Alright idiots, Tip's back after a serious bout of thinking. If you'd like to know what sort of drinking he's talking about, take as evidence the amount of time passed between the beginning of this post and this point here. Now here. Now here. Now here.
It hit me at the Bronx zoo the other day: after warming up my projective capabilities with organisms relegated to the gulags of the food chain ("Awww I sometimes sniff my freshly-laid poo too!") I shelled out the $3 it cost to enter the Congo. And for the first five minutes I had considered my money not-too-ill-spent: fake mist mixed with fake ferns and fake exotic/organic rainforest tree trunks, the tails and other physiological traces I caught of strange animals were worth at least $1.25 (or a Busch diesel tallboy). I was even getting a little horny, like what happens with the mom and her son in the greenhouse of Zola's La Curee. The I reached the pot of gold: the gorilla exhibit.
For lack of light I had a hard time getting oriented at first ("this must be what it's like to first arrive on the other side of the protective zoo bars") but once my eyes adjusted and my ears became accustomed to the pitch of seven-year-olds' screaming I got a good look at the scene: a grassy knoll covered in imported central-African deciduous herbage, playing couch to a dozen hairy Silverback gorillas of varying age and size. The parents slept or watched their children play/wrestle or chew on sticks and rub their mammaries. The faces of us superiors betrayed memories of more innocent times as if we had lived in that dreamy artificiality ourselves. Couple rubbed each other's elbows and children piled on top of each other for a better look. Transcendent.
In a darker corner of the exhibit was grouped a bunch of the aforementioned youngsters whose peals my ears took a minute to get accustomed. They were intent on what looked like an exceptionally large beast who was leaning back against a tree trunk at a ninety-degree angle to the spectators, but about six inches away from the protective glass. Every forty seconds or so the group of kids would scream with delight or disgust and push closer or farther from the glass. I inched in for a better look: gorilla on display (Bigsie?) was working his jaws reflectively with his right hand out as if both proposing and contemplating a conflicted statement for the first time; there were bits of brown I-don't-know-what on the sides of his mouth and his fingertips, but I didn't have enough time to make a guess as to what the stuff might be because at that moment he gave me an answer ("Here he goes!" one of the kids screamed): tipping his head back and shaking it for a second, Bigsie lurched forward and vomited a neat brown poo ball (with chunks and nuts, yes) into his hand, looked at it, then ate it once more.
I gagged, naturally. The kids screamed and laughed and clamored for a better look at the next one. It was worth $3, yes. I had seen something I wouldn't have thought to have seen at home. Here was the reflective image of a beast in captivity whose numbness and ease of life had pushed him to an extreme form of engagement and consumption. He wasn't eating because he was hungry; he wasn't vomiting because he felt sick. Food and medical attention would be provided to him without fail; toys and sex and exercise were all at his disposal. I read on the placard that Bigsie was the first gorilla to have been successfully birthed and raised in captivity at the Bronx Zoo. Not once had he met with challenge or despair but had rather been afforded, arguably, the easiest life a Congolese Silverback may have ever known.
The life in the cage was a homogeneous community without threat from within or without. In this way it would accord with what Fukuyama (or Hegel before him) would have called an 'end of history', wherein the seeds are sown for the overcoming of the master-slave dialectic, where man can devote himself to self-knowledge and the completion of science. In this way Bigsie could be, perhaps, the gorillas' Philosopher, with nothing to do but use the tools he has available and contemplate his role in the world order. It would be easy to pin his behavior on what we know about the death drive: the repetition of a foundational event in order to regain control of a situation, no matter how painful that event may be. His action could be the same as little Hans' "fort - da" that introduces the concept to Freud in the first place. Deleuze would move it beyond Oedipus, however, and take special note of the action taking place: the mouth/digestive machine and its predicated flow. Bigsie is acting not simply according to a death drive but in contemplation of the makeup of his very existence, namely, synthesis. Stuff goes in, stuff comes out. It's true that he reverses the order and doesn't allow the machine to do its work (and this is where the death drive is appropriate), which may be the appropriate place to stop this here and think, then, about why the kids liked watching it so much.
