![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
first -- this is a memo to me: I sent The Conduit to Tor today, standard submission packet --first 3 chapters and synopsis.
It's raining hard and cold out there, which I would gloat in, but I keep seeing people who live out there and then I worry about them, and somehow this gets mixed up in the news of the tsunami. The thing I was going to say -- about gloating in the rain: the way the slap of the wind drives the breath out of my lungs, the way the rain comes right into my eyes because the wind is blowing it nearly horizontal and I can't see -- it's thrilling, because I only have to be out in it for a little while.
And finally, another thing for Anna: the gorilla.
We went to the zoo on the day after Christmas. Emma wasn't really supposed to walk all that much because she has a sore ligament in her knee, but she said she was doing well, and so we went all around it. I'm not really the happiest camper in a zoo. I keep apologizing to the animals. It's not the zoo itself, so much, nowadays -- they really do work hard at making nice places for the animals, and they are actually kind of working on making themselves obsolete by saving habitat and stuff: but there's only so much you can do with the situation, and without the siamangs' manic displays the zoo was kind of subdued in general. So many of the animals are from warm places, and while San Francisco isn't really cold by global standards, it was pretty well not warm.
The zoo has an exhibit called Gorilla World. It's a grassy island with a traditional zoo moat on part of it and a glassed-ion place for people and gorillas to commune closely and other places where they can get pretty close. The island has a complicated set of structures for playing and nesting, and objects that look pretty random, and four female gorillas (they had a silverback male, but he died, I think of age: there's another coming to join them, but he's in preventive quarantine right now). They are large and glossy and distinctive and beautiful in that healthy gorilla way. The zoo says the gorilla females are "lost" without their silverback, and I can believe that they miss him mightily -- they were all kind of slow-moving, thoughtful, sad looking.
One gorilla particularly caught my eye. Literally. She sat down in one of the places where she could get pretty close and she stared at me, not in a challenging way, but with a level, calculating gaze. After a while she looked at someone else the same way. Then she walked to another place and did it again.
By this time we'd moved over to the place where the moat was and she came up around to that side and sat down under an artificial rock overhang with her chin on her fist and studied us again, one at a time, unblinking, contemplative -- if I were anthropomorphizing, even if I hadn't known she'd lost a dear friend recently, I would have thought she had that look that the bereaved have, that the-world-has-ended clarity. After she was done with us, we moved away to another place where I took the two pictures that are in the gallery "Zura at the zoo," within "every picture tells," in my scrapbook gallery that you can get to from my userinfo. After she had sat there for a while she moved over to the picture window and gazed at the people in there, who included a lot of children. She pulled up a big rubber ball and sat on it, and patted the glass.
That's all. That's the gorilla.
I looked at the portraits they have there with their names, and figured out that she was Zura, and I wrote the name on my hand.
Here's where the San Francisco zoo talks about their gorillas:
news about the gorillas
basic facts about gorillas
the story about Gorilla World
It's raining hard and cold out there, which I would gloat in, but I keep seeing people who live out there and then I worry about them, and somehow this gets mixed up in the news of the tsunami. The thing I was going to say -- about gloating in the rain: the way the slap of the wind drives the breath out of my lungs, the way the rain comes right into my eyes because the wind is blowing it nearly horizontal and I can't see -- it's thrilling, because I only have to be out in it for a little while.
And finally, another thing for Anna: the gorilla.
We went to the zoo on the day after Christmas. Emma wasn't really supposed to walk all that much because she has a sore ligament in her knee, but she said she was doing well, and so we went all around it. I'm not really the happiest camper in a zoo. I keep apologizing to the animals. It's not the zoo itself, so much, nowadays -- they really do work hard at making nice places for the animals, and they are actually kind of working on making themselves obsolete by saving habitat and stuff: but there's only so much you can do with the situation, and without the siamangs' manic displays the zoo was kind of subdued in general. So many of the animals are from warm places, and while San Francisco isn't really cold by global standards, it was pretty well not warm.
The zoo has an exhibit called Gorilla World. It's a grassy island with a traditional zoo moat on part of it and a glassed-ion place for people and gorillas to commune closely and other places where they can get pretty close. The island has a complicated set of structures for playing and nesting, and objects that look pretty random, and four female gorillas (they had a silverback male, but he died, I think of age: there's another coming to join them, but he's in preventive quarantine right now). They are large and glossy and distinctive and beautiful in that healthy gorilla way. The zoo says the gorilla females are "lost" without their silverback, and I can believe that they miss him mightily -- they were all kind of slow-moving, thoughtful, sad looking.
One gorilla particularly caught my eye. Literally. She sat down in one of the places where she could get pretty close and she stared at me, not in a challenging way, but with a level, calculating gaze. After a while she looked at someone else the same way. Then she walked to another place and did it again.
By this time we'd moved over to the place where the moat was and she came up around to that side and sat down under an artificial rock overhang with her chin on her fist and studied us again, one at a time, unblinking, contemplative -- if I were anthropomorphizing, even if I hadn't known she'd lost a dear friend recently, I would have thought she had that look that the bereaved have, that the-world-has-ended clarity. After she was done with us, we moved away to another place where I took the two pictures that are in the gallery "Zura at the zoo," within "every picture tells," in my scrapbook gallery that you can get to from my userinfo. After she had sat there for a while she moved over to the picture window and gazed at the people in there, who included a lot of children. She pulled up a big rubber ball and sat on it, and patted the glass.
That's all. That's the gorilla.
I looked at the portraits they have there with their names, and figured out that she was Zura, and I wrote the name on my hand.
Here's where the San Francisco zoo talks about their gorillas:
news about the gorillas
basic facts about gorillas
the story about Gorilla World
Tags:
no subject
no subject
no subject
And thanks for the gorilla story. I love apes, in general: sometimes I wish I had the gumption to go out and see them in their own environment instead of just in zoos.
Gorillas do that. In my experience they have the most human eyes of all the apes -- though chimps have more human expressions in general, more varied for a start.
In Dublin zoo, they have 3 rather old (40+) female chimps; they have lived together in the zoo for 40 years. For a series of complicated reasons having to do with reintroducing a baby chimp who has been handreared, one of the three old ladies was moved to the new, larger chimp area ahead of the other two (who will join her once the baby is settled, but clearly cannot know that). Betty and Judy spent several days looking for Wendy on their small island. Having the baby to discover and make friends with helped them -- but I want to be there when they are rejoined in a couple of months' time.
I think with the great apes it's really really hard to know where you start anthropomorphizing, and where you may be doing the reverse as a reaction -- "disbelieving" interpretations that are in fact correct for fear of anthropomorphizing.
And I understand your feelings about zoos. I see both the good and the bad sides. I enjoy working there as a volunteer, and I am sad for some of the animals, too. One thing that I have gained with age is that I am much less shy of embracing contradiction.