Elephant

Last year I visited my sister in Namibia and went on a short safari. When I saw my first wild elephant, a young lone male, I burst into tears and promptly had a nosebleed. 

To those around me, it probably seemed a bit over-dramatic. To those I was travelling with, it was the natural result of the few days I had just spent at altitude in Windhoek. But it makes a good story. 

Like the elephant, I have a reputation for having a phenomenal memory, which I have mentioned before. I also have a reputation for having a brain like a sieve. I will forget to post a birthday card in time, or that I have arranged to meet someone for a coffee, or to go to the dentist. But I can bring back at a moment's recall the stories I created to capture something that at the time felt worth remembering. I am not the slightest bit unique in this: it is a quintessentially human way of navigating the world and fixing our place within it. It is why we have our myths and legends and histories: long before man first scraped animal skins to vellum, or beat plant fibres to paper-pulp, we passed on knowledge through stories that echo around us still.

Story-telling might be a wonderful way of capturing memory, but it is also deeply flawed as a way of capturing the facts as they have a tendency to shift with every re-telling. I have taken a while to come to terms with this. I knew I couldn't trust my day to day memory, but the veracity of my longer-term recall was part of my identity. If I couldn't trust my memories, then is anything true, and who or what am I? I wrestled with the idea for months, and then stopped thinking about it until I sat down today to write and found a half-written piece about elephants and memory. And as I picked it up to finish it, I realised I've made peace with my brain's unreliability. I accept that sometimes I will tell a story and someone else will say, "It wasn't like that at all." I accept that sometimes someone else will tell me a story and I will say, "I don't remember that at all." And that's OK. Those stories might be full of inaccuracies, but they preserve what is important: the lesson we took away with us and what it means to us now. And they are written, not in stone, but in the fleshy folds of our mind and as such may be adjusted to allow for the extra facts and perspectives someone else brings.

In the elephant kingdom, matriarchal groups preserve shared memories and use them to teach the young. I suppose that for young bull elephants, these memories have to be embedded well, because they are destined for a life wandering largely alone. When elephants meet, they connect or re-connect in low sounds that rumble through the air and sound like the earth shaking. So it is for us. No matter how lonely we wander, cloud-like or otherwise, when we connect with others and share our stories we may feel the world shift around us, but we also discover ourselves to be rooted and anchored after all. We find that we can move beyond the insularity of our own narratives and gain a sanity-saving sense of perspective without which all our carefully-constructed edifices will crumble and bury those we love beneath their stones.