An Elephant on Labor Day

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

You know how it is when you're trying not to think of an elephant on Labor Day, and the gray and soft red gravel is crunching under your boot heels as you walk slowly along the path trying to be quiet, your eyes alert up ahead and peripherally, continuously swinging about like searchlights for a rattlesnake that could be coiled up and impassively waiting, or one of the baby ones harder to see and with no rattle, but no less venomous. Baby snakes without their rattles. The cottonwood leaves flutter like sap-sticky green tongues in the breeze, and the local odors fill your nostrils to remind you of wet places, earthworms and flatworms and sulfur and methane, that sick-sweet summer syrupy river smell that reminds you of childhood. The only sounds are the branches and bulrushes tussling in the wind and the random, startled blasts of waterfowl, and the keening black birds with bright orange epaulettes, or the sudden startling plashing of a frog hitting the water from some secret perch on the bank. It's rough, his thick pachydermal skin, like baked mud, silvery-white, bristling with coarse hair, and a small tail like a bell pull that swings lightly as he lumbers along, and this is what you're trying not to think about, but there it is again and you've failed.

When it is just beginning to be no longer so unbearably hot in the early evenings the snakes venture out from their cool subterranean dens and come gliding over the path, making for the river's edge. Their heavy bodies, like dragging ropes, bend down the reeds as they loop up into their pliant green spline-like walls, limberly mashing them down into a mat that rides close above the surface of the water where snakes, slowly waking up, can stay cool and hunt their prey: the abundant brown wood rats that scurry constantly away from your hushed footfalls. Many snakes have glassy scale armor, but the rattlesnake's skin is rough and bleached out sandy-brown, making it that much harder to see, even with the long chain of diamonds down his powerful, muscly back. A single supple muscle attached to a network of delicately articulated yellow-white bone-spines with a mouth full of fangs and flicking black tongue and poison at one end and a rattle of successive dead skin sloughings at the other. That's all a snake is. A living tentacle, independent, driven by the reptilian consciousness. Deep hindbrain circuitry, unadulterated fight or flight. Low-level machine language programming, but the absence of interfering doubt makes it supremely and deadly effective. None of those complicated overlays that get mammals into so much trouble. Higher function calls. Higher? If you say so. These the kind of mental traps our culturally-programmed verbal language-construct games use to enclose consciousness. Control.

What are the secret thoughts of elephants? They are not simple reptilian chip processors. They say elephants never forget. Imagine the weight of elephant brain. All that processing capacity, but no opposable thumb. Is that what makes the difference? Can't make tools and so can't modify the environment sufficiently to recoil back with instant feedback and jump-start an intellectual existence? Elephants sleepwalking through whole lifetimes. Hindus say they hold up the experiential universe. Holy elephants. Something to that. Lines of elephants trudging ahead through sun-baked African plain trunk to tail, trunk to tail, and the sun intolerable on their bulging shoulders and bellies. No subterranean dens for them; no mat-building above the refreshing whirlpools of a flowing river. They must endure the heat just as they endure time.

The river is an inevitable metaphor for mind-consciousness, always, cross-culturally. Inescapably attractive for objectification. The way it is never the same from instant to instant, and those whirlpools turning, and how the surface conceals everything lying beneath. Thin skin of sensory interface between interior Existenz and the phenomenal Dasein. But the Dasein is only the objective, manifested world. At heart I am an acosmist. I reject the objective as Maya: the Dasein is useful and utilitarian, an embedding matrix upon which Existenz operates, but this objective reality, universally mistaken in the Western mind as the Reality, is only a reflection of Brahman. Christian, Hindu, Buddha, it little matters. No matter. There is no matter. We waltz through a maze of mirrors, light flashing transiently in our eyes like sparkles from a gently flowing river, and we arrogantly believe we understand rivers from these constricted observations.

But what power these wonderful illusions wield! The call of body for body, and although I know about the molecular crosstalk of intrinsic and extrinsic neurotransmitters, this knowledge matters nothing at all. This is wisdom without impact. Thick, horny gray elephant skin is not undesirable among discerning elephants. No. Cascades of chemical messengers, and the neuroanatomical switchboard ignites. What triggers, then? Memories and desires. Powerful, powerful words that preclude cultural definition. Too strong and primitive. Some words emerge not from the mind or the heart but from the marrow.

A verdant green algal scum lies close in to the shore, cracked like transverse tectonic fault lines by invisible sub-currents and vortices, and the puffs of vagrant breezes. The clouds are really piling up in the east, pouring in from a long migration out of Mexico. No atmospheric inspection stations. I can clearly feel the electricity raging in my muscles and nerves. Fists clench, relax: clench, relax. Jaw pressed tightly closed. Voices in the flesh. Imagine it for elephants. So much more mass to work with. Driven forward we are by chemistry and demanding hurricanes of nucleotides. My mind is boiling over from subconscious cauldrons I can't fathom, but I know the effects from much experience, and the sources. Not think of elephants. I am swearing constantly in my mind in hoary, crude, copulative terminology that has endured for centuries, for a millennium or more, formulating demanding questions whose answers I already know and understand far too clearly and completely. No matter. No matter. My genes speak a different language, though, like trying to reason with the reptilian hindbrain. Unassailable Baptist revival anti-logical knowing. Cannot be appeased or assuaged. Starving. Hunger. Thirst. Demanding. Expecting. Requiring. Requisite needs. Desires. Boiling up and over, foaming, frothing. Hungry. Do not think about elephants. As if. As though. I am a mind alone in this cold universe demanding. . . .demanding. . . .

I cannot help wondering whether these inescapable ponderings of elephants preoccupy her thoughts, too.