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Title: A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen ISBN: 1-931498-55-5 Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company Pub. Date: March, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.69 (48 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Connection
Comment: This is one of the most profoundly moving books I've ever read. I absolutely encourage everyone to buy it and read it, over and over. Never before have I read words that so courageously challenge our assumptions about the way we live while simultaneously awakening a profoundly intimate connection with our souls. Jensen weaves a story of abuse, love, and impassioned relationship with family, friends, nature, culture, and self. The son of a wealthy attorney in western Montana, Derrick Jensen reveals heart-wrenching details of his own childhood, and uses these experiences as a springboard to talk about the culture at large. In a provocative weaving of his own experience, critical research, and folk stories, Jensen makes clear the relationship between the intimate atrocities of domestic violence and the larger atrocities of ecological destruction. Yet, he promises that when we begin to change our way of living, on both personal and cultural levels, we will find a whole world of connection waiting for us. It is a world of joy and pain and love and sorrow, but most deeply of all, connection. With masterful skill, awareness, and insight, Jensen's hard-hitting yet poetic writing style forces readers into an acute awareness-and deep experience--of the connected relationships between our personal lives and the world. This book is a guide for living and should be read by anyone interested in being alive.
Rating: 5
Summary: "Don't look at my finger. Look at the moon."
Comment: Deep-ecologist, Thomas Berry, says "the universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightning and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees--all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related" (p. 361). In his engaging book, Derrick Jensen encourages us to listen to those voices. Jensen is a familiar name to readers of The Sun magazine, where his interviews appear frequently. I first heard this LANGUAGE a year ago, when Jensen read excerpts from it in Tempe, Arizona. "There is a language older by far and deeper than words," he writes. "It is the language of the earth and it is the language of our bodies. It is the language of dreams, and of actions. It is the language of meaning, and of metaphor. This language is not safe" (p. 311). It is the language of "wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone, gesture, symbol, memory" (p. 2). And it is the language of interspecies communication.
Jensen's book belongs in the "life-changing books" section of the bookstore. It is as much a memoir as a "grenade rolled across the dance floor" (p. 108), encouraging us to wake up, pay attention, and listen (pp. 143; 248). This is not a "feel-good" bestseller. Rather, Jensen writes, it is "a cry of outrage, a lamentation, and at the same time a love story" (p. ix). As a victim of child abuse, Jensen digs deep into his personal experience to explore the silence and denial common to the world at large. "I wanted to write a memoir that moved beyond the microcosm of my personal experience," he explains, "to the macrocosm of the world in which we live" (p. ix). Why do we numb ourselves to our experiences, he wonders. Why do we deafen ourselves to other voices (p. viii)?
Through exploitation or annihilation, Jensen observes, our conscience and conscious awareness of relationship have been silenced by religion, science, politics, education, and violence, and we live by the maxim, "Thou shalt pretend there is nothing wrong" (p. 188). This book is about walking away from the "make-believe world" in which we "pretend all is well as we dissipate our lives in quiet desparation" (p. 6), and remembering "how to listen" (p. 7). "If we celebrate life with all its contradictions, embrace it, experience it, and ultimately live with it, there is a chance for a spiritual life filled not only with pain and untidiness, but also with joy, community, and creativity" (p. 142).
Jensen marches to the beat of his own drum, and the beat feels real. He shows that "wherever you put your foot, there is the path. You become the path" (pp. 150-51). We find the environmental activist in him wondering whether he "should write or blow up a dam" (p. 50), and pulling up surveyor's stakes (pp. 154-55). And we find him tending his chickens, dumpster diving for lettuce to feed them, conversing with coyotes, beekeeping, and shooing snakes off the road. He ponders, "what it does to each of us to spend the majority of our waking hours doing 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 . . . we are and what . . . we're doing" (p. 109).
This is a wise, old LANGUAGE that will speak to your soul, and then stay with you, reminding you "about the potential for life and love and happiness we each carry inside, but are too afraid to explore" (p. ix). I hope Jensen is working on another book in between his interviews for The Sun.
G. Merritt
Rating: 5
Summary: Five Stars Aren't Enough
Comment: _A Language Older Than Words_ is one of the best books I have ever read. Derrick Jensen is without a doubt my favorite author of all time, and I highly recommend all of his books.
_A Language Older Than Words_ is written in a unique style which blends Derrick Jensen's personal experiences, conversations with other authors and activists, critical cultural analysis, as well as historical and contemporary events and facts to back up his analysis.
If you are concerned with domestic violence, ecological destruction, how civilization is responsible for both, and where we should look for answers, then this is a book for you.
No other author has contributed more to the way I view the natural world, civilization, and this culture in particular than Derrick Jensen. I recommend all his books, but I think _A Language Older Than Words_ is probably the best of his books to start with.
_A Language Older Than Words_ is written in a very non-linear conversational style. What at first appears like unrelated tangents are masterfully woven into a complex vision of how the silencing of the natural world is related to the silencing of the oppressed and abused. Intertwined with those concepts are gut wrenching first hand accounts of both, as well as other attrocities in the culture at large. But while there is much that is dark, the book on a whole shows a hopeful path to reconnection with ourselves and the natural world.
I first read _A Language Older Than Words_ a few years ago, and I have continually lent my copy to friends, and recommended it to everyone I know. If there is any hope for humanity, and any hope that the natural world won't be completely decimated, I think some of the wisdom in this book will help guide the way.
The reason that I love this book the most is because it is intensely personal in the way that it is written, in the subjects that are discussed, and what the author reveals about himself. Derrick Jensen's cultural criticism and analysis is not some abstract intellectualized theory, but rather put together and put forth in a very down to earth and easy to grasp way. He pulls no punches, and is willing to go against cultural convention when necessary to speak what the pepetrators of abuse (domestic, ecological, economic, social, and political) would have us all remain silent about.
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Title: The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen ISBN: 1893956288 Publisher: Context Books Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Listening to the Land by Derrick Jensen ISBN: 1893956253 Publisher: Context Books Pub. Date: 12 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution by Derrick Jensen ISBN: 1931498482 Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company Pub. Date: April, 2004 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Dancing With Mosquitoes by Theo Grutter ISBN: 053312977X Publisher: Vantage Press Pub. Date: 15 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests (Politics of the Living) by Derrick Jensen, George Draffan ISBN: 1931498458 Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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