Navigating the World as an Orangutan in a Room Full of Bonnet Macaques
By Greg Evans
JOHNSON CITY, TN - Sitting in a Starbucks watching the world go by. I saw my favorite bartender earlier. She has long blond hair, sometimes straight, today it was wavy or crimped or coiled. She is tall and symmetrical with an enigmatic smile and sparkling eyes. Literally, I think she puts glitter or sparkles around them. Or maybe it is just the evocative way the light dances upon her face. Or maybe it is all in my head, the fleeting lure of appetency in an otherwise prosaic microenvironment.
Had she been around in Florence or Milan in the late 1400’s to the 1520’s, at the height of the renaissance, she would have been unanimously and faithfully selected for portraits painted on poplar planks that today would have been worth hundreds of millions of euros and dollars, schillings, or a handful of bitcoin. The angelic face from Derry and Tyron, hanging bewitchingly in the Louvre, the MET, and the Gallerie Degli Uffizi. Mona Pæga. No doubt by the ripe page of 16, she would have been betrothed to the Duke of Genoa or the Gonfaloniere of Justice of Firenze for a nice fat sumptuous dowry. Surly Borgia, Medici, and Sforzas would have pulled daggers and squabbled for a lock of her golden ambrosial coils.
She always wears a winsome, flirty expression, and has a perpetual sunset blush. It’s rather alluring after a long day of work, digging up stories and doing research. Today, she appeared out of my peripheral like a twinkling Jophiel. It was unexpected. She wasn’t yet dressed in her black Hooter shorts. She smiles because it’s her personality. She knows who I am, the glint of recognition is there, like seeing the milkman.
She’s affable with all the patrons, equally as far as I can tell. I like to watch her interact with customers. I couldn’t be like that. Even for a pourboire. It is a paradox of theater mixed with sincerity. She embraces the moment. For her it is not a tedious, wrist-slitting bore as sitting through a Cost Accounting class. It is in such moments I feel like an orangutan in a room of bonnet macaques. It quickly becomes overwhelming. But never with her. She can put you at ease as a friend you have known for many years but only see sporadically. I am never there for long, and then gone, but not gently into that good night. For those of you who don’t read, that was a Dylan Thomas hollo.
I say she is my favorite bartendress, but that is theoretically speaking since I don’t sit in bars and drink in public. Not anymore anyway. These days I drink at home with a cigar, high on my deck looking off into the distance at the world yonder. I live in a fortified compound high in the mountains (when I’m not at some ocean, or upstate New York). I see her only on occasion and her portrait-appearance is transcendentally fixed in the cosmos. Our relationship is wistfully platonic, the way it has to be. I sometimes catch a glimpse of her in the coruscating kaleidoscope of greens and blues of mountain streams, in the blush moon reflecting in my glass of Romanée-Conti, or in the winds blowing through a field of cotton-white trilliums or Nadeshiko-pink lady slippers out in what is left of the countryside of East Tennessee. Ephemeral snapshots, like reveries; the daydreams are there and then they are gone. Fugacious, like our encounters.
I am drawn-in and moved by many aesthetic aspects of the world. The music, art, literature and poetry, gardens and galaxies, and those many ravishing women that appear on every street corner and in every coffee house and in each delicious eatery - those resplendent ladies with scintillating eyes and enigmatic smiles. I drip like spermaceti (whale blubber) candle wax in these moments of woolgathering.
“She walks in beauty, like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies.” Lord Byron wrote those enduring lines, no doubt toiling for the endearment of a fair, tawny-haired demoiselle after his third porter and an unassuming wink of her twinkling eye. I uncomfortably admit, I have wrestled such hyperbolic sentiments.
I have studied closely how my peers interacted as they mingled. So easily they’d engage, like flowing water, picking up on cues, laughing in turn, building upon the fabric of the conversation. I just don’t understand how it works. The science of social interactions through gestures, costumes, and discourse as a ballroom dance in perpetuity - everyone at once, stepping and sliding, touching and gliding, like a movie. It seems exhausting.
Those restaurant scenes bend like waves of light when needed, as traveling from one transparent medium to another, from air to water, and water to glass. Fragile like glass are the nuances of the micro-dynamics of community synergy, even within a controlled environment, such as a Hooters restaurant bar. Maybe I have been overthinking this?
I wish it was different. I wish I could ebb and flow with the tides, like a moon jellyfish, a passive drifter through the intertidal zone of the restaurant bar milieu, indifferent as I navigate the complex sociocultural interplay.
A little perspective is in order here. Family and friends will observe me speaking fondly or ogling a beautiful woman and mistakenly surmise that I am lonely or pining for human connection. This is not true. I simply embrace the beauty of a woman as I do a song, sunset, passage of literature, or painting. This is a hard concept to drive home as it is wholly antithetical. I have been married once, dated a variety of women here and there but relationships are fundamentally different than having a muse. And my personality is not conducive to them. A muse is manageable, stimulating, inspirational minus the mutual expectation of commitment and intimacy.
A muse can fill you with nostalgia, of what you imagine your time together was like, had it happened. A feeling like August, at the edge of autumn. A bathos you feel from conversant moments in the past, engaged from a distance. Moments that feel almost awkward in the thick air of June. Faulkner said it best, “Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.”
My close and in-depth observation of a beautiful and pleasing woman may come across by today’s cheap modern standards as “creepy,” but I can’t help you with that. When a woman confronts me with disgust at my invasive propensity for staring, I respond in kind, “Just be thankful you are not ugly, and I should be staring repulsively at you for that.”
My exotic, golden-haired barmaid has never accused me of visually fondling her as I have never been so bold. I have imagined her painted on a canvas in gouche, though, 1,000 times.
Such women fill the pages of mythology and history textbooks (Pocahontas, Helen of Troy, Nefertiti, Sacagawea, Xi Shi, and Amina of Zaria) volumes of poetry, and those ladies who influenced the characters in the literary cannon (Anna Karenina, Scarlett O’Hara, Libe, Arwen and Eowyn). We see them everyday.
I have crossed paths with them my whole life. Caroline, Alma, and Pamela in Long Beach. Eglentine, Danielle, Kelly, Caitlin, Victoria, and Sonya in New York; Melanie in Albany; Naomi, the “Ederra” Basque, the Cherokee Princess waitress at the Olive Garden in Johnson City; and so many others, on every corner in Vienna, in Rio de Janeiro, the Outer Banks, Madrid, Charlotte, Miami, Mazatlan, Nassau, Salzburg, London, Quito, and Tangier.
I see them all, tucked in the bosom of dense novels and coming to life for posterity on fading wall murals, on thick canvas, and upon near-forgotten cavern walls, flickering with ancient torches or bathed in silver moonlight.
It is said the phenomenon of attraction is a complex equation consisting of biological, psychological, and various social factors. Let’s throw in a bit of incomprehensible algebra, quantum field theory, a bit of inscrutable combinatory calculus and astrology.
Sure. We could bore ourselves and look scientifically at it like the initial spark, the prospect of fertility, ability for humor and being genuinely compassionate, and the activity of neurotransmitters and shared values but where is the justification in an apathetic world where the divorce rate hovers around 70%? All that science is just a more refined way of saying, “it is all about the sanguinity of potential coitus,” sub-consciously or otherwise. At least at first. Women may scoff at that, but I can’t help you there. Get past it.
The intimacy, if it happens (which it does all the time, evident by the overpopulation on the planet. Lots of sex being had) is more unstable than the entropic connection with a muse; a foundation built from the connection between disorder and unpredictability, which is part of the evolution of creative inspiration (as mentioned earlier). In a nutshell, bumping uglies will always muddy the water and revise the dynamics of any situation, unless of course you are a sociopath.
I left the restaurant, got into my car, pulled out of the parking lot, passed over the megalithic speed bumps, and ventured out onto Roan Street (which now resembles Interstate 480 at the Lee Road exit in Cleveland, or Hoosick Street in Troy, New York, traffic like a square knot). Before long I would find myself here in Starbucks, down by the college, one of my alma maters, thinking intensely about how much I enjoy the scalding bitterness of a cup of coffee on a quiet, cloudy, yet humid afternoon in a sparsely-crowded coffee house, not overrun by gauzy chatter.
I find I am almost even enjoying the pop music in the background, but that just may be because of my elevated mood. Maybe from the encounter with my Irish rose, or the caffeine like electricity that hath entered my bloodstream.
I watch the traffic from the window, heavy for a Saturday, people tailgating each other, swerving in and out and I am thankful I’m not amongst those animals, at least for the time being.
In another life, in a different dimension, would my sweet bartendress muse be considered my soulmate? How exactly does that work, the soulmate? That word gives me anxiety. Would she have to think I was hers too for it to foster growth? Until everything becomes normal and the bickering starts? And that penetrating silence at meals? And the lurid affairs? Before it went sour would it be considered a true connection? My elevated mood has begun to slide with such formal thinking. What would Chaucer’s heavy, gapped-tooth shrew Allison have to say about that? That I am nothing but a warthog? I’m sure her five husbands would agree with me.
In my opinion, in my greatest moment of honesty, despite being an ancient romantic, i don’t think humans actually have a soulmate. We are far too psychotic and flippant for that kind of long-term fluff. We aren’t anywhere near, for example, doves in terms of emotional evolution. I bet even they get fed up with their nest mates. However, over 50 million years, their species, learned how to co-habitat instead of putting hemlock into each other’s bowl of bird seed porridge after a small squabble.
It’s all too much for me. The bonnet macaques can keep their gregarious communal world. I’ll just stick with being an orangutan content with my muses, solitude, and strong coffee by the window.
The point of this piece is that having a muse is complex but not as complicated as it seems, like a physical relationship. Merely having a muse is complicated in the sense that there are intricacies that are often difficult to initially pinpoint but eventually you see patterns emerge, from a distance. Complexity, on the other hand, involves layers of emergent behaviors, up close and personal, that require significant investigation which inevitably leads you to a blank wall of confusion- i.e. the eventual emotional distancing, the slow burning separation, fighting, distrust, the inevitable breakup or divorce, yadda yadda.
Does that make sense? Barely right? Though complicated, it is all somewhat predictable. The complexity, on the other hand, is non-linear leading to unpredictability. You need a strong stomach for that kind of soup.
So, that is what I am dealing with once the caffeine from my “tall,” cup of black coffee hits.