Recollection Trajectile

Skinship, James Reich, Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024.

A space odyssey encased within sack of skin, a chamber-capsule, an inflated haggis miles long and growing still longer. A stretched and distending dermis, threatening to crack at any point and eject the last humans into space. The vessel, if it may be called that, has grown large enough during its 1500-year transit to contain extraordinarily detailed replicas of memories of objects from Earth, even its cocktails for those with the leisure to drink them, and its beaches too—their over-grazed sands—and then its churches, even its arboreta, those places people visit and regard trees in their most unnatural state, attempting to conjure a oneness with nature that the arboretum in its basic conception is driven to occlude.

The ship has printed and respawned entire chunks of cities, detailed urban landscapes designed to include even the back alleys, the muck and detritus, including marginal zones, refuse dumps and attendant refuse-dump-life, those parts of a city edge which might be considered cancerous or diseased (as if the root stock was not already infected), and so its outgrowths and mistakes and pariahs, these have been printed too, or bred.

The fabricated spaces within this vast capsule, this elongated and gaseous tripe-meat reserve, a zoo of sorts, manage to support all forms of human life, ranging from (a simulation of) respectable and orderly analogues marching along its thoroughfares, sitting meekly in its trains—a domiciled and domesticated populace as it has been remembered (from a memory of the Earth, now dead)—right through to some kind of simulation, again, of erstwhile, Earth-bound countercultures, subcultures, and its (once) resistant underclasses, taken from the last century worth recalling, the twentieth. This was ‘the last century not overwhelmed with helplessness and mediocrity’, which has to be a pithy summation of our own period, such as it has been, so far.

But the printers—an obscure order of grotesques—have other plans, although these intentions might also be read as emanations of what human life has already planned for itself. In effect, it has no need of monsters, and the printers, which only appear inhuman, simply lack the human casement, the human skin, which is the great concealer.

James Reich’s Skinship manages, somehow, to combine a lament, of sorts, for the fragility of human existence and the death-driven impulses of human civilization, with a depiction of the grotesque persistence of the life drive itself—in a horror show of microbial spread and insectile thinking. This life capsule, wet in places, crusted over in others, is as voided of all things humanity might find ultimate solace in, as is the nebula through which it finally travels.

A story of intergalactic amoeba-like transit first, and human futility second. A masterpiece of invention (or quite possibly, recollection, the memory of a future, projected). A reflection upon the lies that are necessary to keep living, the lies that sustain, and keep going, and which, thereby, are the lies that are doing some of the killing too. 

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Ansgar Allen is the author of books including a short history of Cynicism, and the novels, Black Vellum, Plague Theatre, The Wake and the Manuscript and The Sick List.

[image: Postcard: Making Brookfield Pure Pork Sausage]