Elephant Blood

A friend of mine recently sparked a conversation that sparked another I've had in my head for a long time and was almost sure I'd written about before, but apparently I haven't. It has to do with genetic memory. I first became familiar with this phenomenon when I learned of elephant graveyards. Elephants have this uncanny ability to return to the same exact spot that their ancestors finally laid to rest. There are several theories about why this is the case. You could easily argue that it isn't within the blood... but, it's the idea that it could be that's the point. And you start to wonder about what lives in the blood. Alice Walker tapped into this thinking in her novel, Possessing The Secret Of Joy. There's this idea that actual memories can live on through the bloodline. And these memories may shape any number of things. And I wonder about how our blood shapes the way we are as men and women. What sort of legacies are we living out? What's written in our blood? What part of ourselves is the beginning of something new and what's merely the continuation to a story spun long, long ago?

I have to imagine trauma is key to this flow; that an experience has to hit hard to leave any lasting effect for generations to come. And I've wondered what lives in the heart of Native Americans as a whole. What happened to this country and it's people was such a radical and violent shift that I can't help but believe it lives on somewhere: the anger, the rage, the sorrow, the shame, etc. And I'm not speaking of socioeconomic effects, that's much too superficial and physical. The way these things live on is more subversive. And they don't live on through history... through stories and spoken word. It has to do with the blood. I imagine being a part of many legacies that I'm not physically in tune with; that I'm living out parts to stories my mind is oblivious to but that my heart is all too familiar with. It sometimes feels that way... like things are foreign and familiar at the same time and I wonder if all this has something to do with it. These stories, these memories live on a spectral plane. I may never know what I'm a part of... what's choice and what's merely cause & effect?


DS333, vibrating.