Darkopolis
Far below she saw the edge of her burning planet by the curve of a wing. It would be a lonely final trip. She gazed at the wavering stars rising as she flew her jet late into the post-historic Parisian dusk.
Before I get to this event, you might want to know a little about me: I am the ghost of Babar, sitting on the mangled remains of the Eiffel tower in Paris of 2031. I was sky-high on magic mushrooms and wearing my customary green suit, when I was burnt alive.
The story goes that I was taken to the big city to be civilized. I am famous. I was clever. I was brave. I became king. I made peace. I civilized. I built a city. I am not a drunk. I am not a fanatic. I may be a moralist and a colonialist fool. Wasn’t I imaginary before I died? I am the ghost of Babar the elephant, one of the most beloved and classic characters in children’s literature!
My creator Jean de Brunhoff’s Paris was filled with charming elephants. That City of Lights is now a city in darkness. My daughter Isabel and I died dramatically this evening. Now it is past midnight for me, and I am a tripping ghost haunting you — if you can read this! We ghouls can travel instantly — back and forth through time-space without any ‘exotic assumption worm holes’. In your time-space, I am still alive in millions of imaginations. They will all die before me. And you will die soon too! Read on.
My Paris became a city without lights, without anything, except for me and Isabel. This slow demise began a decade ago, when the Mighty Pandemic of 2019 wiped out about 7 billion people on planet earth, in just two years.
There were some survivors. All of them were children below age nine. They lost their hearing and their speech, though not their lives. The virus overwhelmed and deactivated their ear drums, and their voice boxes and also their gonads, before their immune systems defeated it. This mighty microorganism hopped, skipped & jumped between all earthly species for twenty four months. Its zoonoses infected and then enhanced us elephants greatly.
A Cornucopia of Corpses
The dead were everywhere. My Parisian sky became a carrion murmuration of vultures & ravens, eclipsing the sun and the moon for months. Striped hyenas were multiplying faster than rabbits, after exploding hungrily out of local zoos. They proliferated by day and by night. Their pups were suckled atop the countless corpses strewn in hospitals, homes, and offices, as the mother-bitches jaw-crushed human bones to swallow. These grotesque and cowardly scavengers savoured their ‘dead delicacies’ jackpot without taking a break, even to breathe.
The putrid air of Paris was blurred with hovering flesh-flies. They jam-packed every cubic inch of space inside and outside the magnificent architecture along the exquisite avenues. Siene-crocodiles were busy slobbering, slithering and sliding on cobblestoned pavements that had become an endless oozing carpet of maggots. Cockroaches were democratically creeping and crawling out of the eyes, ears, noses and mouths of dead tourists and locals alike. The crocs lusted for the baguettes that were still tucked under some of their moribund elbows.
Six months later, the macabre gluttony slowed down. Post-pandemic urban obesity hit them all. The vultures were grounded by paunch. The flies couldn’t fly, much as they would try. The gorging of the hyenas ended their bellicosity. They were all bunged up. Crocodiles went stationary, flapping their helpless limbs around, like air-fins straining to reach the ground, while it ain’t really happenin’. Cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, turkeys, chickens, horses, dogs, and cats - all the domestics and the farmed creatures which were still alive - they soon reached extinction from hunger. Since no one was there to feed them.
A Memory of Mammoths
At the fag end of the Mighty Pandemic, all elephants across the world emerged as the ‘chosen ones’ on earth. The virus got their gut feeling going, and after a mild feverishness, it left them with the gift of pan-species telepathy. In unison they began to blow their own trumpets melodiously.
The deaf-mute, snotty, naughty, human children couldn’t hear this call of the wild! Yet they were drawn to the good vibes. En masse they moved out of their corpsed conurbations, their malodorous megapoli, their concrete sprawl. In good faith, and happily uncluttered by any belongings or even clothes, carrying just the toddlers with them, the sweet children, orphaned without exception, entered the jungle. These multiple motley crews’ carbon footprints into the wild, worldwide, were light and imperceptible. Greta should’ve lived to see her dream come true…
Girls & Boys! Onwards to the pied piper pachyderms! Trunks to the right of them! Trunks to the left of them! Trunks in front of them! Into the joys of life, rode all of them! Thank god (the one they left behind and have no reason to believe in) for the inherent magnanimity of these perceptive gentle giants.
The human offspring were lovingly adopted into the waiting herds and protected by them. The mama pachyderms fed them like their own young. The papa-bulls brought back bananas, potatoes, sugarcane, edible leaves and found fowl-eggs by the trunk load. This kept the kids growing. In return, the grateful woman-cubs dug up a bunch of magic mushrooms now and again, for the elephants, who were now their only companions - and they expanded their minds together as night fell. This kept the jumbos glowing.
Just a single lifetime was left for the young and infecund surviving Homo Sapiens before their carefree extinction. The elephants also knew that these youngsters would probably have a very short lifespan in the woods. So they got fully engrossed in scratching each other’s backs - meeting mutual tactile needs. There was hardly or softly anything that a trunk and a pair of hands couldn’t get done. Every memory of elephants had a bunch of happy kids in it.
A Taste of Tomes
The Haathis had a sixth sense about absorbing all the leftover learning of the now defunct human race. All elephant herds could think alike spontaneously on every continent. So they felt simultaneous pangs of hunger for knowledge. They eagerly rushed into all the renowned old libraries. These were easily identified by the smarter and nerdier amongst their human wards. The Tuskers and Tuskresses purposefully entered all athenaeums, and avidly began devouring books.
The pachyderms soon realized that they had to drink a bucket of water with every book they consumed, to quench. Otherwise, by the next day, the exhilaratingly gutsy absorption of volume upon volume of ‘bookish-blah-blah’ cellulose, became a real pain-in-the-arse. In that sense, word also went around that the aged leaterbound hardbacks were a bit tricky, and would make you puke with a tinge of gold from the page-edges. One needed to soak them overnight and soften them up, before orally perusing them for a brainy breakfast. All of history and herstory, was thus wiped out in no time at all!
I would describe this phenomenon as a truncated assimilation of extant verbose wisdom, by the mouthful.
A Surge of Singularity
The concept and the term ‘singularity’ were popularized by Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity, in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new super-intelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate. He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030. (Says ol’ Wikipedia).
In reality, this turned out a bit differently from the way it is imagined above. Such things usually do.
Soon after the Mighty Pandemic ended everything human by late 2021, the new world order, with super-intelligent elephants at the top, was established beyond doubt.
Post-history emerged once the gentle giants completed the collective digestion of all former human knowledge.
That done, the Large Ones gathered to pass a motion.
Aye! Aye! A revelation! The much anticipated ‘great singularity’ which ‘signalled the end of the human era’ was foisted upon this earth. It arrived just behind the benevolent behemoths. Just below their tails.
Voila! It was our dung. We may call it the manure of enlightenment. Finest of psilocybin fungi in the world reliably emerged in every pile, every time. Just like that!
Like you humans, we have reached our ‘missing link’ moment. Our shroomy dung was a simple device for ‘the new super-intelligence to continue to upgrade itself and advance at an incomprehensible rate, by the end of 2030! No shit!
Hefalumps are a ‘singularity’ which was not seen as much as it was herd.
A Flight of Fancy
Much to my sophisticated chagrin, my daughter Isabel was with the mammoth matriarch munchers, who went on to the Sorbonne library - or the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, as she liked to correctly call it. I was tailing her, just a few steps behind. She sensed it, but didn’t complain, nor let on. I waited outside, chewing on my packet of magic truffles, and lit a very stale Galoise. These cigarettes had numbed my tongue, and I had no taste left for knowledge.
Our mutual ESP told me that she was at the technical section, savouring a tome of Jet-pilot’s training manuals. She got really into it! As you would easily guess, all of us Jumbos can instinctively fly Jumbo Jets. Duh!
Before I could even blow my perfect smoke ring, Isabel mischievously slipped out of a side entrance, and headed directly for Charles De Gaulle airport.
Abandoned pre-pandemic Boeing 787–10 Dreamliner Jumbo Jets were lying there. Refueled, lined up, and ready to go - parked at many of the CDG aerobridges since too many moons. Isabel had to find an Air France plane, of course. All she needed to do, was to climb in through the cargo hold, and the rest would take care of itself. She popped a couple of shrooms, and excitedly entered the large plane. On her way there, she had pushed over and spilt all the big fuel tankers onto the tarmac. As she climbed on, she left behind a trail awash with highly flammable Avtur.
Take off was easy-peasy and exhilarating. She was getting bored of living in the long abandoned, dark and deceased city, which had once been her chic Paris. Living with me must’ve been difficult too. I was too demanding and possessive in my old age. She was depressed and suicidal. That’s why she was doing this. Or so I thought.
No sooner did I get a whiff of her decision and I immediately started following her. An upright, uptight elephant in a green suit, can only make slow progress in any direction. I finally reached the wet tarmac, and looked up to see if it was raining. That’s when I caught sight of the once familiar flickering lights of her Dreamliner ‘space-ship’ taking off gracefully. No machine had been activated on earth since the Pandemic. My witnessing this noteworthy post-historic event of a Jumbo flying a Jumbo Jet, had to be shared with you.
Very big tears streamed down my wrinkled elephant cheeks. I was so proud of my darling baby! I knew she wasn’t coming back. So I looked up and flapped my large ears at the plane, to bid her farewell. I mindlessly lit another strong stale cigarette. The volatile inflammable fumes, rising from her deliberate fuel-spill on the tarmac, caught the spark instantly. The whole airport soon burst into a huge red firestorm!
She saw the red glow of me burning ‘like a planet’ on the curve of her wing. I was indeed her planet, and my loving daughter Isabel was my Sun. She adroitly flew her Jet straight into the Eiffel Tower. Getting to the top of the Eiffel Tower is on every self-respecting, civilized French elephant’s bucket list! Isabel and her plane were very much there, when she ‘kicked the bucket’!
With La Tour Eiffel toppled, Paris would never be Paris…
The Phantom of Philosophy
Kafka felt that what is known by them cannot be expressed by animals. Bresson showed that what is expressed by animals cannot be known by them. Focault argued for a silent animal totality, that is not yet characterized by the dualism of reason and madness, nor by the order of language.
Such philosophical investigations into animalist existence have lost all relevance for the deaf-mute young and dead-end of humanity, living symbiotically with large super-intelligent altruistic elephants in the wild.
These lads and lasses are carefree, instinctive and blissful. They co-exist in close synchronized relationships, as members of protective and caring familial elephant herds, in a post-historic jungle.
Had Kafka, Bresson, Faocault et.al. been around as very young children, in 2021 with you, they would’ve lived to see these wavering star pachyderms devour their books, to make dung!
Philosophy has no animals in it. Nor ghosts!
I am the ghost of Babar. Babar was an imaginary, recently dead, civilized, intelligent, French-colonial elephant, in a green suit. He was living with his civilized suicidal elephant daughter Isabel, before their deaths on the same day, in post-pandemic Paris.
Us two elephants were this ‘long defunct but once vibrantly beautiful’ city’s only civilized inhabitants for an entire decade. We were attempting to carry on in life, as the only remaining smartly dressed individuals in the whole wide world! No one else was even dressed! Our enlightened yet wild kith and kin were roaming naked in Paris and even in Rome, at that point in space-time. Also naked and by their side, were the progeny of our very bourgeois human creators, who even with all their clothes on, had tended to refer to themselves as ‘Naked Apes’!
The phantom of an imaginary elephant, who dies in your future after you, has travelled back to your space-time, shroom-vroom, to give you all this cool mumbo-jumbo!
Fin.The End.
