Mr. Lawrence also tried to instruct me and Clever in logic and philosophy. He built a small schoolroom in the big house, with a whiteboard on the wall and two little desks. There Mr. Lawrence in the role of professor spoke to us of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu, Kant and Hegel. He spoke to us of history and politics, of mind and matter, of skepticism and faith, of natural right and the state of nature, of man and god and law.
Sometimes he would play us classical music while Clever and I sat on the floor and drew or painted or made little clay sculptures. Sometimes he would show us films of Shakespeare plays (this was my first exposure to the Bard). Mr. Lawrence insisted that we have exposure to the long golden procession of art and ideas, the great conversations throughout the history of human thought, all the sweetness and light of civilization, the sweetness and light.
I remember, for instance, Mr. Lawrence telling us about Xeno’s paradox. For some reason I remember that lesson very clearly. It was presented to me in the illustration of a frog and a pond.
“Say there is such-and-such a distance between a frog and a pond,” said Mr. Lawrence, and uncapped a black dry-erase marker, and with a few squeaky strokes on the whiteboard rendered an illustration of a tree, a tract of land represented by a flat horizontal line, and a pond. A sun with a face on it gazed down on the scene. He uncapped a blue marker and drew a squiggly line inside the pond—to indicate water—then with a green marker drew squiggly lines on the ground (grass) and in the fluffy top of the tree (leaves), and with a brown marker he drew a squiggly line inside the trunk of the tree. “The frog is sitting under the tree.” Beneath the umbrage of the tree’s canopy he drew a picture of a frog. The drawing looked like this:
“Now say the frog wants to hop to the pond,” said Mr. Lawrence, and already I was remembering the image of my father, Rotpeter, raping the throat of an even less fortunate frog than this one. I shook off the unpleasant memory and tried to pay attention.
“But!—there’s a problem: each time he takes another hop, the frog can only hop half the distance of the last hop.”
What?—I thought, my mind beginning to roil—why?—what kind of bizarre hopping disorder afflicts this particular frog?
“So right away he hops halfway to the pond,” and with a sweeping squeak of the black marker Mr. Lawrence drew a parabola that spanned from the frog, seated at the base of the tree, to a point about halfway across the plane between tree and pond, representing the arcing motion of the frog’s first hop.
“Then, on the second hop, the frog only hops half of the distance he just hopped.” Mr. Lawrence drew another arc, about half as big as the last one. “On the third hop, he can only hop half the distance of that hop, and then half of that and half of that…” Mr. Lawrence’s voice grew quieter and quieter as the hops he was drawing dribbled into a squiggle that culminated in a static black blot representing the point at which the exponentially diminishing distances of the frog’s hops had become unillustratably microscopic. Like this:
I glanced over at Clever, sitting in the schoolboy’s desk beside me. Ours were the only two desks in the classroom. Clever was scratching the back of his neck and looking out the window.
“So then,” said Mr. Lawrence, turning to face us. Clever dragged his gaze from the window to the whiteboard in a pretense of attention. “When will the frog reach the pond?”
I reasoned that although he was moving very slowly, the frog was in fact moving forward, so surely he had to get there at some point unless he died of thirst before reaching the pond, which at the rate he was going had to be a concern.
“Nope!” said Mr. Lawrence, with a certain pedantic pleasure evident in his bright eyes and lips pursed beneath the snowy broom of his mustache.
“Clever?”
Clever shrugged his shoulders, more from apathy than ignorance.
“Because space is infinitely divisible,” Mr. Lawrence concluded in triumph, “the frog will never reach the pond!”
But how could this be possible? I thought. As I remember, I pointed out that the frog himself must take up a certain amount of space, and I asked how it was that the frog could leap a distance shorter than the length of his own body. I looked at the illustration, eyeballed the size of the frog drawn beneath the tree and visually measured it against the amount of space that remained between the edge of the pond and the black blot at the end of the frog’s trajectory where the hops had grown too tiny to see, and it looked to me that the yet-untraveled distance was shorter than the frog himself, so surely he was close enough to the pond that he could simply bend his lips to the edge of the water to drink. I remember asking this, and I remember Mr. Lawrence’s response was twofold: (one) that he never said the frog wanted to go to the pond because he wanted to drink, only that he wanted to go there because he wanted to be at the pond (to swim, then? I wondered); and (two) that I was for the purposes of the thought experiment to ignore the body of the frog, that this was an abstract, mathematical frog, a frog who is merely a point in space devoid of volume, area, or any other dimensional analog. I could not even begin to fathom how a frog could be a volumeless point in space and still be considered a frog. And then I began to ponder the fate of this poor frog, who was doomed by his rare and improbable condition to die en route to his destination, so very close to it, within sight, within mere inches of the pond, yet effectively stuck there, out of reach of it. Much later, I would read the Greek myths about the cruel and ironical tortures that certain heroes had to endure for eternity in Hades: about Prometheus, shackled to a rock, whose liver regenerates in his body every night so that come the morning the eagle may disembowel him afresh; or Sisyphus, who must in endless repetition roll his rock uphill until he’s moments away from finishing the job, when he loses his grip on it and must watch it tumble back to the foot of the mountain; or Tantalus, forced to stand forever in a pool within arm’s reach of branches burdened fat with fruit, but doomed to everlasting hunger and thirst because the branches of the tree bend just out of reach when he tries to pick the fruit, and the water at his feet evaporates if he kneels to drink it; and studying these mythological punishments I recalled the unfinishable journey of Xeno’s incorporeal frog, and wondered what it was about the psychology of this famous race of wisdom-loving ancients that made them so fascinated and horrified by the eternal wax-and-wane of favor and denial, of futile labors and frustrated desires.
After class was dismissed, Clever and I would be released to play outside. We would skip through the fields of grass with Sukie the dog, and play fetch, or go for long walks in the woods, or go to pet or feed the animals with Lydia.
When I had begun to speak articulately enough that people other than Lydia could understand me, Lydia extracted a promise from me: that for the time being, I would not speak to any humans who did not already know my secret. If I was in the presence of her, or the other chimps, or Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence, or Rita—all the people in the world who knew I could talk—then I could say all I liked, but around anyone else mum was the word. The reason for this moratorium on my speaking was that she wanted to keep me a secret from the world in order to give her as much time as possible to teach and study me in peace and without the winds of unwanted publicity and public outcry howling at the door. I complied with her request of my silence. I slipped up only once.
Clever and I would often take walks along the high metal fence that separated the vineyards from the free-range area of Mr. Lawrence’s property. It looked much like the tall chain-link fence that surrounds the research center where I live now. Clever and I enjoyed conversations together, of a certain sort. Linguistically speaking, they were all very one-sided. I did all the talking, and he just made gestures that I failed to understand. I liked his company though, and he liked mine: we were friends. We were walking along the fence, with Sukie, the dog, yapping and panting about ten feet up ahead of us. Clever and I walked side by side. My hands were clasped behind my back, and I was in the middle of pon
tificating aloud on some ponderous philosophical subject, while Clever mutely listened, dragging a stick against the fence to make it go clink-clink-clink-clink as we walked.
“… and indeed,” I was saying to Clever, “not even Augustine conceived of a God in terms of material imagination, yet for Kierkegaard—” I stopped cold, my thought truncated in midsentence. I had been so lost in my soliloquizing that I was startled by a small grubby-faced child standing just on the other side of the fence, looking out at us. Her star-kissed ink-black eyes were transfixed in an expression halfway between wonder and fear. She stood stock-still, silent. She had heard every word.
I looked past her. Up ahead, in the vineyard, in the aisle of dirt between two long fences covered in grape vines, was a group of vineyard workers. They were bent over their labor: picking the grapes and putting them in the big plastic buckets that hung from their fingers. They wore straw hats to keep off the October sun that glued their clothes to their skin with sweat. Some of them were barefoot; some of the men were shirtless. The little girl who had heard me speak ran off toward them. Clever and I stood there at the fence, trading nervous looks, unsure of what to do.
“Mamá, mamá!” said the girl. One of the grape-picking women looked up at her, put down her bucket and wiped about a gallon of sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. She visored her eyes with a hand and squinted at me and Clever, standing just beyond the fence at the edge of the vineyard.
“¡Oí que el mono habla!” said the little girl, pointing at me. “¡Aquel mono puede hablar! ¡El mono puede hablar!”
The men picking grapes all looked up at us and laughed. The little girl jumped up and down and shrieked in frustration.
“¡Es verdad! ¡Oí que el mono hablaba!”
The girl’s mother sighed heavily and shook her head.
“No estás tonta,” she muttered, and went back to work. “Imaginas cosas locas, Mercedes.”
The girl stamped her foot in frustration. She ran back to us at the fence.
“Speak, monkey!” she shouted at me in English. “Speak again!”
I did not like doing what I had to do next. I shook my head no, and turned away from her. She was a child, and would never be believed. My secret was safe. I looked back as we were leaving and saw her beginning to cry. My heart was heavy. I took my leave of Clever’s company and returned to the cabin, where I knew Lydia was. I wanted to be with the woman I loved, and to speak freely.
During our savage pilgrimage Lydia never ceased to feel uncomfortable with the Lawrences’ generosity. She slowly lost all contact with the outside world. In a way she was as much a prisoner as I was. She fell completely out of touch with her old friends and family. Lydia’s parents had both been dead for a long time, and she had become estranged from her brothers and sisters. She regretted this. They came from humble stock, she told me. The last she knew, all of her living family members remained in Arkansas. They were farmers, miners, carpenters, mechanics—none of whom lived much farther than a stone’s throw from the house they grew up in. Her brothers and sisters were salt-of-the-earthers who were content to plod through unremarkable lives, the kind that Thoreau called lives of quiet desperation. She had fled her family into education. She was the first and only person in her family to go to college, much less graduate school, and when she came back to them with a master’s and a doctorate, she found that they no longer spoke quite the same language. She said her parents had been alcoholics. I got this story in bits and pieces over the course of many quiet nights sitting by the fire or lying naked in bed, talking. She had been married. She had been pregnant, but the child had died inside her just before she was due, and she had no choice but to endure the agony of childbirth only to push from her body what she already knew was a corpse. Sometime afterward, her husband, who had been a young architect on the up-and-up, for his own various reasons jumped off the Congress Parkway Bridge and died. Then she met me. And devoted her life to me. She had no one left but me. And I devoted my life to her. We were devoted to each other. Sometimes in the night she would wake up crying. She would tell me it was because she did not know what she was doing. She would say that she had no clear plan for the future. A few years before, she had been happily married and expecting a child, and had a promising academic career ahead of her. Now she had lost her child, husband, and career. She had lost the respect of the scientific community and now found herself living as an indefinite houseguest in near isolation on a remote ranch in a strange place, and was furthermore the lover of an ape. This of course she did not articulate to me, but all things considered, I wonder if at the time she suspected she was losing her mind.
Lydia accepted the Lawrences’ magnanimous hospitality, but she hated feeling like a parasite. I would ask her why we couldn’t just live here forever. She would have no answer. Only that she knew that at some point our living situation would inevitably come to an end. Then we would make love again, and forget everything.
One would think that all this privileged peace would have alleviated the problem of her headaches, but it never did. In fact, in the course of these two otherwise happy years, her headaches even seemed to have gotten more frequent, longer in duration, and worse. She went to doctors in town—the closest town was fifteen miles down the road, the small mountain town of Montrose—but the doctors never knew what was wrong with her. They told her that her headaches were stress-related, psychosomatic, they were all in her head. Of course they’re in my head, she would say, they’re headaches. She worried. I worried, too, because I loved her.
XXVI
My memories of my time at the Lawrence Ranch in Colorado could fill a dozen thick and happy volumes for you to store on your bookshelf to await your occasional perusal like a set of encyclopedias whose editors have permitted articles only on subjects pertaining to love, wonder, and joy. But to tell of love, wonder, and joy is not what I am here to do.
Soon I will ask you to imagine my long purple fingers manually spinning the hands of an analog clock representing the period of time in which I have lived my life, and as I do, momentary snippets of my experiences over the course of these two years will fade in and out and blend together as the hands of the clock spin faster and faster, until the eye can no longer distinctly see the hands themselves, but only a radial gray blur. Then the hands of the clock will gradually slow down, until I’ve frozen them in place again, two years after Lydia and I first moved to the ranch. But before I ask you to imagine this, I am going to relate an important incident in the development of my young consciousness, which occurred about a year or so into our habitation at the ranch. I am going to tell you about the death of Hilarious Larry.
This was a significant event in the process of my ontogenesis: it was my first glimpse of death. I would come to know death more intimately later on, but this was my first real peek behind the curtain that beshrouds the stage of life. As I mentioned earlier, Hilarious Larry was an elder chimp, and just as it is no tragedy when an old man dies, neither is it a tragedy when an old chimp dies. I never got to know Larry well. He was always standoffish with me, distant, faintly suspicious, uncaring, unloving. Of us chimps who inhabited the ranch, Larry was both the least humanized and had suffered the most traumatic past. Larry wore clothes, yes, and yes, he ate his dinners and breakfasts with the rest of us in a civilized manner, at the table, with fork, spoon, and knife. But unlike me—and unlike, to a less obvious degree, my poor mute friend, Clever Hands—he had never asked to live this life, the life of a man. Samuel Johnson remarked that he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man, and the converse of this is that he who makes a man of himself gets rid of the pleasure of being a beast. Larry had been kidnapped as an infant and then rudely thrust against his will into his mock manhood, which in the process had robbed him not only of his freedom and his savage dignity, but of the pleasure of animality that is the birthright of the beast alone.
In many respects Larry reminded me of my own father, Rotpeter. Like my father, Larry
had not been born in captivity, but as a natural citizen of the state of nature. Like my father, he would learn at a heartbreakingly precocious age that life in the state of nature may be nasty, brutish, and short: he too most likely saw his family slaughtered when he was an infant. But Larry’s subsequent imprisonment had been so much worse than my father’s. Rotpeter had gone to the zoo, Larry to the circus. His experiences there had filled up his heart with disgust, anger, and loathing for human beings, in whose civilization he had been forced to live for most of his life, and this darkly colored his worldview. Now Larry was very old and very ill. He wanted to die. Larry could have been a great patriarch of the jungle, a powerful and revered alpha male, proudly commanding his tribe of apes in the darkness of the forest. That was his true destiny, which of course he was denied. Instead he was removed to America, to sing and dance in a clown costume, to clap his hands and juggle and ride a tricycle, to suffer a life of slavery and humiliation. Of course, he could never have gone back to the wilds. He was accustomed to humans, he had undergone the injustice of being socialized to them. And this was what he resented most of all. The way he looked at me was never hostile (though at times I felt a note of condescension in the dark silent music that issued from his eyes), rather it was a look of incomprehension—incomprehension at my desire to betray my species so openly, at my willingness to join the ranks of this animal, man, who had proven himself to be the enemy of all other things that are living. No, he never had much of that yearning to join the human race that confused and perverted the creature speaking to you now. Larry lived a life of torment and exile, and I could no more have understood his psychology than he could mine. I loved the artifacts of humanity—these things of such great sweetness and light, all these jewels and candies of human civilization: the paintings of Van Gogh, the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, the architecture of a church, the taste of wine, the singular beauty of an articulated word—these things were motivation enough for me to join humanity, these things were all it took to nudge my soul into a state of rapture. Hilarious Larry, even if he had understood these things—though I do not believe he ever could have—would have found nothing in his heart to love them with. He would have preferred to spend his life beating his chest, sleeping in the trees, and fucking in the mud beneath an open sky, to move through the world in the sensory immediacy of nature. What could Van Gogh or Beethoven have possibly given to such a soul? Nothing. I cannot help but admire the obstinate purity of such an attitude, and although I do not share it, my reflections on it sometimes cause me to doubt the inner honesty of my own convictions on the fundamental goodness of art. And then, if I let them, my most pessimistic ruminations on this subject lure me to the thought that perhaps we must count all things of human artifice that outlast the very days of their creation as only so much pollution.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 27
