Lycanthropia

As the waters fail from the sea,
and the flood decayeth and drieth up:
so man lieth down, and riseth not:
till the heavens be no more,
they shall not awake,
nor be raised out of their sleep.
— Job 14:11-12

Two nights ago in a dream I followed the sound of music, a somber, otherworldly meditation that drew me into the back yard, over the tall wood fence, through the yards of backfence neighbors, across the sales lot of a mobile home dealer, over the asphalt river of a broad county road, through the parking lots and uninspired brick buildings of a community college, over chainlink and barbed wire and four lanes of concrete interstate highway past more chainlink and barbed wire, until finally — finally! — I came to an oasis of woods — oaks and hickories and pines and maples — a space that would pass, in the absence of civilization, for non-tropical rain forest. There, in the cool dense shadows of a glade I came upon hundreds of Great Apes — gorillas and chimpanzees and bonobos and orangutans — gathered together in a vast circle, playing musical instruments of their own making and singing in voices that were nothing like their usual screeching, chattering depictions, but were warm and lyrical and, above all, resigned. The apes were playing a funeral dirge. Their own.

In my dream I stood for long minutes listening to the bleak, hypnotic, percussive sound until I began to understand its meaning, and I heard the long history of a simple people who lived in trees and foraged for food and warred among themselves and with men until technology came, with its rapacious appetite and its enormous greed, and slowly ground down the bones of the ancients, distilling them into what remained: Little more than a great symphony orchestra and a handful of prisoners in zoos. I was so moved by their dirge that I stripped off all my clothing, covered my body in mud, colored my hair with ash, and uttered a primal scream out of the despair in my gut. In that moment I was the last representative of my tribe, consumed with loneliness, aching for a companionship that simply did not exist, understanding that, when I breathed my last it would not simply be my final exhalation, but the death rattle of all my people, the genocide of my kind. It is finished. Amen.

•

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills…” begins one of my favorite books, Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen’s memoir of her experience as the owner of a coffee plantation in Kenya. A number of preferred reads are centered in what Henry Stanley called the “Dark Continent,” including Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Ernest Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa. There is, in each of them, a strong appreciation of Africa’s natural beauty, coupled with a thoroughly paternalistic attitude toward the land and its people. From the Victorian era deep into the 20th century, Europeans migrated south, planted colonies, plundered them, polluted indigenous cultures and then fled back to their “civilizations” when their luck turned sour or their investments proved less than profitable. As Chinua Achebe expressed in an essay entitled “The Role of the Writer in the New Nation” for Nigeria Magazine in 1964, “African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; …their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, …they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity. It is this dignity that African people all but lost during the colonial period, and it is this that they must now regain.” Nearly a half-century later, much of Africa remains oppressed, ravaged by war, famine, and epidemic disease. In many areas the dignity Mr. Achebe envisioned is as elusive as ever. In such a fragile environment, one is hard pressed to prefer apes over humans: After all, aren’t humans of greater value than their “lesser” kin?

Truth is, we seem to blithely ignore both the relatively quick genocide of Great Apes and the slow destruction by HIV/AIDS of African humans, preferring, instead, to invest in the creation of new and improved weapons of mass destruction. So neoconservatism has as its ultimate goal not the preservation of life, but its abolition. Perhaps it takes a little too seriously the REM lyric, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” Or maybe there is truth in the notion that the neocons believe they are hastening the Second Coming of Christ. Whatever the case, to hear the Vice Fund tell it, investing in self-destruction is quite profitable. How this relates to the extinction of Great Apes may not be immediately clear, but consider this: If we care so little for the preservation of our own species, and choose profit over survival, why should we be expected to care about the loss of a few higher primates? The world lost passenger pigeons and dodo birds at the turn of the 20th century. It is simply moving a little higher up the food chain at the turn of the 21st.

•

When I was a kid, accepted wisdom concerning the Neanderthal peoples was this: They were distant ancestors in a chain that passed from Great Apes through homo erectus and homo neanderthalensis to homo sapiens. According to the convention, in my distant past there existed a series of blood kin Neanderthals. Science in the 1960s said they were as much a part of my family tree as my own mother and father. But the accepted wisdom was mistaken. Nearly all anthropologists now agree that Neanderthals were “an evolutionary dead end,” and DNA evidence seems to support their view. Neanderthals were a very different species from modern humans.

Still debated is how exactly Neanderthal man ceased to exist. Some claim lower birth rates and higher morbidity rates caused the decline in Neanderthals; others blame the climate or environmental changes. I agree with those who hold the view that modern man simply exterminated his Neanderthal neighbors. Considering we have been for centuries quite willing to kill our homo sapiens brothers and sisters for something as simple as the amount of melanin in their skin, it is little wonder that, competing with a different species for territory and food, we would resort to violence. It’s our modus operandi.

That interpretation, as distasteful as it sounds, goes a long way toward explaining why we have succeeded as a species for long centuries where others have failed. We’ve been smart at winnowing out everything that got in our way. From tiny bacteria to great beasts, we’ve met them all and taken them out; at our technological acme, we can now eliminate hundreds of thousands of our own kind with the utterance of a single bomb. If homo sapiens are good at anything, they are good at this: We are perhaps the best killers on the planet.

It may well be the reason Gaea spewed us up in the first place. Maybe she is tired of these squirmers squirming over her crust; maybe she longs, as a dog longs to rid himself of fleas, to purge herself of these wrigglers wriggling. Perhaps homo sapiens are her answer to the problem — a gang of highly specialized killers who, in their bloodlust, will eventually destroy even themselves. Perhaps my sentimental belief that we should stop encroaching on the habitat of the Great Apes, that we have a moral obligation to those humans dying of HIV/AIDS in Africa is exactly that: A sentimental belief. It could be those who deride me as a “tree-hugger” and a “knee-jerk liberal” are on the money. This isn’t Disneyland. We’re here to do a job. Let’s get on with it.

But the notion chafes at everything I’ve come to believe in 48 years, and at the teaching of a man whose birth we seem hell-bent on forgetting in our lust for a perfectly commercialized holiday season. He points toward a higher way, a nobler evolutionary path: “Love your enemies,” he says. “And pray for those who spitefully use you.” His closest disciples define love not in the way we take lives, but in the way we lay down our lives. In other words, this man, this radical preacher, this rebel Jesus (to quote Jackson Browne) wants homo sapiens to live utterly opposing their deadly natures. Taken at his word, he is the anti-Rambo. No wonder neocons twist his sermons and distort his teachings. He is not one of them. Not even remotely.

•

In my dream one of the Great Apes, a gentle orangutan, is named Jesus. He makes one promise, one guarantee to his apostles: “If you follow me,” he says, “you will suffer persecution.” None of his disciples question what he means by it. He is talking about physical suffering and death. “And then, the resurrection,” he says.

Outside, on this late-December morning, shoppers are scurrying from place-to-place, buying presents and hanging tinsel, hastening, hurrying. The great carol of the day is not “Silent Night” nor “Noel” but the hustle and bustle of consumerism. It’s what we know in the world of plastic Jesuses and one too many pontificators interpreting his teaching. I suppose the condemnation reaches all the way down to me. He said it most eloquently himself: “Turn the other cheek.” The best acknowledgement of it is not in repeating the words, but in doing it. In turning the other cheek. We aren’t big on cheek-turning in the beginning of the 21st century. We’re much better at revenge.

In the orchestra of my dreams, bonobo drummers keep a steady rhythm, and I imagine a procession of humans carrying the corpse of the last Great Ape, perhaps a gorilla, from the wild to its final resting place.

The corpse looks remarkably human.

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For those who have read this far, thank you. I hope your holidays are happy ones. For insight into how I arrived here, I offer the following links:

• UNAIDS
• Countdown to extinction for world’s great apes
• Orangutans Headed Toward “Catastrophe”

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