Traveling to St Lucia?: Red Peter is groomed as an ‘

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another and speak sounds of encouragement, though Red Peter doesn’t yet understand what they mean. So Red Peter is groomed as an ‘intelligent’ being, a close relative. In the space of five short years he manages to reach the ‘cultural level of an average European’. “In itself that might be nothing to speak of, but it is something insofar as it has helped me out of my cage and opened a special way out for me, the way of humanity.”

No doubt his fate is an awful one. Later we learn of the bouts of depression he suffers, his need to be alone, his persistent and intense feelings of repulsion towards humans. Yet his own words convey a sense of achievement: he had managed to escape from the three-sided cage he was brought in to against his will. And how did he escape? By his own admission he escaped through his own intelligence. “And so I learned things, gentlemen. Ah, one learns when one has to; one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs.” Red Peter learnt because he had to, because he was faced with two choices: life in a cage or life beyond the cage. “There was nothing else for me to do, provided always that freedom was no to be my choice.”

In the early days on board the boat, through the first fogs of his growing awareness, Red Peter weighed up his options. Between his sobbing, his apathetic licking of a coconut, the pain of the bars, he was filled with only one desperate feeling: no way out. “Of course what I felt then as an ape I can represent now only in human terms, and therefore I misrepresent it, but although I cannot reach back to the truth of the old ape life, there is no doubt that it lies somewhere in the direction I have indicated. Until then I had had so many ways out of everything, and now I had none.” He understood that having no way out he had to devise one, “even should the way out prove to be an illusion.” He considered the possibilities of escape, of flight- ‘for an ape it must always be possible’- now his teeth are filed down and straight but he must have had sharp teeth then, teeth capable of cracking nuts. But even if he bit through the lock they’d catch him again and treat him all the worse. It is not as though Red Peter asked for much. He didn’t want an abstract ‘freedom’, that to which some humans blindly aspire. He wanted only a way out, a way of exercising his arms and legs, of breathing air, of choosing where to go and what to do, “only not to stay motionless with raised arms, crushed against a wooden wall”.

And so Red Peter is forced through necessity, and we may call it desire, the desire to live, to do what the humans were unable to do: he extends himself into another world; he belies the impossible, the limitations of imagination and physicality, and becomes another being. The humans couldn’t understand that the ape possessed intelligence, yet it was he who discovered what it was they understood as intelligence, not through mimicry but through observation, attention, concern, desire and effort. He had to learn how they experienced the world so that they would accept him as something- a lesser being maybe, but one with freedom beyond the cage.

Humanity came to appreciate Red Peter’s progress as the movement of equality. They perceived the untamed Red Peter as a dumb, befouled, lice picking animal. They saw Red Peter’s imitations as some hope that there was really more to him than just that- something they had imagined possible through previous experiments, the way in which certain noises ‘they made’ were ‘just like talking’, or certain touches between a male and a female ‘just as if they were in love’.

This is determinism in its most brutal form: calculating and reducing the world to endless tautologies: is the ape intelligent? The ape shows it is intelligent if it gets the food; the ape got the food it must be intelligent. This determinism is applied generally. Of course the ape can learn and evolve, but only from a position of less, from a position of inferiority: it is never the one learning who defines the parameters of civilised and uncivilised.

Red Peter’s fate was determined by a choice: live like us or die like your own. He had no way of continuing as an ape, not in a world of humans. Transformation, adaptation, progress, change were thus held out to him as if they were empowering. “I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out.” This confession should cause consternation: he didn’t want to become more human, he was forced to against his will. After the consternation subsides the radical meaning of his confession becomes apparent: the ape was intelligent before he learned how to speak, before he learnt how to tie his own bow tie, before he learnt how to drink schnapps from a dirty bottle. He was intelligent from the start.

The aspiration to make things more equal by ‘raising the inferior’ is nothing more than the re-constitution of inequality through ascription and determinism. The way to break this circle is to assert another way of knowing, of being, of relating to the world. This is not easily done. It cannot be prescribed or represented. It emerges through the intelligence and expression of individuals, through moments of desire or fear, as experienced by Red Peter in his cage.

Red Peter explains how his life as an ape has been forgotten. “I could have returned at first, had human beings allowed it, through an archway as wide as the span of heaven over the earth, but as I spurred myself on in my forced career, the opening narrowed and shrank behind me; I felt more comfortable in the world of men and fitted it better.” But he adds that everyone, man and ape alike, retains the potential for that first, stuttering encounter with the world. “Everyone on earth feels a tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike.”

Be the first to comment - What do you think? Posted by rab1501 - April 22, 2010 at 3:31 pm

Categories: Arts And Entertainment Tags: Academics, Addresses, Apes, Audience, Cheek, Franz Kafka, Jungle, Memories, Short Story, Wounds

Public Speaking: Timing

Timing in public speaking is one of the most important aspects of humor and NO ZZZZZs speaking. Not only is timing involved in an individual piece of humor, it is also involved in the placement of that piece of humor in the overall presentation. Timing is also involved in spontaneous reactions to ‘expected’ unexpected developments during the presentation.

Jack Benny said, ‘When you are speaking, timing is not so much knowing when to speak, but knowing when to pause.’ He should know, because he delivered one of the funniest and most famous lines in the history of comedy after an extremely long pause. He was being held up by a robber at gunpoint. The robber said, ‘Your money or your life!’ Jack didn’t speak a word for an extended period of time. The robber became impatient and said, ‘YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!!’ Jack finally replied, ‘I’m thinking.’ His persona as a cheapskate, coupled with a long pause indicating he was having trouble deciding whether to give up his money, or die was hilarious. A pause lets the audience catch up and draw pictures in their mind. It is the audience’s signal to imagine.

In public joke telling, a pause just before and just after your punch line gives the audience a chance to laugh. Absolutely do not continue speaking when laughter is expected. Laughter is hard to get and easy to discourage. Hold eye contact a little bit longer than you think you should when delivering punch lines because time is hard to judge when you are pumped-up for a speaking engagement.

The size of your audience will affect your timing. Your presentation will take less time to deliver to smaller audiences. Smaller audiences should mean quicker laughter. Conversely, presentations will take longer for big crowds in large public arenas. Your pauses will be longer to compensate for the wave effect created because of the physical distance between you and the back row of the audience.

Be the first to comment - What do you think? Posted by rab1501 - April 17, 2010 at 7:58 am

Categories: Writing And Speaking Tags: Audience, Audiences, Cheapskate, Crowds, Eye Contact, Gunpoint, Period Of Time, Public Arenas, Punch Lines, Wave Effect

Public Speaking – 3 Reasons Why People Fear Speaking in Front of an Audience So Much

There are so many people that fear public speaking these days. Heck, in the U.S. public speaking is the number one fear, closely followed by death.

But why do people fear public speaking so much? Why is it that people are more afraid of speaking in public than of death?

Embarrassment
I think one of the reasons why people fear public speaking so much is because they could be embarrassed. Of course that’s true in almost every activity you do but speaking in public means to speak in front of an crowd.

If you embarrass yourself there everyone in the audience is going to notice it. You thus might fear that the people will be talking about you if you are not able to deliver a great presentation. But there also might be other reasons.

Pressure
I also believe that pressure plays an important role. For years now society has dictated us how we are supposed to behave and what things we should know and what we should be able to do nicely. Speaking in public is one of those things that society expects us to be good at it naturally.

It’s strange since with other activities such as sport we are not expected to perform well without any training. Yet with public speaking it’s exactly the opposite. You have the pressure to perform well in order to not embarrass your family or friends.

Society
I guess society is the number one reason why people fear speaking in public so much. Society at least partly creates the pressure I have talked about above. It also tells us that we need to perform well. It expects us to be a good natural speaker. But not everyone is.

That’s why some people don’t even have a problem with speaking in public while others would rather die than to speak in front of an unfamiliar audience.

Be the first to comment - What do you think? Posted by rab1501 - April 13, 2010 at 3:18 am

Categories: Writing And Speaking Tags: Audience, Crowd, Fear, Heck, Many People, People Talking, Public Speaking, Reason, Speaking In Public, Why Do People

Improve Public Speaking by Choosing Suitable Public Speaking Topics

How to choose speech topics is one of the most popular problems people have in public speaking. If you are having the exact same problem, what can you do to solve it? You can follow the following tips to choose the right speaking topic:

1. Your topic should be something you are familiar with

It is not recommended to browse the Internet or read magazines to find the topic you are going to use in your speech. When I was in junior high, I made the very same mistake in choosing my topic for a speech competition. I grabbed my old magazines, and found a topic about the environment that I actually did not know a lot about. The result was of course, I did not do very well.

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, once also did a mistake in choosing his speaking topic. He used to be requested to speak in business events, but he used to memorize what he would say as he was not really knowledgeable in the topic he was going to deliver. So, one day he decided to only speak about the thing he’s been always passionate and familiar about, customer relationship and company culture. Since then, he’s been declining speaking requests about the topics he’s not passionate about.

2. You should be interested in discussing the topic

Knowing a lot about a certain topic does not always mean that you want to discuss it. You might be familiar and understand a lot about a topic, yet you don’t want to talk about it. You should always avoid this kind of topic, because first of all you should make yourself interested before you can make your audience do the same thing.

When you do this, your audience may get interested when you are finished speaking even though they are not paying attention at first.

3. Your topic should suit the speaking requirements

You should know what kind of speech you are requested to do, the duration you will have, and other requirements. Choose your topic accordingly.

The topic you choose may be general in the beginning, but you can always narrow it down later. For example, you may come up with the topic of “public speaking” (what a perfect example!) at first. You can then narrow it down into “public speaking fear”, “improving public speaking”, etc.

To end this article, I would like to say that you should not try to be perfect in preparing your speaking topics and also in delivering your speech. Understand that public speaking is not about getting 100% approval from the audience, but to give as much value as possible to them

Traveling to St Lucia?

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Red Peter is groomed as an ‘

Public Speaking: Timing

Public Speaking – 3 Reasons Why People Fear Speaking in Front of an Audience So Much

Improve Public Speaking by Choosing Suitable Public Speaking Topics

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