PrimatePoetics | SocialFiction

In Defence of PrimatePoetics

"The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with his varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which his half-human ancestors long ago aroused each other's ardent passions, during their courtship and rivalry." - Charles Darwin

Only fools and linguists are still denying that representatives of all species of great apes have mastered some form of language! And that they have done so with a creative flair entirely their own!! Ape language is in it's Ubu Roi phase of unacknowledged newness: Merde!!!

Poetry, contrary to what so-called poets and their broken lines will want to suggest, blooms only rarely. Poetry is that what is generated in intense moments of linguistic uncertainty and chaos, moments in which the most ordinary of ordinary conversations must be invented for the very first time. Suddenly, seemingly trivial bits of language become the templates and prototypes for the future development of that language. Therefore: the first ape lie? Poetic! The first ape curse? Poetic! The first ape telling a story? Poetic! The first ape asking for a new word? Poetic! The first ape inventing a word? Highly poetic! Together these notable utterances create a body of language that will eventually be recognized as literature. This is why Percy Shelley wrote that poetry is the initial stage of all language, adding that “Poetry is connate with the origin of man”. But Shelley never specified how far back this origin went and perhaps we are slowly able to begin answering this question. Now is the time to start marvelling at the fresh, original, charming achievements of the PrimatePoetic.

For most of human history humans have been aping around in the mud, crying performative Tarzanites, "irrepressible, context-bound indices of emotional states", before a sudden unexplained burst of culture civilized us into what we are today. We still have at least 30.000 year to go before our existence in history will be of equal duration to our existence in prehistory. Culture is not a triviality. An ape raised by humans considers itself human and does not possess the skills to survive in his or her 'natural' habitat. About wild ape culture we still no barely more other than that it exists. The language displayed by apes in ape language research projects does lack accomplishments that we take for granted in human language; the differences between the languages of our peoples are vast but shrinking. No one can claim to know how vast the gap really is. Nor can anyone tell how fundamental and of what nature the differences will ultimately prove to be. Allow the descendants of current language capable apes a millennium to catch up, instead of the forty years they have had until now, and then we can see what the real differences of capability are. The drawings of young children must do without many achievements that come slowly as we mature, but in the process of getting there a certain directness of observation is lost and only the greatest artists ever succeed in recapturing it.

In the beginning the transmutation of the ape into a conversationalist was thwarted not by any unwillingness on the side of ape but by the to the ape incomprehensible human insistence on arbitrary and unnatural 'correct' ways. The ape was treated like a machine to be conditioned. Our language was presented to them as something given, as a dogmatic procedure that had to be swollen whole or not at all and they resented it. Language does not emerge out of silence and immobility, is not a sinecure for a meagre reward, it is what comes together naturally out of a need to communicate. Language starts with a desire to tell. Grammar is not an innate crystal but a mimetic consequence of the cycle of cause-and-effect that surrounds us. Mistaking language for grammar is like mistaken art for renaissance perspective. Language is a nail-bomb not a heat-seeking missile. Language does not move from the human to the ape through a one-way-street of benevolence. The human and ape learn language together and from each other. All ape-language researcher mention the coming-together of ad hoc mixtures of human, ape, apish-human and humanish-ape languages alongside the 'official' language as the default language for communication. Language needs to be free for the rules to make sense, as it were, and this pidgin language, this unofficial product of the collision between two kinds of mind, is the under-documented breakthrough, the real poetic achievement of ape language research.

Apes do not need external pressure to use and learn a second language and why should they? In the wild they have their own languages (and local dialects) that turn out to be little more complex every time anybody approaches them from a different angle. When looking for language we thoughtlessly assume it to be vocal, but gesticulations, facial expressions and posture are of more importance to the silent primates. In 120+ years that humans have tried to create linguistic understanding between our two people, no one has tried to teach an ape a full human language. In the beginning chimpanzees had to endure speech therapy to learn to speak. It took ten months before chimp Viki pronounced 'aah'. Eventually, after many more months, she learned to pronounce 'mama' and 'papa'. This time-consuming procedure underscored what was really already long known: apes can't speak for anatomical reasons alone. Speech is the ape language bottleneck but language transcends its medium and a small number of mute alternatives have been explored. Simplified American Sign Language (ASL) seemed for a while the best strategy but researchers working with word-images or lexigrams have been most successful. Their success is however not a success of having the right tools for the job, the success was in their overall vision on how the apes should live and be treated. Apes manhandled as dumb beasts deserving the whip and the cage, taught and tested by rote, will actively resist you and your language. Chimp Lana, when forced to go through the same round of questions time after time, surprised her trainer: "Please move out of room". A sentence "Which was considered very remarkable because she was never trained to use 'out of' in such a context". Lana knew more than she was taught but tests were too crude to sense the full depth of her comprehension. Apes have personality, some of them just don't care about our language regardless of any benefit it might give, while others have innate curiosity or are eager to please. Chimpanzee Bruno refused to sign. Only after being threatened with a cattle-prod (without the intent to actually use it) Bruno revealed to actually be a very good student.

Bonobo Kanzi has command over more languages then the people of the United States demand from their president. Kanzi is the first ape to have learned a human-created language by 'accident', as an unintended consequence of his presence from a very young age onwards during his step-mother's language sessions. Having learned the lexigrams unprompted and unobserved, not aware that it was anything special, he used it with unseen enlightenment but was also unwilling to sit through the endless number of repetitive tests science wants him to take in order to formally establish his language ability. Apes are not taught, but they allow you to teach. The language of Kanzi is not restricted to lexigrams: he uses self-invented gestures and comprehends a good deal of spoken English (like most other apes in language programs though often missed). Comparison between Kanzi and untrained bonobos show that Kanzi vocalizing oftener, uses novel sounds and connects sounds as if proncouning human words, mimicking the way humans connect syllables into words. The suggestion that apes do speak but at such high pitch that we can't hear it is unrefuted. Kanzi also translates between humans and less-language competent fellow apes, suggesting that apes unable to fully communicate with humans must nevertheless have some language because Kanzi could not otherwise mediate between parties. There is another way of looking at this. Jane Goodall makes a show out of her lectures by giving her version of a Gombé Stream chimp call. Our blind test in waxing chimpatically however leaves no room for doubt: no human is fooled by Goodall's impersonation, and one would guess that this applies for the ape as well. Researchers encouraging their apes by copying their calls and hoots, and they all do, are understood only because the ape manages to translate powerless human-apish into something the ape can understand. The history of ape language research is also the history of the ape changing the way humans think about their own language. No apish has made it into the English Dictionaries but once it happens the reverse power of PrimatePoetics, the infiltration of ape language into human language, will have scored a major victory.

The language the ape develops in unison with humans is not a short cut to food or attention. Once great apes have learned some derivative form of human language it becomes a natural part of their behaviour, they use it to comment on the things they see and do, they use it to tell about what they are going to do next and whether humans will like it or not, they use to talk ape-to-ape, they use it to argue, and they can say the same thing in different ways. They know about the degree of language ability in others; Washoe was expert in ridiculing students who signed sloppily by making his signs slowly and deliberately, as if talking extra loud to a foreigner. Swearing is one graphic example of unprompted linguistic creativity. Once Washoe had learned the ASL sign for faeces, 'dirty', he quickly made a point of adding it to all things he did not like like 'dirty monkey', 'dirty food', 'dirty Roger'. Great apes, in short, have what it takes to be literati: they are intensely self-aware and have great temperament, they are capable of anger, empathy, compassion, they are playful as well as deceitful, rumbustious and self-aggrandizing. Kanzi 'talks' in lexigrams about his own behaviour as “good” and “bad” when he thinks to be unobserved. Apes are perfectly able to juggle mental concepts and invisible objects, their sense of social hierarchy makes Jane Austen look like an insensitive brute. They have talents in which they surpass us, like a superb short-term memory (perhaps they can make sense of the madding use of nick-names in Cao Xueqin's classic Chinese novel 'The Dream of the Red Chamber'). But most importantly they have metaphysical imagination. Savage-Rumbaugh reports on the 'mythology' she has created for the pan/homo culture lab in Ohio. In this cosmogony, worthy of M. Night Shyamalan, the powers of the goodwill bunny and the evil forbidding gorilla are a precariously balanced system of otherworldly forces. We would be able to understand a hypothetical great ape novel, but the ape will remake the language we think of as ours in their own image, and for most of us it would be like learning to read again.