Thursday, December 26, 2013

from Derrick Jensen's 'Dreams'

Possession

The closest to being in control we will ever be is in that moment we realize that we're not. ~Brian Kessler

The fourth story involves a conversation with a friend.  She came over, asked, "Do you believe that those in power are possessed?"
"By greed, so their possessions actually possess them?"  I asked.
"No."
"By the economic and social system, so that, like Fredrick Winslow Taylor said, "In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first?"
"I don't understand what that has to do with possession."
"The system owns them.  They serve the system, even when it's killing them.  Even when it's killing the planet.  They are owned--possessed--by the system."
"I'm sure that's true, but that's not what I mean."
"Do you mean possession like in The Exorcist, with heads spinning, projectile vomiting, and all that?"
"Yes.  I mean, no."
Now it was my turn not to understand.
She said, "I don't mean Hollywood.  Hollywood lies about everything.  The Exorcist is to possession what The Day After Tomorrow is to global warming: spectacularized to the point of being bullshit.  By possession I mean one being inhabited by another, controlling or at least influencing the other's behavior.  Do you believe those in power are possessed in this way?"
"Absolutely."
She seemed a little surprised.
I told her I think it's very possible that possession is quite common, for better and for worse.  In my book Songs of the Dead I wrote about rabies, a virus passed from creature to creature by saliva.  Once the virus has entered someone's body, the virus makes its way to the spinal column and brain where it reproduces, then spreads to the salivary glands.  I went and got my book, read to her: "At that point symptoms diverge into two distinct classes.  In what's called 'dumb rabies,' the creature retreats steadily and quiety downhill, with some paralysis, to death.  in what's called 'furious rabies'...the creature begins to experience extreme excitement and is hit by painful muscle spasms, sometimes triggered by swallowing saliva or water.  Because of this the creature drools and learns to fear water--thus the frequent references to rabid creatures being hydrophobic...but there's more.  During that final furious phase, the creature may, without provocation, vigorously and viciously bite at anything: sticks, stones, grass, other animals.  This stage lasts only a few days before the creature enteres a coma and dies.  Once infected, death from the disease is almost invariable."
I looked up from my book.  "This leads to the questions: Who's in charge?  Who is actually doing the biting?  Is it the creature, or is it the virus?"
I continued reading, "The virus knows that if it is to survive the death of its host, it needs to find a new host, which means it needs to get [the creature]...to slobber on or bite someone.  Thus the painful spasms on swallowing and the excessive salivation, which combine to led to the drooling.  Thus the furious biting.
"In some ways central to this discussion is the question of whether you perceive the world as full of intelligence, and so do not hesitate at the possibility of viruses knowing, viruses choosing; or whether you believe viruses act entirey unthinkingly, mechanistically, and so at most you'll allow viruses not to know, but to 'know' that they need to find a new host.  But in some ways that question doesn't matter at all, because in either case the viruses cause [the creature]...to change his or her personality...
"The central point in R.D. Laing's extraordinary book The Politics of Experience was that most of us act in ways that make internal sense:  we act according to how we experience the world.  If, for example, I experience the world as full of wildly varied and exciting intelligences with whom I can enter into relationships I will act one way.  If I experience the world as unthinking, mechanistic, and compost of objects for me to use, I will act another.
"Clearly the virus changes its host's experience, at the very least by causing pain and hallucinations.
"Now here's the question...: As Old Yeller [to take the famous fictional account of someone's 'possession' by rabies] snarls and snaps at those he so recently protected, what is he thinking?  if I could ask in language he could understand, and if he could answer in a language that I, too, could understand, what would he say?  is he terrified at this awful pain, and is he, because of that pain, lashing out at everyone around him?  Is he confused?  Is he asking where this pain comes from?
"Or does he have his behavior fully rationalized?  Has he--or the virus--created belief systems to support this behavior?  Is he suddenly furious at the thousand insults large and small he has received from those who call themselves his masters?  Certainly throughout the movie the humans--especially his 'owner' Travis--have treated him as despicably as we would expect within this culture...Does he perceive himself as suddenly seeing things clearly, and as hating these others and all they stand for?
"Or is he delusional, snapping not at Travis standing in front of him, but instead protecting him as he did before and biting at the rabid wolf who gave him the disease?  Is he seeing phantoms dancing before him, just out of reach, so each time he lunges, it is at someone who is not there at all?
"Or maybe Old Yeller fights with every bit of his emotional strength to not lash out at the humans who are his whole world, these humans for whom he has already many times offered his life.  Maybe he feels like he has picked up some sort of addiction, a compulsion, and he just can't help himself.
"Or maybe the virus has insinuated itself into his brain in such a way that Old Yeller now perceives the virus as God.  He hears its commands, and knows he must obey.  maybe this God tells him that he must convert these others to this one true religion, and that in doing so both he and they will achieve everlasting peace and joy--and a release from the torment of this world.  Maybe he perceives himself as thus giving these others a gift.
"We act according to the way we experience the world.  The virus changed Old Yeller's experience of the world.  When Old Yeller acts--or when any of us act--who's in charge?  Who actually makes the decisions?  Why does Old Yeller act as he does?  Why do any of us act as we do?"
I looked at her.  She looked at me.
I said, "This is not uncommon.  In that book I also wrote about lancet liver flukes, who are parasites with three hosts: snails, ants and sheep or cows.  Snails eat shit, which contain fluke eggs.  The flukes develop, emerge in snail slime.  Ants eat this snail slime, and thus flukes.  Now how do flukes get to a place where they get themselves ingested by cows or sheep?  By taking over the ant's brain.  As I wrote, 'The larvae continue their development in the ant's gut, then chew their way out through the ant's exoskeleton.  Because the flukes don't yet want the ant dead, once they're out, they patch up the holes in the ant and cling to the ant's outside.  That is, all but one of them cling there.  One fluke is chosen instead to chew into the ant's brain, where it actually takes over the ant's movement and control of the ant's mandibles.  Come sundown, this fluke guides--convinces?--the ant to climb to the top of a piece of grass and to bite down hard, then cling there, waiting for the third host, a sheep or cow.  If no ungulates shows up that night, the ant climbs down in the morning to resume its normal life, until the next night, when the fluke once again takes the reins and sends the ant back up a blade of grass.  When an ungulate eats the grass to which [to whom, actually] the ant is clinging, it accidentally eats the ant, and therefore all the liver flukes.  The flukes--eventually there can be as many as 50,000 in a mature sheep--make their way to the cow's or sheep's liver by way of the bile ducts, and within a few months begin laying eggs of their own.  The eggs are deposited on the ground in the creature's feces, where they are eaten by snails and the whole story starts over.'
Now she was staring.
I continued reading: "And of course there is single-celled parasite Toxoplasma gondii.  These creatures normally cycle back and forth between rats and cats, as rats eat infected cat feces, and cats eat infected rats. 








Friday, December 13, 2013

The Play

You said the play
  showed Icarus wings
  made of copper by the hands
  of his father to fly his angel/
  son over the sadness of soil
  blown dry and dying over the United
  States.  What year by reckoning?
  Twenty-one hundred summers after
  that one grape was crushed on the cross?

The actor said you could tell no more
of human history than the dirty jokes left by
the greeks, the roman war stories or
the grain yields of the curve of land
between two main rivers.  I say
ask the trees to tell you of loss,
how they missed the kinship of humans,
how many friends they no longer hear
and how they yearn for their dear ones to call their name.

~for krc