in the realm of the everlasting

Notes on killing and not killing.

By Sallie Tisdale '83

Several years ago, I learned how it felt to kill a man, and I learned that I liked it.

He didn’t really die, but in a way that counts, I killed him. I found in myself the will to kill, and I never quite forget that it is there. I learned this in a self-defense class — an impolite workshop designed to teach women how to fight dirty — how to knock someone down, knock them out, how to kill if need required. The first lesson was screaming — screaming for help, screaming to surprise, for the vast upwelling of power one’s own voice invokes. This was hard; we had all been taught long before not to raise our voices. We practiced, laughing, and then, more seriously, until we could do it.

The second lesson was how to escape. This was a little easier; we all had a little experience at being slippery in difficult moments, and escape was less frightening than screaming. I was reassured to be told that escape is the best way to win a fight.

Only then did we learn to hit back. Hour after hour, day after day, we took turns being attacked: cheered on by the rest of us, one woman at a time fought back against our attacker. He was a tall man dressed in thick padding, with his face hidden behind a blank screened helmet. He never spoke; we never knew his name. He silently stalked us across the floor, grabbing us in long, strong arms like every masked intruder we had ever feared, and we had to get away from him, and then we had to fight back and survive.

I had found it surprisingly hard to scream, but I found it much harder to hit — to really punch and kick another person as hard as I could, gouging at eyes and throat, groin and knee. I was, in fact, afraid to hurt him, this monster of my dreams. But with practice, I found out how deep was my fear, and how intimate fear is with rage. When we finally began to scream, the walls shook. And when we started to hit, we knocked him down: a petite fifteen-year-old, a chubby grandmother, all of us. I slammed my fists into his face and he fell down, and I felt exultant joy.

For our final examination, we had to begin from a hopeless position and end by striking a killing blow. My final test began when I lay on the floor, with the attacker lying on top of me, his whole weight pinning me down, as though

I had awakened to this nightmare in my own bed, alone. I was breathless, scared; in all its false ritual, this was the real thing. This happened to women every day. At the signal, I fought, and I was fighting for my life. I screamed and hit and the other women’s cheers faded away, and finally I knocked him off, but I didn’t run. I stood atop him, kicking. Then I stomped on his throat, hard and calculating and vicious, a death blow. And then I did it again.

I was carefully lifting my foot once more when the instructor pulled me away.

“He’s dead,” she said. “You can stop.”

That was several years ago; I’ve remembered the lessons of self-defense, but this last is the one I remember best of all. I had known as a parent that I had feral power hidden away, that to defend my children I would be capable of many things. But I had only felt this; my life has been sheltered and safe compared to many. A number of the women in my class were survivors of rapes and violent assaults — violence only theoretical to me. I was tired of my anxiety in parking lots and city streets. I just wanted to know what to do, for myself and my children, if I ever had to — and instead I found out what I could do, even when I didn’t have to do anything at all.

I’ve been a Buddhist for 17 years. A lot of people think of Buddhism as a passive religion, a kind of ultimately non-violent withdrawal. In fact, Buddhism is intensely pragmatic and by no means pacifistic. But Buddhists do share with all major religions a precept against causing harm: it is usually worded simply as “do not kill.” What that means, how to do that, is the study of a lifetime. Whatever meaning we seize upon in those words, something else will take away.

I believe there are two realities, entwined like warp and weft so intricately they are a single word. In the first reality, a world of multiplicity, I am I and you are you and we have trouble agreeing on the simplest things. In the second reality, we are one thing, born from a single substance and living a single life like cells in a body. Call it connection, non-separation; call it divinity. In this reality, no life can be truly destroyed. “I” cannot kill “you” because you and I are not separate beings. To hurt you is to hurt myself. When we see from this view, we are filled with repentance for every harsh word ever spoken.

But we spend most of our time in another place, in a place of relative nearness and distance, a place of gaps and blankness. In this world, I can kill you quite easily; all I have to do is pull a trigger. Just to live means to kill, and this is not a metaphor — our bodies are destroying and digesting other bodies all the time. We smash insects as we walk; we write letters on the shorn bodies of trees and live on sterilized ground. I am a killer every day, by nature, and so are you.

When one first grapples with this fact, the world can turn inside out. I was seven when I suddenly realized that the “chicken” I ate at dinner was the same as the “chickens” that I liked to feed. One can react to this understanding with fervor or with paralysis. At seven, I chose fervor, and became an obnoxious vegetarian for many years. Much later, when I realized that I couldn’t take a breath or a step without killing something — that in fact I could kill a man and be glad of it — I was paralyzed.

Of all religious practices, that of the Jains most bluntly confronts this essential shame to human life. Jains are taught to care for nothing; they strive to own nothing and desire nothing — not even death. Most of all, they strive never to harm anything. They believe that life is tainted by the shame of decay and killing and that our only purpose must be to cleanse life. The surest way to cleanse is a repentant, courageous asceticism that has endured for thousands of years.

Many Jains shelter and feed sick animals; others sweep the road gently as they walk in order not to step on any living thing. Some sleep on the nests of insects in order to feed the tiny creatures. Jain ascetics starve themselves, sit in sewage, and crawl naked through sharp rocks in order to free themselves of passion and desire. They veil their mouths so as not to disturb the molecules of air. They try not to wipe the sweat on their brows, because to do so would disturb the molecules of water. To see the world this way is to see an infinite web of error. A Jain is most at one with his beliefs when he does not move at all.

On the other side, though, we find only another trap — the one of complacent resignation. If I am a killer by nature, if I can’t help but kill, then I might as well live without worrying too much about it. I might as well eat steak.

I have at times felt my life swing like a long and heavy pendulum through these sharp arcs. But even big pendulums return to the middle with time. There, in the middle, knowing what damage I can and will do, trying to do as little as I can, compromising at times, holdings fast at other times, repenting and amending with regularity, forgetting and ignoring again and again, trying not to forget to be grateful, to remember joy — there is the ambiguous and wealthy place of daily life. There the circle of my world slowly expands, slowly opens wider, admitting one thing, one being, after the other — beings that have until now been too far away or strange to protect.

“I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk,” wrote the poet Robinson Jeffers, who looked a bit like a hawk himself. This is a sentiment many of us can understand. Hawks are deadly, but they seem magnificent and pure when one stands in the midst of messy affairs. The whole of the natural world, no matter how brutal, seems somehow spare and clean compared to what people can do to each other without seeing each other’s faces.

After one of the bloody battles of the Napoleonic Wars, Jane Austen wrote, “How horrible it is to have so many people killed!” The circle widens; we take in even strangers. Then she added: “And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!” It is Jane’s self-conscious irony, perhaps, but like all her irony, too close for comfort. We’ve all known the grace of that simple relief.

The circle widens — or it narrows. If we simply don’t believe we are divine beings, we are capable of terrible things. If all the world is just this place, this hard-scrabble world of one up and one down and suckers born every minute and predators on every corner, terror is the flavor of the world — given or received, take your choice. Sometimes I, me, mine is demarcated in clear and uncompromising ways: my family, my people, my nation, my church. And then all else is just not-me. Not mine.

During the Crusades, which may seem very long ago but are not really very far away at all, Pope Innocent III was trying to stamp out the Catharists. The town of Beziers was besieged by a force led by barons from the north of France; there were heretics inside the town, hidden among the innocent populace. The chief of the besiegers ordered his men to invade the town and kill the people there — all the people. His men are said to have complained. They were Catholics. But they did; eventually they massacred everyone. A German monk on the scene supposedly recorded the leader’s order thus: Neca ecos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet. “Kill them all. God will know his own.”

This was the Albigensian Crusade, in the year 1209 — so long ago. Surely such a thing could never happen again? Surely we would not separate the world again into God’s and not God’s?

Most of us aren’t besiegers. We aren’t generals. We are soldiers getting orders, citizens listening to our leaders. We are aides-de-camp. We, like those before us, can silently turn away, ignore, shun. The United States maintains Death Rows populated in the hundreds, institutional factories of rite and rule. On Death Row, the prisoners cannot be touched. (That is, not with love: they are often touched with force.) These people, who have strayed far from life’s source, are denied any other chance to feel it. They can’t be hugged, kissed, soothed. They are beyond the pale; invisible. They are there to suffer; they are there to die. And their punishment begins with this — that they are still breathing, they are treated as dead.

This is never just a matter of war, this cutting off of life. I mean my neighbor, who is sick and unpleasant, from whom I hide. I mean my great-aunt, who lives alone and has not had a letter from me in many months. I mean people dying alone in cold rooms, under bridges and in doorways, without witnesses. I mean closing the door, our minds, our hearts.

This is not about war, but heaven knows there are lessons there. When I don’t like this word, this killing, when I want to soothe my ruffled self-concern and find a kinder phrase, I remember that the Nazis had rules for words. The collaborators who supported the Holocaust were thousands of ordinary people; they weren’t genocidal maniacs, they weren’t murderers. They were secretaries and drivers and cooks. The Party leadership was concerned that they would not be able to function as well if they were forced to see too bluntly the facts of their work and so the Party used code — “what in ordinary language would be called a lie,” wrote Hannah Arendt. They spoke of the ‘final solution,’ ‘evacuation,’ ‘special treatment,’ never of killing. “For whatever other reasons the language rules may have been devised, they proved of enormous help in the maintenance of order and sanity,” adds Arendt.

Today we speak of collateral damage. When the bombs hits a hospital, a school, the generals apologize for an accident; a politician bemoans the result of bad intelligence. And the people at the desks and in the airplanes can later say, we were only taking orders. We didn’t know. If we are honest with ourselves, you and me, we might admit we were distracted, too. We were busy, and read the newspaper with only half our mind. If we see through the code, we might feel regret, or sorrow at such necessity, or a distant, tinny anger. But then we move on.

Adolph Eichmann himself often protested that he was not a military man, not a soldier, but was in fact rather squeamish. “I am not so tough as to be able to endure something of this sort without any reaction,” he wrote in a fussy protest after seeing the gas chambers being built at Treblinka. His problem wasn’t the killing; his problem was being presented so plainly with it, with bare facts. He said more than once that duty was his driving aim, and that he was proud that he did his duty in spite of his delicate nature.

So long ago, so far away? We do our duty, too. I do it every day; my life, like yours, benefits from death. Sweatshops. Factory farms. Toxic waste dumps. More collateral damage. We are all complicit; most of us, like Adolph, are a bit squeamish.

“Do not kill,” reads the precept of not causing harm. In my sect of Buddhism, there is a commentary attached, that reads in part, “In the realm of the everlasting Dharma, holding no thought of killing is keeping this Precept.” It isn’t enough not to kill — I am taught to have no thought of it, never even a thought of me, not-me. Impossible — how to begin? Where to begin? No thought? I can think of so many ways to kill that I stand stock-still in the middle of the room, afraid to move again. I kill with angry words, sarcasm, inattention. I kill time — I kill possibility. I kill my talent, frittering it away or selling it cheap. I kill myself whenever I am afraid to take a risk. I kill when I take the easy way out.

I begin with these little deaths, which are in a way the most important ones. I begin with the endless ways I act as though I was the only one who belonged to God. I begin with admitting that I am only part of something. I begin by being ashamed.

Then I have to let go of shame as well.

If in fact everything we do causes harm in some way, if we can’t even breathe without hurting something, then all we can do is pay attention. Pay attention to life around us, to our recklessness, our self-absorption, our greed. Pay attention to what’s inside, to our intent, our desire. To kill with your eyes open isn’t a matter of anger, but of fear. You have to be afraid of the world to break the world into pieces. You have to believe that some things are sacred, and others profane, and that it is up to you to decide. Not killing means loving it all, without reserve.

I think that it is not the killing, or the not-killing, that makes the biggest difference. It is how we go on with our lives, knowing this truth — going on with regrets, going on with sorrow, going on with joy. Then we can take care of life. I try to notice what I eat, and where it came from. I watch my quick temper, notice (if I can’t control them, and often I can’t) my petty thoughts. I try to pay attention when someone talks to me, not bang the dishes around when I’m annoyed.

I try to say I am sorry when I make a mistake, and oh, that can be hard.

An old, oft-told tale: The prime minister is visiting with his teacher. He thinks he is doing well with his practice of letting go of ego. So one day he casually asks his teacher, “What is egotism?”

The teacher sneers at the prime minister and says, “What kind of stupid question is that?” The prime minister is very upset; he is ashamed and hides his face.

“That, my friend, is egotism,” adds the teacher.

This is the really big death, of course — that self-concern. Killing the ego: letting go of opinions, being right, being certain. This is divine life — to move with grace and evenness, to stop asserting my own damnably solid ideas of how things ought to be.

The odd thing is, doing these little things to cherish others makes the bigger acts of violence much more difficult. Not impossible, of course —not by any means. Easy enough to make mine, not-mine — God’s, not God’s, while picking up litter and opening doors for strangers. I practice and I fail constantly. But all we can do is try. One day I make a different choice, a tiny choice for life and kindness, and suddenly I am so grateful to that man from years ago — sweltering in his padding and lost behind his mask, wordlessly taking our blows day after day, listening to our screams, teaching us how to kill and thus, how not to.

Sallie Tisdale, who earned a nursing degree on The Bluff in 1983 and returned in 1991 as the University's Schoenfeldt Series Visiting Writer, is the author of many books, notably Lot's Wife, about the lore and legends of salt, and Stepping Westward, about the character of the Pacific Northwest.

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