John Glacier Nevasure (2024)
An old philosophical parable: six blind men try to figure out what an elephant is. Because they have never come across this type of animal before and because each one of them is examining a different part of its body—the trunk, an ear, the tail, a leg etc.—they can’t come to a common understanding of what an elephant is. This parable is known as “The Blind Men and an Elephant” and has been told across continents and cultures for centuries. One of the earliest versions of the tale was found in the Buddhist Tittha Sutta scriptures that date to about 500 BC. American attorney and poet John Godfrey Saxe re-told the story in his 1872 poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant” and in doing so introduced the tale to Western audiences. Saxe’s version suggests that the elephant represents God and the blind men are a metaphor for religions:
So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
On a more general level the moral of the parable has been interpreted in such a way that we should never be too sure about our own point of view because it is limited and subjective. A recent song of London-based artist John Glacier circles around the theme of not being sure, too. However, in Glacier’s song “Nevasure”, the artist focuses on a negative side to this feeling in the sense of doubting or struggling, hoping to “stop feeling like I'm nevasure…”
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