A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [148]
For my father to have stopped beating us, to have stopped raping us, he would have had to die to his own bitter childhood. Because he clearly did not beat my sister over the stated reason of finding drowned puppies, we can know that his anger had to be located elsewhere. It lurked among the internalized images of those who froze his psyche in a state of perpetual fear and anger. A bubbling pot frozen mid-boil. To let that go, he would have to fall into it, let the significance of his own actions—for actions, as they say, speak so much louder than words--surround him. He would have to let them speak to him. What does the rape of his daughter, his son, his wife, mean? What deep desires do they manifest? As he brings back his fist to strike his son, how does the fist signify?
It is not easy. Earlier I said that the way to step past atrocity is to step toward experience. But experience is tied intimately to perception, which is tied intimately to prior experience. How does one know that experiences are what they seem? My father's experience was undoubtedly of anger: so listen to it, man, and pop that flicking smartass kid across the mouth. It ends up that we must not stop at direct experience, but instead pause there to listen again to that voice of anger or sorrow or hatred or even perceived love, and then while stepping again forward even further into experience step also into meaning.
But even that is of no use. My earlier wish for my father— that he would understand the effects of his actions—is wishful thinking. It is likely that he, like so many of us, like the monkeys made psychotic by removing them from their community, like the race of the indecent mentioned by Viktor Frankl, is simply unreachable. If that is the case, trying to make someone like my father understand this is a waste of time. In order to understand, he would have to first die. As we all do.
Jesus in the grave, Jonah in the whale, Moses in the desert, Jesus once again and also in the desert, the Phoenix burning to rise from its own ashes, the snake shedding its old and dead skin, caterpillars forming cocoons, trees dropping leaves: everyone understands that for there to be growth, there must always be a dying away.
George Gurdjieff wrote, "A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake." Being born without dying is false, and leads only to a reaffirmation and strengthening of the same impulses that drive us terrified toward death while disallowing us from entering that cleansing abyss. Dying without awakening is just as false, playing out as we see in the unquenchable cannibalism of the som-nambular undead, those who enact a death wish never realizing that what they want to kill—or rather to allow to die—is wholly inside. The trick is to walk that sharp line between death and life, and to allow yourself, with full cognizance of the risks involved, to collapse, to let a part of your life die so another may emerge, to dive as fully into death as you do life, to embrace it and let it embrace you, to eat the fish of collapse and death as well as the fish of life and experience, and to let its line also pull you to the bottom of the ocean.
Looking back, it is fitting that I last heard my fathers voice as a part of the same larger experience that killed off the first part of my life, a part dominated by him and my reaction to him.
My first night in the hospital the telephone rang. I picked it up, heard my name. I asked, "Who is this?"
He said, "Your father."
I hung up.
The bleeding stopped soon after I entered the hospital. Not because of anything the doctors did, but simply because it stopped. I returned to my home in Carlin, Nevada, where the summer months passed in an unfocused tunnel of days and nights in which I crawled again and again from bedroom