Steaming Monkeys

Yesterday a neurophysiologist gave a talk here at Berkeley, on their usual subject of the correlation of electrical activity of a neuron in Macaque cortex with some thing or another. While the audience walked in, the speaker had a short movie of a wild Macaque sitting contently in a hot spring with snows all around, probably shot at Jigokudani. The movie's tranquility and meditative mood seemed strangely at odds with the boring work experimental animals usually have to endure. Maybe the strangely beautiful closing sequence of Aguirre, where Kinski's mad explorer chases monkeys around a doomed raft would be a better metaphor.