They say an elephant never forgets. What they don’t tell you is, you never forget an elephant.
The pachyderm, as a whole, seem rather content in a general sort of aloofness to mortality… that there are very few predatory threats definitely plays a part… there’s no pricking up of the ears or fidgeting about the landscape… subsistence is undertaken in that quintessential leisurely demeanour and the beauty sleep is never compromised…
Thus went an evening muse on the Zambezi as the elephants went about their daily bon homie, taking all in their stride, be it the terra firma or the aqueous… nothing hasty or hurried, even the mating rituals submerged in the measured flow of the river… there are no complexities of ambush or stealth, just one long journey that takes in the ebb and flow of the synthetic cacophony of the human, rustling tunes through dry grass whose melody subscribes rather grudgingly to the notions of time…
Up close the elephant is a rather laborious consequence of evolution, the proboscis a stymying the path to perfection… but it is in the panorama of a twilight silhouette that the symphony seems to emerge… no more blind men interpreting the critters to absurdity as they come to terms with the immensity of the canvas and the consequent scaling down of the gargantuan… where beginnings and ends coalesce and every monstrosity becomes a speck…
The elephant then becomes erudite, an anti thesis to the constant craving for acceleration, a semi-colon to some prose going haywire, a sigh consoling the winded dispositions, a dash of depravity in the luxury of enclosures… for elephants can remember for aeons the ways to master monotony despite the impediments of corporality, and thus in the annals of interpretation of nature cement themselves as the antidote to the restive…
The lilting taste of elephant landscapes, river cruises on the Zambezi, Zambia…
