Paradise Preoccupied

I have lived my life in awe of people who possess talents that allow them to produce pieces of art with a physical presence.

The idea that Michelangelo considered his David to have been encased in excess marble that he simply removed, albeit carefully, is astounding and confounding to my little brain that contorts itself uncomfortably when called upon to reproduce even the most basic of forms in ink or pigment or Play-doh.

Van Gogh, da Vinci, Monet, Hocking … even Jackson Pollock and Stan Lee … accomplish what I can’t begin to begin, and the fact that their images not only endure, but endure while adding so much to the world in such a graceful and accessible form occasionally has me tingeing toward the greenish as I admire their work and covet their genius.

Yes, I do my best to sculpt sentences and paragraphs from a palate of letters and spaces and marks meant to add structure and emphasis, but not even a million blog posts, no matter how brilliantly written, could ever prompt the gasps inspired at even a peek at a corner of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or one water lily on Monet’s pond.

As a physical manifestation, words are the pale ghosts of art.

As a writer, I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have some of the bonnier of my bon mots literally engraved in stone.

The greatest of writers often have their words transcribed onto impermeable surfaces as testament to their greatness, and as one who pauses to read them when finding such treasures in places where people are meant to gather, to appreciate, to be impressed, I am.

Composers of epitaphs must feel some thrill at knowing their concise summings up of lives and deaths stand for the passing world to see, read and perhaps be touched by even a century after the inspiration for the words has little of their substance left.

Should a time come that someone decides something I’ve written deserves to be posted in a form less ephemeral than cyberspace … less fleeting than a blog, more substantial than an e-book … a form solid and strong and shiny-hard, unlike ink-on-paper, I assume that if I’m in a position to appreciate the effort, I will.

It would be with pride that I would approach such a monument, and I would be overcome by the image of words of my own configuring set in stone for all the passing world to see for generations to come.

Wow. What a moment that would be.

One request, however, way in advance of something that’s not likely to happen in the first place …

please spellcheck before engraving.

(The photos are of a monument in Maurituis. Sigh … )

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Like a rare exotic pampered in the orchid-perfect climate of a Kew Gardens greenhouse, Judy the Chimp was accustomed to feeling special. Doting upon had been de rigueur since the minute her birth made national headlines: World’s First Known Golden Chimpanzee Born.

To say she was a special simian was an understatement: Judy was a jewel — a gleaming, 165-pound primate the color of 24-carat gold from head to opposable thumb-like toe — and she knew it.

Like an opus designed to set her praises in stone so generations hence could learn the libretto and join in the worship of Judy, the routine that filled her days was perfectly orchestrated.

She would never suffer the humiliation of nostrils inhaling the product of last night’s monkey chow. Between the specially designed ventilation system in her den and the immediate attention paid to every evacuation she so satisfyingly deposited, all potential for fug was removed almost before it hit the floor.

Not that monkey chow featured prominently. No, Judy’s dinners usually started off with a nice gazpacho, then followed a gourmet curve that put the “pan” in Pan troglodytes.

If you think the girl was content with her lot in life, you’re wrong. The call of the wild came late to Judy, but it did come.

Due to well-meaning, but misguided attempts to encourage Judy toward an amorous inclination in the direction of a baboon of a chimp named Joe, she’d been subjected to hours of moving images from a small box regularly wheeled just beyond arm’s reach and developed other ideas.

Judy’s viewing of Jane Goodall’s outtakes … “Survivor” should be ashamed by comparison … resulted in her first experience with horripilation of full piloerection variety and a yearning for the day her present innocence could be embraced as salad days fondly recalled, but not missed.

From the minute she set eyes on the feral males of Gombe Group freely cavorting like the burly, hirsute, untamed gorgeous hunks of ape-flesh they are, Judy was agog.

Suddenly she saw her posh accommodation as dull and uncomfortably confining, her human companions as puny and pitifully depilated. Her longing for the wild eroded her contentment. As she became increasingly restless, thoughts to abscond developed.

Formulating a plan of escape isn’t a simple process for a chimp, especially a chimp who’d never ventured beyond the squeeze-shoot leading to her private examining room, and years of aloof snobbery toward her neighbors, all lesser apes and downright monkeys, made it likely there would be no fifth-column to pass information or create diversions that might allow her to reconnoiter.

In desperation, she turned to the one hope she had as co-conspirator: the ever-frustrated, yet hopeful, Joe.

“You want to do what?” he coughed; then lip-flipped for emphasis. “Are you out of your pretty little anthropoid mind?”

“But I want to be a wild girl!” Judy insisted.

Pant-grunting to beat the band, Joe mulled this for only a moment before resorting to an attention-getting bout of chest beating.

“You have no idea, do you?” he waa-barked. “Do you actually think you could cut it out there?”

“And why couldn’t I?”

“Miss Golden Ape 2007 in the wild? Don’t make me laugh?”

Grunting softly, Joe raised his arm and presented the back of his wrist in the classic pose of conciliation.

“Listen, Judy, before I came here I was housed with a wild-caught chimp, an old guy who’d tell stories about life in the jungle. Sure, it sounded exciting, all that running around, playing and copulating whenever the mood hit, but there was more; stories of war and death, of starvation and disease, and of chimps that didn’t fit in, so spent their lives wandering alone.

“Look at yourself,” he said, moving toward her slowly and settling down to groom her shoulder before he continued. “You’re yellowier than an orangutan and almost as ugly. What self-respecting wild chimp would have anything to do with you?”

Just then, a female human carrying a fruit basket lunch interrupted them.

“Would you like some of my pineapple, Joe?” Judy offered.

“Thank you,” he answered.

Soft lips smacks filled the den as Judy relaxed under Joe’s deft fingers.

“You’re not all that ugly,” he said, pineapple juice soaking his hairy chin. “A funny color, yes, but you don’t really look like an orangutan.”

“Have a mango, Joe,” Judy grunted.

This is another turn on the treadmill-for-the-brain for Answers.com’s creative writing challenge in which the ‘must use and link’ words are: fifth-column, gazpacho, agog, horripilation, simian ,fug, opus, salad days, abscond and Kew Gardens.
Here is my last attempt which didn’t win anything, but was fun to write.

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If you’re wondering why the previous post, the creative writing challenge, exists … well, you have good reason to wonder right along with me. I certainly do have enough work on, and just the thought of adding to my ‘to do’ list sets my fingers into spasm.

This, however, popped out like giggle.

The rules were that it had to be less than 750 words and correctly use all of the following words:

The thing was written almost before I finished reading the submission instructions. Apparently, my brain needed a sugar fix.

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Hiking across an island with Norman is always more of an adventure than it should be. Completely and understandably dedicated to a case of melissophobia arising from an encounter on a lump of land in the Indian Ocean with about 13,000 African bees that should well have killed him, what should for all intents and purposes be little more than a perfunctory scurry from Point A to Point B ends up with us popping off and on the trail like a yo-yo in the hand of a hypoglycemic manic-depressive riding a blood sugar spike.

Like background noise on every tropical island in the world, buzzing is ubiquitous; every single thing, living or inanimate, gives off some thrum that could be confused for a flying fellow of the apiary assortment. Sheesh … evaporating raindrops off coconut leaves buzz, forcryinoutloud!

I’ll admit there was a time when these strolls with Norm held some quixotic appeal, but ever since an early attempted tryst on a semi-deserted caye in Belize went pear-shaped — the engine of a distant fishing boat convinced him that a bee’s butt was headed for his hind end — I’ve been less than swept off my feet. Seeing as how I broke three toes when he tossed me into what he thought was the path of a speeding stinger, I think my present state of unimpressed is about right.

This is not to say that I don’t have my own freakish moments of the small and creepish kind. Far be it from me to abrogate a healthy aversion. Quid pro quo, I say, and a bug is a bug is a bug.

Arachnophobic to the nth degree … and not one bit ashamed since it makes nothing but sense to react with revulsion to something with far too many legs and all those eyes … I can trace my very reasonable and not irrational fear to a childhood liaison with a brown recluse spider who wasn’t nearly reclusive enough, but most certainly brown and had more than enough spider to her.

Lest anyone think it was some mutual repulsion from the small and furry that brought the two of us together and set us on a course to walk the world’s atolls and isolated smatters of land mass side-by-side, I should probably explain that the whole island-walking relationship thing was actually based on a typo I mistook for a mystical omen.

Just out of college, I had a hankering to see my footprints on the small and sandy shores dotted around the globe. As a single woman, it seemed a good idea to find a compatible male counterpart to share expenses and lend a semblance of couple-commitment to ward off unwanted advances.

With a sense of fulfilling a mystical mission designed by pure karma, I set to perusing the classifieds in my local paper for a traveling companion of the masculine variety that would share my calling.

It was within the first minutes of searching that I triumphantly discovered what I now know to be a misprint that dropped a couple of sentences and made one ad out of two:

“1972 Chevy Vega, good condition, call Norman,” and “Why not own a piece of paradise? Happiness is an island.”

Imagine my wonder … my blissful inner-assurance that a match made on a greater plane than I usually managed to tread was about to become my reality … as I read:

Norman is an island.

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