“Honey, I’m home!” a basso voice calls from downstairs, as Bob arrives to take the evening shift. Then two sets of doors rattle closed, and soon afterward size thirteen feet start climbing the creaking stairs. I know it’s Bob from the schedule posted in the counselor room, but he doesn’t know who is on afternoon shift, and I’m tempted to yell down something clever. After all, he is a sculptor who works exclusively with cement—someone who likes to watch things harden in his hands—and the temptation to tease him about it is strong. But before my brain can sharpen itself, he appears, a tall, thin man in his forties, with shoulder-length brown hair and the largest hands I’ve ever seen on a man, wearing jeans and a red-and-white T-shirt that shows a drawing of a snarling Schnauzer, under which are the words BAD DOGGIE, NO BONE.
“Hi, how’s it goin’?” he says.
“Busy day.” I turn the logbook so that he can read the seven new entries. “Louise called. I don’t think she’ll phone back tonight, but I’m not sure. And there’s a teenage girl named Jesse who may call. Her classmate phoned, worried because Jesse has been cutting herself.” Both of us winced at the word “teenage.” We know the number of teen suicides has skyrocketed, know it only too intimately, since there were four suicides in one local high school last year. After each tragedy, SP sent in their postvention team to talk with the shell-shocked classmates, the grieving families and friends, the mystified school officials, the worried teachers and guidance counselors. Since then, more teenagers have phoned us for help, but the suicide rate continues to be alarmingly high. For every 660 depressed teens, one commits suicide. Researchers have found that over half of all teens think about killing themselves. Indeed, suicide is the third cause of teen death in the US. Only accident and homicide claim more lives. Depression plagues both village and city teens, and the very young have become especially vulnerable. Gang members, interviewed after a brutal killing, often explain their actions by pointing out that they don’t expect to be alive past their teens. With such a death of hope, it’s not surprising how many inner-city kids speak in a disconnected present tense—“we be going”—since they have no usable past or recognizable future.
Our local teens also find the world a frightening place. What with raging hormones, school pressures, family problems, world events, and such normal identity issues as who they are and what they should do with their lives, it’s a miserably confusing and stressful time of life. Mind you, depression isn’t the only risk factor for teens. Withdrawn, lonely perfectionists sometimes kill themselves out of shame or guilt. Anorexia, bulimia, and self-mutilation are reaching epidemic proportions, and that’s ironic, since these are often the afflictions of the educated, accomplished, “good” families, in which parents relentlessly demand excellence from themselves and their children. However, since body piercing has become fashionable among teens in the US, some forms of self-mutilation aren’t worrisome. After all, people all over the world have been stretching, piercing, or carving their body parts into unusual shapes and emblazoning them with fashionable emblems throughout the ages. It’s when the person loses control and pain becomes its own end, a habitual lure, that we worry.
“Cutters are tough,” Bob says. “Had one the other day. Lordy, that’s a tough call.” I like the way Bob mixes “lordy,” “land’s sake,” and “holy smokes,” with hip nineties talk. I doubt callers have any idea of his age, he slides so smoothly into their lingo. “He was this upright dude, a banker, who would sneak out to the bathroom at work to burn himself with his cigarette. Called here instead.”
“At least he phoned first. That’s a good step.” I tell him about the woman caller I spoke with recently who had burned herself minutes before the call. She had a history of cutting, but had only recently started burning herself, and she was afraid her problem was escalating, that she was crossing a new and dangerous threshold, afraid of what she had become and of what her two young children would think. In a weak voice almost too quiet to hear, she explained how emotionally exhausted she felt, how upset and frightened. We talked about what she felt when she burned herself, how overpowering a compulsion it was, what might have precipitated it, if anything helps when she senses the urge coming on. Sometimes she would spend days thinking about hurting herself, brood on it for hours, and go through curious rituals of preparation—stroking the area of the arm she meant to cut or burn, arranging the knives or razor blades or cigarettes in a tidy way. She was seeing a therapist, but progress was slow. Self-mutilation is a stubborn addiction. It has something in common with eating disorders: people who suffer from one frequently suffer from the other. My caller confided that she was sexually abused as a child, and I responded with how heavy a burden that must be to live with, but I didn’t pursue motives or history. Cutters tend to be women who were sexually abused as children, tend to be people who can’t complain about the torment in their family, can’t fight back at their abuser. One theory about cutters holds that, as children, they received nurturing only after they were badly injured, and thus as adults they injure themselves because subconsciously they associate harm with kindness, protection, love.
Or this strange affliction may be due to a physiological glitch. Cutters almost always report that they feel relief afterward, possibly because endorphins flow in response to the pain. They say that it makes them feel alive, in touch with reality, and that they otherwise feel dead inside and disconnected from life. Is there something off-balance in their chemistry? Thrill seekers have been found to have unusually low levels of serotonin and other neurotransmitters—to feel “normal” such people apparently risk danger just to wake up their system to a state we would regard as ordinary. I became especially aware of this years ago, when I was learning to fly and was hanging out at airports and visiting air shows. When they aren’t flying, even the most daring pilots tend to be surprisingly calm and quiet people—golf is their favorite pastime; they probably fly planes to boost their low metabolism. So could it be that cutters don’t have enough neurological feedback to have a physical sense of themselves in the world? Or is it, after all, a psychological problem? Cutters seem more driven to hurt themselves as a response to rejection, anger, and helplessness, which to some analysts suggests that they may be consumed by an emotion like rage or resentment, and are enacting the desire to symbolically punish their abuser by punishing themselves. Whatever their motives, their actions are horrifying and leave me and other counselors feeling both helpless and sad. We know they rarely commit suicide, though sometimes they’re so disgusted by their addiction, which seems unstoppable, that they do end their lives to end their misery. Ironically, when that happens, they choose an overdose or some other swift method unrelated to their condition.
My cutter had caught me off guard and I didn’t know how to help her, except to persuade her to flush her matches down the toilet, which she did while I waited. The next immediate problem was what to do to keep her hands busy. Remembering advice my mother once gave me—“There’s no problem that can’t be lightened by doing two sets of windows and two sets of floors”—I gently asked the caller how she would feel about accomplishing something around the house. She said she’d put off cleaning her bathroom and her kitchen was a mess, and yes, she might feel better about herself if she mopped and scrubbed them. After that she might take her sleeping three-year-old daughter out for a walk. By then it would be time to pick up her son from school and make dinner for the family. That was her plan of action when we hung up. I had asked her, begged her really, to call us before she hurt herself next time, but she confessed with remarkable candor that she couldn’t, that at such times she entered a remote place mentally, far from help or self-control. That’s probably why she responded so well to taking control of her life, if only for an afternoon, in even such small ways. It’s possible she may need us again tonight, but it’s more likely that the young cutter, Jesse, will call, which is what I tell Bob.
Alerting the next counselor to people who might call back makes it possible to prepare a little, perhaps devise a strategy for dealing with them. Sometimes it feels as if we are all part of a slow-motion relay race, and the baton we pass to the next person is made not of matter but of energy. I envy those who can take off concern’s thick lenses and leave the callers behind when they go home. Some days I can, with a heartlessness that surprises me; today, I feel as if I’m carrying ingots on my shoulders.
On my first shift three years ago, when I heard the crisis line ring for real I reached out a finger ET-style to the phone, and my hand trembled so much I was afraid I’d hit the wrong button. Suddenly, it was not a role play A live, hurting, unpredictable human—who didn’t know the crisis model—blurted out her suffering, offering it up for my understanding and acceptance. Breathlessly, she bemoaned her predicament, and seemed to be sliding into a well of despair. Frantically, I scanned my memory for what to say, how to be. But there was no clear category into which the call fit. At long last, something astounding occurred to me—the caller was still on the line. She hadn’t hung up, she was still talking, even though all I had been doing was making listening noises, hearing her out. What a relief. I took a risk, waded out into the water, and asked her to focus on what problem was toughest that night, what had prompted her to call, and from then on the call went reasonably well, although meandering at times, silent at times. I wouldn’t say the call ended exactly, but rather that the caller felt heard, sorted out her mood a little, and could get on with her day. That was all. It was a revelation. The next caller was entirely different, and I felt the same burst of nervous insecurity, then after a while discovered once again that the caller didn’t hang up. What a thrilling and scary five hours.
—
As I head home, I roll my tense, tired shoulders, and suddenly remember being thirteen, at a lakeside camp in the Poconos, where we took Red Cross courses in life saving, water safety aid, and water survival. Those courses made sense for kids who went swimming and canoeing, and they built confidence, but man, were they tough! I am a strong swimmer today because of them, and they instilled in me a lifelong ease in the water that has led to a lot of fun, kept me safe, made possible expeditions where scuba diving or snorkeling were necessary, and on one occasion allowed me to save a dear friend’s life. I owe much to those camp swims. To pass the survival course, we had to tread water—fully clothed—for an hour; take our clothes off in deep water, seal and inflate an article of clothing and use it as a buoy; and be able to swim across the lake while wearing a knapsack loaded down with heavy rocks, among other equally daunting tasks. The lake always looked dark and impenetrable, with an invisible bottom and a green-brown surface that reflected the sky. Richly alive with minute plants and animals, gently churning up silt as hidden springs fed fresh cold water into it, the lake seemed mysterious and menacing, a realm of potential monsters, clutching claws, mirror worlds. Darkness bespoke danger, and a dark lake doubled the risk. Many of my fellow campers had drowning dreams that summer. I didn’t understand then how clean, safe, and natural the lake really was, or how much fun it might be to study the animals whose lives it enriched. I craved its challenges, though, and by summer’s end I had mastered most of them, and received a small card stamped with a Red Cross logo, which I treasured for years.
Swimming across the lake with what felt like a boulder on my back had been the toughest test—I can still remember sinking, fearing the squooshy lake bottom thirty feet below, where snapping turtles were rumored to swarm, kicking frantically toward the surface, thrashing and gasping for air, breaststroking furiously, feeling as if someone were trying to pull me over backward, sinking, kicking, swimming, then crawling out on the other shore, shaky and cold, barely able to stand until I let the knapsack fall. There, for a moment, I felt lighter than air. It was a hot August day The sky was a dazzling blue. My face was caked with mud. A handsome counselor I had a crush on was cheering me from a nearby rowboat. Campers were watching from the other shore. A second counselor picked up the knapsack and spilled the rocks on the beach. It had seemed the heaviest burden in the world, huge and boulderlike, but as it turned out it was only a collection of rocks—many small things, not one large thing. Big stones, little stones, they all weigh the same if you’re thrashing across the lake. Today at the Crisis Center there was a hodgepodge of troubles, all urgent, but none requiring the police or ambulance, yet massed together they were exhausting. No wonder my shoulders feel as if I’ve been lifting boulders.
So, as evening falls, I sink into the Jacuzzi in my bathroom. Both modern and pagan, it reminds me of ancient days, when hot baths were prescribed for depression, compulsiveness, mood swings, and other mental woes. Manic-depressives bathed in (and drank from) certain lithium-rich pools. Others chewed on willow bark for migraines. Steeping the flesh in hot water as if it were a bundle of tea leaves was a favorite cure for mental ills and heartbreaks alike. In the twentieth century, psychotherapy may have become the talking cure, but for centuries bathing was the water cure, and Europeans made regular pilgrimages to Bath, Baden-Baden, and a host of other spa towns to submerge in miracle waters bubbling up from the earth. The Romans before them doted on baths, and devised ingenious heating and plumbing systems, so that the bathhouse floors could be toasty, the steam rooms cleansing, and the mosaic-clad promenades a delight to bare feet. Bathhouses once offered Roman citizens an oasis—they were the perfect place for manicures, coiffures, massages, jugglers, conmen, flirtations, and gossip hounds—and an ideal spot to meditate on one’s life and troubles.
We baptize with water, we purify with water, we take steam baths in small closeted clouds, we wash away the dirt and toil of the day with hot water, we dilute our food and drink with water, we stare for hypnotic hours at any abundance of water, be it aquarium or ocean, and we relax in a pool of water, especially if it has been heated to our own body temperature. We ourselves are contained estuaries, swamps, canals, and reefs. Women have monthly tides and wombs where eggs lie like roe. Small wonder the water world relaxes us. When we worship water we worship our own plumbing.
The other animals I share the yard with don’t feel this way about water. Squirrels can swim, and many is the time I’ve seen one frantically treading water in the pool, unable to climb out until I’ve offered it a pole or broom to cling to. When they perch on the side of a green plastic tub to sip the fresh water I provide for them, they occasionally fall in and scramble back out again. Squirrels sometimes wash their faces with falling snowflakes. The deer drink from the stream in the woods, but they worry about deep water. The raccoons wash in shallow pools by moving their paws rapidly sideways, then they rub their faces with wet hands. I’ve seen a pheasant stand under a dripping tree limb to shower its feathers during a gentle rain. But by and large the animals don’t wallow the way humans do.
There’s the cheap and dirty wallow of a farm pond or a stream, there’s the private wallow of a bath tub, and there’s the high class and pricey wallow of a spa. The one that intrigues me most is at Bath in England. Although I’ve never submerged in its waters, I’ve sat beside them, plunged into them in my imagination, and often thought of the Saxon tribes who first settled the area around Bath and found the natural hot spring so astonishing that they swore a goddess produced it. Where did the water come from? It must have been an ancient rain that fell about 10,000 years ago and penetrated deep into the earth, rising when the water had been warmed by the heat of the earth’s core. How miraculous hot water must have seemed to the ancients, even after the discovery of fire. It took so much fuel and labor to stoke a fire, haul water, and wait for it to boil. Hot water was rare, a luxury, and there it was day and night in flowing streams. Only a goddess could be responsible for such sensuous magic. The conquering Romans, lured by this liquid treasure, were frankly carnal about its value. But superstitious, too. The spring at Bath is full of curses—human curses. They were written on sheets of pewter and then thrown into the spring. We know many of the Roman bathers, their families, social life, and irritations only by the curses they left behind.
There are no curses or Roman mosaics in my bathroom, but it is a pleasuredrome dedicated to the goddess of hot water. Heavily tiled in mauve, purple, lavender, and teal, it also includes two wallpaper designs that complement each other—a pattern taken from a Persian mosque, in teal, pale green, and lavender, and a peacock-feather pattern in lavender and teal. A broad border separates the two, combining their elements—large peacocks in full-tailed display alternating with fruitful trees of life. Two white sconces glow softly like ringed planets. I love this Garden of Allah retreat with its colorful flowerpot holding shampoos and a small birdbath (complete with pottery birds) filled with aromatherapy vials. Tiled benches flank the tub, one a window seat that looks out onto a flowerbed filled in summer with phlox, in spring with bushy yellow evening primrose, and in deep summer with tall snapdragons, blue balloon flowers, spidery pink gas flowers, tussocks of yellow coreopsis, and poker-tall purple liatris, miscellaneous lobelia, nasturtiums, and dahlias. I can also see the red flag on the mailbox through the window; the mailman’s visit perpetually inspires hope and surprise in a two-writer household. Or I can watch the neighbor children bike in the cul-de-sac after school.
Some of SP’s callers would profit from a good long soak in a hot fragrant rub, and from time to time I recommend that after we hang up they might consider brewing a cup of herb tea and steeping themselves in a tub of lavender or pine, two good spirit lifters. If they have apple-spice tea at home, I suggest this, since some researchers have found it successful in staving off panic attacks. I don’t mention that, for ages, spas have been the main escape of melancholy women, who withdrew from family and society for a spell to take stock of their lives and let others serve and nourish them for a change. I don’t tell them of the long tradition of women and baths, from the sacred cleansing baths of the ancient Hebrews (menstruating women were considered dirty) to the fashionable baths of eighteenth-century French women, who sometimes entertained while in the bath. Ben Franklin reports that his lady friend Madame Brillon received guests while bathing, with a board placed over her for modesty, although I’m not sure how she concealed her breasts. Eighteenth-century etiquette required many elegancies and protocols, and lovers too were bound by ornate rules of courtesy. A woman could receive socially while in bed or bath, because she and her visitors alike were expected to hide their feelings. Madame Brillon liked to set up a chess game on her bath board so that she and Ben could play flirtatious chess while other guests drifted in and out of the room.
I don’t receive guests or play chess while in the tub, but I do have a board to lay across it, since I often work there. Indeed, I do most of my serious reading while partially submerged. I usually take food and drink in with me, and also a portable phone, a pocket calendar, and a stack of good books. Two large skylights flood the room with sun and sky. Visitors often try to turn off the light, only to discover there’s no light on—except the sun. Or they wonder at the dark luminosity on winter days when the skylights are covered in deep snow. But it’s the twelve-inch Dynamax telescope on the tiled bench beside the tub that usually makes them twist their brows in surprise for a few moments, and then grin hugely. What better place to watch the moon and stars? The skylights turn the room into a peaceful observatory where, as Walt Whitman says:
I open the scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher
edge but the rim of the farther systems
Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward and outward and forever outward.
Tonight, soaking in clouds of pungent jasmine-scented bubbles, I tune in the moon as it floats overhead, and sight on the changing constellations and wandering planets. The moon is full. The man in the moon has his mouth rounded—I think he may be caroling. Leo floats by with a brilliant white roar. And then a parade of glittery stars, galaxies, and nebulae fills the telescope with images of distant worlds. In the dark, it’s hard to tell where that field of stars begins and ends. Watching the stars veer through tight local orders and whirlwind tumults, I cup a handful of foam, smoothing it over one shoulder, and picture suns roiling down my back, galaxies clinging to my chest and arms, molten starblood trickling from an airborne knee. Planets rise up my neck. Seething in the small of my back, a stellar nursery whorls out neutron stars, black holes, vagabond comets. Suns cascade from each wrist, where my tiny pulse dislodges a thousand worlds. I can almost hear the crackling swan song of Supernovae, the mournful whistle of pulsars, the disciplined panic of the newly born. Then, drenched in immortal quiet and a sandstorm of light, I lie back, so bristling with wonder that for long granite seconds I feel calm and contented, and would not have the universe be anything it is not.
A mug of decaffeinated hazelnut-spiked coffee adds a nutty-sweet scent to the atmosphere already fragrant from perfumed soap and a bowl of fresh raspberries. I have a wonderful little book to read—How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, by Frances E. Willard, a nineteenth-century feminist for whom cycling became a journey of self-discovery and a metaphor for a life well lived. A colorful Finger Lakes region map, whose creases are almost worn through, reveals a section of Seneca county between Cayuga and Seneca lakes, the planned destination for a weekend bike trip. I also have the day’s mail, and, turning on a small reading light, I begin by opening a large manila envelope from a friend at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. What I find inside shocks me wide awake: a sheaf of xeroxed articles from the Washington newspapers regarding a bizarre, horrifying event. The clippings start on Sunday, March 5 and run through Monday, March 20, with each article disposing of more rumors and adding new increasingly bizarre facts.
On Saturday, March 4, at 5:00 A.M., a woman went over a three-and-a-half foot cement barrier at the National Zoo, crossed a four-foot-wide dirt buffer, lowered herself down a nine-foot wall into a moat, swam twenty-six feet through the water, and pulled herself out onto the large stone terraces of the lion enclosure. Two African lions watched her—a 300-pound female named Asha, and Tana, a 450-pound male. Then one or both of them attacked, ripping at her jugular, tearing back her scalp, and eating her arms clear up to the shoulders. A lion keeper found her at feeding time two hours later and called the police, who spent weeks trying to figure out what had happened. She had no remaining fingerprints they could check, and there were few leads. Who was this woman? Did she die in an accident, suicide, or slaying? Had she been killed first and then dumped in the lion enclosure? When they discovered in her jacket pocket a bus pass issued in Little Rock, Arkansas, rumors flew in that most political town that her death was somehow related to the Whitewater investigation, that she was a squealer who had been “thrown to the lions.” A sick thought even for Washingtonians. Each day, a new ghoulish fact appeared in print. She hadn’t died immediately, but lived for several minutes while being mauled. The lions began by eating her hands, bones and all. Her scalp “had been peeled from the front and was hanging behind her neck.” The woman was thirty-six, with long black hair, and wore a light jacket, T-shirt, gray cotton pants, and brown walking shoes. Police found a money order in her shoe and a business letter in her pocket. A barrette and a portable tape recorder lay near her body. The bus pass was an “honored citizens pass,” a lifetime pass given to the elderly, infirm, or mentally ill. She was a twice-married, divorced mother of two, and one source said she had traveled to Washington to seek President Clinton’s intervention in a child custody battle because, as she told a city clerk, “she couldn’t get justice anywhere else.” The clerk reported that she had tried to file a lawsuit to regain custody of her daughter, but was confused about whom she wished to sue—possibly the president—and so she went away with paperwork to fill out. She said her child had been taken from her by Arkansas authories because of her mental illness, but she seemed “focused,” “attractive and well-spoken,” and “calm.”
At 3:00 a.m. on March 1, she checked into a cheap hotel; three days later she fed herself to the lions. A transient who lived in a veterans shelter, she had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, but none of her therapists or caseworkers would go into much detail about her history. Social workers in Little Rock did report that she was delusional and believed she was Jesus Christ’s sister, talking to and receiving messages directly from God. She had been in and out of mental hospitals. The Sony Walkman found near her body contained a tape of Amy Grant singing spirituals. In her hotel room, there were some handwritten notes “of a religious nature.” The coroner ruled her death a suicide. Her name was Margaret Davis King. Had she identified in some strange way with the Lion King movie? In ancient Rome, Christians were thrown to the lions for practicing their faith; could she have felt punished for hers? Was she inspired by the Old Testament story of Daniel, the Judean exile, who was condemned to a lion’s pit by a Babylonian king, but saved because of his belief in God? Did she imagine herself a latter-day Daniel walking into the lion’s den, convinced that she would emerge unscathed? Or did she commit suicide in a most gruesome and public way?
And what of the traumatized zoo people who found her? Counseling was available to the staff, a zoo official reported, “but no one has used it.”
Picking up the phone, I dial the head of public relations at the zoo, thank him for the clips, and ask how he and the staff are doing.
“Oh, there’s no problem now,” he says briskly. “Except for the occasional grisly dreams, everybody seems to be coping.”
The occasional grisly dreams? “Yes” I say ironically, “that sounds like they’re coping. Are you sure they don’t need to talk to a counselor about what they’re feeling?”
“They probably do,” he says thoughtfully, “but I can’t force them to go. If they say they’re handling it okay, well …”
“How about you? You’re the one who had to describe the scene over and over to the press, and make sense of the mutilation—how are you feeling?” I can picture him sitting at his desk as we talk: a tall, attractive man in his late forties with salt-and-pepper hair and a neatly trimmed beard. It seems impossible that he has three children, one of whom is already thirty. I have no idea how he manages a large family, his research, and all the welter of zoo publicity and politics. And now this—an atrocity on his doorstep—and millions of anxious parents to reassure that the zoo is safe.
“Okay,” he says, “no problem really … well, now and then I get these flashes of that instant when she must have realized that she wasn’t going to be saved, that she was going to be mauled and eaten … that things weren’t going to go according to plan, but horribly, violently wrong.… That single moment when the true terror of her situation dawned on her is what gets to me,” he says in the tone of voice that is usually accompanied by a cold shiver of the shoulders. “But only now and then. Otherwise, I’m okay.”
I rub a wet hand over my temple, slowly shake my head. I can’t tell him that I’m a counselor at SP, but I can tell him about the organization here and its sister chapter in Washington, and ask if he thinks it might help him to talk with someone. He says possibly, and files the information.
There is a code of stoicism among people who work with animals, since a certain amount of discomfort and danger is built into the job. Zoo keepers tend dangerous animals and each year a certain number of them do get mauled by tigers, drowned by killer whales, or trampled by elephants. Because zoo animals are tame, visitors assume they are timid. Not so, as handlers know only too well. On zoo expeditions to repatriate, capture, or monitor animals in the wild, life-and-death dramas sometimes unfold, but people gunnysack their feelings so that work can continue as normal, and then they unpack their feelings later, when they’re safely back home, with the aid of drinks, nervous humor, and a touch of bravado.
When I hang up, I look once more at the clippings, the last of which includes a photo of the lions and notes that they seemed “high-strung and skittish” after the attack, and that the keeper had trouble coaxing them back into their cages. Only the female was hungry enough to eat the prepared lion food, so presumably it was the male that attacked Margaret Davis King. These were lions born and raised in the zoo, fed a kind of dogfood mixture at each meal. That was the only food they knew, they had never stalked and downed wild animals, but when a prey animal in the form of a human entered their enclosure, pure instinct took over. If, afterward, they were agitated and ill at ease, perhaps it was because they had done something new, something exciting and savory but wrong. Ever since they were cubs, they had been kept from mauling their human keepers, indeed had been avoided by humans, driven back or punished when they threatened humans, fed and doctored and nurtured by humans, and now they had eaten a human. As any dog or cat owner knows, it doesn’t take much brainpower for an animal to understand, if only fleetingly, that it has done something wrong. Despite a public outcry, the zoo refused to kill the lions. After all, they were doing what was natural, what lions do. Should we punish them for their nature? And what of our own thinly controlled penchant for violence? We, too, have evolved into impulsive, territorial, ravenous creatures. I once heard a grim joke that was a parable for the seemingly endless conflict in the Middle East: A turtle and a scorpion sat at the edge of river, and the scorpion begged the turtle to ferry him across. “You’ll sting me if I do,” the turtle protested. “No I won’t, I promise,” the scorpion said. “After all, if I sting you, I’ll drown too.” “That’s true,” the turtle said thoughtfully, and so he agreed. The scorpion climbed onto the turtle’s back and they set out across the river. In the middle, the scorpion suddenly stung the turtle. “Why did you do that?” the turtle cried in his death throes. Now we’ll both drown!” “I know, but I can’t help myself,” the scorpion replied, “it’s my nature.”
Among the squirrels in my yard, tempers flare easily, violence often erupts. Male or female, they turn savage at the drop of a nut. I don’t idealize them or overlook their calamities, and I don’t turn a blind eye to their wicked ways. I find it remarkable that, given their violent nature they can also be peaceful, nurturing, ingenious, prudent, quirky, delicate, playful, and moody. The spectrum of their behavior intrigues me. I feel much the same about humans. No lion behavior is more bloodcurdling than soldiers can be, or gang members, or terrorists, or serial killers, or toxic parents. Humans know how to maim and kill outright, and we have learned how to wound and slowly kill the spirit. We’re so addicted to violence that when we can’t aim it at others we unleash it on ourselves—gouge our skin, grow depressed, commit suicide. Violence is a strong pigment on our emotional palette. No cat persecutes its prey more brutally than humans sometimes do. Cats torture for practice, to hone their hunting skills, or to teach those skills to their young. Why do we do it? A jealous husband can rage to violence of mythic proportions in which he slashes a rival’s jugular and tears him limb from limb. Zealots of all stripes murder by the score. Even office politics can lead to imaginary murder. We try to control our violent impulses with laws, fear of retaliation, threat of punishment, appeals to civility (really a feared loss of face or status). We saturate our minds with symbolic violence in sports arenas. We sell murderous people and fiendish acts as entertainment on television’s so-called news shows. We kill vicariously in movies, so hungry are we to sink our teeth into an enemy; indeed, we’ve developed a cuisine of violence, spicing up the staple elements of death and butchery in ever more horrible and ingenious ways.
Although I regret our bloodthirsty nature, I’m nevertheless a great fan of humankind. What seems astonishing to me is that, despite our ferocious heritage, we so often act so well—as virtuosos of kindness, tenderness, peacefulness, generosity, cooperation, and spirituality. We devote most of our lives to exploring the many avenues of love, not always happily or with a clear road map, I’ll grant you, but what a majestic tour de force. It’s remarkable how we restrain and triumph over the dark side of our genes. We are resplendent beasts. Not an easy battle, the one we wage with our brutal appetites. We carry our instincts on our backs in invisible knapsacks filled with ancient needs and cravings, we struggle under the weight, often start to sink and thrash our way back to the surface, and yet somehow we keep our heads above water, and even celebrate the world’s beauty, even sing songs of praise and forgiveness, even help our kin and absolute strangers cross, too, as we swim frantically toward the far shore. We act nobly, even when to do so may fatigue or endanger us. It doesn’t make sense that we should, but it is our nature.