A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen Read Free Book Online Page B

from the pasta factory. But this time the duck I was going to kill, a beautiful, large, white Pekin, ran past me into the coop. At the time I put the birds in at night (I no longer do that), and they were generally loathe to enter it during the day.
    I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die.
    Retreating to my library, I thought about all that had happened, and I remembered something I'd read in Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men: "One of the central questions about predators and their prey is why one animal is killed and not another. Why is one chosen and another, seemingly in every way assuitable, ignored? No one knows."
    He continues, "The most beguiling moment in the hunt is the first moment of encounter. Wolves and prey may remain absolutely still while staring at each other. Immediately afterward, a moose may simply turn and walk away ... or the wolves may turn and run; or the wolves may charge and kill the animal in less than a minute. ... I think what transpires in those moments of staring is an exchange of information between predator and prey that either triggers a chase or defuses the hunt right there. I call this the conversation of death. ..."
    I checked outside, and the duck was still in the coop. I returned to the book, to read of wolves signaling prey, and prey signaling back: "The moose trots toward them and the wolves leave. The pronghorn throws up his white rump as a sign to follow. A wounded cow stands up to be seen. And the prey behave strangely. Caribou rarely use their antlers against the wolf. An ailing moose, who, as far as we know, could send wolves on their way simply by standing his ground, does what is most likely to draw an attack, what he is least capable of carrying off: he runs."
    Lopez calls this conversation "a ceremonial exchange, the flesh of the hunted in exchange for respect for its spirit. In this way both animals, not the predator alone, choose for the encounter to end in death. There is, at least, a sacred order in this. There is nobility."
    The duck was still hiding out in the coop. I would wait until he was ready.
    He never came out that afternoon, and I didn't shut him or any of the others in that night. The next morning I arose late. He was out and about. When he saw me he waddled back to the coop. I decided to go inside, too.
    While I ate breakfast I thought about death, and the conversation of death. This set off another series of associations that were broadly about violence, and the way in which so often we conflate violence and sex, especially in popular culture. Horror movies, for example, may seem prurient in that they frequently show a whole lot of unnecessary tits and ass, but the underlying message is violent. In these dime-a-dozen flicks, if two people have sex, you can usually count on one of them (most often the
    woman) buying it soon after, often in a fashion with strong phallic overtones. Because both sex and violence in these films are too often random, gratuitous, and devoid of deep emotional significance for the participants and the audience alike, the acts are desacralized, robbed of their inherent meaning.
    Not only horror movies follow this equation.
    Suddenly it occurred to me that the problem is not that sex mid violence are conflated in these films, and in the culture at large. In fact they share something: both are deeply relational in that they inherently create or magnify at least some degree of relatedness. I would say that the predator-prey relationship is even more fundamental, and in a sense even more intimate, than a sexual relationship. But by deafening ourselves to the emotional consequences of violence we have become confused by its relationship to sex. We have come to believe that violence equals aggression, and we have come to base our model of sexuality on our model of violence. This goes a long way toward