Outside the gate of the beachside chalet complex in which our holiday home is situated is a sign advertising a business that also occupies part of the development: ‘Welcome to Paradise!’ it proclaims.
Outside the gate of the beachside chalet complex in which our holiday home is situated is a sign advertising a business that also occupies part of the development: ‘Welcome to Paradise!’ it proclaims.
And in many ways it’s right. This stretch of the Wild Coast is beautiful indeed, the untamed Indian Ocean breaking gloriously on the sandy shore as it has for millennia. Paradise.
There’s something within most of us, I suspect, that is attracted to wild places, that is drawn to elemental beauty such as this. I certainly am. And this is nothing new; it seems to be a fundamental part of the human psyche, as the 8th century Chinese poet Wang Wei demonstrates:
Deep in the Mountain Wilderness
Deep in the mountain wilderness
Where nobody ever comes
Only once in a great while
Something like the sound of a far off voice:
The low rays of the sun
Slip through the dark forest
And gleam again on the shadowy moss.
Wang Wei (Translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
But ‘wilderness’ is not what most of us seem to want in our paradises. It’s a much tamer, more controlled version of it we’re after. A hint of wildness is great but we mustn’t feel threatened by it. Looking and admiring from a safe distance is fine but keep it at arm’s length, please – don’t ask us to get too close.
So that word in my first sentence – development – epitomises what we often require our paradises to be. Beautiful, yes; peaceful and idyllic, of course; but also essentially safe. Developed.
If it’s wild, in other words, it can’t really be paradise.
Even as I write I’m conscious of a kind of duplicity in my words, for is not poetry itself a kind of controlling, a shaping of language into something palatable and artful? Doesn’t it (at least sometimes) take the ‘wild’ aspects of our nature and mould them into something else, something we can recognise and live with? Doesn’t it tame them into ‘literature’?
Yet the wild refuses to go away entirely, even as we seem so intent upon domesticating it. Wilderness still has its representatives.
A wonderful example of such representatives are the few remaining old male elephants – tuskers – whose magnificent ivory is so coveted by those ignorant humans who cannot acknowledge paradise when they see it. Sadly, very few of these superb animals remain alive and they continue to be slaughtered by bloodthirsty fools.
One such elephant, a truly superb 50-year-old bull named Satao, was killed by poachers in Tsavo, Kenya last year.
A statement by the Tsavo Trust, which had tracked and protected him for many years, spoke of “a great life lost so that someone far away can have a trinket on their mantelpiece”.
Another bit of paradise thrown away.
In tribute, Kenyan poet Stephen Derwent Partington posted this on his Facebook wall:
Satao, 2014
Cowards, let us sing in dead Elmolo
how the elephants have died.
We thank the cavemen, that they drew them,
that zoologists described them,
for the photos of them herding
which the tourists left behind,
for who would ever, fools, believe us?
Teeth from heaven to the ground!?
I stretch my arm out like a trunk
to palm the graveyard of its cranium;
it’s how, I hear, they mourned.
The brain within worked tools and language.
I have none: a useless pen
(it’s only good for drafting elegies)
and even then, no words.
We once had tuskers. Tell the birds!
Stephen Derwent Partington
