THe Periplus of Spur Tank Road

In his introduction David Vardeman wrote: The physical body evolves and at the same time assumes a moral position, depending on the use to which it is put, which is only to say that the physical and spiritual will always be linked. The question of use always involves its effect on other people, other species, the environment. The missing piece of Darwinism is that it addresses not at all our moral and intellectual evolution, if such can be said to exist. Pagan would say un-happening. It is the genius of this periplus to address all that. This chilling exchange sums it up:

Rick: When the monkeys were watching, did they know what they were seeing?

Pagan: We know what we see.

Rick: We think we do.

Author of Oskar Submerges, Zachary Tanner observes "There's more packed in here than in most 900-page novels. Three lines of dialogue and I beheld Darwinian simians emoting."

Comment by Roberto Segrov

The Minotaur Left When He Found I Had Moved in for Good

My face was extinguished in a stone hell

Georg Trakl

Baudelaire wrote: “Jerusalem, which, like Delphi, has been the navel or center of

the earth, can become at least the center of mortality. Because if that is where

death was humiliated, it also revealed its most sinister character there.” The

fragment of the French poet entails the horror that is manifested and experienced

in the face of obliteration through ideology, all the worse because it is a modality of

ideology determined by faith. The theogamy between religious belief and profit

motive is an invention of the Christian religion, one could say.

In fictions and historical accounts (fictions of another type, disguised as objective

and scientific, but shameless due to their unavoidable intention), scholars and

opportunists have pointed out, for example, how brutally and with an iron fist the

Persian empire ruled conquered peoples, but the same account has cleverly

ignored the fact that Darius I never imposed his faith on the fallen, allowing them to

practice their cult as they saw fit, as long as he was recognized as king or emperor

and tribute was paid to him. The tendentious Western historical discourse has

always branded the Medes as barbarians, mystified them, and mistreated their

cultural heritage, and, on the other hand, omits the fact that the word barbarian

was applied to all peoples who were not Greek 1 ; there where it is said that the

ambiguous invention of democracy was born.

Baudelaire reproduces the nasal laugh of the macaque that sustains Rick Harsch's

story: “I think I was right about the laugh, for he went into a nostril snuffery that

lasted a good half a minute.”

1 Is it necessary to point out that, in limited Western thought, the paternity of History is attributed to the

Greek Herodotus?

Of course, the history of violence by way of religious ideology stems from what in

the academies of political correctness is now called colonialism in postcolonial

studies. It should be noted that few are honestly interested in the matter; obsessed

with the inane celebration of the faculty, they become more interested in the

industrial production of insufficient commentary on the phenomenon. Viewed the

category of the colonial from the smooth terrain of the geopolitical north, what is

said is little and insignificant. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, saving the subtleties of the

process, (a true student of the disastrous effects of colonialism in South America)

calls the above cultural transvestism. In The Periplus of Spur Tank Road, Rick, in

the voice of the ape, describes it like this:

“When the monkeys were watching, did they know what they were seeing?”

“We know what we see.”, the macaque responds, to which the narrator (Rick?)

replies: “We think we do.”

It is not for nothing that Rick Harsch allows the witness to express himself and the

narrator to doubt what the observer (observer is not equal to witness) claims to

know or have learned.

Regarding the massacre of the banana plantations in Colombia, an event closely

linked to the strategies of modern colonialism, that is, capitalism 2 , the number of

massacred continues to be discussed: were they three hundred thousand? Were

they seventy? The statistical figure fulfills the task dictated by economic science to

relativize the damage, because numbers can’t stand for exterminated beings, so

the notion of the enormity of the consequences is lost.

The witness, that is, the participant knows firsthand the consequences of what

happened. Homi Bhabha, an Indo-English essayist, knows how to approach the

phenomenon of colonialism as incisively as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui or Harsch's

macaque. Bhabha understands that it all comes down to an inversion of terms that

2 I trust that a historical commentary is not necessary here to recall the form Milton Friedman's laissez faire

took in the laboratory of South America, from Brazil to Chile, from Bolivia to Argentina, including Uruguay.

shakes the cultural structures of the worlds. Rivera Cusicanqui, using a Quechua

term, calls this: Pachakuti, the great inversion, the shock that cracks the political

structures of the peoples and ends their intersubjective reality as it is known.

Bhabha writes that the colonized is no longer the one who wonders what the

colonizer is doing in their territory, but that the presence of the colonizer creates a

demand inscribed in the narrative of such phenomenon and carries within itself the

threatening switch: tell us why we are here. The justification is the same that is

translated today in the so-called manifest destiny of that nation located in the

geopolitical north, that claims to be the land of freedom and, therefore, feels

entitled to impose freedom in other territories. As Bhabha's object of study is his

first nation, India, he cites the following: the English in India are part of a belligerent

civilization (...) they are the representatives of peace imposed by force.

The narrative proposed by Rick Harsch in The Periplus of Spur Tank Road,

although it deals with the case of the Portuguese, it really refers to the fact and the

consequences of colonialism in a satirical way. It does not seek to downplay the

devastating impact of colonialism, though, but rather, through this satire, it seeks to

expose the sinew and bone of said process, while mocking the supposed

superiority of humans because, bottom line, the great colonized have been the

animal and plant genera, that is, the other animals and the planetary flora.

The discussion proposed by Harsch is based on the brutality of man against man

to subtly lead to a discussion that is not obviously ecological in biopolitical terms.

As a climax to this personal reading, a couple more comments.

1. Facts in history are equivocal, because history is just another fiction. For this

reason, when the narrator hears the name of Francis Day, he ends by

commenting: “I Heard it as one hears the tree frog in the hurricane.”. Thus,

revealing and concealing the meaning of horror.

2. Given the question formulated by Bhabha regarding the values ​​inverted by the

violence of colonialism, which can also be translated into the demand of the

colonizer to the colonized: and you, what are you doing here? Which can be well

rephrased: and you, who are you? Harsch's macaque's response to this, which

involves religion, the origin of all evil, is: “A name? Why would I? I am the monkey I

am”.

Roberto Segrov

09-02-2023