Thailand Journal IX: They Shoot Elephants, Don’t They?

Photograph by Hallie Cohen

The Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation rescues elephants that have resorted to begging (even in the streets of a metropolis like Bangkok), from over use in trekking and from landmines. Even in a country like Thailand where goods tend to be cheap, elephants, who can eat 400 pounds of food a day, cost at least $12,000 a year to maintain. In a way the foundation is returning elephants to the sacred status they’d had before they became orphaned by modernity and it recognizes the extraordinary characteristics of the elephant. Elephants which have approximately 40,000 muscles in their trunk are as flexible as they are strong. They can pick up an egg without cracking it while pulling down a tree. Within the chain of animal being, they are approximately sixth in intelligence, coming after dolphins, bonobos and chimps to name a few of their compatriots in the animal kingdom. The foundation, which routinely tests elephants, has determined that they probably see dichromatically and experience most of the world with a lateral vision that leaves a blind spot at the center. Mahouts care for the elephants and there are certain words that are used to direct them. “Bai” means to go forward,  “ben,” turn and “how,” stop. Elephants are regal animals and there is something wonderfully anachronistic and romantic about riding one (you feel like a maharajah). To control such a beast creates the illusion of enormous power though if one of these peaceful animals turned on you, it would be all over.

Thailand Journal IV: Massage and Elephants

Ganesha

Massage, not necessarily prostitution or erotic, is one of Thailand’s calling cards. You might call it one of the exports and also one of its greatest natural resources since practically every other storefront in a city like Chiang Mai is a massage studio and that can make for a lot of studios in an urban center with a population over 1 million—massage that is, and elephants. Here in Northern Thailand there are statues of elephants everywhere. The elephant has a kind of sacred status and almost functioning as a deity, though not quite. The Hindu god Ganesha which some Thais have adopted was depicted with the head of an elephant and Thailand itself is shaped like one, with the trunk representing its southern most portions. There are as many statues of elephants as there are statues of the Buddha. But as you leave Chiang Mai and head into the mountains, you feel you are entering sacred territory, a land of temples and ancient tribal civilizations like that of the Lanna kingdom and the Hill Tribe peoples. Buddhist monks with their shaved heads and yellow robes are as ubiquitous in Chiang Mai as are streimels worn by the Hasidic Jews in Jerusalem. Parenthetically Chiang Mai has its own little Jewish quarter replete with chabad, right along one of the major thoroughfares, Chang Klan Road. Despite the discos and karaoke’s filled with bar girls, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai and other cities of the North are religious territory in which the sacred and the spiritual coexist uneasily with the profane. Right outside of Chiang Rai is the Doi Tung Royal Villa, which was built by the mother of the current king. It’s gardens are a Thai Giverny and inside are exhibits of sacred Buddhist objects. In the Buddhist conception the feet are low on the food chain with the brain and head at top. Perhaps traditional Thai massage which starts with the feet and ends with the head is a way uniting the high and the low.

Train in India Hits Elephants

Photograph: The Daily Mail

“Train in India Hits Elephants Crossing Track” (NYT, 11/15/13) may be the saddest story reported this year. There have been many terrible stories. Certainly the carnage following the typhoon in the Philippines is a constantly unfolding Pandora’s Box of horrors. Add to that the case of Ariel Castro (“Death in Prison of  Man Who Held Ohio Women Captive Prompts Investigations, NYT, 9/4/13)  and the kidnapped girls in Cleveland, the young woman recently shot in the face in Chicago (“Fatal Shooting of Black Woman Outside Detroit Stirs Racial Tensions," NYT, 11/14/13), the 9 year old boy killed (“Boy, 9, Is Killed by S.U.V. in Brooklyn,” NYT, 11/2/13) when a SUV jumped the curb in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, the twisters that recently reeked havoc in the Midwest. Add to that the suffering that still lies in the wake of Sandy and the fact that there are people in New York and New Jersey whose lives have still not returned to a semblance of normality (one displaced family was reported eking out an existence cramped into a Times Square hotel room where they have subsisted on fast food). Rob Ford continues to provide comic relief as North American’s resident Falstaff and George Zimmerman keeps getting arrested. The power of poetry is that it contains eternity in a finite number of words. The elephants are like poetry. The image of them being destroyed epitomizes both the sentiments of helplessness and senselessness which is the essence of pure tragedy. In addition elephants are large and stately, fitting the Aristotelian view of tragedy, which alludes to the fall of a person of greatness. What could be a greater representation of the greatness itself than the elephant? There was one female elephant who the Times said literally “fell into a ravine below the tracks." The Times quoted a statement Hiten Burman West Bengal’s forestry minister gave to the Associated Press to the effect that “The herd scattered but returned to the railroad tracks and stood there for quite some time before they were driven away by forest guards.” The image is awful and yet also creates its own brand of awe. “More than 26,000 elephants are believed to live in India, where they are closely associated with the Hindu god of wisdom,” was how the Times writer Hari Kumar began his concluding paragraph.