Wolf, Witch, Man, God
A Tribunal of Wolves
Photo by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen
There is a serpent coiling herself around my organs. I feel her twisting into knots around my lungs and stomach. Her impeccable strength tenses and releases in undulating ripples in absolute unison with my breath. I choke down a short, stifled inhale, causing my diaphragm to contract giving her a little more space to lace her muscles ever more tightly together, little by little, tighter, tighter. I become nauseated as she holds me in her intimate embrace. The muscles in my thighs, deprived of oxygen, ache from constriction. My heart becomes a clenched fist, my shoulders creep up and bow inward like the brittle limbs of a spider’s corpse, holding herself in death. My fingernails burrow themselves into my forearms, clinging to my body lest I be swept away by the tidal waves now causing me to rock rhythmically to and fro. I’m on the bedroom floor where my knees gave out and, unable to open them, my eyes begin to burn as my head starts pounding, threatening to crack open like a dam. The sobs cross over into grisly wailing, which begins to sound less and less human. I hear myself as though I am not of myself. No longer in control of my body, I am seized. There is nothing left I can do but surrender to the entity that has now wholly taken me and wait for it to tire of its assault. A thousand visions of horrors flood and torment me; a voice hisses hatred in my ears. I remain pressed to the floor on my knees, now folded in half as in prostration, my spine curled over my body, forehead to the floor in a protective posture. I cry and wail until I taste metal. I cannot breathe and yet I cannot stop. My retinas, my veins, my skin, my very bones, every last piece of me is in pain. I feel myself being ripped apart and think, surely this is the one that takes me.
But then something happens…a new texture. It’s not sharp. It’s not searing. No, it’s cold and wet and loving, and it’s searching for me there in the obliterating darkness.
It’s a nose.
A nose belonging to a predator.
Beren, my companion in mutualism, my more-than-consanguineal kin. My friend. I feel his nose seeking a trace of me; he knows I’m still in there somewhere. Through the ringing and the hissing, a powerful snort puffs into my ear dislodging the vicious voice from its perch. She flaps around like a harpy, agitated and squawking her curses, but her talons have lost their hold on me. My muscles relax just enough for me to reach an arm out for my rescuer and without opening my eyes my quivering fingers find his thick fur.
Beren has been my attachment point to this world on numerous occasions, like so many animals before him. However, never have I shared my life with a being who has been so profoundly attuned to me. His responsiveness to the subtle changes in my breathing and to the contraction of each one of my major muscles is like that of a dog trained from puppyhood to sense an oncoming seizure in their human companion. Beren has had no such training that I know of, and the picture I just painted was not of an epileptic seizure, but a meltdown.
I’m sure I will spend more time in the future exploring in writing the realm of meltdowns, but for now one needs only to know that the term is not quite adequate for what is really happening inside someone in the clutches of one. It is, in my experience, not a matter of an autistic person having a meltdown, but of being violently taken ahold of.
Triggers are usually manifold and successive, and in my case it is often a confluence of sensory, social, somatic, and event-based incitation which eventually causes the rupture.
The first cut, and the deepest, which set this particular meltdown into motion was the reading of a horrific event. One involving a wolf and a human.
There will be no graphic reporting of the details of this event out of respect for the wolf some are now naming Theia. One need only know the irrational malice held by so many around the world towards this species in order to fill in the blanks after a headline reading ‘Wyoming man publicly tortures wolf to death’.
To say I read of this event isn’t accurate. I did not sit passively taking abstractions in through my eyes as one reads ‘the news’. No. I could feel it, the presence that flooded into my body as magma fills and takes the shape of its subterranean chamber. I was host to this presence for a week in which a variety of other events and intrusions took place before it finally exploded to the surface and before my carnivore companion offered his guardianship. My companion whose living ancestors and kin are victim to the some of the most horrific acts of cruelty enacted by humans. My companion whose ancestors entered into a precarious experiment of sympoiesis1 with my human ancestors anywhere from 15,000 to 40,000 years ago. It was an experiment that likely provided the means to our very continuity as a species, and for better or worse, led to the current epoch we’ve baptized with the at once tragic and self-enshrining name, Anthropocene -the age of man.
The demonization of wolves is thoroughly documented, and exasperated advocates and scientists have spent countless hours trying to dispel these myths. Myths of modern wolves relentlessly decimating livestock, pets, and even human children. Myths of wolves hunting deer, elk, and caribou to the brink. Myths of wolves killing for sport(an ironic one coming from humans). Myths of wolves as ravening and depraved. Myths of wolves as signifiers of evil or the devil himself. I have nothing new to contribute to the persistent effort of allaying such myths. More and more evidence shows that having the facts, the data, and scientific evidence does little in the face of deeply entrenched sentiments and beliefs. As it turns out, facts are not the theriac for feelings. There’s a quippy little phrase credited to an American conservative commentator which says “facts don’t care about your feelings”, a phrase saturated in feeling if you ask me, but the inverse also holds; feelings don’t care about your facts. I’m more interested in burrowing a little deeper beyond the subsoil of myth and exploring the parent material of mythos.
There on my bedroom floor I was curled tightly into a ball. Beren, who has retained more attributes of his wolf lineage than most domestic dog breeds, continued standing over me, solemn and vigilant. My whole environment had reduced to him, who had become an oak tree to which I clung as the ecology of my inner world began to rapidly expand. Grief has an astonishing way of taking you through the looking glass, into a psychedelic wonderland of unstable dimensions and proportions. I was sure my body had reduced to the size of an acorn, and at the same time I felt myself swell from the inside as a host of beings, grieved and needing to be grieved, entered and pressed against the inner walls of my skin. One ghost invites another.
A strange thought comes to me frequently when I reflect on these instances: how in the throes of a meltdown, if I had been alive a few decades or centuries ago, I must fit an extreme image of Freud’s hysteria, or a more dangerous explanation still, a 17th century classic case of witchcraft, the ancestor of pathologized hysteria. Today I suppress and conceal meltdowns as best I can to avoid crushing shame and horrifying any human onlookers, but there was a time, and for many people that time is still the present day, when suppressing a meltdown was, and is, a matter of survival. To be caught slipping through the manicured hedges of order can be fatal.
A witch, whether accused or a self-identified modern practitioner, is a figure which disturbs a foundational myth upon which our modern human world was built. The myth of stable boundaries….
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