November 21, 2012
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Rotting Elephant
It is late and I don't know why I am writing this except that it seems important, somehow, someway. To me, at the least. I was barely awake and a television documentary on a dead elephant was on. It showed one of the most horrific things, I think, that one could see. I think it became horrific only in contemplation because the antiseptic scientist who seek to make everything removed from the experience. There was a gored elephant with flies covering it. There were men in lab coats, an ecstatic Entymologist who was narrating, "there is all kind of fly activity-they are feeding on the juice that the hyenas are causing to exude from the carcass, mating near the holes and on the skin, they are dying, breeding, all on this elephant. It is just marvelous". The hyenas, all in front of robotic cameras, tore into the softening flesh, softening because the bacteria was racing the maggots to to the flesh-and the bacteria tenderized the meat. The hyenas tore off the lips, the elephants mouth widened, and its shockingly white teeth almost immediately turned black from the flies crawling over it. The elephants muscles were completely loosened and relaxed. A particular hyena kept ramming his head into the anus of the elephant and coming out with black bits of intestine, it thrust its body so savagely into the elephant that it was three quarters of the way into the body until it popped wholly in. It ate its way out of a hole in the elephants stomach.
This is a symbol of life, in some way, in some way that I cannot connect fully. But it is. It sends shivers down my back. The night vision green glow killing any life in the animals eyes. The glee in the scientists drone as they cheer the rendering of the elephant into the muscle of living beings and to a wet spot on the dry earth.
Tell me it is natural, I know, but this is no comfort to me.
Lest we forget, too often, this is our lot at this level and all else, at least in this early morning reverie, are efforts at trying to forget it.
Be well
G
Comments (2)
My friend,
this life is so sad.
Let us try to make it better for those around us...
all we can really hope to accomplish.
@monkegeist - you are right, as always, this is the drive for us, the only, frankly, honorable one there is. Patrul Rinpoche, quoting some great sage I am sure, said,
"all the sorrows of the world come from wanting happiness yourself, all the happiness of the world comes from wanting it for others"
In this day and age where many are chastised for caring for anything, this age of 'irony', it is difficult to sell the idea that caring for another's happiness is the pathway to your own.
I care and it hurts. In this body that is not much different than the elephant's or the hyenas-or the flies-and yet, different in the sense that it is possible to observe, realize, my status as a rotting carcass, as a brief moment, as a beast ripping the flesh off of another, of a beast fornicating by the rotting holes of death. And yet, and yet, despite this 'reality' we desperately try to make these actions desirable, and here, my mind, latches on and makes the error of saying it IS and therefore must HAVE.
sad.
But you have said the Truth, the way out.
Be well my friend
G
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