Why elephants do not scape

In the near future, the Basque independent state will obviously need good, efficient MI5 style secret services to protect its citizens in the name of national security, but also the best hospitals and healthcare possible. Enjoy this great short story by Aritz Gorrotxategi that I translated from Basque sometime ago. The clip is one I have found of Zizek telling “a few words about reality” in French. 

 

Why elephants do not escape?
I have been asked to write about memory, and the first word that comes to my mind is elephant. Hence I will begin. It is well known that, since long time ago, popular wisdom equates the pachyderm with the ability to remember. To tell the truth, it is a long time now that I learnt about the truth of that saying. I was probably nine then and I remember I went to the circus with my parents. Straightaway, my eyes went to that huge animal next to the tent. The elephant was chained to a pole. Neither the chain nor the pole was thicker than my thigh. The pachyderm’s long trunk was drawing a question mark in the air. It was the only moving part of the body. Apart from that, the elephant would not move. He was quiet, sadly looking at the peanut- throwing kids. Today, I would say that I saw the empty void of the elephant’s eyes. Then, instead of the elephant’s pitiful gaze, something else called my attention. I knew elephants were able to uproot a whole tree, let alone a pole. And yet, that elephant was quiet, as if that pole contained the whole of his weight. There was no attempt to set himself free. He was quiet anchored in the mud. I then asked my father why the elephant did not escape. He patted the back of my head. Because he is tamed, my father said. Without thinking it twice I answered back with another question. If he is tamed, why is he tied up then? I did not obtain the answer. With the tickets in the hands, my father signalled me to enter the tent.

Already at home, I kept on thinking about the issue. If the elephant does not make any attempt at escaping, then this also signals that he is well aware of his limits. The elephant knows he cannot escape because he was taught so when he was little, be it because he was tied up to thicker posts or else because he was beaten up with strong batons. When he was small, probably, he did try to escape from time to time, but he soon realised it was not possible. This is why I concluded that impotence is the the first lesson an elephant learns, and this lesson is the first that enters into his memory. Hence the popular saying.

Let me go ahead leaving aside the story of the elephant. For, in fact, there is another issue that dazzles me: speed. The same way as the elephant and memory are related so are memory and speed. You might have noticed that when we want to forget something unpleasant that has happened to us recently, we keep on running and going fast down the street, blindly finding our way through the walking people as if speed could help us forget that unpleasant event. On the contrary, when we want to remember something, we reduce the speed of our walking. Food for thought, is it not? It seems that there is some proportionality between memory and speed. The same can be said about time. The longer we live the more materials we compile in our memory, although it is increasingly difficult to remember.

Then there are people with good memory and with bad memory. There are those who remember faces easily. I think they are called physionomists, but I do not have a dictionary at hand. Unfortunately, there are also faces that we want to forget straightaway. Memory compiles data but we do not know how such data are measured. To say it somehow, memory is a giant storage room. Let us say that it is divided by a corridor and into sections. On the left, the good things, our children stories… Then on the left side, poems learnt by rope, nebulous film passages, a beloved ’s birthday… The question is: who chooses the memory bits we want to remember? Why do some passages pile up while others are lost? Thinking about it, it would be amusing to imagine a whole bureaucracy administering our memory, messengers and advisers included.

According to Freud, in any case, bad memory is no coincidence. There are people who never remember telephone numbers. The same happens with birthdays, anniversaries and so on… For the Austrian, a tiny negligence is not negligible. It seems that there is some hidden will in the unconscious to remember or forget things. That is to say: when dealing with issues of memory there are no coincidences. Therefore: we are responsible for what we do remember or not.
Another interesting phenomenon of memory is what is known as déjà vu or paremnesis. This is when we live something we have never experienced before as already having happened to us. You know what I mean: you are on a bus and see something through the window. You don’t know why but it seems to you that you have already lived that scene through, words and movements included. To a great extent it is like a dream; or, if you prefer, a stowaway thought escaping from the storage room of memory. A memory immigrant in the wrong corridor, looking for who knows what new territories… If you want me to tell you the truth, in writing this article I have felt that I had already written it. I am sure that I kept it in a drawer, among other old papers. But how am I going to find it now! … By coincidence I have recently moved home, and I still don’t know the new house very well. It is very big indeed and I don’t know exactly where the removal people left my boxes. That’s where I keep my books and all kinds of manuscripts. But if you don’t mind, I rather don’t stop writing now. It would take me too much time to check my papers one by one.

On the other hand, as I am running out of paper I will come to a close. To finish, I would like to raise an issue that has dazzled me since long time ago. You all know we have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Well, I think memory is the sixth. After all, memory is a must to live, to remember things… The classic senses do not tell us who we are but what to do. Memory is the enabling mother of all the other senses, the link that sustains them all. If we don’t remember we don’t exist. Yes, I know Descartes wrote this in another way, but I like it better in my own. Without memory we are nothing. Even in the gravestones we write short biographies not to forget the death.

As to myself, my hair has also gone grey a long time ago and I have already started forgetting things. It is like a tiny leak, drop after drop. Occasionally I do have some moments of light, and I remember things from a long time ago. Faces, names, places… For instance, if you ask me who were the Hungarian eleven in the 1954 football world cup, I would name you them in a whiff: Puskas, Hidegkuti, Kocsis, Bosnik, Kroetowth… Unfortunately there are few such moments of light… Less and less so… alas!

But I will not complain. In the new house I am being taken very good care of. There is a woman dressing in white in my charge. Don’t ask me her name, I don’t remember. But she does talk to me very sweet, and she tickles me when she changes my clothes. The house has many corridors and turns, like memory. There are some people who come to pay me visits from time to time. I don’t know who they are, but they keep crying most of the time. They look at me and they cry, as if I was an elephant tied up to a pole. I am the elephant and they are the kids, always crying and crying. I don’t know why. I feel just fine. The woman who minds me keeps telling me they are my sons and daughters, but I don’t remember them. I don’t even know if I ever had a wife. The question is that they suffer on my behalf, and I too suffer on theirs, because I never liked seeing people in pain. There we are! I have lost the thread again. What was I talking about?
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Aritz Gorrotxategi, Zergatik ez dute ihes egiten elefanteek? HEGATS—38 pp 13-18