Emilija Ferdmanaitė: Start with the elephant, and somehow you will hook the monkeys | Culture

The train would stop at poor stops and end stations, from which it would depart in the opposite direction, then everything would get mixed up and you would no longer care where you were going and what part of the world it was. Majestic vistas floated by, unfolding a sacred phantasmagoria of towering peaks, and you rushed to those mountains and into their arms, here they rose before your reverent eyes, here they vanished once more behind the bend of the road.¹

Above the middle of the navel,

At the top, the primordial roars.²

When I look at my childhood photos, I don’t look like someone who would often climb trees or climb fences. And yet, conquering the summit and its separate acts – contemplating the height and one’s strength, choosing a climbing strategy, rehearsing or reinventing the choreography of movements, balancing, finally the feeling of victory and immediate disappointment at the very top – figure in many of my early memories. Perhaps this is what childhood is all regarding: the stubbornness to add a curb, a stool, a ladder to your small stature. To catch up.

The kindergarten was right next to the house, across the everyday road to the store. It was surrounded by a standard metal braided fence, through which brambles and nettles rushed. It was common practice not to walk the few extra meters to the wicket, but to change where convenient; I remember the roughness of the metal under my palms, I remember the fun pushback and how high you had to lift your leg to get through in one fell swoop. The palms then smelled a bit of rust. I remember the last time that fence still seemed impenetrable to me. I remember who taught me to climb it. I remember the satisfaction and surprise when I climbed over for the first time. Satisfaction is understandable; surprise: “Just that much?”

Kindergarten was the universe of us, the children of the yard: Disneyland, takeshi castle, the scenography of fateful events. The gazebo under the lime trees, where I first heard regarding menstruation and bet a hundred bucks that it was nonsense; I was five; following returning home, I checked the information in the reference book “Where I came from” and avoided going out into the yard for a week. The same linden trees that we used to climb to pick lime blossoms for winter teas. The parallels on which one evening my friend declared that my first love was a “moron” when I sat down: then I experienced for the first time what a point of view is. Other parallels, from which I suffered a different, bloody injury following driving away – an extraordinary event for me, a normally cautious child (I did not realize how scared I was until the elderly neighbor I met started screaming: “Kid, you’re covered in blood!”). A globe that I didn’t dare to climb for a long time, but once when no one was looking, I decided: it wasn’t that difficult, and the result was disappointing – nothing special might be seen from its top.

The challenges increased gradually. The next summer, more boys joined the yard shed and we started playing a game of “Jump off the roof and don’t get killed.” The roof was a nursery roof at its lowest point: you might jump onto it from the slate canopy of the gazebo, and onto this you would climb by leaning once morest the bench and resting your feet on the cracked bricks. There was a sandbank ahead – for a soft landing. Apparently, we didn’t kill each other. We didn’t think to be afraid.

AJ Graham in his essay “The Search for Fear” concludes that the canonical character of folktales – the Fearless Hero – cannot be classified as animate because he does not have the only characteristic that characterizes him – fear (“fear”). Like his opponent the Devil, he participates in a double life, ignoring the distinction between life and death. The absence of fear becomes the impetus that drives the Fearless Hero to action—to seek fear, to seek authority, sacred or secular.

In many such tales, Fearless is ultimately frightened by the element of water – a pitcher of cold water or a bucket of ice that is turned over his head. This freezing cold, the holy terror of being momentarily confronted with death, is the closest thing to “horror” that the hero gets to experience.

After turning the top, we get the depth, the bottom. A tangle of roots teeming with worms and slugs, decaying dead leaves, fruit scraps, and who knows what. Viscous river or lake mud. Walking on the sand of the sea, the cold, dark green water rushing over the head; another memory, the first approach to death.

Diving into the deep is semantically close to climbing to the top: intermediate states are not suitable, the goal is the very final stop, vaguely promising – what? Fulfillment? Knowledge? Eternity?

I look over what I wrote and frown: why does childhood persistently come to mind when thinking regarding the peaks? More peaks in childhood? The feats of the Fearless Hero in overcoming them? Or maybe as a child you are convinced that every peak in the field of vision or imagined is finite, so at least in theory it can be reached, mastered, appropriated? That there’s a predictable chain of emotions when you reach the top: job satisfaction, self-indulgence, then boredom, indifference, and a re-opening void?

The peaks are impressive when viewed from below. Beaking the cathedral ceiling until his head spins, stretched out on the forest floor, trying to take in the infinity of leaves. “Peaks beckon…” But no: peaks do not beckon and do not require us to reach for them; they are still alone.

Over the years, you realize that a peak is only a peak as long as you climb it. A peak that has been climbed ceases to be a peak; sooner or later, but usually sooner, the climax of the possessed peak is freed and you are back at the zero point. “So where now?” asks the mind, and the eyes wander restlessly until they stop at a new, yet unconquered peak. Ah, here she is. Well, let’s start.

There is a saying: the closer to the top, the weaker the branches. Gardeners would agree: a taller tree doesn’t just risk summoning lightning; its leaves are smaller and more lustrous due to the complicated sugar metabolism, it does not bear fruit for longer. Similarly problematic is the mountain air, which is traditionally used for health by dry farmers – such as Th. Manno Hans Kastorps or his literary second-in-command, O. Tokarczuk Mečislovas Voinićius. Although praised for its cleanliness and antimicrobial properties, the lack of oxygen in the air of the highlands takes the breath and turns the head, dries the throat with its special dryness. You begin to see fairies and demons, discuss high topics, delve into self-analysis, seek personal transformation.

In the collection of essays by R. Barthes published in 1957, the author of “Mythology” dives into the very thicket of bourgeois neuroses, from which he draws and deconstructs what he calls socio-cultural myths – symbolic systems of meanings on which the prevailing ideology in society is based. Some of the myths he describes are related to the celebrities of the time, others cover industrial or marketing trends, and still others, crossing the boundaries of the era, deal with political-ideological systems. By introducing the myths he considered to the world, R. Barthes opened the door for further attempts by other semioticians to identify similar systems of signs. One of such sociocultural myths, not described by R. Barthes himself, but ask for his pen when you beg – Climbing to the Top.

After rejecting the evolutionary assumptions (by climbing into a tree, you will not only protect yourself from a saber-toothed tiger, but at the same time, you will also pick fruit and feed the cubs), the concept of “climbing to the top” appeared in modern consciousness, firmly took root in it, and became the most important personal, professional and social aspiration. (Here it can be argued that the pursuit of the top is completely pre-modern, in its essence a deeply Christian aspiration, based on a vertical heaven-hell axis, but a line should be drawn somewhere, so let’s draw it at the beginning of the industrial revolution and the birth of the Western ideal of “self-made man”. ) To reach the top is to become something from nothing. The myth of the top transcends personal ambition and encompasses a complex web of ideologies and societal expectations; it can be broken down into smaller interconnected myths: the Hero’s Journey, the Social Ladder, Individualism and Self-Realization. There is no need to explain – the mirage of our perceived reality is woven from these myths, and in general, the very writing of this essay hits all four corners of the myth of the Peak.

But here is the paradox: following the logic of this myth, individualism calls for abandoning what is universal, normal, conformist. Maybe instead of climbing the peaks shown by others (isn’t that a kind of “peak consumerism”?), it’s more interesting to build your own towers? Your tower is your will: build as you like, where you like, from what you like; want – climb, don’t want – don’t climb.

Once, as an adult, I had to play a board game, or rather, a carpet game: connect wooden blocks in the shape of animals to a tower in such a way that it comes out as high as possible and does not fall over for as long as possible. My friend did better than me; when I asked in exasperation how he did it, I heard the advice: “Start with the elephant, and you’ll hook the monkeys somehow.”

Start with an elephant, and you’ll hook the monkeys somehow.

Perhaps the trick is to find an elephant that can support the weight of your ambitions? What do you say, monkey?

In this essay, I used the word “top” and related cognates 35 times; 17 times I ended the sentence with a question mark directed at myself, or perhaps at the reader; I inserted regarding 30 nouns, adverbs, prepositions that describe their relative position in space.

Why is this grammatical-syntactic arithmetic here? After all, she helped me to make an unexpected discovery for myself, which occurred while finishing this text:³

The top is a relative size; it exists only in relation to its opposite, but its opposite (unlike we are accustomed to believe) is not the bottom. The opposite of the top is the middle. Gold?

Illustration drawn by the author

1 ^{Excerpt from Th. Mann’s “Enchanted Mountain” (translated by V. Petrauskas).}

2 ^{Out of my head.}

3 ^{To be honest, I don’t feel that it, this text, is standing firmly – apparently the elephant was lying down or twisted into an awkward position. The monkeys chatter, squeal, and paw at each other restlessly. The tower is regarding to fall, and there is one last paragraph that I still manage to attach to the tail.}

The event is sponsored by the Goethe Institute. The winner of the competition was Rasa Alė Petronytė.