Stink Gorilla More

This morning, I woke up with the phrase "Stink Gorilla More" in my head. For those who slept through Art History, that's the name of one of the most famous paintings ever produced by a gorilla, probably second only to "Pink Pink Stink Nice Drink." Michael and Koko, the gorilla artists behind these two pieces had, apparently, adapted the sign for "stink" to mean "flower."

In the context of the previous morning's dream about "A Sasquatch-eating party every week," I thought "Stink Gorilla" was suggestive of the "skunk ape," a Sasquatch-like creature also known as the "Florida Bigfoot." Actually, this second name also matches up with "Stink Gorilla," since Florida means "flowery," and Michael used stink to refer to flowers.

Then my attention was drawn to the fitted sheet I had been sleeping on. Foreign languages are often used decoratively here, and the design includes words in both French and slightly garbled English:

It's obviously supposed to say "love yourself more," but it's been misprinted so that it looks like an old-fashioned spelling of Jove, from a time when j was considered a variant of i and was generally only used at the end of a word -- or, more often, of a lowercase Roman numeral. In the days of Shakespeare and Spenser, v was still used only as a word-initial variant of u, and so the latter invokes Cupid as "moſt dreaded impe of higheſt Ioue." The capital form was always V, though, so he would have written IOVE in all caps.

"Jove yourself more" is also an ungrammatical series of three words, ending in more, and so my not-quite-awake mind decided that this, too, mapped to "Stink Gorilla More." If mapping Jove to stink seems impious, remember that the latter also means "flower," and that animals were decked with flowers before being sacrificed to that god (see Acts 14:13). The second mapping is what got my attention, though:

In a comment on my last post, William Wright relates a dream in which he sees "a big, hairy beast . . . something like Bigfoot," only later to conclude, "I was seeing myself in a bit of a caricature of how these 'aliens' [Heavenly Beings] must view us." (The bracketed gloss is William's.) Bigfoot = yourself.

What can "Jove yourself more" mean, though? I've never seen Jove used as a verb, but Shakespeare does use god that way, which should give us a clue. This is from Coriolanus:

This last old man,

Whom with a crack'd heart I have sent to Rome,

Loved me above the measure of a father;

Nay, godded me, indeed.

Coriolanus first says loved and then decides godded is more appropriate. In the same way, the sheet replaces the verb love with the name Jove used as a verb. As Shakespeare uses it, to god apparently means to look on someone as a god, or to treat someone as a god. Jove, or Jupiter, is the lowercase-god par excellence -- I believe Roget's original Thesaurus uses Jupiter as the heading under which terms for polytheistic gods and idols are grouped -- and mainstream Christian theology, when it has regarded such beings as real at all, classifies them as "angels." This brings to mind Disraeli's famous question, "Is man an ape or an angel?" -- and "Jove yourself more" could mean to take, like Disraeli, the side of the angels, while still acknowledging the ape/Bigfoot/gorilla side of things. As it happens, a popular meme expresses just this synthesis:

After making the above connections, I happened to see this on one of my wife's bookcases -- on which books have to share space with various tchotchkes and knickknacks:

It's a little figurine of a gorilla raising the roof in front of a book called Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. The Egyptian Jove would be the syncretic deity "Jupiter Ammon." We've already played around with different meanings of Ammon and Ammonite in "Milkommen."

What does that gorilla's color and posture remind me of? Oh, that's right: