boy in the box
Hey All,
Since the work i've been doing--editing on interviews that will go into the book about my mom's death, after the interview subjects give their okay to the edited version--hasn't been providing you with any new material lately, here is the beginning of The Boy in the Box, which I think is one of my best books, and this is one of my best beginnings to a book. I finished the book last year, but there are problems in the middle of it, so it needs to be edited. So the start of the book is below. the whole book is in the reading club.
There haven't been many bears around the last few days. There were 8 several days ago, but only 4 each the last two nights, and even them not for every long. I think that's because it's the end of may and early june, when, as Alfred, Lord Bearyson might have put it, a young bear's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. so I'll see fewer for the next month, with the ones I'm still seeing being mainly younger ones. Right now I can feel the shakes through the floor as two or more are roughhousing out there.
thank you,
Derrick
The Boy in the Box
By
Derrick Jensen
Part I: Violation
From the Latin word vulnerare, “to wound,” vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens to overwhelm our capacity to function. The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpless child’s prime defense mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale
dulling of emotional awareness.
Gabor Maté[1]
Chapter 1
Boxes
The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.
Susan Griffin[2]
The capacity for dissociation enables the young child to exercise their innate life-sustaining need for attachment in spite of the fact that principal attachment figures are also principal abusers.
Warwick Middleton[3]
When I was a child, my father was extremely violent. He broke my sister’s arm. My brother has epilepsy from blows to the head. He raped my mother, my sister, and me.
None of us survived.
Oh, we continued to breathe (sometimes—and you know the times—as shallowly as possible, so we could move as little as possible, so we could be as unnoticed and unnoticeable as possible); continued (sometimes) to sit bolt upright, unmoving except for wide unblinking eyes that jumped to any movement; continued to eat (like the time my father leapt over the dinner table to get at my brother, and I continued to (try to) eat because that’s what you do at the table, and because I didn’t want to be noticed).
But did we survive?
I don’t know, because I don’t know who we would have been without my father’s teachings.
But I know one thing: we each in our own way learned to persist. We learned to be mules, to be impervious to whatever happened. Oh, we’d break, and we’d plead, and we’d cry, and we’d run, but somewhere inside each of us stood a mule who could and would take every blow and not give an inch. Or put another way, inside each of us was a box into which we could climb, where we could not be touched.
Like I said, none of us survived.
#
I don’t know what was inside my sibling’s boxes. I’ve never asked. Inside of mine were stars, and the irrigation ditch behind the house, and the meadows beyond that, full of meadowlarks, garter snakes, cottonwoods, grasses, grasshoppers, and ants.
The boxes of some people are full of music. Others are full of words, stories, books. Some are full of paintings. Some are full of beautiful places. Some are full of pets or other animals.
Here’s what I learned about boxes as a child. The box must be strong enough to withstand any amount of battering, yet small and light enough to be with you always. It must be constructed such that you can dive inside almost instantaneously, faster than a slap, certainly faster than a door quietly opening and shutting in the dark. And you need to train yourself to be able to find that entrance to the box no matter what else is going on. You need to be able to move instantly from deep sleep (wait, sleep can be deep? Who knew?) and dive into the box with no discernable transition from sleeping to waking. You need to be able to get into the box while you’re running and dodging. You need to be able to get into the box while sitting on the couch watching someone else get beaten, get into the box without moving a muscle.
The box is transparent, and permeable, so that at every moment you can see and hear and feel everything—and I mean every slightest hint of movement, every slightest change in musculature that might indicate a change in mood—that goes on outside the box. Your life depends on this. At the same time, the box must be completely opaque and impermeable, such that you’re able to protect yourself from even the slightest awareness of what’s happening to everyone—including yourself—outside the box. Your life depends on this as well. The box must simultaneously allow you to perceive everything and to be aware of nothing.
#
The box exists, of course, as a sanctuary. Its most important feature—and in fact its reason for existence—is to provide some place, some thought, some relationship, that the perpetrator cannot destroy. Which of course makes the perpetrator try all the harder to get into the box, or to destroy the contents of the box.
It must be resilient enough to withstand when the perpetrator attempts to find what you love, and use your beloved against you, or destroy your beloved. Your pet. Your art. Your place. Whatever it is you hold in your box, whatever it is that keeps whatever parts of you it can alive.
I loved playing baseball as a child. I’d spend hours throwing a ball against the side of a building. My father once offered to play catch with me. I was thrilled, until he hit me in the face with a ball hard enough to send me to the hospital. That was the summer I quit playing organized baseball.
So the box must be strong enough to not allow thrown baseballs through. It must be strong enough to withstand punches, kicks. It must withstand the thrusting of hips, the throwing of elbows (accidental or otherwise). It must be sealed tightly enough against sound to not allow through “moronic, lazy, ignorant, unreliable, deadweight.”
#
For decades I made excuses for the baseball incident. I thought perhaps it had been an accident. That excuse crumbled one day in my twenties when I was warming up for a softball game. A player on my team was playing catch with his son, who was the age I was when I quit baseball. My teammate threw the ball to his son, so softly that if the son would have put down his glove and let the ball hit him in the cheekbone, it would have caused no pain.
This possibility—that you should never as a child have a ball thrown at you hard enough to send you to the hospital—had never occurred to me.
#
We must at all times perceive everything and be aware of nothing.
#
I’m not going to try to convince you that the song of a meadowlark is the most beautiful sound in the world. If you’ve heard it, you already know it is.
I could, of course, say the same about the chrring of red-winged blackbirds. Or the song of western toads. The ringing calls of grasshoppers. Each is the most beautiful sound in the world.
Or perhaps it’s that particular dense, almost wet, silence of a heavy snowfall.
Is there anything more beautiful than stars on a dry, cloudless night? Or how about moonlight making shadows of cottonwood limbs? And during the day, have you ever paid attention to the flying rainbows that are grasshoppers?
How about the smell of honey locust blossoms? Or the rich, delicious smell of soil. Or barns. I love that comforting smell of old wood, hay, horses, cows. The smell of rain on a hot summer day. The smell of my grandmother’s and later my mother’s cinnamon rolls.
The taste of water when you’re thirsty.
The feeling of running as fast as you can, a friend matching you stride for stride. You glance at him, share a quick grin, and both of you find it in yourselves to run faster, and faster still, each still matching the other, feet no longer touching the ground.
All of these and more, all of these were in my box.
#
Or maybe none of these were in my box. How would I know? I wasn’t there. That’s the point of the box.
I can talk all I want about meadowlarks and cinnamon rolls, but the truth is that my box was full of dread.
The primary feeling from my childhood was not terror, but rather dread. The beatings and the rapes did not directly occupy most of our time. Most of our time was spent probably not that differently than any other children or youths: playing, reading, doing chores. Only with shoulders pinched up to our ears and a hollowness behind our eyes. In fact when our father wasn’t home things could almost feel what we guessed was normal. He’d arrive, and the ceiling would drop from its regular height to five feet, then four, then three, and keep dropping till we were all crushed between floor and ceiling.
Dread. The hollowed-out knowledge that what you fear most will come to pass, combined with the brittle hope that if you can act just so—in ways incommensurate with the real threat—you can prevent the inevitable. If you can clean the dishes spotlessly enough, if you can sit unmoving enough, if you can be quiet or good or invisible or smart or stupid or enthusiastic or indifferent or happy or sad enough, if you can in some way placate whatever implacable anger is thrown at you, the dreadful may not happen.
And when the dreadful, which has already happened, and will continue to happen, happens, as it always does—or rather as it does often enough to make you certain it will happen again, and infrequently enough to keep alive your false hope it will not happen again—then that is when you go back into the box.
No, that’s not true. If you’re outside the box when the dreadful happens, your box has failed you, and you have failed you. You must go into the box each time before the dreadful happens, even if this means you must go into the box instantaneously, even if this means you must go back in time to before the dreadful and then completely erase everything that happened before you got in the box, even if this means you must completely erase great swaths of your life. Because no one can survive the dreadful. No one.
It’s only after, when whatever happened outside the box is for now finished (did something happen? I don’t remember. All I remember is a box (and I don’t remember even that)) that the box, this box filled with dread, fills instead with stars, and the songs of meadowlarks, the chuckling of toads. It is then that the world does what it does, and helps us survive what we all know in our tightly wrapped hearts is unsurvivable, helps remind us that the world is more than the sum of our abuse, that it’s not the world but the perpetrator who perpetrates, that these perpetrations are neither natural nor inevitable nor all that is. That is when the box fulfills its most important role—perhaps even more important than protecting some part of us from the blows that hammer down on some other part of us—which is to remind us that the perpetrator does not control everything, that there are other ways to be, and that we can and must and will hang on to these other ways, and that we can and must and will find ways to live through and beyond them.
[1] Maté, Gabor, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Vintage Canada, Toronto, 2009, p 31-32.
[2] Griffin, Susan, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, Knopf Doubleday, New York,1993, p 200.
[3] Middleton, Warwick et al, “The abused and the abuser: Victim-perpetrator dynamics,” Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, Volume 18, 2017, Issue 3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15299732.2017.1295373
Site accessed 4/18/2023.