MONKEYS DON'T HAVE WORDS

In a former life I was a monkey. I didn't have a name, just a scent. I used to drink water from leafs and pee anywhere I liked. I spent a great deal of time screeching and hopping up on other monkeys who didn't mind at all. I jumped from tree to tree and threw berries at predators, taunting them from the safety of high branches, just for the laugh.

Past life regression therapy has brought these memories back to me. The main thing I remember is an overriding sense of urgent delight and an overwhelming immersion in what they call Oceanic Feeling. I wasn't just in the jungle, I was the jungle and I was everything else in the jungle.

I eventually got old and fell out of a tree and into the jaws of a big cat, which was a nasty end but up to that point I'd had tremendous craic. Anyway, even though I was eaten by a big cat, I was the big cat. It's hard to explain. It was a feeling beyond words. Monkeys don't have words. They don't need them. They'd find them inadequate.

In another former life I was a cartographer of either geographic land or the human mind, I'm not sure which. All I really remember is a sense of discomfort. There was a kind of fear there: of boundless spaces, of uncharted realms, of unlabelled and uncategorised things. I didn't have this fear as a child but as I grew older, and read stories of wild places, wild animals and wild people, I came to understand that categorisation was necessary. I too was categorised and this gave me a robust sense of what they call Ontological Security and this Ontological Security provided me with a buffer which I used to protect myself from the sheer randomness of what they call 'outrageous fortune'.

I eventually got old and developed dementia. I started drinking water from leafs and peeing anywhere I liked. I spent a great deal of time screeching and hopping up on people who took offence and contacted the authorities. I jumped from building to building and threw bottles at the police, taunting them from the safety of high rooftops, just for the laugh.

I eventually fell from the top of a multi-storey car park and dashed my brains on the pavement below and was taken to a morgue where a little label was attached to my toe, with a little number on it, and I was put into a drawer that had another number on it and then I was put into box that had my name on it and then I was buried under the ground in a plot in a cemetery that had a saint's name on it and then I could have sworn that I felt a nameless monkey walk right over my grave and I think it took a pee.

ARSES

Who are you? How do you define yourself? If something, anything, happens do you respond to it based on the values and social norms that were downloaded onto your cranial hard drive as you were reared and socialised by family, school, religion, media, and all the rest? Is that really your response or just an instruction? Is your sense of 'self' merely a construct formed by external cultural and societal forces? What are you other than a range of predictable responses and a few personal memories and traumas that you have placed into a formalised context that depends on the aforementioned external influences? Is there a self there at all? Are you there at all? How free a thinker are you? Do you even really think and, if you do, do you ever find yourself thinking something and then stopping yourself thinking it because it seems disconcertingly transgressive or embarrassingly absurd?

Do you think you're a rebel because you dress like a rebel or are you actually a rebel? What is a rebel? What are you rebelling against? How are you rebelling? Is that really the best you can do? Is that actually rebelling? Are you just playing the part of the rebel in an agreed upon cultural game?

I went to art college. They asked me to make something and to give of myself so I shat on the floor. I was following instructions but interrogating those instructions and showing them up for what they were by carrying them out. Why? Because we must be constantly awake and make no lazy assumptions. Every moment of every day our true selves are smothered by the externally constructed selves imposed upon us by whatever culture presides at the time. We must remove the blinkers. We must reject and then we must reject rejection and learn to accept nothing. Does that make sense? Why not? What is sense? Ceci n'est pas une pipe!

Language too is blinkers. What is language but a way of placing boundaries on thought and expression? If we could ditch language and communicate telepathically we could say so much more. Dogs are more genuine when they snarl and whine and sniff each others' arses. We are just trading agreed assumptions and myths. Even when we're telling the truth we are lying.

Last week I held a protest against protesting. It turned into a riot against rioting so I threw a molotov cocktail at a molotov cocktail. Then I told a woman that I loved her but that I didn't know who she was or what love was and neither did she and she said that love was a feeling and I said that I didn't know what a feeling was and she said it was just a feeling and I said that I had a feeling she was just told that by someone who heard it from someone else. Later we got married and divorced at the same time and then I sniffed her arse and whined and then I snarled.

I am most awake when I am asleep. I will not sleep in a building. I will not live in a house. A house is a contract and a house is a series of assumptions. When I lived in a house I slept in the bath, I shat in the kitchen sink, and I ate my dinner from the toilet bowl. When it got dark I hung my pyjamas over the windows and I dressed in curtains. Then I sat in the fireplace and set fire to the rest of the place. I will not live in a house or an apartment. Apartment. Apart-meant. Where we are 'meant' to live 'apart'. Apart from others and ourselves. What is a roof but a blindfold?

I live in a forest. I eat nuts and berries and when I eat the wrong berries I get a sore tummy. I shout and roar as I endure the cramps but I do not call a doctor because a doctor will just say this is a stomach, this is poison, this is illness, and then it will be decided that my stomach is ill because I ate the wrong berries and that I ate the wrong berries because my head is ill and I am not adhering to the all powerful Adherable and I should be locked away. I only trust one type of doctor. I only trust the proctologist. The proctologist sniffs people's arses and so knows more than any other because up our arses is where our heads can be found.

We only think we are people in the same way that we think that there is a world and there is a universe. That is all just an idea. It's not even our idea, we were just told the idea. The truth is that there is nothing. The Big Bang was just an idea that got out of hand and spread out into the void. If we think about something else maybe it will all just go away. What will we think about? We will think about nothing. Nothing at all. We will think about nothing and it will be easy because even when we think that we are thinking about something we are thinking about nothing.

And now I must go. Using language has made me feel cheap and dishonest and besides, I've still got a pain in my stomach and it's really getting bad but maybe that too is all in my head and my head is up my arse and everything is a load of arse. Someone call a proctologist!