Tracking Down the Chimp in the Cage
A couple of weeks ago I found the first story I ever wrote. I think - but am not sure - it may have appeared in translation in a student zine in Poland. I remember learning Polish by reading my translated story.
It is the first story I ever wrote (though this is not quite true either), and my only childrens' story. This was the year 199x, the year before the internet. The core image of the piece was in my mind for a long time. I had a suspicion that it was based on something I'd read years before. There was no way to check however.
When I moved to Ireland ('back' gives the wrong impression) I screwed out the hard drive from my 50 MHz 486DX 32MB ram computer. In Dublin someone told me they'd just bought a 1.7GHz computer. I presumed they did not know what they were talking about. Unlike my informant, I had a scientific background and I knew the basics of how a computer worked. Current CPU clock speeds were about 200MHz - I was willing to believe there may be 600MHz chips around, but nothing near 1,700 MHz. Later I found my mistake, and was shaken to find how much time I'd let slip by.
CD burners were now common, and a friend of a friend burned the contents of my hard drive onto a CD-rom. The contacts on the hard drive were destroyed in the process. I transferred whatever files I needed to my new laptop, so they could sit safely there unpublished instead of soemwhere else. That was before the FISH prize which gave hope to all the media-zeroes. I'm being ironic there.
Early last year Philip Ó Ceallaigh published his debut collection Notes From a Turkish Whorehouse. It was a great encouragement for me as it appeared he got published by submitting excellent fiction from abroad, with none of the usual "vitamin C" as the Poles call it. At the time I was engaged in a fruitless search for a recent author who had got published from being a nobody.
In one of the stories there's a mention that Nabakov got his inspiration for Lolita by a newspaper article on a chimp, or monkey of some sort, who was given a crayon by his handlers. They didn't have high expectations, but apparently the lines the chimp drew were unmistakeably the bars of the cage.
So that was my chimp. I was working on a linguistics department in and had read some article or another on Kohler's apes, Chomsky and innate grammars. It had seemed a good idea to writer a story on an ape's inchoate drawing abilities.
When I finished Ó Ceallaigh' story I found Nabakov's original comment:
as far as I can recall ... a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed bars of the poor creature's cage.
Nabakov's memory may have been faulty - no such article has been found in any Parisian newspaper of the time, nor were there any such experiments at the Jardin des Plantes. This site looks at a possible source, with Nabakov's imagination filling in the rest.
When I found the disk I searched through it for my story, See No Evil. I found it had aged well, and is even better now than when I first wrote it.
Then on the wiki article on Nabakov I found the following:
. . . the recent discovery of a 1916 German short story titled "Lolita" about a middle-aged man travelling abroad who takes a room as a lodger and instantly becomes obsessed with the preteen girl (also named Lolita) who lives in the same house. Maar has speculated that Nabokov may have had cryptomnesia (a "hidden memory" of the story that Nabokov was unaware of) while he was composing Lolita during the 1950s.
That's the word for it - cryptomnesia.
Science Fiction
Here's a classic sci-fi story. Back in the fifties there were pulp magazines where people used to buy this stuff and read it on the bus. But science fiction, insofar as it portrays a possible future, has been overtaken by the accelerated rate of change. It is evident now that each will inhabit the future of his or her choosing. If you want to live in a world where the future opens out to new possibilities then you can do that too.
Some people have enjoyed this story. I promise it is worth reading if sci-fi is your thing.
The title has a nice ring to it though.
Contact
I welcome emails.
aiden o reilly 'at' aiden oreilly.com
with no gaps and 'at' is replaced by @ (this is to flummox the spammers)