The Periplus of Spur Tank Road, Rick Harsch, Corona\Samizdat, 2025/2022.
Mr Palomar once stared at a gorilla (and said nothing in the presence of its muteness), Bataille was much struck by the arse of an ape, and now, Rick Harsch, or someone called Rick, has found the time to converse with a monkey. In Rick’s hands, ‘the enormous anal fruit of radial and shit-smeared raw pink meat’ which transposed Bataille into another realm (Bataille, The Jesuve), could become a sign for humanity itself, and all refined philosophical notions, including Bataille’s debasements, would achieve the status of a lethargic joke. Only, Rick’s monkey is closer in kind to the Jolly Chimp with a synthetic butt, a fully mechanical wind-up designed to chat your ear off. Not shrinking at all from the awfulness of things (and the inadequacy of words, including the awfulness of the word awful—it really is repugnant), The Periplus of Spur Tank Road (for this is the name of the book), leans in its achievement in the direction of Kurt Vonnegut who is mentioned in the Typesetter’s Note. That is to say, the book invites laughter, or rides along, side-saddling its mirth in the context of human idiocy and abjection. Pure abject negativity is not at all the object as the Typesetter indicates in writing: ‘Life gets bleak really quickly when we put on our mammal glasses. That’s a thought that can destroy us or evolve us’. A Harschian proposition worth pondering… It invites the objection that this proposition itself is too optimistic still (or is its opposite, depending on your thinking), for it may well be that ‘thought’ cannot even destroy us. And besides, evolution has always been a dirty game. Yet thought, for Rick, or Ricky, or Ricky’s conversational partner, the bonnet macaque, is not in its usual domain. Laughter, in this context, does what seriousness cannot manage, it provides access to a different mode of thinking, or a manner of seeing, or perceiving, which ordinary thinking is constituted to discount as a lesser form (if indeed laughter is allowed to constitute a species of thinking at all). Rick’s monkey does of course claim not to think, as if its words were mere studied likelihoods of speech, conversational exchanges learnt from observing humans at their best, and worst. But this claim on behalf of the monkey to be incapable of thinking could be read as an aversion to what human beings usually elevate as thought, which is also, in part, their self-image. If Rodin’s thinker was wheeled into the Chennai establishment where Rick and the monkey sit, all talk would be rendered in kind as the neighbourhood monkeys (all the mute ones) would line up and shit upon its head. Rick’s Jolly Chimp might be content to watch, and perhaps Rick’s Jolly Chimp will have never said a word to start with. But this would make for a very short book. The macaques, being of matriarchal society, might be invited instead to line up and shit on each and every patriarch, imperialist, and leader of human atrocity (and what goes by the name of human order) that human society has recently spawned (and I’m sure Rick would suggest a good list), and so bid the lot farewell in a swill ceremony. And some of them, why not, might be confined to this farewell gesture in perpetuity, their purgatory, only, there would be two good objections: even this expenditure of shit would be too generous (for them), or should the shit be gainful, this freefall gift, and this general enlightenment (by enmirement) shown upon the heads of all leaders and their lackeys, would only be the inaugural work at the baptismal faucet. We might need to turn on some bigger taps. I should put it to Rick’s macaque.
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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: taken at the Rock Garden of Chandigarh]
