Derrick Jensen - A Language Older Than Words (2000)

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I wondered what it does to each of us to spend the majority of our waking hours doings things we'd rather not do, wishing we were outside or simply elsewhere, wishing we were reading, thinking, making love, fishing, sleeping, or simply having time to figure out who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing.

Derrick Jensen
The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings - as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture - but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time.

Derrick Jensen
I've since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years. It takes that long to sufficiently break a child's will. It is not easy to disconnect children's wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure.

Derrick Jensen
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... converting an act of aggression into an act of consensual sexuality.

Derrick Jensen
There can be no real peace when living with someone who has already declared war, no peace but capitulation. And even that, as we see around us, doesn't lead to further peace but to further degradation and exploitation. We're responsible for not only what we do but for what is in our power to stop. Before we can speak of peace, we have to speak honestly of stopping, by any and all means possible, those who have declared war on the world and on us. Those who destroy won't stop because we ask nicely. There is only one language that they understand, and everyone here knows what it is. Yet we don't speak of it openly.

Derrick Jensen
I remember staring at the computer screen—light green letters on dark—then at the clock, and finally at my outstretched fingers held a foot in front of my face. And then it dawned on me: selling the hours of my life was no different from selling my fingers one by one. We've only so many hours, so many fingers; when they're gone, they're gone for good.

Derrick Jensen
Violence, and evil, doesn't always come dressed in black, and it doesn't always look like Charles Manson. Nor does it always come to us as obvious and arrogant[...]. Often it comes to us with the simple plea to be reasonable.

Derrick Jensen
I sat at the computer at work, debugging. I was bored. It was afternoon. I was twenty-two. It was June. Along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, thunderheads move in almost every afternoon between May and early July. They materialize, darken the day, spit a few drops, open the sky with lightning, then disappear like so many dreams.

Derrick Jensen
I quit work two weeks later—having sold another eighty of my hours—and knew I could never again work a regular job.

Derrick Jensen
I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet.

Derrick Jensen
Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.

Derrick Jensen
All we want, whether we are honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?

Derrick Jensen
Jeanette [Armstrong, "a traditional Okanagan Indian"] said, 'Attitudes about the species communication are the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor.' She paused, then continued emphatically, 'It's not a metaphor. It's how the world is.'

Derrick Jensen
When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.

Derrick Jensen
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 it exists...

Derrick Jensen
I no longer see Descartes' statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture's narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body.

Derrick Jensen
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 believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.

Derrick Jensen