"Honoured members of the
Academy!
You have done the honour of inviting me to give your Academy an
account of the life I formerly led as an ape.
I regret that I cannot comply with
your request to the extent you desire. It is now nearly five years
since I was an ape, a short space of time, perhaps, according to the
calendar, but an infinitely long time to gallop through at full speed,
as I have done, more or less accompanied by excellent mentors, good
advice, applause, and orchestral music, and yet, essentially alone,
since all my escorters, to keep the image, kept well off the course. I
could never have achieved what I have done had I been stubbornly set
on clinging to my origins, to the remembrances of my youth. In fact,
to give up being stubborn was the supreme commandment I laid upon
myself; free ape as I was, I submitted myself to that yoke. In
revenge, however, my memory of the past has closed the door against me
more and more. I could have returned at first, had human beings
allowed it, through an archway as wide as the span of heaven over the
earth, but as I spurred myself on in my forced career, the opening
narrowed and shrank behind me; I felt more comfortable in the world of
men and fitted it better; the strong wind that blew after me out of my
past began to slacken; today it is only a gentle puff of air that
plays around my heels; and the opening in the distance, through which
it comes and through which I once came myself, has grown so small
that, even if my strength and my will power sufficed to get me back to
it, I should have to scrape the very skin from my body to crawl
through. To put it plainly: your life as apes, gentlemen, insofar as
something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be farther removed from
you than mine is from me. Yet everyone on earth feels a tickling at
the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike."
".... And so I learned things,
gentlemen. Ah, one learns when one has to; one learns when one needs a
way out; one learns at all costs. One stands over oneself with a whip;
one flays oneself at the slightest opposition. My ape nature fled out
of me, head over heels and away, so that my first teacher was almost
himself turned into an ape by it, had soon to give up teaching and was
taken away to a mental hospital. Fortunately he was soon let out
again.
But I used up many teachers, indeed,
several teachers at once. As I became more confident of my abilities,
as the public took an interest in my progress and my future began to
look bright, I engaged teachers for myself, established them in five
communicating rooms, and took lessons from them all at once by dint of
leaping from one room to another.
That progress of mine! How the rays
of knowledge penetrated from all sides into my awakening brain! I do
not deny it: I found it exhilarating. But I must also confess: I did
not overestimate it, not even then, much less now. With an effort
which up till now has never been repeated I managed to reach the
cultural level of an average European. In itself that might be nothing
to speak of, but it is something insofar as it has helped me out of my
cage and opened a special way out for me, the way of humanity. There
is an excellent idiom: to fight oneÕs way through the thick of
things; that is what I have done, I have fought through the thick of
things. There was nothing else for me to do, provided always that
freedom was not to be my choice.
As I look back over my development
and survey what I have achieved so far, I do not complain, but I am
not complacent either. With my hands in my trouser pockets, my bottle
of wine on the table, I half lie and half sit in my rocking chair and
gaze out of the window: if a visitor arrives, I receive him with
propriety. My manager sits in the anteroom; when I ring, he comes and
listens to what I have to say. Nearly every evening I give a
performance, and I have a success that could hardly be increased. When
I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions,
from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained
little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. By day I
cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered
half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I
cannot bear it. On the whole, at any rate, I have achieved what I set
out to achieve. But do not tell me that it was not worth the trouble.
In any case, I am not appealing for any man's verdict. I am only
imparting knowledge, I am only making a report. To you also, honoured
Members of the Academy, I have only made a report."
Theatre Arts: History
:
Theatre: History:
Opera: Kafka's Chimp - 1996 Production