Coconut crushers

My mom told me that when she went to Thailand last month, for her first vacation in a decade, she and my dad rode on the back of a pregnant elephant who kept turning her head to grab at the bananas my mother had in her lap, nearly overturning their sedan in the process. This elephant was voracious (understandably so! How would you like to weigh 8,000 pounds and gestate a 500-pound fetus for two years while subsisting on an exclusively herbivorous diet?) and kept pulling up banana saplings with her trunk and eating them as she made money for the Thai tourist industry.

My mom watched the elephant pluck fallen green coconuts off the ground. Would they be eaten whole? No. The elephant gingerly placed a coconut under her front foot. There was no smashing, just a gentle depression that cracked the coconut into two halves that were then trunk-scooped for the meat. Awesome! Tender! Brilliant! I suggested to my mom that we ought to have raised an elephant instead of the fat and beatific dalmatian that we did, but I think that attempt at a joke was lost in translation.

One of the earliest fake arguments Laura and I had involved elephantine brilliance. I'd heard of elephant paintings, which continue to seem as fraudulent as the franchise restaurant wall-hangings of four year-old Marla Olmstead, since any prehensile organ can grasp a brush and flail it around until it's art. I had never heard of elephant music, though when Laura introduced the subject I was ready to dismiss it in similar terms: give any prehensile organ a mallet and a xylophone, and there you go! Musique abstraite made musique concrete in the studio. Laura said I was a monster for not appreciating the music that almost brought her to tears with its beauty. We had to agree to disagree.

For the last three years, Laura has kept in her address book a newspaper clipping about an elephant herd that unlatched a gate and freed antelope in a game preserve in Zululand. Like unhappy people crab-walking, it brings a smile to my face every time I think about it. I mean, they're dextrous, they're sentient, and they're compassionate. How can you not love that?

Since my respect for elephants only increases the more I hear about them, I decided today that I ought to give the elephant music a listen. I found a few MP3s online featuring music from a twelve-piece elephant percussion ensemble. For the most part, the elephants stick to banging their mallets on various resonating items (some of which produce beautiful overtones in their long decays), but the rapture overwhelms a few players in "Little Elephant Saddle" and they can be heard bleating in ecstasy.

I have no basis for the judgment of elephant music; it seems misguided or mean-spirited to compare elephant percussion to, say, an Art Blakely solo or the Anvil Chorus. Listening to the elephant songs reminds me of reading my students' writing when I was a high school teacher. Judging the worth of a piece of student writing as a work of literature would have been stingy, because my primary duties were to encourage and improve. Likewise, I'm so delighted that elephants can manipulate mallets at all that to say their music sucks would be like mocking a student poem for poor syntax.

Anyway, even if I'm being stingy, I don't think the music sucks. It's perfectly adequate music to think frantic thoughts of deforestation and watershed pollution to. Happy listening.