A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [136]
It is to learn the power of the word no. No more clearcuts. No more tumors on turtles. No more genocide. No more slavery, neither our own nor others.
So long as we, or I, continue to discuss this in the abstract, we, or I, still have too much to lose. Presumably the mother grizzly did not find herself paralyzed by theoretical discussions of what is right or wrong, and presumably the same is true for the woman who takes the weapons from her attacker's hands. If we only begin to feel in our bodies the immensity of what we are losing—intact ecosystems, hours sold for wages, childhoods lost to violence, women's capacity to walk unafraid—we will know precisely what we need to do.
Any revolution on the outside—any breaking down of current power structures—with no corresponding revolution in perceiving, being, and thinking, will merely further destruction, genocide, and ecocide. Any revolution on the inside—a revolution of the heart—which does not lead to a revolution on the outside plays just as false.
Anton Chekhov once said that he would like to read a story about a man who squeezes every drop of slave's blood from himself. That is first what we must do. For when a slave rebels without challenging the entire notion of slavery, we merely encounter a new boss. But if all the blood is painfully squeezed away, what emerges is a free man or woman, and not even death can stop those who are free.
I've been thinking about what I wrote before, about me being fucked up, manifesting in part by scenes of ecstasy and intimacy involving nonhuman others, and I've come to the conclusion I was wrong. Oh, I'm still fucked up in some ways: my sleep patterns are disturbed, confrontation is not always easy for me (not that you'd know it from this book), certain scenes remind me overmuch of my childhood (to this day I hate beans because I forced them down my too-tight throat, and only recently have I gained the ability to wash dishes when another is in the room). But I don't think that experiencing intimacy and ecstasy with nonhumans is a sign of mental illness. Rather it is the opposite. To experience these scenes only with nonhumans might be reason for concern, but one of the great losses we endure in this prison of our own making is the collapse of intimacy with others, the rending of community, like tearing and retearing a piece of paper until there only remains the tiniest scrap. To place our needs for intimacy and ecstasy—needs like food, water, acceptance—onto only one species, onto only one person, onto only the area of joined genitalia for only the time of intercourse, is to ask quite a lot of our sex.
I'm not suggesting we remedy this by having more sex with more partners, or with trees, high-jumping pits, or sheep. Sex is not the point at all. That's one of the problems of our mechanistic perspective. Because our science cannot measure and quantify existential loneliness, and because love, too, deigns not to be put on the rack and relieved of its secrets, we talk too much about that which we can comprehend, photograph, reproduce, commodify, which we can see: sex. But like an iceberg, or the entrance to a cave, or like the ocean itself, there is so much more beneath only hinted at by the surface.
I remember a midnight some ten years ago. I was walking through the late spring snow and looking at the sky. Suddenly, lightning began to dance from cloud to cloud. Billows and curves reflected purplish white behind the blinding glare of the bolts themselves. Opening my arms I fell into the clouds, then stood back in the snow, laughing, then finally moaning with delight as I saw for the first and only time in my life a lightning storm with snow on the ground.
I remember another night when northern lights coincided with the Perseid meteor shower. I carried a blanket into the dark, wearing only shoes. I spread the blanket, then took off those last bits of clothing.