And I Was the Monkey King
October 8, 2024
BEING DEPRESSED WHILE FEELING GOOD
Being depressed while feeling good is a singular experience. When I was younger, I was always depressed while I was feeling bad, which made a lot of sense. I could tell exactly why I was depressed; it was because there was nothing going on in my life. Nowadays when I get depressed, it’s just strange. I have all of the exact same thoughts I have when I’m happy, but none of them feel good. For example, recently I’ve been thinking about the movie Monsters Inc. I remember lines and scenes from the movie and I feel joy. But the joy doesn’t last longer than three or four seconds; right as the happy thought reaches its crescendo, a cloud comes over my mind, and I feel bad again. The cloud doesn’t even contain a thought: I don’t think, “Oh poor me, I will never work at Monsters Incorporated with Mike Wazowski and Sully.” I don’t think about how I can never recapture the childhood joy of watching Monsters Inc. The happy thought just… dies.
It becomes impossible for me to have two happy thoughts in a row. I start thinking that there must be something wrong with my life. I wonder if it’s that my new job is preventing me from writing. I wonder if it’s that I don’t have anyone to go drinking with down at the pub. I wonder if it’s that I’m not an illustrator of comic books. All sorts of potential issues occur to me. But despite all that, I don’t have any motivation to change my life at all. In fact, I can’t even cook dinner. I start compulsively eating sweets. I have trouble sleeping. I also have trouble getting out of bed.
After a day or two of such symptoms, it will finally occur to me — often in the evening, while sitting in my armchair with an interesting book in my hand that I feel no desire to read — that I am depressed, and that I have been for a few days. I will think, “Oh!”
Of course, this knowledge doesn’t help me much in the moment. I will continue to eat Twizzlers and mope around. However, it does allow me to understand my situation, and judge it accordingly. Most likely, I don’t need to make any drastic changes to my life. Within a week, I will be back to writing and reading and performing adequately at my job. I’ll remember the things that I like, and be able to enjoy them again.
In fact, I’ve come to understand that getting depressed for a little while is an important for my well-being. While depressed, I can’t think straight. I live in a sort of fog. During this time, a lot of unnecessary things fall out of my head. I just forget to think about them, or care so little that I can’t be bothered. When I emerge, what's left is only what's important. I think, “Wow, I really love books. Can’t wait to start reading and writing again.”
REGARDING THE VIDEO GAME SUPER MARIO 64
In Super Mario 64, there are a wide variety of different jumps Mario can perform. Aside from the standard jump, he can do a triple jump, a crouch jump, a crouch backflip, a sliding backflip, as well as a mid-air dive. He can also do a jump kick, punch, do a punch-punch-kick combo, or dive into enemies head first. Mario is an entity that carries momentum, causing him to slide or even run backwards depending on his velocity, direction, and the slope of the ground. To put it simply, Mario is a versatile creature.
Once you’ve got a handle on all the vagaries of Mario’s movements, you can maneuver him around a level with great speed. With this great speed, however, comes great danger. Mario is an entity that carries momentum, and this momentum can throw you off the edge of the world very easily if you’re not careful. Mario can be unwieldy; even when you think you have him under control, he can still surprise you. The physics model of the game has its quirks; sometimes you will land halfway inside of a fence or wall, and the game will take a few moments to sort itself out. The game’s camera occasionally moves by itself, and since your directional input is always relative to the camera’s orientation, confusion can result. These are just a few of the strange things that can happen.
The joy of Super Mario 64 lies in this combination of predictability and unpredictability. Mario is a physical object in a world of physical objects. To a certain extent, we can use our understanding of physical objects that we’ve gained through real world experience to try to understand Mario’s world. However, Mario’s world has its idiosyncrasies. In classic video game fashion, you can prevent Mario from becoming injured by a large fall by performing a “ground pound” move (which I neglected to mention above), which causes him to flip over into a seated position and fall vehemently toward the ground. Performing this move near the ground at the end of a long fall will negate Mario’s downward momentum, preventing him from taking damage. We can see from this example that Mario is an entity with a strange relationship to gravity. This is what makes him Super.
The creativity with which a proficient player can traverse the world as Mario leads to a certain identification with the man. During play, Mario makes a lot of noises. While jumping, he yells, “Wahoo!” While falling, he yells, “Waaaoaoaoaah!” When Mario enters a level, he yells, “Let’s a-go!” (although it kind of sounds like he’s saying “Dill pickle!”) and when he collects a star, he yells “Here we gooooo!” The experienced player finds themself anticipating and mimicking these noises.
I played Super Mario 64 as a child, and I enjoyed it. I ran around the levels, bumping into things, falling into pits, and generally making a fool of myself. I opened my older brother’s save file and visited the levels I was too unskilled to unlock on my own. I burned in lava and I drowned in quicksand. More than anything related to my actual input, I enjoyed the music and the sounds of the game. I experienced the game as if it was a cartoon. It made almost no difference that I was playing it. In fact, I probably spent most of my time watching my brother play.
I don’t play Super Mario 64 now in order to reconnect with those childhood sensations. I don’t need to hearken back to childhood afternoons spent with the game. The reason is that I enjoy the game more, now, than I ever did back then, and this is true of anything from my childhood that I still bother to remember. The childlike joy I experience as a twenty-nine year-old man yelling “Wahoo!” as I make Mario jump is much more powerful than the childish joy I experienced as an actual child. I actually remember my childhood quite well — maybe more than I ought to. I remember throwing a lot of tantrums and being very angry about tiny problems. I remember fighting with my brothers and screaming at classmates. There was nothing particularly wrong with my childhood; my childhood was actually pretty good, both materially and emotionally. It’s just that… I was a child.
I have plenty of fond memories too, of course — fun outings with family, long nights with friends, surreal experiences where my limited understanding came face-to-face with the actual world (such as the time I thought a car had veered off the road in a deliberate attempt to kill me, when in retrospect I was just scootering on the wrong side of the road and got spooked.) There’s nothing wrong with being a child; it’s just that I’m over that part of my life.
I don’t feel nostalgic for those times. I don’t yearn for them, because everything good about being a child I’ve kept with me. I’ve retained my sense of wonder. I’ve retained a reasonable amount of whimsy. I've learned to temper this wonder and this whimsy within a more controlled emotional range. I don’t scream about things anymore, whether in excitement or in anger. I don’t get down on the floor and flop about. I don’t pound my fists or waggle my arms.
But that doesn’t mean that I can’t be silly, or occasionally look at the world entirely upside down just for fun. It doesn’t mean that I can’t imagine preposterous scenarios. For example:
I WANNA LIVE AS A MONKEY KING
A few months ago, I watched the film Planet of the Apes in the middle of the night since I couldn’t fall asleep — the original one, with Charlton Heston. While watching that movie, certain anti-monkey prejudices that had taken root in my brain silently began to unfurl. More so than with its Twilight Zone-esque plot, the movie engages the viewer’s sympathies with the fantastic monkey make-up that allows the actors an impressive range of expression. The ape characters feel as much like people as the people characters, or perhaps more so.
All this got me to looking at apes and monkeys a little differently. Surfing the web, one is often confronted with videos of monkeys, whether in captivity or in the wild. Most of these videos are of apes or monkeys performing entertaining actions and looking silly. These videos impact us on a much more profound level than similar videos of other animals. When a cat acts silly, it acts silly in a cat-like way. When a dog acts silly, it acts silly in a dog-like way. When a monkey or ape acts silly, it acts silly in a distinctly human way.
I've often ranted and raved in previous writings about the dangers of thinking of humanity as mere “monkeys on a rock.” The point in all these instances was to encourage a certain respect for the capacity of people to engage in free and thereby compassionate behaviour, unconstrained by what many would call our “nature” or our “instincts.” I still think this is fundamentally true, but perhaps it’s unfair to malign monkeys so absolutely. While there are many monkey-like or ape-like qualities that we should have no wish to emulate, this doesn’t mean that we can not maintain certain sympathies with our distant cousins.
Things that monkeys enjoy that we can also enjoy include: climbing trees; swinging around from branches (or pipes or poles or whatever else); eating fruits; making funny faces; making funny noises; standing or crouching around while looking at things; among many others.
It is said1 that several of the Buddha’s reincarnations were in the form of Monkey Kings. As a Monkey King, the Buddha showcased some of his most admirable qualities, such as his ingenuity in inventing drinking straws to circumvent a water demon, or his compassion in putting his life on the line to help his monkey troop escape certain death. At the end of each jataka, or story of a past life, the Buddha clarifies which character was a past incarnation of whom. These particular stories end with the phrase, “And I was the Monkey King.”
I’m not sure whether, in real life, monkeys have kings or not. Sun Wukong in Journey to the West is also referred to as a (or the) Monkey King, so clearly the idea has a certain resonance. Monkeys are similar to people, and people have kings, so it only makes sense that monkeys, too, would have kings. You could argue that silverback gorillas are kind of like kings. Really, it’s completely immaterial whether the monkey king has any legitimacy within a scientific view of nature. The monkey king being exclusively a literary phenomenon is just fine with me.
ALL OF A SUDDEN, IT’S FALL
A wise man once said, “I was born in a hoop, and I'll die on a stoop.”
A much wiser man once said,
I have relinquished all that ties me to the world, but one thing that still haunts me is the beauty of the sky.
The clouds rush angrily across the wild blue yonder. The leaves yellow. The sun sets earlier and earlier still. There’s a chill in the wind, and Tom, the maintenance guy, had to be called in to fix our heating. This morning, I bought a jacket, and this evening, I wore that jacket.
Everyone loves to talk about an unseasonably warm September, but there’s nothing like a seasonably cool October.
I took this picture last night at the University of Saskatchewan. I like to call this thing the Synchrotron, even though I know it’s not the Synchrotron. The reason is that once, while driving by this building, a local said to me, “That’s where the Synchrotron is,” and I looked at the satellite dish and decided it looked like it might be called a Synchrotron. I now know that the Synchrotron is a type of particle accelerator.2 However, in my mind, the Synchrotron is still this satellite dish, pointed up at the sky, transmitting and receiving God-knows-what.
And here I am, uploading the latest transmission from the Planet Balckwell, and there goes my chair — the wheels are lifting up off the ground — oh! — oh! — here we gooooooooo!
BALCKWELL RISING!!!!!!
1. Kumbha Jataka, Nalapana Jataka
2. You wouldn’t expect us to have one of those in sleepy ol’ Saskatoon!