Amy Leach - The Everybody Ensemble: Donkeys, Essays, and Other Pandemoniums

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To my parents

But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish in the sea inform you.

JOB 12:78

Flout em and scout em; and scout em and flout em:
Thought is free.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Welcome to the Everybody Ensemble! Were so glad you could make it for our concert tonight! We chose this location, where the Zambezi River empties into the Indian Ocean, so that aquatic and semiaquatic and land animals could all participate. The flapshell turtles didnt have far to travel, but we know that many of the rest of you have been traveling for months, even years, from Puducherry and the Grampian Mountains, from your bogs and boonies and cubicles, and we are grateful for all the trouble you took to get here. The trip would seem easiest for the birds, but of course they couldnt leave their eggs behindand we see that some owls are still arriving, rolling their eggs around the mud puddles, stopping every several yards to sit on them and warm them up.

While they are settling in, lets talk about how you would like to be arranged. In a conventional choir the magic number is fourfour sections corresponding to the four registers of the human voicesoprano, alto, tenor, and bass. But four is insufficiently magic for our assemblage here: four leaves out the dolphins and oilbirds and rhinoceros singers and the animals who just thrum.

So, all twenty quintillion of you, just go ahead and arrange yourselves however you want! As soon as theres more than one of you, you can be homogeneous or heterogeneous. You might sort yourselves by smelliness, sneeziness, spazziness, specklinessspeckled chachalacas can sort themselves from plain chachalacas, Holsteins from Jerseys. You can sort yourselves by biases and then again by sub-biases; there can be a reflective section and a section for those who are all reflex. There can be a section for the surreptitiouswere not sure who you are, but we noticed you arriving, obscured by the leafy branches, pampas grass, and toadstools you were carrying in front of you.

There can be an emergency section for the two- and three-year-old humans, who are forever losing their marbles, who act like the stars are sparkling them to death. We will use the emergency singers quite a bit in our program tonight, since most music could use a little emergency. With the toddler contingent, there will be no pathetic, droopy music, no songs of resignation. They may be joined by some emergency singers at the other end of life, too, the ones jonesing for time. Along with the emergency singers, there can be a section for emerging singers, like owlets, as well as submerging singers, like crocodiles.

There can be a section for those who feel like precursors, like all those people and animals in history. Precursors sing with a lot of presentiment. Or maybe you feel belated and sing with lots of remembrance, like you elderly koalas who remember your forest before it ceded to the suburbs. Or maybe you feel perfectly current, like the man of the minute: currency has a lot of currency these days. But however current you feel, remember that everyone here is as contemporary as everyone else, and as temporary.

If you are undiscovered, you are in good company, with millions of undiscovered species. The Tapanuli orangutan herself was an unknown till last year. Those of you who arent sure whether you exist or not can sing with the Mongolian death worms. If you feel imperfect, you can join the likes of Abraham, Moses, and David, or you may find yourself gravitating to the perfect section, with the wind-up toys and the single-celled constituents of slime mold. If you do join the perfect section, your repertoire will necessarily be reduced, for perfection is only attainable in miniature. Anyway, music is a good form for the fallible, because mistakes made in music are like mistakes made in snow. Also, imperfections make someone a better wisher, and a better wisher is a better singer.

There can be a section for the thousand-songed singers, like the thrashers, and a section for the one-song singers, like the white-bellied go-away-birdGo away, go away! Someone who can sing only one song is someone with a very stable identity, like an ice-cream truck. When an ice-cream truck joins the symphony, either everybody else has to play Turkey in the Straw over and over and over, or else the ice-cream truck has to stay quiet during the other pieces till finally everybody plays Turkey in the Straw. With their one jingle, ice-cream trucks can evince one thing and one thing onlynot death welling in sweet William, not a girl imploring her lover to remember her but not her wrongs. Though of course the more versatile musicians cannot dispense Choco Tacos.

Were sorry, but there will be no prizes awarded today, and if you came here hoping to sing about money, remember that money is a sore point with many animals. We couldnt really think of any indelible songs about dollars anyway. Oh, and another thing we should have said first off is that everyone must stop eating each other. One important foundation of music is that the musicians are not devouring, eviscerating, mutilating each other. Forgoing these pleasures, you may discover a different kind of pleasure. Spanish ribbed newts, please refrain from poking your ribs through your skin and poison-jabbing your neighbors. Tasseled wobbegongs, stop ambushing your little oceanmates. Humans, please turn your guns into kazoos.

That music is nonviolent is one reason we chose it; also because it transcends apathy, invective, and fatigue. Many of you must be so tired from all your trekking, to say nothing of your normal dam-building, web-spinning, burrow-digging, dish-doing. Many days are so exhausting that we conceive insipid, dishwatery philosophies. So lets have a song to spike our philosophies!a solo, sweet as a julep, sung by a canyon wren. While she sings, we can think about how there is so much being in so many beings, but also so much being in one being. One little wren can fill a whole canyon with her silvery rallentandos. Tininess is no object for musicians, and neither is gravity. Are you a tiny musician? No worries! Are you a musician subject to gravity? No problem!

For even canyon wrens have bodies that are subject to gravity, but voices that are not, and this is equally true of guinea pigs. Although they look like lumps, guinea pigs sing not lumpish, leaden songs but whistly whirly-up songs. Sometimes we humans take this soaring property of the voice so far that our songs leave the world altogether, flying up to otherworlds. Were not sure if you animals have otherworlds or not, but it seems like there are plenty of songs to be sung about the marshes and grottos and simooms you have actually experienced, on the planet you have actually experienced.