The Leveler –
entry in The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley
Between 1840 and 1864, the Father of Light (who is also called the Inner Word) afforded the musician and pedagogue Jakob Lorber a series of protracted revelations concerning the humanity, the fauna and the flora of the celestial bodies that make up our solar system. One of the domestic animals that those revelations apprised us of is the Leveler, or Tamper-Downer (Bodendrucker), which renders incalculable services on the planet Miron (identified by the current editor of Lorber’s work as Neptune).
The Leveler is ten times larger than the elephant, which it greatly resembles. It has a shortist trunk, long straight tusks, and pale green skin. Its legs are very thick, and they are conical; the points of the cones seem to fit into its body. The Leveler is a plantigrade animal that labors for bricklayers and builders to level the ground: it is led to a plot of uneven ground, and with its legs, its trunk, and its tusks, it levels it.
The Leveler feeds upon grass and roots and has no enemies, save a few species of insects.
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Illustration of the Leveler by Peter Sis. Photo by Judith Huang.
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I have been fascinated by elephants for a long time. I am slowly amassing a collection of representations of the elephant. I’ve gotten up to four so far.
This fellow is from Ghana. It was given to me by my friend Lois who was a reporter there for a summer. It’s made of wood.
This little guy was blown out of glass by a third-generation glassblower in Murano, Venezia. I remember this guy because he is a True Artist. We had a long conversation and he showed me his best piece, which he doesn’t even bother displaying, which is of a little deer being carried off by an eagle while his mother watches on in panic – a scene from Bambi. He has loved Disney movies since he was a child, and so this fellow was modeled after Dumbo. He doesn’t like tourists, and literally ducked onto the floor when he saw a crowd pass by the store so he wouldn’t have to serve them, as he preferred to show me how he made the glass baubles he was working on. His brother, who makes jewelry a few doors down, is better at earning money than him, but he isn’t too bothered. He is very annoyed that crass little Disney figures made in China are displayed all along the storefronts that are closest to the main island. He has promised, if I’d like, to teach me glassblowing if I should ever return to Venice.
I can’t for the life of me remember how I got this elephant.
This colourful fellow was carved out of wood in San Martin Tilcajete, Oaxaca, Mexico, a village that specializes in the craft. The little figures are called alebrijes. The wood is extremely light. I also have a really big wooden tiger from one of the artisans there who looks like something out of Picasso. The state of Oaxaca is a puzzling and delightful demonstration of the goods and ills of specialization. You have one village specializing in red pottery, one village specializing in black pottery, one village specializing in a carpets, one in wooden animals, one in cochineal dyes. And you have to wonder if this is the secret to the preservation of craft. The problem is, when the economy is down, craftsmen’s livelihoods are precarious. They pour into Oaxaca City to sell their wares in the market, they turn up in D.F. – Mexico City, and just the word “Oaxaca” is enough to give them instant credibility, a kind of brand signifying quality. But can one rely entirely on tourism?
After all, the sadness of Venice is that there is almost nothing else.
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Treatise on the Prosepoem
by Judith Huang
But it was Baudelaire who launched the genre, giving it a local habitation and a name. Of course, we had to do that visionary work of appropriating that old and sagacious institution – the sentence, and make it our own: The New Sentence, like the New York or the New England. The New Sentence is the Liberated Sentence in prose that works like poetry. Not a unit of logic. But an Independent. Entity that relates. To the sentences before. And after. (In multiple, complex, and ambiguous ways.) But then, like all appropriated things, before long we had to set it loose. We had to let it stride in long strides across the continents. The sentences became a paragraph, and dwelt amongst us. It was akin to the elephant, that most sagacious of beasts, humble enough to be funny and princely enough to be beautiful. It now roams the earth upon its pillared legs, its huge heart spanning acres of cedars, falling in its mellifluous gallop.
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Basically one of my ambitions in life is to grow up to be an elephant. I’m working on it.
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