A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [147]
It didn't help. As I came to know later, the doctors misdiagnosed me and performed inappropriate and damaging procedures. They overprescribed some medications and underprescribed others.
One of the worst things they did—and there was obviously no reason for it—was to one night give me a laxative. The cramps worsened. I had not thought that possible. For the first time in my life—and I remember experiencing a sense of sickly wonder at this encounter with a new feeling—I could not cope. The pain was too much. At some point long after midnight I felt my will buckle and collapse, a feeling as physical as the implosion of an overburdened archway. Had someone entered the room, handed me a gun, and said, "I will let you sleep if you shoot the person in the other bed," I would have done it. Had this person suggested I shoot my nieces, who lived down the street from the hospital, I would have done that, too. I would have shot anyone or destroyed anything to sleep. Not so much because I was tired, though I was, but because I was empty. I had ceased entirely to care, nor even to exist. I was dead.
There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of the earth, and it is the language of our bodies. It is the language of dreams, and of action. It is the language of meaning, and of metaphor. This language is not safe, as Jim Nollman said of metaphor, and to believe in its safety is to diminish the importance of the embodied. Metaphors are dangerous because if true they open us to our bodies, and thus to action, and because they slip—sometimes wordlessly, sometimes articulated— between the seen and unseen. This language of symbol is the umbilical cord that binds us to the beginning, to whatever is the source of who we are, where we come from, and where we return. To follow this language of metaphor is to trace words back to our bodies, back to the earth.
We suffer from misperceiving the world. We believe ourselves separated from each other and from all others by words and by thoughts. We believe—rationally, we think—that we are separated by rationality, and that to perceive the world "rationally" is to perceive the world as it is. But perceiving the world "as it is" is also to misperceive it entirely, to blind ourselves to an even greater body of truth.
The world is a great dream. No, not fleeting, evanescent, unreal, immaterial, less than. These words do not describe even our dreams of night. But alive, vivid, every moment present to and pregnant with meaning, speaking symbolically. To perceive the world as we perceive our dreams would be to more closely perceive it as it is. The sky is crying, from joy or grief I do not know. Waves in a wild river form bowbacked lovers and speak to me of union. Industrial civilization tears apart my insides.
The world is speaking, every moment of every day, and because so often it does not choose to speak English—or in the case of caged apes, American Sign Language—we choose to believe it does not speak. How sad. Our bodies speak, too, and to them, too, so often we choose not to listen. A woman once said to me, "I love my children, and I'm glad they exist, but I now know I wanted so much to be born that three times I went through the process of giving birth. Finally I know what I wanted all along."
Our actions also speak to us of death. I've often wondered if the urge to destroy is really the desire to do away with a way of living that does not bring us joy. Perhaps what we want is not to destroy the world with plutonium, but to stop living the way we do. We know that to be reborn we must die, but we do not know what form this death must take. Having denied the