Monkey Tree The tree had shaped his life. An upright fork with two tines. He couldn’t remember when he had started following the tine with the dense tangled branches, but it had been after he’d realized that he was a monkey who had looked upon living as a problem he’d set for himself. He knew he would have to assault life to learn what was out there. Did he reject the existing order of the monkey house, or was he striving for a new order? Out of a moral need or as a way to keep fit? And the second tine had shaped the images for his life. Harder to discern, it lay against the house, more shadowy, like a dream. Leaves and twigs rustling up there in the wind were his only signs that this tine even existed. Was his compulsive self standing in for his real self? In everything he had ever done he’d felt trapped in endless thought that had never resulted in anything being different than it was. As his life had evolved it had lost any sense of its own necessity. Recently he’d understood his failure to integrate his life. Failure had become apparent in his strained relationships between metaphor and truth, or as some monkeys had told him with glee, between literature and truth, if a monkey could call what he had written literature. His two ways of coping, his strategies for living, the figurative and the unequivocal, had been distinguishable from early on, but then he’d realized that only by being single-minded might he avert disaster. An either or question, one of those, he thought. He had believed metaphor to be the guiding principle directing his soul. His heart had connected his different observations with each other with metaphor. It was how he’d made sense of his dreams and their discrepancies. He could only understand in metaphoric or figurative terms the many ways he had tried to connect the myriad aspects of living to himself. All this by way of his second tine. But now his problem was how might he fuse metaphor with truth and create some grand unifying understanding before his warders could catch him and send him away. After all, there his box stood outside the monkey house in the yard. And worse than that, he was learning that in order to prevail in life, a monkey had to practice lying. For nowadays when monkeys lie, it was not out of weakness. Monkeys also resorted to violence. He’d learned, that after much long and fruitless discussion, simple violence was such a huge relief. Monkeys would band together in organizations because just by obeying orders they could do things that individually they had been unable to do from personal convictions alone. After all, blood feuds were always preferable and more enjoyable than love spats followed by acquiescence that just put monkeys to sleep. He’d seen monkey’s couple their philosophies with activities that used up energy and time like politics that then resulted in a generalized obsession with changing viewpoints into standpoints and then regarding the standpoints as new viewpoints. Back and forth. Over and over. How boring. Changing positions in this way just permitted any fanatical monkey to reiterate ad nauseum the one idea that had taken hold in him. He fixed on this idea, and then learned he could multiply it out to infinity, dimmer and dimmer like a grainy reflected image bounced back and forth between his two mirrors. He had learned by looking at his two faces in the two mirrors up there on the tree. By twisting one mirror and then the other so his face bounced around and became a blur, he could see into infinity. That was it. His multiply reflected images at some point had lost the soul that had originally clearly reflected back to him. He had now understood that the two sides of monkey existence in their separateness and in their way of working against each other kept life in the monkey house at its common mediocre level. He’d seen how it had been that living in the monkey house had created such reverence, such devotion in all the monkeys to all that was common. But could he now combine what he’d learned before it was too late? By Jim Lawry
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 10:50:29 +0000
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