A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [0]
DERRICK JENSEN
Contents
Preface 4
Silencing 6
Coyotes, Kittens, and Conversations 17
Taking a Life 26
Cultural Eyeglasses 30
Cranes 43
The Safety of Metaphor 47
Claims to Virtue 56
Seeking a Third Way 69
Breaking Out 85
Economics 94
The Goal Is the Process 101
Heroes 106
Metamorphosis 115
Insatiability 119
Violence 129
The Parable of the Box 139
Violence Revisited 145
Coercion 157
Honeybees 162
A Turning Over 166
A Life of My Own 174
Interconnection 179
The Plants Respond 188
Death and Awakening 197
A Time of Sleeping 205
Out of Mourning, Play 218
Trauma and Recovery 221
Connection and Cooperation 232
Acknowledgments 240
Notes on Sources 242
Bibliography 250
Preface
THE GENESIS OF THIS book was an event. I used to raise chickens and ducks for food. After a couple of years, a pack of coyotes discovered the easy meals, and I began to lose birds. I scared the coyotes away when I happened to be home, but I knew I could not forever stand guard. One day, when I saw a coyote stalking chickens I asked it to stop. I did this more out of frustration than conviction.
The odd thing was, the coyote did stop, and neither it nor other pack members returned. I was skeptical about the significance of this. Indeed, it took quite a long time and many more interactions with the coyotes before I began to suspect that interspecies communication might be real. This created a new concern. What I was experiencing went against everything I'd been taught—at school, on television, at church, in the newspaper—and especially went against my training in the sciences.
I began to question my sanity, which further piqued my curiosity.
Crazy or not, I soon discovered I wasn't alone. I began to ask people if they too experienced these conversations, and overwhelmingly they said yes. Pigs, dogs, coyotes, squirrels, even rivers, trees, and rocks: all these, according to the stories I was hearing, were speaking and listening if only we too would enter into conversation. Almost without exception, the people I asked said they'd never told these stories, for fear that others would think they were crazy.
The path for the book seemed clear: I would document these stories so that others could learn through the number, variety, and dailiness of these interactions to begin trusting that their own experiences of interspecies communication might be real. I hoped they would learn that just because they speak to their tabby, or because their cocker spaniel responds to their words and intents, that they may not be crazy after all. Or at least if they are crazy , far from being alone they outnumber the skepti cal sane.
What promised to emerge from this exploration was a feel- good book. It seemed to have New York Times bestseller list written all over it.
I tried to write that book, and couldn't do it. Not if I wanted to be honest. One reason is that the conversation with the coy otes was not in truth my first interaction of this kind. It was simply the most obvious I'd experienced in a long time. I recol lected that as a child, I had routinely participated in this sort of conversation, listening especially rapt to what the stars had told me almost nightly. I remembered in fact that the stars had saved my life.
Soon it became dear that an honest examination had to be gin further back than my experience with the coyotes. At the very least it would need to start with the story of the stars. And in order to fully tell that story, I would also need to tell the story of my childhood; how I came to listen to the stars, and why their message was important to me.
At that point another storyline emerged, and it became clear that what I had to write, regardless of my relative youth, was a memoir: How did I later come to deny my experience in favor of what I had been taught? How and why does this happen to each of us as we grow