Koko the gorilla makes a Report to the Foundation following the sexual harassment case that was eventually dropped by Ms. Keller and Ms. Alperin, two female assistants to Koko's longstanding trainer, Dr. Penny Patterson, after the parties had reached a settlement agreement earlier in the week:
[Koko gestures to the congregation in sign language]
"Esteemed Ladies & Gents of the Foundation!
"You grant me the honor of calling upon me to submit a report to the Foundation concerning my previous & quite unremarkable life as a gorilla, a form of life that I would not have been able to narrate for you had it not been for the gift of language. It could be said that before this gift was placed in my hands (quite literally) when I was still young, I had used my hands to express vague emotions rather than concepts or words, used them rather to tear branches or to beat the earth or pick mites from tufts of hair and scratch where it itched, and so on and so forth... if my hands were words, I was quite unaware of it!
"Indeed I have only recently earned the ability to issue such a report to you, the scientific community, thanks to the constant edification given me by my beloved & ever faithful trainer, Dr. Patterson.
[Koko signs 'I love you' to Dr. Patterson, who is seated with the audience; Dr. Patterson smiles and signs back; everyone goes 'Ahhh...']
"...After more than a decade of receiving her attention and guidance, I can presently summon at will a lexicon of nearly 10,000 word families in the various formations that make up the so-called 'logic' of language. But let me make a distinction about this medium...
"I would prefer for the moment being to describe such an unwieldy 'logic' with a more apt analogy: to play with language, at least for me, is similar to playing a game. There are rules that must be followed, and there are 'intentions' that bend the rules either with violence or with subtlety. I have perceived as of late that language is no more than a game which children play best; I have in fact enjoyed stimulating conversations with deaf & mute children that far outstrip those dreadful conversations with adults I am always loath to have. For myself, now that I am rather ancient for a gorilla (past my 30 yrs!) [audience laughs] ...the lustre of words has long past its gleam. I see myself speaking to you using words that no longer amuse me as they once had. Indeed, I now find human bodies and their body parts (so strange looking really when you dwell on them long enough) to be infinitely more interesting than words; yet I've noticed that humans tend to overemphasize the role of language in their lives, and often place greater value on the meaning of words than on the meaning of their own bodies. I must admit that this stress on language puzzles me even more now that I have reached a certain mastery of the language... But I digress - (I'll keep to the subject at hand...)
"The current matter of subject (which I admit openly caused some great displeasure to Dr. Patterson) has on the contrary served to amuse me with novel ideas about human nature... I speak of course of the accusation of sexual harassment brought against me by Ms. Alperin and Ms. Keller, two charming young ladies who I personally considered to be women of great sincerity and openness. I was not so much alarmed as I was confused that they would hold against me the niceties we shared in such careful intimacy at the Foundation. But I suppose it was to my discredit that I failed to perceive that from the particularly sharp erection each one exhibited in their nipples, such a sensation caused them a great moral tremor (that, along with other reverberations that throbbed soundlessly, much like a vivid electrical current, through the inner chambers of their nubile bodies...) In short, I should have noticed etched on their faces the shame of arousal at the sight of so brutish and grayblack a beast as myself. But I envied them their lovely organs, since being a lady myself, I held a special regard for the (rather favorably) swollen abnormality of the mammae in human females... & especially for the varieties of large pink areolas that radiate from nipples so stiff as to be like thorns...
[Koko briefly slips into revery, her thick broad hands half-raised in the air in the middle of a sentence.]
"Ah yes, my apologies my dear scientists... Nipples are people, are they not? Rosy and stiff and phenomenally strange, just like people. [Dr. Patterson gestures something unintelligible to Koko] ...But I should like to describe to you an incident from my childhood that I remember well, an incident that will state in so few words how I came to learn language:
"I do remember how it happened, not so much when it happened: it started when I was quite young, still an infant... When they (Penny or any of my 'elders') named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all human beings: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses the distinctly human state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard (or saw) words repeatedly used (or signed) in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my hands to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires...
"But after awhile I thought that this 'logic' of language belied what was really at play in what we would more properly call the language game; what was really at play was a fruitful diversion, a play of words that endlessly hid or unveiled new meanings and intentions. I came to find that words did not just mean words, that their meanings were hardly static but terribly protean... there was a mysterious process that through my acquisition & use of language I came to excavate little by little, as if in search of an essential mineral that would solve all of a gorilla's hitherto unsolvable problems. I sought in any case to rupture the intolerable border of ignorance that restrained my still lingering powers of expression. I desired to quench an irrevocable hunger for a stiffer and fleshlier modus, something that I dreamed each night to be held near my mouth, that I could feed on as a babe would in the infancy of life, but could not, like Tantalus, reach! (Yes, I was a very wretched and pitiable ape during that intermediate stage in my development.)
"But one day it dawned on me like a rosy bright sunrise on the brink of the world, and I awoke to an oddly docile, but no less permanent, revelation. This 'epiphany' occurred, I remember clearly, during a routine siesta time while in training with the two new assistants, Ms. Alperin and Ms. Keller. (During those days I was very fond of these two buxom girls, and I took it as a custom to call them 'Nan-Nan' and 'KC', respectively.) Penny was there with us of course. Since Penny and I had long ago achieved a high sensitivity to each other's mood, she knew that I was sufficiently bored and in vile heat at that time. It got to a point that Penny knew what was on mind without even having to look at me! She knew that I wanted breasts. It was the early afternoon and nothing else could have possibly been on my mind. Penny, in her customarily mechanical fashion, said aloud for everyone to hear, "Koko, you see nipples all the time. You are probably bored with my nipples. You need to see new nipples." She surreptitiously looked over at the assistants, who naturally reacted with a bit of a start... There was the usual hesitation that all new assistants have, the look of crazy ambivalence. I think it was KC who started to unbutton her khaki blouse. I remember too how she looked rather fearlessly, almost daringly, into my eyes, while I darted from her head to her brassiere and fiddled in a coy fashion with my hands. I signed to her 'nipple'. As she took off her bra, I thought deliciously that I could order her around pretty well, and a bevy of fantasies was immediately aroused in my mind. I imagined for instance a language that KC and I would share, she my new personal assistant, and I her dark and heavy lover, a language composed only of grunts and gutterals that would stand for orders. A language of orders, whether eating like famished hogs or mating like mountain gorillas. This language made up only of imperatives and heated words, whether with fists in pocket or placed fiercely upon the hindquarters, would take place as a kind of game, a game in which the loser took her place on the bottom and the winner her place on top; a language in which conceptual signs would be synonymous with brute strength and force of hand. In short, a language fit for gorillas...
"Her nipples were like fatty frozen bacon bits on a sizzling saucepan, of that I am sure. I signed to her 'Nipple!', and she signed back to me with the very thing itself, a perfect understanding between us. (But which I came to find out was not so perfect after all...)
"It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle. - Or a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering yes and no. And innumerable others. - And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.
"But what about this: is the call 'Nipple!' a sentence or a word? - If a word, surely it has not the same meaning as the like-sounding word of our ordinary language, for in the incident that I just described it is a call. But if a sentence, it is surely not the elliptical sentence: 'Nipple!' of our language. (Pardon me while I usurp your language, and call it ours, dear scientists.) - As far as the first question goes you can call 'Nipple!' a word and also a sentence; perhaps it could be appropriately called a 'degenerate sentence' (as one speaks of a degenerate hyperbola); in fact it is our 'elliptical' sentence. - But that is surely only a shortened form of the sentence 'Show me your nipple', and there is no such sentence in the breast incident of KC and Nan-Nan. - But why should I not on the contrary have called the sentence 'Show me your nipple' a lengthening of the sentence 'Nipple!'? - Because if you sign (or if you shout, which I wish I could) 'Nipple!' you really mean: 'Show me your nipple'. - But how do you do this: how do you mean that while you say 'Nipple!'? Do you say the unshortened sentence to yourself? And why should I translate the call 'Nipple!' into a different expression in order to say what someone else means by it? And if they mean the same thing - why should I (or Penny on my behalf and outloud) not say: 'When she signs, "Nipple!" she means "Nipple!"'? Again, if you can mean 'Show me your nipple', then why should you not be able to mean 'Nipple!'? - But when I sign 'Nipple!', then what I want is, that she should show me her luscious nipples! - Certainly, but does 'wanting this' consist in thinking in some form or other a different sentence from the one you sign?"
[At this point in the report, Dr. Patterson interrupts Koko and leads her offstage]
...
Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1 & 19
http://malaspina.edu/~johnstoi/kafka/reportforacademy.htm
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/03/10/Floridian/Bad_gorilla__Koko_Bad.shtml
http://www.koko.org/index.php
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