There are deaths such as the death of a chicken in the jaws of a coyote, an aphid in the jaws of a ladybug larva, a duck as I bring down the hatchet to split him head from body. And there are deaths such as that of the larva who falls asleep to awaken as a ladybug, the grub who spins a black cocoon before becoming a honeybee, and each of us each night dying to one world to find ourselves in another, and each morning dying in the other to walk again in the present.
My old way of living—or rather surviving—that had allowed me to persevere through the violence of my childhood was no longer sustainable. Perhaps it never had been, but was all along a stopgap response to a pathological environment. In any case, I could not continue controlling or ignoring my emotions, nor could I, and this amounts to the same thing, continue to ignore my body. A way of living based on ignoring the body can lead only to bodily collapse.
I didn't see it that way at the time. I just knew I hurt like hell, and that I was defecating thirty times per day (defecating what? I could keep nothing down, so in time I simply quit eating), and throwing up at least that many times, from the pain that rolled across my lower abdomen.
That summer, I could sleep in only one position: on my back, knees clutched to my chest. Any other position immediately precipitated cramps that caused me to dash doubled over to the toilet. This made nights especially difficult, because as a child I had trained myself to sleep only on my stomach, neck tucked under upraised shoulder to keep vampires or others from sucking me dry.
I didn't go to the hospital. I had no way to pay, nor did I have any sense. I kept thinking that if I ignored the symptoms with enough determination and for a long enough time, the sickness would go away on its own.
Then one morning I awoke to no pain at all, only a grainy pulling at my full bowels, not unlike the feel of rough-hewn lumber sliding under fingertips. I stood up straight and smiled briefly before tripping down the stairs to the toilet. What came out was liquid, but I couldn't expect all the symptoms to disappear in one night, could I? I cleaned myself, and looked in the bowl. Bright red. Blood. I was bleeding internally. I finally understood that it would not work to ignore the sickness. I checked into the hospital.
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 existence of the spirit (it can't be measured in the laboratory), or at the very least having attempted to sever the ties between spirit and flesh (flesh bringing "the manly mind down from the heights"), we have forgotten their interconnectedness.
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 with
out 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 to bathroom and back. I lost weight, down to a hundred and fifteen pounds. I could no longer stand straight, or again I'd cramp, then stagger to the sink and toilet. I lost the capacity to think clearly, and to remember. My vocabulary disappeared, and I could say no words over four syllables, even directly after they were said by others.
The woman I dated through college and after, the one whose question sparked the dream of cranes, flew out to get me to eat. I could not, and after a few days she checked me back into the hospital. She called my mother in England, where she was thinking of staying, and said, "If you want to see your son alive, you need to come home." She then said to me, "I do not want to watch you die." She flew back to her home.
The doctors continued their maltreatment, and I continued to lose weight. They scheduled me for a colostomy. Had my mother not returned, and pulled me from the hospital, I would probably not have survived my death to be reborn: a decade later I speak easily of these deaths and rebirths, but in all truth they are dangerous, and messy. This spiritual death, this collapse, does not come without its price, exacted in pain and tears and oftentimes physical death as well.
After speaking with experts on Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis (this latter the disease with which I'd been misdiagnosed), and after learning of the wrong tests done and right tests undone, my mother took me to another hospital, this in Salt Lake City. There, they diagnosed me immediately with Crohn's (a case so classic that later, when part of my colon was removed, they used it as a teaching tool). The doctors tried to strengthen me with intravenous feeding. They weaned me off the steroids I'd gotten from earlier doctors, and for several weeks tried many medications to control the disease.
The recurrence rate of Crohn's following surgery is high— according to one cheerful account, "greater than ninety-nine percent," and according to another about fifty percent per year— and for this reason the physicians were hesitant to operate. But I had another bleed, and then another, and despite transfusions began passing out from loss of blood.
I awoke the morning after surgery to a delicious absence of pain. Sure, my belly hurt where they'd opened me up, but it was nothing compared to the cramps. They were gone. I pulled myself up, and looked out the window to the dawn sunlight reflecting off scattered hills to the west. The surgeon came in, told me they'd removed about two-thirds of my colon ("We left as much as possible for next time"), and was followed shortly by a nurse who told me to pee. I told her I couldn't. She said I needed to so they could make sure my kidneys still worked. I told her I'd be happy to, but I couldn't just right then. She said they needed to know right away, so she'd go get a catheter. I told her I'd try real hard. When I handed back the bottle, it was closer to one-tenth full than nine-tenths empty.
I went home as soon as my guts awakened, and through that fall my mother cooked for me four or five meals per day to fatten me up. I remember that the first night back I was too weak to climb the stairs to my room, and so had to crawl. A week later, on my first walk outdoors, I made it only to the next city lot before returning home exhausted.
I spent that fall and winter taking long slow walks to the river, or down to the towns park where I would stand alone and shoot baskets for hours on end. When other people showed up, I was not yet strong enough to play in games, but by spring I stood my own, and played pickup basketball and Softball as often as I could.
Through that winter my mother often said to me, in response to my despair at the slow return of strength, "It took you a long time to get sick, and it will take you a long time to get well."
A Time of Sleeping
"The part of the mind that is dark to us in this culture, that is sleeping in us, that we name 'unconscious,' is the knowledge that we are inseparable from all other beings in the universe." Susan Griffin
THIS PAST SUMMER I went to the beach with Julie. The sky was gray, the wind sharp. Tiny drops of rain hit our faces, or fell to the sand at our feet. We ate lunches of dry meat sandwiches— we'd forgotten mustard and mayonnaise. Seagulls circled above, or trotted toward us, only to scurry away.
One bird looked especially pathetic, a forlorn adolescent evidently unpracticed at scooping up starfish. He looked hungry. Julie tried to throw him the scrap-end of her meal. Another seagull swooped for the snatch of bread before it hit the sand. Julie reached into the bag for another piece. Another toss, and another seagull had a snack. The young bird still stood, still seeming pathetic and hungry. Again her hand went into the bag, and again another bird snatched the bread away.
I laughed, then said, "It's a bait-and-switch routine they've got set up. They take turns being the orphan."
Julie didn't think it was funny. She kept throwing food until the Pathetic One had tasted a bite.
A large part of me had not been laughing, but had instead been wanting to grab the bread and repeat to her the warning I'd heard repeatedly as a child: do not feed the animals. Do not cause them to become habituated to humans. It will only hurt them in the long run. Don't feed the seagulls, because they will just be a nuisance, and besides, they will not learn to fend for themselves. And if they can't learn to catch starfish they die. It's survival of the fittest. The same is true for all others. Don't feed the bears, or they'll lose their fear, and having lost their fear they may attack. Even if they do not attack they will knock over trash bins and iceboxes, and we will have to shoot them. Then I remembered the offerings I give the coyotes, and noted my own hypocrisy.
Julie said, "I've always loved feeding animals. Ever since I was a child. Do you think it's wrong?"
I wanted to say yes but heard myself say, "No."
"I don't think so, either," she said. "I think it's what we're supposed to do."
I didn't have to ask why. I just nodded, agreeing now, and thought of salmon swimming toward bears waiting for the food that would last them through their long winters sleep. I thought of the duck, giving his life to me. Part of our task as members of a community is to feed each other. I thought again of our fundamental inversion of all relatedness, of how we nearly always ask precisely the wrong question—What can I get from this?—and so very rarely the right one—What can I give back? Even when we try to learn from others, it is from this same spirit of acquisition: What can I learn from this forest ecosystem that will teach me how to manage it for maximum resource extraction? Rarely: What can I learn from this forest community that will teach me how to better serve it?
We did not talk for a long time. Instead we sat watching seagulls lose interest and trot away to stand one-legged in the wind. My fingers picked at the huge log of driftwood on which we sat, an
d I felt the softly textured surface, worn smooth by sun, salt, water, and sand. For some reason I thought of bear baiting, a process in which for months prior to the season, a "hunter" places edibles at a spot in the forest. Come season, he sits in a tree, waits for a bear to show up for dinner, and shoots him or her at point-blank range. I've often wondered what that bear must think and feel while dying, lying next to an offering of food. I would imagine shock, sorrow, and a deep sense of betrayal. How could you? I thought you were giving me this meal.
Times like that—times I consider the duplicitous nature of so many of our relations—I think back to a time I've never known, when children painted the faces of wolf pups and placed them gently back in dens, and when wolves found lost families and led them home. A time when humans and nonhumans conversed, and when the world and all in it were not resources to be consumed but friends and neighbors to be loved and enjoyed, and even when killed and eaten to be perceived with a sense of gratitude and wonder. Times like that I think back to when men did not rape women, nor did they rape children, and when fathers did not strike their sons nor daughters. It really wasn't so very long ago, but it was a time I've never known.
I did not die for only one night, but for the several years it took for the lessons of that night to travel to every cell of my body, and for the layers of old skin—formed in an earlier time of trauma, when I had different requirements for survival—to scrape away or slough off and be replaced by new ones.
When we imprison another we must also place one of our own in prison as a guard. Likewise when we imprison a part of ourselves, other parts must move into that same dungeon. Prisons—whether made of steel, razor wire, floodlamps, and observation posts, or a steel will holding emotions and flesh in check—consume a tremendous amount of energy. When as a child I vowed to no longer feel anger, to no longer feel anything, not only did I lose access to banished feelings but I lost also the energy it took to keep them at bay. Where did those emotions go, what did they do? They did not vanish into the psychic equivalent of thin air. How did they twist and turn to find their way out, as ultimately they must? How do frustrated emotions make clear their need for expression, and how, in the end, are they expressed?
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