A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [152]
She didn't have to say anything else, for suddenly I understood. There is a difference between assigning causal responsibility to someone—I caused this Crohn's disease, the napalmed baby caused the atrocity—and someone becoming responsible (that is, capable of responding) to the events which engulf them. In other words, Crohn's disease had arrived, which meant it was now my responsibility to learn how to respond to it, enter into a dialogue with it. Obviously, in many cases—the napalmed baby; myself as a child; all of us, I fear, faced with the monumental momentum of our culture's death urge—the circumstances of any particular calamity can be so overwhelming as to disallow reasonable response. But so long as we are capable it is our duty and our joy to remain as present as we can to our circumstances. At that moment something shifted inside. I was no longer simply a person afflicted with Crohn's disease, but instead a person with a new companion for life. This companion was not always going to be pleasant, and in fact could kill me if it so chose, but from now on our lives were inextricably bound. For better or for worse, I was accountable to this other, which (or who) was also accountable to me. Just as it would behoove me to learn to listen to the friends and family with whom I plan on maintaining any sort of relationship and to learn to speak honestly to them as well—hearing what they need and making clear what I need in order to continue—sitting on that plane I realized that if I were going to survive this disease, I had better learn to listen. I realized, too, that learning to listen to the disease might not only keep me alive, but might also help to release me from the prison of my own steel will, which I had built as a child to keep the world out, but which I now was finding kept me locked in even more firmly.
The psychologist Rollo May retells the story of Briar Rose, modifying the emphasis so that no longer is she a mere sleeping beauty waiting unchanging to be awakened by a kiss, but instead she— or rather her primarily unconscious processes of maturation— now runs the story. Far more important than the kiss is the time of sleeping—the hundred years of death—and it is now she and not the prince who determines the moment of reawakening. The lucky prince merely happens to be in the right place at the right time with the right attitude.
The story, if you recall, runs like this: A king and queen were unable to conceive, until one day when the queen was bathing a frog crawled onto land and said, "Before the year is out you shall have a daughter."
The daughter, named Briar Rose, was born, and the king gave a great feast. Because he hadn't enough golden plates, he was able to invite only twelve of the country's thirteen Wise Women. On the night of the feast, each of the first eleven Wise Women granted gifts to the princess: virtue, beauty, riches, and so on. Then the thirteenth, the uninvited one, showed up unannounced, and to avenge herself said that in the princess's fifteenth year she would prick herself with a spindle and fall down dead. The twelfth Wise Woman, who had not yet granted a boon, stated that while she could not undo the words of the other, she could soften them; instead of dying the princess would sleep for a hundred years.
Her father responded by removing every spindle from the kingdom, trying to protect his daughter from the death everyone knew must come. But it is no more possible to cheat fate than it is to resolve the nonrational through the purely rational. One day in her explorations the princess found an old woman spinning in a deserted room in the castle. Briar Rose "pricked" her finger on the spindle and began to bleed—the sexual imagery here is not tremendously subtle—and fell