The Tropic of Cancer

For a long time, scientists had puzzled over the ways in which elephants communicate. E.S.P. was suggested as a reasonable mode of communication: the only plausible way in which these majestic animals could possibly communicate so silently over long distances. Of course, when these learned men and women found the truth, E.S.P. seemed not only ridiculous but more along the lines of thought that men of old used to suggest that the earth was flat and all else revolved around it. At the time, however, E.S.P. appeared to be logical, as who really can understand the mysterious instinct of animals with their assumed sub-par intelligence. As time progressed, however, the idea of a lesser intelligence designated for animals faltered as men found that sparrows are finely tuned to the gravitational patterns of the planet; and in the same line found that the elephants had not been communicating through E.S.P. but through sound frequencies too low for the human ear to pick up.

Like elephants, the mountains also have long been communicating through this low rumble for millions of years. Across the great expanses of ocean and land, mountains have been rumbling, grounded by the weight of all the words they are made to pass on.

Suppose this method of communicating: that of echoes and travelling sound was not merely something for elephants and mountains and the bigger creatures of the world. Suppose then that our early ancestors also communicated through the calling out of ones feelings, as we emulate now through our own open mouths.  Sound, being both a means and a signal gives us the one tool that we can use to share with another being the thoughts that we ourselves have. Like mountains and elephants, we too transmit our thoughts through echoes and resonances.

Consider this: Dr. José Ganéa is no longer doctor, but hunter. The flesh that he will one day come to repair is atonement for the flesh that sharpened stone and spear now tears. José, although he knows that his own self is not the self of another, has no name, for names can only mean something if there is someone to designate meaning. Therefore, José, being far closer to being José than the man next to him, is still further from being José than he will ever be again. For now, he is Hurghk. Hurghk faces the same challenge that each of his descendants will face: he sees in his view an attractive woman. For all his lives of ripping apart and sewing together flesh, the most human and animal of qualities, Hurghk knows nothing of how to show this woman what he wants: that being herself.

This woman is Anaïs Gentileschi, but far removed from the Anaïs that at sixteen gave herself away to the most alluring, Anaïs at this present moment is hardened, a strong woman who wholly deserves the term ‘woman’ in a way that each generation values for its meaning in the same primordial sense. Anaïs, like José, will not yet know the name of Anaïs. Now, Anaïs is Ayglk. Ayglk is a hunter as much as Hurghk, her long fingers are strong and her eyes are fierce.

It could be Ayglk’s fierce eyes that call Hurghk to her, or it could be the shape of her legs, the length of her fingers, or the resonance of her voice. However, this connection could also go back much further, to a time where Anaïs and José meet for the umpteenth first time in a park outside a laboratory, a time where the moon and the ocean first fall in love, a time where two particles meet to make the first hydrogen atom.

In this age, Hurghk follows instinctually what all men have done since the beginning. He begins to woo Ayglk, at first with his own merits, a transaction for her attention not shared with any other. Once gained, Hurghk, like José will not stop. He finds the branches that burn the longest; he finds the sweetest smelling things; the brightest, most colourful objects. He carves for her ornate stones, for her and the rest of humanity to admire. He brings to her the best foods; paints for her the vivid portraits of the world he wants to give her, the world that men will admire for millennia as a mark of each persons history. But before it belonged to anyone else, this history belonged to just two.

As soon as Hurghk had won Ayglk’s devotion, he found once more a chasm separating them from becoming like the atom. Gesture, the first means of communication was falling short of everything Hurghk wished to say. In the same way, Ayglk found that silence, the great carrier of emotion was grossly inadequate. Together, they began to search with their hands and ears and eyes for the ways in which to tell another the things that only you may know.

Years may have passed, but perhaps it was days, or hours or centuries before they found the first seeds of conversation in the most primitive cries: sound that escaped one’s mouth when one felt too much.

Perhaps it was in one’s sleep that these first cries were found, or maybe it was the sound of the heart breaking through ones mouth as they observed the thing they cared most about being destroyed. Whatever it may have been, the first sound our ancestors made would have been weighted down with all the feeling of every being who had ever lived. And then it began. The first word to be spoken was ‘love’. For a time people would walk around pointing to the things they felt most strongly about, announcing ‘love’ as their name. Soon the world was filled with men and women naming love to the things that made them feel.

‘You’ was the next word, to give meaning to the things that were not themself. ‘You’, you are not I. You are separate from me, but you are now you, and valid because of that. The next words to follow were ‘Fire’, ‘Food’, ‘Look’, ‘Mother’, ‘Father’ and ‘Child’.  ‘Goodbye’ was said when the first person had to leave, ‘Hello’ was said as they came back. ‘Beautiful’ was said after ‘Why’, just as ‘Sorry’ followed ‘Hurt’. ‘Everything’ followed ‘Nothing’, which birthed ‘Make’, ‘treasure’ and ‘Destroy’. The last few words were ‘Them’, ‘Us’ and ‘I’. ‘I’ was one of the last words to be said, and only came about because men and women found that the names they gave things also gave weight, a reason to hold each object to itself, and the heavier other things became, the lighter they themselves felt. Thus, ‘I’ only came to ground each individual to the ground, and now ‘I’, the heaviest word of all, sinks people deeper than ever.

At this time, men still spoke with their hands as well as their mouth. They felt as though the words that they spoke could still be fallible, that some things may not be understood. Ayglk could be standing next to the flames cooking the meat and Hurghk may say ‘love’. For all Ayglk knows, Hurghk could be pointing to the flames, the bringer of heat and light, or the meat which would keep him alive, both of which seem a more likely object of his love than her, a desire yet no more necessary for his survival than the paintings on the wall. Without Hurghk pointing at her, Ayglk may never realise that each time Hurghk announces ‘love’, he is announcing her name, and thus naming all that he feels most strongly about as a testament to her.

Suppose then, that this was the birth of the spoken word. In the days of our ancestors, communication was valued for more than mere conversation. In the age of stone, of fire and of cave walls and gesture, the ability to use ones mouth, to shape and mould the sound as a sculptor does his clay, was of an importance that we fail to understand now. In a time where men spoke as mountains, the ability to say things was easily shared. The things that one man would shout would be echoed by all those who heard it.

Thus, if a man: Hurghk was to go away hunting and miss the chance to say something to his love: Ayglk, he could simply yell out  ‘I love you’, and know with all certainty that it would reach her ears. But just as ‘I love you’ would reach her ears, it would reach many others. As one man shouts his love, all who hear it would repeat it, each man standing as a mountain from which the sound would bounce off. Soon, a whole expanse of land could be covered with the echoes of ‘I love you’, and each who heard it would feel as if it was especially for them, and lock a piece of it away in their hearts before echoing it onwards.

In the days of mountains, men understood the importance of things said in the same way that they understood the importance of stone weaponry and the importance of art. In an age of telephones, of daily newspapers and disposable love, we seem to have forgotten the significance of permanence. Like the cave paintings and weapons of our ancestors, the words that they once shouted over savannah and plain still reverberate to this day in the hearts of mountains, still echo in the rumbling of elephants.