Songs of the Dead

by Derrick Jensen

  Perhaps I would learn some of those answers at the river.

  We go to the park where I saw the man die. I drive. Allison rides. I know I’m not going to fall through time on the way there. We stop, get out, walk the overgrown road toward the river, come to a small overlook with a ten-foot drop-off. This seems as good a place as any. We sit, feet dangling over the edge. The river makes soft sounds: gloops and laps and hisses. I don’t know how to read them. I don’t know what I’m supposed to read. I don’t know what I’m supposed to learn. Is it the old Heraclitus line about how you can’t step into the same river twice, because it’s not the same river, and you’re not the same person? Maybe the forest is trying to say that a forest is a process, like a river, like any other being.

  I see gnats hovering. I see a fish jump. I see swallows flying low over the water. I see one open its mouth, maybe take a drink. I wonder if I’m supposed to learn that a river is not just water but insects, fish, birds, and that a forest, too, is not just trees.

  I was expecting something more dramatic.

  I turn to Allison. She raises her eyebrows.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  I look at the river, lean back a little, rest my weight on my hands, slightly behind me and to the side, arms straight, elbows locked. I close my eyes.

  When I open them it’s dark. I see very little. There’s no moon, and the only light is from the city. I can’t imagine I fell asleep so suddenly. I’ve never done that before. I say, “Allison.”

  No response.

  I say it again.

  Still no response.

  I don’t think she left me while I was sleeping. I don’t know why she would. But she’s not there.

  I hear a vehicle behind me and I scramble off to the side. Bushes scratch my arms. I see headlights. After the dark they blind me. The vehicle stops. The lights go out. The door opens. There is no dome light. Someone—I think a man—gets out, turns on a flashlight, walks to the overlook, shines the flashlight down. Apparently satisfied, he moves to the rear of the vehicle. It’s a truck. He opens the tailgate, pulls out something heavy, carries it to the edge, sets it down, rolls it over. I hear a splash. I creep out to look. He again shines his flashlight on the river. I see a woman in the water, her long hair spread like a fan. The man returns to his truck, gets in, starts it, drives away.

  I close my eyes.

  When I open them it’s bright. I blink, can’t see anything. Finally I see I’m standing near where I was sitting before. Allison still sits. She looks at me, concerned. I tell her what I saw.

  “Was it Nika?” she asks.

  “No, her hair was different.”

  “Was it the same man?”

  “I think so.”

  “How do we stop him?”

  “I don’t know.” I stay standing, stare at the river. There’s too much death. I don’t know what to do.

  After a time, I begin to wonder what this has to do with what it’s like to be a forest. I still don’t understand.

  I close my eyes.

  When I open them it’s dark. I hear the river. A truck is parked close by, and even closer is the man with the flashlight. His breath is heavy from exertion. He plays the light over the water, and I look for bodies. I see none. He turns off the light. He’s still breathing heavily. I don’t want to move, for fear of him noticing me. I some- how know that if he notices me, even the slightest, I’m dead. I shift. My foot feels something slightly soft. I think I know what it is.

  Finally the man’s breathing slows. I don’t know what he’s going to do. I sense him look up, and I look up, too. I see a few stars, beyond the trees, beyond the refracted lights of the city. He looks back down. Something’s going to happen.

  He turns on the flashlight, points it toward the ground.

  There is not one body there. There are two. They are on their backs. I see their faces. Suddenly I know what it is like to be a forest, what it is like to be a forest faced with this culture. One of the bodies is Allison’s. The other one is mine.

  twenty

  hell

  We’re at home. We’re sitting on the couch. I haven’t told Allison what I saw. The only words I’ve said to her are, “We need to go.” I said this the moment I got back to the daylight, with me blinking in the brightness, barely seeing the figure of Allison sitting on the overlook. She stood, took my arm, turned me toward the vehicle, led me up the path. She asked a couple of times what I saw that made me so pale, that made my whole body a mask, that made me unsteady on my feet.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even think.

  Allison drove. I sat. She was silent. I tried to think, tried to clear my mind.

  First I tried to convince myself I had not seen what I had seen. But I had. I knew that. I have seen Allison’s and my own faces enough to know them, even cut and bruised as they were. Or rather, cut and bruised as they will be, when this comes to pass. Cut and bruised as we will be.

  We’re sitting on the couch. Allison is crying. She is holding my hand. She squeezes. I haven’t told her anything. I can’t. I won’t. I don’t want to plant those memories inside of her. I don’t want them to grow as they’re already growing and twisting and climbing and reaching out inside of me. I don’t want for her to be able to picture the mutilations, the disfigurements, the pulpy, bloody masses where before were flesh and organs.

  She squeezes again, says, “What did you see?”

  Silence.

  We’re sitting on the couch. I wish I’d never gone to the river. I wish I’d never asked what it’s like to be a forest in the face of this culture. A river. A mountain. An ocean. A nonhuman. A human being. I no longer want to know. I want to go back to the way I was before: ignorant, dead to the world. I wish I had never fallen through time. I wish I could pretend none of this was happening. I wish I could pretend I was not going to be tortured and murdered.

  There is a difference between death and death. I feel like a fool for even asking that question. The question is theoretical, abstract, absurd, the sort that could be asked only by someone who does not live in the real, physical, world, who is not paying attention to the meaninglessness—the absolute meaninglessness—of the suffering and death—the utterly needless suffering and death—caused by this wétiko culture and by individual wétikos. It could only be asked by someone who has no experience of the real world. It could only be asked by someone who is hiding from the real world. I wish I were still hiding. I wish I had no experience. I wish I could still ask that question.

  We’re sitting on the couch. Allison asks again, “What did you see?”

  Silence. “We need to leave.”

  “Why?”

  I won’t tell her more. I won’t plant those memories.

  She asks, “Leave this house?”

  “This area,” I say. “Far away.”

  Silence. She’s not squeezing my hand. She’s thinking. I see she is starting to understand. She is anything but stupid. Finally she says, “You saw another body…”

  I look straight ahead.

  “Another woman.”

  I feel my teeth press against each other.

  “It was me, wasn’t it? You saw me.”

  “We need to leave.”

  It’s odd. You’d think that, faced with our own torture and murder, we would immediately flee. But we don’t. After the initial shock wears off, we pretty much go about our lives, now wearing a cloak of dread. I’ve read that many Jews in Nazi Germany did the same thing, going about their business as though if they ignored the threats diligently enough, the dreadful would never overtake them, as though pretending that nothing was wrong would exempt them from the consequences of their inaction. And it wasn’t just Jews. Many German officers knew the war was lost—and long before that, they knew it was wrong—yet they lacked the nerve to join the resistance. Inertia, cowardice, and short-term self-interest so often trump everything, from morality to sanity to realistic self-preservation.

  Most of us do th
e same.

  Oh, I shouldn’t say that Allison and I don’t change our lives. We start locking the doors at night, we buy guns, and I stop lying naked in the forest (although I don’t tell Allison why). But we don’t immediately flee.

  We do make plans. Allison has a show opening in a month at a major gallery in New York City. Normally you wouldn’t catch me dead in New York City, but given that the alternative is for me to get caught dead—for real, not cliché—in Spokane, I’m going to accompany her. After that we’ll stay a while with her parents in northern California. We aren’t sure what we’ll do after that.

  I don’t tell Allison what I saw. She doesn’t ask. I do tell my mother, though. She already knows about me falling through time. I tell her what I saw at the river, everything but the mutilations. I tell her where Allison and I are going.

  She says, “I’m glad you’re leaving.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll take care of your animals and your place until you decide where you’re going to live. And then I’ll move into the area.”

  “You won’t stay here?”

  “In a town where you’ll be murdered? Of course not. I don’t want to think about you dead every time I think about the river. And if I did stay, I’d never see you: do you think I’d want you to visit if I knew you’d be murdered here?”

  I go back to my mom’s the next day. We sit at her kitchen table. The house is on a hill southwest of Spokane. You can see the city out the windows. You can see the valley where the Spokane River runs. She is drinking tea. I am drinking water.

  “Is it possible,” she asks, “that what you saw was wrong?”

  A pause. “No, I saw it was us.”

  “I’m not suggesting you were mistaken. I mean, just because you saw it, does that mean it’s bound to happen?”

  I think a moment. “It hasn’t been wrong yet.”

  “I’m still not being clear. I don’t even mean wrong. I guess I mean inevitable. Maybe you’re being shown one possible future. Maybe it’s not the only one. Maybe by acting you can change what only seems inevitable.”

  “That’s why I need to leave.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  I am not simply telling the truth when I say that the inevitable end that I most want to change is not my own torture and murder, nor even Allison’s, but rather the torture and murder of the planet. Compared to that, our own is very small.

  We bid temporary farewell to my mother, our friends, and our animals, and we say good-bye to the forest, hugging and caressing trees we have grown to know and love over the past years. We’re glad that at least we were able to get them a temporary stay of execution before we ran away. We say good-bye also to the apple trees, and to Latah Creek. We do not return to the Spokane River.

  During all of this I do not fall through time.

  On the last afternoon in Spokane, I see a small snake curled on the kitchen floor. I pick her up, carry her outside, put her on bare ground in the partial shade of a clump of wild grasses. I watch her. She stays coiled, and flicks her tail several times. I leave for a few mo- ments, and when I return she is gone.

  We all have our own large and small delusions by which we live, delusions we wear like undershirts to keep ourselves from feeling the discomfort—the agony—of the cloaks of dread and terror that accompany and characterize this culture. One of my own delusions is that because I live next to a forest that there are forests everywhere, and even that the forest I live next to is not itself horribly wounded: remember, a forest is more than just trees (and young trees at that). But whenever I leave my home I’m reminded that even small areas of wild have become an exception. What was once everywhere now persists in patches. This reminder slaps me even harder each time I fly.

  We fly to New York City.

  In the West we fly over clearcuts, patchwork quilts of relatively bare ground alternating with sanctuaries of green that are smaller each time I see them. I’ve walked those clearcuts, and they look as bad from the ground as from the air. Worse, even. Sometimes moonscapes, sometimes patches of invasive weeds, sometimes intensive replantings of monocropped seedlings. Never a forest. There is no rest.

  In the Great Plains it’s field after field after field, circular patches of irrigated green in a landscape that should be tall- and short-grass prairie, that should be brown with bison. I’ve walked those fields, too, those killing fields where giant sprinklers suck the life out of rivers, streams, aquifers, where any nonhuman who threatens the production of saleable goods—anyone who threatens the production of money—is “treated” with herbicides, insecticides, rodenticides, is killed. Humans who threaten production are arrested, labeled as terrorists.

  When we cross the Missouri the fields start to give way to towns and cities, until no matter where we are we can see the artifacts of this machine culture, shiny towers and ribbons of black asphalt, great masses of land devoid of any living being not surrounded by concrete, by stasis.

  We’re in New York City. I have seen the future, and the future is hell. It is a hell of concrete, steel, glass, asphalt, and people. It is an echo-chamber hell where the distorted voices of distorted human beings—and most especially the voices of the machines to which these humans have enslaved themselves—echo and re-echo and re-echo until they literally overwhelm with their deafening and deadening sameness, until there is no escape from this sameness, this constant repetition of the one overriding and underlying message of the supremacy of the manufactured, of the produced, of the artificial, of the machine-made over the living and the wild. It is the hell of a hall of mirrors reflecting back who and most especially what we have become.

  It becomes easy to see why so many people are insane. Sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations, and in the city every sensation we receive—save that coming from pigeons, rats, roaches, and trees encased in concrete—is created or mediated by humans. It’s no wonder, given the hellish church in which they worship, the hellish house in which they live, that so many people in cities lose the ability to perceive reality, lose the ability to perceive that anyone exists other than themselves and those just like them, and that they wear this narcissism like a suit of armor, never acknowledging that this armor weighs them down, that it constricts and ultimately kills them at the same time that it protects them from ever perceiving physical reality.

  So many humans in cities are infected by the insane spirit of an insane God, and come to see themselves in the life-negating image of this life-negating God, and come to believe that there is no god but God, that there is no god but Man.

  So many humans in cities are wétikos. It would be hard or almost impossible to survive in a city without becoming infected yourself, surrounded as you are by wétikos and their creations, their totems, their fetishes—from tall buildings to banks to razor-wire- topped fences to flattened sidewalks to dogs and humans whose paws have never touched the ground—with no wild available to heal you, replenish you, to help you remember what it is to be alive and to be human, to be wild, to remind you that this city is not all there is, that these wétikos are not all there are, that a real, physical world still lives beyond the reach of those who would control or destroy everything.

  I’m walking down the street. I have no skin left. It’s been worn off by sharp corners of buildings and too many people. This is how I feel every time in a city. The pain is physical.

  I see a billboard of a man reclining in a chair, holding a beer bottle, base at his groin. The bottle stands like an erect penis. A seminude woman sprawls between his legs. I’m surprised they don’t show her sucking on his bottle. Another billboard shows a woman, an erect whiskey bottle, and an invitation to slip into something smooth.

  I hear a horn blare, and another, and another. A siren. I’m at the edge of a park. I hear the rhythmic thumping of a woodpecker and I marvel at the ability of any creature to survive this environment.

  “That’s not a woodpecker,” Allison says. “That’s a helicopter.”


  She’s right. I soon hear it more clearly, and finally I see it.

  We walk. I remember an analysis I read of cities saying that if you pack any other mammal this tight the gutters would constantly run with blood. Rats packed this close begin to cannibalize each other. And the humans I see are eating each other, just not always physically.

  Allison asks, “Have you noticed how skinny so many of the women are?”

  I nod.

  She continues, “And how disproportionately large their breasts are?”

  It looks freakish. I respond, “I wonder how much of this is real.”

  “This?” She points at the buildings, the cars, the people. “Almost none of it.”

  We’re in a hotel. Allison sits on the bed. I sit in the room’s lone chair. “I’ve been wondering,” I say to Allison, “if maybe I haven’t been falling through time at all.”

  She looks at me out of the corners of her eyes.

  “Maybe I’m not falling or going anywhere.”

  She waits.

  “Maybe I’m staying right where I am, and the land is showing her memories to me. Maybe the land is moving inside of me.”

  She thinks about it.

  I say, “I’ve read lots of accounts of plants hitchhiking into people. That’s a standard part of some indigenous peoples’ experience. A plant might jump inside of you and ride along with you for a while, then go back to its own body.”