Right now in here in Nina’s house is a small gathering of people that I really really love. Drinks, isaw, tapsilog, DVDs, cuddling and awesome conversations about diverse topics—and one of them’s still bugging me right now. Wacks told us a few minutes ago, “So I was reading Newsweek a while ago and apparently we live in a culture that values not only youth but also growth and development, and believes that this growth continues throughout life. Isn’t this all crap?”
Wacks, you’re right, it’s crap. The word “growth” is most accurately used to describe physical growth. To use it in the way that Newsweek suggests is an abstraction, not to mention a delusion. A construct grounded in wishful thinking, betraying the basest sort of longing. Physical growth is real. Children start out very short and get taller. They literally grow up. Their feet get bigger. Their arms get longer. Their teeth come out. New teeth come in.
Endless growth, like endless youth, is not to be found in nature. We live in an era enthralled by nature, obsessed by it, worshipful of it, yet at the same time entirely unwilling to accept its reality. If nature is not reality, then what is? Perhaps it is not really nature that people love. Perhaps it is not really love. Perhaps it is a myth. A canard, a fairytale, a lie.
You cannot kill an elephant. An elephant. We now value elephants very highly. Because we’re not allowed to kill them, we can’t use their ivory to make piano keys. We have to keep them, even though, in my opinion, for the elephant it could only be considered a step up to become a piano. You cannot make a piano out of an elephant anymore. To me it is testament to man’s ingenuity and inventiveness that we ever thought to make a piano out of an elephant to begin with. I personally know that if I had looked at an elephant I would not have seen a piano. I’m grateful to the person who did. This is what humans are for, to see an elephant and make a piano.
We now live in an era where you’re not allowed to make a piano out of an elephant. That we could ever could, I’m awe-struck. That we no longer do, I’m sunk in despair. An elephant should be happy that it can even be a piano. I personally do not think an elephant would ever have thought to make a piano out of man.
Do we prohibit the killing of elephants because we love elephants so much? Because we love nature so much? Because we loathe pianos? Or because when it comes to nature we have decided to make certain selections so unnatural that they come close to achieving the condition of art? We love elephants in their natural state, but abhor people in theirs.
People wholly unable to form a single coherent notion seem to have no trouble at all entertaining diametrically opposed points of view. Save the whales, get rid of the gray. Old-growth forests, new-growth hair. Organic tomatoes, silicone breasts.
Perhaps it is not really the elephant’s life span that concerns us. Perhaps we have decided that it is easier to deal with the elephant’s mortality than it is to deal with our own. It is, after all, easy enough not to kill an elephant. You simply have to not kill an elephant.
What could be simpler? What could be more humane? What could be a greater tribute to our empathy, our compassion? All of which we have for elephants, none of which we have for ourselves. Gray, wrinkled, hardly lithe, the elephant is a thing of beauty, the first wife, a thing of the past.
I’m just mumbling here, or I just really drank a little too much.
Time to watch the 10 Things I Hate About You DVD!
