Tarzan

This is strange subject for a contemplative blog, but bear with me. I think it will make sense. Tarzan is one of my favorite characters. An achetype, a hero, if you will. He has been adapted and readapted in books and movies and television, some good, some bad.

My connection to Tarzan started when I was a child, with the fact that my grandmother knew Johnny Weissmuller, the man who made the Tarzan yell famous, and the best of the classic Tarzan actors in my opinion. In fact, he taught her how to dive. She grew up in Silver Springs, Florida right during the era of his films. So of course, I was raised on every Tarzan movie imaginable. That led to TV and cartoons. And eventually to the original books.

As an aside, I think the two best adaptations of the story are the movie Greystoke, and the Disney animated Tarzan. As much as I could find fault with Disney, this movie is fantastic, adapting the story to a modern audience without making it overly kiddy and while keeping enough true to the Burroughs original...in fact Tarzan uses a lasso...one of his main tools in the books. They also did a fantastic job adapting the apes to modern understanding of gorillas.

Anyway, my fascination with Tarzan has much to do with my training as a naturalist. To me, Tarzan is the ultimate human. He lives in wildness, but also in society. His wildness, in fact is well translated into skills for society. He is altruistic and noble. He is strong and gentle. But most of all, his mind is clear. There is a clarity in wildness that only those who have experienced it can know. When extras are stripped away and the romanticism of nature is lost in the weather and bugs and fatigue, there is a crystal sublimity that we become aware of. The world appears differently. Powerful, gentle, nuturing, savage all at once. This is the world as it is. The world as close to how it was meant to be.

Now I know that statement will raise eyebrows given the Biblical references to the Garden and lions and lambs, etc. Granted...the wild world is fallen as well, hence the nasties that quickly suck the romance out of wild experience. But since men are the source of the fall, it is in the world of men that we find more corruption. The further we move from the world of men, the further we move from our own corruption.

So what would an uncorrupted (yet still fallen) man look like? Tarzan. He epitomizes what man would be in that purest context. Even apart from our own tribal society. He is man without a nurture in society. He is first wild. Thus his heart is open. He harbors no malice. He sees justice in black and white. He understands the interrelation of all things. His ideas and his actions are ever in line. There is no presupposition, and therefore no prejudice. He takes things as they come, life or death, and manipulates what he may control, knowing that he cannot control what is beyond him. He is man with the peace of animal, the fierceness of wild, the intellect of human. He is to be admired.