So I guess, a word about these.
I tend to be a sort of long-winded essayist.
My feeling about the essay is just keep adding stuff to it
until it becomes really cool.
But I wanted to keep them short enough
you could put them on a 6x9 card and put them back in a book.
So I kind of limited myself to 750 words.
And the price of that, at least for me-- well, not the price,
I mean, I guess the interesting constraint was
that I wrote a lot of these as lineated poems originally,
which you can kind of hear.
There's more use of rhyme than you would expect, probably,
in prose, in some of these.
Here's one for Sabu, the elephant historian,
from the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin,
which is a really great museum, by the way.
And they have a research library where I found this,
Ringling Elephant History.
"For an Elephant Historian."
"Sadness is your lot.
There is a lot of it.
You remember, since someone should, that elephants do not,
not all of them, regardless of their reputation.
Since they cannot speak in frequencies we are prepared
to hear, you wrote down their names.
Icky, Lucy, Siam, Marcella, Jenny, Roma, Rani, Betty,
Susan, and India, where they were kept, in Ringling Brothers
Barnum and Bailey stock car number 130,
in 1976, their ages and their provenances,
what they were made to do, how long they lived,
how and when they died.
No one called you by your given name, Raymond Moreau.
Instead, you chose Sabu, Hindi for elephant.
Behind a name like this, it's easy to disappear.
Many Sabus exist.
Hard to believe you didn't understand your naming
would be your erasure.
That you would disappear into your role.
Unlike the magician, a historian's work
is to reverse a disappearance, to chronicle,
to enshrine, to collect, to save.
Perhaps to do it well, we must disappear ourselves.
I met you here in the manuscript of Ringling Elephant
History, the book you worked on up until your death.
It was never published by a press.
But it has not disappeared.
A little edifice, it still stands
on the back shelf of the Robert Parkinson Library,
a branch of the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin,
the former world headquarters and a winter home
of the Ringling Brothers Circus before it
merged with Barnum and Bailey and departed for the East.
It's Sunday.
And so, if you were alive, you would
be working the Sunday show.
If you weren't, then you could spend
the day watching padded giants collide on screen.
Or like me, you could read story after story
of elephant deaths, many of them executions
if you could call them that.
The newspapers read, bad elephant killed.
Killer elephant destroyed.
Alice, the only elephant in modern times
to calf in the United States, was
executed at the Hogle Garden Zoo,
because she had become ill-tempered.
Or Albert, a very large and treacherous Asiatic elephant,
was sentenced to death.
Tip the elephant, finally deemed bad, was publicly poisoned.
We might note a whiff of the rhetoric of lynching.
An elephant story is a story of cruelty.
To be the largest land animal is to be tormented for your size.
To be hit by a train, to escape and to be mutilated,
to be beaten, burned, poisoned, starved, shot, imprisoned,
blown up, strangled, and executed.
On camera, no less.
Electrocuted by Edison, no less, as part of his public quest
to discredit alternating current.
To be this big is to be used as an instrument of execution,
too, and an instrument of war.
Then there were also better days, I'm sure.
I look out the window into the darkness
and wonder just how deep it goes.
Sabu, for you, the world was truly hard.
The life you were born into took you far.
On train tracks, a set of lashes crisscrossing the continent
and overseas, into a world you were paid to entertain.
You knew entertainment has its costs.
The least we can do, your example says, is keep accounts.
We can't account for everything.
It's a miracle we hold onto anything.
Here you're filed under KA, AN, EL, miscellaneous.
In an idiosyncratic and sometimes
impenetrable cataloging system, created by founding librarian
Robert Parkinson, for whom the library is named,
as the archivist explains to me.
His cataloging rules have disappeared.
But the archivist keeps discovering pointers to them
the deeper he goes into the collection.
And when he does, he adds them to a file.
We have only recently understood a great deal of elephant
language occurs in a range below our capacity for hearing,
between 1 and 20 Hertz.
These calls can travel for long distances
and often mean I am here, where are you?
Sabu, obscure is far from disappeared.
Like Dusty, Mustan, John, and Peru, you are here.
I hear you."