Items related to Love, War, and Circuses: The Age-Old Relationship Between...
Describes the historical relationship between elephants and humans, discussing their ecological significance, prospects for their extinction, efforts to preserve the species, and the use of elephants in warfare and industry.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Eric Scigliano, who has written for Outside, the New York Times, and many other publications, first became fascinated with elephants as a child in Vietnam.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
1
Human Nature and Elephant Nature
The people of India assert that the tongue of the elephant is upside
down, and if it were not for that, it would have spoken.
— Muhammad Ibn Musa Kamal ad-Din ad-Damiri, Hayat al-Hayawan (ca.
1371)
By his intelligence, he makes as near an approach to man, as matter
can approach spirit.
— Advertisement for "The Elephant," 1797
Every creature, from a louse to a lyrebird, is a marvel of nature.
But some marvels are just more marvelous than others — and none more
so than an elephant. Look at one, a full-grown tusker, and see the
image of the Other: huge and looming, weighing up to sixty times as
much as a large man, by far the largest creature walking the earth
today — "an animated mountain," as the promoter Edward Cross boasted
in 1820, when he offered Londoners their first exotic menagerie show.
Its legs are pillars, its inch-thick skin a fissured topography, its
dark eyes unnervingly tiny and remote. Its front teeth are gleaming
tusks growing nearly as long as goalposts — the mightiest of fangs,
fearsome lances in battle and powerful chisels and levers in work,
borne by a creature that eats only plants. Weirdest of all its
wonders, the elephant defies the laws of quadrupedalism and bilateral
symmetry. Its nose and upper lip have fused to form a fifth limb, a
trunk (or hasta, "hand," in Sanskrit), the original multipurpose
tool: a crane, forceps, whip, vise, noose, snorkel, shower, vacuum,
jet blower, trumpet, bludgeon, and probe — a supple, writhing
tentacle, moved by some sixty thousand muscles, which seems a thing
of the sea, a precise but mighty instrument that can lift a log or a
grain of rice and snap a man"s back — as John Van Couvering of the
American Museum of Natural History puts it, "the ultimate in giant
mammal design."
Indeed, the elephant stands for the entire world in a
Buddhist parable that has spread worldwide. The Buddha"s disciples
ask him to sort out the scholars" endless debates over whether the
universe is infinite and eternal or finite and created, and whether
the soul perishes with the body. He replies that a rajah once
gathered the town"s blind men and had each touch a different part of
an elephant and say what he found. "A pot," said the man who touched
the dome of the elephant"s head. "A sail," said another who touched
its ear (or a fan, in one retelling). Others mistook the trunk for a
snake, a tusk for a plow (or sword), the back for a mortar, the belly
for a sack (or wall), the leg for a tree, the tail for a rope, and
the tail tuft for a paintbrush. They began quarreling. Just so, the
Buddha explains, are the preachers and scholars who, knowing one side
of a question, claim to know the truth of it.
If a camel is a creature designed by a committee, what army
of artists and engineers could have conceived all the elephant"s
parts? Small wonder that when science-fiction pulp illustrators weary
of bug-eyed insectoid monsters, they draw wrinkled, tentacled space
elephants. Or that the fourteenth-century scholar ad-Damiri, in his
treatise on the 931 creatures named in the Koran, noted that "if a
woman dreams of an elephant, it is not a good thing, in whatever
state she dreams of it." Or that John Merrick, the "Elephant Man" of
late-nineteenth-century London and twentieth-century Broadway and
Hollywood, should be called thus to evoke his extreme deformity and
lure the gawking crowds. Merrick himself, in a brief
promotional "autobiography," purportedly wrote, "The deformity which
I am now exhibiting was caused by my [pregnant] mother being
frightened by an elephant." This mumbo-jumbo was surely concocted by
one of Merrick"s exploiters, but "Elephant Man" is apt nonetheless.
Like the actual animals, he was a gentle soul and a sensitive
intelligence in an outlandish body. And he was dragged about and
displayed, a virtual prisoner, in tawdry sideshows.
Consider this monster again and all it shares with us.
Elephants live sixty to eighty years, the same span as humans, if
they are not killed by humans first and don"t wreck their health
through bad habits; they also enjoy alcohol, and nineteenth-century
captives were often given ale or whiskey to calm or reward them, and
even as daily rations. The ploy sometimes backfired: some elephants
were gushy, maudlin drunks and some turned mean — again, just like
us. It"s recorded that Jumbo, the most celebrated elephant of all
time, would share a large bottle of stout each night with his keeper,
Matthew Scott, who pitched his cot by Jumbo"s pen. When Scott forgot
himself and drank the whole bottle, Jumbo shook him awake and
demanded his nightcap. Three of P. T. Barnum"s elephants once took a
chill after some winter labors and were given three bottles of
whiskey each. The next day, now recovered, they put on the shivers to
get more medicine.
A taste for intoxicants suggests intelligence, and anatomy
affirms what mahouts and trainers have long attested: elephants are
very smart animals. Their brains are by far the largest among land
animals — about twice the size of humans", though much smaller as a
share of body weight. Brain size alone is not a strict predictor of
intelligence, but elephants" brains are richly folded and convoluted,
indicating sophisticated development, with expansive cerebral lobes,
the seats of memory (at least in humans).More telling is the degree
to which their brains grow after birth, an indicator of learning
ability. Most mammals already have about 90 percent of their ultimate
brain mass at birth. Humans have just 26 percent, and chimpanzees
about 50 percent. Elephants have 35 percent.
From Aristotle"s day to the present, innumerable authorities
have ascribed almost human "sagacity" and almost demonic ingenuity to
elephants. When Seattle"s zoo elephants were kept in a dank old barn,
one named Bamboo would sneak in pebbles each night, then methodically
toss them through the glass windows that stood outside her bars.
Keepers still puzzle over her motive: To get fresh air? To pass the
time? (Elephants are famously restless at night, and sleep just two
or three hours.) Or out of sheer mischief? A keeper at the Great
Plains Zoo in Dubbo, Australia, once told me of the pleasure, or at
least distraction, her elephants seem to find in turning their home
into a shooting gallery: "Every morning we have to wash the feces off
the whole elephant barn, starting with the ceiling and working down
the walls. They toss it at the possums that crawl on the rafters at
night." A San Antonio keeper says his charges sling mud "whenever the
gibbons next door make too much noise."
Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Williams, the legendary "Elephant
Bill" who led elephant-borne refugees out of wartime Burma, spotted
timber elephants plugging the wooden bells around their necks with
mud, then sneaking silently into their masters" gardens to steal
bananas. Another domestic elephant, chained in the path of a flood,
piled up broken saplings to make a dry perch. A wild South African
elephant was observed digging a drinking hole, then plugging it with
a large ball of chewed-up bark, concealing it with sand, and
returning later to drink again. This suggests several behaviors once
considered uniquely human: invention, foresight, deception, and
making and using tools; elephants have also fabricated fly swatters,
back scratchers, water sops, and poultices.
Even when they sleep, elephants resemble us. They snore, take
siestas in the midday heat, and use hummocks and bushes as pillows.
Most of all, they resemble (perhaps even surpass) us in the depth and
durability of their familial attachments and affective
communications. Female elephants remain for life in the ultimate
matriarchies. Aunts and older sisters help care for the young, an
important factor in the survival of a species with a long gestation
(twenty-two months) and longer childhood. Elephants are among the few
mammals, together with primates and sirenians, whose breasts hang
between their forelimbs, allowing caressing while infants nurse and
strengthening maternal bonds.
Like the love of humans and chimpanzees, elephants"
affections endure after loved ones die. "Elephants" graveyards" may
be fables, but elephants perform something like burial services:
watching over and evidently mourning their dead, and even returning
to the sites of death, fondling bones and tusks — and shattering
them, as though to release their spirits.
They remember more than their dead; that old adage about
elephants never forgetting bears some truth. Handler Jeff Pettigrew
recalls returning to Ringling Brothers after five years away and
being instantly recognized by the elephants he"d worked with. And, he
adds, when the show played Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, for the first
time in forty-five years, the three old girls who"d been along the
last time "knew exactly the route" from the train station to the
arena.
At the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee, a new
arrival named Jenny met a lonely older cow, Shirley, whom she"d met
briefly twenty years before. "Jenny became very agitated upon
perceiving Shirley, and started calling," recounts sanctuary operator
Carol Buckley. "After ten minutes there was an unbelievable exchange
of vocalizations — the volume was so intense it was deafening. You
could see the moment Shirley remembered Jenny. They climbed all over
each other through the gate. When we let them through, we expected a
huge dramatic scene. Not at all. They just melted into each other.
Now, when Jenny naps, Shirley straddles her," sheltering her like a
mother.
The singular nature of elephants has struck untold
generations of observers dumb, or at least credulous, and magnified
qualities that were already remarkable enough. Even before Barnum and
other circus promoters, the original spinmasters, began inflating the
measurements of their pachyderm stars, many who knew the animals
firsthand saw them as even bigger — much bigger — than they really
were. The colonial elephant catcher G. P. Sanderson noted that Madras
elephants were variously accounted to be "seventeen to twenty feet
high"; one mahout insisted his approached eighteen feet. Sanderson
measured that giant and "it did not exceed ten feet." The tallest
Asian elephants scarcely top eleven feet, and the tallest Africans
twelve, perhaps thirteen. But stand beneath the stuffed thirteen-
foot, seven-ton tusker in the lobby of the Smithsonian"s Museum of
Natural History and it"s easy to see how imaginations ran wild.
Aristotle, Aelian, Bishop Ambrose, the Indian writer
Nilakantha: from ancient authorities to nineteenth-century experts,
writers on elephants routinely put their life span at one, two, three
hundred, even one thousand years. Even the ordinarily reliable
Sanderson opined that "the elephant attains at least 150 years" —
twice the actual figure. Perhaps these authorities presumed that
elephants needed so many years to acquire the wisdom they so
evidently embodied. Wisdom and its companion, gentleness, are the
elephant qualities most revered — or exaggerated — by ancients and
moderns alike. Pliny saluted elephants for possessing "virtues rare
even in man: honesty, wisdom, justice, also respect for the stars and
reverence for sun and moon," and cited reports that "in the forests
of Mauretania, when the new moon is shining, herds of elephants go
down to a river named Amilo and there perform a ritual of
purification, sprinkling themselves with water." Other Romans
described elephants, which delight in bathing and water play, praying
to the gods, purifying themselves in the sea, and raising their
trunks to salute the rising sun. Even today some Indian temples
handily exploit the animals" natural "prayer" gestures: at the
Thepakkadu elephant camp, a young elephant performs a daily sunset
puja, repeatedly circling a small shrine, then kneeling and saluting
with its trunk.
The ancients saw elephants as not only reverent but romantic.
Pliny, Aelian, and Plutarch all write of an elephant who "fell in
love" with an Alexandrian flower girl. Pliny mentions another who
fell for a young soldier. The ancients believed that elephants
relished sweet scents and, by one account, preferred flowers even to
food. In return, the giants afforded their own aromatherapy; their
sweet breath was believed to be a "sovereign remedy for headache."
Indeed, despite their reputation for flatulence, I"ve never detected
a hint of halitosis in many close approaches.
Elephant flatulence is nothing next to elephant diarrhea, a
desired sequel to constipation (which can otherwise be fatal). In
1998, according to the journal Elephant, a zookeeper in Paderborn,
Germany, fed his constipated elephant Stefan twenty doses of animal
laxative and a bushel of berries, figs, and prunes. He was trying to
administer an olive oil enema when Stefan"s dam broke. The torrent
knocked over the keeper, who struck his head, passed out, and was
suffocated under the dung. It was a death worthy of one of Peter
deVries"s most absurdly unlucky heroes — and at the same time a
monumental professional martyrdom.
And what should this selfless keeper"s monument be made of?
In 1999, elephant dung became the culture war"s latest rallying cry,
succeeding blood and urine as the most sensational and controversial
art medium. That year the British-Nigerian painter Chris Ofili
exhibited his Holy Virgin Mary, decorated with dried elephant dung,
in the "Sensations" show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani took the bait and tried to jerk the museum"s city funding,
declaring that "civilization has been about trying to find the right
place to put excrement, not on the walls of museums." In the uproar
over The Holy Virgin Mary, much cruder and crueler pieces
in "Sensations" were overlooked, as was the longtime use of dung,
especially elephant dung, in West African art and worship. Indeed, it
could be seen as expressing the same great mystery as the Virgin
herself: of spirit contained in corporeality, of supreme power — the
elephant in African tradition — combined with fertility, fuel for
fire, and fertilizer for crops.
In 1612 the greatest metaphysical poet, John Donne, pondered
that mystery in a long verse meditation, "On the Progress of the
Soul." It includes the most eloquent evocation of elephantine
gentleness and dignity:
Natures great master-peece, an Elephant,
The onely harmlesse great thing; the giant
Of beasts; who thought, no more had gone, to make one wise
But to be just, and thankfull, loth to offend,
(Yet nature hath given him no knees to bend)
Himselfe he up-props, on himself relies,
And foe to none, suspects no enemies
Still sleeping stood; vex"d not his fantasie
Blacke dreames; like unbent bow, carelessly
His sinewy Proboscis did remisly lie. . . .
Reading such exaltations, one might think God created
elephants in his own image and man just got in the way. Indeed, some
elephant handlers seem to think that; at the least, they feel more
comfortable around their giant charges than with other humans. But
they harbor n...
Human Nature and Elephant Nature
The people of India assert that the tongue of the elephant is upside
down, and if it were not for that, it would have spoken.
— Muhammad Ibn Musa Kamal ad-Din ad-Damiri, Hayat al-Hayawan (ca.
1371)
By his intelligence, he makes as near an approach to man, as matter
can approach spirit.
— Advertisement for "The Elephant," 1797
Every creature, from a louse to a lyrebird, is a marvel of nature.
But some marvels are just more marvelous than others — and none more
so than an elephant. Look at one, a full-grown tusker, and see the
image of the Other: huge and looming, weighing up to sixty times as
much as a large man, by far the largest creature walking the earth
today — "an animated mountain," as the promoter Edward Cross boasted
in 1820, when he offered Londoners their first exotic menagerie show.
Its legs are pillars, its inch-thick skin a fissured topography, its
dark eyes unnervingly tiny and remote. Its front teeth are gleaming
tusks growing nearly as long as goalposts — the mightiest of fangs,
fearsome lances in battle and powerful chisels and levers in work,
borne by a creature that eats only plants. Weirdest of all its
wonders, the elephant defies the laws of quadrupedalism and bilateral
symmetry. Its nose and upper lip have fused to form a fifth limb, a
trunk (or hasta, "hand," in Sanskrit), the original multipurpose
tool: a crane, forceps, whip, vise, noose, snorkel, shower, vacuum,
jet blower, trumpet, bludgeon, and probe — a supple, writhing
tentacle, moved by some sixty thousand muscles, which seems a thing
of the sea, a precise but mighty instrument that can lift a log or a
grain of rice and snap a man"s back — as John Van Couvering of the
American Museum of Natural History puts it, "the ultimate in giant
mammal design."
Indeed, the elephant stands for the entire world in a
Buddhist parable that has spread worldwide. The Buddha"s disciples
ask him to sort out the scholars" endless debates over whether the
universe is infinite and eternal or finite and created, and whether
the soul perishes with the body. He replies that a rajah once
gathered the town"s blind men and had each touch a different part of
an elephant and say what he found. "A pot," said the man who touched
the dome of the elephant"s head. "A sail," said another who touched
its ear (or a fan, in one retelling). Others mistook the trunk for a
snake, a tusk for a plow (or sword), the back for a mortar, the belly
for a sack (or wall), the leg for a tree, the tail for a rope, and
the tail tuft for a paintbrush. They began quarreling. Just so, the
Buddha explains, are the preachers and scholars who, knowing one side
of a question, claim to know the truth of it.
If a camel is a creature designed by a committee, what army
of artists and engineers could have conceived all the elephant"s
parts? Small wonder that when science-fiction pulp illustrators weary
of bug-eyed insectoid monsters, they draw wrinkled, tentacled space
elephants. Or that the fourteenth-century scholar ad-Damiri, in his
treatise on the 931 creatures named in the Koran, noted that "if a
woman dreams of an elephant, it is not a good thing, in whatever
state she dreams of it." Or that John Merrick, the "Elephant Man" of
late-nineteenth-century London and twentieth-century Broadway and
Hollywood, should be called thus to evoke his extreme deformity and
lure the gawking crowds. Merrick himself, in a brief
promotional "autobiography," purportedly wrote, "The deformity which
I am now exhibiting was caused by my [pregnant] mother being
frightened by an elephant." This mumbo-jumbo was surely concocted by
one of Merrick"s exploiters, but "Elephant Man" is apt nonetheless.
Like the actual animals, he was a gentle soul and a sensitive
intelligence in an outlandish body. And he was dragged about and
displayed, a virtual prisoner, in tawdry sideshows.
Consider this monster again and all it shares with us.
Elephants live sixty to eighty years, the same span as humans, if
they are not killed by humans first and don"t wreck their health
through bad habits; they also enjoy alcohol, and nineteenth-century
captives were often given ale or whiskey to calm or reward them, and
even as daily rations. The ploy sometimes backfired: some elephants
were gushy, maudlin drunks and some turned mean — again, just like
us. It"s recorded that Jumbo, the most celebrated elephant of all
time, would share a large bottle of stout each night with his keeper,
Matthew Scott, who pitched his cot by Jumbo"s pen. When Scott forgot
himself and drank the whole bottle, Jumbo shook him awake and
demanded his nightcap. Three of P. T. Barnum"s elephants once took a
chill after some winter labors and were given three bottles of
whiskey each. The next day, now recovered, they put on the shivers to
get more medicine.
A taste for intoxicants suggests intelligence, and anatomy
affirms what mahouts and trainers have long attested: elephants are
very smart animals. Their brains are by far the largest among land
animals — about twice the size of humans", though much smaller as a
share of body weight. Brain size alone is not a strict predictor of
intelligence, but elephants" brains are richly folded and convoluted,
indicating sophisticated development, with expansive cerebral lobes,
the seats of memory (at least in humans).More telling is the degree
to which their brains grow after birth, an indicator of learning
ability. Most mammals already have about 90 percent of their ultimate
brain mass at birth. Humans have just 26 percent, and chimpanzees
about 50 percent. Elephants have 35 percent.
From Aristotle"s day to the present, innumerable authorities
have ascribed almost human "sagacity" and almost demonic ingenuity to
elephants. When Seattle"s zoo elephants were kept in a dank old barn,
one named Bamboo would sneak in pebbles each night, then methodically
toss them through the glass windows that stood outside her bars.
Keepers still puzzle over her motive: To get fresh air? To pass the
time? (Elephants are famously restless at night, and sleep just two
or three hours.) Or out of sheer mischief? A keeper at the Great
Plains Zoo in Dubbo, Australia, once told me of the pleasure, or at
least distraction, her elephants seem to find in turning their home
into a shooting gallery: "Every morning we have to wash the feces off
the whole elephant barn, starting with the ceiling and working down
the walls. They toss it at the possums that crawl on the rafters at
night." A San Antonio keeper says his charges sling mud "whenever the
gibbons next door make too much noise."
Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Williams, the legendary "Elephant
Bill" who led elephant-borne refugees out of wartime Burma, spotted
timber elephants plugging the wooden bells around their necks with
mud, then sneaking silently into their masters" gardens to steal
bananas. Another domestic elephant, chained in the path of a flood,
piled up broken saplings to make a dry perch. A wild South African
elephant was observed digging a drinking hole, then plugging it with
a large ball of chewed-up bark, concealing it with sand, and
returning later to drink again. This suggests several behaviors once
considered uniquely human: invention, foresight, deception, and
making and using tools; elephants have also fabricated fly swatters,
back scratchers, water sops, and poultices.
Even when they sleep, elephants resemble us. They snore, take
siestas in the midday heat, and use hummocks and bushes as pillows.
Most of all, they resemble (perhaps even surpass) us in the depth and
durability of their familial attachments and affective
communications. Female elephants remain for life in the ultimate
matriarchies. Aunts and older sisters help care for the young, an
important factor in the survival of a species with a long gestation
(twenty-two months) and longer childhood. Elephants are among the few
mammals, together with primates and sirenians, whose breasts hang
between their forelimbs, allowing caressing while infants nurse and
strengthening maternal bonds.
Like the love of humans and chimpanzees, elephants"
affections endure after loved ones die. "Elephants" graveyards" may
be fables, but elephants perform something like burial services:
watching over and evidently mourning their dead, and even returning
to the sites of death, fondling bones and tusks — and shattering
them, as though to release their spirits.
They remember more than their dead; that old adage about
elephants never forgetting bears some truth. Handler Jeff Pettigrew
recalls returning to Ringling Brothers after five years away and
being instantly recognized by the elephants he"d worked with. And, he
adds, when the show played Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, for the first
time in forty-five years, the three old girls who"d been along the
last time "knew exactly the route" from the train station to the
arena.
At the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee, a new
arrival named Jenny met a lonely older cow, Shirley, whom she"d met
briefly twenty years before. "Jenny became very agitated upon
perceiving Shirley, and started calling," recounts sanctuary operator
Carol Buckley. "After ten minutes there was an unbelievable exchange
of vocalizations — the volume was so intense it was deafening. You
could see the moment Shirley remembered Jenny. They climbed all over
each other through the gate. When we let them through, we expected a
huge dramatic scene. Not at all. They just melted into each other.
Now, when Jenny naps, Shirley straddles her," sheltering her like a
mother.
The singular nature of elephants has struck untold
generations of observers dumb, or at least credulous, and magnified
qualities that were already remarkable enough. Even before Barnum and
other circus promoters, the original spinmasters, began inflating the
measurements of their pachyderm stars, many who knew the animals
firsthand saw them as even bigger — much bigger — than they really
were. The colonial elephant catcher G. P. Sanderson noted that Madras
elephants were variously accounted to be "seventeen to twenty feet
high"; one mahout insisted his approached eighteen feet. Sanderson
measured that giant and "it did not exceed ten feet." The tallest
Asian elephants scarcely top eleven feet, and the tallest Africans
twelve, perhaps thirteen. But stand beneath the stuffed thirteen-
foot, seven-ton tusker in the lobby of the Smithsonian"s Museum of
Natural History and it"s easy to see how imaginations ran wild.
Aristotle, Aelian, Bishop Ambrose, the Indian writer
Nilakantha: from ancient authorities to nineteenth-century experts,
writers on elephants routinely put their life span at one, two, three
hundred, even one thousand years. Even the ordinarily reliable
Sanderson opined that "the elephant attains at least 150 years" —
twice the actual figure. Perhaps these authorities presumed that
elephants needed so many years to acquire the wisdom they so
evidently embodied. Wisdom and its companion, gentleness, are the
elephant qualities most revered — or exaggerated — by ancients and
moderns alike. Pliny saluted elephants for possessing "virtues rare
even in man: honesty, wisdom, justice, also respect for the stars and
reverence for sun and moon," and cited reports that "in the forests
of Mauretania, when the new moon is shining, herds of elephants go
down to a river named Amilo and there perform a ritual of
purification, sprinkling themselves with water." Other Romans
described elephants, which delight in bathing and water play, praying
to the gods, purifying themselves in the sea, and raising their
trunks to salute the rising sun. Even today some Indian temples
handily exploit the animals" natural "prayer" gestures: at the
Thepakkadu elephant camp, a young elephant performs a daily sunset
puja, repeatedly circling a small shrine, then kneeling and saluting
with its trunk.
The ancients saw elephants as not only reverent but romantic.
Pliny, Aelian, and Plutarch all write of an elephant who "fell in
love" with an Alexandrian flower girl. Pliny mentions another who
fell for a young soldier. The ancients believed that elephants
relished sweet scents and, by one account, preferred flowers even to
food. In return, the giants afforded their own aromatherapy; their
sweet breath was believed to be a "sovereign remedy for headache."
Indeed, despite their reputation for flatulence, I"ve never detected
a hint of halitosis in many close approaches.
Elephant flatulence is nothing next to elephant diarrhea, a
desired sequel to constipation (which can otherwise be fatal). In
1998, according to the journal Elephant, a zookeeper in Paderborn,
Germany, fed his constipated elephant Stefan twenty doses of animal
laxative and a bushel of berries, figs, and prunes. He was trying to
administer an olive oil enema when Stefan"s dam broke. The torrent
knocked over the keeper, who struck his head, passed out, and was
suffocated under the dung. It was a death worthy of one of Peter
deVries"s most absurdly unlucky heroes — and at the same time a
monumental professional martyrdom.
And what should this selfless keeper"s monument be made of?
In 1999, elephant dung became the culture war"s latest rallying cry,
succeeding blood and urine as the most sensational and controversial
art medium. That year the British-Nigerian painter Chris Ofili
exhibited his Holy Virgin Mary, decorated with dried elephant dung,
in the "Sensations" show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani took the bait and tried to jerk the museum"s city funding,
declaring that "civilization has been about trying to find the right
place to put excrement, not on the walls of museums." In the uproar
over The Holy Virgin Mary, much cruder and crueler pieces
in "Sensations" were overlooked, as was the longtime use of dung,
especially elephant dung, in West African art and worship. Indeed, it
could be seen as expressing the same great mystery as the Virgin
herself: of spirit contained in corporeality, of supreme power — the
elephant in African tradition — combined with fertility, fuel for
fire, and fertilizer for crops.
In 1612 the greatest metaphysical poet, John Donne, pondered
that mystery in a long verse meditation, "On the Progress of the
Soul." It includes the most eloquent evocation of elephantine
gentleness and dignity:
Natures great master-peece, an Elephant,
The onely harmlesse great thing; the giant
Of beasts; who thought, no more had gone, to make one wise
But to be just, and thankfull, loth to offend,
(Yet nature hath given him no knees to bend)
Himselfe he up-props, on himself relies,
And foe to none, suspects no enemies
Still sleeping stood; vex"d not his fantasie
Blacke dreames; like unbent bow, carelessly
His sinewy Proboscis did remisly lie. . . .
Reading such exaltations, one might think God created
elephants in his own image and man just got in the way. Indeed, some
elephant handlers seem to think that; at the least, they feel more
comfortable around their giant charges than with other humans. But
they harbor n...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherHoughton Mifflin
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0618015833
- ISBN 13 9780618015832
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages358
- Rating
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Love, War, and Circuses: The Age-Old Relationship Between Elephants and Humans
Published by
Houghton Mifflin
(2002)
ISBN 10: 0618015833
ISBN 13: 9780618015832
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Love, War, and Circuses: The Age-Old Relationship Between Elephants and Humans
Published by
Houghton Mifflin
(2002)
ISBN 10: 0618015833
ISBN 13: 9780618015832
New
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Seller Inventory # Wizard0618015833
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US$ 34.86
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Love, War, and Circuses: The Age-Old Relationship Between Elephants and Humans
Published by
Houghton Mifflin
(2002)
ISBN 10: 0618015833
ISBN 13: 9780618015832
New
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0618015833
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US$ 43.72
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LOVE, WAR, AND CIRCUSES: THE AGE
Published by
Houghton Mifflin
(2002)
ISBN 10: 0618015833
ISBN 13: 9780618015832
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Hardcover
Quantity: 1
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Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 1.22. Seller Inventory # Q-0618015833
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US$ 57.60
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