The Wisdom of No Escape
by Jenna Devany Waters
The Thread by Ronald Walker
There is a story you read while death shutters your city, about a woman being chased by tigers. She runs and she runs, tigers hurtling ever closer, until she comes to the edge of a cliff draped with vines. She stumbles, gasping; sides heaving, muscles clenched like knives, she seizes the largest vine and climbs downward, but there—below her—more tigers, circling. From a niche in the rock, a mouse appears and sets its teeth to the vine. Beside her, a single strawberry glows with the pulse of a sun. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. She takes the strawberry and places it on her tongue.
Outside your window, sirens crest and fall. Later you will speak of waves and surges, overflows and inundations. You will give the virus the language of water while the oceans rise around you, lapping at your calves. Time will add context.
But this is before. Hollowed by ablation, you sit in the box you call home and turn the story like a snow globe, watch the fragments shift and settle. Tigers. Rodents. Strawberries. Vines.
Once, when it was still possible to travel, you commuted with your daughter to school by train. Rock, paper, scissor, shoot! she squealed again and again, glee unfettered as you held out your hands, shuffling through the possible endings: rock crushes scissors, scissor cuts paper, paper covers rock. A zero-sum game, they called this, only two outcomes: win-lose, or tie.
The story is told by Pema Chödrön, in a book she calls The Wisdom of No Escape.
You consider the premise, cast yourself as the woman on the cliff. You study the tiger. Note: its glistening saliva, the gape of its jaw, the ripples of articulated power beneath its fur. In the wild, tigers are solitary animals, wary of humans. They hunt alone. Yet somehow, surrounding you, there is a pack.
Escape, noun. 1: the action of escaping or the fact of having escaped.
If all you can do is crawl, start crawling, a translation of a translation of Rumi says. Rumi, the queer thirteenth-century Islamic mystic who in his distillation has become the best-selling poet in America, was born near the border of present-day Tajikistan. He fled as a child—escaped—with the Mongol army at his back and traveled 2,500 miles through Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia before finally settling in central Turkey. A refugee in life, his words migrate now across language, escaped from meter and context both.
The tigers that roamed the sparse forests and Tugay corridors of Rumi’s exodus were Caspian tigers, one of the largest cats to ever exist. Standing 10 feet long and weighing up to 500 pounds, these sun-streaked behemoths were extirpated in the nineteenth century through a mix of habitat destruction, resource extraction, and bounty payments, then hunted into final extinction for sport.
You read once about a video game where players were stalked by tigers and other marauding beasts, then ordered to murder them to avoid being attacked. And so they did, until the day one girl decided to feed them instead and unlocked a new ability to tame them. Girdled by monsters, she forged her own virtual empire—changed the entire playable world.
Escape, noun. 2: mental or emotional distraction from the realities of life.
You understand you are avoiding the point of the story.
The problem is the babies. One, wrapped in a sling across your back; the other, crouched and wary between your feet. They are not so old yet that they believe the only choices are the ones set before them. They have no use for a narrator. You shift your baby to your breast, loosen the sling. Lift your gaze and consider the mouse.
Mice, from the family Muridae, the largest family in the largest order of mammals: Rodentia, “the gnawers.” A rodent is defined by its teeth—pairs of open-rooted incisors that never stop growing. They are self-sharpening knives—organically regenerating weapons—harder than lead, copper, aluminum, iron, concrete, glass, and metal. They can eat through bone. They must gnaw to survive. One of the only things mice cannot chew through is rock.
Escape, noun. 3: A passage. A means of escape.
Your son fusses, then clamps his jaw. Milk sprays the cliff, pools on the rocks as you unlatch him and move his mouth to your other breast. Budding teeth sink into your skin; from your spare nipple, milk still drips, clings like honey to the vines.
Escape, noun. 4: An outlet for a liquid; a leakage; an egress.
Like tigers, like people, mice are mammals. We share the same pentadactyl limbs, one homologous structure stretching out beyond evolutionary divergence and echoing back through thumb, through pad, through claw. Nursing, gnawing, gnashing, we descend from a shared placental ancestor—we are all weaned from the same ancestral teat.
In The Bacchae, Euripides tells of women who escape to the mountains, shun loom and shuttle for the run-mad revels of Dionysus. Cloaked in stolen skins, they twist their hair with vines and take up thyrsi, fennel stalks whose pinecone crests hold honey in their scales and iron spears inside their hearts. These maenads—these “raving ones”— pull milk from rocks with their fingertips; draw forth wine and water with a strike of their thyrsus rod.
Raving, convulsed, god-possessed, mothers leave behind their children, suckle fawns and wolf cubs to slake the engorgement in their breasts. With bare hands they rend the limbs from all who threaten them, flense the flesh then ‘burst like a wave of birds over the ground’—an omophagic whirl of carrion. Human, tiger, maenad, mouse: our teeth the common tools we use to crush something else’s life into fuel for our own.
Escape, noun. 5: the descendant of a domesticated species that has reverted to a wild state and turned feral.
Silently, your daughter begins to cry. You pluck the berry, let your knife quarter the heart. One segment for you. One for each child. One for the ghosts.
When you planted strawberries last spring they withered without ripening, hard green stones on the vine. The children had to forage for wild berries instead, miniature beads studding thimble-sized leaves among the clover and thyme on their grandmother’s lawn. These woodland berries, Fragaria vesca, are the strawberries of antiquity, the kind Rumi and Euripides might have plucked from a wood’s edge or mountain face in Greece or Central Asia. Unlike garden strawberries, these alpine antecessors do not send shoals of berries traveling out on nets of woven runners. These elder plants grow in singular clusters and produce only a few diminutive berries at a time. Yet their potency is dazzling—the perfume of one tiny berry enough to alchemize the air.
The story does not say what happens after the strawberry, does not concern itself with the aftermath of its self-proclaimed wisdom: the death, the claws, the hot spray of blood. The tunnel in the rocks. The sacrifice. The remaking.
You pause to make dinner and listen to a podcast by a climate futurist: We are living in the transapocalypse. We have fallen into a gap in our apprehension of reality. Most of us are confused about ‘when’ we are.
The news tells of earthquakes and babies found nursing from corpses; of miracles, resurrections, and the spectre of dead mothers. Two years from now your own mother will die, come back, quiver indefinitely at the mouth of the abyss. Cracks will form chasms. The virus will pass six million dead.
As you cook you read of endings, learn that the last sighting of a Caspian tiger before extinction is disputed. Some believe it occurred in Tajikistan in 1958, less than 50 miles from Rumi’s childhood home. Others believe the last tiger was killed in Turkey in 1970. All agree that the cause of its extinction was humanity.
Escape, noun. 6: a transgression; a peccadillo; a venial error.
In the stories of your childhood, babies were raised by wolves, by monkeys, by dolphins. You remember that tigers, like all mammals, will attack when they perceive a threat to their cubs. You see your children prowling the cliff together, mutant hybrids with claws and paws and glistening fur, strawberry seeds gleaming in their teeth. The Maenads suckled wolf cubs—could a tiger be so different?
To live in a discontinuity is to stand in a rupture, to be physically lost in time. As paradigms shift, so does our understanding of what is fundamentally possible.
With your free hand you snatch the mouse from the vine and wrest the teeth from its jaw.
Escape, verb. To effect one’s flight; to free oneself; to get safely out of painful or dangerous conditions.
Rock: You press your hands to your children’s mouths and crack their skulls against the cliff. Wrap the vine around your throat; taste strawberry mixed with blood.
Paper: You wreath your daughter in weeping vines and make a poultice to clot her blood. Hold your son and pour your milk out in offering. Pray, sing lullabies, plead mercy against the tigers’ teeth.
Scissors: You carve a tunnel; lift your thyrsus and pull iron from the earth. Harvest the tigers, don their skins, and forge weapons from their bones.
There is no escape. Only the choice of how to be in this world. Only the hope of fundamental remaking.
Rock. Paper. Scissors. Choose.