FROM THE ARCHIVES:Myles na Gopaleen turned Darwinism on its head in this Cruiskeen Lawn column.
A FELLOW quite seriously confided this fact to me: There is an ancient belief in India that monkeys can speak: they don’t speak, because they know that if they were heard speaking, they would be made work.
I think the remark was intended as a joke, yet from me it got no laugh. How subtle, how profound, how portentous, how alarming! Hinc, I may say, illæ lacrima! If this proposition be true, in what wise can the late Charles Darwin take an unbow? Who will explain how monkeys are descended from men?
At my place in Santry I happen to have a small private zoo. My observation of my monkeys fortifies the belief of the Indians. The monkeys engage in wholly unnecessary and even dangerous gymnastics, chatter so energetically that what they appear to say can have no grammar or dignity, and give to the observer (me) the impression that they are merely animal extroverts and worthless from the point of view of employment. It is all presumably an act.
(Query: Does the fabulous present figure of some 80,000 unemployed include the 137 monkeys recorded as being resident in the 26 counties, most of whom are Irish nationals? Query 2: If heard talking, would they be entitled to Unemployment Assistance and, in due course, to Mother and Child Benefit? Could you have such a thing as an Old I.R.A. monkey complete with pension?
That is not so cynical as it sounds. Had not a she-wolf come to the succour of the twins Romulus and Remus, then we had no Rome to-day. Ever since my discovery that dogs frown vertically, as distinct from the human fashion of frowning horizontally.
The vertical frown seems to argue vertical thinking – that is to say, acuity, concentration on a particular point: the human horizontal frown suggests diffused, slobbering modes of thought I wonder will I be in time for the bus did I turn the gas off where is me clean handkerchief I suppose there will be an election soon what time it is at all is me watch stopped and all that class of thing. Dogs are more, well, dogged. Dogs are very queer people, as James Stephens would say. They refrain from speech as carefully as monkeys but no other animal is as much invoked by garrulous man. [...]
Why do humans call that penitential chamber the dog-house? Why the fiction that dog does not eat dog – I have personally seen a Kerry Blue eat the best part of an Irish terrier? Why all such words as dog-berry, dog-days, dog-fish, dog-star – I am perfectly sirius! – dog-watch, dog-eared? [...] Personally, my estates in Santry are shared with a dog. We don’t ... speak. Your man is twice as cute as any monkey. Yet I feel that if he were to break down in his monumental taciturnity, he would speak in perfect French, quoting Rimbaud – accurately. And that is more than My Honour, or perhaps even Austin Clarke, can do.