RuKsaK

When I lived in evil Moscow I used to teach a crowd of physicists at the Nuclear Power Institute in the south-west of that dog of a capital. I lived in the north-east and it took me over an hour on the Moskovski Metro to get there.

The Moscovski Metro is a Stalinist trophy. It’s inanely cheap. Millions use it daily. It’s super efficient, it’s solid-clean and has that Eastern European gloom you can measure in kilos. A bulky light-timer tells you how long you’ve been waiting – not how long it’ll be until the next train. It’s never more than four minutes, unless Chechnyan militants have ripped into a score of family’s entireties by exploding a train or station. The circle line stations are extravagant, grim temples to the Communist Gods. Paeans to electrical progress.

I hated using it. Have always loved travelling in the back of cars, everything else from camels to balloons can crawl up my wide hole.

In the rush hour, you’d be pummelled into your wagon, smacked to wherever the absolute point of no-more-movement was. People in a wobbling clamp. In winter, when it’s minus-twenty-five outside, you’re dressed in eight layers of synthetics, inside the train you sweat into the bottom three layers in minutes. For the whole journey, the whole carriage seethes.

In seething, I, like most of us, think of hate and hating people.

I’d think of Darwin and his particular –ism. First, thinking:
‘We’re all just monkeys. How can anyone believe otherwise?’
I’d think of Nietzsche:
‘Jesus – with Doestoyevsky’s help that bastard really convinced this commuting mob-lot that God is dead.’
Then I’d think of the monkey, the gorgeous Nihilist monkeys we all once were, who knew more than Nietzsche, without knowing they knew it. Buddhist pre-god freaks.

I imagined hauling one of Darwin’s men-monkeys into my modern day. Allowing him a few hours of expression – language to ask me questions.

At the train wailing into the station:
‘Jesus – what the fuck is this metal box coming at us?’
‘We have to get in it.’
‘I’m not getting in that mad tin can. Why do you get in that?’
‘It’s takes me to work.’
‘To where? I’m not going there. Not in that screaming junk.’
‘I do this everyday Monkey. I have to. To get money.’
‘What’s that for?’
‘It’s so I can buy food, buy booze, have a life.’
‘Buy food? Shit, I pull bananas off the tree I live in.’
‘It’s not all bananas when you become a man in a million years you know. Life is complicated.’
‘It’ll have to be more than complicated to get me in that fucker!’
‘Look –without money I have no fun, can’t meet people, no women.’
‘What? I just waggle over to another monkey. Pick some nits and give her a quick shag. If not, I just have a wank and make daft noises. I never, ever climb in a hot, tin box, sweat my arse off, and hate other monkeys because of it.’
‘Ach! You don’t get it. You’re just a frigging gibbon. This is life!’
‘You can fucking stuff it man-dude. I’m staying a monkey. Fucking metal dungeons on wheels – making you angry, taking your time, for bananas and sex? Fuck evolution! Fuck this Darwin guy! Load of bollocks!’
‘Fair enough. Word of advice – stay off the wanking, because I didn’t tell you about Freud.’

The futured monkey-man idea got me to work some days, as did more hate, a few sexual desires and the need for bananas in Moscow.

Anyone need a teacher in the jungle?

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Convincing the monkey