A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [137]
And I remember a third night, looking out the bedroom window of a house I rented in Nevada, and seeing the moon so bright it passed in front of any wispy clouds that happened by. I heard the quiet sounds of nightbirds, and beyond that the Humboldt River, soft and slow. I remember that I looked at the green blisters of paint on the windowsill, and I loved them just for what they were. I saw then the distant headlight of a train. carving out a bright helix as it swept toward me on its tracks. With it came its sounds, all the rush and roar and clatter that means a train, and the bumping of couplers straining as the train changes speed. It approached, and it held me tight, and then it passed on and left me alone again with the river, the night birds, and most of all, time.
There are some ways in which I'm fucked up, but that's not one of them.
The Plants Respond
"The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence, 'at bottom' the psyche is simply 'world.'" Carl Jung
SOMETIMES IT HAPPENS THAT a person can name the exact moment when his or her life changed irrevocably. For Cleve Backster, it was early morning on February 2, 1966, at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds of chart time for a polygraph he was administering. One of the world's experts on polygraphs, and the creator of the Backster Zone Comparison Test, the standard used by lie-detection examiners worldwide, Backster had threatened the subjects well-being in hopes of triggering a response. The subject had responded electrochemically to this threat. The subject was a plant.
Some thirty-one years later, I had the opportunity to ask him about it.
He said, "I wasn't particularly into plants, but there was a going-out-of-business sale at a florist on the ground floor of the building, and the secretary bought a couple of plants for the office: a rubber plant, and this dracaena cane. I had done a saturation watering—putting them under the faucet until water ran out the bottom of the pots—and was curious to see how long it would take the moisture to get to the top. I was especially interested in the dracaena, because the water had to climb a long trunk, and then to the end of long leaves. I thought if I put the galvanic-skin-response detector of the polygraph at the end of a leaf, a drop in resistance would be recorded on the paper as the moisture arrived between the electrodes.
"That, at least, is the cover story. I'm not sure if there was another, more profound, reason. It could be that somebody at another level of consciousness was nudging me into doing this. "I noticed something on the chart resembling a human response on a polygraph: not at all what I would have expected from water entering a leaf. Lie detectors work on the principle that when people perceive a threat to their well-being, they physiologically respond in predictable ways. If you were conducting a polygraph as part of a murder investigation, you might ask a suspect, 'Was it you who fired the shot fatal to so and so?' If the true answer were yes, the suspect will fear getting caught lying, and electrodes on his or her skin will pick up the physiological response to that fear. So I began to think of ways to threaten the well-being of the plant. First I tried dipping a neighboring leaf in a cup of warm coffee. The plant, if anything, showed what I now recognize as boredom—the line on the chart just kept trending downward.
"Then at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds chart time, the imagery entered my mind of burning the leaf. I didn't verbalize; I didn't touch the plant; I didn't touch the equipment. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart. The only new thing the plant could have reacted to was the mental image.
"I went into the next office to get matches from my secretary's desk, and lighting one, made a few feeble passes at a neighboring leaf.