Lindsay Remee Ahl

I refrain from telling him that the facts I know never seem to have in and of themselves any particular consequence; it is only in how they are interlinked, how they change and alter the other facts around them, that gives you a full picture. I am interested in the full picture. I’ve rarely found a genuine fact, complete with the weight of objectivity, or a history that is unalterable. Facts are so complex and subtle, so deceptive and slippery, that I doubt their ability to elucidate the truth.

           I’ve always told everyone: my mother died in Africa in 1975. Her name was Elena Monroe. She had straight brown hair to her waist, wore polka-dotted miniskirts, and painted every kitchen she ever lived in black and white. This is what I know about Africa in 1975: the price of ivory was thirty-five dollars a pound, although seven years before, in 1968, it was only three dollars a pound, and by 1980 in Japan the price would rise to two-hundred dollars a pound. In 1975, one large tusk was worth seven thousand dollars; by 1980, the same tusk would be worth forty thousand dollars. Ivory became more precious than gold, and at least seventy thousand elephants a year were killed, more than eighty percent shot by poachers.

          Even amazing facts, like for example, facts about elephants, eyewitness observations about how elephants in zoos will play with the faucets, how they love to paint, how they get bored, or in the wild, how they mourn their dead by placing leaves and branches over dead bodies, and seem in fact to have an anticipation and dread of death, or how a male bull in the wild walks easily 150 miles a day and will get painful and crippling arthritis if not allowed to walk a great deal, or the more technical facts, like the elephant penis averages four feet long and weighs 60 pounds– these add up to nothing but a complexity problem. The interrelated parts combine with a randomness, and out of that, arise real facts.