Songs of the Dead (6 page)

They said, “No, the dominant culture is not powerful enough to reach over there. Do not grant it more power than it actually has.”

I'm sure you can see my problem. I believed what these elders told me. And I believed my muse. How could I bring together these different truths into one overarching interpretation?

I got the answer from a piece of carved wood on an elder's coffee table: an orca intertwined with a sea lion intertwined with a salmon. Each melded into the others until it wasn't possible to tell where one became the other became the other. It represented, she said, the way none can be defined without the others, the way none can survive without the others.

It came clear to me that the same is true for the other sides as well. Yes, there are places the dominant culture cannot reach—the muse was appealing to the gods for a lover, which implies layers even further than hers from our everyday world of trees and spiders and soil and cats on our laps, and implies as well that these gods are beyond the reach of these homeless, rootless, attackers—but in no way is this geography as simple as here and there, one side and the other. There are layers, and there are spaces, and there are complex intertwinings so complex that sometimes we aren't sure where one ends and another begins. Some places may be affected by this destructive culture, and some may not. And some may be affected in ways we could never predict, even if we were able to begin to understand.

The elder told me that the sculpture is not only about animals but also about time.

I told her I didn't understand.

She didn't say anything, but merely moved her hands in small circles, each around the other.

I want to speak to the director. I want to understand what that dream—that visitation—was about. Who are the vampires, the demons? Where are they from? Are they real, or are they symbols representing something else?

I ask for a dream. One comes. I'm standing in line to use a lavatory. Even while I sleep, even while I dream, this encourages me. I know the landscape of my dreams—the language used between us by those who give me these dreams—well enough to know that for us toilets mean a connection to the unconscious and a connection beyond that to places even deeper. You flush the toilet, and where does everything go? Down through pipes into a whole other world, a world of digestion and decomposition. A world of remaking and reconstitution. A world with dripping, flowing, moving water. A world most of us never see, most of us never think about.

The line is long, and slowly I make my way to the front. Finally I am first. I open the door, step through. I'm inside a bare room: concrete floor, brick walls, dark wood ceiling. There are no toilets. There is no plumbing. There is absolutely nothing in the room. I turn, open the door, and leave.

The message was clear. I do not ask to speak with the director. To do so is to face a brick wall. If the director has something to say, the director will contact me.

Sitting here against this tree I try to not fight it. It's very hard. I feel the slender silver thread that is the only thing that connects me to everything I've known. I feel its delicacy, and I begin to know that if it snaps, I will never return.

“Don't fight it,” the voice keeps saying.

I see Allison sitting beside me, looking at me intently. I look beyond her to the forest I know is no longer a forest, to the shadows and to the sunlight who never strike the ground and to the ground who never feels the sunlight, the ground who never wants to feel the sunlight. I see the green leaves, and I see the tan patches of normal disease or fungus: life feeding off life. I see the remains of old trees softening, crumbling. I see someone's scat, and the mold growing on this scat. I see soft mosses at the base of trees. Despite my fear I see the beauty of all of this, and I see the bare movement of needles in a breeze I cannot feel, the scurrying of large-bodied, small-headed beetles with beautiful black backs. I see small brown birds who hop from place to place on two legs. I see tiny plants and fungi. I see ants and spiders going about their days. I see so many lives I would normally never notice.

I hear Allison say, “I'm right here.”

I take a deep breath, feel for that silver thread, and let myself fall just a little bit deeper.

six

Wétikos

I don't know about you, but when I catch a cold, I get psychologically down. It sinks into my experience. I get a little bit crabby. I don't deal with that stress very well. The virus infects my spirit as well as my body. I guess what I'm saying is that if my body is sick, my brain changes. So it would make sense that if I have a spiritual sickness, my brain and my body are apt to change as well.

Why are the only epidemics that we recognize physical? I think it's because we take such great pains to keep our physical and spiritual selves apart. It's crazy that people devastated by physical illness receive all kinds of support—or at least some of them do—while those who become desperately sick mentally or emotionally most often do not. In regular hospitals, patients get flowers and people come to visit. Mental hospital inmates are shamed.

Physical illness I can see and measure and diagnose. So because I feel I can understand it, I can respect it. But because we don't know how to understand mental illness we pretend it doesn't exist, and we shut the ill into mental hospitals far away. Even if they're not physically far away, they are far away from our hearts and our minds.

How much moreso, then, do we fail to acknowledge any disease of the soul? There is a cannibal sickness, which is a sickness just like any other plague or epidemic, highly contagious, with physical vectors, spread by contact, by air, by water, by touch, even also by spoken or written word—spread till it now covers the earth and to a greater or lesser degree infects us all. There are no hospitals for this sickness. If we cannot acknowledge it, how can we attempt to cure it?

Of course I'd heard about rabies from when I was a small child: everyone who has ever bawled through the end of Old Yeller knows that any beloved pet who contracts the disease turns into a vicious monster frothing at the mouth and lunging at anyone who comes too near, and everyone who lives in the country knows that the fear of rabies is why you never pick up injured rodents.

But the implications of rabies didn't hit me until my twelfth year, and to this day I remember where I was and what I was doing when the central question of rabies struck me. I was sitting on a wood bench on our deck on a hot summer day, holding an encyclopedia and thinking about the ground squirrel who had gotten stuck in our garage the day before. I'd caught her and put her in a cage, because that's what I'd been taught you do with wild animals unfortunate enough to come in contact with you: you turn them into “pets,” whether they want that or not. Fortunately the cage was rickety, and overnight the ground squirrel escaped.

I wasn't thinking about the ground squirrel's bad fortune of encountering me or her good fortune of the cage being old. I wasn't even feeling guilty or bad for caging her in the first place: the understanding that an other has a life of her own, and is not here solely for my use, didn't come to me until a bit later:

I'm grateful it's come at all, since the same cannot be said for most people in this culture. Instead I was thinking about the heavy gloves I'd worn to keep her teeth away from my skin, and I was thinking about how gentle ground squirrels seem most of the time, but how she had scratched and bit when I grabbed her. I understood her fighting back, and certainly respected it. But I didn't, once again, yet take that understanding to the next level, that her fighting against being put in a cage was her telling me she didn't want to be caged, and that for that reason alone I should let her be. I didn't, in short, empathize with her. I know we've all been told that children naturally feel a connection to others, and I'm sure that's true, but I know that by the time I was seven, eight, nine, and ten this connection had at the very least been deeply frayed, and it took years of seeing others suffer as a consequence of my actions—or more precisely seeing the external trappings of their suffering, but not actually seeing their suffering at all—before it even occurred to me what I was doing. At that point I began the slow process of reweaving the braided connection between me and others.

The squirrel trying to bite me made me think of animals acting in ways you wouldn't normally expect, and that made me think of
Old Yeller
. That made me suddenly curious about how rabies works and sent me to the encyclopedia, which I brought onto the deck. Rabies, I learned, was a virus passed from creature to creature by saliva (this latter I knew from the book and movie). Creature A has rabies, and bites creature B, or less frequently, slobbers on creature B. The important thing is that viruses in creature A's saliva enter creature B. The viruses move quickly into B's nerves, and from there they inhabit B's spinal column and brain. Creature B will not show symptoms for a few weeks or even a few months. But once the viruses reach the brain, they reproduce rapidly, and soon inhabit the salivary glands. By now creature B will show signs of illness. In humans—and we've no reason to believe anything else for nonhumans—these include headaches, fever, irritability, restlessness, and anxiety. Within days these symptoms progress to cerebral dysfunction, anxiety, confusion, and agitation, leading to delirium, abnormal behavior, hallucinations, and insomnia. All of this is accompanied by muscle pains, salivation, and vomiting. At that point symptoms diverge into two distinct classes. In what's called “dumb rabies,” creature B retreats steadily and quietly downhill, with some paralysis, to death. In what's called “furious rabies”—and this is what Old Yeller had—the creature begins to experience extreme excitement and is hit by painful muscle spasms, sometimes triggered by swallowing saliva or water. Because of this the creature drools and learns to fear water—thus the frequent references to rabid creatures being hydrophobic. The creature will also be- come extremely sensitive to air blown on the face. But there's more. During that final furious phase, the creature may, without provocation, vigorously and viciously bite at anything: sticks, stones, grass, other animals. This stage lasts only a few days before the creature enters a coma and dies. Once infected, death from the disease is almost invariable.

I remember at that point putting down the encyclopedia, leaning against the deck railing, and staring at the light blue sky above the brown and gray and smoky blue and white of the distant Rocky Mountains, and I remember thinking about volition, free will. Of course I didn't use that language—I was precocious, but volition would certainly not yet have been part of my everyday vocabulary—and I couldn't have clearly articulated any of this, but I got it. I understood—or rather asked, which is almost always more important than understanding anyway— “Who's in charge? Who is actually doing the biting? Is it Old Yeller, or is it the virus?”

The virus knows that if it is to survive the death of its host, it needs to find a new host, which means it needs to get Old Yeller to slobber on or bite someone. Thus the painful spasms on swallowing and the excessive salivation, which combine to lead to the drooling. Thus the furious biting.

In some ways central to this discussion is the question of whether you perceive the world as full of intelligence, and so do not hesitate at the possibility of viruses knowing, viruses choosing; or whether you believe viruses act entirely unthinkingly, mechanistically, and so at most you'll allow viruses not to know, but to “know” that they need to find a new host. But in some ways that question doesn't matter at all, because in either case the viruses cause Old Yeller to change his personality, his behavior toward those he loves. Or perhaps loved.

The central point of R.D. Laing's extraordinary book
The Politics of Experience
was that most of us act in ways that make internal sense: we act according to how we experience the world. If, for example, I experience the world as full of wildly varied and exciting intelligences with whom I can enter into relationships I will act one way. If I experience the world as unthinking, mechanistic, and composed of objects for me to use, I will act another.

Clearly the virus changes its host's experience, at the very least by causing pain and hallucinations.

Now here's the question that struck me so hard on that hot summer afternoon: as Old Yeller snarls and snaps at those he so recently protected, what is he thinking? If I could ask in a language he could understand, and if he could answer in a language that I, too, could understand, what would he say? Is he terrified at this awful pain, and is he, because of that pain, lashing out at everyone around him? Is he confused? Is he asking where this pain comes from?

Or does he have his behavior fully rationalized? Has he—or the virus—created belief systems to support this behavior? Is he suddenly furious at the thousand insults large and small he has received from those who call themselves his masters? Certainly throughout the movie the humans—especially his “owner” Travis—have treated him as despicably as we would expect within this culture (where do you think I learned to mistreat animals?). Does he perceive himself as suddenly seeing things clearly, and as hating these others and all they stand for?