Return of the Monkey
There seem to be many monkeys in my life. No, I do not live in the tropics of Costa Rica, where monkeys are constantly in the trees around you, making their presence all too obvious (as we saw a few years ago during a holiday visit to the fond place of my 5-6-year old life). In that never-never land of vagueness between an early childhood memory and a pseudo-memory that has been imbedded through family lore and retelling, there is the story of having breakfast on the patio in what I think was Maracay, Venezuela on the Lago de Valencia to the west of Caracas. I was perhaps three or four years old and we were trying to enjoy some scrambled eggs before the day got too hot and humid. Just then, one of those Capuchin monkeys that inhabit the Orinoco environs, swooped down from the trees on an overhanging branch and grabbed a handful of my eggs, much to everyone’s amazement. I remember being startled, but finding it equally humorous rather than scary. You scare less easily of monkeys when they are all around you every day.
By the same reasoning, I am not so bothered by monkeys as I know them these days in my life. I find them mildly humorous and derive very little annoyance from them. This past week, Raffaelo and Octavio (a.k.a. Beautiful since his last name is Bello) came to put on the “brown” coat of stucco on my Hobbit House. This is the middle coat and the mixture of sand, Portland cement and lime that gets applied to the prior “scratch” coat and before the “finish color” coat that gets put on only once the base is firmly dried. I enjoy Raffaelo, a big guy with a gentle manner who was born in the U.S. and speaks English like a native and Spanish like a native. Beautiful is a sweet man from the look and sound of him. He laughs easily because he wants to laugh. I say that because his English is only so good and he probably only gets half of the jokes I make with them, but he is always quick to laugh. It is the sign of a light and pleasant spirit unburdened by his obvious undocumented alien status. I watched them help Pedro, who I hired for the day to help carry heavy wood for the roof to the site. Pedro is from Guatemala and in the hierarchy of Southern California workmen, the Mexican can easily lord over the lesser Central Americans and yet Raffaelo and Beautiful seemed to prefer to help Pedro learn the correct “American” way to do construction. That alone is a beautifully human thing without any monkeys on their backs about it all.
Raffaelo had masked off my Mouth of Truth boulder carving in order to stucco around it (It looks incredibly tailored now bounded by nicely smoothed stucco). At one point he was telling me that they would be taking off all the masking and drop cloths from the Hobbit House when they finished that day since there would be such a long time until the finish coat would be applied. He went on to say that as soon as he finished the boulder-imbedded wall he would take the masking off the monkey. I knew what he meant but I had to smile to myself. I was not upset that he referred to my carved boulder art as a monkey rather than the God of the Sea, Oceanus, who is the model represented on the original Boca Della Verita that I had reproduced by my carving. I was rather amused in a cross-cultural way. I had told Raffaelo and Octavio on the first day that it was a carving of a famous antiquity in Rome and that lack of familiarity apparently washed over them and they saw what they thought they saw. They saw the face of a monkey in the stone. The funny part is that I realized early on that in trying to reproduce the Roman statuary, I had, indeed, made the nose a bit too long relative to the positioning of the eyes and mouth, making the face look rather Simian. Proportioning and positioning is one of the key elements in facial recognition software for a reason. How our eyes are set in terms of width from one another and relationship to our nose and mouth is what makes us look like who we look like. I imagine that its lesson number one in the police sketch artist school or art. So Oceanus is Curious George to Raffaelo and Beautiful.
I have spent the time touching up the carving as best I can and I think I have done a decent job of it. I have molded the tussled hair of Oceanus and put some stringiness into his mustache and beard. I have ground down the hollow of his cheeks, exposing the more pronounced cheek bones. And, most importantly, I have done some subtle shading of the nose, which is the original mottled rock of the boulder, to make it look more three-dimensional and protrude more into the viewer’s eye. Last, but not at all least, I added two cabachon marbles for the eyes. I bought an inexpensive bag full of them (the 2cm ones) and they ranged from reptilian to demonic. I landed on the cobalt blue ones with black pupil slits that sat somewhere between all-seeing and ominous without being too evil in their intent. The blue has a connection to the deep Sea where Oceanus lives and while I wanted the eyes to be piercing, I did not want them to scare away my little granddaughters (less and less little every day, I fear). I believe the blue eyes have found that balance, and it would be hard to say that monkeys have blue eyes, right?
But Oceanus, while looking less Simian, must still look like a monkey to people who are more familiar with monkeys and less familiar with mythology and Western Civilization on display in the churches of Rome. That is one monkey I can enjoy and live with rather than become annoyed or offended by it (my visual artistic skin is pretty thick compared to my literary skin).
It is said that idioms are for idiots, but I like idioms and exploring their derivation. Having a monkey on one’s back is one that’s been around for more than a century. It creates a visual in the mind’s eye that is very understandable to the most casual of listeners. You literally cannot hear of a monkey on one’s back without getting a firm understanding of how that might look and feel. It evokes a certain emotion and a strong preference to be without a monkey on one’s back, even if it is mildly humorous in the moment (assuming that moment is not fear-wracked by the presence of a wild animal so close to your jugular vein). The idiom gets traced back to Sinbad the Sailor, a fictional wanderer form Baghdad who appeared in Middle Eastern lore in the Seventeenth Century. Sinbad suffers a large monkey jumping on his back and struggles to get out from under. In Nineteenth Century England the monkey was meant to reference a mortgage, which became the homeowner’s burden. And then in the Twentieth Century it came to relate to drug addiction. So, here we are today in Southern California and it has morphed again and now refers in this household as my need to occupy myself on my back hillside by taking on projects of whatever kind I can, even if the Simian nature in them sneaks through.