The psychological and physical cabinet of curiosities that is Desmond Morris (both his mind and home) was to greet me last Thursday. I was somewhat apprehensive about interviewing what one could happily refer to as the world expert on body language, for obvious reasons. Yet within ten minutes of meeting Desmond Morris, his bubbling enthusiasm, wit and joie de vivre had dissolved any such paranoid notions. His memory is an overpopulated stage of actors and scenes from a fascinating life, his house a venerable melting pot in which is condensed an extravaganza of books and paintings (many being his own creations), oozing exotic artefacts from every pore – with even more exotic stories behind them. Even when seated, I realised the world of Desmond Morris is never stationary – our discussion was continually punctuated by lively demonstrations of the gestures he described.
The juxtaposition of such a diverse collection of objects and facts in Morris’ house and mind reflects his original background as a Surrealist artist. As a member of the British surrealist movement, he exhibited from very early on in his professional life, sharing his first London exhibition with Joan Miro. Through an unfortunate case of bad timing, surrealism was effectively ‘shut down’ in this country, and it dawned on him that his living would have to come from another means. He thus pursued his other love (that of animals) through a successful career as a scientist. Yet he never stopped painting. He still produces vast quantities of work, has written a surrealist manifesto ‘just for fun’, and last year sold his ‘Magnum Opus’ in London – a triptych with the dimensions of Bosch’s Garden Of Early Delights, where all his surreal biomorphic figures come together for a grand ‘gathering.’
Near the end of his popular television series in the 50s (‘Zoo time’), having mastered the self-admittedly contradictory art of ‘simplification without distortion’, he became something of a public figure and moved increasingly towards the study of the human animal, publishing the controversial book ‘The Naked Ape’. Morris removed the blinkers cast over our eyes by habit, using his highly developed skills of zoological observation to observe and analyse the human species, with spectacular results. The book was a rip-roaring success and became an international best-seller (selling upwards of 10 million copies and translated into 23 languages) that was to change our paradigm of human life as we know it.
Having accomplished fame, travel was next on the list. Persuaded to ‘see more of the world’ by his wife and friends, the Morris Odyssey began. He has now exceeded his childhood aim of visiting 100 countries, which started with a journey around 30 to create a global ‘gesture map,’ revealing fascinating links between gestures and cultural history. Not that body language isn’t subject to modification – he recounts the history of the ‘Aloha’ greeting he received (a sort of sideways ‘phone’ hand signal ‘waggled at you’) upon reaching Hawaii. Its origin was something of a mystery. It turns out to have been adopted by the Hawaiians from the ‘let’s get a drink’ sign they observed from Spanish sailors as this imitated pouring a bottle of drink into their mouths. Mistranslations in gestures are not always so happily received – he discovered that in Germany the ‘crazy’ signal of circling a finger next to one’s head can get you arrested. Indeed, having been troubled by both the KGB and the Mafia through his travels, it seems Morris had undertaken a rather risky business.
Following a mini-tour of lucky charms collected during these travels, our conversation moves into the mysterious realms of human superstition. Morris muses on the sometimes unbelievable series of rituals undertaken by many individuals, particularly those with ‘high risk’ professions – footballers being a case in point: ‘there’s one (English) goalkeeper who had 33 things he had to do before a match.’ As with body language, we often don’t know the exact reasons underlying our behaviour. ‘Do you know why you’re wearing earrings?’ he asks me. It turns out earrings are a result of an ancient practice to ‘distract’ evil spirits from entering the body through the ears. He draws a parallel to the use of ‘Sheela-na-Gigs’ – rather risqué stone carvings of women placed over churches, whose parted legs ‘distracted the devil’ (one used to feature on the Norman clock tower on Cornmarket Street). The Maltese devised a slightly more sophisticated diversion tactic in the form of two clocks, with one telling the wrong time, to confuse and distract evil spirits.
Body language often reflects more about a person than they intend to give away, especially to the observant eye of the zoologist. Some are easily spotted – the nose itch of a liar (YouTube the Clinton trial to see this one in action). Fascinatingly, scratching the back of the head is a sign of concealed aggression, (thankfully) hiding the basic urge to deliver an overarm blow during everyday conversation. Others are more subtle. Morris recalls being asked to film a show on body language. Displaying a duo of identical photographs of a woman, he asked the men in the audience which ‘twin’ they would choose to spend the night with. The audience gasped as they realised that 90% put their hands up for the same picture. The explanation? ‘Pupil enlargement.’
Morris elucidates the true impulse behind the lovers gaze: ‘in actual fact they are checking pupil dilation in the other person, a sign of attraction, and we are unconsciously aware of this.’ He then went a step further: ‘we were very naughty, and went to the flat of one of the researchers to take a photograph of her boyfriend.’ Fitted with a ‘pupilometer,’ the researcher was shown a series of pictures: a landscape (elicited no response), a rubbish site (reduced the pupils to a pinprick), a fit movie star (showed evident enlargement), and finally the photograph of her boyfriend – at which point ‘the pupil just exploded!’
After a discussion of the origins of smiling, Morris notes ‘you’ll never see a Japanese girl laugh without holding her hand over her mouth.’ Morris puts down the extreme degree of control over body language by the ‘inscrutable oriental’ to their strong military history. With a strong level of self-discipline, it appears a degree of control over body language is possible. Morris recalls undertaking fieldwork at the World Poker Championships: ‘I saw a man win a million dollars and there wasn’t a flicker of expression on his face. He was a statue. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, he was presented with a mountain of cash by two armed guards and actually had to walk across the room, and wait a few minutes, and only then did he give a subtle jerk of the forefinger into the air.’
Another case of ‘training’ in body language emerged in Morris’ travels to a Geisha house. ‘I was sitting there thinking, why do I feel so good? There’s no sex involved! How are they doing it?’ He explains that Geisha’s are in effect being paid for body language: ‘they’re trained in a whole range of tiny, subtle details. You’re exposed to a series of subordinations and acts of submissiveness. It’s impossible to resist, it swirls a man’s ego without him knowing why.’ We agree that a Geisha’s guide to flirting would be a feminist’s nightmare. Subordination however is no long term aphrodisiac: ‘A Belgian friend called me up the other day, and asked me an old-fashioned Hugh Heffner question: ‘What gives a woman sex appeal?” Morris is decisive in his belief that rather than looking for a fashion model (‘exquisitely, outrageously beautiful women actually frighten a man’), most men are quite simply after someone who is physically and intellectually at their level, ‘who is not going to be submissive and subordinate as ultimately that’s boring.’
This brings us to a topic Morris evidently feels strongly about: ‘Women should run politics. Men are very bad at it – they keep mucking it up, getting greedy, going to war. Men are a disaster! They don’t have the natural precaution and multitasking abilities of the female.’ In primeval times, Morris explains, the male and female totally relied on each other. This was lost with the process of urbanisation which unequivocally favoured men. Morris is keen to emphasise that our natural habitat is certainly not the ‘human zoo’ of city life, which is to blame for much ‘unnatural’ human behaviour – the horrors of domestic abuse being a case in point. ‘You can’t say let’s go back to village life, you have to get more clever about organising city life and the way people live.’ Morris notes the amazing propensity we have developed to ignore and avoid each other. ‘It’s a modern invention that people don’t want to be intimate with strangers, for millions of years we lived in small tribes where everybody knew everybody. The natural thing to do would be to greet everybody when walking down the street, but this just isn’t practical. So we make them into non-persons, we’ve developed a switch-off.’ The exception to the rule being Moscow – where Morris recounts movement along the street seemed to occur via the process of bumping into one another – ‘maybe it’s just too cold to bother,’ he chuckles.
Despite all this, humans are certainly not shy about self-advertisement. Cross-cultural studies searching for what humans find truly beautiful reveal frustratingly mundane results. For every tribe that found thinness sexy, another favoured the chubby; for every community that considered large boobs to be attractive, another favoured a more subtle cleavage; even a preference for white teeth is not universal – ‘some societies find blackened teeth extremely attractive.’ The only three characteristics considered universally irresistible were clear skin, youth, and health.
Another form of self-advertisement is dancing. Morris again bubbles over with anecdotes from his travels, from the ‘contrived dances’ of Eastern Europe which act out stories of milkmaids and young men to the ‘exquisite art form’ of flamenco dancing. ‘There is another kind of dancing which is, to put it crudely, pre-copulatory’ – in other words a vertical expression of the horizontal.
He nonetheless puts the pleasure of clubbing down to an experience of ‘vertiginous pleasure,’ the same joy we get from other tension-releasing ‘flowing movements’ such as swimming or bouncing on a trampoline. It appears efforts to control human bodily expressions can often backfire: in Ireland the Catholic church ‘thought it too erotic to allow waving of arms and hips around. All movement is from below the hips, giving a curiously erotic quality,’ he giggles, ‘because of its restraint, it’s almost as if they are prisoners – a case of bondage dancing as if the top part is bound and can’t express itself.’ Morris endearingly describes ‘his kind of dancing’ as that seen on a visit to Christmas Island, where all dancing was done whilst seated.
It is impossible not to believe Morris when he says ‘I really love humans’. Having dedicated much of his working life to observing and analysing their behaviour, he remains wildly enamoured by the species. He notes that his ability to switch between the objective and subjective is exercised and strengthened through his second life as an artist. His library encompasses a similar degree of compartmentalism – physically divided into his two cerebral roles. Although taking on many qualities of a library himself, a cabinet of curiosities is certainly a more apt description.
He has an upcoming exhibition in Oxford this December, continues to write and paint and is still one of the most interesting naked apes around.
