A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [175]
The next reason I can't offer solutions is that the "problem"— whatever that means—is unconsciously though intentionally structured to make solutions impossible. A double bind is defined as a situation where if you choose the first option you lose, if you choose the second option you lose, and you cannot withdraw. Would you like to vote for the Republican or the Democrat? Should you step into the line on the left or the right? Should you fish the puppies out of the pool or get your brother? Should you work for IBM or Microsoft? Try leaving the wage economy. The only way to defeat a double bind is to obliterate it.
In the seventeenth century the Zen poet Bunan wrote, "Die while you're alive and be absolutely dead. Then do whatever you want: it's all good." We are, of course, already dead. There is no hope. The machine is too powerful, the damage too severe. There are too many child abusers, too many rapists, too many corporations, too many tanks and guns and airplanes. And I'm just one person; I can't do anything. You're dead right, so what the hell are you waiting for? An Irish friend of mine once told me his favorite saying: "Is this a private fight, or can anyone enter?" Give up. Capitulate. Realize there's no hope, then have at it. If you're dead, you have nothing to lose and a world to gain.
The third reason I can't propose solutions is that to attempt to do so presupposes that solutions exist. But to believe that we can rationally "solve the problems" is to pretend the "problems" are rational, and is to manifest the same megalomania that got us here in the first place. We can no more manage the problems than we can manage a forest.
The best I can offer is the suggestion that if we are to survive, we must not only begin to learn the difference between real and false hopes, but we must also remember how to surrender. No, not to the destructive forces guiding our culture toward its own collapse, nor even to the despair caused by seeing the murder of so many peoples and so many species and biomes, so much beauty, but instead we must remember how to surrender to the land itself, to immerse ourselves in the implications of the natural and social circumstances in which we find ourselves engulfed. If we do not allow ourselves to attend to our surroundings and what is happening to them, to feel the implications deep in our bones, how can we respond appropriately and deeply to the situation?
What are the dying salmon telling you, and the dying forests? What lessons are whispered to you by the ghosts of the passenger pigeons, or the ghostly roll of thunder of a mammoth herd of bison? Allow these voices to inform your actions.
There are some lines from the Tao Te Ching that I dearly love. They are: “Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?"
None of this is to say that we shouldn't work to revoke corporate charters, revest corporate-claimed lands, file timber sale appeals, vote, write, work at battered-women's shelters, throw pies, blow up dams, or even write letters to Slade Gorton and Larry Craig. All of those actions are necessary to the degree that they arise organically from the situation. If we listen carefully enough I believe our bodies, the land, and circumstance will tell us what to do. If someone were to ask me what to do about the problems we face in the world today, I would say, "Listen. If you listen carefully enough you will in time know exactly what to do."
Change is coming. We are in the midst of it. Ecological system after system is collapsing around us, and we wander dazed through our days as though we have become in reality the automatons we so often strive to be.
Often when I awaken I hear the voices of those who will come after, and sometimes