It Is What It Is

Something that has come up in my life twice in less than one month (and not much comes up in my life these days) is this story -- apparently a very old and frequently told story -- about six blind men who wander through a field. The men find a giant something and can’t determine what it is, so they each touch a different part of the thing and argue about what they’re touching. One man touches a large leathery tube and concludes that the thing is a snake, while another man touches a solid, upright surface and concludes that it’s a wall, and still another man touches two oblong flaps and concludes that they're two fans, etc., until each man has reached a different conclusion about the thing. Only when the men walk away from the thing and collaboratively discuss their findings do they realize that they were touching the trunk, side, ears, and other parts of an elephant. This little ditty of a tale is supposed to teach the importance of getting out from your own narrow mindset so that you can learn something from other people.

The first time I heard the story I made an elephant-penis joke. The second time I heard the story I gasped and hit my boyfriend’s arm because I couldn’t believe that I was hearing the story again in such a short period of time and in a completely different context. AND! The cool part about the second time was that the storyteller, Derek DelGaudio*, added his own little spin to the meaning of the story. Sure, we can all gather that the men needed to collaborate in order to figure out that they were touching an elephant… but what if they weren’t touching an elephant? What if “groupthink” led them to the wrong conclusion and they were really touching some undiscovered mythical creature with a snake for a nose, a wall for a body, and fans for ears? AND! What would such a mythical creature think about having been reduced to your standard elephant? Would the creature no longer think itself unique and so resign itself to a life of elephant-hood?

I was instantly reminded of a different story, The River God by Tim Gorichanaz, that explores this idea that things become whatever we label them as. Sasquatch was creepy and intriguing until we learned that he was probably a bear with mange. Then he was just sad. Did he stop being a creepy-and-intriguing Sasquatch because he transformed into a bear, or because we changed what we called him? When I was a kid, my brother went through a phase of being obsessed with aliens and crop circles. I remember looking at images of crop circles and being baffled; when I was told that they were just a hoax (besides not really understanding what a hoax was) I couldn’t possibly imagine that a human could create those shapes in the fields, nor did I understand why a human would want to create them. Even now knowing that they truly were created by humans as, I don’t know, some giant public gag, I still call them crop circles, and I’m still kind of baffled by them. Why is that?

* DelGaudio’s one-man show, In & Of Itself, was recently turned into a movie and I highly recommend it!