Non-Human Primates

99% of Our DNA, None of Our Achievements in DIY Independent Publishing

“The comprehensive failure of the primate order of mammals to contribute to the struggle for Aesthetic Modernism must be regarded as one of the ongoing fiascos of the historical record. With an upper estimate of more than 500 living species and an evolutionary time frame contemporaneous with our own, the combined genealogies of apes, gorillas, lemurs, tarsiers and the like have, in every epoch, over millions of years, done nothing of any significance to aid their human relatives in the ongoing development of art, music and poetry. Given that these primates share in some cases nearly 99% of our DNA, this constitutes a dereliction of fraternal duty on what can only be called a Biblical scale. It seems scarcely credible that a single species alone out of hundreds must bear the burden of creative responsibility required for producing technically sophisticated art and writing, yet this is the conclusion that must be reached by anyone who turns a cold eye on the art scenes and publishing industries in every era of every nation, in all civilizations, stretching back into the immemorial reaches of prehistory.

Early records of contact with non-human primates document their failure to exhibit finished art in gallery spaces or fund truly cutting-edge literary journals. Hanno the Navigator, the Carthaginian explorer whose 5th century BCE account of exploring the West African coast remains the only notable example of Punic literature, wrote of landing on an island inhabited by hairy creatures referred to as gorillai. Hanno remarks that “the gorillai did not seem interested in a truly competitive publishing scene encompassing various well-defined yet conflicting Aesthetic positions,” and “the gorillai island was as provincial as the gentrified neighborhoods of Manhattan yet its inhabitants did not even attempt the sort of remedial ‘social novels’ about aging white millennial men documenting their conflicted feelings of sexual desire that are known to be produced in the 5 Boroughs.” Hanno attempted to add the gorillai as “friends” on GoodReads but was met with only strange guttural noises of rejection.

Judged by even the most cursory survey of their output—or, properly speaking, lack thereof—non-human primates are social and artistic conservatives. Unlike avant-garde human poets and artists, they are congenitally sincere, forthright, and incapable of dissimulation. They use vocalizations not for charming lies, but to signal immediate threats, alert others to nearby food sources, and address other mundane exigencies. Even their reflexive violence never rises to the level of respectable criminality.

The chimpanzee life plan, as revealed all too clearly by the research of Goodall and others, is a mere variant of the gang warfare model in which a small group breaks off from its fostering elders, fortifies itself, then returns to attack the original group. Lengthy teenage periods of sulky indulgence in 19th century Uranian poetry have yet to be documented by primatologists; and the observable behavior of the so-called ‘lesser apes’ and monkeys has yet to be contradicted by any primary sources: no hidden macaque journals or colobus blogs have been discovered which would modify the prevailing scientific assessment of their activities, including their failure to establish independent journals and presses with a distribution network that would equal even the likes of Valancourt Books.

The strong hands and opposable thumbs of many non-human primates render them capable of MacBook and tablet use, but none have managed to complete even a sparsely-updated Substack account. The primates on Substack are human…all too human. Rhesus monkeys are absent from the discourse.

If we charitably choose to regard non-human primates as ‘differently-abled,’ in the sense of being unable to speak coherently due to their tongue and larynx structures, then we must still conclude that attempts to equip them with a symbolic vocabulary through sign language have been a consistent disaster. 20th century examples of non-human primate ‘achievements’ in hand signing remain embarrassing catastrophes. First in the list of these notable non-events must be Nim Chimpsky the ‘educated’ chimpanzee, recipient of several years of private tutoring in 128 separate hand signs by human primate graduates of the human primate university known as Columbia University. Even under the salutary influence of alcohol and marijuana provided by his educators, Nim’s sentences failed to rise to the level of a participant in a standard MFA program; his ultimate utterance seems to have been:

Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.

Although this stream of consciousness imperative is arguably more impressive than much of what was published under the Alt-Lit heading in the late 00s, Nim’s failure to expand it into a full-length novel or memoir seems proof that the resources lavished on his education went largely to waste. It should be noted too that Nim responded to the ineptitude of the Columbia University staff by physically attacking them instead of filing a lawsuit; this is a recurring theme with the complaint process invariably followed by non-human primates.

An argument could be made that non-human primates simply haven’t endured the requisite personal hardship that would prompt the self-reflection necessary to develop artistic consciousness and pursue sophisticated formal expression. Yet we can point to numerous examples of non-human primates undergoing conditions that would certainly have resulted in punitive memoirs from human writers. We are thinking here of the case of Travis, the chimpanzee who was ‘adopted’ (in the sense of being abducted from his parents and held in the unnatural environment known as Missouri) by human primates. Fed unhealthy food, forced to wear poorly-fitting and terminally unfashionable American clothes, surrounded constantly by intolerable Midwestern provincials, provided only with low quality drugs and cheap alcohol, Travis’s hardship was surely considerable. And yet, instead of visiting lasting infamy on a particularly offensive human acquaintance with a professionally-edited piece of autofiction, Travis ripped her face off. This must be regarded as a triumph of the nearly Presbyterian stolidity and inhuman forbearance that strike us as endemic to the primate set. The excessive and self-defeating modesty of chimpanzees beggars belief, since a human would certainly have taken to print in order to financially recoup the numerous humiliations of prolonged forced exposure to human primate Neo-Passéists.

The overall effect of experiencing non-human primate artistic abstention is to inflate even the most restricted of human creators into Titanic geniuses. The collected poems of Robert Creeley or any of the lesser ranks of the Black Mountain school, however unendurable by conventional standards, seem masterpieces of form and sensibility if compared with what a lemur does when presented with paper. The yawning gulf of more than 55 million years of the primate fossil record can be surmounted in an afternoon by a human teenager with a fanfiction.com account. The geological scale of non-human primate non-achievement surpasses the imagination.

Even if non-human primates must be accepted as artistic and literary non-combatants, their lack of empathy deserves comment. Non-human primates have provided zero aid and zero sympathy to human artists and writers. When an ailing poet needs Venmo funds, non-human primates do nothing. When a visiting scholar needs a couch on which to crash, non-human primates do nothing. When an exhausted artist needs help cleaning up a poorly-attended gallery space, non-human primates do nothing. When an emerging fiction writer needs a brief, favorable review, even from a small journal, non-human primates do nothing. There are no gorilla Guggenheims or primate patrons.

Insensible to the rhetorical axis of attack, non-human primates limit themselves to the conventional ‘fight or flight’ responses to aggression, which means this review of their deficiencies is unlikely to breach their callous and overwhelming indifference. Yet here our censure extends to human primates; we scan the likes of the Paris Review or n+1 in vain for similar critiques. The emerging, so-called ‘Dissident Right’ has given the inactivity of non-human primates a free pass. This is further evidence of the prevailing sentimentality and reduction of the sphere of concern which we term Neo-Passéism.”
— Justin Isis

“The archetypal diet of non-human primates isn’t merely Neo-Passéist but, rather, worse: wannabe Neo-Decadent, all by virtue of never using fire or spices despite being ambiently bombarded with them for millions of years. How else could you ruin eating hearty grubs, vibrant, endangered birds, or even cannibalism? They never brew their own alcohol, only steal what’s rightfully patented by humankind. They’ve not even got the sense to make chewing gum out of treacle. Consider this next time you roll your eyes at a viral TikTok recipe, shirk at one of KingCobraJFS’s ‘food hacks’, or momentarily relapse into tradsgressive-grade culinary racism: OUR COUSINS CAN'T FUCKING COOK.”
— Colby Smith

“Monkeys, apes, chimpanzees, orangutans, baboons…it’s perhaps not too much of a stretch to claim that many humans harbor a warm fondness towards non-human primates (even William S. Burroughs adored lemurs). Or do they? If pop culture is the true looking glass by which we may see society’s social mores reflected back at us in an honest (if funhouse-mirror-distorted) way, then the picture becomes a bit more complicated. Because while one can cite some pop cultural examples of positive representations of NHPs (Curious George, Lancelot Link, Tracy the Gorilla), I think the negatives far outweigh the shining beacons.

Oh, you think I’m joshin’ yas? Well, just to put the spotlight on some of the more negative exemplars of the evil non-human primate trope, in the movie world one is reminded of the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz; the Killer Apes of Zinj in Congo; the monkey working as a spy for the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark'; and, of course, the great King Kong himself. And even when they’re not being depicted as monsters on the silver screen, they’re being portrayed as apocalyptic plague bearers (28 Days Later, Outbreak). Video and computer games often feature non-human primate antagonists: see Donkey Kong, Emperor Andross in the Star Fox series, Coconuts in Sonic the Hedgehog, and the psionic African squirrel monkeys in System Shock 2. In the realm of literature, there’s the murderous orangutan at the heart of Poe’s famous detective story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ the titular cursed and mummified monkey’s paw in W.W. Jacobs’ classic short tale ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ and who can forget Shift, the talking ape who serves as the simian Antichrist figure of C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, that Götterdämmerung of his Narnia series? Meanwhile, in the domain of comics, there’s (just off the top of my head), the Weeping Gorilla of Alan Moore’s Promethea, Gorilla Grodd from The Flash, Monsieur Mallah from Doom Patrol…even Grant Morrison, a writer who has historically been sympathetic to NHPs, has never been averse to using them as villains from time to time (see, for example, Jackanapes from their Batman run), and on paper, their most famous original NHP creation, The Filth’s Dmitri-9, certainly sounds like a total badass, until you read the comic and find out that not only is he a flatulent and scatological potty-mouthed hothead with poor fashion sense (no surprise there: he is, after all, a relic of the Soviet Union), but also that he suffers from a crippling inferiority complex (what with his hatred for Ham, Dana and Enos of the NASA American space program), and on top of all that he ends up getting his ass unceremoniously handed to him by a combination of young street hooligans and a commuter train.

Now, I know what some of you are probably thinking here: ‘Well, James, what about Marcel, Ross Geller’s pet monkey on Friends? Certainly he was a little angel with an unblemished soul, no?’ News flash, Mojumbo: not only was Marcel on the show a sex-crazed menace to society (granted, not on the same level as nipple gorilla Hanabiko, but still) with lousy taste in music to boot (The Tokens? Seriously?), but in real-life even the genial David Schwimmer couldn’t stand them (for Marcel was actually played by two monkeys, both females: tragically, one of them passed away from cancer not too long ago), finding them to be a royal pain in the ass to work with: no doubt the cast breathed a collective sigh of relief when the ornery capuchin was written off the show towards the end of the first season.

Even outside the matrix of pop culture, the non-human primate hardly has an unblemished record, despite their being a popular fixture in the menageries of princes and kings in the days of yore. In the Middle Ages, non-human primates were often seen as symbols of both the Devil and Man’s bestial nature personified, and they were frequently included in the drolleries in the margins of medieval manuscripts, sometimes carrying fruits in their mouths (thus making them allegories of Original Sin, for according to rabbinical lore and certain Talmudic scholars, Adam once had a tail in the likeness of an orangutan), or parodying human actions, for even since the time of antiquity, the monkey had garnered a reputation as an imitator of Man (it was not uncommon for them to be illustrated as doctors, standing by the bedsides of patients and examining jars of urine). Isidore of Seville, the last scholar of the ancient world and patron saint of the Internet, wrote in his landmark Etymologiae that the Greek word for ape, simia, can possibly be traced to the term similitudo, in that monkeys mimic actions they observe (incidentally, in the same text he also advises pregnant women to not gaze at the faces of ‘ugly’ beasts such as the ape or the gorilla, for fear of them then giving birth to an ugly or monstrous child, this being a common medieval superstition). Likewise, in her book Physica, the original Flaming Telepath herself, Hildegard von Bingen, writes, ‘The monkey is hot and, since it is somewhat like a human being, it watches a person and does what he does. It also has the habits of beasts, but is deficient in both natures. Unable to do completely what a man or beast does, it is unstable.’ And the 12^th-century Aberdeen Bestiary states, ‘The ape does not have a tail. The Devil has the form of an ape, with a head but no tail. Although every part of the ape is foul, its rear parts are disgusting and horrid enough.’ On a similar note, in the bestiary chapter of his novel The Cathedral, J.-K. Huysmans observed that Origen Adamantius ascribed both levity and mockery to the monkey.

With that being said, it was not just Christian Medieval Europe that found the moral character of non-human primates seriously wanting. Even some contemporary occultists of the modern era have seen fit to cast shade on our simian friends. Consider the Nightside of Eden, that travel guide to the Kingdom of Infernal Spaces and trans-plutonic voids lurking behind the Qabalistic Tree of Life that was written by the late Typhonian occultist Kenneth Grant in the late 1970s. When discussing Frater Achad’s Formula of Reversion (the belief that in order to become God man must first regress to the primal state of consciousness), Grant wrote, ‘Many magicians go astray on that backward journey, their consciousness assumes forms of larval life that antedated the human. Then the Ape of Thoth mocks them as they struggle to extricate themselves from a swiftly accelerating reversion of consciousness that finally hurls them into oblivion. Such is the fate peculiar to Adepts who, nurturing their animal propensities while in the abyss, assume the form of beasts without first relinquishing the tendencies of the ego to use for personal ends the powers which these creatures symbolize.’ In this same book, Grant also noted how the ape is the symbol of the Meon/Universe B, how it is a ‘notorious masturbator,’ and also commented on how apes were the outcome of pre-human magical experiments conducted by extra-terrestrials who copulated with primitive women, and thus are ‘cosmic miscegenations’…assuming, that is, one believes in the Berosusian account of Creation (see also the writings of the Pre-Adamite/Rosicrucian/Erotic Alchemist Paschal Beverly Randolph, in particular this passage from his 1896 book Eulis! The History of Love: ‘No one, that I am aware of, contends that monkeys, either large or small, are capable of overriding the billows of Death, and swimming safely to the etheral shores beyond, (they probably deserve that power quite as much as some men do), yet man is, physically, but an improved ape, which fact has a singular proof in this: viz., the higher simia will, and do, inter-breed with the lower human. Proof — the tailed ‘Men’ of Namaqua Land: the dwarf peoples of gorilla-land, and the offspring of Hottentot women captured and impregned by the giant apes of Nigritia’). Also, and to once again touch on the uncomfortable subject of lemurs, mention must be made of the Tunnel of Set presided over by the Shadow-Guardian Gargophias, a domain of ‘lemurian horrors’ in which Grant wrote, ‘The menstrual incense of the 13th kala assumes the forms of lemures. Although most lexicons derive this word ‘from the Latin lemures, pi. spirits of the dead’ the term connotes more than the ghosts of the departed, for the 13^th tunnel is haunted by the ape-like teratomas spawned upon the 12th path which seep into the lunar miasma via the sleep of the virgin. Thus, the description given (in lexicons) of the terrestrial lemur provides a more exact definition: kinds of nocturnal mammal…allied to monkeys.’

Still, unlike some of my brethren, I would disagree that the non-human primate sucks at everything it attempts. In Ancient Egypt, baboons were trained to guard temples and also to help patrol the marketplaces, where they would often apprehend thieves, hence why the Egyptian police and guards of that era referred to themselves as the ‘Forces of Thoth’ (Dr. Tamara L. Siuda, in her exhaustive The Complete Encyclopedia of Egyptian Deities, notes that this association between baboons and authority figures might be one of the reasons why the god Thoth would sometimes assume a baboon form). Also worth highlighting is the god Babi, first-born son of Osiris and the deification of the hamadryas baboon, who (although living on a diet of entrails) had a funerary text spell that could help men enjoy the pleasure of sex in the afterlife.

To wrap things up, what does all this tell us about how human primates view non-human primates? I suppose some might proclaim that any negative view we have of the NHP can be traced to an evolutionary contempt one feels for one’s past form, much in the same manner in which a religious convert hates their prior selves and past life (and no species on Earth has cultivated an infinite capacity for self-contempt and self-hatred quite like the human race has). But I would also argue that perhaps one can detect behind all the vitriol a form of veiled jealousy. The ape, after all, like many creatures, eventually found its genetic state of equilibrium, and was thus content to go no further. Humans, on the other hand, often find this state of contentment difficult to achieve, and can never be happy with what they are, hence a constant striving to continue evolving onwards and upwards; this is one reason why happiness will always elude the Transhumanists and Singularity-fetishists. And so it goes.

Ross: Hey, remember when I had a monkey?

Chandler: Yeah.

Ross: Yeah, what, what was I thinking?

— Friends, ‘The One With The Unagi’”
— James Champagne

art by Dan Heyer