Listening to Koko
Hanly, Elizabeth
LISTENING TO KOKO A gorilla who speaks her mind Elizabeth Hanly his is the story of an embrace: the story of Koko the gorilla, or as she describes herself, "the fine animal gorilla," and Dr....
...ith his trademark clarity of vision, honesty, and intelligence, Ronald Rolheiser identifies different types of loneliness and discusses the dangers and opportunities they represent in our lives...
...Let alone that of gorillas...
...This is, after all, a gorilla that, when using a large plastic tube to slurp up a drink from a pan, describes herself as a "sad elephant me...
...he was free to interact with other staff members too...
...I think perhaps I could not recognize it...
...Nobody was sure whether to trust the work or not...
...LISTENING TO KOKO A gorilla who speaks her mind Elizabeth Hanly his is the story of an embrace: the story of Koko the gorilla, or as she describes herself, "the fine animal gorilla," and Dr...
...Even today, thirty years later, Koko is still trying to tell me things I don't always understand at first...
...I haven't had a single moment of regret," she says, but she does worry...
...self, "What is real, what not real...
...Patterson: "Who is God...
...Koko: "Another woman...
...Koko, as you may know, has been featured in National Geographic, on PBS, and on Mister Rogers...
...Yeah, like the Inquisition," she answers...
...Our conversation went like this," " she says...
...She had always known that she wanted to study animals...
...Everybody knows how hard it is to keep a little child concentrating on a task," Patterson says...
...Actually, she had a deadline to meet for the Koko newsletter, which serves not only to keep Koko's fans updated, but also to keep issues of great ape survival in the public eye...
...Zoo conditions being what they are, even under the best of circumstances, Koko was in trouble almost from the start...
...one of the staff asks her...
...Might it be framed not so much as man as unique spark of consciousness, but rather as nature as mixed bag—and what we as a species may have gained and lost...
...Ronald Rolheiser holds the key to helping loosen the suffocating grip of loneliness so that our deepmost desires flourish and find rest in God...
...Remember what that can feel like...
...People have goodness...
...One day Patterson was talking to another staff member within earshot of the gorilla...
...Do gorillas know things that people don't...
...Clearly, the great apes—either chimps or gorillas, ac-cording to what measures one focuses on—are humankind's closest relatives...
...Koko exists, and so do cannibalism, assassination, even political kid-napping among her relatives and ours...
...Then I'm usually stunned—how Koko has taken Ameslan, which is in some ways basically a telegraphic language, and molded it to her own expression...
...Patterson says, "If there's anything sacred in us, it's in them, too...
...Patterson can barely bring herself to talk about the loss...
...When Patterson pushed the question, the gorilla's response was painfully honest...
...I'd blow on a window in her living area and draw things—stars and angels—in the breath...
...Going to Los Angeles once a month will kill me," she was saying...
...This is not a character trait that gorillas often exercise," Patterson told me...
...Penny Patterson...
...Patterson is betting on it...
...I kept trying to get Koko to focus Elizabeth Hanly has written for Vogue, Elle, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among other journals...
...The drama of light and dark—it seems that humankind hasn't invented it...
...Patterson had been looking into experiments using human language with apes, studies that at the time were very new and highly suspect...
...At first, I couldn't sleep," she told me,to be explored in depth...
...Koko refers to ice cream as "my cold cup...
...Patter-son remembers an evening when one of her migraines hit hard...
...Koko: "Me...
...Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral (San Francisco, California) Koko has at least nine hundred words at her signing disposal...
...Very slowly he would open his eyes, and close them, almost hypnotizing me in the process...
...language used for self-musings—for reflection—opens further, perhaps even more tantalizing doors...
...Don't know," she said...
...But interspecies communication is her experience of Communion...
...She was with Ndume...
...Simplistic...
...Koko indicates another staff member, whirls about and starts to laugh...
...This lady is no simple roman-tic...
...Patterson worked with a second gorilla, Michael, who, it was hoped, would be Koko's mate...
...Getting out word of this—getting out word of the "humanCommonweal / 6 June 18, 2004 ity" of the apes—may help stop their slaughter...
...We'd do this over and over and over...
...One of those questions was about the meaning of life...
...For hours each day, every day, she would mold Koko's hands and model the signs...
...But then came a night"—Patterson is clowning now—"it was a wet and stormy night...
...Perhaps the question may be not so much what another species may be capable of, but rather what it has chosen, or what evolution has chosen for it...
...Meanwhile, Ndume's presence is very much felt...
...Patterson's problems are not of epiphanies but of time...
...Over a decade of work, Patterson came to believe that Michael was potentially even more articulate than Koko...
...Patterson once asked Koko...
...She has had her steadfast lover...
...Her creative transformations, her creative play with language—her creativity per se—may be more interesting...
...The gorilla can keep rhythm when asked...
...The psychologist is now downright delighted with her-self...
...RON COHN / THE GORILLA FOUNDATION/KOKO.ORG Commonweal 1 4 June 18, 2004 From the author of The Holy Longing Ronald Rolheiser offers a hopeful meditation on the many faces of loneliness...
...Mankind becomes more and less than a glorious and lonely experiment...
...Patterson has a recurrent dream: she and Koko are not just signing to each other, Patterson is hearing Koko's words...
...In fact, her foundation has come to focus more and more on Africa...
...Patterson remembers thinking, "I'm certainly not going to torture Koko with that...
...Almost as a reflex she spoke to him of what was happening as she lay down nearby...
...Death in the abstract had seemed to suggest peace to the gorilla...
...Maybe...
...I'm serious...
...one of the staff asks her...
...Patterson's foundation has recently helped establish an orphanage for them in Cameroon...
...Koko approached...
...Small glitches...
...People be polite...
...She may talk of gorillas sharing 98 percent of our DNA pool...
...And his face became one of excruciating pain...
...Her faculty adviser at Stanford, Karl Pribram, a leading theorist in neuropsychology, suggested that after several months' work, Patterson should be satisfied if Koko managed to learn three signs: eat, drink, up...
...Ndume was free to move on to other rooms in the enclosure...
...Koko indicates another staff member, whirls about and starts to laugh...
...Koko talked about her hairy belly and her harder head...
...Isn't she adorable...
...For Patterson, the Body of Christ is large and ample...
...All of the great apes are now endangered species...
...But isn't all this just a bit comforting...
...At four months old, she weighed what a gorilla customarily weighs at birth...
...Talking with animals was the stuff of wizards...
...It can legitimately be asked, for example, what we have lost in immediate experience, thanks to language...
...she was malnourished and suffered from a variety of potentially lethal diseases...
...Koko also has some thoughts about God," Patterson tells me...
...Researchers have thus far notated sixty distinct gestures...
...Patterson doesn't disappoint...
...Koko, it seems, is always listening...
...She lies when it suits her...
...She has literally tons of tapes and notes still She lies when it suits her...
...Patterson had asked Koko about her understanding of it, and the gorilla had responded, "Trouble old...comfortable hole bye...sleep...
...E Commonweal 17 June 18, 2004...
...The dialogue went on like that for a while, then for a moment the sleep-deprived psychologist became less than a purist: she asked the question...
...But Michael was something different...
...Suffice it to say, this is an uphill battle...
...It also appears that untaught gorillas sign as well as speak...
...Enter Francine (Penny) Patterson, then a doctoral candidate in psychology at Stanford...
...But now she was agitated and signing "frown, frown, frown, frown, frown...
...The gorilla has her favorite insults too, not unlike those of small children...
...The gorilla has her favorite insults too, not unlike those of small children...
...Once Patterson assumed she'd have a houseful of children...
...Imagine how much harder it is with a gorilla...
...Who's to say...
...Come on, Koko...
...That research is beginning to suggest that what had once appeared as simple hooting and hollering may be instead a sophisticated tonal language...
...Perhaps the whole drama can boil down to something simpler...
...Language as a means of communicating (creatively or otherwise) is one thing...
...He stationed him-self close to me and seemed to stay there seated deep with-in himself, like a Buddha, for a very long time...
...A ring becomes "finger bracelet...
...A much-needed antidote to the uneasiness of the times...
...Meanwhile, Patterson's research is taking a closer look at Koko's utterances...
...Two decades ago, a story of Koko and her pet kitten was published in the States...
...Patterson may point to myriad gorgeous exchanges with Koko, but she's also the first to bring up stories of what we might call the great ape atrocities...
...Or we're not its only players...
...Who broke the kitchen sink...
...Raised a Catholic, Patterson laughs about the no-escape clause inherent in her religion...
...Come on, Koko...
...Patterson had grown up in the wilds of Minnesota...
...Sometimes people write to Patterson with questions they would like Koko to answer...
...I ask...
...Nectarine yogurt translates into "orange flower sauce...
...Did Patterson intuit from the start how much her gorilla might be capable of...
...Give me something to begin with...
...Who broke the kitchen sink...
...But Patterson and the zoo staff are hoping that Ndume and Koko may form an attachment...
...The figure of Christ, she tells me, continues to move her as no other...
...Finally, the ape-language experiments became too compelling not to pursue...
...Was there a Helen Kelleresque moment...
...Then there is fundraising—the time it takes to keep the whole thing running...
...Please...
...He chose instead to ac-company her, eyes slowly opening and closing...
...About a billion of them," Patterson says...
...Sitting amid the nest she has built of fabric and old tires, she'll hold a bit of that fabric to her face...
...Humankind and its spirituality are in their infancy," she says, referring to just about all organized religions and what she calls "their small glitch-es...
...He died three years ago from cardiomyopathy...
...It's also more elusive and harder to quantify...
...Reductionistic...
...Imagine yourself in a forest, or on a beach...
...Dirty stupid toilet," she signs...
...She had spent the first decade of her life hanging out with just about every animal she could find...
...She under-stands that color carries emotional weight...
...I wasn't a fluent signer when I began the project," Patterson says...
...Patterson's foundation is reprinting that story and distributing it, free of charge, throughout Africa, but especially in those countries where gorillas are regularly killed for bush meat, or where the sale of a gorilla hand for export might support a family for a year...
...Koko is a gorilla who understands human language and can sign in response...
...Man as evolutionary apex...
...Michael Downey, Cardinal's Theologian, Archdiocese of Los Angeles "The book is not simply an exercise in personal spirituality—it also comes at a time when great social and political harm is done because many of us cannot endure and enjoy who we are in our loneliness...
...And then she saw Koko...
...But considering the reputation of gorillas—ferocious, unmanageable, downright stupid—Patterson assumed that she'd work with the more user-friendly and apparently smarter ape, the chimp, as had other psychologists...
...Koko has her opinions about the sacred," Patterson tells me laughing...
...About two weeks into the project, Koko had begun to sign...
...Soft," she signs...
...She sees that figure as something to emulate, something she treasures when she glimpses it in others...
...Initially the zoo master had turned thumbs down on Patterson's proposal...
...Koko may have been signing even earlier...
...She can link them up in statements of up to eight words...
...While she may be quite young, fifty-five, she's well aware of her own mortality...
...One may hope for no less honesty from Koko's teacher...
...It takes about eight hours to transcribe one hour of exchanges with Koko...
...on her hands...
...One who decorates her head with flowered fabric when she has a crush on some guy (I'm talking human guy...
...Using contemporary parables from literature, film, and his own life, he shows that solitude can be embraced as a path-way to greater meaning and fulfillment in life...
...All this is documented...
...But she describes the flash—the realization—as her own, rather than Koko's...
...Patterson: "Who created the world...
...Only after Patterson explained that she wasn't about to do anything that was going to get her killed, did Koko relax...
...Patterson talks of biological tradeoffs, of the human brain as a very expensive piece of equipment—of blood and other resources going there at a considerable cost to a whole muscular system...
...And Koko's response...
...When it became apparent, however, that Koko would be isolated from her own kind anyway, off for months of recovery in the zoo nursery, he relented...
...You've got to help me, Koko," Patterson told her comrade-in-arms...
...A statement this simple, of course, can turn much of West-ern civilization on its head...
...But the work was all-consuming...
...A gorilla who shivers with delight when tales of alligators reach her ears...
...Now Patterson and the staff have taken to spelling such hot items...
...Nature becomes alive, numinous as cave painting in Lascaux...
...Patterson often finds Koko signing quietly to herself...
...So far sever-al dozen repeating and distinct sounds have been recorded...
...She has no trouble decoding pig Latin...
...Koko," Patterson laughs, "is a terrible painter...
...She'd breathe onto the glass and try to draw too...
...Not only were his language twists and turns arguably more inventive, Michael loved to paint...
...volution—as just about every reputable scientist understands it—is about each species developing its own best way to survive...
...She and Patterson had previously talked seriously about death...
...I've got to sleep...
...I've run dry...
...Many psychologists and biologists believe that human language originated with gesture—with our hands—that it was by using our hands that we were first able to conceive of propositionality, hence abstract thought and language...
...At first it was all about patience," Patterson says of her work with Koko...
...Koko loved that...
...And now, three decades later, not so much has changed...
...She was born Hanabi-Ko, "the fireworks child," in the San Francisco zoo in 1972...
...Mating among gorillas, it seems, is only a modicum less complicated than it is among humans...
...And Patterson herself...
...When angry, she sometimes describes herself as "red rotten mad...
...Patterson was working with Ameslan, standard American Sign Language...
...She lives in Florida...
...Now there is Ndume, a third gorilla, an adolescent who arrived too late, Patterson believed, to begin to learn to sign...
...Or on a dance floor...
...A whole generation here read it, loved it...
...That doesn't include any time to reflect on what Patterson has experienced, or to talk any of it through with staff members, or hear their feedback...
...Al-ways after this dream, Patterson wakes and has to ask her-"for wanting to get back to Koko's side to work...
...Lights off," Koko signed and laughed and whirled...
...Often I have to look at a video tape of our interaction, and look at it again and again, before I see something...
...Patterson describes herself as too tired to think that night...
...A gorilla who, when tired or afraid, asks that the drapes be drawn in her room...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 12
