Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,56

much matter if you cry it out or not. It’s the same with everything. Don’t you have that feeling with your elephants? Isn’t there always a kernel of doubt that the imagined life between you isn’t the same for them as for you? That you don’t fully understand? But you don’t cry out. You just keep working at it until you understand a little better.”

There were so many things she said. How to remember all the stories? But if they were written every one . . . I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.

I watched the minister rise and descend the two steps to stand behind the coffin. The people in the crematorium stirred back to life out of their solitary meditations, anxious now to go out into the weak spring light. Christ’s voice sang Ecce mater tua, Behold your mother.

Why had she wished me to sit and listen to this after she was no longer living, my mother, the woman who dying asked me only for breath? The voices fell low and lower. The chorus moaned and soared and sank again and finally we heard the last . . . miserere nobis. Amen.

Death was come, nature’s purpose fulfilled. The music was finished and men moved to each side of her coffin. The minister broke the silence, her human voice too sullied to speak after the bells and timpanies and strings. But she spoke because her work was to break the silence, she spoke the simple words my mother had asked for. She intoned over the coffin, “I commend your spirit to God.”

And then, according to my mother’s wishes, the men slid her into the fire and I drowned in salt waters as her dead body burned.

ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY PART FIVE

Expletives

This is my favourite category of speech act, rich and varied. While there is no such thing as a profanity in Elephant because the sacred and the profane are not separate, there are many expressions of exasperation, disgust, surprise, pleasure. The general nature of a contented elephant is inquisitive, witty, creative and full of joie de vivre. Expletives help an elephant express her complex nature.

In most studies of dead and unwritten languages, expletives tend to be relegated by the dictionary-makers to a class of sounds used primarily to modulate rhythm. But in Elephant, they contribute mightily to meaning, are stylistically and syntactically important and often signal mood changes and shifts in the direction of the discourse.

I include as many expletives as I have found, fully recognizing the danger of this enterprise because the nature of expletives is primarily creative and changeable to a degree unknown to other categories of vocabulary.

A Note About Metaphors and Expletives

Buried in human language is a continual and subtle shifting between the naming of a thing and its metaphorical significance. In Chinese, for example, a greeting as conventional as the English, “Hello, how are you?” is “Ni hao, ni chiguo le ma?” or “Hello, have you eaten yet?” The reference to eating is a metaphor for the state of well-being. Learning the metaphors of a culture is a way into the culture’s deep structures.

Since Elephant concerns itself not with naming but with being, its buried metaphors tend to concern states of being. The utterances for food and water are sometimes buried in situations concerning other pleasures. Expletives also express the level of well-being not only for the individual but also for the group. They create a backbone of feeling that unites the group.

tchrp: (130 Hz. Squeak through trunk) How curious! And pleasureful.

Upon seeing something unusual an elephant will squeak. When a piece of string was left in the yard, the group came up to it, tchrp’ed, then picked it up, tossed it around and played with it.

brooh: (92 Hz. Exhaled snort through trunk) How stupid! Displeasure.

An expression of dismay.

rii: (18-26 Hz). Pleasure.

This utterance can be combined with others to express either simple pleasure or a kind of elephant laughter at witty or humorous behaviour. (See poor^rrr, food; and owrr~rrr, water)

wht wht: (340 Hz. Whistle) Astonished pleasure.

When Saba was young she liked to whistle when she got special foods. As she was learning the Elephant songs and chants she liked to insert this favourite expletive. She’d begin the community song then break off in exuberance. She reminded me of Praxilla of Sicyon, who was cited by the men of her day as an example of how not to write poetry. I suspect this was because she couldn’t help throwing