You really ought to do something about it, I told myself in a tone of anger. Then I added: though it would be best if you just took a seat and sat still for a moment.
I tuned in to the echo of this peculiar reproach as if it were the opening riff of a song I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I stared at the chair and wondered if would it be in my best interest to just sit and be still? And if so, why? An answer spoke to me from instinct: because once you become still, you will be better prepared to hear. Sounds about right, I thought, such a truth should never be denied.
For lack of any conscious reason, I turned my eyes upward to that of my companion in the Upstairs room. As most of you are aware, the eyes often speak out loud. A pair of complete strangers can fluently reveal their shared interest and mutual attraction with just one simple glance. That eye that I couldn’t see spoke to me, and I understood. My lower body began to congeal like jelly, and I could hardly navigate my way to the chair without caving in completely.
He turned his monstrosity of a head to one side and peered upon me with curiosity and spoke. “Now that I have your attention, it may help you, as well as others, to first hear my story.”
“Yes, indeed,” I nodded. “Although first—if you don’t mind—could you afford us the pleasure of knowing your name?”
He glared at me for an infinite minute without so much as a response or even a facial expression. Then he went on ahead of himself as if I never asked the question at all.
“I was born somewhere in the forests of a different kind of wild,” he mentioned matter of factly. “I’ve never taken the time to find out precisely where, and see no reason as to why I should start now. Though, I do have a question for you. Do you happen to have any sort of history as far as poaching wild animals for zoos and circuses is concerned?” He asked concertedly.
Shaking my head—startled at the question—I answered, “I know nothing about what you speak of.”
His eyes sighed and he spoke with a shrug. “That’s good. I have no actual memory of the first circumstance—though, I still have memories of other moments prior to my first poaching. In any case, I was sold to a zoo in some small but sprawling southeastern village. The loveliest village on the plains I once heard them call it. I cannot for the life of me say which village it was, for the awareness of such things, remember, I have none. But there I lived and grew for lots of years.”
He paused and chewed absentmindedly on a mound of peanuts for a while, as if he were gathering his thoughts about him…
(In a nutshell)
In places such as a zoo—he was back at it, at last—where wild animals are locked away in cages, most of those caged are more wise than their relatives lost in the distant wild. This being because even the dimmest of those of those caged cannot help but sense that something doesn’t quite add up with such style of living arrangements.
When I say that we are more wise, I’m not one to try and imply that we have acquired the power of deductive reasoning. But the lion, the one you often notice pacing the cage, is nonetheless preoccupied with something that human nature might recognize as critical thinking.
And this thought begs the question: why?
“Why! Why! Why?” The lion asks itself, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, end to seamless end, as it retraces its circuitous path locked away too slowly rot in a cage. The lion cannot dissect the question or even pretend to begin to elaborate upon it. If one were somehow able to ask the beast, “why what?”, it would not be able to answer.
Nevertheless, such a question burns like an inextinguishable flame within its heart, generating a sort of searing pain that will not diminish until the beast has a momentary lapse of reason into the terminal malaise that the powers that be consider as the rejection of a life trapped in captivity. And these sorts of questions are ones that no lion asks himself in his native habitat.
So before long, I too, began to ask myself why. Being more mentally advanced than the lion, I was able to cross examine what I meant by the question, at the very least, in a darker, more primitive sort of way. But I began to remember a distant life, which was, as for those living it, interesting and comfortable. And yet, by stark contrast, this life now, was agonizing and far from comfortable.
Thus, when asking myself why, I was trying to piece together the puzzle of why so many lives should be divvied up this way, half of them interesting enough, the other half, boring as hell. Mind you, I carried no concept of myself as a captive of pain; it never occurred to me that someone else was preventing me from living a pleasant and carefree life, and which, such a thing still hasn’t really occurred to me. And so when no answer presented itself as forthcoming, I began to consider the matter of all things puzzling.
And it was in the piecing together of such trivial matters that my interior growth began—often unnoticed.
And although, though naturally I knew nothing of it, the Great Divide was taking its toll on every last aspect of the American Dream. Zoos and circuses everywhere were being forced to pinch every last penny, forced to flush out such wild and rampant inventory and thereby significantly reducing spending of all sorts.
A great and disheartening number of us “animals” were left to be—to say it frankly—euthanized for the greater good of something they called economy. This I believe, for there has never been a high demand in the private sector for pets that neither offered simplicity in their upkeep, nor very colorful in the way of their theatrics. The exceptions were, of course, the extravagant cats, the primates, a bluebird, and a pachyderm.
So to make a long story short, I was sold to some roadshow troubadour and his cirque du calvary with an empty cage—or void, if you will—that he needed filled. I was a large and magnificent adolescent beast and to him I represented a metaphoric long-term investment.
Some might imagine that life in one cage is just like life in another, but this is nowhere near the case. Take the matter of human communication for example. At the zoo, all of us animals were aware of our visitors. They were quite a curiosity for us, very much worth the entertainment, in the way that bluebirds building a nest around a house might seem worth watching to a brood of humans, if that’s what you call them in a group. I can’t say for sure.
Though it was crystal clear to me that these strange creatures were there for the sole purpose of seeing us in a habitat unfamiliar to us, but it never crossed our minds that they had come for only us. With the troubadour at the helm, headed in every direction known to animal, however, I quickly came to the understand the reason for such spectacle.
Indeed, my knowledge of such regard for said spectacle began the moment when the troubadour first put my ass on display. A few guests approached my cage and after a moment or two, began speaking to me. I was awestruck.
At the zoo, guests spoke to one another—never to us, perhaps this was the circus, I thought. “Maybe folks are just confused,” I wondered with another thought. “Perhaps, they have mistook us for them.” My bewilderment and perplexity grew with exponential growth, as one by one, every soul that visited my cage, spoke in a consistent way. Yet, I simply had no clue as to what to make of it.
In the time that followed I started to place more attention on what the guests were saying. After awhile, I noticed that while every voice was different, there was one sound they spoke out loud over and over again, and it seemed to be meant to gather my attention. So it did. Though, mind you, again, I was unable to even a gamble upon a guess as to what it meant. Remember, I possess nothing that would serve as a translating tool for the human tongue.
Over time, I realized that the cage next to mine was occupied by a female and her offspring, and I had long observed that the clientele spoke to her in the exact same way they spoke to me. But yet I realized, that the guests offered a different kind of repetitive sound to attract her attention. When at her cage the guests called out, “Pallas! Athena! Pallas! Athena!” And when at my cage, they called out “a….! pro….! mise….!”, but I was never able to put two and two together as to what my name was, or hers really for that matter.
But yet, with these intricate revelations, I soon understood that these foreign sounds in some enigmatic way attached us directly to something along the lines of what you humans call an individual. You, given a name at birth, cannot imagine the sort of revolution that took place within my heart upon the acquisition of an actual name. It is of no exaggeration to say that I was truly born again in that moment—born as “something” with a bit more “oomph” behind it.
So, with the nature of captivity no longer a mystery, as I had heard my life explained to thousands of people, children and adults alike, all of us wild beasts in the troubadour’s cirque du calvary originally belonged to some place you humans call the wild, which apparently stretched across every corner of the earth (whatever an “earth” might be).
See, we had been taken into captivity—hearts and all—from the aforementioned wild, and brought together in one confined place, all because of, for some inherent reason, someone found “us” interesting enough to be locked away in a cage, this all due to the fact that your kind considered us to be just “wild” and “dangerous” enough to call your own. But such choice of words left me puzzled because they, upon further examination, evidently refer to the qualities I have often used to simplify myself.
I guess what I mean is that when someone wants to show someone else something wild and dangerous, they would point their finger in my direction. It is also true that they would also point their fingers toward the lion, but since I have yet to see a lion outside its cage, there was nothing enlightening about pointing fingers.
And if you would please afford me the effort of circling back around to the fact that I meant to keep a long story short. So please allow me to wrap it up.
As a whole, life with the troubadour’s “cirque du whatever” was a huge improvement over life at the zoo, because my thoughts were never bored.
And so perhaps a year had passed. Then one rainy afternoon, the circus was deserted, I was welcomed to a peculiar, yet beautiful visitor. A lone woman, who looked to be the prettiest thing something like me had ever seen. She stood at the entrance, glancing methodically at each cage, and then, without so much as hesitation, she headed straight for mine. Her steps took a pause, when she noticed the length of rope slung about my immediate surroundings, then she planted her low profile high heels into the mud, and leered distinctively with intent into my eyes. Now, I have never been perplexed by human eye contact, but hers were different, for the sheer fact that I saw something that reminded me of a wild much like home in her eyes.
So delightfully, I stared back in awe. We both stood for the eternity of a few moments without so much as a movement—stillness, I thought. I remember feeling a promising admiration for the woman unlike any I’d ever felt. And there she stood, so glowingly enduring the painful drizzle that was pouring down her cheeks and leaving her clothes soaking wet.
Then, at last, she stood up straight, smiled from ear to ear, zipped up her jacket, and gave me a quaint nod, as if she had surprisingly come to a carefully considered conclusion.
“You harmless thing, you are no beast,” she spoke out loud. “We shall name you Love!” And with that the cage door swung open.
And then, she turned and walked back in the direction from which she came. And as she was almost out of sight, those eyes stared back at me.
“Well, hurry up mister, you’ve got somewhere to be…continued.”
Ryan Love
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