by Colin McAdam
Fifi, Mama and Mr. Ghoul don’t look at each other.
Mr. Ghoul picks some grass and puts it to Podo’s mouth, hoping he will take it.
Jonathan remains in a frenzy, and his foot hurts.
Everyone wants to go somewhere, but nobody knows where.
Mama comes around to the other side of Podo’s body. She rests a hand on his belly. His eyes are hard and flat like buttons on a Visitor’s coat.
The new one climbs up Mama and Bootie stares and touches the body, and Burke does not come near.
Mama keeps a hand on Podo’s belly.
Jonathan charges once more.
The body is removed at night with a forklift.
The annual electrocardiogram and serial blood pressure had shown moderate amounts of interstitial myocardial fibrosis. It is registered as sudden cardiac arrest. That day’s video is reviewed and a short paper is prepared, with a focus on IMF among captive chimpanzees.
In the morning they go to the greybald tree and smell the ground.
Jonathan will not go near it. He had nightmares in his bedroom.
They do not greet each other.
Mama plays with the new one.
Fifi eats.
Magda wants something.
Mr. Ghoul has a feeling in his throat.
He sits at the foot of the greybald tree.
He spends most of his days there.
He looks at nothing and everything and the everything amounts to nothing but a tree is a tree is a tree. He thinks and sees pictures.
He does this for twenty-nine days.
When Mr. Ghoul was smaller, Dave took him for drives to the forest in a van.
Dave had put a string around his neck as if he needed to be held back and they stepped into the woods, Mr. Ghoul’s first time feeling dirt and branches underfoot.
He was terrified and excited and wanted to be carried by Dave but Dave said
You’re too heavy.
Dave brought the keyboard and Mr. Ghoul tapped on pictures and he squirted white on his leg.
That tree.
That tree.
A stick was a baby tree, a leaf a baby tree, a coloured leaf a flower.
Mr. Ghoul felt shy with everything at first because it was different from the slides and movies and different from the pictures of pictures he tapped on.
A heron flew over and Mr. Ghoul chased it then ran to the pictures that said
That airplane.
He wanted to climb things but felt especially shy near trees.
Mr. Ghoul was at that point twelve years old.
He knew candles and numbers and could remember a random pattern of numbers on a screen and tap them, 5,8,1,9,4,3,11,14, faster than a thirty-five-year-old International Master of chess. And the International Master of chess was sitting on the forest floor asking Ghoul to put it all in a sentence, how many leaves was he holding in his hand.
Dave looked hard at Ghoul and Dave was thinking about time.
This was part of the paper he submitted to Science:
Chimpanzee Mama (MA) was eating cereal and Chimpanzee Ghoul (GL) approached wearing a backpack. GL showed signs of intense interest in MA’s bowl of cereal.
Observers Margaret Jones and Timothy Spence recorded the following interaction:
GL motions towards cereal, making food grunts and panting.
Dr. David Kennedy (DK) (speaking): Don’t eat Mama’s cereal Ghoul. Don’t touch it. She’ll get mad.
GL observed tapping on lexigram for cereal, repeatedly.
DK (speaking): That’s Mama’s cereal. Here. How about we make a deal. You show Mama your backpack. If you let Mama wear your backpack, I’ll … Mama and I will let you have some of her cereal.
GL is observed removing his backpack. MA leaves her bowl of cereal on the floor. GL eats cereal. MA wears the backpack.
GL is later observed sitting with the keyboard by himself, tapping on lexigrams:
Cereal.
Ghoul eat cereal.
Nut.
We submit that the interaction not only shows proficiency in the use of a visual-graphic-aided language system (lexigrams), but also in comprehension of spoken English and of complex, conditional sentences: “If you let Mama wear your backpack, I’ll … Mama and I will let you have some of her cereal.”
The use of lexigrams among chimpanzees at the Girdish Institute has been well documented for over fifteen years (see Appendix E).
Appendix C shows the results of separate experiments involving 580 novel sentences spoken in a controlled environment. As discussed earlier, the complexity of the sentences was increased by asking the subjects to perform unusual or nonsensical tasks (“Put the blue hat in the microwave”), showing a level of abstract comprehension beyond utility and separate from reward.
Proficiency in spoken versus lexigraphical comprehension is roughly equal (+/–2 percent), at 74 percent correct per 135 trials.
In the woods Dave and Mr. Ghoul shared peanut butter sandwiches. Dave said there’s peanut butter on your face. Mr. Ghoul wiped it off with a leaf.
Dave said you can climb a tree like you can climb the monkey bars in the playroom. Trees are like monkey bars.
Dave spoke and used sign language while he spoke, and he tapped on the lexigrams for tree and up and Ghoul.
Mr. Ghoul stared at Dave and various trees and thought about peanut butter.
Dave stared at Mr. Ghoul and Mr. Ghoul moved and sat and sighed.
David rested his forehead on his hand and fingered his hair, pushed it back and thought about how little hair his fingers felt, and reordered it into his ponytail.
It was the ninety-fifth paper to emerge from his department at Girdish. Over eight years of his work.
Unassailable rigour and control of experiments.
Independent witnesses.
David had set out to defy Noam Chomsky’s assertion that humans were unique for being born with language, born with a sense of grammar. Linguists believed that grammar and syntax were innate and were the preserve of humans like flight is that of angels.
He had video evidence, eyewitness proof of intentionality, rule learning, imitation, fast associative mapping, sequencing, cognition and meta-cognition. When Ghoul comments on what he is eating, what he is watching, there is no clearer sign of self-awareness, of language as a tool for expressing self.
How many times had he wished that he could tie down Chomsky, seat a roomful of Chomskyans, behaviourists, petty-minded linguists, behind that glass in the observation area and demonstrate that it is not a uniquely human ability to do something so utterly pointless as putting a blue hat inside a microwave because you have kindly been asked to.
The editors at Science called his conclusion an “over-interpretation of stimulus and response” and refused to publish the paper. It was doomed for some other journal in the gutters of the Citation Index.
Language emerged with our early ancestors as a way of coordinating action. That is what David and others believed. The more complex our social life became, the more there was a need to make needs known and to act in unison. This was the real syntax, the real putting together. And as complexity grew, so too did syntax. Ghoul and Mama were demonstrating its rudiments.
But by mentioning syntax and grammar he drew criticism from linguists. For linguists, language is words, not communication. They ignore what words were made for.
After the first visit to the woods on their own, David had trouble persuading Mr. Ghoul to return to the van.
David took hold of the leash and pulled and it may as well have been tied to a tree.
He knew better than to try force.
I wonder what Mama is doing he said.
Mr. Ghoul wouldn’t look at him.
I bet Mama and Podo are playing Pac-Man he said.
Mr. Ghoul walked with him to the van.
They won’t do anything they don’t want to do. That has always been part of the problem with ape language research.
So even if he sat Ch
omsky or Terrace down in the observation room, it would no doubt be a day when Ghoul was tired or sick or ornery like he has been more and more.
And people only see what they want to see.
The next time they went to the woods Mr. Ghoul said
Ghoul put hat on tree.
Dave said what.
Ghoul tapped on the lexigrams again.
Ghoul put hat on tree.
David took off the Greek fisherman’s cap that Julie had bought him before she moved to Manchester.
Mr. Ghoul took the hat and walked with it to an ageing pecan tree that was standing apart from others. He ground the cap into the dirt as he walked, and stopped at the foot of the tree.
Mr. Ghoul was climbing a tree.
Mr. Ghoul had been born at Girdish to a mother who produced five chimpanzees for research. He was taken from her immediately and raised in the nursery, and came to David at the age of three and a half years, socialized to both chimpanzees and humans.
At a height of about twenty feet he began to shake and cry out for Dave.
David was thinking about the hat which Julie gave him and how their love had faded.
There were birds in the tree which Mr. Ghoul had never seen. One flew near his face.
Mr. Ghoul lost his grip and threw the hat which tumbled to the outer leaves of the tree and rested. He regained his grip and had no idea how to regain the hat.
He hugged the tree and slid down a few feet, scraping his belly and thighs.
Dave was looking at the hat caught in the leaves beyond his reach. The branch was too high for Dave to shake. He told Mr. Ghoul to shake the branch.
Mr. Ghoul wanted to get down.
He jumped and landed on all fours and wanted to do it again but didn’t.
They drove home in the van and David was unexpectedly melancholy, feeling an ache to meet someone new and angry with Ghoul for ageing.
Ever since they compared ape language to Clever Hans, the talking horse, language research had lost credibility. Apes are just mimics they said.
Funding was drying up. He had to broaden his experiments.
When they went back to the woods the third and final time, Mr. Ghoul went back to the pecan tree. He stared at it and didn’t climb.
He walked back to Dave and pointed at the keyboard.
? Where hat.
He continued with cognitive tests and realized that all they were doing was testing by human standards. David said if you hang bananas and see if they’re smart enough to use tools to reach them, you’re only testing if they are smart in our terms. What if they’re not in the mood. What if they wonder why you aren’t giving them the bananas directly.
Their politics, the subtle emotional variables that are as important to cognition as logic. Those are the things to look at.
David had risen through his profession as a young man, as much through being good with colleagues as through conducting original research. We don’t like to see it this way, but a life is shaped less by talent than by handshakes and the right words. He was getting what he wanted by being liked around the table at funding committees.
That was the real essence of language. He was fed up with trying to prove that chimpanzees can communicate. Of course they can. Communication is a process of getting what you want, finding your way in a group. Politics is each individual’s struggle to get what he or she wants, in the face of what others want. Language is political.
We are not born with words and symbols, and words and symbols mean nothing without a social context. What linguists and so many of his colleagues don’t see is that they protect their fields of interest because they are territorial. David did it himself. It is an inescapable characteristic of apes.
Dave offered Ghoul his cigarette. Ghoul took the Zippo and lit the cigarette, even though it was already lit.
You can’t study a chimp the way you can drosophila or even something potentially charming like dolphins. There is more than charm; there is kinship, no matter how objective you remain. There were moments in David’s work when that kinship was amplified towards love, towards pure wonder. He knew there was no human/animal divide, there was a continuum. He could never look at Ghoul without wondering what he was thinking, and the lexigrams offered the bliss of revelation. When Ghoul said Dave swing Ghoul, the physical bond of swinging was redoubled by the knowledge of mind.
He felt a need for change, a hunger for some sort of opening. He could look back later in life and say it’s what a man starts doing at the age of thirty-five.
He had set things in motion to change the structure of the field station. It was time to move away from language, and away from trials which set out to show how like us they might be.
He thought of Julie again. I don’t feel whole without you she said.
Perhaps his work boiled down to an attempt to redress the unspeakable loneliness of humans. Perhaps it was just a recognition that sometimes one ape needs another to show him who he is.
It was time to go, and David thought about the old game.
Ghoul what colour Dave’s eyes.
He looked at Ghoul and saw an old-looking, wise-looking, restless but composed hairy teenager, a perpetual but time-worn child, so much bigger than the child in the lab, so familiar but different from the pup he began as.
David pointed at the lexigram for friend.
Mr. Ghoul thought Dave had pointed at the picture for milk, and waited.
twenty-five
Looee bit the tip of Walt’s finger off once when Walt reached for a piece of chocolate that Looee thought was his own.
He punched Larry in the eye one evening for no good reason and would only calm down when Larry gave him another beer and showed him his blood on a hanky.
He lunged at a black woman in Kmart when he was little, having never seen a black person before. On TV he had something to say to anyone who wasn’t obviously white.
He scratched and kicked and pissed and bit.
He learned to share but usually didn’t.
When older, his blackened face and greying frown, his increasingly beastly and hunched-over figure, made him look like a despicable bully.
When he sat on a chair, a chimpanzee on a chair, and looked jerkily around a room, he was everything we have collectively turned from, every gene and culture we have shed across millennia. He looked foreign, hairy, retarded. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t remember enough, couldn’t plan far ahead, couldn’t control his temper or his jealousy.
This home video of him hammering a nail while wearing a Hawaiian shirt shows a figure to be pitied.
He was a wild animal, is how he was summed up in the Burlington Free Press.
More than thirteen winters had passed since Looee arrived in Vermont and with all the necessity of being indoors he was more sedentary than he would have been elsewhere. He climbed when he had bursts of energy but he was just as happy to climb in his house as he was outside. When there’s no need to forage and no enemy to flee from, we might as well stay still until we’re bored.
Walt took note of Looee’s pleasure in staying on the ground and built a fence around the back half-acre—trusting that he would not climb over. In the summer they had barbecues and parties out there. He was still gentle with children, and Dr. Worsley liked bringing his grandkids over to see Looee. Dr. Worsley could no longer treat Looee at his clinic so he paid visits when needed. Looee didn’t trust the doctor, his soft hands and tools, but he loved the grandkids and played tickle-chase with them.
Judy invited Susan over, who had coloured and cut her hair in the manner of Princess Diana. Looee caught a glimpse of her from across the garden and hooted from the basso profundo of his great black balls to the glistening brass of his lips. He ran towards her and she asked Judy, as calmly as she could, if they could go inside to the kitchen.
Looee picked up his pace when he saw her moving away. He was shirtless. He stopped short of the back porch and stood upright and threw a tantrum like he hadn’t for several years
. Larry and Mr. Wiley were individually unsettled by his shamelessness. He was rolling and pounding on the ground with high-pitched screams and teeth exposed.
Walt waited awhile and said let’s go toss the ball and get a hot dog, and Looee calmed down. All of his tantrums and flare-ups passed quickly. But the mood often took a long time to change. As he played catch, Susan was in his mind like a wasp in a tiny room.
He watched her in the kitchen through the window. Instead of catching the football as Walt had taught him, he attacked it. He took it in both hands and brought it down on a flat rock and it popped like a dull balloon.
Christ said Larry, realizing how strong Looee was.
Walt scolded Looee and Looee sulked like an athlete who says fuck this and leaves the team. He ran towards his house and plotted holocausts and flayings, and walked back with his hand held out and Walt said that’s okay, sweet boy.
They sat on the lawn and the fullness of the day brought thunder. Instead of rushing in they stayed beneath the warm downpour and laughed at the strength of it. Looee did a ritual dance and pounded the ground as though the rain could be beaten into submission. They were soaked when the rain had passed, and happy, and they were spontaneously silent for a moment. The only sound was the dripping.
Parties faded and Looee watched the trees change. December arrived. Snow was curling into people’s collars and the onset of Christmas was reddening the blanch. Everyone was looking for a friend.
Larry carried a bottle of rye from his car to Walt’s front door and rang the bell, shaking the snow from his jacket. Judy greeted him and took the whiskey with a hug.
Walt’s not here yet, he might be caught in the weather.
Larry felt immediately warm and said you’ve sure made it cozy in here, did you make all those.
The living room was beribboned and wreathed.
It’s my favourite time of year said Judy.
She poured them drinks and they talked themselves out of any awkwardness, Larry and Judy alone. He watched her light candles in the dining room and Larry said they’re talking about a season like no other on the mountains.