in her own pleasures and preoccupations, as in this fragment from her hymn, “To Adonis, Dying”:
Loveliest of what I leave
is the sun himself
Next to that the bright stars
and the face of mother moon
Oh yes, and cucumbers in season,
and apples, and pears.
Saba’s first songs were a little like this:
~ah ~ah oooo ~ah ~ah
~~~pra ^wht wht
freely translated:
Praise the morning, praise all of us together.
Praise our being together apart.
Praise us. Praise the light.
Hey! I’m hungry! Where’s something good to eat?
pft: (40+ Hz. Air blown roughly through trunk) A note of light frustration when a task can’t be accomplished, usually a task imposed from outside.
trt trt: (137 Hz. Between a whistle and an exhaled, high-pitched snort) Mind your own business (mild threat implied), I know what I’m doing.
I heard this after moving my piano into the barn during the winter to give the elephants something to do. One morning I came in and found all the keys ripped off. It turned out that Gertrude had taken and buried them behind a loose board. (The piano was old and the keys were ivory. I do not know if this had any bearing on the event.)
errh: (30-35 Hz. Repeated grunt) Um . . . um . . . hmmm. A memory grunt. This is one of the few expletives that is infrasonic.
I have heard this utterance in several contexts, usually having to do with the physical and mental effort required to remember something. 1. Alice trying to turn on a water tap she’d turned on before (that I’d locked differently). 2. Kezia playing with mud and leaves just before creating a little hat to put on her head on an exceptionally hot August day.
noo^orrr^noo^orrr^noo: (12-15 Hz.) Despair, sob-like futility uttered over and over in a trochaic chant.
I include this little chant in its entirety because it was one of the few I ever heard by a male. It was uttered by Lear when he was frustrated with his training. He was asked to do something he simply didn’t understand and finally he lay on his side, let tears fall from his eyes and made this song.
wff: (10-12 Hz.) Utterance of appreciation made when a young elephant creates a meaningful new chant.
tttttttt: (50 Hz. spitting-like click) Ironic doubt.
I call this the “Mass for Holy Saturday” expletive: O felix culpa quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorum (O blessed sin rewarded by so good and so great a redeemer). It is a small sound uttered when an elephant transgresses the order of the Safari but discovers through the transgression a larger truth, rather like Milton’s Adam.
Full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By me done and occasioned, or rejoice
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring,
To God more glory, more good will to men
From God, and over wrath grace shall abound.
I have seen Gertrude, sporting the double face of irony, after breaking into the grain bin, look at me and murmur tttttttt, “Full of doubt I stand . . .”
The BIRTH of OMEGA, or BREEDING in CAPTIVITY
Elephants have a system of mothering that, typically, has little to do with ownership. Generally, elephant babies are not more than a few feet from their mothers for the first three years of life. Other females join in the mothering, especially young females, eight, nine, ten years old. A peaceful community spends its days following the rhythms of the youngest of the group. If a baby is sleeping (most often in the shade underneath its mother) the whole group stops and waits until it awakens.
In the final months of my pregnancy I felt a desire to burrow and a craving to sleep. Sleep was the other life, of things growing unseen. I slept everywhere. In the barn. Out back in the fields. In the bathroom. There was nothing better than to tumble into sleep, awake refreshed, eat, and lie down again. But I needed to get things organized for the elephants. Bring in a temporary keeper. I had to take the Grays back to the Safari and get the budgies used to spending more time in their aviary. I had to do legal and banking and gallery paperwork for my mother. And figure out how I was going to manage things when the baby came.
Our culture doesn’t encourage us to sleep.
I spent most nights in the barn. The elephants liked having me there and I felt better among them in the small cot than alone in the empty house. Having no place I had to be, and