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When I got my first office job, at a
medium-sized publishing house in Toronto, I finally learned the
meaning of the word Stress. I capitalize it to denote the real,
grown-up-people kind of stress that comes with riding Go trains and
worrying over job performance and office politics when your job is
linked to keeping a roof over more than one person's head and food in
more than one stomach. Academia had been a breeze. True, many people
consider university to be stressful, but my naturally argumentative
nature had dovetailed perfectly into an English lit degree filled
with passionately argued papers. I was not prepared for the unique
panic brought on by sitting in a windowless cubicle with carpeted
mini-walls for eight hours a day, hoping to GOD that the press
release I just emailed to my boss was free of typos.
So, rather than railing Hulk-like
through the halls, I devised a coping mechanism. I taped pictures of
baby monkeys to one wall of my cubicle. It was the least conspicuous
of the three, only visible from within the tiny dungeon. And it
worked. I felt better being able to sneak a glimpse at a wheelbarrow
full of infant orangutans, a tiny spider monkey clutching a lily, and
the mother of all baby monkeys---a newborn pygmy marmoset clinging
with all four limbs to a human pinky. I could have pasted up picture
of my family, my baby nephew or toddler nieces. Surely they would
have served the same cute-reprieve-slash-instant-smile purpose. But
there was something ultimately comforting about those furry, almost
(but not quite) human faces. It wouldn't have done much good to post
pics of real people whose birthdays I might forget or whose tiny,
fragile feelings I might inadvertently hurt. Animals give without
knowing how to ask for anything in return. We can take from them what
emotional fulfilment we need, and they carry on, unaware of what
they've given.
Love in Infant Monkeys
takes that ability to write ourselves on to our non-human companions
as its central focus. Her people use their relationships with animals
to make digest their human relationships, their own failures, their
guilt, their neuroses. All the while, their animals blink blankly
back at them, beautiful and brilliant and dumb. It should be noted
that most of the human characters in this book are celebrities, or
historical figures, and there are many familiar pairings here: Tesla
and his pigeon wife; George Adamson and his lions; Edison and poor,
doomed Topsy; Harry Harlow and the eponymous infant monkeys of his
now-famous studies on mother love. Millet is playful with these
characters and our existing understanding of them, but that wasn't
really what made me devour her stories. It was the honesty of her
perspective on human-animal relationships that carried me through.
Nowhere
is Millet's understanding of the complexity of these relationships
more apparent than in the title story. Click here for background on
Harry Harlow, should you need it. Then consider that Millet places
Harlow in the middle of an experiment that involves removing infant
monkeys from their mothers (natch) and essentially torturing by
placing them in completely enclosed deprivation pits (the “pits of
despair,” as he calls them) where they can see no one and nothing
other than the walls of the pit---all while he drinks enough to dull
the knowledge that his wife, mother of two of his own children, is
dying of cancer. In the briefest descriptions and observations of a
tiny monkey named Minestrone, Millet paints Harlow's entire character
arc in six sentences. There's scientific detachment paired with the
unavoidable urge to console mingled with a strange sense of
commiseration, even as one party sits helpless in a pit. It's a
powerful cocktail of emotions and Millet hits the mark dead on.
Just
read it. It will make you want to hug your dog. Or kill an elephant.
One of the two. And don't let the appearance of Madonna in the first
story throw you: these waters run deep and Madge is just the
beginning.