The Rhinoceros Opera

The Rhinoceros Song And The Sea

About the poem: Perhaps (I wondered) the rhinocerine culture holds to its own origin myths; one that tells how their ancient woolly ancestor, Coelodonta Antiquitatis, was, in the great Oligocene regression of the tropics to the equatorial belt, 21–26 million years ago, guided across the ocean by the universal songs of the sea, a navigational symphony presided over by a cetacean choir of humpback whales. For how else is it that these same songs became the lingua franca of the rainforest rhinoceros of Sumatra?

However as settlement and land clearance accelerates through the 21st century these Dicerorhinus Sumatensis, naturally reclusive individualists, find it harder and harder to overcome endemic isolation to find their promised love, and the songs that once echoed through the rainforest are fast fading from this planet’s repertoire.

In The Rhinoceros Song and the Sea, the first fable from an opera suite called The Rhinocerotidae, I have imagined the life, love and longing of a menopausal rhino in the jungle glades of Sumatra.

 

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Old Rhinini hums the ancient lullaby,

Its provenance as shadowy as the jungle floor,

Its strange syllables salty as the sea,

Echoes of an ancient ocean crossing

song-guided by Benevolents of yore

seep through its melismas into memory

as legend into mythos seeps.

Old Rhinini cries out for Dicero,

the lover she had conjured in her youth.

Now made flesh he wanders near.

A little late, She sighs

But once she heard his voice,

singing back,

‘Eeeep’, she voices softly.

There’s no reply today.

Old Rhinini sniffs a piece of dung she keeps .

Finders keepers, Finders keepers…

Mmmmm, a faecal trace of you,

spiced with the scent of leaves I cannot reach,

Not since the jungle cleaved in two

and bled

(sniff) Mmmmmm…

a fragrant sign of you,

passing here. But when?

Before the season turned

Before the jungle bled.

Old wisdom knows the secrets locked within this calling card;

his way, his health his heart

Where he watered, where he wallowed, where he fed,

Finders Keepers, this sweet earth of you,

but the seasons turned and then

the jungle bled

Reverie draws Rhinini to the thinning edge

where aliens have trod away the landscape and move like ants between their piled rubble.

Where her lovers song,

sucked sideways into slipstreams,

eddies, scattered in the turbulent melange.

This gulf, this cancer,

swallowing the paths of lifetimes passing;

Throughways

where once time lay layered

in clay-hard shims,

where I perchance heard echoes

of the old ones sing,

now end abruptly in abyss.

No song.

She draws back into gloomy heartlands

to the wombing comfort,

vine-meshed dark,

To wallow in her private mudden bath.

. . .

A scream.

A tiny scream ..

made so small by distance,

pinpricks the calm

As if some minor prey by harimau brought down

Yet more than terror thrills through blanket vines,

A tad too shrill it strikes

in deep amigdala

For squealing predator not prey it is

that utters such tormented sounds

as if its soul demented by the crime.

And it’s the voiceless agony

of jungle sentinels that palls,

to hear their cracking spine,

their flailing arms,

Beloved tenants flee,

the suicide route to ground,

And each twin towers tree,

shockingly crashing down

The mantle gashed,

A gaping wound

that lames the gaian body

and every part

from bright crown to secret dark

from leech to leaf to elephant

feels the body smart.

 

 

eeeeEEEEEiiiii

Ho! ka mudiak! Awas! Tarik!

Hep, kiri-kiri! Alah! Jadi. (thud)

Old Rhinini holds her ground,

still as a stone

Still as a twitching, quivering

standing stone

straining a tufted ear

 

eeeeeEEEEiiii

Cukuik, tarik, dorong, lagi!

Old Rhinini aches with the tree,

Awas, ke hilir, ke hilir, ke hilir

the pain without witnessed within

Hep, kiri-kiri! Alah! Jadi (thud)

the trunk her leg, the bough her limb

The breaking bough,

ark ark ark ark aaark!!!!

Smell.. (she sniffs the air) …the Fear

The little people flee

and I

in the still dark

my thudding heart

my bones a brittle thrum

Run, Run,

the stabbing light in my eye

Run, the dreadful crack of spine, Run,

Run, the creaking twisting down down down

The plunge to silent mourning ground

I run

until the still dark wraps around

my thudding thudding heart.

 

EeeEEEEEiiiiii

Again like tearing flesh from skin

Snap! Crash!

The sudden daylight flooding in

ark ark ark ark aaark!!!

All seeds and feathers tossed upon the wind

An old Rhinoceros naked in the brightness,

Trembling

 

A hush. A shout.

Elok-elok! Awas, badak

The loggers hearts a-thudding, fear and beading sweat

To greet this strangely wild,

Half-forgotten beast

ditembok, ditahan, tangkap

as myth? or mortal threat?

Jangan dekat, mati awak, pelan pelan!

This tete a tete…

suspending time and breath,

All hearts in mouth…

biped and odd-toed ungulate.

 

 

Ark ark ark ark aaark!!!!

The birds, dislodged, aloft, looked down

And many winged but one of mind

swooped in.

And each a tuft of hair a fold of skin a whiskered ear a pinch of limb

a thousand tiny tweezer beaks and flapping wings made light of

that great Rhino queen.

 

Up up the drag she felt it twinge,

up up, the stretching saggy skin,

up up the dizzy heady spin,

up up above the little men, the crowning green,

the view unfurled, the thick and thin, the ragged rim a-glimmer in the savage sun.

And there for all to sickly see,

And there for all to witness

And there for all to grieve

and there…

…

You asked where.

Where hides

your shy and galant Dicero,

Each violent breach

has rent apart young bull from matriarch

Rendered up a share of wild, arboreal shadow-zone

from lovers reach.

You were bold, Shy Dicero, to dream

wrapt in night, slip past the settlements,

uncovered over threadbare hostile hill

to seed a dream, to serenade

to plant a kiss on Rhinus lips

to explode your deep primordial essence

stir a spark of life, to spawn a calf

But no no no no No!

Not this

Song silenced here alone

Defaced defiled

Your golden horn

that crowned your gentle whiskered face

Has judas kissed away your love,

Your progeny

Your future

Seeping crimson from its gaping wound.

Striated amber keratin,

so fine so beautiful to touch

is ground to dust mere dust

Elixir only to the rhino, heaving,

full of life.

. . .

Old Rhinini cannot name the anguish

Her first glimpse of love

from unearthly height

hijacked by unearthly grief

Her furrowed eye wellspring of an aeon’s tears,

brims up and rolls one briny orb that drops

drop

down

splash

into the Java Sea

tossing up, hoh, in its salty spray

sweet strains

of humpback whale polyphony

sonic droplets rise

like mist on melismatic flurries

to flirt

with fragments floating fresh in voice and memory

 

“The songs, the songs.. These are my songs”

the swaying ungulate exclaims

“O Let me follow my tears,

for my clan, my clan

They are calling me in, draw near they sing

So long its been, to hear them sing”

And she sang in an ecstasy of eeps and wails,

Sang to the mist to the foam to the sea

But the birds, they hiss and can’t agree

Nobody would drop their precious cargo into the sea

 

“Fly on, fly on; Fly down; theres nothing there.

Fly back; its best we fly on track.

She wants the song; Oblivion.

To Borneo, where rhinos throng.

No No!

Its just the song of Ghosts you hear;

She’s Mad!

No, No, its Grief ringing in your ear;

She’s Sad.

No, No, its prehistoric Rhino fish that never left the sea.

You’re barking Ma-a-aaark aaark aark aark aark!

 

As each beak of bird to bicker opens

beckoning chaos

to lose collective grip in the commotion

Old Rhinini feels her body falling,

falling, singing, calling,

like a shaggy, saggy angel,

graceful, silent, slow, tumbling,

rushing toward the ocean wallow.

Down…

into the dream,

I fall, I dive (she sings)

Into the dream, the chant

the voice of earth

of moon, of star

primordial sound

to guide my body

home…

[Plunge. Splash.

falling weightless in a fluid blue]

I dream, I surely do.

 

The last dung of Dicero

long dry-lodged, safe, between her toes

dissolves in the briny sea

as past and future merge with primal foam.

And great cetacean choristers

enchanted by their sudden guest

enfold her rhinus song, so like their own,

of strange patois but all-familiar melodies

enfold her earthen voice

in complex Ur-mammalian symphonies,

and swim her in their midst beyond…, beyond…

So merged again the songs

. . .

In Borneo treetops,

birds are counting down,

Two hundred and twenty five

Two hundred and twenty four

Twenty three

…Two, …One,

…gone.

 

 

Rhinoceros Libretto Part 2&3 (5pTREATMENT+sketches)

Copyright: indija mahjoeddin 2012