Blank Simian Rote

A reviewer in the London Review of Books, Glen Newey, wrote in the March 2012 issue words I found refreshingly on point—although somewhat removed from the book he was reviewing, one dealing with human failures in the realm of statistical inference. Here is the passage that caught my eye:

Human existence is an acquired taste, and many of us get through it with the aid of what Vladimir in Waiting for Godot calls the “great deadener”. Blank simian rote—the round of feeding, grooming, ablution, slack-jawed vacancy—serves to block out tracts of time that might otherwise get colonized by anxious thought.

The first sentence is a bull’s eye, in a way. I don’t know Mr. Newey’s own stance on cosmology, but in mine that sentence is descriptive—because I don’t think that we belong here. And “blank simian rote” will bounce around in my own slack-jawed vacancy for a bit yet, bringing a little smile—as it has now for a few days since reading the phrase. I have this maddening habit of sometimes becoming aware of people’s ears when I watch TV; the situation is always one of intellectual exchange, interviews, or speakers behind a podium, usually on C-Span. The content is abstract, in other words, but I’m suddenly fixated on the ears. And yes, I am. I’m seeing a simian holding forth learnedly on some global subject of complexity. We find ourselves in bodies, sort of wake up in them. And when I watch little babies, it’s quite apparent that they’re surprised, baffled, and exploring what this thing is, meaning their little hands and little legs and toes. And the acquisition of the habit happens quite naturally.

Then it goes on for a while—make that decades—before a kind of reversal of that process begins. At minimum you notice that people have ears—and in the ultra-sophisticated world of abstraction and high technology, with ritual garments and blow-dried hair or sculpted coiffeurs more or less sublimating the underlying ape, only the ears remain as drastic reminders of what we are beneath the highfaluting reasoning that vibrates the air that the ears manage to detect and then to signal inward by incredibly sophisticated bio-technology until neuron servers make it audible to the mind—a mind that acquired a taste, as it were, for human existence—and then with age, is beginning to lose the habit. Because “seeing ears” is just the beginning.

Another of my symptoms, anyway, showing that the process is reversible, is when I hear of 70 or 80 or 90 year-olds praised to the heavens for their heroic fight, usually against cancer. And I wonder why it is so heroic to keep holding on, to the bitter end, when the ape just wants to lie down and die. My reviewer tells me why; they resisted being colonized by anxious thought. In them, evidently, the blank simian rote is still all right. The heroes are still hanging on; evidently they didn’t spend much time in thought and wonder, wonder about who they really are and what they’re really doing here. If they had they wouldn’t fight so hard when the end comes knocking on the door. They would’ve been waiting for Godot, not fearing the encounter.

A lifetime of thought, however, and not always anxious thought, either, produces insights that really help as the trip to the Garden of Simia begins to draw to its close. One can have a fair amount of fun, too—not least studying people’s ears. And, by the way, you can’t get away from them. Your own are there in the mirror to tell you that you too have a pair. Then, if you’re a man, you envy women who can hide them so well. Just checking on the spelling of the word “coiffeur” just now, I am looking on my screen, to the right, at a page featuring what is called Coiffeur D’Elegance. It shows five lovely ladies’ hairdos—and not an ear in sight.