CHIMPO'S CLAIM TO FAME

A tale that sweeps across many millennia...

Chimpo the monkey swung from tree to tree in a moment of gay abandon. Before that moment not much had crossed his mind. In fact, for not much you can really read nothing.

That’s the reality. He had lived with his family and acquaintances for seven long years, waiting for something to happen inside his head. Something, maybe blind instinct or maybe something more mysterious, rattled around at the edge of his awareness and warned him that maybe, one day, in a moment of magic, everything would change for him.

And like the miracles of ancient texts it did. Out of the blue he discovered abstract thought.

Now Chimpo discovered that he had power. The power of creation. The power of seeing two different things and calculating a third equally different thing, like a pea in its pod and a bamboo stalk and seeing a missile launcher complete with a pod of missiles.

He could, if he chose to, make a pea-shooter and plague his folks until he had victory over them. He could select the hardest and toughest of the little peas and make them sting the Grandfather on his increasingly hairless bottom until the old monkey leapt into the air, yelping. They would fly, with his breath behind them, like vicious stinging insects and make the Grandfather leap higher than high before rubbing his bottom and searching ruefully with his eyes in order to discover the wasp that had dared to assault him.

So the first thing that Chimpo did with this new skill that time and experience would call intelligence was annoy the Grandfather. And being Chimpo with just the one thought in his head, he did it a huge number of times until the Grandfather caught him at it and approached him with the kind of whippy cane that Chimp knew full well could hurt like a thousand devils when he pushed past it in the wilderness and it flicked back towards his face with an unbelievable and possibly magical force.

He believed in devils, even when they came in their thousands.

“Was that you, Chimpo?” growled the Grandfather in the grunting language they used for a kind of speech. It was peculiar, was that language, because it didn't seem to have any form or shape to the sounds that created it, but all the monkeys seemed to understand what was being said.

It was at this point that Chimpo used his new found skill to what was possibly the very worst purpose because what he saw was the Grandfather with a whippy stick together with memories of only yesterday when he’d been chasing a gosling through the bushes and just such a whippy stick, having been bent as he lurched forwards, had spring back and struck him sharply on the matted hair of his back. And it hadn’t half hurt. He could still feel it when he rubbed up against the bark of a tree, and it made him shudder even now.

Putting the two things together he knew what the Grandfather intended to do with that whippy stick. The Grandfather intended to beat him with it. Chimpo knew that even before the Grandfather had worked out the possibility.

So, “It wasn’t me,” he grunted, and pointed, “but that rabbit.”

The Grandfather interpreted the grunts and saw the rabbit and proceeded to chase it, intending to give it a piece of his mind before preparing it for the pot in order for the Grandmother to cook it.

This pleased Chimp no end. Now he had ways and means. He could get away from punishment whenever it came his way by conjuring up a falsehood. And punishment of one sort or another did come his way quite often, usually intended to guide him safely through his younger years to responsible adulthood, when he’d be a useful member of the community and guide even younger monkeys of his (now extinct) genus to their own adulthood.

So, “it wasn’t me,” he repeated, and sauntered off.

He had learned the skill of representing the world, not as it really was but as he wanted it to be. And he did it lots of times.

Like when the Grandmother grunted “you’d better not have any more rabbit stew or you’ll be sick,” and he replied with a jaunty, “not me, not ever, I’m not the sickly sort” not half an hour before he was sick.

Or when the Bossmonk declared that all young and fit lads must go to fight in a war against a nasty, brutish tribe of gorillas who wanted to steal their females, and he grunted “not me, I’ve got an affliction in my eyes and cannot see”, and as a consequence was the only young monkey who wasn’t sorely wounded on the battlefield that day. Not that they called it a battlefield or that it was even a field, and not that it was anything like a battle, more a rough-and-tumble skirmish with claws and sharp teeth. But as I mentioned, their language was little more than grunts and might be interpreted any number of ways.

By the time Chimpo grew up he was a master of the art of misrepresenting reality, or lying as it was to be called in later years when language was more precise and contained hardly any grunts at all. He even became leader of the Tribe, the Bossmonk, by telling everyone else that his own genitals were truly enormous and indicated massive fertility on his part, which made him observably superior to anyone else.

Now let the years slide past. Decades come and go, centuries in a heartbeat, species rise and fall in the eternal struggle for survival, millennia flicker past like moments.

And we have the latest chapter in Chimpo’s discovery, the one that changed his life even though what was to be called his wedding tackle a thousand generations later was never particularly large, though occasionally it was fertile. But he did pass something on, something that had been solely his, the ace discovery that an individual might describe the world as he wants it to be rather than how it us, and, somehow, it arrives to condemn the rest to darkness.

And such distant progeny became politicians.

Like Boris Johnson.

© Peter Rogerson 25.10.19