Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

During all these long and good days on the Lawrence Ranch my vocal capacities exploded. How can I describe this? How can I possibly narrate it? Describing the process of learning to speak is like trying to bite your own teeth. It is like trying to describe what happened in a dream. We do not remember the process of learning our native tongues. At first my voice was high-pitched, uneven, scratchy, screechy, breathy. You may have heard from my many deniers that the shallow vocal tracts of apes are not properly equipped for the production of articulate speech. That is like saying the legs of an infant are not properly equipped to run marathons — of course not, not yet —but given a lifetime of growth, training, exercise, nourishment and so on, they will be. And so my larynx descended as my neck straightened out, as I spent years walking upright and holding my head up high, like a man — and as I did my speech grew less uneven, became richer, smoother, more melodious in pitch, tone, and timbre, more relaxed in tempo, until the voice that you now hear arising from my lungs and exiting my body via my mouth developed its current condition. And the more I spoke, the more I began to understand the words I spoke. My understanding of the meaning of a word further solidified every time I said it. Soon I understood words as discrete bits of digital information, rather than purely as a flowing unbroken stream of analog information, and the more the digital paradigm of language replaced the analog, the more I grasped of grammar and of syntax, and the more and more easily I intuited the structural architectures of phrases and sentences — how a word, when uttered, affects the word that came before it and the word that will come after it, the word’s relationships with its neighbors. The more I dared to speak, the more I thought in words rather than in pictures, in terms of tactile and visual information. See, an animal mind expends much energy in mapping the body’s immediate physical surroundings; but language causes us, for better or worse, to forget this, and to think instead in abstract symbols that are physically evident nowhere but in our mouths, ears, minds, and memories. And the more abstract, the more wordy my thoughts became, the more my affinities and perceptions of the world became less and less pictorial and concrete.

I was helped along by a very particular combination of personal attributes that nature sprinkled in my genes: my ambition, my capacity for love, my awe, my hunger, my boundless desire — a voice that always cries forth within me, I want more, more, more! I happen to have a gift for language, and a love of it, which helped me to grasp the gestalt of a word as an utterance basically consistent in pronunciation and consistent in its possible sets of meaning and composed of components both tangible and abstract. That is to say, in one sense a word does not exist at all but in the harmony of shared understanding between speaker and listener, and this is the abstract component; but in the tangible sense a word is fueled by the exhalation of the lungs, the upward thrust of the diaphragm, is sculpted into existence by the throat, the lips, the teeth, the tongue. Most chimps can understand a verbal sign in the second sense, but not in the first. I, however, was able to connect the tangible signifier to the abstract signified, and so became the first chimp in history to learn to speak. To make this mental shift is something like realizing that a person still exists even though he has just walked out of sight behind a corner: likewise, a word still exists even when it is not being said.

It was also crucial to my linguistic development that during this two-year period of monastic meditation, concentration, isolation, and study, no one ever did a single test or experiment on me. I was no longer a lab animal, nor was I any longer treated as a pupil to be taught, but rather I was consistently treated by the humans at the ranch — and of course, by my favorite human in particular, Lydia — as a fellow participant in this life, this society. I do not think I would have ever gathered up the courage to launch myself into the world of articulate communicative speech had I not been treated with such trust, patience, and kindness for such a prolonged period of time.

At first the other chimps were baffled by my newfound loquacity, but once they got used to it they quickly ceased to mind. Sukie, the dog, was not surprised in the least to hear human language pronounced by tongue of brute, and human sense expressed: it seemed to make perfect sense to her, and presented no particularly jarring experiential non sequitur to her vision of the way the world ought to be. Lydia — who knew me and knew me intimately, and as myself, as Bruno, rather than as simply “a chimp”—saw this delightful development as quite natural, and a long time coming. After they got over the initial shock of hearing me speak, Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence also grew accustomed to conversing with me. I do not know how much they knew about us, at first. Of course they knew that Lydia and I slept in the same bed (there was only one bed in our little house) but I don’t know if they knew then that we had long been lovers. I doubt they would have looked down upon it — the wealthy and eccentric Lawrences were not stern moralists.

The days and months stretched on without much incident. The more I spoke, the clearer and smoother my voice became. My grammar and syntax were rapidly improving, and my vocabulary was swelling. Back in the beginning, I would have to hear a word spoken many times before it settled into the cement of my memory, but during this period of my great linguistic explosion, it rapidly became easier and easier for words to sink into my brain and stay there to effect their changes upon my neural architecture. My painting also vastly improved. I painted, I threw sticks into the whispering fields of grass for Sukie, the dog, to “fetch,” I fed the animals, I petted the animals, I played games with Clever Hands, the frequent mute companion to my ramblings about the ranch, and I lay in blissful erotic love each night with Lydia. I came to know Lydia’s corporeal matter so well that if, Gwen, you gave me enough clay, I could probably sculpt you an exact replica of Lydia’s body — missing only the kiss of life — without omitting a single detail, right down to the orange mole on her ribs, about four inches below her left breast.

It was also during my time at the Lawrence Ranch that I learned to read. I do not believe my reading skills would have developed as quickly as they did were it not for Mr. Lawrence’s library. See, it so happened that Mr. Lawrence was not only a titan of industry, a philanthropist, a viticulturist, and a lover of all animals but an avid bibliophile, and he had a great library stocked to the gills with texts, many of them rare and ancient. Mr. Lawrence obligingly allowed me to explore his library at will, and so once I finally did learn to read, I had already been addicted for some time to the printed page. I spent many an afternoon in Mr. Lawrence’s library. Before I loved Mr. Lawrence’s books as windows into information, or as players of silent mental music, I loved them simply as objects. Before I could read them, I would spend hours flipping through their thick old pages, looking at the complex illustrations in nineteenth-century children’s books — the books of Lewis Carroll, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson — running my long purple fingers along the rough edges of the unevenly cut pages that sometimes stuck together in the corners (or that still had a few uncut pages from back in the days when every other leaf of a new book had to be surgically separated from its conjoined twin), inhaling the warm and sleepy smell of decaying pulp and yellowing glue. I kept a secret collection of the bric-a-brac I found flattened between the pages of some of these decrepit volumes: the delicate exoskeleton of a grasshopper; a mummified sunflower; a tamely pornographic daguerreotype of an ample-hipped and hairless woman twirling a parasol, naked except for ribbons and slippers; and what was surely a love letter, written in the femininely curvilinear hieroglyphics of some foreign alphabet and penned in blue ink. I secreted these clearly magical items in a shoebox, which I hid in a small dark place in the Lawrence house. No, I won’t tell you where it is. As far as I know, it is there still. I hope that one day, maybe hundreds of years in the future, someone finds my little treasure chest, and ponders on the possible connections between these enigmatic artifacts.