29 December 2005: Fong

Okay.

So.

Near the beginning of the very first Monkey Days entry, "Maybe It's You," on 27 June 2002, I said that I would tell you about the Monkey.

And here we are, three and a half years later, at the final entry of Monkey Days, and I still haven't got around to telling you about that Monkey.

It's the one last thing I have to do before I can wrap up this journal and get on with Further Research. So here goes.

The Monkey's name is Fong.

But you knew that much already.

I suppose I should acknowledge for the record at this point that Fong isn't actually a Monkey. Fong is a Pan Troglodytes, a Chimpanzee, a member of the distinguished Ape family, closely related to us humans and sometimes (among trusted companions in the warm glow of those late nights around the corner table at Lloyds when the drinks and confidences are flowing freely) willing to admit it.

I call him a Monkey, and have called the journal Monkey Days, because "Monkey" is somehow inherently funnier than "Chimp" or "Ape."

Fong's cool with it. He calls me a Monkey, too.

But why Monkey Days?

Why a Monkey, even if it’s really not so much a Monkey as a Chimpanzee (and a rather handsome and debonair one at that, he’d like me to point out) who’s open-minded enough about such things that he’s willing to stand in for a Monkey?

And why a Monkey (or handsome Monkey stand-in) seated, as Fong is, upon what appears to be a chunk of rock festooned with icicles?

(I must say, by the way, that I’m quite pleased that after three and a half years of Monkey Days entries I’ve finally had the opportunity to use the word festooned, one of the best words in this or any other language.)

About five years ago, in late 2000 and early 2001, I had a breakdown and plunged into the deepest depression of my life – and the last depression of my life, because in the course of working my way out of that one I learned some things that now seem to have made me immune to falling back in.

One major cause of depression is excessive dissonance between the needs of one’s soul and the life that one is actually living. This can actually be exacerbated by the acquisition of spiritual knowledge, if one fails to integrate that knowledge into how one lives one’s life – one is increasing the dissonance, or at least increasing one’s unconscious awareness of that dissonance.

That was a big part of what was happening to me: I’d acquired an enormous amount of spiritual information and had not integrated it at all into my daily habits of life, thought, and interaction. When I started to recognize this, my first reaction (since I was in the depths of depression, and thus prone to indulging in the histrionic negative thought patterns that are part of how depression maintains itself) was to be dismayed at just how far off track I was, how benighted and how far from any sort of grace or enlightenment. For all my learning, I was still a total fuckup! I must be the most hopeless fuckup in the world!

By this point in the depression, I had already considered suicide and dismissed it. The reason I dismissed it was that while I hadn’t yet integrated most of the spiritual knowledge I’d acquired into my life, I still knew it on some level. One of the last chunks of spiritual knowledge I’d acquired before the breakdown concerned my own soul’s ongoing journey through the cycles of life, death, and rebirth. I was (and am) certain enough of the accuracy of this knowledge that suicide, except as a means of shortening a slow agonizing death or in instances where an act of self-sacrifice is the only means of achieving some vital benefit for others, seems to me to be not just stupid but downright obnoxious: it amounts to leaving your mess for someone else to clean up; dumping your whole spiritual workload and your untidy stack of unpaid karmic bills onto the desk of your soul’s next incarnation.

My soul, I knew, like all souls, was going to have to work through all of its karma eventually. If there was that much work to do, I figured I’d better stop sitting around moping and get started on it, so at least the next incarnation would report for work to find the desk reasonably tidy, the pile in the inbox a little shorter and a little less precariously balanced, and the top drawer stocked with new pens and good chocolate.

So I got to work, and as I worked my way out of the depression and began creating a new life for myself that integrated what I needed to integrate, those two ideas – the knowledge that my soul was going to have to do all this work eventually, and that histrionic depressive thought that “I must be the most hopeless fuckup in the world” combined into one of those bizarre “What If” thoughts that frequently pop into my head and delight me, and that I’m prone to forcing my friends to listen to.

“What If...” I thought, “What If souls were a lot more bound by linear time than I think they are, and What If one really was the soul whose various incarnations proved, on the whole, to be the least competent at doing the Work? In that case, sooner or later there would come a time when every other soul had attained Moksha, transcendence of the Wheel of Samsara, and had ceased incarnating and passed on into Nirvana... at which point one would be the last soul that was still incarnate! And one would be stuck in that position for a long, long time, perhaps even for eternity, because it would be very hard to do one’s remaining work with no teachers or other beings of any kind to interact with...”

So that’s what Fong was originally intended to represent: my soul, still incarnate at the end of it all, last orphan piece on the great Gaming Wheel of Samsara after the rest of the Cosmic Game has played itself out and all the other souls have cashed in their chips and gone Home. A Monkey floating in starless space (because I suspect that stars have souls, in which case they would have all gone out at that point), sitting on a chunk of frozen space debris, trying to work out what he’s doing there.

But why a Monkey?

Because billions of souls wouldn’t have chosen to incarnate as funny-looking primates (instead of, say, dragons or stars or dolphins or beetles or fungi or clouds) without a good reason. I believe if one is incarnate as a human, one’s spiritual work ought to include some contemplation and exploration of what it means to be a primate, and thus of one’s close kinship with other forms of primate.

And because I’m not the only human I know who has, in the course of some or other sort of intensive mystical exploration, made contact with some or other nonhuman consciousness that insisted on addressing me as “Monkey Boy.”

And because that’s just how it was when that Last Incarnate Soul idea first came to me – I pictured that final incarnation as being a Monkey, because my mind is very, very strange.

And because it’s funnier that way.

It's been a good year.

See you on the other side.

 

 

 

 

 

The Monkey sat on a pile of stones
And stared at the broken bone in his hand
And the strains of a Viennese quartet
Rang out across the land.

The Monkey looked up at the stars
And he thought to himself,
“Memory is a stranger;
History is for fools.”

And he cleaned his hands
In a pool of holy writing
Turned his back on the Garden
And set out for the nearest town...

- Roger Waters, “Perfect Sense, Part 1”

 

Wow, dude, that's beautiful...
o
o