I respect honesty

I was deceitful today and absolutely hating myself for it. I feel so bad I don't know what to do with myself. Deceit is just another form of dishonesty and what I crucified JH for so much! I hate that I have done this and don't know what to do. It makes me untrustworthy. This is one of my very best friends and I know it was fear based and controlling too. Wanting everything the way I want it instead of respecting others in all of this. What on earth do I do? I am afraid to tell anyone as they will judge me and I will be untrustworthy to them too.
I feel as if the whole world knows anyway and can see straight through me.
What do I do? I need to speak with someone. And I need some guidance of what to do to unpick this and show everyone that actually I totally respect them and I have made a grave mistake. I do not like how I am feeling as a result of this horrid behaviour and attitude I have adopted.
I am think I am complete fuck up now. And I knew I was doing this in the morning as my day started. No wonder I was feeling so shit this morning. What do I do?

Well I have spoken frankly about this with a friend. I felt so ashamed but glad I found the courage to speak openly and honestly about my devious and deceitful behaviour. She said she agreed that it's not great. She also said to cut myself some slack. So I did this but have a really bad feel about it and so can learn. She didn't think it would be beneficial to suddenly come clean reminding me that making amends is not to clear my conscience , it's to really be sorry except when to do so would injure others. So, I think I will not say anything. What I can do is learn and not repeat this to the very best of my ability. It shows me I have some work to do on my co dependence with the people involved. I had little self worth enough to be able to ask for myself ans set some boundaries with AM. ET has offered to look after LouLou if she is available. That is really helpful and an alternative to always relying on AB. I am sure AB would be relieved too. I can tell her that as a start of an amends. I will buy her a thank you gift too. And make every effort never to do that again.

Ew yuch the pain of this action is just so horrid. I am glad to have the conscience to learn and grow away from this behaviour. I value and respect my friends too much to allow myself to repeat this. I am grateful for a good friend that I was able to risk my truth with. And to be identified with as well which helps to dilute my level of shame. I am glad for the guilt as it is this that has pushed me into taking the first steps of action - sharing the whole me with a friend. And embarrassment is useful. Being found out for what I have done is enough to ensure I feel the guilt and put in the action. I am not a bad person but have done something I consider bad. Learn and grow. Talking about it is progress in itself.
Thank you Universe for showing me what I needed to do to lead to the next step of change.

Someone said something really helpful in connection with pain I have

The positive outcome today is that I saw a collection of Egon Schiele's work. Wow! How fortunate I feel. Works that are in private collections and brought together in a lovely private gallery.
Richard Nagy's Studio at 22 Old Bond Street.
Artdaily.org article

LONDON.- More than forty-five extraordinary works by Austrian artist Egon Schiele, previously unseen in the UK, will be unveiled at Richard Nagy’s new gallery on Old Bond Street from 07 February – 04 March 2011. Much of the four thousand works Schiele produced during his short lifetime can only be seen in Vienna; at the Belvedere, the Albertina and the Leopold Museum, or New York, primarily at the Neue Galerie.

While Schiele is recognised as one of the greatest draftsmen of the 20th Century, with watercolours making over $11 million at auction, his work is absent from museum collections in the United Kingdom and has been given little public attention in the past twenty years. In 1989, the Royal Academy of Arts staged the first and last museum exhibition in the country, Egon Schiele and his Time. Since then Schiele’s work has only made fleeting appearances in group shows, to which Nagy has loaned pieces. Focusing exclusively on women, this exhibition provides a rare opportunity to discover museum-quality drawings and watercolours from the artist’s most creative ‘Mature Period’ (1910-1918).

Egon Schiele was born in 1890 in the Austrian town Tulln, just outside of Vienna. After his father’s death in 1905, Schiele began studying painting and drawing at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts & Crafts), where Austrian painter Gustav Klimt was once a student, as well as the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts), both in Vienna. However finding these institutions too conservative, he left in 1907 to seek out Klimt, the leading contemporary artist of the day, becoming the painter’s protégé and friend. In some instances Schiele’s unsettling erotic work gained him unwelcome attention.

He was arrested in 1912 and charged with carnal knowledge and distributing immoral material, for which he was cleared, though he served 24 days in prison. That same year SchieleNeuzil, who he later dropped to marry the bourgeois Edith Harms in 1915. Schiele produced little in the two years directly following his marriage as he was called to serve in the army. In 1917 following his participation in the war, Schiele began to exhibit successfully across Europe with shows in Vienna, Zurich, Prague, and Dresden. When Klimt died in 1918, Schiele became Austria’s leading artist, though he died of Spanish influenza at the age of 28, only months after Klimt and three days after his young pregnant wife.

Throughout Schiele’s life, women fascinated him. As the only son in a household of women, his earliest drawings are of his mother and sisters. His closeness to his younger sister Gertrude has raised many metaphorical eyebrows – exemplified by naked drawings of her and in some instances rather provocatively so. It is evident in his early nudes of street girls, that he had a young man’s curiosity for the erotic. Schiele has an unerring genius for scrutinising the human qualities in the women he draws. This interest in women matured with his years and circumstances, and was with him until his death.

Nagy’s exhibition shows the diversity in Schiele’s depiction of women, from the tension and anxiety demonstrated in his 1910-1911 works, to his calmer, softer style of 1917-1918 when he was becoming comfortable and successful as an artist. Schiele, for so long a hidden genius known only to a few, is now one of the acknowledged luminaries of 20th Century art history. Masterpieces on display include Dark Haired Girl (1910), Woman with Infant (1910), Nude in Orange Stockings (1914), and Girl in Underclothes (1917), amongst others.

Dreaming Woman

The Dreaming Woman

Edith Schiele

 Gerti Schiele in Orange Hat

 Squatting Woman with boots

Semi Nude in Black Stocking and Blue Jacket

 Standing Nude with Orange Stockings

 Woman removing green stocking

 Gerti Schiele in large hat

 Girl in underclothes

 Kneeling nude in coloured dress

Close up from Dark haired girl undressing


Wally Neuzil in Black Stockings

Sleeping Girl (I love this one)

I would so love to own some of his sketches. Have you seen the prices they can fetch? $11000000 and probably more. I wonder if there are any good prints about?
I felt so lucky to be able to be in the room with few people. AM and I went back to purchase a book. And there were few people there as the gallery was soon to be closing. I observed a man sketching from the original of Gerti Schiele in a big hat. I would loved to have photographed him sketching. I didn't ask. I wish I had.
What a privilege this was. Not worth lying for. All the same I am grateful to have been in a room with all these privately owned pictures. How lucky I am and also thankful for the introduction to him ion the first instance by JH and then AM spotting the exhibition.
I am very thankful that I have great friends who help me out in so many different ways. And realising this has lifted me slightly.
Tomorrow I will call my dad and wish him a happy Father's Day.

Bliss
XX

Written noises

Here is my test to a friendposted here so that I don't forget the thnking as I wrote it. I think it's very valid in helping me re-attach
I have written a lot since texting. It has helped. I got in touch with some fear, anger, sadness. I think the detachment is denial and blocking me up. I am feeling very, very guilty about not sending a card but it's fear! Fear I will make my dad angry and he will leave again. I think having engaged with him recently, I am terrified if I do anything he will leave. As I write this I feel so afraid and a lot of emotional pain. I think detachment is similar to the times when I just used to lie ever so still, not a single movement, and even try not to breathe so nothing bad could happen. I feel like that child. I want my dad. Yet terrified. Writing helps, sharing helps. Thanks for listening (in the form of written noises) :)
Bliss
xx

Exiting from freedom

"Horrible morning shouting at and being shouted at...why are some mornings so horrendous? Doesn't exactly set you up for a good day!"

well this comment made by a friend provoked some thoughtfulness in me. My first thought was at least (you, we are) I am aware of my behaviours, often in reflection, sometimes as it's happening and occasionally, becoming more often, before I act out. And my distaste for the way I act is surely positive. It's more evidence that I have a conscience and constantly reviewing myself.  The emotion was valid but the behaviour was not in my opinion. And so I can learn how to change my behaviour and to be the person I wish to be. That takes practice. And that is given to me on a daily, minute by minute basis by this wonderfully, ever changing world. Life gives me plenty of opportunity to practice. But do I change? Yes actually I have made some changes. Of course there are always more to make.
Then I got to thinking. Why do I not like the way I behave? Perhaps that thinking that it's "wrong" or skewed because I have been told it's wrong. What if it's right or simply OK? And actually it's just people expressing themselves. Displays of anger, disappointment, frustration. A way to be heard, seen and understood. Just because people don't like it ...... Most people don't like dealing with uncomfortable emotions it appears. There seems to be a need to have everthing nice and levle all the time. Perhaps people don't like to see what they have been a part of invoking in others. That feeling of responsibility and having done something that has displeased another. Perhaps everyone is just running from the lower levels of responsibility?
But then I returned to the fact that actually I don't like my behaviour. I noticed that. I am always checking how I am feeling and reacting when at work. Sometimes I do get angry or frustrated and I am careful to ensure that I do not attach that to a person but rather to a particular behaviour or attitude. And I am always trying to monitor this so that I don't act out. I can state a feeling in a calm manner and without blame. So If I can do the same in my personal life. Oh I am far from perfect at it. Sometimes even in my work I say things and want to swallow my words. I am human and I am practicing. So in my personal life, where I am more easily provoked when things touch my heart and soul, it is no wonder that I am more reactive than responsive.
At least I am working on myself. It's about internals as well as externals. Finding that balance is crucial to a fuller growth for me.  I can focus too much on one or the other. It's a fine tuning and a delicate balance.
I have acted out this morning by eating biscuits after breakfast. I wanted a fix of carbs and sugars. Of course having eaten them I am not sure anymore of the feeling I was escaping.
I had a fairly good sleep but with a few disturbances. In the moments of waking I was tossing and turning about the fact that I have over eaten or rather not stuck to my food plan for the past 2 days. It contributes to my feeling of detachment. The feeling of detachment has been an increasing worry for me. I feel so ill at ease when I am uncertain of how I am feeling. I wonder if it's always been like that and I have simply acted out with intensity when that has happened. Or is this a more recent thing and magnified by hormonal changes. I just don't know.
The detachment is simply a sense of not really being aware of any emotional response to any in particular. Things I hear or see or do. Other people. I think I can feel anger when it's there. I definitely feel a discomfort with the sensation itself. I worry about my performance at work. I cannot feel anything to be able to see what we need to be working on. I start something and get lost. So I am definitely eating on the anxiety that that brings. I do not know how to deal with it. I can function on basic information. But I feel incompetent and that brings about a feel of worthlessness. So I eat on the worry around that. It takes it away for a brief moment. And actually it contributes to the state of detachment because I am "using".
People are saying that it's probably also connected to what has been happening with my dad. I am not sure. I am thinking that actually I have been the problem and the cause of the distance between us. If I hadn't been such an idiot, acting the way I did, hooking up with so many men that were in my parents vie unsuitable. The problem is I didn't feel worthy for anyone else and I didn't know how to believe that I was likable, always mistaking sex for love. I forgive myself for mistaking sex for love. Then people say well you were shown that sex was the way forward by my dad from a young age. Was I?
I also feel terrible that I haven't sent my dad a card for Father's Day. I have never been structured around sending cards. I leave it and leave it even though I know I need to do it. It's so lazy and yet there's something that blocks me too. I don't understand myself and then I feel dreadful. Especially as I think I have opened all this up with my dad and here I am being my usual neglectful self. I feel terrible about this. So bad it makes me cry and hate myself. I will call him and say something but sorry is futile because it's always happened and I still haven't changed it. When I prepared a years worth of cards and had them all stamped and ready to go, I was left with my mum's because she died! God! I miss my mum and feel so much pain every so often - NOW!
I feel alone and lonely. A Lone. That's me. When I choose that it's good an what I want but lonely is not my choice. That's at a soul level. And I just want to run and run and run until I fall off the planet.
JH then comes to mind. Which adds to the torturing. I start wondering what he is doing now, and if he's found what he's looking for and at peace with someone else. I wanted us to be at peace with each other but it wasn't how it ended. I wasn't prepared to put up with the other women and the lies. I had lief too I realise. I had been ashamed of a few things when we first met so covered the truth about some things. They were little things but lies nonetheless. Finding out about any degree of lie results in distrust over all. So it wasn't made in Heaven although I think there were two human beings who had no reason to lie and it could have been wonderful. It wasn't how it was to be though.
But I wonder if it is ALL me actually. I haven't stayed in any relationship. They cheat, they lie, they cannot give me what I want or need apparently. I run when it gets boring. I want something else. It is intense when it's full of the getting to know each other and then then discovery of lies and deceit is more intensity. Perhaps it is me? I think it is. I feel a complete waste of space and time and then I just think what's the point. It's too late to change and make anything work now. So why carry on. I cry as I write it because I am scared I don;pt have the courage to actually go through with it. I did feel that a few weeks ago and didn't do it. Now I want to do it but don't have the courage. I want the courage. Just go!
So all these thoughts start rolling and crescendo! Resulting in me feeling dreadful.

Oh I forgot to mention that I am struggling to stay disciplined about my studies. Doing other things instead, avoiding getting down to it. Well my friends are on holidays and doing things and I want to do things too. I love theatre, meeting up, galleries etc. And there is only time at the weekends really. That is meant to be study time. So I feel guilty, get behind and then stress. This is not good for my sense of self esteem. So adds to my need to get away from me.
There it is. Eating then takes over. Well wither that or I will stop eating become high and then men become involved. I cannot survive another round like last year. I feel certain that I will die.

It helps to write it all down. I feel a sense of self more. I mean by that I can get an understanding better.
What is the solution to my dad and Father's Day. I could send some flowers for their home. Good idea.
I will do that now. More money! Of which I am spending like there is a bottomless pit. Is this to do with the bi-polar stuff too? Is all of this to do with the bi-polarity in my brain? Are hormones exaggerating the polars?
I have no idea.

Kafka's Monkey was amazing. Often when I am in the experience I cannot fully appreciate it. Too much thinking. Too much expectation as well I think. Even though I didn't know what to expect I expect a lot. So the experience itself is often overlooked. Until afterwards. Does anyone else do this? I have done this since a little girl. And I wonder if that's why I have sought intensity? I have done extreme things and they have had to escalate. Does everyone do this? Is the intensity itself addictive in a sense. The need for more and more intensity resulting in more dangerous or exciting things.
Anyway Kathryn Hunter was simply outstanding. Her movements, her voice, her command of her performance. She held me captivated and I was so sad when it was over. It ended so suddenly even though I knew we had heard Kafka's story. She is truly amazing.

A Report for an Academy by Franz Kafka

Esteemed Gentlemen of the Academy!

You show me the honour of calling upon me to submit a report to the Academy concerning my previous life as an ape.

In this sense, unfortunately, I cannot comply with your request. Almost five years separate me from my existence as an ape, a short time perhaps when measured by the calendar, but endlessly long to gallop through, as I have done, at times accompanied by splendid people, advice, applause, and orchestral music, but basically alone, since all those accompanying me held themselves back a long way from the barrier, in order to preserve the image. This achievement would have been impossible if I had stubbornly wished to hold onto my origin, onto the memories of my youth. Giving up that obstinacy was, in fact, the highest command that I gave myself. I, a free ape, submitted myself to this yoke. In so doing, however, my memories for their part constantly closed themselves off against me. If people had wanted it, my journey back at first would have been possible through the entire gateway which heaven builds over the earth, but as my development was whipped onwards, the gate simultaneously grew lower and narrower all the time. I felt myself more comfortable and more enclosed in the world of human beings. The storm which blew me out of my past eased off. Today it is only a gentle breeze which cools my heels. And the distant hole through which it comes and through which I once came has become so small that, even if I had sufficient power and will to run back there, I would have to scrape the fur off my body in order to get through. Speaking frankly, as much as I like choosing metaphors for these things—speaking frankly: your experience as apes, gentlemen—to the extent that you have something of that sort behind you—cannot be more distant from you than mine is from me. But it tickles at the heels of everyone who walks here on earth, the small chimpanzee as well as the great Achilles.

In the narrowest sense, however, I can perhaps answer your question, nonetheless, and indeed I do so with great pleasure.

The first thing I learned was to give a handshake. The handshake displays candour. Today, when I stand at the pinnacle of my career, may I add to that first handshake also my candid words. For the Academy it will not provide anything essentially new and will fall far short of what people have asked of me and what with the best will I cannot speak about—but nonetheless it should demonstrate the direct line by which someone who was an ape was forced into the world of men and which he has continued there. Yet I would certainly not permit myself to say even the trivial things which follow if I were not completely sure of myself and if my position on all the great music hall stages of the civilized world had not established itself unassailably.

I come from the Gold Coast. For an account of how I was captured I rely on the reports of strangers. A hunting expedition from the firm of Hagenback—incidentally, since then I have already emptied a number of bottles of good red wine with the leader of that expedition—lay hidden in the bushes by the shore when I ran down in the evening in the middle of a band of apes for a drink. Someone fired a shot. I was the only one struck. I received two hits.

One was in the cheek—that was superficial. But it left behind a large hairless red scar which earned me the name Red Peter—a revolting name, completely inappropriate, presumably something invented by an ape, as if the only difference between me and the recently deceased trained ape Peter, who was well known here and there, was the red patch on my cheek. But this is only by the way.

The second shot hit me below the hip. It was serious. It’s the reason that today I still limp a little. Recently I read in an article by one of the ten thousand gossipers who vent their opinions about me in the newspapers that my ape nature is not yet entirely repressed. The proof is that when visitors come I take pleasure in pulling off my trousers show the entry wound caused by this shot. That fellow should have each finger of his writing hand shot off one by one. So far as I am concerned, I may pull my trousers down in front of anyone I like. People will not find there anything other than well cared for fur and the scar from—let us select here a precise word for a precise purpose, something that will not be misunderstood—the scar from a wicked shot. Everything is perfectly open; there is nothing to hide. When it comes to a question of the truth, every great mind discards the most subtle refinements of manners. However, if that writer were to pull down his trousers when he gets a visitor, that would certainly produce a different sight, and I’ll take it as a sign of reason that he does not do that. But then he should not bother me with his delicate sensibilities.

After those shots I woke up—and here my own memory gradually begins—in a cage between decks on the Hagenbeck steamship. It was no four-sided cage with bars, but only three walls fixed to a crate, so that the crate constituted the fourth wall. The whole thing was too low to stand upright and too narrow for sitting down. So I crouched with bent knees, which shook all the time, and since at first I probably did not wish to see anyone and to remain constantly in the darkness, I turned towards the crate, while the bars of the cage cut into the flesh on my back. People consider such confinement of wild animals beneficial in the very first period of time, and today I cannot deny, on the basis of my own experience, that in a human sense that is, in fact, the case.

But at that time I didn’t think about that. For the first time in my life I was without a way out—at least there was no direct way out. Right in front of me was the crate, its boards fitted closely together. Well, there was a hole running right through the boards. When I first discovered it, I welcomed it with a blissfully happy howl of ignorance. But this hole was not nearly big enough to stick my tail through, and all the power of an ape could not make it any bigger.

According to what I was told later, I am supposed to have made remarkably little noise. From that people concluded that either I must soon die or, if I succeeded in surviving the first critical period, I would be very capable of being trained. I survived this period. Muffled sobbing, painfully searching out fleas, wearily licking a coconut, banging my skull against the wall of the crate, sticking out my tongue when anyone came near me—these were the first occupations in my new life. In all of them, however, there was only one feeling: no way out. Nowadays, of course, I can portray those ape-like feelings only with human words and, as a result, I misrepresent them. But even if I can no longer attain the old truth of the ape, at least it lies in the direction I have described—of that there is no doubt.

Up until then I had had so many ways out, and now I no longer had one. I was tied down. If they had nailed me down, my freedom to move would not have been any less. And why? If you scratch raw the flesh between your toes, you won’t find the reason. If you press your back against the bars of the cage until it almost slices you in two, you won’t find the answer. I had no way out, but I had to come up with one for myself. For without that I could not live. Always in front of that crate wall—I would inevitably have died a miserable death. But according to Hagenbeck, apes belong at the crate wall—well, that meant I would cease being an ape. A clear and beautiful train of thought, which I must have planned somehow with my belly, since apes think with their bellies.

I’m worried that people do not understand precisely what I mean by a way out. I use the word in its most common and fullest sense. I am deliberately not saying freedom. I do not mean this great feeling of freedom on all sides. As an ape, I perhaps recognized it, and I have met human beings who yearn for it. But as far as I am concerned, I did not demand freedom either then or today. Incidentally, among human beings people all too often are deceived by freedom. And since freedom is reckoned among the most sublime feelings, the corresponding disappointment is also among the most sublime. In the variety shows, before my entrance, I have often watched a pair of artists busy on trapezes high up in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked back and forth, they jumped, they hung in each other’s arms, one held the other by clenching the hair with his teeth. “That, too, is human freedom,” I thought, “self-controlled movement.” What a mockery of sacred nature! At such a sight, no structure would stand up to the laughter of the apes.

No, I didn’t want freedom. Only a way out—to the right or left or anywhere at all. I made no other demands, even if the way out should also be only an illusion. The demand was small; the disappointment would not be any greater—to move on further, to move on further! Only not to stand still with arms raised, pressed again a crate wall.

Today I see clearly that without the greatest inner calm I would never have been able to get out. And, in fact, I probably owe everything that I have become to the calmness which came over me after the first days there on the ship. And, in turn, I owe that calmness to the people on the ship.

They are good people, in spite of everything. Today I still enjoy remembering the clang of their heavy steps, which used to echo then in my half sleep. They had the habit of tackling everything extremely slowly. If one of them wanted to rub his eyes, he raised his hand as if it were a hanging weight. Their jokes were gross but hearty. Their laughter was always mixed with a rasp which sounded dangerous but meant nothing. They always had something in their mouths to spit out, and they didn’t care where they spat. They always complained that my fleas sprung over onto them, but they were never seriously angry at me because of it. They even knew that fleas liked being in my fur and that fleas are jumpers. They learned to live with that. When they had no duties, sometimes a few of them sat down in a semi-circle around me. They didn’t speak much, but only made noises to each other and smoked their pipes, stretched out on the crates. They slapped their knees as soon as I made the slightest movement, and from time to time one of them would pick up a stick and tickle me where I liked it. If I were invited today to make a journey on that ship, I would certainly decline the invitation, but it’s equally certain that the memories I could dwell on of the time there between the decks would not be totally hateful.

The calmness which I acquired in this circle of people prevented me above all from any attempt to escape. Looking at it nowadays, it seems to me as if I had at least sensed that I had to find a way out if I wanted to live, but that this way out could not be reached by escaping. I no longer know if escape was possible, but I think it was: for an ape it should always be possible to flee. With my present teeth I have to be careful even with the ordinary task of cracking a nut, but then I must have been able, over time, to succeed in chewing through the lock on the door. I didn’t do that. What would I have achieved by doing it? No sooner would I have stuck my head out, than they would have captured me again and locked me up in an even worse cage. Or I could have taken refuge unnoticed among the other animals—say, the boa constrictors opposite me—and breathed my last in their embraces. Or I could have managed to steal way up to the deck and to jump overboard. Then I’d have tossed back and forth for a little while on the ocean and would have drowned. Acts of despair. I did not think things through in such a human way, but under the influence of my surroundings conducted myself as if I had worked things out.

I did not work things out, but I did observe things with complete tranquility. I saw these men going back and forth, always the same faces, the same movements. Often it seemed to me as if there was only one man. So the man or these men went undisturbed. A lofty purpose dawned on me. No one promised me that if I could become like them the cage would be removed. Such promises, apparently impossible to fulfill, are not made. But if one makes the fulfillment good, then later the promises appear precisely there where one had looked for them earlier without success. Now, these men in themselves were nothing which attracted me very much. If I had been a follower of that freedom I just mentioned, I would certainly have preferred the ocean to the way out displayed in the dull gaze of these men. But in any case, I observed them for a long time before I even thought about such things—in fact, the accumulated observations first pushed me in the proper direction.

It was so easy to imitate these people. I could already spit on the first day. Then we used to spit in each other’s faces. The only difference was that I licked my face clean afterwards. They did not. Soon I was smoking a pipe like an old man, and if I then also pressed my thumb down into the bowl of the pipe, the entire area between decks cheered. Still, for a long time I did not understand the difference between an empty and a full pipe.

I had the greatest difficulty with the bottle of alcohol. The smell was torture to me. I forced myself with all my power, but weeks went by before I could overcome my reaction. Curiously enough, the people took this inner struggle more seriously than anything else about me. In my memories I don’t distinguish the people, but there was one who always came back, alone or with comrades, day and night, at very different times. He’d stand with the bottle in front of me and give me instructions. He did not understand me. He wanted to solve the riddle of my being. He used to uncork the bottle slowly and then look at me, in order to test if I had understood. I confess that I always looked at him with wildly over-eager attentiveness. No human teacher has ever found on the entire earthly globe such a student of human beings. After he’d uncorked the bottle, he’d raise it to his mouth. I’d gaze at him, right into his throat. He would nod, pleased with me, and set the bottle to his lips. Delighted with my gradual understanding, I’d squeal and scratch myself all over, wherever it was convenient. He was happy. He’d set the bottle to his mouth and take a swallow. Impatient and desperate to emulate him, I would defecate over myself in my cage—and that again gave him great satisfaction. Then, holding the bottle at arm’s length and bringing it up once more with a swing, he’d drink it down with one gulp, exaggerating his backward bending as a way of instructing me. Exhausted with so much great effort, I could no longer follow and would hang weakly onto the bars, while he ended the theoretical lesson by rubbing his belly and grinning.

Now the practical exercises first began. Was I not already too tired out by the theoretical part? Yes, indeed, far too weary. That’s part of my fate. Nonetheless, I’d grab the proffered bottle as well as I could and uncork it trembling. Once I’d managed to do that, new energies would gradually take over. I lifted the bottle—with hardly any difference between me and the original—put it to my lips—and throw it away in disgust, in disgust, although it was empty and filled only with the smell, throw it with disgust onto the floor. To the sorrow of my teacher, to my own greater sorrow. And I still did not console him or myself when, after throwing away the bottle, I did not forget to give my belly a splendid rub and to grin as I do so.

All too often, the lesson went that way. And to my teacher’s credit, he was not angry with me. Well, sometimes he held his burning pipe against my fur in some place or other which I could reach only with difficulty, until it began to burn. But then he would put it out himself with his huge good hand. He wasn’t angry with me. He realized that we were fighting on the same side against ape nature and that I had the more difficult part.

It was certainly a victory for him and for me when one evening in front of a large circle of onlookers—perhaps it was a celebration, a gramophone was playing, an officer was wandering around among the people—when on this evening, at a moment when no one was watching, I grabbed a bottle of alcohol which had been inadvertently left standing in front of my cage, uncorked it just as I had been taught, amid the rising attention of the group, set it against my mouth and, without hesitating, with my mouth making no grimace, like an expert drinker, with my eyes rolling around, splashing the liquid in my throat, I really and truly drank the bottle empty, and then threw it away, no longer in despair, but like an artist. Well, I did forget to scratch my belly. But instead of that, because I couldn’t do anything else, because I had to, because my senses were roaring, I cried out a short and good “Hello!” breaking out into human sounds. And with this cry I sprang into the community of human beings, and I felt its echo—“Just listen. He’s talking!”—like a kiss on my entire sweat-soaked body.

I’ll say it again: imitating human beings was not something which pleased me. I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, for no other reason. And even in that victory little was achieved. My voice immediately failed me again. It first came back months later. My distaste for the bottle of alcohol became even stronger. But at least my direction was given to me once and for all.

When I was handed over in Hamburg to my first trainer, I soon realized the two possibilities open to me: the zoological garden or the music hall. I did not hesitate. I said to myself: use all your energy to get into the Music Hall. That is the way out. The Zoological Garden is only a new barred cage. If you go there, you’re lost.

And I learned, gentlemen. Alas, one learns when one has to. One learns when one wants a way out. One learns ruthlessly. One supervises oneself with a whip and tears oneself apart at the slightest resistance. My ape nature ran off, head over heels, out of me, so that in the process my first teacher himself almost became an ape and soon had to give up training and be carried off to a mental hospital. Fortunately he was soon discharged again.

But I went through many teachers—indeed, even several teachers at once. As I became even more confident of my abilities and the general public followed my progress and my future began to brighten, I took on teachers myself, let them sit down in five interconnected rooms, and studied with them all simultaneously, by constantly leaping from one room into another.

And such progress! The penetrating effects of the rays of knowledge from all sides on my awaking brain! I don’t deny the fact—I was delighted with it. But I also confess that I did not overestimate it, not even then, even less today. With an effort which up to this point has never been repeated on earth, I have attained the average education of a European man. That would perhaps not amount to much, but it is something insofar as it helped me out of the cage and created this special way out for me—the way out of human beings. There is an excellent German expression: to beat one’s way through the bushes. That I have done. I have beaten my way through the bushes. I had no other way, always assuming that freedom was not a choice.

If I review my development and its goal up to this point, I do not complain, but I not am content. With my hands in my trouser pockets, the bottle of wine on the table, I half lie and half sit in my rocking chair and gaze out the window. If I have a visitor, I welcome him as is appropriate. My impresario sits in the parlour. If I ring, he comes and listens to what I have to say. In the evening I almost always have a performance, and my success could hardly rise any higher. When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific societies, or from social gatherings in someone’s home, a small half-trained female chimpanzee is waiting for me, and I take my pleasure with her the way apes do. During the day I don’t want to see her. For she has in her gaze the madness of a bewildered trained animal. I’m the only one who recognizes that, and I cannot bear it.

On the whole, at any rate, I have achieved what I wished to achieve. You shouldn’t say it was not worth the effort. In any case, I don’t want any human being’s judgment. I only want to expand knowledge. I simply report. Even to you, esteemed gentlemen of the Academy, I have only made a report.

Such a sad sad story -

Bliss

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