A Language Older Than Words (7 page)

As often happens when you kill a bird, his nervous system caught fire. His wings flapped explosively, as if now, for the first time, he was flying.

I carried him to a post and hung him by his feet so he would bleed while I heated water. I scalded him and removed his feathers, then eviscerated him. As promised, I carried his head, feet, and guts, along with his feathers, into the forest to the east, and placed it all at the base of a tall, shapely pine I now call the coyote tree.

I returned to the tree a couple of days later. The remains of the duck who had taught me about violence, sex, intimacy, and the acceptance of death were gone. Instead of the bare mound of feathers I had seen in the woods each other time the coyotes had eaten a bird, atop the feathers
this
time was a pile of coyote shit.

I smiled, because I could
think
of no better way for the coyotes to "sign" our agreement. There was the poop; they had closed the deal.

I was now, of course, thoroughly convinced that I was crazy.

Cultural Eyeglasses

"All through school
and
University
I had
been given maps of
life
and
knowledge on which there was
hardly
a
trace
of many of
the
things
that
I most cared
about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until
I ceased to suspect
the
sanity
of my
perceptions
and
began, instead, to sus
pect
the
soundness of
the
maps."
E.F. Schumacher

ISOLATION DOES STRANGE THINGS to a persons mind. This is true for any social creature, human or otherwise. Monkeys taken from their mothers at birth, placed alone in stainless-steel chambers, and deprived of contact with other animals ("human and subhuman" alike, according to the researchers), develop irreversible mental illnesses. As one of the experts in this field, Harry Harlow, put it: "sufficiently severe and enduring social isolation reduces these animals to a social-emotional level in which the primary social responsiveness is fear."

Harlow and another scientist, Stephen Suomi, wondered if they could induce psychopathology in primates by removing baby monkeys from their natural mothers and placing them in cages with "cloth surrogate mothers who could become monsters." They created a cloth frame "monster mother" that would "eject high pressure compressed air" and "blow the animal's skin practically off its body." They created another "that would rock so violently that the baby's head and teeth would rattle," and finally, a "porcupine mother" that on command would "eject sharp brass spikes over all the ventral surface of its body." In the former cases, the baby simply clung tighter, because, as the scientists reported, "a frightened infant clings tightly to its mother at all costs," and in the latter case the monkey waited until the spikes retreated, then returned to cling to what it perceived to be its mother.

Harlow and Suomi finally discovered that the best monster mothers they could devise were simply the products of their own experiments: the monkeys they had raised in isolation. These monkeys—depressed, made permanently psychopathological by artificially removing them from the social embeddedness in which they had evolved—were too fearful to interact normally with other monkeys, and were incapable of normal sexual relations. Undeterred, the scientists impregnated them through the use of what they called a "rape rack." When the babies were born, the mothers had no idea what to do with them. Many of the mothers ignored their infants, while others, in the words of Harlow and Suomi, "were brutal or lethal. One of their favorite tricks was to crush the infant's skull with their teeth. But the really sickening behavior pattern was that of smashing the infants face to the floor, then rubbing it back and forth."

About two weeks ago I received in the mail the Executive Summary of the Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect. This comprehensive report estimated that in 1993, approximately 614,000 American children were physically abused, 300,000 were sexually abused, 532,000 were emotionally abused, 507,000 were physically neglected, and 585,000 were emotionally neglected. 565,000 of these children were killed or seriously injured.

What is the relationship between these numbers and our culturally induced isolation from the natural world and each other, from the social embeddedness in which we evolved?

When I was a child, I sometimes used to lie in bed and look at the ceiling. By softening my gaze, I could cause the spackling above to take form. I saw tin cans, demons, books, knives, flowers,
faces. I made up mysteries, which I tried to solve with clues I gath
ered from above. It is possible to find patterns where none exist. When Descartes said, "I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false," he was on to something. Each day we are bombarded by so many pieces of information—as I write, there is the sound of the space heater, the black on grey of the computer screen, the plastic of its housing, the pictures of the earth on the wall behind, and below them a pair of newspaper clippings ("Defiant activist defends guerrillas," and "Mother bear charges trains"), the clucking of chickens and chatter of geese outside, the quick movement of a tiny spider on the ceiling, the weight of my clothes, the smell of dust on the back of a cat who just came inside: all these and thousands more in only this one moment. It's never possible to know for certain the "true" source of any given interpretation, the dividing line between our association (i.e., projection) and reality. The question quickly becomes, What
is
real? It is always possible to consciously or unconsciously "see" almost anything we want. I can look at the ceiling and see an image of the Virgin Mary, or I can look at the ceiling and see that the spackler did a damn good job.

Perception is of course intimately tied to preconception. I have, as is true for each of us, a pair of cultural eyeglasses that will determine to greater or lesser degree what will be in focus, what will be a blur, what gives me a headache, and what I cannot see. I was raised a Christian—the mythology resides deep in my bones—and I know the story of Jesus nearly as well as I know my own. Until my late teens I couldn't see some of the darker acts perpetrated in the name of Christ. I still feel a twinge each time I say, "I am not a Christian," a slight apprehension that I may have gone too far. Sometimes I look up, a small part of my upbringing still telling me that my blasphemy will call forth a bolt of lightning from the sky.

Blasphemy is more complicated than the simple act of cursing God. It is an attempt to remove our cultural eyeglasses, or at least grind the lenses to make our focus broader, clearer. There are deep strictures against removing these eyeglasses, for without them our culture would fall apart. Question Christianity, damned heathen. Question capitalism, pinko liberal. Question democracy, ungrateful wretch. Question science, just plain stupid. These epithets—blasphemer, commie, ingrate, stupid—need not be spoken aloud. Their invocation actually implies an incomplete enculturation of the subject. Proper enculturation causes the eyeglasses to be undetectable. People believe they are perceiving the world as it is, without the distorting lens of culture: God (with a capital G)
does
sit upon a heavenly throne; heaven
is
located beyond the stars that make up Orion's belt (and, so I was told, you can
just
see heaven's brilliance if you look closely enough); a collection of humans, each acting selfishly,
will
bring peace, justice, and affluence to all; the United States
is
the world's greatest democracy; humans
are
the apex of creation.

A couple of years ago, mining prospectors in Venezuela shot down about seventy Yanomame Indians who were opposing the theft of their land. Each of the newspaper articles I read about the murders mentioned that the Yanomame could only give approximate numbers of the dead, because they could not count

past two. The implication was that because the Indians could not count, they must be unbelievably stupid—perhaps even subhuman. The belief that underlies this implication probably accounts for the fact that the eventually apprehended mass-murderers were only sentenced to six months in jail. But—and I'm telling this story to point out how deeply embedded and utterly transparent the cultural assumptions are—the truth is that even something as simple as one plus one equals two carries with it powerful and hidden presumptions. I hold up the first finger of my left hand, and the first finger of my right. I put them together. Am I now holding up two fingers? No. I'm holding up the first finger of my left hand, which has the almost invisible remnant of a small wart between the second and third knuckles. And I'm holding up the first finger of my right, which has a tiny freckle near its base. The fingers are different. Arithmetic pre-sumes that the items to be counted—the digits—are identical. Before you dismiss this as so much hair-splitting, consider that Treblinka and other Nazi death camps had quotas to fill—so many people to kill each day, each shift. Guards held contests among the inmates in which winners lived, and a preset number of losers didn't. But they're just so many numbers, right? Not if you lose. Its easier to kill a number than an individual, whether we're talking about so many tons of fish, so many board feet of timber, or so many boxcars of
untermenschen.

None of this is to say that I have anything against counting; it is merely to point out that even the simplest of our actions— one, two, three—is fraught with cultural assumptions. Nor is this to say—and here is one place where Descartes and our entire culture have gone wrong—that there is no physical reality, or that physical reality is somehow less important than our preconceptions. The fact that Descartes' views—like yours, like mine— are clouded by projection and delusion doesn't mean that nothing exists, or that, as Descartes put it, "nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me." It simply means we don't see clearly.

The truth is that the physical cannot be separated from the nonphysical. Although it's certainly true that cultural eyeglasses worn by death camp attendants made it seem to them that Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, Russians, homosexuals, communists, intellectuals, and others were killable, it is also true that no matter how strong our social imperatives, physical reality cannot be denied. Perception is connected to preconception. Conception is connected to perception. This was one reason for widespread alcoholism among members of
Einsatzgruppen
—Nazi mobile killing units—and one reason many death camp attendants got drunk before the selections. Not even the lens of Nazism was distorted grossly enough to entirely eradicate the truth.

No anesthetic was necessary for the people who ordered the killings; they had the misleading language of technocratic bureaucracy to distance them from the killings. Thus "mass murder" becomes "the final solution," "world domination" becomes "defending the free world," the War Department becomes the Department of Defense, and "ecocide" becomes "developing natural resources." No one needs to get drunk to do any of this. A good strong ideology and heavy doses of rationalization are all it takes. But it may require little more than a simple unwillingness to step outside the flow of society, to think and act and most importantly experience for ourselves—and to make our
own
decisions.

Let me put this another way. Had Descartes been in the hold of a ship tossing violently in a storm, the contents of his stomach lurching toward his throat with every swell, his famous dictum may not have come out the same. By the same token, had he shared his room not with a stove but a beloved, he may not in that moment have believed that thoughts alone verify his existence, nor that "body, figure, extension, movement and place [were] but the fictions" of his mind.

The point is that physical reality does exist, and it's up to us to detect its patterns. And it is our job to determine whether the patterns we perceive are really there, or whether they're the result of some combination of projection and chance. It's also up to us to determine for ourselves how closely the patterns we've been handed by our culture fit
our
experience of the world.

A frenetic monotony describes our culture’s eradication of every in
digenous culture it encounters, and an even more frenetic monotony cloaks our inability to recognize this. Throw a dart at a map of the world, and no matter the territory it strikes, you will find the story of cruelty and genocide perpetrated by our culture. I throw a dart. It lands low and to the right. Tasmania. A little research reveals that our culture arrived in 1803, and the massacres began soon after. In early 1804, weaponless Tasmanians, waving green boughs in a gesture of peace, approached a regiment of British soldiers at Oyster Bay.
As
the commanding officer later stated, the Tasmanians would be of no use to the British. The soldiers opened fire, killing fifty, including women and children. British encroachment on the island continued through the
decades, leading to the Black War, which lasted from 1824 to 1831.
One of the many weapons used to civilize these savages was the penis. Rape of Aboriginal women was widespread among settlers and soldiers. There was not a single instance of rape committed by an Aborigine against a white woman. When war had not eliminated the Tasmanians, a bounty was placed on their heads. A settler reported, "It was a favourite amusement to hunt the Aborigines; that a day would be selected and the neighbouring settlers invited, with their families, to a picnic. . . . After dinner all would be gaiety and merriment, whilst the gentlemen of the party would take their guns and dogs, and accompanied by two or three convict servants, wander through the bush in search of blackfellows. Sometimes they would return without sport; at others they would succeed in killing a woman, or, if lucky, a man or two." Bounty and sport still not sufficing to exterminate the natives, Governor George Arthur mobilized all available settlers and convicts to form what became known as "The Black Line" stretching from one side of the island to the other. The settlers systematically beat their way across the territory, trying to drive the Aborigines before them. Although the last full-blooded Tasmanian male died in 1870, neither the Tasmanian race nor culture have been entirely eradicated. Nine Tasmanian women were abducted and raped by seal hunters, and two more went voluntarily. All Tasmanian Aboriginals are related to them.