A note on : Julia Rose Lewis' article on The Great Apes

Brilliant. Readable in full at HVTN https://hvtn.substack.com/p/elaborate-biological-filigrees?sd=pf

“SJ Fowler is inquiring what chimpanzees have to say about our blindness to our life history? It is a mirror not a miracle. Haeckel’s Law states that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Ontogeny refers to the unfolding of the body of the organism in time otherwise known as embryology and developmental biology. Without it, we synthesize again and again and soon we are lost. Haeckel writes: ‘we do not really understand [the facts of embryology] until we trace them to their true phylogenetic causes, and see that each of these apparently simple processes is the recapitulation of a long series of historical changes.’ [2] Phylogeny refers to the unrolling of species in time otherwise known as descent with modification and evolutionary biology.

The origin of recapitulation means gone through heading by heading, chapter repeating, again diminutive of head. Let us go through the series of readings. Fowler created a film reading of The Great Apes for the Broken Sleep Books Extravaganza on 14th April 2022.[3] [4] The event took place after the face-to-face launch of The Great Apes and before the online launch.[5] [6]…..

Ontogeny unrolls the self. Fowler is unrolling line after line of the chimpanzee poem. He repeats the phrase, it’s a fight, twice in the reading and its echoing creates a stillness in sound and meaning following itself. It’s a fight that’s so still to refrigerator, where the fight is a long unresolved conflict, where the fight is decay slowed to the point of stillness as a refrigerator slows the growth of bacteria and mold. Is he saying refrigerator or refrigerate her, where refrigerate means to hold her body before burial, the reader finds themselves in the middle of grief. Is the fight consuming her or foreshadowing ‘Mary mother of glitter’ in the next line? [9] In the supermarket, it is a fight with consumerism and modernity. Here refrigerate comes from back cold becoming; it is the exposure of the private time in the public. So the supermarket is recalling the human missing the chimp part of himself. There is primate echoing private. Chimps have thick hair down their backs that helps them maintain body temperature in cold and rain and it is missing from humans. Ontogeny unrolls; it is the vase found before the outlines of birth and grief…..”