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How I feel after reading about monkeys having intercourse for a few days.
If I have to be honest, the reason I checked out a book by Frans de Waals, the dutch primatologist, was that it had Matisse's La Danse on the cover. A painting of naked orange people holding hands and dancing in circles you probably recognize. It’s currently at The Hermitage St Petersburg and as my chances of ever seeing this painting in real life descend, I figured I could hold on to it for a while longer. Even if it meant reading about ape sex for a few days.
I mourn a bit because museums touch me deeply. I like modern art's obvious brush strokes on a canvas, which gives me to the materiality of the artist, the human in them that makes every painting extra special. I read the little museum note cards glued to the wall cynically because the 3D specks already put the creator right in front of me. Sometimes I just read the location and year just imagine the making in action.
The moment when I felt this soul-to-artist connection the strongest was when I witnessed the thousand-year-old handprints at the Honanki site in Sedona. There were stamps (kindergarten mom present style), but also negatives so graphic I could feel the warmth of where the hands rested on the mountain, waiting for the white pigment to be blown out of a straw and land, splattered, on both the hand and the rock wall.
We forget that we are not the only ones that share the 5-finger imprint.
As a primatologist, Frans de Waal has decades of experience observing our closest relatives, Chimpanzees, and Bonobos, and established a few very clear and touching parallels. After all, biology is a strong bond when you share 99% of your DNA. Even though we use chimpanzees as synonymous with stupid homo sapiens or aleatory chance ("lucky monkey taking a test”) it just took a photo of a spiked hair baby ape in diapers to see them as people, my brother especially. When he was born he had so much hair that we took him to get a haircut.
The author analyzes the theory that the animal kingdom is heterosexual and patriarchal and provides solid evidence that all of this is frankly, just bullshit. And before you call my bias, yes, the author also ditches the anti-hierarchy matriarchal society, as we, women, know, who's boss.
Still, there are a few very significant differences in how we live our lives. Turns out, there is no evidence that any other species apart from ours know about the correlation between sex and the offspring that was born so many months later. Their focus is on the now. Every NatGeo description of males fighting to win over the female and spread their seed is a stretch.
Fortunately or unfortunately, we, humans, have been bombarded with information to the point where it’s hard not to know about the consequences of our pleasure-seeking binges. Does information change how we manage our hedonistic instincts?
Taking a step back, how did we get to the place where everything that I like will make me fat, poor, or worse? We even have the vocabulary for it: guilty pleasure.
Yuval Noah Harari’s theory in Sapiens is that our biology can not evolve at the speed of society and that we very well have hunter-and-gatherer brains. When our ancestors saw a tree full of fruit, the compulsive eaters were the ones that made it. But now, these very traits that brought us here, maybe the ones to wipe us out.
Being aware of this unfortunately did not keep me from eating 7 doughnuts and still getting furious at Kalman for attempting to eat the last one. Knowledge may be power, but pleasure is what makes the world go round. What's so hard in admitting that we are just the same horny monkeys that can't say no to the dessert menu?
I am tired of bleeding gums from unwaxed sustainable dental floss. Done with staining my clothes with a vinegar wash, or worse, those stupid laundry nuts. Don't even get me started with aluminum full-stink deodorant. Until I learned about the superpowers of cornstarch against body odor I was content with living a shorter life.
The popularity of the contraceptive vs abstinence. That’s my epiphany for now. Can’t better habits feel as good as Krispy Kreme? Solve this, chat GPT.
Very glad I judged this book by its magnificent cover.
I haven't read that book yet, but I've read The Naked Ape - Book describing the human species, by Desmond Morris and despite our advances as humanity, we continue to be animals and behave like. It is obvious that there are talking bipeds that have not reached the point of being considered intelligent.
Fantastic, they had to call my name 3 times to pick up my food while I was reading this