A Language Older Than Words (51 page)

They ask not only about salmon, but also about forests, bears, fisher, marten, lynx, cutthroat trout, bull trout, sturgeons. They ask about them all. And there is nothing I can do except hand them my book, and say I'm sorry.

I sometimes wonder if the other creatures on the planet are doing what they can to shut down the machine. Perhaps salmon are leaving not just because of dams, and not just because they do not like our unwillingness to participate in reciprocal relationships, and not just because we make life intolerable for all others, but also to deprive us of calories; perhaps they are willing to give away their existence in order to stop civilization. Perhaps trees sometimes refuse to grow on clearcuts because they do not want to give their bodies to be used to enrich those in power. Perhaps Eskimo curlews—whose appetite for grasshoppers was legendary—left the planet so we would poison ourselves with pesticides. Perhaps the planet as a whole is now pushing us along in our own headlong rush to self-extinguishment, so that whatever creatures remain behind can at last and again breathe easily. Or perhaps the salmon and the trees are not acting merely physically but also symbolically, and perhaps then it becomes our task to ask them clearly and carefully what it is they are saying through their own deaths, what it is that they are dying to tell us. It becomes our task after that to listen to their stories, and to act upon what they have to say.

Here is another thought: perhaps the others—the extirpated salmon, the disappearing frogs—have not gone away forever. Perhaps they have only gone into hiding, and will return after civilization collapses, once we learn, or remember, how to behave. When we are ready to receive them, and to give ourselves up to them in relationship as all along they have given themselves up to us and to each other, they will return. Only then.

At that point we will again see herds of bison stretching from horizon to horizon, the huge creatures eating grasses taller than a human. We'll see flocks of passenger pigeons that stretch also to every horizon, and that take days to pass overhead. Then, too, we'll see so many Eskimo curlews that we could not count them if we lived a thousand years. Salmon will keep us awake at night with the slapping of their tails against the water, and we will have plenty to eat. We need only dip a basket weighted with a stone in order to catch a fish for dinner, in fact enough fish to feed the whole village.

And at night, we will talk to each other, and talk to the moon, who looks down not quite so sadly, and we will talk to wolves, and to bears and to porcupines and weasels. And they will talk to us. Children will paint the faces of wolf pups. Perhaps women and children will not need to dread the night. Women may walk alone with no fear of rape—
rape? I do not know that word
—and children will sleep soundly with no worry of nightly visits from their fathers. Fathers and mothers will look at their children and say, "It was not always this way," and the children will listen, puzzled.

Stars, too, will speak, and will no longer find themselves the holders of memories too painful to be held by children, but will hold other memories, and other conversations, of celebration, of the changing of the seasons, of growing old or perhaps dying young but in any case living within the larger community of existence.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps the salmon really are gone. Perhaps extinction really is forever, and when at long last we do awaken from our nightmare of plutonium, rape, genocide, and coercion, we will find ourselves finally facing the world we have created. Perhaps we will awaken in an exterior landscape that is barren and lonely enough to match the landscape of our hearts and minds. Perhaps we'll awaken to find that at least one tenet of Christianity is literally true—that hell does in fact exist, and that we are in it. Hell, after all, is the too-late realization of interdependence.

Several years ago, a few days after speaking with Thomas Berry and a few days before my first encounter with the coyotes, I walked into a cold January afternoon to take care of the chickens. My breath hung white in the air. Dogs danced at my feet.

I heard in the distance the clamor of geese, then stood speechless to watch a huge v fly low overhead. I opened my mouth to say something—I didn't know what it would be—and heard my voice say three times, "Godspeed." Suddenly, and for no reason I could understand, I burst into tears. Then I ran into the house. Walking back outside later, and staring into the now empty sky, I realized that in speaking not only had I been wishing them well for their journey south but that they, too, had been using my voice and my breath to wish me just-as-well on my own just-as-difficult journey. The tears, it became clear to me, had been neither from sorrow nor joy, but from homecoming, like a sailor who has been too long at sea, and who spontaneously bursts into sobs on smelling land, and feeling those tentative first steps on solid ground, at home.

It is not possible to recover from atrocity in isolation. It is, in fact, precisely this isolation that induces the atrocities. If we wish to stop the atrocities, we need merely step away from the isolation. There is a whole world waiting for us, ready to welcome us home. It has missed us as sorely as we have missed it. And it is time to return.

Godspeed.

Acknowledgments

MEISTER ECKHART SAID THAT if the only prayer you say in your life is Thank you, that would suffice. This book is, among many other things, a prayer of thanksgiving.

Long before the first word found the page, many people helped me disentangle my thinking from civilization's sticky web. Without their support and assistance, I do not know whether I would have had the courage to start making sense of what I was experiencing, and later, to follow my experience wherever it led. This book would not have existed without countless long and loving conversations with these friends. Many of them read significant portions of the book, often through multiple drafts. Their suggestions shaped the form and content, and their enthusiasm revitalized me when my energy flagged. These people include Melanie Adcock, Jeannette Armstrong, Paul Bond, Brian Brothers, George Draffan, Molly Eichar, Bruce Hutton, Mary Jensen, Claire and John Keeble, Vicki Lopez, Laiman Mai, Julie Mayeda, Melissa McCann, John Osborn, Laurel Pederson, Carolyn Raffensperger, Royann Richardson, Lee Running, and Bethanie Walder.

My friend Julie Mayeda line-edited most of the book for me. Her ear never failed, even when mine did.

George Draffan helped me write a couple sections of the book, as part of our
End Game
project.

I am grateful to Sy Safransky and others at
The Sun
for giving me the opportunity to interview Jim Nollman, Cleve Backster, and Judith Herman.

Julie Burke did a better job of designing the book than I could ever have hoped.

I need to thank the members of my family who did their best to protect me from my father's violence: my mother, my brothers, and my sisters. I could not have survived without you.

The support of my mother has been instrumental in my recovery from the trauma of my childhood. Crucial also have been the many conversations with many of my friends listed above.

Nor could I have survived without the nonhuman others who have nurtured me all along, even when I did not know it. Stars, bees, the ponderosa pine outside my window, the coyote tree, coyotes, dogs, cats, poultry, the duck who gave me his life, the Dreamgiver, the muse, even Crohn's disease pathogens, and all of the others too numerous even to remember.

I would not be who I am without your guidance and love.

Notes on Sources

None of the information in this book is in any way arcane, or even
difficult to find. Many fine researchers have compiled thorough and
often devastating histories and analyses of our culture's horrible tra
jectory and have articulated viable alternatives. I am thankful that
these other authors were able to point me toward original sources. I
include here the primary sources where I can, otherwise, the second
ary sources.

Silencing

The epigraph (and all other R.D. Laing quotes) is from R.D. Laing's ex
traordinary book
The Politics of Experience.
This book, along with Neil
Evernden's
The Natural Alien,
helped me perhaps more than any others to understand the alienation that characterizes our culture, and to understand also that it is possible to
experience
the world—to not be alienated.

For the description of a factory slaughterhouse I unfortunately had to rely on a composite of friends' descriptions and published accounts. My attempts to enter slaughterhouses were met with polite yet insistent
refusals. The public relations hacks with whom I spoke «&/provide me
lots of nifty literature, none of which mentions death or killing.

My figure for rates of rape within our culture come from Judith Hermans
classic
Trauma and Recovery,
and Diane E. H. Russel's
Sexual Exploita
tion, Rape, Child Sexual Abuse, and Sexual Harassment.

"I suppose, then . . ." is from Descartes'
Meditations on First Philosophy.

"Let the woman ..." is from
First Timothy.

My source for many of the quotes concerning the European hatred of indigenous Africans is Noel Mostert's comprehensive
Frontiers: The
Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People.
He
pointed me toward many informative primary documents.

"extremely ugly..." is from Raven-Hart's
Cape of Good Hope,
citing Leguat's
1708
New Voyage to the East

"when they speak . . ." is also from
Cape of Good Hope,
this time citing Baptiste Tavemier.

"it is a great pittie ..." is from Raven-Hart's
Before Van Riebeeck.

I have two sources for many of my quotes concerning the European hatred of indigenous North Americans. The first is David Stannard's

American Holocaust.
The second is Frederick Turner's
Beyond Geogra
phy.
Both are invaluable references to the primary documents, both provide wonderful analyses, and both are extremely difficult to read because of the atrocities they detail.

"animals who do . . ." and "were born for ..." is from Stannard.

The quote about scientists administering beatings is from
When Elephants Weep,
by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy.

I became aware of the study by Allport, Bruner, and Jandorf through an article someone handed to me at a reading, entitled "The Psychology of Smog," by Ira J. Winn, from
The Nation,
March 5, 1973.

The figure of one hundred and fifty million enslaved children comes from cross-referencing two sources, and then being extremely conservative in my extrapolation. The Anti-Slavery Society finds more than one hundred million enslaved children just in Asia, and the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, which puts the estimate of enslaved children worldwide in "only" the tens of millions, finds that Africa has an incidence of child labor nearly twice that of
Asia. The mere fact that I can even consider estimates differing by one
hundred million (I think an estimate of two hundred and fifty million
enslaved children worldwide would be defensible) disturbs me greatly.
Lost in the numbers—in fact worse than lost, but masked—is the misery inherent in each one of these cases. This little girl enslaved to prostitution in Thailand, this little boy enslaved to rugmaking in Pa
kistan. My source for the Anti-Slavery Society figure was the
Spokes
man-Review,
September 19, 1995.

Evernden's story about cutting the vocal cords is from
The Natural Alien.

The Okanagan definition of "violation of a woman" is from Jeannette Armstrong.

Coyotes, Kittens, and Conversations

"We are the ..." is in Dolores LaChapelle's extraordinary
Sacred Land

Sacred Sex,
citing Paula Gunn Allen's "The Psychological Landscape

of Ceremony." "Since nature ..." is from Aristotle's
Poetics.
"I perceived it to be .. ." is from Descartes'
Discourse on Method.
"My only earthly wish ..." is from Bacons
New Organon.
"I am come .. ." is from Bacon's
Temporis Partus Masculus.
The account of the robo-roaches is from the
Spokesman-Review,
January

10, 1997. The vivisection accounts come from Singer's
Animal Liberation,
Ruesch's

Slaughter of the Innocent,
and Levin's and Danielson's
Cardiac Arrest.

None of these books are for the faint of heart.

For information on the Sand Creek Massacre I am indebted to Stannard, who provided an excellent analysis, and pointed me toward three ear
lier sources, Svaldi's
Sand Creek,
Hoig's
The Sand Creek Massacre,
and
the U.S. Congressional inquiry volumes.

Taking a Life

"Today we took ..." is from Jack Forbes'
Columbus and Other Cannibals,

a short but crucial book. The "conversation of death" materials are from Barry Lopez's
Of Wolves

and Men.

Cultural Eyeglasses

"All through school
..."
is from E.F. Schumacher's
A Guide For the Per
plexed.