Elephant Winter (20 page)

There were so many things she said. How to remember all the stories? But if they were written every one . . . I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.

I watched the minister rise and descend the two steps to stand behind the coffin. The people in the crematorium stirred back to life out of their solitary meditations, anxious now to go out into the weak spring light. Christ’s voice sang
Ecce mater tua,
Behold your mother.

Why had she wished me to sit and listen to this after she was no longer living, my mother, the woman who dying asked me only for breath? The voices fell low and lower. The chorus moaned and soared and sank again and finally we heard the last . . .
miserere nobis. Amen.

Death was come, nature’s purpose fulfilled. The music was finished and men moved to each side of her coffin. The minister broke the silence, her human voice too sullied to speak after the bells and timpanies and strings. But she spoke because her work was to break the silence, she spoke the simple words my mother had asked for. She intoned over the coffin, “I commend your spirit to God.”

And then, according to my mother’s wishes, the men slid her into the fire and I drowned in salt waters as her dead body burned.

Expletives

This is my favourite category of speech act, rich and varied. While there is no such thing as a profanity in Elephant because the sacred and the profane are not separate, there are many expressions of exasperation, disgust, surprise, pleasure. The general nature of a contented elephant is inquisitive, witty, creative and full of
joie de vivre.
Expletives help an elephant express her complex nature.

In most studies of dead and unwritten languages, expletives tend to be relegated by the dictionary-makers to a class of sounds used primarily to modulate rhythm. But in Elephant, they contribute mightily to meaning, are stylistically and syntactically important and often signal mood changes and shifts in the direction of the discourse.

I include as many expletives as I have found, fully recognizing the danger of this enterprise because the nature of expletives is primarily creative and changeable to a degree unknown to other categories of vocabulary.

A Note About Metaphors and Expletives

Buried in human language is a continual and subtle shifting between the naming of a thing and its metaphorical significance. In Chinese, for example, a greeting as conventional as the English, “Hello, how are you?” is “Ni hao, ni chiguo le ma?” or “Hello, have you eaten yet?” The reference to eating is a metaphor for the state of well-being. Learning the metaphors of a culture is a way into the culture’s deep structures.

Since Elephant concerns itself not with naming but with being, its buried metaphors tend to concern states of being. The utterances for food and water are sometimes buried in situations concerning other pleasures. Expletives also express the level of well-being not only for the individual but also for the group. They create a backbone of feeling that unites the group.

tchrp:
(130 Hz. Squeak through trunk)
How curious! And pleasureful.

Upon seeing something unusual an elephant will squeak. When a piece of string was left in the yard, the group came up to it,
tchrp’ed,
then picked it up, tossed it around and played with it.

brooh:
(92 Hz. Exhaled snort through trunk)
How stupid!
Displeasure.

An expression of dismay.

rii:
(18-26 Hz). Pleasure.

This utterance can be combined with others to express either simple pleasure or a kind of elephant laughter at witty or humorous behaviour.
(See
poor^rrr
,
food; and
owrr~rrr
,
water)

wht wht:
(340 Hz. Whistle) Astonished pleasure.

When Saba was young she liked to whistle when she got special foods. As she was learning the Elephant songs and chants she liked to insert this favourite expletive. She’d begin the community song then break off in exuberance. She reminded me of Praxilla of Sicyon, who was cited by the men of her day as an example of how not to write poetry. I suspect this was because she couldn’t help throwing in her own pleasures and preoccupations, as in this fragment from her hymn, “To Adonis, Dying”:

Loveliest of what I leave
is the sun himself

Next to that the bright stars
and the face of mother moon

Oh yes, and cucumbers in season,
and apples, and pears.

Saba’s first songs were a little like this:

~ah ~ah oooo ~ah ~ah

~~~pra ^wht wht

 

freely translated:

Praise the morning, praise all of us together.

Praise our being together apart.

Praise us. Praise the light.

Hey! I’m hungry! Where’s something good to eat?

pft:
(40+ Hz. Air blown roughly through trunk) A note of light frustration when a task can’t be accomplished, usually a task imposed from outside.

trt trt:
(137 Hz. Between a whistle and an exhaled, high-pitched snort)
Mind your own business
(mild threat implied),
I know what I’m doing.

I heard this after moving my piano into the barn during the winter to give the elephants something to do. One morning I came in and found all the keys ripped off. It turned out that Gertrude had taken and buried them behind a loose board. (The piano was old and the keys were ivory. I do not know if this had any bearing on the event.)

errh:
(30-35 Hz. Repeated grunt)
Um . . . um . . . hmmm.
A memory grunt. This is one of the few expletives that is infrasonic.

I have heard this utterance in several contexts, usually having to do with the physical and mental effort required to remember something. 1. Alice trying to turn on a water tap she’d turned on before (that I’d locked differently).
2. Kezia playing with mud and leaves just before creating a little hat to put on her head on an exceptionally hot August day.

noo^orrr^noo^orrr^noo:
(12-15 Hz.) Despair, sob-like futility uttered over and over in a trochaic chant.

I include this little chant in its entirety because it was one of the few I ever heard by a male. It was uttered by Lear when he was frustrated with his training. He was asked to do something he simply didn’t understand and finally he lay on his side, let tears fall from his eyes and made this song.

wff:
(10-12 Hz.) Utterance of appreciation made when a young elephant creates a meaningful new chant.

tttttttt:
(50 Hz. spitting-like click) Ironic doubt.

I call this the “Mass for Holy Saturday” expletive:
O felix culpa quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorum
(O blessed sin rewarded by so good and so great a redeemer). It is a small sound uttered when an elephant transgresses the order of the Safari but discovers through the transgression a larger truth, rather like Milton’s Adam.

Full of doubt I stand,

Whether I should repent me now of sin

By me done and occasioned, or rejoice

Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring,

To God more glory, more good will to men

From God, and over wrath grace shall abound.

I have seen Gertrude, sporting the double face of irony, after breaking into the grain bin, look at me and murmur
tttttttt,
“Full of doubt I stand . . .”

E
lephants have a system of mothering that, typically, has little to do with ownership. Generally, elephant babies are not more than a few feet from their mothers for the first three years of life. Other females join in the mothering, especially young females, eight, nine, ten years old. A peaceful community spends its days following the rhythms of the youngest of the group. If a baby is sleeping (most often in the shade underneath its mother) the whole group stops and waits until it awakens.

In the final months of my pregnancy I felt a desire to burrow and a craving to sleep. Sleep was the other life, of things growing unseen. I slept everywhere. In the barn. Out back in the fields. In the bathroom. There was nothing better than to tumble into sleep, awake refreshed, eat, and lie down again. But I needed to get things organized for the elephants. Bring in a temporary keeper. I had to take the Grays back to the Safari and get the budgies used to spending more time in their aviary. I had to do legal and banking and gallery
paperwork for my mother. And figure out how I was going to manage things when the baby came.

Our culture doesn’t encourage us to sleep.

I spent most nights in the barn. The elephants liked having me there and I felt better among them in the small cot than alone in the empty house. Having no place I had to be, and no person who cared where I was, I began to slip into the daily rhythm that the elephants preferred. They slept most deeply in the smallest hours then roused themselves and liked to walk out in the fields just before dawn. I walked out with them to watch the sunrise each day, dozed in the late mornings and fell asleep early in the evening. I didn’t do their feet every day and I didn’t always bathe them as the days grew longer. I relaxed the strict routine we’d always had and they didn’t object or become unruly. With all of our obligations to the world dissolved, we wandered behind the fences and ate and slept when we wanted to. It was a time of great contentment among them, simple unfolding timeless days. Even Kezia began to waggle her ears again and nudge Alice aside for a chance to spoil Saba.

One early morning I was out back watching the elephants toss fallen leaves under the bones of a dew-shrouded maple tree. Their great bodies rubbed against each other, ribs expanding with deep breaths, their raised trunks searching the air, seeking scents muted by cold. They examined the sky. Kezia was first to sense my labour and she reached her trunk out to touch my body. The pains seized me and
let go like a cross-stitch. She shuffled sideways to support me and when the pains came I bent forward, leaning my hands against her side as if it were a bed or a wall. Dust clung to her rough stiff hairs. I wanted to drop to the ground but she used her trunk to lift me, to urge me to stay on my feet. Kezia, from the land of endless heat, moved us all back through that dispassionate chill along the hard elephant path. They had to be put in the barn, shackled and settled in before my baby could be born.

There are, for most of us, a few singular moments around which we create the rest of our lives. People get stuck in them in all sorts of ways. Being born is a series of stucks. When Omega was born she moved quite nicely down the birth canal, push-stuck, push-stuck, push-stuck, until the very end when she didn’t move any more. There we were, me and Omega, on the brink of a new life, stuck. Did she not want to be born? Did I not want my sleepy pregnancy to end? I remember pushing in a desultory sort of way and a strange woman’s voice saying, “If you don’t push her out I’m going for my knife!” I didn’t really care what she said, I was too interested in my own pain, but an image of a blue baby began to fill the room.

In the centre of this cross-stitch of pain and rest, pain and rest, I glimpsed backwards into a time without self-reflection. I was body and mind undivided. The elephants have a sound for this:
waohm
. But I had to rouse myself out of my meditations and reluctantly push the baby out, sploosh! with a cry and a mighty heave.

When I held Omega a moment after the cord between us was cut I felt like a sacred hero at the end of a race. I also felt like a used-up tube of toothpaste. How could I feel these two things at the same time? But I did, caught between Omega’s desire and my own. It has occurred to me that this is about ecstasy and garbage—a milky new baby in my arms, a lot of stinky blood on the floor. When she nursed we were skin to skin like throat singers humming and vibrating the sounds of each other against the world’s darkness. Nursing and dripping in days and nights divided not by sun and moon but by seconds and minutes. I could hardly wait to show her to Kezia.

She had Jo’s eyes.

With a child it is difficult to meditate. I have learned with Omega the fathomless worlds of meditating on Omega.
It’s all for such a short time
.

I brought Omega to the barn when she was three days old. I unwrapped her, took off her diaper and let Kezia touch her all over. Her gentle trunk left a trace, her scent, on the baby. Kezia was chanting,
ooo ahahah~whoo aaohh
. I’ve never found a good translation of this sound. On that occasion it meant something like,
Be it unto me according to thy word
.

And so, I am still at the Safari. With a small baby it is easier to stop moving around so much. My migrations are interior wanderings as I cosy her on my back and take her walking with the elephants each day. I record the elephants chanting their nurturing songs over her and I’ve caught
Saba trying to lift her up from her blanket on the barn floor more than once. Her earliest inchoate memories will be of the scent of hay, the soft brush of an elephant’s trunk. I have moved back into my mother’s house and sleep there most nights. I made a nursery for Omega in my old room but she still sleeps with me. I’m going to build a summer aviary outside and soon I’ll open up the studio. I am encouraging all of the elephants to draw and I’m going to sell their pictures instead of taking them to the circus. I suppose I have become one of those zoo people I used to find so eccentric. But when I take my Elephant-English dictionary to the university the zoologists and linguists find me odd too. I wonder, as time passes, if Jo would fit in if he ever came back. And I dream sometimes of Alecto. In the dreams he torments me, mouth agape, silently pulling me down until I awake in a sweat. Perhaps this is part of supplication, hope beyond memory.