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A Language Older Than Words
At once a beautifully poetic memoir and an exploration of the various ways we live in the world, A Language Older Than Words explains violence as a pathology that touches every aspect of our lives and indeed affects all aspects of life on Earth. This chronicle of a young man's drive to transcend domestic abuse offers a challenging look at our worldwide sense of community and how we can make things better.
421 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2000
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5053 people want to read
About the author
Derrick Jensen
56 books679 followersDerrick Jensen is an American author and environmental activist living in Crescent City, California. He has published several books questioning and critiquing contemporary society and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He holds a B.S. in Mineral Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. He has also taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison and Eastern Washington University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 230 reviews
December 4, 2008
This is one of the few books I have consciously decided not to finish in recent years. I agree wholeheartedly with Jensen's basic premise-- that we are rendering the world uninhabitable and committing atrocities against its human and nonhuman residents, and that our ability to do this depends on our denial of reality and our disconnecting from the people around us. I cannot, however, support the belief structure he builds up around this premise. Jensen equates studying science with raping children, and treats public schools as analogous with genocide. He condemns all modern western social structures and sources of knowledge, and offers only eco-terrorism and unverified personal gnosis as alternatives. I was reading this book hoping for solutions I could apply in my own life, and I found only contempt for my not having found them already.
In my opinion, A Language Older that Words leaves the most important questions unanswered. If medical animal research can never be justified, should all the advances of modern medicine be reversed? If factory faming is never acceptable, must every person (including the entire continent of Africa and most of Asia) who does not have access to sustainable farmed staple foods starve? Does Jensen actually believe that every human whose children, pets, or livestock have been killed by a wild animal simply failed to communicate with the predator?
And if he believes that we participate in structures of oppression by participating in society, just how far has he dropped out? He owns a car-- how does he justify driving it? Does he wear clothing whose fibers were cultivated on industrial farmland or synthesized in a third world factory, whose threads were spun by children in China and whose pieces were assembled in a sweatshop? Or does he go naked? Does he use only products (silverware, cleaning products, furniture?) whose origins are ethical and verifiable? He turns such a condemning eye to everything he sees in our society, and yet never presents a viable alternative, or turns his scathing contempt on himself. Jensen's own fatalism, hatred and hypocrisy are as sickening to me as is the abuse he experienced as a child. Two wrongs don't make a right-- hatred and rage in the name of the environment is no less damaging than hatred and rage in the name of the ego.
In the end, one absolutist ideology is much like another. Jensen is an environmental fundamentalist-- he believes that there is no room for compromise or even discussion with conflicting viewpoints. As such, I see no reason to continue reading his opinions; he would have no interest in mine.
I give this book two stars because I think it has something to teach. I'll leave it at my local coffeehouse because I hope its ideas may be valuable to some people who can use them constructively. I, alas, wasn't able to find anything constructive here.
In my opinion, A Language Older that Words leaves the most important questions unanswered. If medical animal research can never be justified, should all the advances of modern medicine be reversed? If factory faming is never acceptable, must every person (including the entire continent of Africa and most of Asia) who does not have access to sustainable farmed staple foods starve? Does Jensen actually believe that every human whose children, pets, or livestock have been killed by a wild animal simply failed to communicate with the predator?
And if he believes that we participate in structures of oppression by participating in society, just how far has he dropped out? He owns a car-- how does he justify driving it? Does he wear clothing whose fibers were cultivated on industrial farmland or synthesized in a third world factory, whose threads were spun by children in China and whose pieces were assembled in a sweatshop? Or does he go naked? Does he use only products (silverware, cleaning products, furniture?) whose origins are ethical and verifiable? He turns such a condemning eye to everything he sees in our society, and yet never presents a viable alternative, or turns his scathing contempt on himself. Jensen's own fatalism, hatred and hypocrisy are as sickening to me as is the abuse he experienced as a child. Two wrongs don't make a right-- hatred and rage in the name of the environment is no less damaging than hatred and rage in the name of the ego.
In the end, one absolutist ideology is much like another. Jensen is an environmental fundamentalist-- he believes that there is no room for compromise or even discussion with conflicting viewpoints. As such, I see no reason to continue reading his opinions; he would have no interest in mine.
I give this book two stars because I think it has something to teach. I'll leave it at my local coffeehouse because I hope its ideas may be valuable to some people who can use them constructively. I, alas, wasn't able to find anything constructive here.
September 2, 2023
it has been said, though i recall not by whom, that we do not find great books, that, in fact, they are the ones that manage to find us. having been found, it took me visiting a now-defunct bookstore in the east village of manhattan before i could see whether this book's promise (the promise, ever present yet rarely fulfilled, of every unopened book) were to be kept.
from the first paragaraph i knew this was to be a book so stunning that i would i confuse the wish to have written it myself with the ability to actually have been able to do so... "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 is exists."
by the ensuing two sentences, i realized i was reading a book that i would later count among the very few that i'd ever describe as having been truly pivotal in shaping my thinking and feeling of the world... "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 believeable."
rare is the writer that can stir within their reader even a single emotion, rarer still the one that can rouse many. derrick jensen writes with a rigorous devotion to both an emotional honesty and intellectual clarity encountered very infrequently. his skill is evidenced by a fluid, patient, and poetic prose that, through its steadfastness, marks itself upon our perception indelibly. a language older than words is horrific yet beautiful, tragic yet touching, dispiriting yet invigorating. gasoline tears aplenty for the fire this book enflames.
from the first paragaraph i knew this was to be a book so stunning that i would i confuse the wish to have written it myself with the ability to actually have been able to do so... "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 is exists."
by the ensuing two sentences, i realized i was reading a book that i would later count among the very few that i'd ever describe as having been truly pivotal in shaping my thinking and feeling of the world... "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 believeable."
rare is the writer that can stir within their reader even a single emotion, rarer still the one that can rouse many. derrick jensen writes with a rigorous devotion to both an emotional honesty and intellectual clarity encountered very infrequently. his skill is evidenced by a fluid, patient, and poetic prose that, through its steadfastness, marks itself upon our perception indelibly. a language older than words is horrific yet beautiful, tragic yet touching, dispiriting yet invigorating. gasoline tears aplenty for the fire this book enflames.
May 9, 2009
The secret about Derrick Jensen is that all of his books are the same: they use the same metaphors and repeat the same points over and over again. Additionally, he has given the same public talk at every speaking event he's done for years (yes, the Star Wars bit is funny the first time). He is a good writer and speaker, but he uses this skill to cover up his lack of analysis and creativity. Yes, logging is bad, killing salmon is bad, the Nazis were bad, child abuse is bad. One would hope that someone writing about these subjects for so long could move beyond simple moral denunciation, but he has no reason to give up his hustle if people keep buying it (groups actually pay him money for him to talk to them on the phone!).
I must admit that my review is biased by the fact that Jensen reduced a friend of mine to tears when he was ostensibly supposed to be "supporting" her. Between this and how repetitive he is, I think he's an inconsiderate charlatan. Read one of his books, and you've read them all. Or really, read a few chapters in one of this books, and you've read them all.
A final note on the content of this one: the assertion that "his" chickens want to be killed and eaten is a disturbing case of psychological projection. This self constructed myth of consent illustrates Jensen's lack of ethics vis-a-vis non-human animals and is indicative of the general poverty of his perspective.
I must admit that my review is biased by the fact that Jensen reduced a friend of mine to tears when he was ostensibly supposed to be "supporting" her. Between this and how repetitive he is, I think he's an inconsiderate charlatan. Read one of his books, and you've read them all. Or really, read a few chapters in one of this books, and you've read them all.
A final note on the content of this one: the assertion that "his" chickens want to be killed and eaten is a disturbing case of psychological projection. This self constructed myth of consent illustrates Jensen's lack of ethics vis-a-vis non-human animals and is indicative of the general poverty of his perspective.
July 12, 2022
This was a difficult book to read. Not because of the way it was written but because of it’s subject matter. Author talks about his abusive father, childhood trauma, physical and sexual abuse, weaving those experiences with what is going on in our world today.
The premise of the book is in short; we humans in general lost touch with nature therefore, we dehumanize each other, genocide, abuse of children, rape of women and we treat other non humans with horrible disregard. Such as over fishing, over hunting, mass factories of animal slaughter, disregard for global warming all in the name of profit and power over other beings. His argument is that we are not only destroying the world we are also destroying ourselves.
I believe it’s all true and made complete sense but the book became a bit too repetitive after awhile. It was almost him beating us over the head with how horrible everything is.
It’s a beautifully written book but be ware not very uplifting.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Enjoy!
The premise of the book is in short; we humans in general lost touch with nature therefore, we dehumanize each other, genocide, abuse of children, rape of women and we treat other non humans with horrible disregard. Such as over fishing, over hunting, mass factories of animal slaughter, disregard for global warming all in the name of profit and power over other beings. His argument is that we are not only destroying the world we are also destroying ourselves.
I believe it’s all true and made complete sense but the book became a bit too repetitive after awhile. It was almost him beating us over the head with how horrible everything is.
It’s a beautifully written book but be ware not very uplifting.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Enjoy!
January 4, 2013
Great book. All of it being good, a few passages stuck out at me. The first was an explanation of where the dinners of he and a friend came from, going from origin to the plate. The second was a good part of the chapter "A Time of Sleeping," which helped me out by providing something to go to to point out why I want nothing to do with the wage economy.
The whole book, more than anything else, also echoes something I've tried to keep in mind for a long time: to overcome the present predicament will require more than simple policy changes, more than a little activism here and there. What is needed is an awakening of consciousness, a rebirth of sorts. Nothing else will do it. We have thousands of years worth of damage to the collective human psyche, and nothing less than a healing of the psyche will amount to any change that's worth a shit.
Overall: Read it. You might feel like killing yourself half-way through like I did, but he cheered me up, as I was promised he would.
The whole book, more than anything else, also echoes something I've tried to keep in mind for a long time: to overcome the present predicament will require more than simple policy changes, more than a little activism here and there. What is needed is an awakening of consciousness, a rebirth of sorts. Nothing else will do it. We have thousands of years worth of damage to the collective human psyche, and nothing less than a healing of the psyche will amount to any change that's worth a shit.
Overall: Read it. You might feel like killing yourself half-way through like I did, but he cheered me up, as I was promised he would.
January 9, 2009
An unspeakably beautiful, painful book. About what? It’s about interspecies communication, but it’s also about high jumping, and beekeeping, forests and faith, lively writing and dead salmon, sexual abuse and global warming; it’s about Maori tradition and stimulating plant cells; it’s about disease and dis-ease, about the brain and our consciousness; it’s about power and revolution and how revolutions are not; it’s about valuing production over relationships; it’s about community; it’s about our loss of instinct and the ability to listen.
It’s about all of that, and, yes, sometimes it’s far-reaching, but Jenssen brings seemingly disparate concepts neatly together in a passionately personal narrative. Feel his anger, and his gentle good humor, his frustration, his sickness and his awakening, as your own.
And yes, he does cite a vast variety of personal experiences, and several scientific
experiments, in actual (not metaphorical) communication with supposedly non-sentient beings (coyotes, stars, plants). Read the book before ye scoff; you too may remember a time when you felt at one with your surroundings, when you were able to trust your instinct rather than swallowing what you were fed.
The short version of Jensen’s thesis: Our collective acceptance of totalitarian power structures is what, first, led us away from our one-ness with the world; and, second, fosters tragedies from a father molesting a son to a global culture decimating its habitat. We have allowed those in power to convince us that exploitation (of a child, of a nonrenewable resource) is necessary – even for the exploited: “It is not possible to commit deforestation, or any other mass atrocity – mass murder, genocide, mass rape, the pervasive abuse of women or children, institutionalized animal abuse, imprisonment, wage slavery, systematic impoverishment, ecocide – without first convincing yourself and others that what you’re doing is beneficial.”
What allows such a structure to continue is a culture that values production over people, Jensen says: “It really is very simple. What you value is what you create.”
How to change the dynamic? Jensen doesn’t pretend to have easy answers to changing the power structure (and, thus, stemming the vast array of -cides plaguing the planet). To him, the beginning comes in slowing down, stepping out, allowing one’s senses to reawaken, and primarily to listen. Perhaps an anticlimactic ending, but at least not a dishonestly optimistic one.
Everlasting gratitude to Candace for gifting me this book, and I hope Tricia, the next person in this particular copy’s trajectory, gets as much out of it as I did.
Next up on my bookshelf: “Ishmael,” about a gorilla who communicates his worldview telepathically. What strange coincidence led the Morocco Peace Corps librarian to randomly send me this particular book at this particular time? I tried it once before and couldn’t suspend my disbelief. Now, it’s the accepted social norms that I find unbelievable; this too is a compelling (if poorly written) read.
It’s about all of that, and, yes, sometimes it’s far-reaching, but Jenssen brings seemingly disparate concepts neatly together in a passionately personal narrative. Feel his anger, and his gentle good humor, his frustration, his sickness and his awakening, as your own.
And yes, he does cite a vast variety of personal experiences, and several scientific
experiments, in actual (not metaphorical) communication with supposedly non-sentient beings (coyotes, stars, plants). Read the book before ye scoff; you too may remember a time when you felt at one with your surroundings, when you were able to trust your instinct rather than swallowing what you were fed.
The short version of Jensen’s thesis: Our collective acceptance of totalitarian power structures is what, first, led us away from our one-ness with the world; and, second, fosters tragedies from a father molesting a son to a global culture decimating its habitat. We have allowed those in power to convince us that exploitation (of a child, of a nonrenewable resource) is necessary – even for the exploited: “It is not possible to commit deforestation, or any other mass atrocity – mass murder, genocide, mass rape, the pervasive abuse of women or children, institutionalized animal abuse, imprisonment, wage slavery, systematic impoverishment, ecocide – without first convincing yourself and others that what you’re doing is beneficial.”
What allows such a structure to continue is a culture that values production over people, Jensen says: “It really is very simple. What you value is what you create.”
How to change the dynamic? Jensen doesn’t pretend to have easy answers to changing the power structure (and, thus, stemming the vast array of -cides plaguing the planet). To him, the beginning comes in slowing down, stepping out, allowing one’s senses to reawaken, and primarily to listen. Perhaps an anticlimactic ending, but at least not a dishonestly optimistic one.
Everlasting gratitude to Candace for gifting me this book, and I hope Tricia, the next person in this particular copy’s trajectory, gets as much out of it as I did.
Next up on my bookshelf: “Ishmael,” about a gorilla who communicates his worldview telepathically. What strange coincidence led the Morocco Peace Corps librarian to randomly send me this particular book at this particular time? I tried it once before and couldn’t suspend my disbelief. Now, it’s the accepted social norms that I find unbelievable; this too is a compelling (if poorly written) read.
July 20, 2008
Rarely do I read a book that not only hits so many political punches right in the gut, but also brings it all back home on a personal and spiritual level without coming off as cheesy. This is such a book. Skimming through the criticism of this book, it is understandable that many are turned off by Jensen's sweeping critiques of civilization, and are quick to point out the hypocrisy of him living in a big house, owning his own land, and driving a truck. All fair and good, even though he admits that he is not perfect and he is doomed to being inseparable from the culture he was born and raised in, and we all struggle to live by our morals and ideals, however they may be set. What is a greater concern for me reading his book is his positive simplification of indigenous cultures, which runs the risk of being the flip side of earlier negative blanketing of said cultures by white people in the past. I wish he went more into detail or gave better footnotes to these "better" cultures he uses to compare to ours, only to prove his honesty and so I can do my own research on them. But, he is not writing a history book, and what he doe write is beautiful and thought-provoking regardless. I have found that it is less of a book of specific answers to the environmental and social ills of our society, but one of answers of what is at the root of our destructive tendencies, and how to undo this destruction at the base of our everyday lives. It involves building on relationships with everyone, everything, which often times gets ignored or contradicted in many anarchist-associated writings.
I have been recommending and will continue to recommend this book to many.
I have been recommending and will continue to recommend this book to many.
May 8, 2008
This is a very disturbing book.
Jensen is a radical environmentalist and "anarcho-primitivst" to use labels on someone who decries label usage- and for good reason.
Jensen's view is that we are going to hell in a handbasket. A handbasket willed with chemicals and shit, and radiation, and human destructiveness.
he pulls no punches, and there is very little I disagree with him about. His ability to write clearly and show the interconnectedness of so many different elements in society and the consequences of human ignorance, arrogance and meanness is a pleasure to appreciate while at the same time profoundly painful to read. the environment capitalism, patriarchy have so distorted human fiunctioning that only the unraveling of civilization gives any chance of the world not being horribly transformed.
In fact he advocates hurrying the process along because the sooner our high tech society collapse the less we will have raped the planet. there is a strong logic for this
I have issues with his focus and we have had a few pointed disagreements about strategy and about what are the most importnat things to focus on. But Derrick knows his stuff and he is a committed human being who lives life and the natural world with a passion we should all emulate
Jensen is a radical environmentalist and "anarcho-primitivst" to use labels on someone who decries label usage- and for good reason.
Jensen's view is that we are going to hell in a handbasket. A handbasket willed with chemicals and shit, and radiation, and human destructiveness.
he pulls no punches, and there is very little I disagree with him about. His ability to write clearly and show the interconnectedness of so many different elements in society and the consequences of human ignorance, arrogance and meanness is a pleasure to appreciate while at the same time profoundly painful to read. the environment capitalism, patriarchy have so distorted human fiunctioning that only the unraveling of civilization gives any chance of the world not being horribly transformed.
In fact he advocates hurrying the process along because the sooner our high tech society collapse the less we will have raped the planet. there is a strong logic for this
I have issues with his focus and we have had a few pointed disagreements about strategy and about what are the most importnat things to focus on. But Derrick knows his stuff and he is a committed human being who lives life and the natural world with a passion we should all emulate
March 17, 2008
What to say?
If you've read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, or just been paying attention to what's been going on in the world for... well, your whole life, you know things are pretty screwed and human activities are pretty well the thing screwing them up... mass extinction, climate change, pollution of... everything, violence between nations and within families... and the list goes on and goes deeper. This 400 or so page book could have been filled with a bullit-pointed list of all the atrocities of human-(un)kind with a sequel ready to hit the presses the next day. It is chock full of distressing stories and statistics, but Jensen's focus is more on the psychology behind such events, and the cultural values that make them, not mearly acceptable, but a normal part of "the price of doing business".
Jensen takes as his starting point abuse he himself suffered in his own family, which point he returns to often (perhaps a little too often, as it can seem as though the reader is being beaten over the head (no pun, in however poor a taste, intended) with those facts, maybe in a play for sympathy or a statement of the author's credentials in describing horror). This starting point quickly expands, however, to connect all the violence and destruction that's all too easy to see if we choose to look, bringing it all under the gaze of Jensen's stream-of-consciousness (conscience) narrative. While he jumps from point to point, and back to previous points again to expand and re-think and question himself, Jensen's almost-at-the-brink-of-incohesion book manages to hold together quite well actually. The confusion, the turmoil, the self-questioning, is something we all have to face when examining our place in this strange world... the recurring questions haunt us: "do I write today, or do I blow up a dam?"; "do I have any right to be upset at Shell Oil and ADM and the Forest Service et al. when I myself drive a car and may not remember to turn off lights when I leave the house, and so on?"; "what can I really do that will actually make a difference?" Jensen doesn't really offer up answers... any answer he could offer would probably be too pat, too idealistic. What he offers is a suggestion: listen. Through personal anectdotes, and others, gathered from around the world, and even a bit of scientific data, Jensen declares that the whole world is speaking to us, if we just open our ears, eyes, minds, to the "language older than words" of the title. The idea of talking to coyotes and ducks, to say nothing of trees and bees and rocks and stars, is pretty thoroughly poo-pooed by the conventional wisdom, but Jensen makes a valid case that the conventional wisdom, what with its penchant for driving people out of their homes to make way for big business an so on, is not really a great role model... so... go take a walk, take a look around, see what the world is saying.
I don't know that this book will convince anyone who's mind is not already chugging along these, or adjacent pathways. I wonder if Ishmael or any other book can truly change a mind that's seeminly locked in to an essentially opposing value system. It would be nice to think so... if only more people read books... maybe we could make a movie... or a cell-phone ring tone containing the essence of the point "either we change our ways now or we're all dead, and we won't be alone". Everyone hears cell phones ring, whether they want to or not. Anyway, it's a good songbook for the choir at least, though I can wish that it was perhaps written in collaboration with someone like Michael Pollan, whose beauty and lucidity of prose and sense of structure is fully equal to his dedication and grasp of the ideas presented.
If you've read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, or just been paying attention to what's been going on in the world for... well, your whole life, you know things are pretty screwed and human activities are pretty well the thing screwing them up... mass extinction, climate change, pollution of... everything, violence between nations and within families... and the list goes on and goes deeper. This 400 or so page book could have been filled with a bullit-pointed list of all the atrocities of human-(un)kind with a sequel ready to hit the presses the next day. It is chock full of distressing stories and statistics, but Jensen's focus is more on the psychology behind such events, and the cultural values that make them, not mearly acceptable, but a normal part of "the price of doing business".
Jensen takes as his starting point abuse he himself suffered in his own family, which point he returns to often (perhaps a little too often, as it can seem as though the reader is being beaten over the head (no pun, in however poor a taste, intended) with those facts, maybe in a play for sympathy or a statement of the author's credentials in describing horror). This starting point quickly expands, however, to connect all the violence and destruction that's all too easy to see if we choose to look, bringing it all under the gaze of Jensen's stream-of-consciousness (conscience) narrative. While he jumps from point to point, and back to previous points again to expand and re-think and question himself, Jensen's almost-at-the-brink-of-incohesion book manages to hold together quite well actually. The confusion, the turmoil, the self-questioning, is something we all have to face when examining our place in this strange world... the recurring questions haunt us: "do I write today, or do I blow up a dam?"; "do I have any right to be upset at Shell Oil and ADM and the Forest Service et al. when I myself drive a car and may not remember to turn off lights when I leave the house, and so on?"; "what can I really do that will actually make a difference?" Jensen doesn't really offer up answers... any answer he could offer would probably be too pat, too idealistic. What he offers is a suggestion: listen. Through personal anectdotes, and others, gathered from around the world, and even a bit of scientific data, Jensen declares that the whole world is speaking to us, if we just open our ears, eyes, minds, to the "language older than words" of the title. The idea of talking to coyotes and ducks, to say nothing of trees and bees and rocks and stars, is pretty thoroughly poo-pooed by the conventional wisdom, but Jensen makes a valid case that the conventional wisdom, what with its penchant for driving people out of their homes to make way for big business an so on, is not really a great role model... so... go take a walk, take a look around, see what the world is saying.
I don't know that this book will convince anyone who's mind is not already chugging along these, or adjacent pathways. I wonder if Ishmael or any other book can truly change a mind that's seeminly locked in to an essentially opposing value system. It would be nice to think so... if only more people read books... maybe we could make a movie... or a cell-phone ring tone containing the essence of the point "either we change our ways now or we're all dead, and we won't be alone". Everyone hears cell phones ring, whether they want to or not. Anyway, it's a good songbook for the choir at least, though I can wish that it was perhaps written in collaboration with someone like Michael Pollan, whose beauty and lucidity of prose and sense of structure is fully equal to his dedication and grasp of the ideas presented.
September 14, 2016
A book sharply dissects the anatomy of violence it's everywhere we can see: a greed driven economic system, the state which is synonymous with the powerful elite, familial crimes like child abuse, beating spouse, the raping of mother earth: overfishing of salmon, commercial poultry, chemicalized agriculture, abusing animals by radiation, building of mega dams, erasing indigenous cultures( sand Creek masscare), the worship of production over life, a religion of human superiority, a science that values technology over morals, philosophy seperating our minds from our bodies. This mess has been sustained by building a story of make believes which is a web of lies. This also means silencing the voices by making these crimes appearing normal. For example, the frequent bombardment of television by numbers of the dead, the reduction of a tree to paper, the animal to chicken ( as a product).
I would share some poems which, just flowed out while reading the mesmerizing story.
Economics:
In the glittering place
Everything is beautiful
As an exchange
Bereft of joy,sweat and humor
Shrinking experiences and ideas
Self-centered interest is the fuel
To be interconnected
Oblivious to destruction
Potato in my plate:
Potato appears sumptuous
Awakened smelling powers
Wetting the tongue
Full of chemicals
Soil destroying processes
Harvested by blood and toil
Of weak, wageless tillers
Filling the tummy
In fact,of the soulless giant
Learning:
The classroom was dusty
Pen magically created words
Not when we sat on benches
We knew from experiences
Laughter,pain,anger,shame
Baking,music,rock climbing
Consciously we wrote
Of life and it's ways
By giving and receiving
Love in the world.
Revolution:
Bunch of leaders
Bloody coup
Promises new dawn
We come along hopefully
When bullets fly randomly
Filled with fear,we adapt
Silenced quickly
The other choice
Sixty days of hunger
Coercion:
Of religion
Obey or damnation
Of science
Conquer or retardation
Of economy
Success or wage slavery
Of politics
Elite control or anarchy
Of other species
Domestication , testing and slaughterhouse
Of our self
Blind following or numerous deaths
Homecoming:
We break the walls
Built of hate, anger
Despair and silence
As our eyes see
Vicious hell today
We demolished it
Returning home
In togetherness
Godspeed.
I would share some poems which, just flowed out while reading the mesmerizing story.
Economics:
In the glittering place
Everything is beautiful
As an exchange
Bereft of joy,sweat and humor
Shrinking experiences and ideas
Self-centered interest is the fuel
To be interconnected
Oblivious to destruction
Potato in my plate:
Potato appears sumptuous
Awakened smelling powers
Wetting the tongue
Full of chemicals
Soil destroying processes
Harvested by blood and toil
Of weak, wageless tillers
Filling the tummy
In fact,of the soulless giant
Learning:
The classroom was dusty
Pen magically created words
Not when we sat on benches
We knew from experiences
Laughter,pain,anger,shame
Baking,music,rock climbing
Consciously we wrote
Of life and it's ways
By giving and receiving
Love in the world.
Revolution:
Bunch of leaders
Bloody coup
Promises new dawn
We come along hopefully
When bullets fly randomly
Filled with fear,we adapt
Silenced quickly
The other choice
Sixty days of hunger
Coercion:
Of religion
Obey or damnation
Of science
Conquer or retardation
Of economy
Success or wage slavery
Of politics
Elite control or anarchy
Of other species
Domestication , testing and slaughterhouse
Of our self
Blind following or numerous deaths
Homecoming:
We break the walls
Built of hate, anger
Despair and silence
As our eyes see
Vicious hell today
We demolished it
Returning home
In togetherness
Godspeed.
April 2, 2010
There must be a new name for life-changing memoir. Before reading Jensen's book, I thought The Glass Castle was the most revelatory expression of life in an abusive home, but Jeannette Walls' ability to stand back from the experience of it, while powerful in its simplicity, does not deliver the change in consciousness we need to rid the world of violence and abuse. We need to stand in the pain, cry, agonize, and grieve before we can reconnect with a world that is not safe. Beautiful prose from an evolving human.
I will read this book again, and read more of Jensen's writing.
I will read this book again, and read more of Jensen's writing.
March 23, 2015
Derrick Jensen’s book, A Language Older Than Words, is a landmark in environmental writing. A standard formula for eco-books is to describe the evolution of a problem, provide charts, tables, and illustrations to document the extent of the problem, and then present “solutions.” Typically these are theoretical, politically impossible, pie-in-the-sky solutions based on the premise that humankind is fundamentally rational and reasonable — solutions that require minimal adjustments to the machinery of consumer society, will not significantly interfere with perpetual economic growth, and will let us keep our cell phones, lights, and cars.
Happily, Jensen is not stuck in these ruts. Obviously, reason is not the guiding force in the journey of humankind. Obviously, if a workable and intelligent win-win solution to the Earth Crisis existed, we would have already found it and implemented it. Jung had a name for episodes of mass insanity, like Nazi Germany, or consumer society: psychic epidemics. Psychic epidemics are far more devastating than natural catastrophes (earthquakes, hurricanes), and reason is powerless to resolve them, because reason does not communicate with the unconscious.
The “language older than words” refers the voice of the living planet — the wind, the burbling brook, the ravens, the howling wolves, the rattling leaves. Everything is communicating, sharing, cooperating. Unfortunately, civilized humans have isolated themselves from the rest of the family of life. We no longer listen to the ancient language, which is always talking to us. We have become space aliens in our own home. Not coincidentally, we are racing toward catastrophe.
Most eco-writers do not reveal a spiritual connection to life on Earth. Jensen clearly does, and this adds much power to his work. He is not a professional scholar who is systematically analyzing a sub-optimal process, he’s a man who radiates love for the wild natural world, and deeply cares about it. This passion is a treasure, and it is slipping through our fingers as each generation lives in greater isolation from the sacred natural world.
Jensen’s father was a fundamentalist Christian and a wealthy businessman. He was abused as a child, and he grew up to be a violent, controlling tyrant. He physically and sexually abused his wife, sons, and daughters, including Derrick. The family lived in fear of his rage, and all of them suffered permanent emotional damage. Many years later, his father still refuses to acknowledge his violent past, and Derrick still has trouble sleeping. Jensen says that if he had to do his childhood over again, he would kill his father. He believes that it’s essentially impossible to rehabilitate an habitual abuser.
During the years of violent rage, the family members lived in a world of make believe, blocking out the fear and suffering. In order to survive the terror, they had to shut down emotionally. This family was not an unusual freak. Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse are commonplace in our society.
In many ways, on a larger scale, our global civilization resembles Jensen’s family. It’s beating and raping our planet. Similarly, we feel powerless to stop the senseless savagery. We shut down emotionally. We pretend that everything is OK. We ignore vast amounts of information, and what we can’t ignore, we forget or dismiss. Living behind a wall of fear, we become isolated from life, from our bodies, from our spirits. Isolation is poisonous.
Humans are not essentially bad, but we have had the misfortune of being born into a culture that is speeding down the path of self-destruction. Jensen says: “Within any culture that destroys the salmon, that commits genocide, that demands wage slavery, most of the individuals — myself included — are probably to a greater or lesser degree insane.” The central question of our time is this: “What are the sane and appropriate responses to insanely destructive behavior? In many ways, it is the only question of our time.”
One gift of Jensen’s traumatic childhood was that it knocked off his cultural blinders. His father was a respected member of the community — and he was also an abusive monster. Jensen came to the terrifying realization that our celebrated modern culture was as crazy and brutal as his dad. The first step on the path to healing is to acknowledge the existence of problems, to recognize the truth. Then, the process of awakening involves a series of deaths and rebirths, as useless things are tossed overboard, and replaced with healthier ones. It’s about growth, and it’s not quick or easy.
This book is a dizzying non-linear tilt-a-whirl ride that zooms round and round in the insanity of our culture. It’s a slideshow of stories, describing various outbreaks of the disease that’s destroying the world — the Sand Creek massacre, Peruvian dictatorships, the sadism of animal testing, devastating clear cuts, the destruction of the salmon, and on and on and on. He also includes stories about indigenous people who are eager to promote healing. He tirelessly explores many paths in search of coherence and understanding. It’s a messy business. The results are not neat, clean, or consistent. Jensen explodes with pain, love, intelligence, and a burning hunger for a brighter tomorrow. He is a man you will never forget.
Happily, Jensen is not stuck in these ruts. Obviously, reason is not the guiding force in the journey of humankind. Obviously, if a workable and intelligent win-win solution to the Earth Crisis existed, we would have already found it and implemented it. Jung had a name for episodes of mass insanity, like Nazi Germany, or consumer society: psychic epidemics. Psychic epidemics are far more devastating than natural catastrophes (earthquakes, hurricanes), and reason is powerless to resolve them, because reason does not communicate with the unconscious.
The “language older than words” refers the voice of the living planet — the wind, the burbling brook, the ravens, the howling wolves, the rattling leaves. Everything is communicating, sharing, cooperating. Unfortunately, civilized humans have isolated themselves from the rest of the family of life. We no longer listen to the ancient language, which is always talking to us. We have become space aliens in our own home. Not coincidentally, we are racing toward catastrophe.
Most eco-writers do not reveal a spiritual connection to life on Earth. Jensen clearly does, and this adds much power to his work. He is not a professional scholar who is systematically analyzing a sub-optimal process, he’s a man who radiates love for the wild natural world, and deeply cares about it. This passion is a treasure, and it is slipping through our fingers as each generation lives in greater isolation from the sacred natural world.
Jensen’s father was a fundamentalist Christian and a wealthy businessman. He was abused as a child, and he grew up to be a violent, controlling tyrant. He physically and sexually abused his wife, sons, and daughters, including Derrick. The family lived in fear of his rage, and all of them suffered permanent emotional damage. Many years later, his father still refuses to acknowledge his violent past, and Derrick still has trouble sleeping. Jensen says that if he had to do his childhood over again, he would kill his father. He believes that it’s essentially impossible to rehabilitate an habitual abuser.
During the years of violent rage, the family members lived in a world of make believe, blocking out the fear and suffering. In order to survive the terror, they had to shut down emotionally. This family was not an unusual freak. Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse are commonplace in our society.
In many ways, on a larger scale, our global civilization resembles Jensen’s family. It’s beating and raping our planet. Similarly, we feel powerless to stop the senseless savagery. We shut down emotionally. We pretend that everything is OK. We ignore vast amounts of information, and what we can’t ignore, we forget or dismiss. Living behind a wall of fear, we become isolated from life, from our bodies, from our spirits. Isolation is poisonous.
Humans are not essentially bad, but we have had the misfortune of being born into a culture that is speeding down the path of self-destruction. Jensen says: “Within any culture that destroys the salmon, that commits genocide, that demands wage slavery, most of the individuals — myself included — are probably to a greater or lesser degree insane.” The central question of our time is this: “What are the sane and appropriate responses to insanely destructive behavior? In many ways, it is the only question of our time.”
One gift of Jensen’s traumatic childhood was that it knocked off his cultural blinders. His father was a respected member of the community — and he was also an abusive monster. Jensen came to the terrifying realization that our celebrated modern culture was as crazy and brutal as his dad. The first step on the path to healing is to acknowledge the existence of problems, to recognize the truth. Then, the process of awakening involves a series of deaths and rebirths, as useless things are tossed overboard, and replaced with healthier ones. It’s about growth, and it’s not quick or easy.
This book is a dizzying non-linear tilt-a-whirl ride that zooms round and round in the insanity of our culture. It’s a slideshow of stories, describing various outbreaks of the disease that’s destroying the world — the Sand Creek massacre, Peruvian dictatorships, the sadism of animal testing, devastating clear cuts, the destruction of the salmon, and on and on and on. He also includes stories about indigenous people who are eager to promote healing. He tirelessly explores many paths in search of coherence and understanding. It’s a messy business. The results are not neat, clean, or consistent. Jensen explodes with pain, love, intelligence, and a burning hunger for a brighter tomorrow. He is a man you will never forget.
December 20, 2014
This book, if nothing more, is an eye-opener. More than anything I think Jensen was trying very hard to rip the veil the eyes of the reader. He is yelling into the wind, screaming, trying to be heard above the noise of our self-destructing culture and society. I think his warnings are valid and very disturbing.
I'm not an anthropologist, archaeologist or historian, but I think to place the blame almost exclusively on the shoulders of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic belief system is a bit simplistic.
I think we can go much further back in our collective history to find the deep roots to our self-destructing greed. As long as humans were nomadic they possessed only what they could comfortably carry. They lived "off the land" and when they used up an area they moved on. They didn't "own" much of anything. It seems to me that when humans began to farm the land, to settle in one place, and build more permanent structures to live in, they began to think in terms of "this is mine and you can't have it." Or, "I like what you have, I want it and I'm going to take it." It was in settling into villages, towns, and cities that we began to accumulate stuff to fill our homes, which led to our needing to defend our stuff.
History for us humans is pretty much the history of one war, battle, fight after another. It's goes back much farther than 2000 years and may well be in our DNA. Jensen doesn't really explore this, but rather sticks to our more resent crimes against humanity to make his point.
I'm not an anthropologist, archaeologist or historian, but I think to place the blame almost exclusively on the shoulders of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic belief system is a bit simplistic.
I think we can go much further back in our collective history to find the deep roots to our self-destructing greed. As long as humans were nomadic they possessed only what they could comfortably carry. They lived "off the land" and when they used up an area they moved on. They didn't "own" much of anything. It seems to me that when humans began to farm the land, to settle in one place, and build more permanent structures to live in, they began to think in terms of "this is mine and you can't have it." Or, "I like what you have, I want it and I'm going to take it." It was in settling into villages, towns, and cities that we began to accumulate stuff to fill our homes, which led to our needing to defend our stuff.
History for us humans is pretty much the history of one war, battle, fight after another. It's goes back much farther than 2000 years and may well be in our DNA. Jensen doesn't really explore this, but rather sticks to our more resent crimes against humanity to make his point.
December 5, 2007
This was my first Derrick Jensen book, and it's great. It would have been mindblowing if I had read it 3-5 years ago. I already had a similar perspective to Derrick's, and knew much of the information he gave.
But the book brings everything together well: the totality of everything that's fucked up in this world---caused mainly by western civilization.
A Language Older Than Words is an amazing book, and I recommend it for everyone, especially for people who have critiques of the way things are but believe that the system can be reformed.
I look forward to reading Walking on Water, Derrick's book about teaching, because I want to teach high school, and maybe someday reading Endgame, one of his latest works.
I have seen Derrick speak twice, and I highly recommend seeing him speak. It's even better than his books.
To paraphrase one of Derrick's most important points:
Those who rose up in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and fought back had a better rate of survival than those who went along.
But the book brings everything together well: the totality of everything that's fucked up in this world---caused mainly by western civilization.
A Language Older Than Words is an amazing book, and I recommend it for everyone, especially for people who have critiques of the way things are but believe that the system can be reformed.
I look forward to reading Walking on Water, Derrick's book about teaching, because I want to teach high school, and maybe someday reading Endgame, one of his latest works.
I have seen Derrick speak twice, and I highly recommend seeing him speak. It's even better than his books.
To paraphrase one of Derrick's most important points:
Those who rose up in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and fought back had a better rate of survival than those who went along.
December 1, 2010
Reading a book like this, I can always feel a little bit smug in my aboriginal irish womynhood-ness...ah white boy, your kind have ruined the planet, tch tch.
(That's a joke, i don't feel smug.) This book is blowing my mind!
It's desperately sad as Jensen drags you around showing you the nasty-ness that our comfortable western lifestyles are built upon (poisoning the earth, enslavement of people, abuse of animals) but optimistic as he encourages the reader to make a change.
There's philosophy, memoir, history, nature also in the mix. Written in a non-linear style. Definitely recommended!
(That's a joke, i don't feel smug.) This book is blowing my mind!
It's desperately sad as Jensen drags you around showing you the nasty-ness that our comfortable western lifestyles are built upon (poisoning the earth, enslavement of people, abuse of animals) but optimistic as he encourages the reader to make a change.
There's philosophy, memoir, history, nature also in the mix. Written in a non-linear style. Definitely recommended!
May 24, 2012
Awful. Couldn't finish it though I tried and tried. I really wanted to be inspired but found the author whiny. I was too irritated with the repetitiveness and obviousness to waste any more time.
January 18, 2012
Few books have touched me the way this book did. I read it while in Africa and felt the time & place might have altered my interpretation. So, it is on my "read again" book list.
May 15, 2015
This book is a masterpiece. Jensen relates his own past experiences of abuse from his father to the destructive nature of the dominant culture. I highly recommend this book.
May 5, 2020
The mindset that can save the world is that which my wife has. She exhibited it often before, when we still had no cat in our house. I’d see a rat balefullly staring at me from the ceiling and I’d point it to her and say there’s a big rat in there but she’d caution me in a whisper not to call it a rat, or a pest, but call it instead what she had always called a rat—a MABAIT ( roughly, the Tagalog word for “the kind one”). She insists rats understand us and if we call them bad names they’d resent it and take revenge by gnawing at our laundry, appliances or electric wirings; whereas if we call them KIND they’ll show appreciation by leaving us in peace.She thinks even as we know them, these rats also understand us, even our language. So we should therefore respect each other so that we can live in harmony.
The author of this book, Derrick Jensen, is just like my wife. He talks to coyotes, pleading with them not to raid his chickens during the night yet, because he understands that they need to eat chicken for nourishment, he’d promise to butcher some and put the meat regularly in a designated “coyote tree” so the coyotes can pick it up there without resorting to violence and thievery. It works. Jensen apologizes to the chickens before killing them and they’d willingly submit themselves up as offering.
Whenever he feels down, Jensen would go to a tree, sometimes crying, hug it, talk to it, and the tree would console him. It is not just interspecies communication he believes in. He is convinced that all living things speak, and the world itself speaks to us, and that we should listen to them.
As my wife respect rats in our home, Jensen likewise eschews the view that Man is the centre of creation or that we own the earth and can therefore do whatever we please with it—
“What if we stand the notion of ownership on its head? What if I do not own the barn, but instead it owns me, or better, we own each other? What if I do not view it as my right to kill mice simply because I can, and because a piece of paper tells me I own their habitation? What if, because their habitation is near my own, I am responsible for their well-being? What if I take care of them and their community as the grandfather ponderosa outside this window takes care of me, and as before that the stars soothed me? This relationship of mutual care doesn’t mean that none shall die, nor even that I won’t kill anything, nor eventually be killed; it simply means we will treat each other with respect, and that neither will unnecessarily shit where the other bathes. The bees, too, stand in my purview, and so it becomes my responsibility to make sure, to the best of my abilities, that they can sustain their community. The same can be said for the communities of wild roses, native grasses, trees, frogs, mosquitos, ants, flies, bluebirds, bumblebees, and magpies that, too, call this their home. We all share responsibility toward each other and toward the soil, which in truncates responsibility to each of us. What if all of life is not what we’ve been taught, a ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ competition to see who may own or kill the others before the others before the others can own or kill them? What if we don’t need to live our whole lives alone? What if life is a web of immeasurably complex and respectful relationships? What if the purpose—even the evolutionary purpose—is for each of us to take responsibility for all those around us, to respect their own deepest needs, to esteem and be esteemed by them, to feed and feed off them, to be sustained by their bodies and eventually to sustain them with our own?”
He grieves for what we have done, and are doing, to our fellow creatures and to our environment. He is apologetic that he could only talk about it when what is needed is concrete action, blowing up dams, for example, so salmon would not die:
“Change is coming. We are in the midst of it. Ecological system after system is collapsing around us, and we wander dazed through our days as though we have become in reality the automatons we so often strive to be.
“Often when I awaken I hear voices of those who will come after, and sometimes I see their faces. They speak to me of hunger, and ask, always, where are the salmon? They speak to me, too, of beauty, and ask again that same question. I have no answer for them. Sometimes I hand them a book or an article I’ve written. They read it, nod, smile sadly, and ask again about the fish. They do not care so much how deftly we rationalize our actions—and inactions—nor even how deeply we discuss the destruction. What they want, reasonably enough, is an intact and livable world. They ask what we have done to their home.
“They ask not only about salmon, but also about forests, bears, fisher, marten, lynx, cutthroat trout, bull trout, sturgeons. They ask about them all. And there is nothing I can do except hand them my book, and say I’m sorry.”
When the current pandemic started I had wondered if it is but planet earth’s way of survival, of defending itself. Halting major pollutants like motor vehicles, planes, ships and factories and killing some of us who all leave harmful carbon upon the environment during each of our lifetime. Jensen never thought of epidemics, maybe proving that mother earth is more resourceful than him, but he entertains a similar notion:
“I sometimes wonder if the other creatures on the planet are doing what they can to shut down the machine. Perhaps salmon are leaving not just because of dams, and not just because they do not like our unwillingness to participate in reciprocal relationships, and not because we make life intolerable for all others, but also to deprive us of calories; perhaps they are willing to give away their existence in order to stop civilization. Perhaps trees sometimes refuse to grow on clearcuts because they do not want to give their bodies to be used to enrich those in power. Perhaps Eskimo curlews—whose appetite for grasshoppers was legendary—left the planet so we would poison ourselves with pesticides. Perhaps the planet as a whole is now pushing us along in our own headlong rush to self-extinguishment, so that whatever creatures remain can at listened again breathe easily.
“Or perhaps the salmon and the trees are not acting merely physically but also symbolically, and perhaps then it becomes our task to ask them clearly and carefully what it is they are saying through their own deaths, what it is that they are dying to tell us. It becomes our task after that to listen to their stories, and to act upon what they have to say.”
Through the pandemic planet earth proved what once was just considered by many a fanciful theory: that we in all creation are all interconnected with each other. Now the rich, or those who have the means, are providing shelter for the homeless, feeding the hungry and taking care of the sick because it is now clear that their sickness and their death will also be the sickness and death of all the others. The distinction between the lucky “us” and the unfortunate “them,” at least at the moment, has disappeared. We take care of each other or we are all doomed together. We have learned, painfully but mercifully, the language that is older than words. It 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 Nolan 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 the 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 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.”
Jensen calls for a revolution. But of a different kind. It is a revolution—
“that does not emerge from the culture, from philosophy, from theory, from thought abstracted from sense, but instead from our bodies, and from the land. It, too, is a part of this language older than words. It is the honeybee who stings in defence of the larger being that is her hive; it is the mother grizzly who charges again and again the train that took from her the two sons she carried inside, and that mangled their bodies beyond all but motherly recognition; it is the woman who submits to her rapist, knowing it’s better to be violated than murdered, but who begins to fight when he reaches for the knife, or the hammer; it is Zapatista spokesperson Cecelia Rodriguez, who says, ‘I have a question of those men who raped me. Why did you not kill me? It was a mistake to spare my life. I will not shut up…this has not traumatized me to the point of paralysis.’ It is the indigenous Zapatistas, who declare, ‘There are those who resign themselves to being slaves…But there are those who do not resign themselves, there are those who decide to be uncomfortable, there are those who do not sell themselves, there are those who do not surrender themselves….There are those who decide to fight. In any place in the world, anytime, any man or woman rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes that resignation has woven for them and that cynicism has dyed grey. Any man, any woman, of whatever color in whatever tongue, says to himself, to herself, ‘Enough already!’ It is Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, murdered by the Nigerian government at the urging of Shell Oil, whose last words were, ‘Lord, take my soul but the struggle continues!’ It is the U’wa people of South America, a part of whose community committed mass suicide 400 years ago by walking off the a fourteen-hundred-foot cliff rather than submit to Spanish rule, and whose living members today vow to follow their ancestors if Occidental Petroleum and Shell move in to destroy their land. It is the U’wa woman who says, ‘I sing the traditional songs to my children. I teach them that everything is sacred and linked. How can I tell Shell and Oxy that to take the petrol is for us worse than killing your own mother? If you kill the Earth, then no one will live. I do not want to die. Nobody does.’ It is anyone who dares to think and speak for him-or herself. It is Nestor Makhno fighting for his Ukrainian homeland and for the autonomy of those who work the land, against the Germans, the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Bolsheviks again, the Whites again, and again the Bolsheviks. It is the men and women who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and it is those who rebelled at Treblinka. It is Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the temple. It is the women and men who lock themselves down in front of bulldozers. It is the Chipko movement in India, begun by women who clung tight to trees so the woodmen’s axes would bite into their own, and not the trees’, flesh. It is Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo. It is the salmon battering themselves against the concrete, using the only thing they have, their flesh, to try to break down which keeps them from their homes.
“It is not the attempt to seize power or the industrial ‘means of production,’ but it is actions based upon the instinctual drive to survive, and to live with dignity.
“This is not political theory. It is not philosophy. It is not religion. It is remembering what it is to be a human being—an animal. It is remembering what it means to love, and to be alive.
“It is to learn the power of the word NO. No more clearcuts. No more tutors on turtles. No more genocide. No more slavery, neither our own nor others.
“So long as we, or I, continue to discuss this in the abstract, we, or I, still have too much to lose. Presumably the mother grizzly did not find herself paralyzed by theoretical discussions of what is right or wrong, and presumably the same is true for the woman who takes the weapons from her attacker’s hands. If we only begin to feel in our bodies the immensity of what we are losing—intact ecosystems, hours sold for wages, childhoods lost to violence, women’s capacity to walk unafraid—we will know precisely what we need to do.
“Any revolution on the outside—any breaking down of current power structures—with no corresponding revolution in perceiving, being, and thinking, will merely further destruction, genocide, and ecocide. Any revolution on the inside—a revolution of the heart—which does not lead to a revolution on the outside plays just as false.
“Anton Chekhov once said that he would like to read a story about a man who squeezes every drop of slave’s blood from himself. That is first what we must do. For when a slave rebels without challenging the entire notion of slavery, we merely encounter a new boss. But if all the blood is painfully squeezed away, what emerges is a free man or woman, and not even death can stop those who are free.”
In this Year of the Rat we should all listen to what the rats and kindred creatures are saying.
The author of this book, Derrick Jensen, is just like my wife. He talks to coyotes, pleading with them not to raid his chickens during the night yet, because he understands that they need to eat chicken for nourishment, he’d promise to butcher some and put the meat regularly in a designated “coyote tree” so the coyotes can pick it up there without resorting to violence and thievery. It works. Jensen apologizes to the chickens before killing them and they’d willingly submit themselves up as offering.
Whenever he feels down, Jensen would go to a tree, sometimes crying, hug it, talk to it, and the tree would console him. It is not just interspecies communication he believes in. He is convinced that all living things speak, and the world itself speaks to us, and that we should listen to them.
As my wife respect rats in our home, Jensen likewise eschews the view that Man is the centre of creation or that we own the earth and can therefore do whatever we please with it—
“What if we stand the notion of ownership on its head? What if I do not own the barn, but instead it owns me, or better, we own each other? What if I do not view it as my right to kill mice simply because I can, and because a piece of paper tells me I own their habitation? What if, because their habitation is near my own, I am responsible for their well-being? What if I take care of them and their community as the grandfather ponderosa outside this window takes care of me, and as before that the stars soothed me? This relationship of mutual care doesn’t mean that none shall die, nor even that I won’t kill anything, nor eventually be killed; it simply means we will treat each other with respect, and that neither will unnecessarily shit where the other bathes. The bees, too, stand in my purview, and so it becomes my responsibility to make sure, to the best of my abilities, that they can sustain their community. The same can be said for the communities of wild roses, native grasses, trees, frogs, mosquitos, ants, flies, bluebirds, bumblebees, and magpies that, too, call this their home. We all share responsibility toward each other and toward the soil, which in truncates responsibility to each of us. What if all of life is not what we’ve been taught, a ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ competition to see who may own or kill the others before the others before the others can own or kill them? What if we don’t need to live our whole lives alone? What if life is a web of immeasurably complex and respectful relationships? What if the purpose—even the evolutionary purpose—is for each of us to take responsibility for all those around us, to respect their own deepest needs, to esteem and be esteemed by them, to feed and feed off them, to be sustained by their bodies and eventually to sustain them with our own?”
He grieves for what we have done, and are doing, to our fellow creatures and to our environment. He is apologetic that he could only talk about it when what is needed is concrete action, blowing up dams, for example, so salmon would not die:
“Change is coming. We are in the midst of it. Ecological system after system is collapsing around us, and we wander dazed through our days as though we have become in reality the automatons we so often strive to be.
“Often when I awaken I hear voices of those who will come after, and sometimes I see their faces. They speak to me of hunger, and ask, always, where are the salmon? They speak to me, too, of beauty, and ask again that same question. I have no answer for them. Sometimes I hand them a book or an article I’ve written. They read it, nod, smile sadly, and ask again about the fish. They do not care so much how deftly we rationalize our actions—and inactions—nor even how deeply we discuss the destruction. What they want, reasonably enough, is an intact and livable world. They ask what we have done to their home.
“They ask not only about salmon, but also about forests, bears, fisher, marten, lynx, cutthroat trout, bull trout, sturgeons. They ask about them all. And there is nothing I can do except hand them my book, and say I’m sorry.”
When the current pandemic started I had wondered if it is but planet earth’s way of survival, of defending itself. Halting major pollutants like motor vehicles, planes, ships and factories and killing some of us who all leave harmful carbon upon the environment during each of our lifetime. Jensen never thought of epidemics, maybe proving that mother earth is more resourceful than him, but he entertains a similar notion:
“I sometimes wonder if the other creatures on the planet are doing what they can to shut down the machine. Perhaps salmon are leaving not just because of dams, and not just because they do not like our unwillingness to participate in reciprocal relationships, and not because we make life intolerable for all others, but also to deprive us of calories; perhaps they are willing to give away their existence in order to stop civilization. Perhaps trees sometimes refuse to grow on clearcuts because they do not want to give their bodies to be used to enrich those in power. Perhaps Eskimo curlews—whose appetite for grasshoppers was legendary—left the planet so we would poison ourselves with pesticides. Perhaps the planet as a whole is now pushing us along in our own headlong rush to self-extinguishment, so that whatever creatures remain can at listened again breathe easily.
“Or perhaps the salmon and the trees are not acting merely physically but also symbolically, and perhaps then it becomes our task to ask them clearly and carefully what it is they are saying through their own deaths, what it is that they are dying to tell us. It becomes our task after that to listen to their stories, and to act upon what they have to say.”
Through the pandemic planet earth proved what once was just considered by many a fanciful theory: that we in all creation are all interconnected with each other. Now the rich, or those who have the means, are providing shelter for the homeless, feeding the hungry and taking care of the sick because it is now clear that their sickness and their death will also be the sickness and death of all the others. The distinction between the lucky “us” and the unfortunate “them,” at least at the moment, has disappeared. We take care of each other or we are all doomed together. We have learned, painfully but mercifully, the language that is older than words. It 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 Nolan 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 the 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 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.”
Jensen calls for a revolution. But of a different kind. It is a revolution—
“that does not emerge from the culture, from philosophy, from theory, from thought abstracted from sense, but instead from our bodies, and from the land. It, too, is a part of this language older than words. It is the honeybee who stings in defence of the larger being that is her hive; it is the mother grizzly who charges again and again the train that took from her the two sons she carried inside, and that mangled their bodies beyond all but motherly recognition; it is the woman who submits to her rapist, knowing it’s better to be violated than murdered, but who begins to fight when he reaches for the knife, or the hammer; it is Zapatista spokesperson Cecelia Rodriguez, who says, ‘I have a question of those men who raped me. Why did you not kill me? It was a mistake to spare my life. I will not shut up…this has not traumatized me to the point of paralysis.’ It is the indigenous Zapatistas, who declare, ‘There are those who resign themselves to being slaves…But there are those who do not resign themselves, there are those who decide to be uncomfortable, there are those who do not sell themselves, there are those who do not surrender themselves….There are those who decide to fight. In any place in the world, anytime, any man or woman rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes that resignation has woven for them and that cynicism has dyed grey. Any man, any woman, of whatever color in whatever tongue, says to himself, to herself, ‘Enough already!’ It is Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, murdered by the Nigerian government at the urging of Shell Oil, whose last words were, ‘Lord, take my soul but the struggle continues!’ It is the U’wa people of South America, a part of whose community committed mass suicide 400 years ago by walking off the a fourteen-hundred-foot cliff rather than submit to Spanish rule, and whose living members today vow to follow their ancestors if Occidental Petroleum and Shell move in to destroy their land. It is the U’wa woman who says, ‘I sing the traditional songs to my children. I teach them that everything is sacred and linked. How can I tell Shell and Oxy that to take the petrol is for us worse than killing your own mother? If you kill the Earth, then no one will live. I do not want to die. Nobody does.’ It is anyone who dares to think and speak for him-or herself. It is Nestor Makhno fighting for his Ukrainian homeland and for the autonomy of those who work the land, against the Germans, the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Bolsheviks again, the Whites again, and again the Bolsheviks. It is the men and women who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and it is those who rebelled at Treblinka. It is Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the temple. It is the women and men who lock themselves down in front of bulldozers. It is the Chipko movement in India, begun by women who clung tight to trees so the woodmen’s axes would bite into their own, and not the trees’, flesh. It is Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo. It is the salmon battering themselves against the concrete, using the only thing they have, their flesh, to try to break down which keeps them from their homes.
“It is not the attempt to seize power or the industrial ‘means of production,’ but it is actions based upon the instinctual drive to survive, and to live with dignity.
“This is not political theory. It is not philosophy. It is not religion. It is remembering what it is to be a human being—an animal. It is remembering what it means to love, and to be alive.
“It is to learn the power of the word NO. No more clearcuts. No more tutors on turtles. No more genocide. No more slavery, neither our own nor others.
“So long as we, or I, continue to discuss this in the abstract, we, or I, still have too much to lose. Presumably the mother grizzly did not find herself paralyzed by theoretical discussions of what is right or wrong, and presumably the same is true for the woman who takes the weapons from her attacker’s hands. If we only begin to feel in our bodies the immensity of what we are losing—intact ecosystems, hours sold for wages, childhoods lost to violence, women’s capacity to walk unafraid—we will know precisely what we need to do.
“Any revolution on the outside—any breaking down of current power structures—with no corresponding revolution in perceiving, being, and thinking, will merely further destruction, genocide, and ecocide. Any revolution on the inside—a revolution of the heart—which does not lead to a revolution on the outside plays just as false.
“Anton Chekhov once said that he would like to read a story about a man who squeezes every drop of slave’s blood from himself. That is first what we must do. For when a slave rebels without challenging the entire notion of slavery, we merely encounter a new boss. But if all the blood is painfully squeezed away, what emerges is a free man or woman, and not even death can stop those who are free.”
In this Year of the Rat we should all listen to what the rats and kindred creatures are saying.
March 2, 2019
This is one of the best, most heart-rending books I've read in my life. I read a copy from the library, and as soon as I'd finished it, I bought the book because I know it'll be one I go back to, if my heart can take it.
May 26, 2008
I don't think that I am capable of writing a review that does justice to the profound importance and shattering potency of this book. It is a devastatingly honest book that amazingly manages to be horrifying and hopeful at the same time. I urgently, desperately recommend this book to everyone, but I warn you, it is not an easy book to read.
--SPOILER WARNING (and the book is so damn good)--
Ostensibly, this book is about interspecies communication, but Jensen cuts very deep when he begins to illuminate what should be immediately obvious, that if animals could talk they would almost universally speak of generations of cruelty, genocide, and pain like a thousand Holocausts stretching back through the centuries.
Drawing on his childhood experiences of sexual and physical abuse, Jensen illustrates how our relationship with the rest of life on Earth is very much a relationship of domination and abuse. He then explores the psychology of abuse to explain how we, as abusers must deafen ourselves to the world around us in order to continue violating it.
Jensen doesn't take the easy way out by asserting that humans are tragically, irrevocably flawed, but he also doesn't presume to know "The Solution" to our problems. Rather, he argues that there is nothing we can all do to fix this. However we move forward, it must be with the painful and deliberate consciousness that we are perpetrators of the violent abuse of our fellow humans and the rest of life on this planet. From that point, we have to confront the social, economic, political, cultural, and ideological systems that facilitate the continuation of this violence with the urgency such an unspeakable crime demands. Since the front lines are everywhere, we must confront them everywhere, devising creative, unique, and powerful responses to them all. Piecemeal patchwork fixes will accomplish nothing. Recycling and energy efficient vehicles do not stop the abuse, they just put a smiley face on it.
--SPOILER WARNING (and the book is so damn good)--
Ostensibly, this book is about interspecies communication, but Jensen cuts very deep when he begins to illuminate what should be immediately obvious, that if animals could talk they would almost universally speak of generations of cruelty, genocide, and pain like a thousand Holocausts stretching back through the centuries.
Drawing on his childhood experiences of sexual and physical abuse, Jensen illustrates how our relationship with the rest of life on Earth is very much a relationship of domination and abuse. He then explores the psychology of abuse to explain how we, as abusers must deafen ourselves to the world around us in order to continue violating it.
Jensen doesn't take the easy way out by asserting that humans are tragically, irrevocably flawed, but he also doesn't presume to know "The Solution" to our problems. Rather, he argues that there is nothing we can all do to fix this. However we move forward, it must be with the painful and deliberate consciousness that we are perpetrators of the violent abuse of our fellow humans and the rest of life on this planet. From that point, we have to confront the social, economic, political, cultural, and ideological systems that facilitate the continuation of this violence with the urgency such an unspeakable crime demands. Since the front lines are everywhere, we must confront them everywhere, devising creative, unique, and powerful responses to them all. Piecemeal patchwork fixes will accomplish nothing. Recycling and energy efficient vehicles do not stop the abuse, they just put a smiley face on it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 6, 2014
This book is Jensen's unravelling of his abusive childhood and how it mirrors our culture. I am in agreement with Frances Moore Lappe's review of A Language Older than Words. She writes, ". . . Jensen has achieved the impossible: a book that is simultaneously horrifying and uplifting, terrifying and beautiful . . . " While painful to read, I found A Language Older than Words to also be soothing - the acknowledgment of the insanity of genocide, ecocide, rape, terror, greed, and torture in the name of production/power/religion/science that I intuitively feel as a deep loss with no words has helped me begin to formulate my own way of expressing that loss. I hope through my own expression that I can find a way to be effective toward positive change.
December 13, 2020
We live in a culture where we secretly believe if we do not acknowledge abuse, we hope without evidence that it will maybe just go away or not visit us much. If we try to believe it never happened, maybe it will stop. Francis Bacon gave away the game centuries ago, “My only wish is… to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds”. Promised? What a douchebag. The Rocky Mountain News once reported, “Cheyenne scalps are getting as thick now as toads in Egypt. Everybody has got one and is anxious to get another to send east.” Picture a meeting at the Denver Opera House where the question was “civilize” or “exterminate” natives? The room shouted louder than on a battlefield: “Exterminate them, exterminate them”. General Chivington, “hero” of Sand Creek, had no issue killing native women and even infants, after all, as Chivington frequently explained, “Nits make lice.” It’s the U.S. settler-colonial mindset, but it’s also “civilization”. Our British brethren in Australia were such sporting chaps: reports emerged of them burying aboriginal infants up to their necks, “then forcing parents to watch as contests were held to see who could kick the infant’s head the farthest.” It endlessly fascinates me that my American brethren would rather watch every totally fictional Saw movie made 10 times than read once about one of the 100% real Saw stories offered in the name of civilized white man. Every American should read in detail the last five actual hours of Sam Hose or Jesse Washington’s life. Instead, Derrick is right, we live in a culture of make believe. Saying it didn’t happen on my watch is the mark of a coward wanting the conversation to end. Make the people think only lone demented individuals apart from society, as in the Saw franchise, create sadistic scenarios and not civilization/society itself that writs large legions of wanton collective sadistic acts that if filmed would churn the stomach of the hardened movie goer.
The ripple effect: How does an incest victim tell someone they love them when they know their dad always said it to everyone after he beat them up? At the end of the Sand Creek Massacre a toddler stands up, and a soldier was reported saying “Let me try the son of a bitch. I can hit him.” Derrick’s historical accounts continue: Some travelling Christians had a hungry dog, they ripped a suckling infant from an Indian woman, et voila, a perfect meal for the dog - according to one sick wetiko culture based on necrophilia. Yes, that woman had to watch the devouring. How dare anyone mention these real stories! Or expose civilization so nakedly as Derrick Jensen and James C. Scott always do with such brilliance? I know the answer. Because they are both bad ass. Centuries ago, Henry Adams explained the media, “The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and setup for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved.”
There’s no way in the next twenty years to transition to a sustainable future. Question: If your landbase is permanently being despoiled and toxified over time, and is governed by capitalist economics that demands constant externalization of all costs onto the landbase, at what point might that erode your meaning of the word sustainable? The fall from grace in the Bible suggests to many anthropologists and historians to a “life of toil”. The great con in the transition to agriculture from pre-state requires your mark, your rube, the sucker, to buy into the new narrative. Here it is: The world is a competitive place. Attention: It’s obvious that when humans lived cooperatively both with each other and the land base for millennia it was sustainable. Just a few thousand years of believing the new narrative, the world is a competitive place, has brought us to the brink of extinction. Gosh, who knew overshooting your landbase, expanding century after century through endless acts of unwarranted sadistic violence might ever lead to a day of reckoning?
Let’s relax for a minute and enjoy the historical head of the non-Catholic church, the ever so holy Martin Luther discussing his recipe for Christian justice in writing: “I would have such venomous, syphilitic whores broken on the wheel and flayed…” In 799 C.E., the town of Salzburg approved the torture of witches. According to Derrick, “Millions of women were tortured and killed on the pretense that they were witches.” This culture always has a reason for even its worst crimes. It wasn’t blatant odious settler-colonialism for Hitler, it was Lebensraum. It wasn’t blatant odious settler-colonialism in the American West, it was Manifest Destiny. The worst crime admitted by this culture is wearing white after Labor Day, or asking when the mortally wounded U.S. POW Myth will revert to thin air (H. Bruce Franklin).
The Crusaders after Antioch, weren’t feeling particularly rapey so chroniclers stated that instead they did no harm when meeting non-Christian women “save that they ran their lances through their bellies.” I can picture a Christian Crusader saying to the women, “You’ll thank me one day for not also raping you. Oh sorry, got to stab you quick, in Bible class tonight we Christians be getting to hear the Sermon on the Mount for the first time and, Christ, I sure don’t want to be late for that!”
Our culture in a nutshell: “Any being that sparks economic interest is doomed.” Derrick writes so well, his books are an extraordinary act of love to every being which always goes to topics where most of us fear big time to travel. I don’t want to review 32 not-exactly cheery anti-civilization books in a row, but I need to if I want to better understand what is wrong with our culture/civilization/homo colossus lifestyle which began with agriculture. Auks lived with man sustainably for thousands of years, among the indigenous, but on June 3rd, 1844 three fisherman killed the last two auks and smashed the last Auk egg.” That is our culture. Their value is their death, it’s value is it’s death. Rinse and repeat. The U.S. turkeyshoot, a.k.a. the Highway of Death in Iraq exposed some very patriotic facts. Only 10% of the destroyed vehicles in one section were military, most were pickups with rugs, belongings and a pet cat. One driver of a bus of 57 civilians who survived said “people were running away and the planes followed them and strafed them with machine guns.” An international war crimes tribunal noted also in that war that “American troops used plows mounted on tanks to bury Iraqi soldiers alive in their trenches”. And this, “Americans intentionally bombed the Amariyah civilian bomb shelter, twice.” Merciful Jesus be praised, only 1,483 mostly women and children died who were hiding there from U.S. bombers. Fun circular fact: to assure funding the War on Terror creates more terrorists than it kills. Collateral Murder Video 2007, anyone? Talk about NOT winning hearts and minds. It’s not just the U.S., it’s the entire culture. If you can’t see something, you can’t stop it. Read the thousands of true historical accounts confirming the James C Scott/Daniel Quinn/Derrick Jensen “Takers versus Leavers” thesis and the writings of dozens of amazing unsung indigenous activists who knew it by living it. “There are those who listen and those who do not.” The only recipe for future humans involves living according to an insanely easy formula: ten parts NOT hurting your landbase mixed with one-part Golden Rule (socially enforced) to keep you from hurting others and their land base. Stir and add shared music and perhaps some righteous herb (with not too many stems) to season properly.
To add complexity to this amazing book, before the Maori arrived in New Zealand, Derrick was told there were two tribes, the Maoriori and Patipiahiti who were extreme pacifists. At the first sign of bloodshed, hostilities would always cease. The Maori invades, sizes up the situation and slaughters both tribes. Maori activists today fear doing things with others in rows (warrior style) and want to bring back the circle and bring back dancing for well-being, not competition. Their people are getting back to the concept of non-ownership of the “whenua” (earth/placenta). Christian missionaries came along and said that female energy was bad, but for Maori both female and male energies had to live in balance for harmony.
Derrick ends by saying, “Underlying the different forms of coercion is a unifying factor: silence.” I’ll go out on a limb and assume he means we shouldn’t be silent. Why not use the U.S. fascist trope “If you see something, say something” against the dominant culture? After all, BLM adopted it to mean look out for each other and Daniel Quinn told us it was our first chore after digesting his many anti-civ books. Learn to see it, then say it.
The ripple effect: How does an incest victim tell someone they love them when they know their dad always said it to everyone after he beat them up? At the end of the Sand Creek Massacre a toddler stands up, and a soldier was reported saying “Let me try the son of a bitch. I can hit him.” Derrick’s historical accounts continue: Some travelling Christians had a hungry dog, they ripped a suckling infant from an Indian woman, et voila, a perfect meal for the dog - according to one sick wetiko culture based on necrophilia. Yes, that woman had to watch the devouring. How dare anyone mention these real stories! Or expose civilization so nakedly as Derrick Jensen and James C. Scott always do with such brilliance? I know the answer. Because they are both bad ass. Centuries ago, Henry Adams explained the media, “The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and setup for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved.”
There’s no way in the next twenty years to transition to a sustainable future. Question: If your landbase is permanently being despoiled and toxified over time, and is governed by capitalist economics that demands constant externalization of all costs onto the landbase, at what point might that erode your meaning of the word sustainable? The fall from grace in the Bible suggests to many anthropologists and historians to a “life of toil”. The great con in the transition to agriculture from pre-state requires your mark, your rube, the sucker, to buy into the new narrative. Here it is: The world is a competitive place. Attention: It’s obvious that when humans lived cooperatively both with each other and the land base for millennia it was sustainable. Just a few thousand years of believing the new narrative, the world is a competitive place, has brought us to the brink of extinction. Gosh, who knew overshooting your landbase, expanding century after century through endless acts of unwarranted sadistic violence might ever lead to a day of reckoning?
Let’s relax for a minute and enjoy the historical head of the non-Catholic church, the ever so holy Martin Luther discussing his recipe for Christian justice in writing: “I would have such venomous, syphilitic whores broken on the wheel and flayed…” In 799 C.E., the town of Salzburg approved the torture of witches. According to Derrick, “Millions of women were tortured and killed on the pretense that they were witches.” This culture always has a reason for even its worst crimes. It wasn’t blatant odious settler-colonialism for Hitler, it was Lebensraum. It wasn’t blatant odious settler-colonialism in the American West, it was Manifest Destiny. The worst crime admitted by this culture is wearing white after Labor Day, or asking when the mortally wounded U.S. POW Myth will revert to thin air (H. Bruce Franklin).
The Crusaders after Antioch, weren’t feeling particularly rapey so chroniclers stated that instead they did no harm when meeting non-Christian women “save that they ran their lances through their bellies.” I can picture a Christian Crusader saying to the women, “You’ll thank me one day for not also raping you. Oh sorry, got to stab you quick, in Bible class tonight we Christians be getting to hear the Sermon on the Mount for the first time and, Christ, I sure don’t want to be late for that!”
Our culture in a nutshell: “Any being that sparks economic interest is doomed.” Derrick writes so well, his books are an extraordinary act of love to every being which always goes to topics where most of us fear big time to travel. I don’t want to review 32 not-exactly cheery anti-civilization books in a row, but I need to if I want to better understand what is wrong with our culture/civilization/homo colossus lifestyle which began with agriculture. Auks lived with man sustainably for thousands of years, among the indigenous, but on June 3rd, 1844 three fisherman killed the last two auks and smashed the last Auk egg.” That is our culture. Their value is their death, it’s value is it’s death. Rinse and repeat. The U.S. turkeyshoot, a.k.a. the Highway of Death in Iraq exposed some very patriotic facts. Only 10% of the destroyed vehicles in one section were military, most were pickups with rugs, belongings and a pet cat. One driver of a bus of 57 civilians who survived said “people were running away and the planes followed them and strafed them with machine guns.” An international war crimes tribunal noted also in that war that “American troops used plows mounted on tanks to bury Iraqi soldiers alive in their trenches”. And this, “Americans intentionally bombed the Amariyah civilian bomb shelter, twice.” Merciful Jesus be praised, only 1,483 mostly women and children died who were hiding there from U.S. bombers. Fun circular fact: to assure funding the War on Terror creates more terrorists than it kills. Collateral Murder Video 2007, anyone? Talk about NOT winning hearts and minds. It’s not just the U.S., it’s the entire culture. If you can’t see something, you can’t stop it. Read the thousands of true historical accounts confirming the James C Scott/Daniel Quinn/Derrick Jensen “Takers versus Leavers” thesis and the writings of dozens of amazing unsung indigenous activists who knew it by living it. “There are those who listen and those who do not.” The only recipe for future humans involves living according to an insanely easy formula: ten parts NOT hurting your landbase mixed with one-part Golden Rule (socially enforced) to keep you from hurting others and their land base. Stir and add shared music and perhaps some righteous herb (with not too many stems) to season properly.
To add complexity to this amazing book, before the Maori arrived in New Zealand, Derrick was told there were two tribes, the Maoriori and Patipiahiti who were extreme pacifists. At the first sign of bloodshed, hostilities would always cease. The Maori invades, sizes up the situation and slaughters both tribes. Maori activists today fear doing things with others in rows (warrior style) and want to bring back the circle and bring back dancing for well-being, not competition. Their people are getting back to the concept of non-ownership of the “whenua” (earth/placenta). Christian missionaries came along and said that female energy was bad, but for Maori both female and male energies had to live in balance for harmony.
Derrick ends by saying, “Underlying the different forms of coercion is a unifying factor: silence.” I’ll go out on a limb and assume he means we shouldn’t be silent. Why not use the U.S. fascist trope “If you see something, say something” against the dominant culture? After all, BLM adopted it to mean look out for each other and Daniel Quinn told us it was our first chore after digesting his many anti-civ books. Learn to see it, then say it.
November 2, 2007
I was given this book for Christmas. Sort of, anyway: my best friend's ex-girlfriend, with whom I'm still good friends (as is he), sent this to me and asked me to pass it along to him when I came over here to Italy now in March. In fact, the inscription in the front reads: "Dec. 2004 / John -- / Happy winter solstice! / Zach-- / Happy spring solstice!" I'm not sure who ultimately gets to keep it, though the odds favor him.
Anyway, when I read the description of this book, it sounded... a bit "out there," a bit out of the range of things that I normally select for myself to read. And yet, it wasn't so far out and, more importantly, it was a very compelling read. It's one part personal memoir of a man who was abused as a child and who has explored many modes of living and spends a good deal of time and energy on environmental issues as well as human-rights issues. At the same time, it's listed as "Philosophy of Nature" when it comes to classifying the book, and central to this are his ideas about the communication between humans and not only other animals but also plants and potentially even things that we normally consider to be inanimate. Accepting, rejecting, or taking his thesis with a grain of salt is ultimately immaterial to the value that can be found in this book as well as its readability.
Central to his interests are the way that--historically and continually--human being exploit and degrade one another. Whether this is in the form of Nazi prison camps, the torture and elimination of dissident groups in South America, or the displacement of indigenous groups still taking place in the modern world as multinational corporations manipulate politics to take what they want in the third world and exploit the people there in the name of progress. It's a book about what we do to the environment, what we do to each other, and ultimately what we do to ourselves. It's a book that explores the reality and the psychology of these things. And it's all told incredibly well. It's a book that draws from a fascinating range of disciplines and--regardless of the extent to which you ultimately agree or disagree with Jensen's conclusions--it's a valuable read just for the thoughts that it will provoke. His style is quite fluid, so it's a surprisingly quick read: a trans-Atlantic flight, train-ride, and some spare moments in an Italian city are all that you need to get through this book!
Anyway, when I read the description of this book, it sounded... a bit "out there," a bit out of the range of things that I normally select for myself to read. And yet, it wasn't so far out and, more importantly, it was a very compelling read. It's one part personal memoir of a man who was abused as a child and who has explored many modes of living and spends a good deal of time and energy on environmental issues as well as human-rights issues. At the same time, it's listed as "Philosophy of Nature" when it comes to classifying the book, and central to this are his ideas about the communication between humans and not only other animals but also plants and potentially even things that we normally consider to be inanimate. Accepting, rejecting, or taking his thesis with a grain of salt is ultimately immaterial to the value that can be found in this book as well as its readability.
Central to his interests are the way that--historically and continually--human being exploit and degrade one another. Whether this is in the form of Nazi prison camps, the torture and elimination of dissident groups in South America, or the displacement of indigenous groups still taking place in the modern world as multinational corporations manipulate politics to take what they want in the third world and exploit the people there in the name of progress. It's a book about what we do to the environment, what we do to each other, and ultimately what we do to ourselves. It's a book that explores the reality and the psychology of these things. And it's all told incredibly well. It's a book that draws from a fascinating range of disciplines and--regardless of the extent to which you ultimately agree or disagree with Jensen's conclusions--it's a valuable read just for the thoughts that it will provoke. His style is quite fluid, so it's a surprisingly quick read: a trans-Atlantic flight, train-ride, and some spare moments in an Italian city are all that you need to get through this book!
September 16, 2012
This was yet another excellent book by Derrick Jensen. The first Jensen book that I had the priviledge of reading was The Culture of Make Believe, and as soon as I finished it, I knew I had to read this one. Fortunately for me, I was able to get this book via Eastern Washington University's library (it is interesting that Mr. Jensen at one time taught classes at this university; unfortunately, I was not attending this school at the time that he was teaching, but what an incredible experience that would've been to be in his class!).
This book explored many topics in a somewhat non-linear fashion, and that is one of the things that I liked about it. Jensen explores interspecies communication (him communicating to coyotes, who also communicate with chickens and the ducks, trees and stars being able to communicate with humans, bacteria communicating with plants, etc.). This topic was so interesting to me and it made me look at animals and animal rights in a completely new light. Derrick also writes about trauma and exploitation, including examples of his own childhood abuse, and then linking that to the overall sickness of the culture we live in that promotes and facilitates abuse, violence, and destruction.
I highly recommend this book! It would be so beneficial if this was required reading of every high school or college student, think of what a tremendous difference it would make in people's lives.
This book explored many topics in a somewhat non-linear fashion, and that is one of the things that I liked about it. Jensen explores interspecies communication (him communicating to coyotes, who also communicate with chickens and the ducks, trees and stars being able to communicate with humans, bacteria communicating with plants, etc.). This topic was so interesting to me and it made me look at animals and animal rights in a completely new light. Derrick also writes about trauma and exploitation, including examples of his own childhood abuse, and then linking that to the overall sickness of the culture we live in that promotes and facilitates abuse, violence, and destruction.
I highly recommend this book! It would be so beneficial if this was required reading of every high school or college student, think of what a tremendous difference it would make in people's lives.
August 1, 2009
What I learned from this book:
I learned more than I'd like to about Jensen's abuse as a child and how he dealt with a terrifying inescapable situation, building psychological barriers in the interest of immediate survival. I learned of his personal transformation from voting for Reagan and a future of gainful employment to a rejection of wage slavery and dedication to environmental activism. Most importantly, I learned that ubiquitous atrocity and destruction on all levels will only stop when we begin to truly listen--that is, to become present to the pain of personal and collective trauma and to hear the desires of those others and parts of ourselves who were silenced long ago. This would be an almost hopeless message given how thoroughly we have destroyed our formerly intact and livable world, if not for the author's own personal story of childhood trauma and recovery, which provided “an avenue of understanding into many of the culture's otherwise incomprehensible actions.” (p.183) Only those of us who also come to understand the macrocosm of trauma which leads to atrocity and begin listening to the voices of other cultures and species silenced by the incessant lies of destroyers stand a chance of acting on behalf of life and stopping the suicidal course of this culture.
8/1/2009
I learned more than I'd like to about Jensen's abuse as a child and how he dealt with a terrifying inescapable situation, building psychological barriers in the interest of immediate survival. I learned of his personal transformation from voting for Reagan and a future of gainful employment to a rejection of wage slavery and dedication to environmental activism. Most importantly, I learned that ubiquitous atrocity and destruction on all levels will only stop when we begin to truly listen--that is, to become present to the pain of personal and collective trauma and to hear the desires of those others and parts of ourselves who were silenced long ago. This would be an almost hopeless message given how thoroughly we have destroyed our formerly intact and livable world, if not for the author's own personal story of childhood trauma and recovery, which provided “an avenue of understanding into many of the culture's otherwise incomprehensible actions.” (p.183) Only those of us who also come to understand the macrocosm of trauma which leads to atrocity and begin listening to the voices of other cultures and species silenced by the incessant lies of destroyers stand a chance of acting on behalf of life and stopping the suicidal course of this culture.
8/1/2009
June 18, 2010
I read this book slowly and am glad that I did. Lots of things inspired some trains of thought that needed to go slowly themselves. Others may want to be prepared to make notes while reading it. I wish I'd made more. I do think it could have been more concise. Still! I want to share it with various people in my life though I think "As the World Burns" is a better introduction to reality for most (it was mine!) because it has pictures.
Some people get frustrated about Jensen because he goes on about the problems but isn't doling out solutions. They get exposed to all of this horrible shit that he is laying down and they want him to tell them how to fix it. They get frustrated that there aren't "sensible" actionable steps in his books. Nobody seems to have the balls to blow up any dams, I guess (me either). I think the frustration is really masking the realization that there isn't much we can do about the atrocities around us, not really. That's really hard to accept, even though its been true for awhile. Steinbeck wrote about it in 1939 (Grapes of Wrath (nobody to go face off with when its the bank taking the land).
Anyway, I think its a pretty important read. I hope more people read it.
Thanks to Neeshia for patiently loaning it to me for so long.
Some people get frustrated about Jensen because he goes on about the problems but isn't doling out solutions. They get exposed to all of this horrible shit that he is laying down and they want him to tell them how to fix it. They get frustrated that there aren't "sensible" actionable steps in his books. Nobody seems to have the balls to blow up any dams, I guess (me either). I think the frustration is really masking the realization that there isn't much we can do about the atrocities around us, not really. That's really hard to accept, even though its been true for awhile. Steinbeck wrote about it in 1939 (Grapes of Wrath (nobody to go face off with when its the bank taking the land).
Anyway, I think its a pretty important read. I hope more people read it.
Thanks to Neeshia for patiently loaning it to me for so long.
June 20, 2011
It's like i signed up for a course, and the materials just pop up in my environment as needed. You could call the course "Dynamics of Abuse". So i suffered some abuse as a child -- not seriously horrible, but bad enough -- and it affected me as an adult. Big whoop. Destroyed 2 marriages and lots of other damage too. Never enough to get me involved with the justice system, but bad enough. Somewhere along the line i made a decision to avoid justifying my abusiveness, and see if there's some way instead to stop doing that sort of thing. Thus, the need to read this book.
Caution -- reading this book will put you through all kinds of turmoil. The sincere reader will question every part of reality, religion, goodness, and culture. Well we definitely need to question our culture. Many people agree on that. No other book has ever done such a thorough job of tracing abusiveness throughout our entire culture. What i really love about this book is the solution it ultimately presents. It's unexpected, and very workable.
Caution -- reading this book will put you through all kinds of turmoil. The sincere reader will question every part of reality, religion, goodness, and culture. Well we definitely need to question our culture. Many people agree on that. No other book has ever done such a thorough job of tracing abusiveness throughout our entire culture. What i really love about this book is the solution it ultimately presents. It's unexpected, and very workable.
November 13, 2007
we've probably all heard the heaps of praise being composted upon derrick jensen. he's like an artist of words - the man can write. of all his (increasingly large) books, language is the finest i've found. i'd give it to everyone i know if i could afford to and if i could actually make them sit down and read it. so now's my chance: read it. buy it, absorb it (what else can you do?), and pass it along. i usually get shy around books that get articles written about them in green anarchy, but by the end of the first chapter i forgot all about the worries that i mightn't grasp it and sat mesmerised by jensen's writing and self-propelled honesty. language is like a reference book unto itself; and though i've since read three other jensen books language remains amazing. maybe i've over-hyped it now, but give it a shot and see if it isn't the most amazing book you'll read this year.
March 15, 2012
A Language Older Than Words is my favorite book by Derek Jensen. I've read many of his books, and while yes, he does repeat himself, I feel his repetitions are necessary. His message needs to be repeated millions of times because our culture repeats illusions upon illusions billions of times. His books break through the brainwashing. This book shows how abusers have similar tactics to abuse their victims as this culture does to abuse its inhabitants. It also compares the victims survival strategies in both situations - disturbingly similar. This book is so much more than that. There is a language older than words, but humans are convinced only humans are intelligent because they speak. Aren't there other ways to communicate?
Derek Jensen's books should be read by everyone, not just environmentalists.
Derek Jensen's books should be read by everyone, not just environmentalists.
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