WEBVTT

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So I guess, a word about these.

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I tend to be a sort of
long-winded essayist.

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My feeling about the essay is
just keep adding stuff to it

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until it becomes really cool.

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But I wanted to keep
them short enough

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you could put them on a 6x9 card
and put them back in a book.

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So I kind of limited
myself to 750 words.

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And the price of that, at least
for me-- well, not the price,

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I mean, I guess the
interesting constraint was

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that I wrote a lot of these
as lineated poems originally,

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which you can kind of hear.

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There's more use of rhyme than
you would expect, probably,

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in prose, in some of these.

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Here's one for Sabu,
the elephant historian,

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from the Circus World Museum
in Baraboo, Wisconsin,

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which is a really great
museum, by the way.

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And they have a research
library where I found this,

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Ringling Elephant History.

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"For an Elephant Historian."

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"Sadness is your lot.

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There is a lot of it.

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You remember, since someone
should, that elephants do not,

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not all of them, regardless
of their reputation.

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Since they cannot speak in
frequencies we are prepared

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to hear, you wrote
down their names.

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Icky, Lucy, Siam, Marcella,
Jenny, Roma, Rani, Betty,

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Susan, and India, where they
were kept, in Ringling Brothers

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Barnum and Bailey
stock car number 130,

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in 1976, their ages
and their provenances,

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what they were made to
do, how long they lived,

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how and when they died.

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No one called you by your
given name, Raymond Moreau.

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Instead, you chose Sabu,
Hindi for elephant.

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Behind a name like this,
it's easy to disappear.

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Many Sabus exist.

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Hard to believe you didn't
understand your naming

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would be your erasure.

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That you would disappear
into your role.

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Unlike the magician,
a historian's work

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is to reverse a
disappearance, to chronicle,

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to enshrine, to
collect, to save.

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Perhaps to do it well, we
must disappear ourselves.

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I met you here in the
manuscript of Ringling Elephant

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History, the book you worked
on up until your death.

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It was never
published by a press.

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But it has not disappeared.

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A little edifice,
it still stands

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on the back shelf of the
Robert Parkinson Library,

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a branch of the Circus World
Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin,

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the former world headquarters
and a winter home

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of the Ringling Brothers
Circus before it

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merged with Barnum and Bailey
and departed for the East.

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It's Sunday.

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And so, if you were
alive, you would

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be working the Sunday show.

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If you weren't,
then you could spend

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the day watching padded
giants collide on screen.

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Or like me, you could
read story after story

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of elephant deaths,
many of them executions

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if you could call them that.

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The newspapers read,
bad elephant killed.

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Killer elephant destroyed.

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Alice, the only
elephant in modern times

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to calf in the
United States, was

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executed at the
Hogle Garden Zoo,

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because she had
become ill-tempered.

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Or Albert, a very large and
treacherous Asiatic elephant,

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was sentenced to death.

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Tip the elephant, finally deemed
bad, was publicly poisoned.

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We might note a whiff of
the rhetoric of lynching.

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An elephant story is
a story of cruelty.

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To be the largest land animal is
to be tormented for your size.

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To be hit by a train, to
escape and to be mutilated,

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to be beaten, burned, poisoned,
starved, shot, imprisoned,

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blown up, strangled,
and executed.

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On camera, no less.

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Electrocuted by Edison, no less,
as part of his public quest

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to discredit
alternating current.

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To be this big is to be used
as an instrument of execution,

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too, and an instrument of war.

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Then there were also
better days, I'm sure.

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I look out the window
into the darkness

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and wonder just
how deep it goes.

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Sabu, for you, the
world was truly hard.

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The life you were born
into took you far.

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On train tracks, a set of lashes
crisscrossing the continent

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and overseas, into a world
you were paid to entertain.

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You knew entertainment
has its costs.

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The least we can do, your
example says, is keep accounts.

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We can't account for everything.

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It's a miracle we
hold onto anything.

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Here you're filed under
KA, AN, EL, miscellaneous.

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In an idiosyncratic
and sometimes

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impenetrable cataloging system,
created by founding librarian

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Robert Parkinson, for
whom the library is named,

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as the archivist explains to me.

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His cataloging rules
have disappeared.

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But the archivist keeps
discovering pointers to them

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the deeper he goes
into the collection.

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And when he does, he
adds them to a file.

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We have only recently understood
a great deal of elephant

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language occurs in a range
below our capacity for hearing,

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between 1 and 20 Hertz.

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These calls can travel
for long distances

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and often mean I am
here, where are you?

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Sabu, obscure is far
from disappeared.

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Like Dusty, Mustan, John,
and Peru, you are here.

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I hear you."

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