a journey back to remembering

by Derrick Jensen

(Editor’s caution: This essay may be triggering for those with a history of sexual abuse.)

THERE IS A LANGUAGE older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.

In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harm’s way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction.

As is true for most children, when I was young I heard the world speak. Stars sang. Stones had preferences. Trees had bad days. Toads held lively discussions, crowed over a good day’s catch. Like static on a radio, schooling and other forms of socialization began to interfere with my perception of the animate world, and for a number of years I almost believed that only humans spoke. The gap between what I experienced and what I almost believed confused me deeply. It wasn’t until later that I began to understand the personal, political, social, ecological and economic implications of living in a silenced world.

This silencing is central to the workings of our culture. The staunch refusal to hear the voices of those we exploit is crucial to our domination of them. Religion, science, philosophy, politics, education, psychology, medicine, literature, linguistics, and art have all been pressed into service as tools to rationalize the silencing and degradation of women, children, other races, other cultures, the natural word and its members, our emotions, our consciences, our experiences, and our cultural and personal histories.

My own introduction to this silencing—and this is similarly true for a great percentage of children as well within many families—came at the hands (and genitals) of my father, who beat my mother, my brothers, and my sisters, and who raped my mother, my sister, and me.

I can only speculate that because I was the youngest, my father somehow thought it best that instead of beating me, he would force me to watch, and listen. I remember scenes—vaguely, as from a dream or a movie—of arms flailing, of my father chasing my brother Rob around and around the house. I remember my mother pulling my father into their bedroom to absorb blows that may have otherwise landed on her children. We sat stone-faced in the kitchen, captive audience to stifled groans that escaped through walls that were just too thin.

The vagueness with which I recollect these formative images is the point here, because the worst thing my father did went beyond the hitting and the raping to the denial that any of it ever occurred. Not only bodies were broken, but broken also was the bedrock connection between memory and experience, between psyche and reality. His denial made sense, not only because an admission of violence would have harmed his image as a socially respected, wealthy, and deeply religious attorney, but more simply because the man who would beat his children could not speak about it honestly and continue to do it.

We became a family of amnesiacs. There’s no place in the mind to sufficiently contain these experiences, and as there was effectively no way out, it would have served no purpose for us to consciously remember the atrocities. So we learned, day after day, that we could not trust our perceptions, and that we were better off not listening to our emotions. Daily we forgot, and if a memory pushed its way to the surface we forgot again. There’d be a beating, followed by brief contrition and my father asking, “Why did you make me do it?” And then? Nothing, save the inconvenient evidence: a broken door, urine-soaked underwear, a wooden room divider my brother repeatedly tore from the wall trying to pick up speed around the corner. Once these were fixed, there was nothing left to remember. So we “forgot,” and the pattern continued.

This willingness to forget is the essence of silencing. When I realized that, I began to pay more attention to the “how” and the “why” of forgetting—and thus began a journey back to remembering.

What else do we forget? Do we think about nuclear devastation, or the wisdom of producing tons of plutonium, which is lethal even in microscopic doses for well over 250,000 years? Does global warming invade our dreams? In our most serious moments do we consider that industrial civilization has initiated the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet? How often do we consider that our culture commits genocide against every indigenous culture it encounters? As one consumes the products manufactured by our culture, is s/he concerned about the atrocities that make them possible?

We don’t stop these atrocities, because we don’t talk about them. We don’t talk about them, because we don’t think about them. We don’t think about them, because they’re too horrific to comprehend. As trauma expert Judith Herman writes, “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.”

As the ecological fabric of the natural world unravels around us, perhaps it is time that we begin to speak of the unspeakable, and to listen to that which we have deemed unhearable.

A grenade rolls across the floor. Look. It won’t go away.

Here’s what I’ve heard about your typical slaughterhouse.

The room sounds for all the world like a factory. You hear the clang of steam in pipes and the hiss of its release, the clank of steel on steel as chains pull taut, the whirr of rolling wheels on metal runners, all punctuated every thirty seconds or so by the pop of the stunner.

The rooms are always humid, and smell of grease as much as blood. The walls are often pale, the floor usually concrete. I have a picture from a slaughterhouse that will forever be etched in my mind. No matter how I try to look elsewhere, my eyes return to the newly painted chute that leads in from outside, not only because of the chute’s contents, but because the color—electric blue contrasts almost painfully with the drabness of the rest of the room.

Inside the chute, facing a blank wall stands a steer. Until the last moment he does not seem to notice when a worker places a steam-driven stunner at the ridge of his forehead. I do not know what the steer feels in those last moments, or what he thinks. The pressure of contact triggers the stunner, which shoots a retractable bolt into the brain of the steer. The steer falls, sometimes stunned, sometimes dead, sometimes screaming, and another worker climbs down to attach a chain to the creatures hind leg. Task completed, he nods, and the first worker—the one who applied the stunner—pushes a black button. There’s the whine of a hoist, and the steer dangles from a suspended rail, blood dripping red to join the coagulating river on the floor.

The steer sways as wheels roll along the rail, causing the falling blood to describe a sinusoidal curve on the way to another worker, who slits his throat. There is barely time to follow his path before the chute door opens and another animal is pushed in. There goes the stunner again, the hoist, metal, steam, the grind of meshing gears. It happens again and again, like clockwork, every half-minute.

We live in a world of make-believe. Think of it as a little game——the only problem being that the repercussions are real. Bang! Bang! You’re dead—only the other person doesn’t get up. My father, in order to rationalize his behavior, had to live in a world of make-believe. He had to make us believe that the beatings and rapes made sense, that all was as it should, and must, be. Now, it will be obvious to everyone that my father’s game of make-believe was far from fun—it was destructive. My father rewrote the script on a day-to-day basis, thereby making everything right—he created the reality that he required in order to continue his behavior.

In attempting to describe the world in make-believe terms, we have forgotten what is real and what isn’t. We pretend the world is silent, whereas in reality it is filled with conversations. We pretend we are not animals, whereas in reality the laws of ecology apply as much to us as the rest of “God’s Creation.” We pretend we are at the top of a great chain of being, although evolution is nonhierarchical.

Here’s what I think: it’s a sham. It’s a giant game of make-believe. We pretend that animals feel no pain, and that we have no ethical responsibility toward them. But how do we know?

We pretend that other humans—the women who are raped, for example (a full twenty-five percent of all women in this culture have been raped, and an additional nineteen percent have had to fend off rape attempts)—or the one hundred and fifty million children who are enslaved to make soccer balls, tennis shoes, Barbie dolls, and the like—are happy and unaffected by it all. We pretend all is well as we dissipate our lives in quiet desperation.

We pretend that death is an enemy although it is an integral part of life. We pretend we don’t have to die, that modern medicine can cure what ails us, no matter what it is. But can modern medicine cure a dying soul?

We pretend that violence is inevitable, and in some ways it is. But can it be mitigated through better science? Rather than answer that question, most often we pretend, sheepishly, that violence doesn’t exist.

Science, politics, economics, and everyday life do not exist separately from ethics. But we act like they do.

The problem is not difficult to understand: we pretend that anything we do not understand—anything that cannot be measured, quantified, and controlled—does not exist. We pretend that animals are resources to be conserved or consumed, when, in reality they have purposes entirely independent of us. It is wrong to make believe that people are nothing more than “Human Resources” to be efficiently utilized, when they (we!) too have independent existences and preferences. And it is wrong to make believe that animals are not sentient, that they do not form social communities in which members nurture, love, sustain, and grieve for each other, that they do not manifest ethical behavior.

We act like these pretenses are reasonable, but none of them are intuitive or instinctual; nor are they logically, empirically, or ethically defensible. Taken together, a way of life based on these pretenses is destroying life on this planet.

But a real world still awaits us, one that is ready to speak to us if only we would remember how to listen.

this essay was excerpted from A Language Older than Words

photo credits: Stream © Dean Turner / iStockphoto | Pig Farm © Braendan Yong / Dreamstime.com

Derrick Jensen is the author of The Culture of Make Believe, A Language Older than Words, Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros, a USA Today Critics Choice for one of the best nature books of 1995, As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial, and How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization. He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine, among many others.