XXIV
The final stop on Mr. Lawrence’s guided tour of his ranch deposited us before the small pink stucco house where Lydia and I would live like Ovid in exile for the next two years. Two times in this place we would see the crystalline white snow sublimate out of being to denude the brown and green ground, and two times we would see it slowly accumulate again. We experienced two winters, two springs, two summers, and two falls in this place, some seven hundred plus days, two Christmases, and four birthdays: two total Christmas trees, four total birthday cakes for me and Lydia. Over time, I would come to know Regina and Dudley Lawrence as friends of a certain sort—allies at the very least—though I never grew to feel entirely at home with them. I would come to love Sukie, the dog, and to know the friendship of Clever Hands, the only other member of my own species I would at all consider a true friend in my life.
The cabin—as Mr. Lawrence referred to it, as he parked the green Jeep before its pink-painted façade—was really a house, and a pleasant one. It afforded us at least three times as much living space as our apartment in Chicago had. It was a one-floor structure, complete with a fireplace, a bedroom, a bathroom, a cozy living room, a kitchen, and a garage that would mainly become a studio space for me, which I obligingly shared with Lydia’s car in the winter. We found the house decorated in the Southwestern themes prevalent in this area: brightly colored woolen serapes draped over sturdy rustic furniture, prints of yonic Georgia O’Keeffe paintings framed on the walls. We had an attractive front yard, in which spiky yellow and fluffy purple flowers sprouted in the spring. The steps of the back porch descended onto the grassy, lightly manicured wilderness of the Lawrence Ranch, where, when the snow had dissipated, emus, camels, giraffes, elephants, rhinos, zebras, and all kinds of other outlandish animals were permitted to wander the grounds at will, and their massive and ungainly bodies would often curiously saunter right up to our porch to gaze at us, or into the windows of our home.
These two years in the great American Southwest, our own savage pilgrimage, were two years of long meandering walks in the surrounding fields and woods and mountains, two years of feeding the animals, two years of ambling the trails of the ranch side-by-side with my surrogate brother and fellow semi-enculturated chimp, Clever Hands—Lydia, Clever and me, with Sukie the dog yapping excitedly ahead of us on the trail at a handful of passing zebras—and two years of continuing my education, as well as my passionate love affair, with Lydia. Every Arcadian day would be spent in play, in love, in conversation, in a simple life, simply lived. It was there, at the Lawrence Ranch in Colorado, during these two relatively uneventful years of contentment and bliss, where my ontogenesis was completed—in peace, in quiet, in secret. This was possible only because I was living in such an unstressed atmosphere, in such a safe, interesting, and pastoral environment, in which nothing much was ever expected or demanded of me, of us. Several evenings per week Lydia and I would spend in the “big house,” as we at once began referring to it, with Regina and Dudley Lawrence, with Larry and Lily and Clever, eating dinner—at the table, with civilized manners—and conversing, drinking wine, sometimes playing games late into the evening, such as charades, or board games like Monopoly and Pictionary. I tried to teach Clever Hands to play backgammon. He learned the game, but in the same way he learned sign language: he learned to perform the right motions, but would put them together in such erratic sequences that it was dubious whether he actually knew what they meant. In any event, I always won.
These were two happy years. In these two years I learned to speak, and later even to read. This could have only happened to me in such an unhurried atmosphere. All it required for my mind to go from a state of mostly mute listening and comprehension to a state of conversational participation—to the active production of language—was to have no one pushing me. Only pulling me, guiding me. Only then could I dare the audacity of speech. (I have always been this way: obstinate, stubborn, resistant to anyone’s pushing.) All real learning, all education, Gwen, is self-motivated. Teaching helps, yes, but teaching students by force, by pushing, is as good as preaching a sermon to a congregation of stones. It is a notably obscene crime of our language that educate is not an intransitive verb.
What can be said of a long, slow period of daily progress and habitual contentment? The angels of ecstasy and the demons of despair are visitations more at home in the house of literature, which is why I intend to nimbly skip and jump through the pages of this happy period in my life. What did my consciousness gain from my two contented years in Colorado? The cackling of coyotes at night, and in the day, the distant braying of elephants. The sharp pink-and-gold light in the early morning, and in the evening, a skyful of clouds that look as if they had been set afire. The curious company of Clever Hands and my new canine friend, Sukie. And the lineaments of gratified desire: love and love and freely conducted sexual bliss with my Lydia.
During all these long and good days on the Lawrence Ranch my vocal capacities exploded. How can I describe this? How can I possibly narrate it? Describing the process of learning to speak is like trying to bite your own teeth. It is like trying to describe what happened in a dream. We do not remember the process of learning our native tongues. At first my voice was high-pitched, uneven, scratchy, screechy, breathy. You may have heard from my many deniers that the shallow vocal tracts of apes are not properly equipped for the production of articulate speech. That is like saying the legs of an infant are not properly equipped to run marathons—of course not, not yet—but given a lifetime of growth, training, exercise, nourishment and so on, they will be. And so my larynx descended as my neck straightened out, as I spent years walking upright and holding my head up high, like a man—and as I did my speech grew less uneven, became richer, smoother, more melodious in pitch, tone, and timbre, more relaxed in tempo, until the voice that you now hear arising from my lungs and exiting my body via my mouth developed its current condition. And the more I spoke, the more I began to understand the words I spoke. My understanding of the meaning of a word further solidified every time I said it. Soon I understood words as discrete bits of digital information, rather than purely as a flowing unbroken stream of analog information, and the more the digital paradigm of language replaced the analog, the more I grasped of grammar and of syntax, and the more and more easily I intuited the structural architectures of phrases and sentences—how a word, when uttered, affects the word that came before it and the word that will come after it, the word’s relationships with its neighbors. The more I dared to speak, the more I thought in words rather than in pictures, in terms of tactile and visual information. See, an animal mind expends much energy in mapping the body’s immediate physical surroundings; but language causes us, for better or worse, to forget this, and to think instead in abstract symbols that are physically evident nowhere but in our mouths, ears, minds, and memories. And the more abstract, the more wordy my thoughts became, the more my affinities and perceptions of the world became less and less pictorial and concrete.
I was helped along by a very particular combination of personal attributes that nature sprinkled in my genes: my ambition, my capacity for love, my awe, my hunger, my boundless desire—a voice that always cries forth within me, I want more, more, more! I happen to have a gift for language, and a love of it, which helped me to grasp the gestalt of a word as an utterance basically consistent in pronunciation and consistent in its possible sets of meaning and composed of components both tangible and abstract. That is to say, in one sense a word does not exist at all but in the harmony of shared understanding between speaker and listener, and this is the abstract component; but in the tangible sense a word is fueled by the exhalation of the lungs, the upward thrust of the diaphragm, is sculpted into existence by the throat, the lips, the teeth, the tongue. Most chimps can understand a verbal sign in the second sense, but not in the first. I, however, was able to connect the tangible signifier to the abstract signified, and so became the first chimp in history to learn to speak. To mak
e this mental shift is something like realizing that a person still exists even though he has just walked out of sight behind a corner: likewise, a word still exists even when it is not being said.
It was also crucial to my linguistic development that during this two-year period of monastic meditation, concentration, isolation, and study, no one ever did a single test or experiment on me. I was no longer a lab animal, nor was I any longer treated as a pupil to be taught, but rather I was consistently treated by the humans at the ranch—and of course, by my favorite human in particular, Lydia—as a fellow participant in this life, this society. I do not think I would have ever gathered up the courage to launch myself into the world of articulate communicative speech had I not been treated with such trust, patience, and kindness for such a prolonged period of time.
At first the other chimps were baffled by my newfound loquacity, but once they got used to it they quickly ceased to mind. Sukie, the dog, was not surprised in the least to hear human language pronounced by tongue of brute, and human sense expressed: it seemed to make perfect sense to her, and presented no particularly jarring experiential non sequitur to her vision of the way the world ought to be. Lydia—who knew me and knew me intimately, and as myself, as Bruno, rather than as simply “a chimp”—saw this delightful development as quite natural, and a long time coming. After they got over the initial shock of hearing me speak, Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence also grew accustomed to conversing with me. I do not know how much they knew about us, at first. Of course they knew that Lydia and I slept in the same bed (there was only one bed in our little house) but I don’t know if they knew then that we had long been lovers. I doubt they would have looked down upon it—the wealthy and eccentric Lawrences were not stern moralists.
The days and months stretched on without much incident. The more I spoke, the clearer and smoother my voice became. My grammar and syntax were rapidly improving, and my vocabulary was swelling. Back in the beginning, I would have to hear a word spoken many times before it settled into the cement of my memory, but during this period of my great linguistic explosion, it rapidly became easier and easier for words to sink into my brain and stay there to effect their changes upon my neural architecture. My painting also vastly improved. I painted, I threw sticks into the whispering fields of grass for Sukie, the dog, to “fetch,” I fed the animals, I petted the animals, I played games with Clever Hands, the frequent mute companion to my ramblings about the ranch, and I lay in blissful erotic love each night with Lydia. I came to know Lydia’s corporeal matter so well that if, Gwen, you gave me enough clay, I could probably sculpt you an exact replica of Lydia’s body—missing only the kiss of life—without omitting a single detail, right down to the orange mole on her ribs, about four inches below her left breast.
It was also during my time at the Lawrence Ranch that I learned to read. I do not believe my reading skills would have developed as quickly as they did were it not for Mr. Lawrence’s library. See, it so happened that Mr. Lawrence was not only a titan of industry, a philanthropist, a viticulturist, and a lover of all animals but an avid bibliophile, and he had a great library stocked to the gills with texts, many of them rare and ancient. Mr. Lawrence obligingly allowed me to explore his library at will, and so once I finally did learn to read, I had already been addicted for some time to the printed page. I spent many an afternoon in Mr. Lawrence’s library. Before I loved Mr. Lawrence’s books as windows into information, or as players of silent mental music, I loved them simply as objects. Before I could read them, I would spend hours flipping through their thick old pages, looking at the complex illustrations in nineteenth-century children’s books—the books of Lewis Carroll, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson—running my long purple fingers along the rough edges of the unevenly cut pages that sometimes stuck together in the corners (or that still had a few uncut pages from back in the days when every other leaf of a new book had to be surgically separated from its conjoined twin), inhaling the warm and sleepy smell of decaying pulp and yellowing glue. I kept a secret collection of the bric-a-brac I found flattened between the pages of some of these decrepit volumes: the delicate exoskeleton of a grasshopper; a mummified sunflower; a tamely pornographic daguerreotype of an ample-hipped and hairless woman twirling a parasol, naked except for ribbons and slippers; and what was surely a love letter, written in the femininely curvilinear hieroglyphics of some foreign alphabet and penned in blue ink. I secreted these clearly magical items in a shoebox, which I hid in a small dark place in the Lawrence house. No, I won’t tell you where it is. As far as I know, it is there still. I hope that one day, maybe hundreds of years in the future, someone finds my little treasure chest, and ponders on the possible connections between these enigmatic artifacts.
Lydia taught me to read. She gave me reading the way she gave me language to begin with—but it was sitting alone for long hours in Mr. Lawrence’s library, that beautiful room, sliding one book after another from their tight ranks on the shelves and inspecting their contents all day, following each line of text like a line of marching ants that was sure to lead somewhere interesting, which expanded and improved my reading, along with my knowledge of the world. In that sense I was an autodidact. In the early days I would have to sound each word aloud as I read, and later silently in my head, and then I came to a point at which each word was in a sense heard, in another sense seen (as a picture), and in yet another sense abstract. That is to say, when I read the word cow, at least three things occur in my mind: I hear the sound of an inner voice saying the word; I see the physical picture that these three letters make on the page (which is a symbol); and I half-see, on another plane in my consciousness, a kind of platonic-ideal image of a cow. And in these two latter senses of a written word—the physically pictorial and the purely abstract—a word is just there, on the page, not necessarily fully representative of sounds that exist in language outside of ink and paper, but ripe with unique qualities of its own. I am amazed that people can learn with so much ease to perform the metaphysical acrobatics that reading written language requires. The invention of writing and reading might be the single most miraculous achievement of the human mind.
So, to sum up: in time, all in time, I learned to speak and eventually to read at the Lawrences’ ranch in Colorado. I admit that mine is a somewhat unusual memoir, Gwen, for several reasons. This is one of them: most memoirists do not feel weighed down by the onus of having to describe the process of learning to speak. That much is easily granted them. One wouldn’t find it strange for a memoir written by a fully biological human to begin with something like “The first thing I remember is,” or “My parents were poor but honest.” We do not demand that human memoirists first explain how they became capable of language before getting down to the business of telling their stories. If one could teach a stone to talk, I’m sure the stone would forever thereafter live a life of unending frustration that its every conversation begins with someone being flabbergasted to hear its voice before listening to what it has to say. The stone would lead a lonely life of never being heard. What good is it being a talking stone in the land of the deaf?
So if our readers look through these pages searching for a water-pump moment, some great, finite, epiphanic ah-ha when language pokes a hole in my brain and comes trickling, then flooding rapidly in until my head is full, then I am sorry to disappoint them. It simply doesn’t work that way. Everything is a process, nothing is instantaneous. Take for example this cup on this table, Gwen. Look at it. Try to imagine what it would look like to a silent-minded animal. It is not a cup, neatly separated by the word from everything around it. It is not a table, either. That cup and that table do not necessarily have anything in common with any other cups or tables in the world. Everything is immediate and everything is unique. But gradually, as words take root in your mind, without consciously realizing how you got there, there will come a day when you look at that cup and think, with coherent exclusivity, cup. You do not bother thinking also of the room the cup is in, or the g
ravity that anchors it to the table and the table in turn to the earth. That object has been slotted away in a compartment of your consciousness reserved for a certain kind of drinking vessel, and now, upon seeing it for the first time, you may fill it up with water and drink from it without first being amazed that it exists. In a way language is an inner death of that sense of perpetual amazement at the ever-renewed world. But there’s a lot of terror mixed in with that amazement, that constant process of discovery, terror that dies along with that amazement, terror that we need to get rid of before we can get down to the business of being human. We gain language and lose the amazement, and afterward yearn to have it back, while at the same time we are always using our words as sticks to beat back the terror that crouches always just behind us, in our past, in our bodies, in our delicate animal selves.
XXV
After I had learned to speak and read English with some proficiency, Mr. Lawrence undertook to expand my mind: to instruct me in music, logic, philosophy, and the liberal arts—to guide me on explorations of the subjects that have as their focus the search for what it means to be human. He hired tutors in various subjects: there was a woman who came to the house from time to time to give me piano lessons, for example. I regret that I was never able to grasp the making of music. My hands are awkwardly shaped, and they did not conform easily to the dexterous motions that piano playing requires. Little matter, though. Mr. Lawrence would play me classical symphonies and opera. Mr. Lawrence and Clever and I would recline on the couches and chairs in his office, letting our minds be transformed and transported as Eroica boomed from his Bang & Olufsen speakers. I fell in love with classical music—especially Beethoven. Someone once said, Gwen, that the solar system consists of “Jupiter, and debris”: similarly, I would say that classical music consists of Beethoven, and debris. What more is there to say about music, Gwen? I must agree with Nietzsche that life without music would be a mistake. It’s a mistake anyway, but it’d be a worse mistake.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 26
