Imagination In Charles Siebert's 'Elephant Crackup'

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Imagination can be used not just to replace reality, but to make “reality more real”. In Azar Nafisi's work “Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, she uses imagination from her literature class in order to learn about her students and society. Likewise, in Oliver Sacks' work “The Mind's Eye”, the blind people he studies use some form of imagination to “create or construct” individual worlds (Sacks 317). Charles Siebert's essay “An Elephant Crackup?” states that elephants and humans can peacefully coexist and learn more about each other if they understand each other in order to create a “trans-species psyche”. This trans-species psyche requires humans to anthropomorphize elephants using imagination, but the knowledge …show more content…

This knowledge and empathy combined would anthropomorphize elephants, “imagining” them as more human-like and would lead to coexistence, aka the “trans-species psyche”. In Siebert's “An Elephant Crackup?”, elephants and humans as a whole are in conflict with each other due to not knowing why the other group is aggressive and thus are in constant retaliation to each other (Siebert 322). A trans-species psyche can not be achieved if humans do not imagine elephants are equal beings. This imagination is not simply making up things as if they were lies, imagining elephants as more human teaches humans that they are emotionally and socially on the same level by emphasizing their “mind's eye”; giving another perspective of elephants than just wild animals ready to be poached. An example of people being blind to imagination is shown in an incident when a herd of elephants killed a man near the village Katwa, but buried him out of respect. The elephants themselves “elephantmorphize” the human so the human is like them, but the humans that want to retrieve the man's corpse do not anthropomorphize the elephants. The human villagers shoot gunfire on the elephants to drive them away, causing future generations of traumatized and violent elephants (334). Without imagination, people would not be able to understand others(which don't have to be human) causing a lack of empathy, a trait important for creating the “trans-species psyche” that Siebert

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