Strangechord

Fortunately, there is an even deeper sense in which we do care. Our bodies know what is right, if only we listen to them. Beneath the enculturation, beneath the addiction, beneath the psychopathology, our bodies remember that we are meant for something better than this, that we are not apart from our human and nonhuman communities, but a part of them, that what we allow to be done to our landbase (or our body) we allow to be done to ourselves. Our bodies remember a way of being not based on slavery - our own and others’ - but on mutual responsibility. Our bodies remember freedom. Our bodies remember that our intelligence is meant for something better than building monuments to death, that our intelligence is meant to help us connect to the rest of the world, to understand, communicate, relate. Our intelligence is meant, as are the particular intelligences of rivers and manatees and panthers and spiders and salmon and bumblebees, to help us realize and participate - play our part - in the beautiful and awesome symphony that is life.

There are many who will never be able to reach these memories, to accept them in a way that leads them away from their addiction to slavery, their addiction to civilization. That is a tragedy: personal, communal, biological, geological.

But there are others - many of them - who can and do remember the knowledge of bodies, and who are willing to do what is necessary to protect their bodies, their landbases, to stand in solidarity with salmon, grizzlies, redwoods, voles, owls, to work with these others - as humans have done forever outside the iron shackles of civilization - for the benefit of the larger community. And that is a beautiful and powerful and moral thing. It’s also really fun.

You should try it sometime.

- Derrick Jensen, interview in Green Anarchy, Summer 2004

Derrick Jensen is amazing. His ideas have influenced my thinking more than any writer in years (and that’s saying a lot with all of the reading I’ve done in college). He just started a reading club over on his web site. If you subscribe (only $10 for one month!), you gain access to download his entire new book that has yet to be published. It’s pretty damn close to final draft and is 1357 Word doc pages! The working title is Endgame: The Collapse of Civilization and the Rebirth of Community and it is a monumental piece of writing - grander even than The Culture of Make Believe or anything else he’s published so far.

I recently introduced a new co-worker of mine to Jensen’s work. She had been struggling with the novel she’s writing and so I recommended his Walking On Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution because it’s bursting with wisdom and inspiration from his personal experiences with writing and teaching. She devoured the book in less than a week, saying it was exactly what she needed to read to get “unstuck”. She came with me to the panel at Lewis & Clark College last week, and she’s now reading A Language Older Than Words. I can see her worldview turning upside down and a growing sense of aliveness take over; our recent conversations are really rich. I can’t recommend his books enough.