really believe in.'"

"How especially does an abused child mourn what he's never known?" (I was, of course, asking about myself.)

"It's what you've never had that is the hardest to grieve. It's unfair. You only get one childhood, and you were cheated out of the one that every child is entitled to."

There was a long silence between us. I thought now not just of myself, but of all of us who have never seen the sky darkened by passenger pigeons or a vast plain covered with bison, who have never experienced a healthy and "good" community, who
have never experienced the world as whole, who have never known
the joy of walking alone through a night with no fear of attackers. And who never will. Finally, I asked, "What comes next?"

She said, "The recovery doesn't end with the telling and hearing of the story. There is another step after that, which has to do with people reforming their connections, moving from a preoccupation with the past to feeling more hopeful for the future, feeling that they
have
a future, that it's not just a matter of enduring and going through life as a member of the walking dead. Instead there is an ability to knowingly affirm life even after surviving the worst other people have to dish out. And I do think that what renews people is the hope and belief that their own capacity to love has not been destroyed. When people feel damned and doomed, and feel they can't go on living, the fear often has to do with the feeling that they have been so contaminated with the perpetrator's hate, and taken so much of it into themselves, that there is nothing left but rage, and hate, and distrust, and fear and contempt.

"When people go through mourning, and through their crisis of faith, what they come back to as bedrock is their own capacity to love. Sometimes that connection is frail and tenuous, but whether it is with animals, nature, music, or other humans, that's the bedrock to which they must return, to that one caring relationship the perpetrator was never able to destroy. And then they build from there.

"I think as people move into their lives again, the ones who do best are the ones who've developed what Robert Jay Lifton calls a survivor mission. I've seen it happen so many times, that people turn this experience around, and make it a gift to others. That really is the only way you can transcend an atrocity. You can't bury it. You can't make it go away. You can't dissociate it. It comes back. But you can transcend it, first by telling the truth about it, and then by using it in the service of humanity, saying, 'This isn't the way we want to live. We want to live differently'

"In the aftermath of terror many survivors find themselves much clearer and more daring about going after what they want in life, and in relationships. They straighten things out with their families and lovers and friends, and they often say, 'This is the kind of closeness I want, and this is the kind of stuff I don't want.' When people are sensitized to the dynamics of exploitation, they are able to say, 'I don't want this in my life.' And they often become very courageous about speaking truth to power.

"I have heard so many survivors say, 'I know what terror is. I will live in fear every day for the rest of my life. But I also know that I will be all right, and that I feel all right.' And I have heard them join others in saying, This is the thing we want to protect, and this is the thing we want to stop. We don't know how we're going to do it, but we do know that this is what we want. And we're not indifferent.' Sometimes through atrocity people discover in themselves courage that they didn't know they had."

It's not possible to recover from atrocity in isolation, and it is hard to discover a new way to be—or remember an old way— when all signals from the culture pull you in the direction of coercion, control, and ultimately annihilation. I did not walk directly out of my childhood and out of the Colorado School of Mines into a conversation with coyotes, and into the understanding that ours is a culture of atrocity. There were many rebirths along the way, many times of dying—to the control of my emotions, to the silencing of my body, to a belief in Judeo-Christianity, to a belief in the goodness of the United States government, to a belief in the capacity of those in power to act in the best interests of living beings, to a belief in the capacity of a bad culture to reform, to a belief in the superiority or even fundamental specialness of human beings—many times of silent waiting, and many times of
kairos,
large and small.

I could not have learned to listen to coyotes without having first learned to listen to my unwillingness to sell my hours, then to listen to the signals of my body, then to listen to the disease that has made my insides its home, and thus has become a part of me. And I could not have learned to listen to coyotes without having talked to other people courageous enough to validate my perception of an animate world. I talked to the writer Christopher Manes, who said, "For most cultures throughout history— including our own in preliterate times—the entire world used to speak. Anthropologists call this animism, the most pervasive worldview in human history. Animistic cultures listen to the natural world. For them, birds have something to say. So do worms, wolves, and waterfalls." Later the philosopher Thomas Berry told me, "The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightning and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees—all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related."

Without the courage of other people who were willing to speak their own truths, I would not have had the courage to be able to listen again, as I did as a child.

We are what we eat. If daily we take into our bodies the knowledge that Coke is the real thing, and that one can buy happy meals at McDonald's, then we will soon enough believe that Coke
is
the real thing, and that happiness is only a hamburger away. This means also that if we begin to listen to those other voices that have been speaking to us all along, of women, children, other races, other cultures, our own experiences, the songbirds that sing outside our doors and the ladybugs that land on our windows, we will soon enough reenter their world, the world into which we were born, the world in which we evolved, the world we have inhabited all along, though sometimes without knowing.

Connection
and Cooperation

"The
future
of man
kind lies
waiting
for
those who will come to
understand
their
lives
and take up
their
re
sponsibility
to
all
living things." Vine Deloria, Jr.

THE COOPERATION I’VE BEEN invoking as a central tenet of existence is not a sentimentalized version in which death is vanquished, all beings live happily ever after, and the only suffering is in
curred by villains, who even themselves suffer only inconvenience:
a pie in the face, a fiery auto accident in which they walk away clothes blackened and mustache singed. Instead, this is a ruthless cooperation in which those who do not cooperate are extinguished—sooner or later, depending on their degree of insulation from the effects of their actions—but more importantly and to the point are by their refusal to cooperate banished from meaningful participation in the larger community.

A man owns a falcon. He moves from the west side of Washington to a small town near Spokane. His new home is by a lake. Every day he sees an eagle floating far above, circling by the hour and never seeming to move its wings. After the man has lived there a few days, he takes the falcon out back to let it fly. The falcon has barely left his hand when the eagle hurtles down to kill it. The domesticated falcon presumably had not known the rules of the lake, or knowing them had faced no choice when released from its master's hand, and the domesticated owner had not bothered to learn:
I
am here, so you should not be. Your presence is not helpful to this community, so I will kill you now.
The community already had enough birds of prey: more would harm its prey base.

We say that Native Americans had, and some still have, good relationships with the natural world, and it is undoubtedly true, as Jeannette told me, that a primary difference between Western and indigenous philosophies is that indigenous philosophies do not view listening to the land as a metaphor, but it is also true that these nations devised complex rules to guarantee their cooperation with nonhuman members of their larger communities. An intricate network of treaties governed the take of salmon from the Columbia River system: each Indian nation could kill only so many, making certain to leave enough for other nations, for bears, eagles, ravens, for future generations of salmon. The relationship between the Indians of this region and the salmon was and is deeply spiritual and reciprocal, but the treaties were hardheaded policy agreements that worked for thousands of years. Similarly, the relationship between the Indians of the plains and the buffalo was deep and respectful. This did not stop Indians from enacting and enforcing sharp strictures against overkill. Tom McHugh describes what happened to a hunter who violated these rules: "After flogging him, marshalls confiscated or killed his dogs and horses, cut his lodge into pieces, burned his tipi poles, broke his bow or gun, took his meat supplies, and ripped his hides, reducing him to total beggary." As Richard Manning comments on these rules: "The buffalo culture depended upon cooperation and the rules were meant to ensure it." Note that McHugh described enforcement as it occurred long after this buffalo culture had been contacted by civilization. It is possible that prior to contact, neither laws nor violence were necessary: the economic and familial incentives of living in a functioning community would of themselves discourage overkill. Another way to say this is that other cultures with more fully intact systems to siphon wealth from rich to poor have not needed to use violence to enforce cooperation: the desire to cooperate inheres in the values of those present. Besides, when your life depends on the buffalo, who could be stupid enough to kill too many?

It is spring. Deep within a pocket of remaining old growth the seed of a douglas fir germinates. A tiny root reaches its tip toward the fresh fecal pellet of a deer mouse. The night before, the mouse ate truffles, and so the pellet contains a half-million truffle spores that passed intact through the mouses digestive system.
Because the pellet is fresh, the root tip penetrates easily, and comes
in contact with the spores and also a yeast extract that is food for nitrogen-fixing bacteria. The yeast stimulates the spores to germinate, and they grow into and around the tip of the root, and grow also to envelope the nitrogen-fixing bacteria and yeast. The bacteria feeds off both fungus and yeast, and in turn fixes nitrogen crucial to both fungus and tree. The truffle continues to expand, and forms a mantle around the tree's feeder root: the association is called mycorrhiza, which literally means "fungus-root." The tree provides simple sugars and metabolites without which the fungus cannot live. The fungus provides minerals, nutrients, nitrogen, and water without which the tree would die. The fungus also grows new truffles to feed new deer mice, and the whole symphony begins again.