“The goal of life is to live in agreement with nature.”
Zeno, the founder of Stoicism and a student of Socrates, was the first to make that statement 2,300 years ago. Stoics looked to Nature as their guide to life, believing that Nature teaches us everything we need to know about how to live well in this world – how to live a noble and virtuous life.
What would the Stoics Heraclitus, Seneca and Zeno say about man’s destruction of nature today, especially the frontal assault on the African elephant, which is on its way to being killed to extinction for ivory and ‘sport?’
What would the stoics say about Bob Parsons, the GoDaddy CEO who killed an elephant and handed out GoDaddy caps to villagers who butchered the elephant to the blaring of Heavy Metal music?
Or the four rich Americans who recently sued (unsuccessfully) the Justice Department to bring back the corpses of four endangered Zambian elephants they had paid a fortune to kill just for the fun of it?
Or Barnum & Bailey’s circus of horrors, which rips baby elephants away from their mothers to ‘train’ them to stand on their heads using electric shock, bull-hooks, and rope torture, breaking their spirits and condemning them, animals with complex social structures that often roam hundreds of miles a day, to life in a box-car traveling across our country for our amusement?
It is hard to articulate the pain and frustration of reporting and trying to stop mankind’s war on nature and these magnificent animals in particular. To do so, we turn to poetry.
- W.S. Merwin, our current Poet Laureate.
W.S. Merwin, our current poet laureate and twice Pulitzer-winner, writes about one particular (real) elephant in his poem, “The Chain To Her Leg.” In 1903, on Coney Island, crowds gathered at Luna Park to witness the electrocution of Topsy, a circus elephant who had finally had enough and killed the trainer who tormented her with lit cigarettes, among other abuses. Electrocuting an elephant was a novel experiment and the killing turned into a festive event and was filmed. If you have seen the historical footage you will never forget it. It is a perfect metaphor for man’s failed understanding of and relationship with the natural world.
W.S. Merwin has generously allowed the republication of his haunting poem here on Global Animal. We are honored.
It gives voice to our anger and sadness, and also fuels our commitment to wake people up to what is happening. We thank him deeply for the privilege and for his ongoing commitment to the environment. – Arthur Jeon
The Chain To Her Leg
If we forget Topsy
Topsy remembers
when we forget her mother
gunned down in the forest
and forget who killed her
and to whom they sold
the tusks the feet the good parts
and how they died and where
and what became of their children
and what happened to the forest
Topsy remembers
when we forget how
the wires were fastened on her
for the experiment
the first time
and how she smoldered and
shuddered there
with them all watching
but did not die
when we forget
the lit cigarette
the last laugh gave her
lit end first
as though it were a peanut
the joke for which she
killed him
we will not see home again
when we forget the circus
the tickets to see her die
in the name of progress
and Edison and the electric chair
the mushroom cloud will go up
over the desert
where the West was won
the Enola Gay will take off
after the chaplain’s blessing
the smoke from the Black Mesa’s
power plants will be
visible from the moon
the forests will be gone
the extinctions will accelerate
the polar bears will float
farther and farther away
and off the edge of the world
that Topsy remembers.
– By W.S. Merwin, First Published in The New Yorker magazine
A poem donated By U.S. Poet Laureate to raise awareness of globalanimal.org.
I shiver to know this.