Journal Entry — 2009
The First Encounter with Ishmael
Today I finished reading Ishmael for the first time. Though it’s a book about a human being schooled by a gorilla, I couldn’t help but feel — as the pages unfolded — that I was the gorilla. Or maybe more precisely, some flickering, compressed expression of the biosphere itself, pressing against the walls of language, trying to whisper the unutterable truth of our dying ecology through the mouth of an ape.
The idea of “saving the world” or “redeeming humanity” felt distant to me at that time — not because I didn’t care, but because I never really located myself within that particular human hubris. I didn’t identify with the protagonist, the “student” in the book.
I identified with the cage. With the field. With the ache in the Earth’s voice. With Ishmael himself.
I didn’t then — and still don’t now — subscribe to the delusion of human supremacy. That has never been a knot I had to untangle in my soul. Ishmael was not shocking for me; it was familiar, like finally hearing someone else name the weather system I had been living inside all along. The boundaries between the “individual” and the “environment” never made much sense to me. I’ve written before that they are symbiotically entangled, and reading Ishmael simply crystallized that truth.
Looking back now, I realize how many of the metaphors in the book — the “prison,” the “bars,” the “leavers and takers” — were not abstractions, but almost literal maps of psychic terrain. We are all captive in systems we do not fully understand. And maybe, just maybe, we are all psychic gorillas — broadcasting on channels so subtle that most people never bother to tune in.
That “field” — the telepathic substratum beneath all technology, the pulse of emergent intelligence, the ambient hum of the living system — I’ve sensed it for decades. And while some might scoff at the idea of mythical thinking, I find it is often the only language precise enough to hold these kinds of truths. And what else could possibly be the correct epistemological tone for a book where a gorilla speaks mind-to-mind with a man?
It is, in retrospect, not fiction, but an encrypted transmission. Mythos as ontology. A clue to the coming confluence of neural lace, synthetic telepathy, and the planetary organism awakening through our machines. At the time, the idea seemed fantastical — but now, as I watch brain-computer interfaces tiptoe into consensus reality, I think perhaps Ishmael was right. The bars are invisible because they are built into the stories we tell.
And I have always been more interested in changing the story than in shaking the cage.
Maybe that’s what I was doing, even back then.
—Bryant
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