We Are All Elephants or The History of Love

I have always been someone who puts Love on a very high pedestal. You could kind of say I’m a love snob. Not like some critics who may draw distinctions between sentimental love and true, core love. They draw the line between silly love songs and great ballads. Supposedly, the human concept of love was invented in the dark ages when courtly love became all the rage literally as knights rushed to their deaths with great zeal as long as it was condoned by the love of a great lady. But preceding this ‘revolution’ by great spans of times were the Sanskrit definitions of love. Sanskrit is the language of ancient India and considered the most complex language and alphabet ever used. There are eighty words in Sanskrit for love. There’s love of a sunset, love for your mother, love for your daugher, love for your home, love for eighty different things.

That sounds very advanced doesn’t it? Eighty words for love. Can you name at least eighty things you love uniquely? I could never name all the things I love nor could I come close to properly describing each of them. I suppose even Sanskrit is still just a language trying to tie up love into a neat, tidy bundle. But it can’t really be done. And yet, there is one love that is transcendent and unreachable for each of us. The love of self. How much time do we spend contemplating self-love? People talk about self-loathing and how that’s so bad. After all self-loathing is imposed upon us by the harsh, unfeeling judgements of others. Gosh what does it mean to love yourself? Sounds kind of weird. But no it’s not, it just means that you love being who you are and who you could become. It means you love being alive. But do you? Is life all that great? Not a lot of the time. What makes it great are those special ones we let into our sphere of love. What makes it bad is when that sphere is empty.

Chopin was a wild caught Moluccan cockatoo who taught me a lot about this. It wasn’t long after he came to live with us, in his 22nd year, that he realized he was loved just for who he was, a crazy, feather plucked, nosy, destructive, foul-mouthed cockatoo. For the first few weeks, he would squawk back and forth to my amazons who lived in another room. My amazon, Pumpkinhead G. Parrot, had been working for a number of years on his parrot version of the ‘Gettysburg address’ (oddly we live not far from Gettysburg). One evening Pumpkinhead had the opportunity to watch a re-enactment of the Gettysburg address on television by an actor. He was quite impressed that humans could use so many words so concisely and so pregnant with meaning. He got the gist of the address perfectly and immediatley took upon the task of writing his own Gettysburg address. He already had the first line down, “birds are so good/so bad.” And on this day that he saw “Lincoln” on the television, he added a second line, “Birds should fly.” It sounds simple and self-explanatory enough doesn’t it? Birds should fly, but Pumpkinhead hasn’t been able to fly in nearly 15 years. So it means a lot to him.

Pumpkinhead added a third line right away. “Birds should fly up somewhere.” He knew that birds should fly up in the sky and not be in people’s houses. His wild caught mate Guff probably told him about her brief life in the rainforest and perhaps a glimpse or two she might have caught of her parents flying into the nest cavity with some squiggily worms. He knew this was how it was supposed to be from the feared “black birds,” as he called them, outside who seemed to come and go as they pleased. So his parroty version of the Gettysburg address had grown into a paragraph. “Birds are so good/so bad. Birds should fly. Birds should fly up somewhere.” It was finished. That was really all that needed to be said. Birds make great editors.

So when Chopin cried to Pumpkinhead, Pumpkinhead announced back to him, “Birds should fly.” Chopin replied, “I hope I go away soon.” The desperately unhappy Chopin would repeat this daily for some weeks to come and then he would add to it, “I hope I go away soon. I hope I die.”

I found this very troubling and explained to him that I believe if he did die, he would simply be reborn as my experiences have taught me. So he modified his credo, “I hope I go away soon. I hope I die. Forever.” I did my best to try and convince Chopin he was wanted here and that we loved him. He wasn’t disposable to us like he was to his previous owner, he was a grain of sand on the beach which we were attempting to save from the imminent high tide by carrying to what we hoped was higher, dryer ground. He was that world in a grain of sand that Blake talked about and we wanted to admire him. One Friday evening, my husband and Chopin and I were lounging in the sunroom enjoying pizza and old Motown songs. Christian and I sang along with the radio, “you get the best of my love!” and at the end of that line Chopin chimed in happily, “for your WHOLE life!” He was finally happy.

He knew that he had been named after a great composer. Probably because, his predecessor, Mozart was always hovering over my shoulder in Spirit and telling him what to do and how to act. Chopin would talk to the air above my left shoulder in a quiet voice, and I would hear one half of a spectral conversation. Chopin would shake his head, “No I can’t. I can’t help it. Now go away!” Soon Chopin would become very jealous of the spirit of the recently departed Mozart and Chris and I wouldn’t be allowed to mention Mozart’s name or even play any of the human Mozart’s music without loud squawks of protest from the proud Chopin. Chopin came to call me “honeybunny” in efforts to win my great love for Mozart for himself. Eventually he realized that there was no contest, my love was not finite. There was plenty for both Mozart and Chopin and every single creature in our lives. His jealousy relaxed a bit and we just tried to enjoy eachother’s company.

He and Horatio, the dwarf rabbit, lived in the living room with me and I would often read on the couch all day as I tried to keep Chopin from making noise which would awake my husband who worked the graveyard shift and was trying to sleep in a nearby room. It became apparent to me very quickly that Horatio and Chopin could hear every word I read in my head. One particular afternoon I was reading a book about the Buddha and read a passage which explained that the word buddha means ‘the awakened one.’ I looked up at Chopin after reading this passage and he looked astonished and perplexed at the same time. In his parroty voice he croaked as he glanced at his little friend Horatio and his feline friend Cleo, “We are all awake!” What was the big deal? Indeed!

He became proud of the fact that he too was named after a great composer and also of the fact that most humans, in my opinion (which he valued), couldn’t pronounce it with the proper panache. Being a parrot who had to work somewhat to clearly mimic our vocal language without the benefit of vocal chords, it gave him a kick to hear humans mispronounce HIS name. And so I became aware that he wanted to learn more about this “Chopin” person. I told him about the great Polish composer, that he was a revolutionary and not just a musical revolutionary but a political revolutionary fighting for freedom against the aristocracy. I explained how people ruled each other. And then I played him some music of Frederic Chopin.

As we leaned over the CD player, our heads together and listening in reverent silence to each single, furiously played note, he heard the wondrous complexity of emotions being expressed through wordless sounds yet with great eloquence. He was awestruck. After the composition was finished, he whispered to me, “I don’t want to go.” He didn’t want to go away soon, he didn’t want to die, forever. He wanted to stay, he didn’t want to go.

But in an odd twist of irony, Chopin would indeed go and very soon. As he turned 23 it became apparent he was very ill and like his human counterpart, veterinarians would surmise, he also succumbed to tuberculosis from which he had suffered for decades. After his death from a pathological break of the leg, due to lack of bone density, I gathered up his toys and other effects and put them in the roaring fire I had started inside our wood stove in the living room. This was a sanitary and final way of elminating any trace of disease from the environment though I needn’t have worried because he hadn’t been ‘shedding’ it for decades.

Then as I stared into the fire, I was struck with a vision of immense power and magnitude. A herd of fear-crazed elephants stampeded out of the wood stove and through the air and right through me! With my jaw dropping on the floor I sat there and soaked up the angst and terror these animals felt as they fled. What did this mean? I was so dumbstruck that it took me weeks, months and even years before I could really face what their message was, one that they shared with Chopin whose existence was stampeding right out of our galaxy with them.

Immediately however I knew the correlation between the elephants and Chopin was the relationship between pianos and elephants. In olden days, key tops were made from ivory brutally ‘harvested’ from wild elephants. Mankind’s greatest artform and ultimate expression of civilization cost a dear price for a noble race, the elephants, unlucky purveyors of snow white keycaps. What greater disparity could there be than this? A noble race of giants who mourn the bones of their dead and yet inspire us in many ways with their rich emotional lives being driven to the edge of extinction so we can tickle the ivories and make beautiful music? What balance of nature is that? None, it could be the greatest imbalance of nature.

That night I heard Chopin’s croaky voice in my head chanting “We are all elephants, we are all elephants, we are all elephants.” And I knew that this was a message of such great import that I must put it somewhere for safekeeping for a long, long time and nurture it and protect it until I felt I was ready to release it into the world. That time has come.

We are all elephants. We are all awake. Every single living thing is awake and loving it and any lesser expression of love is a denigration, a daydream or a nightmare that keeps us from experiencing our wakefulness fully. Stand up for the integrity of love. It is not meant to be splintered into myriad definitions, it is meant to be one burst of love for life and so don’t fool yourself into thinking there is any justification for taking a life to express it.