During a restful day Sunday I stretched out on the bed in the dim light and listened to Christa Tippet in the middle of a conversation with a woman whose life’s work was listening to and studying the songs and habits of the whale, and more recently, the elephant.   A fascinating woman with a real love for life and a great capacity for study and learning.  She ended by talking about the enormity of the ocean, how being on a small boat is like clinging to a cork bobbing in the vastness of it, and how the largest creatures in the world swim in it, singing.  Human knowledge, she said, is not at any pinnacle, it is only now beginning.  There is so much to learn, for sure, before the lights wink out forever.

This blessed woman got to know several elephants, by their voices, their looks and their personal habits.  Who knew elephant individuals were so different, one from the other?  She suggested there is more individuation among elephants than among people, or at least as much.  Do you think you could put a human being on a space ship and send him to another planet to accurately represent us all?  

You could do it, I guess, but you’d be an idiot to think he or she could represent you as well as me, as well as someone on a continent we’d never visited, someone living a life we cannot imagine.  Where the perfect representative of mankind might have no fear , you and I would be crippled by it; where the perfect representative was grim, we might be cracking jokes.  Where the perfect representative could dance pretty well, she could not invent spontaneous, manic dances the way you can, or draw like I can.  It makes sense, if you think about it for a moment, that there might not be a typical elephant.

Anyway, the famous memory of elephants is also not something someone just made up one day.  She tested it by playing a recording, to a group of elephants in a zoo, of a long-dead matriarch vocalizing in her distinctive voice.  This female had been gone several years, many of the elephants who knew her had still been calves, or whatever young elephants are called.  To an elephant, they perked up their ears, became agitated and started making a racket.  They clearly recognized this voice and knew it was their departed leader, even the youngest ones seemed to know it.

Anyway, don’t take my word, or hers, as your spaceship hurtles toward the distant galaxy where you will be the ambassador for all of us.  You can go to the NPR website and scroll through for Tippet’s recent shows, find the one I’m talking about, listen to it yourself, follow the links to associated scholarship, read up on it.   I’m writing about this to make a point.

After spending a long time observing and learning about several individual elephants she went home, where she did the other part of her work, probably raising money for her research so she could return to the land of elephants.  When she got back there, and began looking for some of her old elephant friends, she learned they’d been culled.  

Culling is a word, like the neutral phrases ‘collateral damage’, or ‘friendly fire’, that, by a marketing-style legerdemain, changes killing into an abstraction that is easier to deal with.  These elephant individuals had been subjected to the natural process of culling, thinning the herd by shooting certain individuals to cull them.  There were too many elephants where there were now too many people, problems were arising and it was necessary to cull the pachyderms.  Nothing more complicated than that.

Learning that these individuals she’d looked forward to spending time with had been culled was crushing to her.  She went into a depression.  All she could do, she reported, was write a book, which turned out to be a very good thing.  When I went into a depression all I could do was write and record songs late at night, not a bad thing, but not really a very good thing, either.  Writing and publishing the book helped her make some sense of her torment, allowed her to pass from depression back into productive action.  I imagine its a book worth reading and I salute her.

I had something else to add, another track, but, as I looked away it seems to have been culled, like a big, extroverted elephant with a loud voice, a direct individual who looks you right in the eyes, and then is gone like smoke in the wind.