The monkey gardener

One of the features of the original Arma Artis, which didn't make it into Laurie Lipton's version and thus does not appear in the Reality Temple meme, is a decorative border showing a garden with various flowers, birds, and -- somewhat unexpected in a garden scene -- two monkeys. One of the monkeys is feeding a fish to a heron, and the other is playing a lute.

This garden with monkeys playing human-like roles dredged up an old memory from when I was perhaps 10 years old. I had seen in some book a photograph of an old painting that showed a monkey taking care of a garden, with the caption describing it as "kindhearted." This picture had inspired me to write a bit of doggerel which I no longer have on paper all these decades later but find I can mostly remember. Words in brackets below are those I'm not sure about; the rest I'm pretty confident I have verbatim. (Judge me not too harshly, reader. I was young.)

The kindhearted monkey that [nurtures] the blossoms and vines,

His scrub brush and sponge in a bucket of solvent and soap,

With infinite care all the tenuous tendrils entwines

With all the finesse of a rope-maker weaving his rope.

A monkey [mysterious], a monkey [of learning] is he.

He knows of the rose, [of the quince] and the blackberry dark.

With all that he knows, it's a wonder he chose to be free

Of charge for the work that he does in his plot at the park.

Our simian cousin a hardworking gardener is,

And payment in full for the labor he does shall be his.

A few things stuck out to me as I called that little composition back to mind. First, I'm not sure why a scrub brush came to mind as something a gardener would need, but the bucket that accompanies it is a link back to "Buckets, bathtubs, and seas of stories (plus hoopoes and caballeros)." One of the hoopoes in that post is the one that appears in the Arma Artis. The post connects buckets, bathtubs, and seas. If the monkey in the poem uses a bucket, one of the monkeys in the Arma Artis seems to have taken a fish from the sea.

From the sea of stories? I checked Wikipedia's summary of Haroun and the Sea of Stories to see what sort of fish plied that sea, but it was the next bullet point down that really got my attention. The last two entries in the list of characters are:

• Plentimaw Fish: Angelfish the size of giant sharks. The name is derived from their multiplicity of mouths, through which they constantly ingest the stories conveyed by the waters. Inside their bodies, the stories combine to form new stories.
• Mali: A "Floating Gardener" composed of interwoven flowering vines and water plants that behave as a single organism. He is one of many, whose task is to prevent stories from becoming irretrievably convoluted and to cut away weeds on the Ocean's surface. Floating Gardeners are divided into a hierarchy of classes, of which Mali belongs to the First Class, presumably the highest. Mali, and presumably other Floating Gardeners, is virtually invulnerable, being able to withstand any and all attacks made against him by the Chupwalas.

"Giant sharks" is a link to Jason Statham's giant shark movie The Meg 2: The Trench (recently discussed in "Pet lions, professional cats and pirates, and Tim Curry"). Statham is also the title character in A Working Man, which ties in with out "hardworking" monkey. In the Rushdie character Mali we have a "gardener" (the monkey's trade) composed of "interwoven flowering vines." The monkey tends "blossoms and vines" and "entwines" them as if he were "weaving."

Haroun was published when I was 11, so it would have been around the same time I wrote the monkey poem (the age of 10 being only a very rough estimate). I never read anything by Rushdie until 12 years later, though, and I'm sure I was not even aware of the book's existence at the time it came out.

(I had heard about the Satanic Verses affair, but my information was indirect and somewhat bowdlerized, leading to a very distorted understanding. I didn't know the name of the author or the book, only that there was a group of people called the Azure-by-Johnnies who wanted to kill someone because of a book he had written. I vaguely imagined that it was called something like A Field Guide to the Azure-by-Johnnies. Why I thought of it as an Azerbaijani issue, I have no idea. I'm sure that, as Muslims, they were against Rushdie, but surely the news was more focused on India and Iran. Azerbaijan wasn't even an independent country at the time of the Rushdie affair.)

I think these links are worth pursuing, and I may need to reread Haroun. Certainly the theme of story-creation couldn't be more timely.