Dogs aren't enough; what we need is elephants.

I probably don't have to say this, that the cause for saving the endangered wildlife in Africa is not new, you know that already.  So I won't.  But it's true. And history repeats itself.  I don't have to tell you that either, and so probably does Nature (repeat itself).  I want to tell you about this novel I'm reading.

The consciousness of the plight of trophy animals, those killed by indigenous poachers for the Asian medicine market, or those killed by Western egoists who have nothing better to do with their time, their money, and their breath--those monsters with whom we share the planet--are addressed in a 1958 novel that I am now getting to.

An author I always wanted to read but kept putting other books in the way is  Romain Gary.

In his novel, The Roots of Heaven, Gary reports that in French Equatorial Africa, post-World War II, post-raising of the Berlin Wall, 30,000 elephants are being slaughtered each year.  And to what purpose?  And that is 55 years ago!  Yes?  One character in the book says:

     "Our hunting regulations are what they are, I'm not the one to defend them, but there was no permit that could justify the ravages the sportsman was wreaking.  I questioned the driver a bit, and he explained to me proudly that "the master, he hunt for pleasure."  ...I don't think this bothered him much: there are people who are always ready to pay the necessary price for satisfying the intimate urges of their soul, as you must know." 

More from the book:

"You see, dogs aren't enough any more.  People feel so damned lonely, they need company, they need something bigger, stronger, to lean on, something that can really stand up to it all.   Dogs aren't enough; what we need is elephants."

 Recently though, as reported by James P. Farwell, Defense consultant, in The Blog, Huffington Post World, 5/24/2013,

"Arriving on military helicopters, aided by night vision camera, the attacks opened up on their victims with AK-47 weapons. It was a massacre.  ...Elephant carcasses, some of 86 elephants slaughtered in Chad a few weeks ago. The victims included more than 30 pregnant females. Many aborted their calves when shot. The hunters butchered some, and left the others to die. The elephants had huddled together helplessly for protection."



More from Romain Gary's book:

"I too have often felt the need to understand it all; but I know my limits.  In my life, I've done more suffering than thinking--though I believe one understands better that way."

And still more recently, from Jason Straziuso, as published in The Huffington Post, 6/5/2013:


Dame Daphne Sheldrick, who runs the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi National Park, said Kenya must pass stricter laws to punish those who poach elephants for their ivory tusks. Sheldrick said it would be economic sabotage if Kenya doesn't prevent poaching deaths, because of the tourism it will lose.  'Unfortunately the demand for ivory in the Far East, particularly China, has pushed the price of ivory up too far,' Sheldrick said, as a dozen orphaned elephants bathed in dry mud nearby. For village residents who have little earning potential, the lure of a poaching payday can be tough to resist, she said."

Assassinating these creatures is not the better song to sing.  

Visit www.savetheelephants.org

and

The Enough Project

 Photographs are courtesy of The National Geographic Magazine, Michael Nichols, Photographer.

"Odysseus in Woodside" Honorable Mention from Writing Tomorrow magazine.

As I have already posted on Facebook, I thought it would be fitting to include this happy bit of news on my blog.  Writing Tomorrow magazine has announced the results of its First Annual Short Story Award.  The winners will appear in the October 2013 issue. And I am pleased to say that a short story I wrote, "Odysseus in Woodside," has won Honorable Mention, and will be among the next issue's contents.

I invite you to check out the current issue as well as the upcoming one.

The judge was Robert Voedisch. His work has appeared in The Greensboro Review, NorthAmerican Review, Five Chapters, and Paper Darts, to name a few.

This is the April 2013 issue (click here).

This is the February 2013 issue (click here).

"Miss Wimbish" now appearing in Uncharted Frontier EZine #10.

Uncharted Frontier EZine Issue #10 May 2013 is out, and in it is a short story by yours truly: "Miss Wimbish."  The magazine has some very interesting poetry and prose, and captivating photography.  I invite you check it out and enjoy.

The Arctic is a long, unbroken bow of time.

[When I began to read Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, I really had no idea what to expect; I thought it was going to be in the same vein as John McPhee or Pico Iyer, authors whom I admire greatly, both for their brilliant mastery of earth science and anthropology.  I thought perhaps there would be a reminiscence of Gaston Bachelard, or perhaps Henri Michaux,  by virtue of the subtitle "Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape."  But what I have discovered about this book is more than beautifully written paragraphs of scientific insight, more than its pages of geologic mystery and fascinating biological and evolutionary narrative.  This book captures my spirit as much as it does my intellect.  I am glad to have had it recommended to me, and am equally glad to recommend it to you.  This is my second post on the subject; there will be more.  Below are excerpts from Chapter 5, Migration: The Corridors of Breath.  --M.]

Time pools in the stillness here and then dissipates.  The country is emptied of movement.  The coming and going of the animals during the short summer gives the Arctic a unique rhythmic shape.... 

Time here like light is a passing animal..., hovers above the tundra like the rough-legged hawk, or collapses althgother like a bird keeled over with a heart attack, leaving the stillness we call death.

No wild frenzy of feeding distinguishes the short summer.  But for the sudden movements of charging wolves and bolting caribou, ...the Arctic is a long, unbroken bow of time.  

To lie on your back somewhere on the light-drowned tundra of an Ellesmere Island valley is to feel that the ice ages might have ended but a few days ago.  

  

How very far from Mesopotamia we have come.

We list the butterflies...we delineate the life history of the ground squirrel...we name everything...then we fold the charts and the catalogs, as if we were done with a competent description.

But the land is not a painting....

Lying flat on your back on Ellesmere Island on rolling tundra without animals, without human trace, you can feel the silence stretching all the way to Asia. 

 

You can sit for a long time with the history of man like a stone in your hand.  The stillness, the pure light, encourage it.

--Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Advice from Muriel Spark, circa 1988

Muriel Spark, 1960

"...So I passed him some very good advice, that if you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat.  Alone with a cat in the room where you work, I explained, the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk-lamp.  The light from a lamp, I explained, gives a cat great satisfaction.  The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding.  And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost.  You need not watch the cat all the time."

and...

Muriel Spark, shortly before her death in 2010

"'You are writing a letter to a friend,' was the sort of thing I used to say.  'And this is a dear and close friend, real--or better--invented in your mind like a fixation. Write privately, not publicly; without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter, as if it was never going to be published, so that your true friend will read it over and over, and then want more enchanting letters from you.  Now, you are not writing about the relationship between your friend and yourself; you take that for granted.  You are only confiding an experience that you think only he would enjoy reading. What you have to say will come out more spontaneously and honestly than if you are thinking of numerous readers.'"

[Excerpted from A Far Cry From Kensington, by Muriel Spark. New Directions, 2000.]
 

Living at moral peace with the universe. "Arctic Dreams" by Barry Lopez. This is a fascinating work.

© 2013 Christine Clifton-Thornton

"At the heart of this narrative, then, are three themes: The influence of the arctic landscape on the human imagination. How a desire to put a landscape to use shapes our evaluation of it.  And confronted by an unknown landscape, what happens to our sense of wealth.

"What does it mean to grow rich?  Is it to have red-blooded adventures and to make a fortune, which is what brought the whalers and other entrepreneurs north?  Or is it, rather, to have a good family life and to be imbued with a far-reaching and intimate knowledge of one's homeland, which is what the Tununirmiut told the whalers at Pond's Bay wealth was?  Is it to retain a capacity for awe and astonishment in our lives, to continue to hunger after what is genuine and worthy?  Is it to live at moral peace with the universe?

"...It is possible to imagine afresh the way to a lasting security of the soul and heart, and toward an accommodation in the flow of time we call history....  That dream is the dream of great and common people alike."   [from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, pp. 13-14]

"A Yup'ik hunter on St. Lawrence Island once told me that what traditional Eskimos fear most about us is the extent of our power to alter the land, the scale of that power, and the fact that we can easily effect some of these changes electronically, from a distant city.  

 

"Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete.  They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, "the people who change nature.""  [from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, p. 39]

The poor read to know that they are not condemned.

Without a doubt, I'm becoming a big fan of Joe Queenan.  This is from his memoir:

Even in his worst moments, my father never resembled the simpletons who masquerade as blue-collar heroes on television; in the darkest of times he never talked like Archie Bunker, the malignant sow dreamed up by West Coast millionaires as a mechanism for sneering at people who have to work for a living. 

Unlike TV’s prefab proletariat, self-congratulatory buffoons all, my father could tell you why Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, why Richard III killed the little princes, why Hannibal dragged his elephants over the Alps, and why one should think twice before venturing out onto the English moors at night.  Hemmed in by ignorant men, he was not himself ignorant.

He was...the best the working class had to offer.  He was ceaselessly in the process of educating himself, not because he thought it might advance his career--he had no career--but because reading was a way to escape to a better world.  ...While some people, to borrow an insight from C.S. Lewis, read to know they are not alone, the poor read to know that they are not condemned.  ...Books are a guiding light out of the underworld, a secret passageway, an escape hatch.  To the affluent, books are ornaments.  To the poor, books are siege weapons.

Joe Queenan. Closing Time, New York: Viking Press, 2009, pp. 14-15.