By Lida Prypchan
Two blocks from the house is a zoo. Every Sunday, my brothers, cousins, parents, and other visiting family members and I go to the zoo. After all, there’s nothing else to do apart from looking at each other’s faces and we prefer to go and see the faces of the animals. All human beings – I mean the faces of human beings – usually have a very strong likeness to the faces of animals, but this is beside the point, let’s go to the zoo. It was Sunday and we decided to go and see the animals. Near us was a child who, when he saw a horse, told his mother, “Look Mommy, it looks like Dad.” And true enough, when his father arrived, we could see that he had a horse face. We laughed and praised the mental acuity of the child among ourselves; we agreed that he was an expert in physiognomies. We were even more amazed when arriving at the monkey cage, the boy pulled at his mother’s skirt and pointed to our neighbor and said, “Just like the man.” The mother, embarrassed, gave him a look, grabbed him by the hand, and took him away to rebuke him. “Poor kid,” I thought. “He has the great defect of sincerity that brings many problems to the person who embodies it.” We stopped for a long time at the monkey cage and I wanted to leave. It was so much like our neighbor that everyone was uncomfortable because, inevitably, one saw the monkey and instinctively turned to look at the neighbor. He had to have noticed, but the monkey was special. His behavior was not that of a monkey, it was that of a thoughtful man with high ideals. In this sense, he did not seem like our neighbor, who usually behaved in an imitative and irrational manner. We looked at the monkey for nearly two hours, and we were so interested that we asked to speak to the owner of the zoo so he could give us more details about the animal.
In the conversation we had with the owner of the place, we were able to obtain beautiful and interesting information about the animal. The monkey was Chinese in origin, was the father of numerous offspring, and was happily married. He was from a higher world, which might be explained because he was a son of the head of a vast tribe. In other words, his father was a revolutionary and this was inherited by his son. When his father died, he was charged with leading the tribe and he did this well. He was known for his idealism, his tendency to live beyond reality, seeking a better world, implementing continuous material and spiritual improvements for his tribe. He became a dictator, but a warm and patronizing, sympathetic, and very human dictator. He forgave the mistakes of his subjects and continually tried to integrate them into his program for perfection. One night he decided to write down what he saw as his mission in life, and here is what he wrote that night, “Before building society, you have to start building yourself. The imperfections we see in society are our own imperfections. One cannot hope to provide services for others to be happier without having reached one’s own state of bliss. One should not project their ideas downwards, they must be projected upwards in order to connect them to the cosmic receptacle. One will then experience a state of enlightenment and mercy and will see that the specific problems of society are due to deficiencies within individuals. When this is understood, one will not try to solve a recurring problem, one that is generated by the same individual defect that made it possible the first time, but one will instead help individuals to fill these internal gaps, but will do so impersonally. “
As can be seen, Mr. Monkey was a great revolutionary. He tried to change the defects of his contemporaries and one day, when least expected, he was arrested and locked up in a cage in some zoo, in some city, in some country. And there, seeing that specimen, I felt shame when looking into his eyes because his eyes were deep and sad and seemed to ask, “Why did they lock me up if I was useful, I transformed things, my intentions were pure and noble, and I wanted the best for my tribe?” But that is precisely why they locked him up; because society does not like revolutionaries; it refuses to see the truth, to change and to transform.
