Elephant Mind

Words, strings of words, baroque lace made of words, sink down so deeply in our consciousness they become embedded there and thus part of us, part of our mind.

There is no French word that is the exact equivalent of the English word 'mind'. If you look it up you will find 'esprit', 'intelligence','âme','pensée','idée','avis', - spirit, intellect, soul, thought, idea, opinion. I would argue most strongly that none of these has exactly the same meaning of our notion as English speakers, of 'mind'.

Does language sculpt thought or does thought sculpt language?

In the book 'Swann', the publisher Cruzzi, thinks back to conversations he had with his own father who maintained that if we had no word for love, then we would have no concept of it. I have been thinking about this. Of course, different cultures have different words for love, separating erotic love from romantic and from familial or spiritual.
But I think we would still need a word, something with which to share our experience with others of the deep bonds or the soaring ecstasy, or the comfort or need.
The filaments which we spin on Earth, like a spider's silk, fragile yet strong as steel and which link us to Heaven.

Poetry or the rhythmic language of childhood stories that comes to us unbidden.
Recently I was visited by Kipling's 'The Elephant's Child' with his mere smear nose, and his satiable curtiosity, and the great, grey, green, greasy Limpopo river, all set about with Fever trees and the bi-coloured python rock-snake.

Descriptions that gave comfort to our childhood whilst we lay in bed and pondered the imponderable, what was it like to be dead on a sunny day and lie in our graves looking up at the sky but unable to go out and play?

And there on 'Planet Earth' are the elephants in the Serengeti, marching to find water, the herd acting as one, bound together as one mind by their need, their thirst, but reliant on the memories of individuals as they follow the Matriarchs.

When we kill them all, will anything remain? If we visit the plains or the jungles where they have lived will there be a memory of them, at the watering holes, under the trees?
Will some part of their existence have been absorbed by the land?
Without words.