Remember the tale of the blind men and the elephant? Somewhat known to me as a child, it was deeply familiar to my American forebears thanks to some amiable doggerel kids often memorized. Their author, John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887), was a household name in his hour. A pal of Longfellow, he’s buried a stone’s throw from two of my great-grandfathers in the Albany Rural Cemetery. His career and those of his son and grandson interweave with many of my relations and intimates: he graduated from Middlebury College, for example, as did Jane more than a century later. How come I’d never heard of him till researching this paragraph? Though a poetaster and no poet, his history emits the tang of tragedy. A hotshot as a young man (what, I wonder, did he think of my great-great-grandfather, his neighbor and exact contemporary?), composer of popular jingles, he embraced the losing (and execrable) side in the Civil War, was thrashed in two runs for political office, lost his wife and five of his six kids, and died embittered.
He was new to me because ignorance is infinite, while knowledge, whatever our smarts, is partial as a grain of sand. We cannot know what we do not know, so we construct tiny enclosures of our certainties and proclaim these hovels the world.
That’s what The Blind Men and the Elephant is all about. Saxe likely found the tale in the Buddhist Titta Sutta, Udana 6.4, Khuddaka Nikaya, though the parable is a staple of the Jain, Hindu, Sufi and Baha’i, as well as Buddhist, traditions (speaking of all I do not know!). In Saxe’s telling, “Six men of Indostan,” all blind, set out to understand the elephant, which they cannot see. The first, feeling the elephant’s flank, proclaims it “like a wall.” The second, fingering its tusk, a spear; the third, from the evidence of its trunk, a snake; the fourth, hugging its leg, a tree; the fifth, based on its floppy ear, a fan; the sixth, grasping its swinging tale, a rope. “And so,” singsongs Saxe,
these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
From which he derives this moral:
So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
Here is the calamity of our time, perhaps of our species: enclosed in our cozy little shanties, we can’t see the whole. We atomize each topic into subdivisions of subdivisions we might master. Oblivious to the general interest, we cling to special interests. Preoccupied with me, we forget we.
But who can know the whole? So might a single grain of sand compass the concerns of the rest!
The whole can be known only by imagining it from our paltry scraps. We must assume our experience resembles that of other humans, then apply the Golden Rule. That’s the role of art and religion, to conceive of us as all: the more profound the conception, the more universal its application (“The Blind Men and the Elephant” preaches a universal truth). Saints and artists lead, but it behooves us all to try to follow, force our heads and hearts toward a vision of the whole and our teentsy contribution to it.
The Whole is not referenced in syllabi. The subject’s too fuzzy, daunting, immeasurable, in this epoch of experts. Proud of what we know, we forget we do not know much.