The Bengal Tiger and the Himalayan Yak

“I am more and more plagued by a single question,” said the yak from Nepal: “What is the meaning of it All?”

“I am sorry to hear that,” said the Bengal, “and sorry that you are not well.”

“Who said anything about being sick?”

“You did. I distinctly heard ‘plagued.'”

“It was just an expression, a figure of speech, a vague make-do word. You know.”

“Yes, I know. So—it just popped into your head, a sort of accident? Well, there are very few accidents in the ways of the mind. Everything is relevant. Furthermore, for your information, whenever somebody speaks in virtual capitals, saying ‘Life’ or, as you said, ‘All’, they are not empty locutions either but broad, urgent, fraught, and he is saying that he is already lost in some wide catch-all empyrean, an indefinable Every Place or No Place—actually annihilation—and probably for a long while already—gone, as they say. How far, we shall soon determine.”

“‘Gone?’ I’m insane?”

Flora

What is the most intelligent plant?

Asparagus.

Why?

Because asparagus is the most monolithic of plants, with the loveliest fern lace in the world That shadowing lace helps keep its ground free of weeds, its immediate area phenomenally clear.

That doesn’t mean it has a mind.

No, no central brain. But maybe there’s mind in petals, stalks and flowers and—while we’re at this—just ordinary arboreal wood. Let’s mention trees.

A tree has bark for cellulose skin, foliage and fir that might do for hair; branches like arms, roots like feet, flowing sap resembling blood, stomata for breathing ambient air; capillary suction to pump up water; pods, cones, parasols in genital profusion. Isn’t it all elaborate, doesn’t it stun? And why not a sense, an over-all sense, a general, informing innate mind-in-matter, a totally sensate unified mood in any tree as a whole, there where it’s stood?

And take all the crops that became good fodder, multiplied by our most diligent tending—can’t we add that also as somewhat mind-bending? Who, exactly, is doing what to whom. Is it the man, at last, or is it the bloom? Who is superior to the other, giving or taking the relevant trouble? Which of the two is really more clever, who is the one who is thinking double, or treble?

And how about this: who figured out how to use the sun, the start of all life and everyone? You think photosynthesis was the work of fools? Nothing will outdo the grasses and trees, that trick they all had up their leaves.

All this begs the question of actual animal and sheer human brain power. Yes. But . . .

Moral: Life that doesn’t have an I.Q may wonderfully succeed or plain up

and down do.

The Fables in Flicks

About the carrot-eating Bunny, the kinetic Road Runner and coy Tweety-bird, remember that their enemies, not themselves, were doomed, time and again, over and over. Even if Elmer Fudd’s rifle was raised and exploded, he never had a chance (and the rabbit outrageously knew it), nor did Wile E. Coyote (and the Road Runner smilingly knew it), nor did Sylvester the Cat (and the canary gleefully knew it). Life was directly reversed in the cartoons, where the little and weak were constant winners, always with a smirk on their faces: the know-it-all infallible rabbit, the wise guy whirligig Road Runner, the smart-aleck superior canary. After a while, if their enemies weren’t also so sure of themselves, we would have wanted all three taken down.
           
Moral: It isn’t all that charming being smug or snide, even if you’ve got the writers on your side.

The Parrot

District Attorney:       For the court record, your name, sir?

Witness, Parrot:        Polly.

D.A.                            Is that your full name? Don’t you bear a longer appellation?

Parrot:                        If you’re suggesting Wannacracker, no.

Judge (to Parrot):     Answer the question directly, please.

Parrot:                        I am Polly Z. Psitlaciformes, according to the book.

D.A.:                          What’s the Z stand for?

Parrot:                       Zygodactyl, meaning pair-toed, unlike, say, the stork or the rook.

D.A.:                          That is a mouthful, if I may say so.

Parrot:                        I don’t see why: you’re here to ask a series of predictable dumb questions,                                             not to say anything in particular.

D.A.:                          Your Honor—

Parrot:                       Withdrawn.

D.A. (to Parrot):        You have been accused, among other things, of complete, off-the-wall                                                     smart-ass remarks that frequently deviate into sense.

Parrot:                       That may be. It depends.

Two Squirrels

Twice upon one time, there were two squirrels in the same wood, one of them in perpetual harvesting motion, wise and industrious, gleaning seeds and bugs and litter and nuts, while the other did not, enjoying instead the one season of good weather. Each of them indulged his situation, the one in fretful, even desperate endeavor, busy-busy to-and-fro-ing, the other in timely and sensible pleasure. (You think you know where this is going?”)

            

What a heaped-up harvest the good squirrel made, while the prodigal lay back on piney boughs in the shade of upper branches for noon nap breaks from his escapades. There were moments when the stirring one, worn to a frazzle, envied the other but could not condone either the laziness or fits of razzle dazzle. He collected mushrooms and dried them neatly on covert twigs, then stored them out of reach. The profligate ate a fading peach, not feeling the need of conscientious greed. He scampered and played all over the place, especially on one high tension cable, running back and forth in a daring race to improve his speeds (how his cousin yearned to follow his lead!) going faster and faster just to be able to better the records that he had made.

            

The Sea Lion

A sea lion on a sun-drenched day, bouncing gently on a small ice floe, was mesmerized by the horizon line, bobbing up and down and far away. He thought a single Great White Cloud, in sea lion’s shape and all aglow, was God, and he was God and God was he. Up and down the ice raft bobbed, he on top, in rhythmic trance, under blazing sky, feeling One-in-all and All-in-one, identity and unity.

When evening came and it grew dark, he slipped into the frothing sea and was eaten by a Great White Shark.

            

Moral: So much for that unified feeling. When all is said and all is done, the All may not feel one with you.

Two Pandas

Xien Won was a giant panda born with a normal, playful, good disposition in the Guiyang compound where she lived. Fresh, in fine spirits, she was positively delightful and cuddlesome, according to standard propaganda until—she wasn’t. Why was that? It was the place. She came more and more to scorn her condition. She grew bored with the monotonous gym set and routine, even gave up swinging on the swing. She came to despise the ooh-ing children and their ah-ing parents, and regularly faced about, turning her back to the crowd (to be rid of them, she thought). In these ways her disposition soured; she was out of humor, she lacked even momentary joy, and gradually her features more or less caught her sulky mood, and her face, though furred, seemed to glower.

           

She refused, of course, to couple with prospective mates, with whom, instead of love-and-hate, it was always hate. After a third and successful artificial insemination, she gave birth to a cub of her own to whom she was so indifferent that it had to be taken from her and put into incubation. She never missed it just as she had never kissed it. Her progressive withdrawal became deeper. She ended as a sullen ward, neither close to fellow creatures nor the staff, bonded to no one, anti-social and glum.

The Genealogical Conversation

“The thing is,” said the crocodile, “I look old—wouldn’t you say? Absolutely dinosauric: the lizardy corruscaded hide, the mindless devouring slithering predatory machine, slit-eyed, cold blooded, everybody’s idea of basic prehistoric ancient primary essence.”

            

“I am the model for all that,” said the shark, “millions of years before the likes of you, before even flowering began on earth. I’m not even bone but primeval cartilage, the reigning monster of the deeps.”

            

“You protoplasmic peasant,” said the Emperor crab, “you’re completely un-regal and inconsequent, next to me. Did you catch my name, you late-coming hulk? Learn what antique royal lineage really is.”

           

“What is all this hydrostatic priority?” asked the ant. “We are the teeming lords of the realm, for eons and eons and in continual hordes.”

            

“My,” said the bacterium, “such interspecial virulence! I’m counting on it to bring down your resistance. All of you together make me laugh. Fact is, we—” he was sub-dividing as he spoke—“in time have laid low everyone. We were here first, numerously, and we will be the last.”

            

Moral: Geneology—it’s not history, it’s bragging rights.

The Stag

When the forest started burning, a great stag held back while all other animals fled in panic. He moved calmly, picking his way before the flames, turning even to browse now and again. Everything in moderation was his motto. He’d never been in a fire before but that didn’t matter, he knew better than to run amok.

            

Creatures all about him paced ahead, including cougars, who might have waited to pounce on any deer or other game gone astray or lingering, but they also raced in frantic haste. So did badgers, humping fast across the tinder floor. And through the underbrush little things were scurrying, and in clearings elk went streaking, and grizzly bears whizz’d along. A ponderous moose bounded by. “Take it easy,” counseled the stag, but nobody heard, least of all flights of frightened birds who clacked or thrummed their wings as they zoomed straight out of there under a dimmed and lowering sky.

            

The stag, aloof, erect, majestic, bided his time. He sauntered through a grotto. He munched snow-on-the-mountain, though something coarse coated his tongue, roughened his bite. He strode slowly, in the darkening light, unperturbed by the pell-mell headlong rush all about him. A bolting horse from somewhere trampled past. Still, the stag held back. He sniffed the air, which had thickened with motes of—what? flakes? ash?—making him chuff and cough. His heart began to quicken.

            

He stopped his temperate grazing and wished now to be off, and he started, but his rack of horns was snared in a raveling bramble which normally he could have disentangled but, wheezing, he shuffled, swayed and bumbled further, folding to his fore-knees, feeling alarm but also curious surprise that he was not able to rise where he had stood but sagged and softly crumbled in the midst of smoke, the sound of crackling wood. Then, casually overcome, he succumbed.

            

Moral: Everything in moderation—including moderation.

The Grasshopper

A juvenile grasshopper under a toxic shroud lost her parents in a field of timothy grass. Only she survived the pesticide. She was adopted subsequently by a cloud of cicadas who acted, yes, in locust parentis. The whole swarm lavished affection and care, whereupon she thrived for the rest of that year—although, however much she ate, she never grew bigger but always stayed svelt, with the same slim grasshopper figure.

           

After that time, it came to pass that the spiraling locusts buried their young, deep under sand and silt, beyond discovery, for the many years it takes for resurrection. She, being she, could not follow successfully, though she sank her whole casing in the same desert hollow. She was not able to draw grasshopper breath so far below. She had learned to chirp their cluster song, had migrated for the summer, and had managed to abide—but she died.

           
Moral:  More or less, when you gotta go, you gotta go.

The Ostrich and the Hippo

When the ostrich strode to the river bank, the hippo smirked and then sank almost out of sight. 

His ears were like a periscope turned in all directions, and he heard the ostrich, who said, “You, you enormous blubber, come out of there and stop your snickering.”

            

“What did you say?” tried the other.

           

“You heard me, your ears don’t lap over. And I can see both of them flickering; does it make you so nervous answering me?”

            

“I’m twitching off testy flies and fleas.”

            

“That’s tsetse flies, you illiterate hulk, you huge sniggering ignoramus. Now, tell me, exactly, what makes you laugh at the sight of me?”

            

“It’s seeing someone almost as ugly as I but far funnier.”

            

The ostrich said, “Oh, you admit you’re the ugliest creature alive?”

            

“I’ve got the disproportion, for a start. I’m so ungainly, all the way around. You can’t see my bulk so much in water where I move all right. But on land I’m ever so slow; if I went any slower, I’d go backwards. I don’t so much move as encumber wherever I am, like a piece of lax lumber.”

            

“Well,” said the ostrich, “I can sprint if not fly, and though I balloon at the waist, have a scrawny neck and a door-knob head, at least I can run, and I feel often spry. But you, I agree, have no redeeming traits, your head’s too square, your mouth opens as wide as a gaping lagoon, your tail’s all wrong, it stops too soon and, over-all, you should have stayed in bed.”

            

“Good!” said the hippo, “I accept all that and the fact that you didn’t dwell on my fat. Do you mind if I repeat the one thing about you that turns all your defects into a virtue? You’re a laughing stock—yes, with wings that don’t lift—and when you sprint, as you say, you whomp and you shift, careening and swaying side to side with a wobble and heave that make one feel you need a gyroscopic guide to keep you on course or you’ll tilt and keel head over heel, your neck stretched out, a glazed look on your face, as you jounce and leap in your ostrich pace, your feet over-long, your claws too splayed, sweat on your beak, even in the shade, your whole body careering, about to flop, when suddenly you come to a comical stop. I may be uglier, but you’re funnier.”

            

“Well,” said the ostrich, “all that makes me more special than you.”

           

Moral: Pride, on anybody’s part, will find its way.

The Bat

The question they ask about the bat is, how did he get from this to that? Between the time he was still on ground and finally flew in air, how did he stay hale and sound, how did he evolve from here to there, being such an easy prey? How did he last more than a day?

            

The answer is, he became an awkward sort of dancer. He began to run with a fanciful skip that was neither a waft nor a gait, skip-hopping along at a furious clip, an intermediate but distracting, off-putting trait. No longer treading, still not flying, he pushed his pinions, bobbing and weaving, rhythmically swaying and heaving, until one day, with the wind just right, all of a sudden— separation! genuine lift—flight—the climax of continuous hesitant application.

            

Moral: Being in-between in life may mean simply—or not so simply—that you’re on your way.

The Miner's Wife and the Butterflies

There was this once when, set apart in the brush of a Rock Creek campsite, I overheard a woman from Butte as she stepped out of her modest trailer and found the place thronged by a pullulating mass of monarch butterflies, en route to Lower Canada. A miner’s wife, she was suddenly and exultantly astounded by the sight and cried aloud, singing to her husband coming after, “Oh, Vinnie! will you look at all the {effing} butterflies! (her joy declared in seemly brackets). An otherwise sedate wife was beside herself, profanely enraptured by the enormous palpitating cloud rising and softly falling, heaving and gently bucking on that vivid riverine coast. In her downright, downhome, gross delight she exclaimed to her husband and to the landscape, her obscene ecstasy bursting at the bright abrupt beauty of the world.

            

Moral: Who you are depends on this: were you struck more by Decline and Fall or, after all and still in all, a woman’s bliss?

The Turtle

The turtle lives on and on, years, decades, a century or more in prominent cases, but he is sad. He is clumsy and yet he can swim; doesn’t that cheer him sometime and lift his gloom in some favored seaway or lovely reef? No, he is always melancholy, everlastingly glum. What is so bad that he is so sad?

            

Is it his shell? the burden of his bone-house toted and carried, pulled and dragged wherever he goes, so that it’s a minor miracle he swims or rows at all, schlepping that inescapable surrounding weight all over the place, the bulk bearing down, brute force on his shoulders, heavier and heavier as he grows older. He labors under his leaden dome, feeling the increasing, encompassing freight. Oh yes, it’s his fortress against some attack, but how would you feel if you could never leave home? But: isn’t it buoyant, helping him float? So, it is also his life-saving durable coat, a principal reason that he thrives—and thrives. He may be immured but he endures—and endures and endures.

            

That’s it, it’s not the shell as shell. It’s existence and durance inside the cell. The shell is not the burden, but life itself is, the monotonous routine, repetitious sights, unvarying scenes. After the first hundred years nothing is as wondrous as first appeared—time and time again the tiresome tides, the flooding sea, the ebbing gulf—boring rhythms no sane turtle abides without turning morose.

            

No excitement can relieve the sheer repetition of even disasters and calamities—another eruption on the ocean floor, another duel between marine animals, a beaching of whales that have lost their direction again and again; another iceberg sloughing off a cliff sending it into the lashing main, one more giant island set adrift; another melting, another freeze; another upheaval or huge retrieval—enormities as boring as peace.

            

Do I make himself clear? He craves release. He is sad from over-long exposure. His mournful eye and stern composure say: life’s gift has become this curse I bear.

            

Moral: Above these waters on the land scientists work ceaselessly to extend human life. Woe to woman. Woe to man.

The Lowly Weed and the Royal Rose

“We are all basically common, you included,” said the chortlewort to the disdainful rose, “so don’t flatter yourself. You’re pampered is why you’re well-petal’d and pretty.”

            

“I beg your pardon,” said the rose, “I’m a Beauty, even a national one. ‘Pretty’ is a put-down word, and it shows you’re jealous.”

            

“Well, we have flowers and florets too,” said the weed, “but not so much of the show-off kind. Don’t you know you’re just a simple sport? Apart from odd, you’re fragile and frail, none of you can stand hard rain or hail, your stems are weak and you lack firm rhizomic foundation.”

            

The Caribou

Professor:      "I am here on the North Slope recording a bilingual caribou, who speaks a unique Eskimo dialect . . . Will you illustrate, please?"

Caribou:         "drzlyfumnpxksrccbggujalkr”

Professor:      "Meaning?"

Caribou:         “One o’clock”

Professor:      "May we have another example?"

Caribou:         “gxh.”

Professor:      "Translated how?"

Caribou:         “The place where two oceans meet in a bay that goes inland through a purple fjord that turns pale and then not so pale and goes on and on, in and out and then narrows somewhere but floods in May and maybe part of June.”

Professor:      "Any other expression, not so nuanced, that we may be interested in?"

Caribou:         “landscapeintruisionsinthenameofcivilizationalloverthespillspoiledplace

                        bypropernounsexxonandbritishpetroleumforimproperpurposes.”

Professor:      "We can almost decipher that."

Caribou:        " In plainer English: 'Men come now and dig dig and pump pump and lay down big pipe and seep and soak the land with poison, and may they go to blazes without taking us with them.'”

Professor:      "Thank you very much."

Caribou:         "You are not welcome."

            
Moral: Enough said.

Lions and Zebras

On the African plains there is a question: why are zebras feeding, heads bent as they browse, relaxed, uncaring, casual prey only to the flies and gnats in the air, while lions loll by, just over there?

            

Here is a lioness lazily walking, and another upside-down, pawing the sky, scratching her back in gravelly sand. And cubs are hilariously, perilously playing with ears and mane and tufted tail of a lordly male they’re bedeviling, but all he does is gigantically yawn and go on grazing. Peace, no domestic or any other kind of violence in this utterly placid scene.

            

Zebras meander and go on grazing, none of them remotely spooked. Some lions even hang in mimosa trees, prominent in their elevated torpor. And the zebras amble at their ease, unabashed, unconcerned, utterly casual.

            

Now, of a sudden, there is a change. Lions draped on boughs begin to clamber down. The great-maned lion who gazed unseeing, blind to the superfluous horde ahead, shakes himself, winks away his drowse. Other lions stir. They are hungering, no longer benevolent, lenient, relaxed. They are undergoing currents of re-animated appetite. And then they see, they see, innumerable zebras as—zebras—now.

            

Here is how: in that intervening placid stage, when they had fed, gorged more than enough, the lions saw their neighbors as a kind of horse, a horse with stripes or—they thought, in such a satisfied state—bars.. Each zebra-horse was in a cell or a cage, inside mobile metal enclosures. Who would charge iron bars, pounce on four-footed moving cars impervious to fang or leonine claw?

            

But then, after a while, a pang of risen hunger gnaws, releasing an efficient hormone secretion, called tapetum, in the iris of the lion’s eye. This whole pride can no longer detect or distinguish the color black—the color of the bars, or stripes. Staring at the zebras, the lions growl, “They are out!”—free for the taking, loose on the plains, in the sudden transforming blink of their eye.

            

The zebras sense something new in the air. They tremble; their skin ripples, quivers, you could say crawls. The adrenalized herd is preparing to flee, to follow old courses of flight and chase. Something in the wind, in the landscape, appalls them. They move in a body, restless, nerve-taut, escaping this place, away from hollow fellowship, feigned peace, false love. They no longer shuffle, they run, they prance, they flee.

            

The zebras never master this recurrent disaster, the sudden change from friend to foe; they tend to forget what they otherwise know.

            
Moral: A friend’s not a friend, tried and true, if half the time he turns on you.

The Otter and the Skeptic

There is no such thing, the Skeptic says, as actual bonafide happiness, anywhere in nature.

            

He dismisses “happy as a lark.” Every lark is unhappily afraid of the dark. Is it owls they fear? Or general lark superstition? Whatever. How about “happy as a clam”? Doesn't that smile proclaim how glad he is? “Hardly,” says the Skeptic, locked up as the clam is in isolation, sealed off like that, he cannot even imagine a state of contentment. Or any state. Clamologists say he has no thoughts or feelings whatsoever, congealed like that in a calcium ball; just as well say happy for the likes of a stone.

            

Did somebody refer to a “pig in clover” or add a note on “hog heaven”? The Skeptic reminds us that, awaiting every sow or boar, is the little matter of untimely slaughter.

            

Who recalls that famous accumulation of happified monkeys, and the barrel they’re in? “Would you be happy in a crowded barrel,” asks the Skeptic, “finding yourself in constant contact with so many pent-up close relations?” And some people mention the domestic cat, purring sweetly on couch or capacious lap. “Listen,” says the Skeptic, “he has memorized a strategic tree to climb more or less as fast as he can whenever his life cuts to the chase and he’s in the inevitable dog-and-cat race. And if he fails to catch his quota of mice, he becomes morbid. You can see it in his eyes. Remember that, about the cat.”

           

But wait a second a minute. There happens to be the indubitable otter. There he is: in or near his river, where, quick and instant, lissome, limber, he can always out-maneuver all the fishes and he can float in the water on his air-pocketed back and, holding a rock, causally strike and ultimately crack any crayfish for a mid-day snack. They run giddily after one another’s tails on a sort of literal merry-go-round. They live in a perpetual open-air amusement park, in their riverine scenery from winter snow to summer greenery, day night morn eve. After all the negatives, the otter is the one positive completely happy creature here on earth.

            

Moral: What the Skeptic needs is—another skeptic.

The Tapir

The tapir, you may know, is prehensile.

With his nose he can hold any utensil.

            But what’s really absurd

            is that he writes not a word

when someone gives him due paper and pencil.

            

Why in limericks and other places do we laugh at so many good creatures? Why are we so relentlessly superior?

           

Moral: Doesn’t it reveal how much we feel inherently and, instead, inferior?

Ebenezer Elephant

Ebenezer Elephant took a trip. He packed his—no, don’t go there—his suitcase, bought his ticket, said see-you-soon to some zebras he knew, one lizard, a friendly baboon, a giraffe he played cards with, and he departed on—or, rather, below—an airfreight blimp, carried in a huge sling underneath. He’d been given a sedative and he slept, swinging in the blue, swaying, rocking, lofted, out cold in cerebral goodbye land. The next he knew, he opened his eyes in Thailand.

            

He was looking for a cousin in the streets of Bangkok, and he found him with the inevitable mahoot on his back. (Thank God, I live in Africa, he thought, where all they can do is kill you.) Still his cousin confessed that it wasn’t so bad, life was better than it had been in the dwindling jungle where teak trees were disappearing because you, for one, were made to knock them over for squalid lumber. It made him sad banging down the columns of his very own ground for a pittance or only because the man on your back sometimes gave you more scrubs in your daily bath as extra reward. When they were done with the woods, there was a swath of long vast emptiness, your home ground gone, not a sapling, not a seedling, left standing, nothing but mounds and mounds of debris. So they left for the city, where they scrounged at night for garbage and handouts for the tricks the cousin had now been taught, just as demeaning as the circus where fellow workers had newly started. He thanked Ebenezer for the presents he had brought, and they parted.

            

Ebenezer flew home, swayed in the sling, not thinking, gratefully, of anything. Then he was home where he’d started from. He did not need any coaching now not to devastate all of his very own trees. But he would still have to take his chances on local poaching. One way or the other, though, he would never get down on his callous’d knees begging for handouts, pretty-please, ponderously.

            

Moral: It’s a close call between death and slavery.