A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [162]
It occurred to me not moments later that this is the relationship with the world at large into which most of us have been forced. It would be nice to simply be able to play intimately with and in an old growth forest, as humans have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years, without having to worry that next year or the year after you will learn that the trees have been murdered, the forest has been cut.
As usual, I walked outside to feed the chickens this afternoon. Because it is now winter, and snow covers the ground, songbirds gather to eat the bread and vegetables I set out for the chickens. After feed time I walked to the coyote tree, carrying my daily offering of bread. I know now that it is coyotes who eat it, and not deer or magpies, because I can see the small prints of a dog in the fresh snow. My own dogs scamper ahead of me. I shield my eyes from the sun's reflection: it's the first time the sun has broken through the clouds in a week.
I placed the bread at the base of the tree, touched its trunk in welcoming, and began to walk home, passing the still-standing stakes the surveyors left behind: tomorrow I will pick them up. Then I passed a rock outcropping onto which also I daily place a piece of bread. A few times I've seen a chipmunk standing atop the rock, and I've got enough bread to share. After the outcropping I followed the trail down a gentle slope that winds among trees to eventually open out at my home. Today, as I stepped beneath the first tree, it chose that moment to unload its burden of the last few days' snow directly atop my head.
It is not true that for the last few hundred thousand years it is only humans who have played with forests. Forests, too, have been playing with us.
Trauma and Recovery
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Milan Kundera
EARLY ON I ASKED what level of violence it will take to make the destructiveness of our way of living obvious. That's not a fair question, because the relationship between the perpetration or even receipt of violence and the awareness of that violence is not linear. As violence becomes more ubiquitous it also becomes more transparent. If one woman out of four is raped within her lifetime, and two out of five are either raped or fend off rape attempts, is the condition of having been sexually assaulted now normal? Is the condition of being capable of, or even having committed, sexual assault also now normal? Add to this the isolating effects of trauma—the erection of internal walls to keep a dangerous world at bay—and the way these walls later facilitate—at least make possible and in some cases make inevitable— the committing of further violence (emotional, spiritual, and physical), and the result can be no other than a constantly expanding sphere of traumatized, isolated individuals. Those on the inside—the already traumatized—will consume those at the frontier (the new children, the newly contacted indigenous peoples, the newly discovered reserves of exploitable human and nonhuman resources), never once seeing the damage they cause nor the isolation they engender. To see the damage would be to revisit their original insult. If they did that, where would they be, and what would they do?
Recall the monkeys made permanently insane by their artificial removal from the social embeddedness in which they evolved. These creatures were too fearful to interact normally with other beings, and became the best "monster mothers" the scientists could devise. Isolation leads to psychopathology. Isolated from the rest of nature, isolated from each other by walls of fear, isolated from our own bodies, and isolated most of all from our own horrifying experience, is it any wonder that we are all crazy?
If we have become so inured to the coercion that engulfs, forms, and deforms us that we no longer perceive it for the aberration it is, how much more is this true for our ignorance of the trauma that characterizes our way of life? Salmon are going extinct? Pass the toast, man, I'm