Love in Infant Monkeys, Lydia Millet [best motivational novels txt] 📗

and when he heard there was an elephant in the area who was slated for execution, he stepped in and suggested a lethal dose of AC. His men would both set up and record the electrocution.

Topsy, the elephant in question, was a disgruntled circus and work animal who had suffered the pains of forced labor, captivity, neglect and abuse. She had responded by killing three men, the last of whom fed her a burning cigarette.

Simple shooting would not have been theatrical enough, for her owners, Thompson & Dundy of Coney Island’s Luna Park, had decided to make an example of the rogue. (The execution of animals, an odd extension of a medieval practice, assumes the animal is a moral agent, accountable to the law and therefore punishable in a formal and public context. It is noteworthy that the elephant was not being euthanized or exterminated, as vermin would, but penalized for her sins against God and man by execution qua execution. The ramifications of this apparent subversion, whereby the ultimate punishment—viz., death—also comprises the ultimate elevation/reward, are of course multifold.)

To put a just end to Topsy, therefore, an effective method was sought. Poisoning was tried but failed. Hanging was next considered, then dismissed when the ASPCA objected. (Despite its unpleasantness, to say nothing of sheer difficulty, this method would be used in 1916 in East Tennessee, on a five-ton elephant named Mary.) Finally Edison made his offer, and, ironically, though it was the unsavory nature of AC he would demonstrate with his movie, the ASPCA did not object to the method—perhaps because it was a new technology, and as such must be regarded as superior.

So Edison sent his technicians to the site of the execution and had them engineer and film the condemned animal’s fiery death. They attached electrodes to her body, strapped on sandals and set up their camera. The brief filmstrip that resulted still survives, a few grainy, gray seconds. It shows the creature being led, swaying gently, to the place of her doom; there, a white fire rages around her body. She collapses onto her side.

Edison himself was not present at the electrocution. As always, his attentions were claimed by a busy schedule. But according to Golakov, whose letters to a sister in Bulgaria were never mailed and therefore found their way into the boxes of household documents transferred to the Edison archives by the Mina Miller Edison estate, he was deeply fixated on the resulting filmstrip. The valet claimed that Edison—blithe, boastful, pragmatic to a fault and not prone to introspection or idleness—watched the filmstrip privately on a regular basis. He further claimed that Edison often conversed with it, addressing his remarks to the image of the dying elephant.

Here it should be observed that the footage, still extant and now publicly available on various Internet sites, represents an early example of what has since come to be called a “snuff” film—that is, a film that records the willful killing of an unwilling subject. Actual human snuff films have only very rarely come to light, and exist in American culture chiefly as mythic fetish objects, but animal snuff films, whose production is not for the most part illegal, are relatively common.

In Golakov’s voluminous letters, a number of the Edison/Topsy monologues are rendered. Most were reportedly delivered late at night or in the small hours of the morning, when the businessman-inventor liked to work; at these times he alone was awake in the house, and during pauses in his labor chose to closet himself in his study with one of his Projecting Kinetoscopes, watching as the blaze rose around the charring elephant’s wood and copper-shod feet.

Frequently the monologues concerned matters of business and technology too arcane to be detailed herein: the vicissitudes of carbon filaments and ore extraction, efficiency improvements at the West Orange facility, various properties of nickel hydrate. But often they were deeply personal, and, according to Golakov, Edison must have found in the elephant a faithful listener, at least at first, for his talks began as tranquil ruminations that tapered into silence only when the businessman-inventor nodded off in his leather armchair. As the disquisitions continued over weeks and months, however, they took on an argumentative tone. It seemed the elephant had begun to rebuke the businessman and had even had the temerity to dispute his assertions.

As Golakov presents them, the conversations are of course one-sided, with lengthy pauses into which Golakov believed the burning elephant’s rebuttals and queries would have been interposed. A typical excerpt from these enigmatic “exchanges,” on the subject of Edison’s fear of oral copulation/death, is set forth below.

“I won’t do it. Filthy. Anyway, she . . . No, I tell you. No. You women are all the same. Selfish, and can’t invent worth a damn. Harlots all . . . That, that wet thing . . . ugh. Like old cow’s tongue, or pigs’ feet. Disgusting . . . Makes her a slut, Topsy. Wantonness! Nothing less. A wife’s duty lies in . . . Do not interrupt me . . . I should have killed you three times if I killed you at all . . . Yes . . . yes . . . I know. I know. I am very sorry . . . I said I was sorry! . . . Is it green? Are there fields? Oh: and is the sun bright?”

Yet Golakov’s letters reflect nothing so much as a longing on Edison’s part for the approval of the boiling elephant. It is not clear to what degree this imputation is a fiction originating with the domestic, whose mind was almost surely affected by his daily use of the diacetyl-morphine cough remedies then sold widely by Bayer; certainly there have been no corroborating reports of any mental infirmity on Edison’s part. But Golakov’s documentation of Edison’s most intimate personal habits, relationships and opinions bears up well under close scrutiny and does reflect a credible familiarity with the businessman-inventor. Since the