Parable of the Forest Pygmy
There’s a story about a forest pygmy who’s taken (not by force, but maybe tricked, not fully informed consent) out of the jungle canopy on to the savannah and he freezes, panics like a stoned hippie before a leering cop, then falls to the ground and covers his head. The space, the vastness of everything, the horizon stretching to the other end of the earth is too much for him. He’s a level-headed, respected, experienced, worldly pygmy—a man among men in his own world and that’s his problem. His known world, his points of reference, definition, boundary are gone and suddenly he’s outside, exposed to who the hell knows what. There’s only a finite number of things that can kill a pygmy in the jungle; it may seem ever so large when the killer comes: panthers, lions, snakes, even those ants that swarm down the trees and descend upon the more careless pygmies or more likely the foolish and uninformed European who got tired or drugged on some exotic jungle berry’s juice.
Even though a pygmy can’t always see what’s coming, at least he knows it’s nearby. There’s a learned level of alertness that will usually protect him and if the panther gets him anyway or he’s trampled by the occasional but not totally random stampeding things that look like pigs, and maybe they are (a pygmy would know)—well, he tried. He can take small comfort knowing he was killed by a known danger, the same collection of dangers that have killed many generations of his ancestors. As they say, in some more deterministic cultures, it was his time to go and the panther’s time to eat. But not this pygmy. He’s on the savannah, the plain, the plateau; he doesn’t even have a name for it, even though it apparently has dozens of names. He can’t even say what it looks like—flat, open, empty, sparse, desolate, bright, burnt sienna. He can’t say gazelle, wildebeest, jackal, rhino, Jeep, Land Rover. He probably has a word for dangerous, for fear, but it’s too small for this. He probably even has a phrase for oh shit what’s that?
This pygmy just curls up in a ball, a fetal position; his anthropologist “friend” might, if he isn’t a totally cruel jerk, gather the pygmy into his arms and say in a rough, but close enough for anthropology translation: “It’s ok Frankie; it’s just the Savannah,” (which, as we know, means nothing to poor Frankie) and lead him gently back to the cover of the panther and python-filled forest. A grad student will be taking notes of course, or a film crew getting every touching and strange moment, but at least our pygmy will go home not too worse for wear, except for the lifetime of nightmares he will have where something silent and large comes out of the sky that never ends in a world where there’s no place to hide and it’s always too bright and burning and it snatches him up and he’s gone, maybe forever, maybe just a night and then again the next night and the next.
