It wasn’t until quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say “I don’t know!”
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
And now it’s time for the answer to why there were seven years between me and my nearest sibling, and to how that destroyed everything I thought I understood about fatedness, and rebuilt it in a way that lets me know that I continue to know almost nothing.
I asked my mother if I was an accident.
She said, “After your sister was born, I never stopped bleeding, no matter what the gynecologist and I tried. Finally he suggested I have another child. I got pregnant a couple of years after that, but miscarried. And then I got pregnant a final time and had you. Sadly, the bleeding didn’t stop, and in fact after you were born I nearly bled to death. I had to have an emergency hysterectomy. That ended the bleeding.”
How would we live our lives differently if we perceived life as full of richness as dreams? How would we interpret this story if it came to us in a dream, or in a story?
Remember, by the time I learned this story, my life’s goal was clear to me: to help stop this culture from killing the planet. And the symbolism of this story was immediately obvious: I was in all physical truth conceived explicitly to stop the bleeding. To stop the bleeding of the mother (and if we want to make this even more archetypal, my mother’s name is Mary).
Had the direction of my life not already been clear to me, this story would have made it so.
I have to say I don’t much like the end of the story, which is that while I may have been conceived to stop my mother’s bleeding, I failed at this task, and in fact my birth nearly killed her.
But maybe this means that what is necessary to stop this culture is not so much my work of preparing the way for radical, militant action against this culture, but rather surgical strikes themselves, this time not against the mother, but against that which is causing the mother to bleed to death. Perhaps this story means my work will fail, but that someone else, this time coming in with a knife, will succeed in stopping the bleeding.
I am home from surgery. Evidently I didn’t die under the knife.
The surgery itself was pretty interesting. They opened up the front of my ankle, then pulled my foot slightly apart from my leg. After that they reached in to scrape off the dead part of my talus (one of the main bones in the ankle), and the dead part of the bottom of my tibia (shin bone). The doctors said that most of the talus and the bottom quarter of an inch of the tibia were dead. Then they cut the donor talus and tibia to fit what remained of my talus and tibia, set it in place with two screws, and put a paste over all of it made of my own dead ground-up talus, among other things. Then they released the pressure separating my foot and leg, let them come together, and sewed up everything. The hope is that my bones will grow into the dead person’s talus and tibia (those bones were kept alive; they can stay alive for up to twenty-eight days after the person dies), and will eventually become my own.
Two weeks later, I understand more than ever why so many of even those who understand that this culture is killing the planet do not resist or even speak of resistance. My increased understanding has come to me in part because I was hopelessly naïve about the recovery process. I’ve had major surgeries before, including the removal of most of my colon when I was twenty-four. But nothing prepared me for the dependency (read, helplessness), discomfort, pain, frustration, and at times panic I’ve been going through with this surgery.
When they took out part of my guts, I was off pain pills within a week or ten days. Planning my recovery, I figured an ankle could never be as painful or difficult as guts. I’d have the surgery on Monday; get out of the hospital Wednesday; stay in a hotel near the hospital Wednesday night; fly back to Crescent City Thursday and spend that night at my mom’s; and on Friday walk (on crutches, obviously, with splints and a huge bandage running from just below my left knee to the base of my toes) three-eighths of a mile through the forest to my home. I planned to make that trek back and forth every day or two.
Two and a half weeks later I’m still at my mom’s, still swallowing Percocets like they were tic tacs, still utterly dependent on my elderly mother for food, for washing my clothes, for carrying anything heavier than what I can fit into a small canvas bag with handles. I’m still sleeping eleven and twelve hours a day.355
On the post-op flight to see the doctor I had the first panic attack of my life. I was sitting in the window seat, reading a mystery novel, when suddenly and for no reason I could understand, I could not bear to have my left ankle and especially foot confined for one more second. I began to panic. Claustrophobia began to scrabble at my guts and at my brain. I’ve never felt anything remotely like that before, not even when I explored caves in college and got stuck (obviously temporarily). I had to get out of the bandage. Even though my crutches were stowed, I got out of my seat and used my hands on people’s headrests to make my way to the bathroom. I didn’t have to go but it got me moving and also distracted me for a while. I had another panic attack the next morning in the waiting room. Fortunately they removed the splints and bandages soon after. This experience gave me even more empathy for those humans and nonhumans who are confined (imagine the terror of being a crated veal calf, a factory-farmed pig, a caged hen, a caged monkey; and imagine this was your entire life, that there was no end from this confinement save death), and for those who suffer panic attacks for any reason. A friend told me today that the majority of people with depression who commit suicide also experience anxiety, leading him to believe that sometimes it’s not the depression that pushes people over the edge, but the panic. I can believe this. The people I’ve known who’ve been seriously depressed have for the most part frankly not been able to summon the energy to kill themselves, but if this panic was chronic, intractable, and had unavoidable and fairly routine triggers, I can’t imagine wanting to keep living.
Because of all this, surgery on my other ankle will be both less and more difficult for me. It will be less difficult because I will know what to expect, and thus will be more realistic and less disappointed; and it will be more difficult because I will know what to expect, and thus will feel more dread in the lead up to the surgery (for example, what if I start having these panic attacks not a night, but a week, before the bandages come off?).
How does all of this relate to the reason why so many even of those who understand that this culture is killing the planet don’t campaign for resistance? I think many of those who care about life on this planet are hopelessly naïve when it comes to transition scenarios. Many, indeed it seems most, plan and speak and act as though there can or will be some sort of “great turning” or “great awakening” where people simply “walk away” from this culture’s destructive way of living—and then, well, we don’t really know what the fuck will happen, but it will be good and peaceful and happy and relocalized and there will be lots of good local music, good local food, good local politics, and everyone will live sustainably and happily ever after. Never mind of course this culture’s several-thousand-year history of conquest. Never mind that it has systematically and mercilessly destroyed or attempted to destroy every sustainable human and nonhuman culture it has encountered. Never mind that it seeks out new beings to destroy (bombing the moon, anyone?). Never mind that it is killing the planet, and has shown itself utterly unresponsive to all attempts at dissuasion. Never mind that the culture has shown and is showing a preference to kill the planet rather than change, or better, stop. Never mind that even on a personal level, abusers often kill their victims rather than let victims leave (or stop abusing). Never mind that on the largest scale, this culture has made the majority of humans dependent for their very lives on this culture that is functionally destroying the planet. Never mind that even if some individuals or even small communities are able to reduce their reliance on the system, there will be other individuals and groups who want what these individuals or communities have got, and these others will have guns, and will quite possibly have the full support of what is left of the full power of what is left of the state.
If you want to know what happens when patriarchal civil society collapses, picture the Democratic Republic of Congo. Picture Mad Max.
If you want to know what we should do about this future, picture preparing to fight back, and picture doing it.
But all of this leads to a second reason we don’t resist: many of even those who understand that this culture is killing the planet do not suggest resistance because they do understand—or at least have an inkling—how bad things will be (and in fact how bad things already are for most beings, including most human beings, on the planet), and they are filled with dread. Better that the world be murdered than I face immediate danger. Things are running “smoothly” for those at the top, or even those near the top. And those of us who are not near the top know what those at the top do when they don’t get their way. And those of us who are near the top will at the very least lose some of our “comforts and elegancies.” Do we want to live, for example, without electricity? Collectively, the answer is clearly negative, even though artificial electricity is not compatible with life on this planet, and even though humans have lived quite well without artificial electricity for most of our existence. Do we really want to dare to stop those in power? No, it’s far better that things not collapse. At least not now, not until I personally am dead, and don’t have to deal with it.
There’s a part of me that wishes I would not have had this surgery, even though without it I was in agony with every step I took, and even though without it I would within the year have no longer been able to walk. Better that I be able to hobble around now, and not be in this more extreme pain, than that I go through this pain now, even though it will make things better in the future. Of course I recognize that in the case of this surgery, it will be my own life that will be improved, and in the larger case it will be the lives of nearly everyone on the planet who will be improved. But are we so small that we would rather the world die than that we face this pain and terror (the pain and terror this culture is already inflicting on the rest of the world)? For many the answer is yes.
Let’s listen to my experiences in waking reality as we would a dream. First, Crohn’s is a disease of civilization. As is true for so many of the diseases we get, this disease is caused by the conditions of civilization. As I’ve written elsewhere, civilization is in all physical truth eating away at my insides. It causes me to waste away, to bleed.
One of industrial medicine’s first lines of defense against Crohn’s disease is prednisone, an extraordinarily powerful drug, useful against an impressive variety of diseases, including asthma, lupus, dermatitis, arthritis, allergies, uveitis, a number of kidney diseases, and so on. It’s also useful in the prevention of organ transplant rejection. It is used to help prevent migraines. It is “very important,” to use Wikipedia’s phrase, in the treatment of many types of cancers.356 Those who don’t mind throwing the word miraculous at industrially manufactured products sometimes call prednisone a miracle drug.
Please note that many of the diseases helped by prednisone are themselves diseases of civilization. So, as in my case, civilization makes us ill, and then offers us synthetic remedies to alleviate our suffering.
As I mentioned before, nothing is free. In this case the world pays through the toxins generated by the pharmaceutical industries (as well as the horrors of vivisection and the dismembering by Big Pharma of whatever scraps of democratic decision-making exist in this oligarchy). And users of prednisone pay, too. They pay in ways that are for the most part inconvenient, like acne, water retention, a moonface common enough to often be called prednisone face, sometimes a hump on your back. Others are dangerous, like the risk of hyperinfections. When I was on prednisone in my early twenties, before I was even diagnosed with Crohn’s (I had constant diarrhea, and such is many doctors’ respect for prednisone that they prescribed it entirely symptomatically, in this case for a generic chronic diarrhea of entirely unknown etiology), I was told to expect infections (prednisone suppresses the immune system). I got many. I will never forget the hangnail I got on my thumb that became infected, turned my thumb purple, and caused it to double in girth. Nor will I forget the university infirmary doctor saying to me the words you never want to hear from a doctor: “This may be a little uncomfortable.” I put my hand on a table. He sliced the swollen skin with a scalpel. Puss squirted through the new opening. The pain hadn’t been so bad. But then he said, “You ready?” and I said, “I thought we were done.” He said, “Almost,” and then put one thumb on each side of the wound, and began to squeeze out the rest of the puss. Now this was starting to hurt. Not only did he squeeze, but he stood on his toes and bore down his weight on my thumb. I didn’t even yelp. I didn’t respond much at all. He said, “There, that’s all done.” He gently put some antibiotic ointment on the wound, and wrapped it all in a gauzy bandage. I thanked him, stood up, took two steps toward the door, and, well, that’s when I don’t remember anything until someone uncorked smelling salts under my nose, and I shook my head, looked around, and wondered what I was doing on the floor.
Some of the side effects are mental, such as insomnia (which made my already severe sleeplessness that much worse) and “personality changes.” Another prednisone-related memory I’ll never forget is reading the words “possible psychosis” on the warning label included with every prescription. That certainly does explain some of my feelings and behavior in my twenties. I don’t think I actually ever reached any diagnostic threshold of psychosis, but I did behave far differently than normal on the massive doses some of the doctors put me on. I’m normally even-tempered, I rarely raise my voice, and I’m a gentle and reasonably nice person. But on prednisone I sometimes flew into rages, yelled at my sister and mother (something I’d not done much if at all even as a teenager, if that says anything about my non-prednisone personality), and on a few occasions more or less threw public tantrums that would have been unseemly enough had they been thrown for, insofar as possible, good cause or sufficiently serious provocation, but continue to be embarrassing even twenty-five years later (thus my use of general terms like “public tantrums” instead of providing the sort of puss-squirting details of the story before). My behavior was out of character, and to me at least, entirely inexplicable, until years later I remembered reading the tiny text on the warning sheet. The sudden understanding of my outrageous, unreasonable, and, prior to this remembering, incomprehensible behavior—the sudden resolution of this mystery—is why I will never again forget reading that text.
For a time it gave me diabetes. Fortunately, as with the personality changes, this was temporary, and the symptoms ceased as soon as I stopped taking the prednisone.
It also devastated my adrenal glands.
But for me the most serious side effect was the avascular necrosis of my ankles, which I defined earlier in the book, and which led to this most recent surgery.
My point is that civilization caused the problem, and then provided a remedy that itself caused more problems, problems which now I hope have been somewhat alleviated (for at least one ankle, so far) by another remedy made possible by industrial civilization.
I think the image we’re looking for is a hamster on a wheel.
I hope that by now readers can apply this to their own lives, and to other larger social and ecological problems.
How would we look at this if it were a dream? What messages would these events be giving, were we to try to listen?
I am not the first to remark that Western medicine is very good at some things, and not so good at others. More specifically, it is pretty good at dealing with many specific crises or traumas or pathogens or maladies or symptoms, and not particularly surprisingly, it is not so good at helping people to be healthy, nor in understanding nonobvious or nonlinear relations between different parts of ourselves, nor, especially, in understanding nonobvious or nonlinear relations between ourselves and others. If I’m massively hemorrhaging into my colon because of Crohn’s disease, or if most of my talus is dead from avascular necrosis, I’m glad to be attended by a team of surgeons, anesthesiologists, and surgical nurses. But medicine really is a crisis discipline, and as we’ve sadly seen, it often creates other crises along the way. This can be shown perhaps no better than by the fact that this culture is systematically poisoning the planet, and at the same time developing ever-newer and more sophisticated ways of attempting to fight cancers caused by this poisoning. All of this is also true for civilization itself.
Epistemologically, science (and once again more broadly this culture) is a blunt instrument, a useful tool for bludgeoning your way to some sort of superficial view of how something works (or worked, before you bludgeoned it). And a bludgeon can be a useful tool. But a big part of our problem—and the fact that this culture’s epistemology and consequent bludgeoning (although I think it’s highly likely that the desire to bludgeon comes first and the epistemology is rationalization, so it should read “bludgeoning and consequent epistemology”) is killing the world makes it everybody’s problem—is that this culture devalues, demonizes, or ignores epistemologies that do not bludgeon, thereby robbing itself of the possibility of perceiving a world full of rich, subtly shaded, and deliciously layered relationships and beings, each and every one particular, each and every one unique; thereby also robbing these rich, subtly shaded, and deliciously layered relationships and beings, and indeed the world, of life.
The gambling god is not really interested in my excuses or in my reasons. Before I left for the ankle transplant, I was writing, and I was winning. I obviously didn’t write on this book when I was in the hospital, although I did write the introduction to my book Resistance Against Empire, and didn’t write anything for the first two days after I got home. But after I got home I did start betting (and betting more than usual, because I was lying in bed not feeling well enough to write, but feeling well enough to do maybe a little more than just sleep). The gambling god gave me no leeway, and I lost massively. I’m guessing I might have had a better case to plead—“Don’t blame me! I was too weak to do what you want!”—had I not written that introduction. But I’m also guessing it wouldn’t have mattered what sort of case I pled; the gambling god is not interested in my reasons. He’s interested in me doing what needs to be done.
I’m sure you can see a metaphor here, a lesson the gambling god might be imparting. Just in case: on the larger scale, with the world at stake, our excuses and our reasons and our pleadings don’t matter. What matters is doing what needs to be done.
A few days after I got home, I started writing again. The next day I started winning.
I kept writing until it was time to go back for the two-week checkup. I flew down Monday, and flew back Tuesday night. I bet Wednesday morning, having not written since Sunday. I lost. Game after game I lost. I lost when I bet on underdogs. I lost when I bet on favorites. I lost when I bet on coin flips. I lost when I chose the teams on which to bet, and I lost when I tossed a coin. I lost when I clicked on an Internet random number generator. If I had monkey friends, I would probably have lost if I asked them to choose. I knew as I was making my bets I would lose. And I did.
Tonight I’m writing. I’ll let you know how I do tomorrow.
I won nearly all of my bets, including a five-to-one underdog (go Indiana State!), and had about an 80 percent return on investment for the day. Now I just have to keep writing.
I wrote another couple of pages yesterday, and then tonight I once again won nearly all my bets, including this time a six-to-one underdog (Go St. Peter’s!). It feels like pretty straightforward positive reinforcement.
But of course it’s not straightforward. Little in real life is. I’ve never said it’s a one-to-one correspondence where for every paragraph I write I win another bet. Instead this relationship is, as real-life relationships with wild beings are, foggy.
How do you determine whether there may be a correspondence between your actions and potential responses to your actions when those responding are volitional (and in fact may not be “responding” at all, but may be the primary actors to and with whom you may be responding), and when you may not always speak the same languages, and when there may be many variables at play?
This brings us back to dreams. I can demand a dream all I want, and in fact I can say I want a dream with pink ponies, lollipops, and chocolate sundaes, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get one.
I can call Shade, and he will usually come; he is domesticated, and for the most part comes when I call. But not always. He’s not a machine. He has volition.
When I try to call the bears, the wild bears, they look at me like I’m an idiot. When my mother calls to them, there are a few who will come to her, and others who do not. The ones who come do so because they have a relationship with her, and because they choose to come. They want to come.
If the bears do not come, why not? Is it because they’re sleeping? Is it because they’ve moved away? Is it because they’re simply not in the mood?
I can ask for words to put in this or any other book or article, and the words may come, or they may not. Most often for me these days they come. They do so because I have a relationship with my muse, and the words want to come, and my muse wants to bring them. But the words or my muse can choose not to come. That is up to them.
How does the world teach us how to be human beings? How might those on other sides—presuming they exist—teach us to be human beings? And crucially: how do we listen?