Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

The Sex Life of Worms (Epidsode Two: Distracted by Deformity)


The Sex Life of Worms

(Or “Purple”)

Scroll the First.

Purple, I say. (Slurping, shuddering.) I needed purple. I had that feeling in my gills again. The light and the air had awakened my nerves to nauseous fancies. Purple, I slabber. Deep. Dark. Putrid puce. Rippling, squirming. Not pink. Not white. Not magenta, cyan, glaucous grey, saffron or icterus. I had exhausted all these, and now, from the constellation of unknown, eclectic points on which my conscious existence hung, there was sent forth the decree to my flesh. This time it had to be the thrashing corruption of purple again.

I was rearing my head promenadingly towards the empty lectern of knowledge in The Hall of Philosophy – where-else? – that august assemblage of chambers that does homage to the worm body and the thought that has arisen therefrom, with its mirrored ducts of light above, bringing us reflections of the outer sky, and its crystalline floor beneath, revealing the earth’s yawning depths – and had come to rest before the memorial of Yqstlss, The Grand Philosopharch. I plumed upright towards shi-he, and shi-he plumed downwards towards I. Consciousness awakes in this moment, finished and opaque as a monument. And for an instant it seemed all consciousness was encapsulated by this two-worm tableau. For a while I wondered if shi-he were aware of me. Since it seemed that all this would not exist without sh-him, surely this was a reasonable notion. I, up-reared, proudly-gilled and riddled with the cancer of my own philosophy, wanted sh-him to know my presence. But shi-he was stone-blind in eternity. I was not rearing before a statue, but the template for a whole civilisation. It was I that did not exist. This galled me. I needed an antidote. Dejected and long soul-starved, now there came upon me the shivering craving for purple.



I let my sense roam past the sundry-coloured effigy to the chamber beyond, the largest of its kind in The Hall of Philosophy, both reading room and reliquary, where the wisdom of Yqstlss, though infinite, took solid, finite form. There were contained – aside from such revered fragments of Yqstlss’ life as sh-his pipette and seal – the Analects and Philosophies, the commentaries on the Philosophies, the commentaries on the commentaries, and the commentaries on the commentaries on the commentaries. Consciousness a tentacle attempting to grasp itself thus becomes a knot. None of this recognised the unnatural hunger in me. Shadows of decay gathered around relics, like skins cast-off, rejected.

I began to swivel my head, casing invisible and nameless opportunities. Around me in the hall there drifted to and fro like luminous gaseous clouds, the disparate existences of other worms, their motivations and their destinations closed to me, perhaps to each other also. All of them, it seemed, sought something in this lofty-roofed cavern, this architectural affirmation and superimposition (of what upon what?). I was drawn to the empty patches between their interweaving. I recalled, with what lancing nostalgia, my cadet years, when truancy seemed a straying into the uncrawled ways of death from which we had all so narrowly escaped by being each selected from the dross of our respective broods. What did death mean to the fragments of worm life that passed me now? These disparate fragments?

Perhaps it was due to these thoughts that my senses latched onto one worm in particular. How shi-he had escaped culling I could not say, for shi-he was clearly a very inferior specimen. Sh-his slime trail was oozily excessive, shi-his pigmentation oddly frozen in places, and sh-his wriggle containing somewhere a lameness as of dead tissue. Perhaps sheer mental excellence had saved sh-him from an acidic fate. An exquisite cold feeling flushed through me when I took in the pathetic appearance of this individual. I noted that shi-he was about to exit the hall. A there-and-then-ish mood took me, and, following in sh-his trail, I made my escape from that place of outwardness.

I wonder if shi-he had felt the shadow of the unknown thing about to descend upon sh-him. Something in sh-his movements suggested a blind, larval recoiling, a rubbery flinching. Perhaps sh-his unlucky genes, having programmed sh-him for a life of furtiveness, and functioning as a biologic and causal clock, now set off an alarm telling sh-him that the moment all this furtiveness anticipated was hard by. I judged that shi-he had never been a male, and, quite probably, never a female. In other words, shi-he was easy prey. For reasons I will never know, shi-he soon turned from the main thoroughfare to a side-burrow of the early Yqstlss era. I reckoned this a fatalistic move.

As I pursued my quarry, I deliberately wallowed in the slime shi-he had left behind, bathing my skin with the vomit-tang of sh-his disorder. I was in pursuit of a question, a stinking slime trail of a question, leading me, perhaps, to the brink of acid extinction. Was that the reason why, in my predatory slithering, I was as furtive as shi-he? On such occasions all worms are apt to be a little furtive. This silent stalking remains, not condoned, but not condemned, in the realms of the impregnably private. A survival of the times before Yqstlss put dos and don’ts methodically into words, it is necessarily silent. Some would have it that it is our much vaunted individuality that ensures this primal contest remains inviolate. Perhaps so. But I venture to suggest the fact that few in this age, or ever, would actually volunteer pregnancy, is not altogether irrelevant. In any case, it is to this charmed open season, this original struggle, this silence, that I first had to put my question, and because of the nature of that question, perhaps I was even more furtive than worms are wont to be when stalking.




The tunnel was something of a discovery for me. It must have been excavated just at the time when Ffsqrmm had inherited a dearly bought, draconian peace from Zjrooshll. One could almost feel the decimation upon which such sedate extravagance was founded. The fantastic idealisation of natural cave formation characteristic of the age had perhaps reached its apogee here. As I crawled through those artificial twists and whorls, I felt I was crawling through the loops of history itself, in which each age is a kind of fleeting dementia collapsing into the next and never quite attaining that glory, that stability and that wisdom towards which the broad sweep of history seems to gesture.

Yes, my strange quarry was leading me into the shadowy heart of history. We were in history, and I felt all history’s romance and longing. Once or twice lone strangers passed us, crawling in the opposite direction, and seemed stranger still for the fact that they slithered through the private zone of my stalking. My darling prey’s lameness seemed to set the pattern for a ritual, or the rules of a game. It was simple, yet elegant and profound. The morbid little snags and hitches in sh-his wriggle meant that I drew closer and closer the deeper shi-he led me. We were converging on the same point at different speeds, destined to arrive at the same moment.

It was at a layered slope leading to a dark narrowing of the tunnel that the moment zoomed in on us. We had both entered the circle of a deadly certainty. All the appendages of my prey stood starkly on end in rising hackles of panic, except where that sickliness had wilted them permanently. Waves of pigmentation ran up and down sh-his body in silent, screaming currents of alarm, these, too, deadened around the areas of pigment stagnation. Shi-he appeared as if reduced to such a primitive level of biologic confusion that shi-he might actually change form on the spot. Was this sexual muteness a sign that shi-he had never learned the language? Was it, instead, evidence that there were many others like myself who saw something in the idea of easy meat, and who had defeated and used this creature according to their various whims? Or, the idea crept up on me seductively, was there something new and nameless in my particular approach? For me it was shi-he who was the mirror and thus the embodiment of this namelessness, and, wasting no more time, I embraced sh-him with glee.




There followed briefly a kaleidoscopic tumble of appendages as we grappled, and in the messy tangle that ensued, my head seemed to lose its authority as the seat of consciousness, and all body parts became equal in biologic anarchy, till I was hardly even able to distinguish the native body parts from the foreign. With this limp creature for an adversary, my expertise seemed consummate. Swiftly and with grim assertion I aligned my male pore with sh-his clitellar region and the foetid spermathecae clustered there. Just as a violent flurry is followed by lethal stillness when some venomous-fanged thing falls upon its victim, so that first tussle was followed by stillness now, my grip fang-like, my caresses poisonous, with only the occasional twitch and feeble straining from my prey to show that shi-he still lived, succumbing slowly to my poison. We had fallen into a bed of green-cratered puffballs, and now they sent a swirling billow of spores into the air. The spores, dizzy and directionless, caught the phosphorescence of the multi-coloured fungi that sprouted in myriad profusion, like a sunken coral reef, all around. In that slow, achromatic blizzard I sensed again the whirl of history, mad and romantic, at whose centre we now sprawled. But my senses were withdrawing from such external things and becoming absorbed in our two bodies. Envelopes of slime had been secreted over out genital segments and now fastened us together. The mucus of my prey was runnier and more copious than is usual in such copulation, forming gooey threads which dangled to the ground. The taste of this slime on my skin was overwhelming. It was the curdled taste of whatever morbid condition it was that afflicted this unfortunate worm.

Even this pathetic specimen was possessed of enough instinct to try and arouse my clitellar region in the hope that my spermathecal apertures would expand receptively. But sh-his ministrations were far too weak to be effective. The battle was already decided. Even before the seeds were sown, I was already he, my prey was already she. My mounting ecstasy had a thoroughly male tenor to it, so that my spermathecal apertures remained closed to any sperm that might come their way. My prey, on the other hand, could no longer control her squirming body’s reactions. She was, despite her crippled condition, from head to tail a quivering, quim-skinned slut. She oozed a variety of noisome fluids and her apertures opened swellingly, like sea anemones, releasing as they did so gangrenous stenches the like of which I had never known. I felt I could not clutch this thing tightly enough. My setae extended from their follicles, puncturing her skin with their grip, so that ichor was added to the many fluids already flowing.

While we were thus engaged I was dimly aware of the passage of two other worms. Possibly there were more. But my furtiveness was forgotten and I was anyway quite incapable of taking note of their reactions to our indiscretion. My gills were beginning to iridesce and my nervous system was as if thrown into delicate, sensitive relief upon the blank nowhere-screen of mind. I felt the ticklish fermentation in my sperm funnel as the cilia there swept the spermatozoa into my vas efferens like so many high tide barnacles. The muscles of my seminal groove began to contract spontaneously in slow waves with that familiar syringe-plunger sensation inside. Finally, the first droplets reached the rapturous penultimate of my vas deferens. And then… the whoosh of silence, the falling off into nothing. The sperm was no longer a part of me. It had passed into her spermathecal openings. I charged one opening after another with my load until none were left empty. What satisfaction! To merely let something go and know that it will have such potency. What strange satisfaction – like crawling to a safe distance after priming a device and watching an explosion that fills a chamber. But this was a silent explosion.

What does this satisfaction mean? This is one of the questions along my way, and one that must be asked. What am I connected with? If we are to understand our own worm psyche and civilisation at all, it will probably be by examining this empty, abstract, post-orgasmic satisfaction.

I detached myself slurpily from my erstwhile mate. She lay punctured and oozing on the ground, her only movements an obscene shrinking and swelling. She. I sensed this object was quite definitely she now, not merely in role, but in biologic fact. The fecund swelling was her she-ness; her male half had shrunk down almost to nothing.

The Dark Nights are Drawing In

Another excerpt from my paper and pen diary:



21st Sep, 2004

Have started wearing my coat to go outside. It is definitely autumn.

Every time I read some more of The End of Nature, I fall into a terrible black mood. Today has been the same.

It also seems to me that I will never be published by a major publisher. In a sense reading the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook is just as depressing as The End of Nature. I seem to recall someone describing Burroughs as the last true writer; all that is left for us now are the career writers. Well, there are real writers left, it’s just that no one publishes them anymore. Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, and other publications of its ilk, are now unashamedly geared towards the sickening crew of smug careerists.

All my dreams have come to nothing. I am growing old alone in a world that is ending. What is this if it is not a nightmare?

How can I care about anything now? I look out of my window at a cold and darkening world. No one comes to visit. The day ends soundlessly, and I am tired.

Death – yes, walking along by the river today I longed for death; the death of the ego that we are told is the end of suffering. What do I have left to lose? I am ready, but it does not come. No, I still have my life to live.

Alone by the window with my thoughts… At least I should let my thoughts run free. There is nothing else for me in the time I have been given. And if no one comes to keep me company, at least it means that no one will trouble themselves if my thoughts stray too far. I have only my own thoughts to answer to.

And if the darkness outside my window seems especially terrible, it is because, even in such quiet there is death. Nothing much is happening, but death is just beyond the glass. ‘Nothing much’ begins to assume its own kind of terror when you realise that is all that stands between you and death. Nothing much – my life this evening and all my life will ever be. But one day death will come. At least death will embrace me. At least death will deign to come into my heart.

A, Like, Totally Unnecessary Announcement, Man

.... As D.R. out of D.R. & Quinch might have said.



Just as a sufferer from Tourette’s is unable to keep from uttering obscenities, so it seems I am unable to keep myself from mentioning, in this blog and elsewhere, the fact that I am a writer. I have the feeling it must sound terribly self-important, and I’m rather embarrassed about it. I’ve no idea why it should sound self-important, though. If, for instance, I simply mentioned the fact that I was a quantity surveyor, would that be self-important? (I’m not, by the way). It’s possible that in such an instance, because the role of quantity surveyor would represent my occupation, it would seem less like information I had simply volunteered. We are, after all, defined by what people pay us money to do. However, if we examine the question further and look at people’s hobbies, it still wouldn’t sound self-important to describe oneself as an ornithologist or a philatelist, even though people are rarely paid for these activities. So why on Earth should it sound self-important for me to describe myself as a writer? Is it just me, or is there some cultural reason for this?

Anyway, since I have been using this blog partly to promote myself as, ahem, A Writer (pauses to polish fingernails on lapel), I suppose I shouldn’t really feel embarrassed about it. I say ‘partly’; I also use this blog as a means of relaxing and releasing stress, much in the manner that you might keep a scrapbook. Because of this second motive in the keeping of this blog, I think I have tended to be slap-dash in the way I make my entries. There is also the problem of time. I tend to toss these entries off left-handedly and slap them up on the Internet without so much as a proofread. However, if I am going to give myself out as… A Writer, I think I need to sharpen up my act a bit, and at least iron out speeeeling mistooks and errors in the grammars and so on before I let these little doodlings see the light of day. I do think it makes a difference. Just look at Momus’ blog, or that of Jonathon Delacour. Not a typo in sight. Damn, I admire that!

Furthermore, since, like Ignatius J. Reilly before me, I am now a working boy, and engaged in the noble calling of copy-editing to earn my living, it at least behoves me to copy-edit my own blasted blog. What kind of message am I sending out if I don’t?

All this is to say that, from now on, I intend to be a little more careful about what I post, which means in turn that, yes, my additions to the Directory of Lost Causes shall be subject to further delays. Bear with me, gentle reader. I shall also be trying to edit out the typos, dead links and so on in archived posts when I get the time, which may be never.

And to celebrate my newfound spirit of self-promotion, I suppose it wouldn’t be a bad idea to post a link here to a recent review of my latest collection.

Mea Culpa

I happen to know that one of my previous posts on this blog – namely, The Second Most Important Thing in Life – has been the cause of some upset. If I had merely offended some war-mongering religious fundamentalist who had accidentally stumbled upon these pages in search of… whatever such people search for on the internet, I suppose I would not mind so much. But on this occasion it seems I have upset someone closer to home (No, not literally).



I don’t intend to say much on the subject here. I certainly don’t intend to defend the post in question. That would suggest that I thought it was ‘right’, and I have never really considered myself to be right. However, since it’s quite possible that I have upset other people close to me with that post, or other posts, I would just like to say, if I have upset you, and you’re keeping quiet about it, I’d rather you told me. Gently, if you can.

While I don’t want to ‘defend’ what I wrote, I would like to post a couple of things here that might offer some partial explanation. The first is a quote from a letter written by Bill Hicks. There is a link to it in the post below with the title, A Virus in Shoes:

The artist always plays to himself, and I believe the audience, seeing that one person can be free to express his thoughts, however strange they may seem, inspires the audience to feel that perhaps they too can freely express their innermost thoughts with impunity, joy and release, and perhaps discover our common bond - unique, yet so similar - with each other.

This philosophy may appear at first to some as selfish - "I play to me and do material that interests and cracks me up." But, you see, I don't feel I'm different from anyone else. The audience is me. I believe we all have the same voice of reason inside us, and that voice is the same in everyone.

In other words, though it may have seemed I was drawing a line between myself and others, and, while I may have accidentally been doing just that, my intention was closer to the intention expressed above.

The next thing I would like to post is something I wrote in reply to a comment left under the post in question. (Being an anal writer, I publish this blog simultaneously on both Blogspot and Opera. I haven’t yet been able to locate the ‘comments’ option on Blogspot, but there is one on Opera. In case you are reading this on Blogspot and were puzzled, that is the explanation). Here is the quote:

Hello Theophilus. Thank you for writing.

I'm not sure I'm trying to solve the problem of self so much as the problem of other, but presumably the same difficulties occur. I'm well aware that what I have written is likely to say more about my own inability to relate to people than it is to say anything about those people. Nonetheless, I didn't think the expression of these feelings was entirely without value. They seem to circle endlessly round in my head, anyway. Embarrassing as they may be, I can't simply deny them.

As yet I have no answer, hardly even a clue, just the intermittent feeling that there is something I must urgently try to communicate.

I hope that some day I will discover that my efforts have meaning for someone.

Autumn Diary

The following is an extract from my actual diary:

13/Sept/2004

Yesterday and today I have felt sure of the signs of approaching autumn. Autumn – inexpressible bliss! Autumn always comes like something long-forgotten, the very home of the heart.

I went out at about one o’clock to buy some shoes and groceries. I went to the shoe shop on the same road as the station. It appeared to be cheaper than the chainstore I visited previously, and now, of course, the shoes I purchased in that place, in a sale, no less, are worn through and useless. They cost me about seventy pounds, if I recall correctly.

This shop was not a chainstore. The proprietor was a foreign gentleman. I could not quite place his accent, but he was certainly European. It seemed like a real shop, not a corporation, and the prices were reasonable, so I purchased a pair of black patent leather shoes for thirty pounds. Since this was almost all the money I had, I paid a brief visit to the bank, and then walked down to the riverside, to try out my new shoes and to catch a breath of early autumn. But, unfortunately, I knew that I had much work to do – the g--- project I have mentioned – and I could not linger. Am I the only person, I wondered, who finds it hard to bear, not to be able to walk along the river bank and dream of coming autumn because of work? I was not born for this. I am too easily overtaken by dreams to be of much use in this world.

On the way back home I popped into Waitrose to buy some mushrooms, a grapefruit, some cheese, some soap, some pasta and some pasta sauce. A gust of cold air followed me in through the automatic doors.

I worked through until about six forty five, at which time I was beginning to feel horribly depressed, as it was becoming clear that it would be impossible to meet the deadline for the project, and it seemed equally clear that full-time work will always be a cause of terrible unhappiness for me, because it does not leave me enough time for my own writing.

Still, there is no other course than simply to do the work that is in front of me.

D— came round and discussed the project, as a result of which I phoned L— and told her I was worried about the deadline. She seemed sympathetic, and I was much relieved. I could feel the tears in my own voice.

Usually I would have immediately sat down to write, but exhausted after the oppression of work and the partial lifting of that oppression, I needed another walk. I took myself along by the river. It was dusk. As I passed Oak Lane Cemetery I smelt a scent I had long forgotten. It was a particular kind of warm smell I had only known to emanate from wet patches of grass in autumn, and was something like the odour of urine. Perhaps it actually was urine. But, in any case, smelling it I felt again autumn’s inexpressible bliss. And what is that bliss? But I’ve already said it’s inexpressible. I associate it with certain things. Autumn has its own smell, and not just that of urine. There’s a particular freshness to the air, a particular blue to the twilight. I associate autumn with softness and gentleness – the softness of dead leaves and warm clothes. The pale blue air makes me think of some French comic book I’ve never read – an old detective story, perhaps. But most of all, I think I regain something of the softness of the child I was. How can I hope to put it into words now, at half past twelve at night? Why should I try?

Yesterday I smelt bonfire smoke on my walk. L— dug out his old cassettes from somewhere. I saw Images by David Bowie among them. I’ve been wanting to hear it again for a long time. So I’ve been listening to it over the past few days. Since when? Yesterday? Two days?

P— sent me a song he’s made with the lyrics I wrote – There’ll Always be a Place For You In My Heart.

Miscellaneous Prayers and Meditations


The Lord’s Prayer:

Our Father, who art in Heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On Earth as it is in Heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom
The power and the glory
For ever and ever
Amen

(From my memory).



From The Upanishads:

Like two golden birds perched on the selfsame tree, intimate friends, the ego and the Self dwell in the same body. The former eats the sweet and sour fruits of the tree of life while the latter looks on in detachment. As long as we think we are the ego, we feel attached and fall into sorrow. But realize that you are the Self, the Lord of life, and you will be freed from sorrow. When you realize that you are the Self, supreme source of light, supreme source of love, you transcend the duality of life and enter into the unitive state.

(Mundada Up. 3:1-3, p. 115; also compare Shvetashvatara Up. 4:6, p. 225)

When identified with the ego, the Self appears other than what it is. It may appear smaller than a hair's breadth. But know the Self to be infinite.

(Shvetashvatara Up. 5:8-9, p. 229)

©1999 by Deb Platt





Jerusalem

Poem lyrics of Jerusalem by William Blake.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.




Lost

Jet trails in the sky
Leave one word behind
A hand bangs into sand a name
And we all understand

Everybody's Lost
But they're pretending they're not
Lost
Oh, Lost

Jet trails in the sky
Leave one thought behind
A hand bangs into sand a name
And we all understand

Everybody's Lost
But they're pretending they're not
Lost
Oh, Lost

So if I see you
And I tell you
How I've watched you
I'm just Lost

So if I see you
And I tell you
I've watched you
Don't make fun of me later
Cause I'm just Lost

If I see you
And I tell you
How I've watched you
Don't make fun of me later
Cause I'm just Lost

If I see you
And I tell you
How I've watched you
Don't make fun of me later
Cause I'm just Lost
Lost Lost Lost Lost Lost Lost

Lyrics by Morrissey




Tao Te Ching

I:

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

II:

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

From The Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell.

A Virus in Shoes


That title is Bill Hicks' description of the human race, and, as I read more and more of another Bill's - Bill McKibben - book about the ecological crisis, I am feeling more and more inclined to agree with it. We are a ridiculous kind of vermin that will wipe ourselves out. Why don't we just call it a day, eh? Look, the human experiment has failed. Let us usher in an age of hysterectomy and vasectomy. Let us bring about a future in which we can calmly watch the human race dwindling to a glorious nothingness. The human race is scum. You don't know what I'm talking about? You don't know what we've done? Let me give you a very small reminder:

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday February 22, 2004
The Observer

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

Senior climatologists, however, believe that their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United States to sign up to global treaties to reduce the rate of climatic change.

A group of eminent UK scientists recently visited the White House to voice their fears over global warming, part of an intensifying drive to get the US to treat the issue seriously. Sources have told The Observer that American officials appeared extremely sensitive about the issue when faced with complaints that America's public stance appeared increasingly out of touch.

One even alleged that the White House had written to complain about some of the comments attributed to Professor Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, after he branded the President's position on the issue as indefensible.

Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove the 'tipping point' in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.

Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office - and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism - said: 'If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.'

Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon's dire warnings could no longer be ignored.

'Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It's going be hard to blow off this sort of document. Its hugely embarrassing. After all, Bush's single highest priority is national defence. The Pentagon is no wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is conservative. If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act. There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,' added Watson.

'You've got a President who says global warming is a hoax, and across the Potomac river you've got a Pentagon preparing for climate wars. It's pretty scary when Bush starts to ignore his own government on this issue,' said Rob Gueterbock of Greenpeace.

Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.

Randall told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. 'This is depressing stuff,' he said. 'It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.'

Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. 'We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,' he said.

'The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable. It seems obvious that cutting the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile.'

So dramatic are the report's scenarios, Watson said, that they may prove vital in the US elections. Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is known to accept climate change as a real problem. Scientists disillusioned with Bush's stance are threatening to make sure Kerry uses the Pentagon report in his campaign.


The fact that Marshall is behind its scathing findings will aid Kerry's cause. Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed 'Yoda' by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is credited with being behind the Department of Defence's push on ballistic-missile defence.

Symons, who left the EPA in protest at political interference, said that the suppression of the report was a further instance of the White House trying to bury evidence of climate change. 'It is yet another example of why this government should stop burying its head in the sand on this issue.'

Symons said the Bush administration's close links to high-powered energy and oil companies was vital in understanding why climate change was received sceptically in the Oval Office. 'This administration is ignoring the evidence in order to placate a handful of large energy and oil companies,' he added.

The Sex Life of Worms (Episode One:Translator's Introduction)

The Sex Life of Worms (Begun Aug.30.2002)


Translator`s Introduction


Having spent upwards of a decade solely in the society of worms, with no human intercourse, I am almost tremblingly afraid that my writing style must have suffered, and feel a lack of confidence – amounting almost to effeteness – in my ability to maintain a scholarly tone in this introduction. However, an introduction must be written, and if I am remiss in my duties to academic convention, I can only plead exceptional circumstances and hope that the reader may forgive me.

It has been some time – a fantastically long and convoluted time during which my life has warped and mutated unrecognisably – since I began to feel jaded with the shameless vanity and anthropocentrism of human literature, and, casting about in my boredom for new drool stimulants, discovered the literature of the Hwraastclllslssshclimn, the worm-like life-forms of the planet Shshlllxnx, more familiar to the reader, perhaps, as Sheesheelynx.

It is close to fifteen years now, fifteen arduous and mind-bending years, since I first arrived in this new world, the daily reality of which is so different to that of our human world that it cannot possibly be imagined by those who have not experienced it. I have sacrificed comfort and companionship in my dedicated pursuit of the extraordinary literature of this annelidan civilization, and as I write this now and think back on the whole garish, goggling venture, I cannot but discover that I am exhausted. I am afraid that the company of worms – as I shall refer to the Hwraastclllslssshclimn from now on – may never be truly pleasant for human beings.

I realise that, in these sensitive times, such a statement, vague, uninsistent and lacking in ideological content as it is, will perhaps seem provocative. This statement is not the result of some rigorously devised philosophy, and by no means the last word on the subject. It is simply an ever-returning feeling, akin to resignation, that prolonged exposure to worm society has brought on in me. Humankind’s tentative contacts with alien beings will inevitably bring many new dimensions to still unresolved issues of racism – or, in this case, species-ism. Happily, worm culture is not hostile to human beings, but there are fundamental biological differences, even before the cultural ones, that cannot be ignored. Up till now humankind has made its case against racism by appealing to our shared humanity. Whatever colour we might be, people are still people and emotions are the same the world over, is the refrain by which we attempt to soothe cultural friction. In the case of alien societies, this argument simply does not apply. (Incidentally, human philosophies of the cosmic unity of all life appear to have no counterpart in worm culture). And what if, for instance, we encounter beings whose biological culture is inherently inimical to our own? What kind of civilization, for example, would spiders construct if they had human intelligence? And would we have any business sending out friendly ambassadors to such a civilisation? If I have anything to propose upon the subject it is only this: that not all life-forms may be reconciled to each other, and that there is something to be said for the idea of keeping a respectful distance. Having said that, I would like to promote understanding where such is possible, and even hope that my translation of worm literature may be a first step towards the mutual understanding of our two cultures, even if such an understanding must include the knowledge of the redundancy, or inadequacy, of the concept of universal love.

But no – after all, I must confess. Out of diplomatic duty I write such words, and as I do I feel deceitful, and the black despair returns. Even such qualified and tentative hope as I offer above represents an ideal that I struggle, and too often fail, to believe in. Before I proceed to the business-like, and hopefully objective, nitty-gritty of this introduction, I must relieve myself of a burden that, for some reason, I cannot help feeling is shameful. When I first arrived, all those years ago, on the planet Shshlllxnx, and commenced my studies here, I felt I had been plunged into a nightmare. I was in no apparent danger. I was not treated cruelly, and worm curiosity alone has been enough to assure me a stable existence here as a guest all this time. And yet it was, and still often is, a nightmare. Sources of difficulty and unease have been beyond number. It took me a great deal of hazardous experiment, often resulting in illnesses with the most bizarre symptoms, and suddenly, unpleasantly altered mental states, before I learnt which foods I could consume without fear. I suffered terribly with a kind of withdrawal from the constant reassurance of human body language and facial expressions. I was confused by the complex, multi-track time-keeping system. I found it near impossible, at first, to make adequate arrangements for my personal hygiene. The list goes on.

But rather than these single, identifiable sources of suffering, it was the entire, all-engulfing environment that brought me out in a cold sweat, that visited me with panic attacks and finally confronted me with madness. It was the complete and hermetically-sealed unfamiliarity of my surroundings. The city of Frfrspfshuul is impressive, bewildering, Daedalian, but I would hesitate to call it beautiful. `Tortuously grotesque`, might come closer to conveying my impression. The fact that the vast bulk of the city is subterranean, and one only rarely gets a glimpse of the outer sky, serves to increase the feeling that this is not so much another world as another dimension, cut off from the rest of the universe entirely. Sometimes I have imagined myself a microbe inhabiting the dripping and lurid inner organs of some infinite and dizzyingly complex life-form whose true nature I will never comprehend. And these organs are also home to zillions of other living creatures, unignorably offensive to my sense of sight, smell, touch… Yes, the city of Frfrspfshuul presents itself to the human senses in the shapes and hues of nightmare.

My residence here has taught me what madness is. It has taught me, conversely, how ultimately local sanity is. It is context alone that assures us of our stable identity – of our place within a culture – context which provides us with our rationalisations for all we think and do. Our cultural and psychological camouflage has evolved that we might blend in with the one insignificant patch of the universe in which our ancestors have made their graves. But to discover insanity we have only to travel a little way across the ever-varying patchwork fabric of the unending universe. Soon enough we find ourselves in the midst of colours where our own hereditary markings do not blend in, but stand out in stark contrast, revealing to us at last that the true nature of the fabric which we traverse is in all places nothing other than insanity.

And so, as I have mentioned, even though my worm hosts have offered me no harm, have, in fact, been almost exemplary in their treatment of me, all things considered, the fact that I have been deprived of all the cultural, psychological and sensual reference points of the context I once knew, has made me prey to the most terrible and nebulous of insecurities. Unable to read the thoughts and motives of the worms in whose midst I am a minority of one, I have brewed up and brooded upon paranoid fantasies – if fantasies they be – so subtle, so complex and so far beyond the scope of my own previous imaginings, that I could not begin to put them into words. I have felt myself suspended in a limbo of mental and spiritual torture, and in all this it has only been a burning devotion to study that has saved me. Indeed, it was not some determination of the will that allowed me to continue my learning – I was propelled into such activity from the instinctive depths of my being as a spiritual imperative. The first fruits of this obsessive activity are the translation which I present here, the proof that, despite all I have said, my struggle goes on. I’m afraid that the English language is not at all suited to the expression of Hwaarstclllslsshclimnean concepts, so that, in a certain sense my purpose in translating this story – to bring non-anthropocentric literature to a human audience – has been thwarted, self-defeating. I can only hope that enough of the spirit of the original remains to intrigue a few readers that, yes, they too might sacrifice comfort and companionship to the study of this remarkable language and so to read this work and others in their original Hwaarstclllslsshclimnean.

The tale I have selected as my virgin translation is a half-discursive, half-impressionistic piece from the pipette of Qsshflrrch, written in a variety of acids and, if one has a chance to peruse a full-colour copy, with an admirably natural nacreous finish. Qsshflrrch is an author who belongs loosely to the Llsthsssqunnnnrl school of writers, perhaps translatable as ‘decadent’ or ‘pessimist’, but closer to ‘ill-intentioned’. Rather than attempting through their work to make some positive contribution to worm society, this group of authors – scattered somewhat over time and physical location – presented an attitude unapologetically anti-social. They simply did not give a damn. They are not necessarily representative of worm culture as a whole, and Qsshflrrch sh-himself is not necessarily representative of this group. However, I hope that after the reader has finished this introduction and the story it accompanies, that he or she will understand why I chose this particular piece as an appropriate introduction to worm literature. I have given this piece the title, The Sex Life of Worms, although the original title may be rendered as ‘Purple’ or perhaps, ‘Puce’.

Before presenting the story itself, I would like to offer a few explanatory words about worm biology and culture in order to aid the reader’s understanding of the text. I do not want this introduction to be longer than the piece it is meant to introduce, so I shall endeavour to keep these explanations to a minimum and hope that they story is translated in such a way that most of it is self-explanatory.


The Biology and Culture of Worms


The city of Frfrspfshuul is situated in a north-west corner of the largest land-mass on the planet Shshlllxnx. It is approximately half the size of Europe and home to some two billion inhabitants. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to describe it as a nation-state than a city, since, aside from a few small and scattered settlements on its outskirts – and perhaps the region known as The Crevices – the cohesion of language, culture and social order that it represents does not extend to any other territories on the planet. There are other races and even other species of worm on the planet, some of them aquatic, but since my own experience is limited to the citizens of Frfrspfshuul, it is to them I refer when I speak of worms.

Although worms have much in common with the life-forms on our own planet belonging to the phylum Annelida, to wit, earthworms and their relatives, they also possess characteristics to be found in coelenterates such as jellyfish and sea anemones, as well as a good many characteristics possessed by neither. Apart from a certain biological similarity, it is mainly due to the fact that Hwaarstclllslssshclimneans are subterranean by nature that we confer on them the convenient designation of ‘worm’.

From prehistoric times worms have sustained themselves largely on the luminous fungi which grow in the caverns and burrows they inhabit. Before there was even such a thing as worm culture or worm consciousness, and before the city of Frfrspfshuul was established, with its many varieties of artificial light, the faint glow of these fungi, each kind with its own particular colour, or subtle shade of colour, must have been so inextricably linked with the very existence of worms that the colours became part of their cellular memory, preceding language. It is no wonder that to this day, colours have a very deep cultural significance to worms. Indeed, although worms possess and largely rely upon a spoken language, they are also capable of communicating through the use of rapidly changing patterns of pigmentation in their skins and gills similar to that observable in cuttlefish on Earth. Although worms possess no apparatus of sight similar to the retinal eye, they have the use of other senses equally sensitive to light, to colour and to the shapes and textures of objects. Sometimes it seems to me as if they can smell colours, feel light, hear shapes – though these analogies are perhaps inadequate or even wholly erroneous.

Acid is another salient item in the inventory of worm culture. Like colour, acid has a deep and multifaceted significance for worms, the roots of which extend into worm biology itself. Although quite capable of making their homes in soil, worms have typically found their ideal habitat in rocky caverns beneath the soil and are equipped with glands secreting a species of acid which eats through rock. In former times, when natural predators were a constant threat, this acid also proved useful as a means of defense. Traditional worm technology has made wide use of an array of acids. Two uses of particular importance in the text of the story are that of the disposal of worm remains in funeral rites or execution, and the use of acid instead of ink for writing. Although not made quite explicit in this piece, Qsshflrrch hints in places at an equation of writing with death, which for sh-him is founded on the associational link of acid.

Because of the use of acid, worm writing usually has a very sensual quality – it literally seems to involve most of the worm senses. Early writings were inscribed on stone, but later worms developed a species of flexible metal on which to write, and later still, a form of plastic. Acid eats into scrolls of these materials, forming letters in a kind of reverse Braille – that is, concave rather than convex. When worms first learn to write, they start simply by forming these shapes. The writing tool – called a pipette – needed for the shapes alone is not much more complex than a pen. A writer of Qsshflrrch’s caliber, however, will use acids of various pigments and finishes to add nuance to sh-his prose. In this case the pipette is a rather more sophisticated instrument, having any number of teats and triggers that the writer will delicately squeeze and tease as shi-he composes. Worms’ appendages are supremely adapted for such intricate work, for instead of hands they possess four very versatile clusters of tentacles.

In worm culture no pursuit is more admirable or more highly valued than that of philosophy. Philosophy is the tool by which a meaning for existence is fabricated, by which progress is steered and by which social stability is maintained, and worms take it as seriously as survival itself. Perhaps, though, the phrase ‘meaning of existence’ is misleading. More accurately, philosophy’s role is to facilitate a constructive attitude and a sense of personal and social fulfillment. This definition of philosophy itself was largely moulded under the tentacles of the philosopharch Yqstlss, who was something of a founder-genitor for the modern state of Frfrspfshuul. Yqstlss was responsible for the twin philosophies of Positivism and Constructivism, both of which terms vary wildly from their human counterparts. Positivism is a means of artificially and intellectually affirming one’s own existence involving an intricate argument, which, despite its self-consciousness, is meant to be compelling and self-perpetuating. Constructivism is the philosophy of applying this individual affirmation to the organisation and continual regulation and evolution of society.

Philosophy stands at the head of worm society. It is not the government, but the assembly known as The Grand Symposium that represents the highest authority. The Grand Symposium is composed primarily of twenty-seven supposedly independent philosophers, or philosopharchs, who have gained their positions by means of a kind of meritocracy. The status of their perpetual philosophical debates are posted regularly for display outside the main debating chamber, somewhat in the manner that the fluctuations of the stock exchange are made public on Earth. This official state philosophy is then put into circulation as the theory upon which all political and scientific practice must be founded. Science and politics seldom have trouble accommodating to these fluctuations in official philosophy since, for the most part, they are exceedingly minor. A single link in a philosophical chain may be debated back and forth for a number of years without any result at the end but the re-affirmation, perhaps in slightly altered terms, of an old and orthodox philosophy.

Needless to say, law too is philosophically based. In fact, law as we know it does not exist. What exists instead are a vast number of philosophical guidelines. Criminals are generally those who are found to be anti-social or even just unpopular. Hidden crime is rare in as much as nothing is a crime until society as a whole recoils from it – a true case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Thus criminals are generally convicted spontaneously when they are seen as a threat to the balance of social order. If there is some doubt as to the guilt of the accused, then this must be dealt with first. But once found guilty, the accused must defend sh-his crime on philosophical grounds in order to avoid the main penalty in worm law – dissolution in acid. If shi-he avoids this fate, shi-he might receive an official warning – something with possibly grave repercussions in worm society – or may even be entirely vindicated. Incidentally, it would be of little avail to try and evade the acid sentence by appealing to the philosophical notion of the sanctity of all worm life, as this is a concept with little or no currency in worm culture.

The majority of philosophical guidelines and taboos prevalent in modern worm society stem directly from The Megadrile Analects of Yqstlss. Indeed, Yqstlss has had an incalculable influence of modern worm life, but since this is an issue dealt with in detail in the text of the story, I will refrain from saying any more on the subject here.


Notes on Translation


A few notes on translation would appear to be in order, so let me deal with them here. There are no words as such in the Hwraastclllslsshclimnean language; what there are instead are fragments of meaning that the speaker, or writer, may string together according to whim, like beads on a string. Since English consists of words with fairly self-contained meanings, it is difficult to translate these fragments of meaning singly. Therefore, even examples may be misleading. Word order in worm language is exceedingly flexible, and this flexibility lends itself both to a kind of creative logic and to a picturesque lyricism. Basic word fragments signifying objects, actions, concepts and so on, are arranged together in the manner that best suits the speaker’s intentions, punctuated here and there by fragments which lend meanings of aspect, tense and so on, or which may designate a concept as a noun or verb or any one of a bewildering array of parts of speech. For instance, the stative verb of Hwraastclllslsshclimnean has no counterpart in English. This is a kind of hybrid of verb and adjective to describe an ongoing state, such as the state of ‘being brown’. Worms typically invent their own words at will from the fragments available to them, and so the idiolect of each worm is quite distinct. Some words, of course, attain a universal usage, but more often than not, words are created to suit the time and situation in which they are spoken. As an example, a worm sentence something like the following, ‘Being brown, being shriveled, you from eaten was the rock from grow food, nature of taste what your sensations in was?’ might be translated into natural English as, ‘How did the (brown, shriveled) fungus that you ate taste?” Even the former version represents a fairly significant modification of the original.

I give this example merely to illustrate something of the difficulties that present themselves to the translator of worm literature, even before taking on philosophical or mystical concepts quite unfamiliar to human beings. It is possible, I think, to reproduce the bare content, at least where it refers to events and objects rather than abstractions, with only a modicum of difficulty. It is frankly impossible to reproduce the style. Nonetheless, my duty as a translator weighing upon me like an absolute imperative, I have tried my hardest to suggest Qsshflrrch’s playful and brilliant assault on logic, sh-his keen sense of juxtaposition, sh-his fusing of logic with lyrical flights of fancy that twist back on themselves like a spiral of mutated DNA. If in the process I have offended against the English language, I hope the reader may sympathise with my reasons for doing so and not think too harshly of the decisions I have made in response to the quite considerable dilemmas that I faced. As always, the translator must choose between a finished product that reads naturally and one that is closer to the spirit of the original. I have not adopted any hard and fast policies on this matter. For instance, where I thought it would most enhance the story to retain some colourful worm idiom, I have done so, and where I judged this tactic would produce results too obscure or inelegant, I have converted worm idiom to English idiom.

One technical matter that may need clarification – all worms are hermaphrodite, being capable of both siring and giving birth to young. For that reason gendered English personal pronouns are highly inappropriate when referring to worms. Worms refer to themselves as ‘this one’ and to a second person as ‘that one’, and, where we would use ‘he’ or ‘she’, use instead a phrase translatable as ‘that other one (which we both know about or which this or that one referred to earlier)’. I decided against using such literal translations, and for a while toyed with the idea of using ‘it’ in place of ‘he’ or ‘she’. I was not happy with this idea, however, as, if anything, it suggests impersonality or asexuality. The method I finally stuck with was the use of the pronoun ‘shi-he’, a phonetic rendering of ‘s/he’. This raised the question of how to deal with passive and possessive pronouns, IE him/her and his/hers. The use of these as is, or phonetically, would be a clumsy mouthful. Therefore, although not entirely in keeping with the logic on which I based ‘shi-he’, I settled on the further pronouns ‘sh-his’ and ‘sh-him’. I hope these devices do not jar too much. Once again, when faced with a dilemma, I was forced to make a difficult decision.

I am aware that there are not a few readers who, when reading translated literature, like to be apprehended of the correct pronunciations of foreign – or alien – words or names that inevitably crop up in the text. In fact, I number myself amongst those readers and sympathise with such a desire. However, since it is quite beyond the bounds of ingenuity and reason to convey worm pronunciation using the written alphabet alone, I shall have to refer readers to recordings of worm speech. For those without access to such recordings, the most I can do is provide some very broad hints as to the general impression worm language upon the human ear. Imagine, if you will, a mouth full of drool. If you can actually achieve this condition, so much the better. Next, lick your lips in imitation of your most grotesque mental image of a lecherous old man. If you can work up enough saliva, and lick and smack your lips with enough of tongue-twisting dementia that you actually feel in danger of choking on your own spit, then you will probably be very close to producing a sound reminiscent of Hwraarstclllslsshclimnean. I am not unaware how undiplomatic this description must sound, but feel that I would have to go to a great deal of effort to phrase it any other way. I hope that it will, at least, provide something for the reader’s imagination to work on.


Finally, I find that I cannot refrain from mentioning the fact that I have had the pleasure – no, perhaps that is the wrong word – the rather disturbing privilege, then, of meeting the author of this work. Perhaps it is not entirely good academic practice to include such personal anecdotes about the author in an introduction such as this, but I hope that, on this occasion, the reader will share my very simple, perhaps even primitive, curiosity about the enigmatic being known as Qsshflrrch.

It was actually Qsshflrrch sh-himself who instigated this meeting. Shi-he, always eager, it seems, to keep tabs on sh-his readership, had learnt that there was a human in Frfrspfshuul who was researching worm literature and, in particular, sh-his own vermicular oeuvre.

I remember with quite lurid, even febrile, distinctness, the day – I use the word ‘day’ out of convenience, since one is seldom conscious of such things as night and day in Frfrspfshuul – when I received the missive from Qsshflrrch. I have heard accounts of subjects in sensory deprivation tanks, severed from the constant input of familiar impressions, drifting into a new world of hallucination. As previously mentioned, I, too, felt myself cut off from all that was familiar. The apartments that were appointed for me as a human guest, in their sealed sterility, often came to seem like my own private sensory deprivation chamber, in which I would frequently have to try my hardest to resist hallucination of a nightmare variety. Hence, when the canister containing the scroll and the message from Qsshlfrrch’s own pipette arrived, it had for me an intrusive hallucinatory quality shared by the whole sequence of events it precipitated.

I am anxious to describe the emotions that the arrival of this communication stirred up in me, but feel from the outset that the task is beyond my powers of language. Firstly, I might say, it was very unusual for me to receive any mail of a personal kind. Back on Earth, the receipt of a letter, on paper or otherwise, was a fairly predictable event and expected to bring in its wake only predictable things, if anything at all. Here, what I felt above all else, was a sense of wonder and mystery. The reasons for my receiving this scroll and the events to which this might lead were utterly beyond my speculation.

I took the scroll from the canister, and even before I had discovered the seal at the bottom, trembled – actually trembled – at the feeling that I knew the author of this message. I had become so intimate with the idiosyncrasies of Qsshflrrch’s acid-trail that my unconscious recognised it before I made the conscious connection. Because the letter was addressed to me, that distinctive trail that was the heart of Qsshflrrch’s literature seemed suddenly alive in a new way. I almost believed the words were aware I was reading them.

This was an invitation to meet from, for want of a better word, a ‘hero’ of long-standing, and, mixed in with all my other emotions was something of the naïve excitement of the fan, as perhaps you can imagine. But the problem lies with the word ‘hero’. Its connotations are far too human. If only there were a single noun to describe my feelings towards this… this fantastic alien figure. I can only hope that my feelings become apparent in the unfolding of this account. In fact, I wish to state my intentions now, for fear of being misunderstood, to relate my impressions and feelings during the whole of this episode with the utmost candour. Perhaps in so doing I shall only succeed in giving a glimpse of the personal psychology of one weak, obsessed and prejudiced man. Or perhaps I shall provide a more useful insight into the inter-cultural ambiguities and ambivalence in which a project such as this translation is spawned.

To return to the scroll and its contents, the letters corroded into its alloy were like a premonition of what was to come. I found the shapes, the texture, the colours, expressive of feelings and thoughts which, though they did not evaporate at second or third glance, were yet too deep and too elusive for me to formulate into words. It was as if the script gave off a kind of foetor. The colours were ripe ordure browns, tainted yellows, mouldy blues and greys, with here and there a sheen of sickly iridescence, all of which was suggestive of a rich decay, like something foul and slick, half-covered with dead leaves. I could only admire the supreme art of the pipette that had produced such profound and sophisticated hues. This was the exotic and grotesque art of Qsshflrrch in which I had lost myself for years. This script was a promise of adventure. But I use the word ‘adventure’ in the same, somewhat distorted way I used the word ‘hero’ before. Just as the letters of that message conveyed a kind of exquisite nausea, so the adventure they promised was tinged with repugnance and dread.

The actual import of the message was very simple. Qsshflrrch apprised me of the fact that shi-he was aware of my studies, expressed sh-his frank curiosity towards those studies, especially where they pertained to sh-his own work, informed me of a time when a meeting would be convenient for sh-him, and provided scrupulously detailed directions on how to reach sh-his abode.

Some of the most common means of transport in the city of Frfrspfshuul are not practicable for human beings, and since Qsshflrrch’s domicile was situated way out near The Crevices – the Frfrspfushuul equivalent of a shanty town – the way was rendered doubly difficult for me. I shall not dwell on the details of my trek. Suffice it to say that this excursion was an eye-opening tour of some of the obscurer parts of the city. Along the way I must have encountered nearly all of the architectural, that is to say, burrowing styles of worm history. I was more than once ambushed by the dawning horror that I was lost in some fairly ghastly places. I had to wait, sweating, like a trapped pot-holer, for passing worm citizens to shuffle my way and study the missive from Qsshflrrch that I kept handy. Towards the end of my expedition, when such passersby grew rare, such a chance encounter seemed to take on a whole different complexion. Of course, I was more or less accustomed to the vicinity of worms in the overcrowded centre of the city, but here in the hinterlands old instincts were reawakened, and I felt as I might had I suddenly come across such beings in an unexplored cave-system back on Earth. By the time I arrived in the locality of Qssflrrch’s apartments, my nerves were very much the worse for wear.

I was to learn later that Qsshflrrch had chosen to reside in an area which, because it was so difficult to defend from worms’ few remaining natural predators, who lurked in the total darkness of further, natural cave systems, had fallen largely into disuse. And, as I stood before the rocky portal that led to Qsshflrrsh’s apartments, I already felt without such knowledge that this was a colder, darker, more desolate part of the city than I was used to. The jagged rockface here presented such a wild aspect, abetted by the clammy air currents, that the suggestion of order beyond the portal made me think not of a dwelling-place, not even a worm’s dwelling place, but rather of a shrine erected in a wasteland. My image of Qsshflrrch was of the urbanite par excellence, and this anchoritic abode was quite out of keeping with my expectations.

I tentatively announced my presence and, after an interval of silence as gaunt and chill as the draught-swept rock floor, was answered by an incoherent whiffling from somewhere within. This was soon followed by a sort of greasy dragging sound portending Qsshflrrch’s appearance in what it transpired was some kind of antechamber. I was mesmerised from the moment I heard that dragging, and when Qsshflrrch sh-himself emerged from the doorway of the inner chamber I was struck dumb by an astonishment for which I cannot properly account. Sh-his pigmentation at that moment was a stunning pattern of white and pink striations that I could not recall ever having seen before. When shi-he apprehended me, shi-he stopped in sh-his tracks, gills bristling like the hood of a startled cobra, and the pink and white striations fluctuating suddenly in rapid waves about the anterior region. For the briefest of moments I forgot both my own identity and that of the creature before me. I seemed suddenly connected with emotions so ancient they transcended atavism, belonging to a time before life forms were identified with the isolated histories of their own planets, to a time that was awesomely intergalactic. My very instincts, human as they were, were confounded.

I do not know what those flashing pigments signified. This is one area of worm communication that is still closed to me, and so still a source of wordless unease. I imagine, though, that just as unnameable feelings had been stirred up in me, so, despite sh-his foreknowledge, Qsshflrrch had, after all, been unprepared for sh-his first encounter with a human being.

After a moment, however, sh-his gills drooped again and the pigments settled into a calmer pattern. Was there embarrassment or some analogous emotion now visible in Qsshflrrch’s demeanor? I could not tell. There followed another pause and then, in slow, squelching syllables, came the following words:

“You are a long way from home, human.”

Qsshflrrch turned away in a slouching manner, almost dejected, and slithered back towards the inner chamber, stopped briefly and added, as if as an afterthought, “You would do well to follow me.”

We passed together through the antechamber, actually a series of connected caves encircling the inner apartments, containing some sparse personal effects, but, without the divisions of doors, seeming little more than an extension of the tunnels through which I had come. The inner chambers were very different. Although they were largely left open, there were actually doors here, of some semi-opaque resinous substance, capable of sliding back into the walls or out again at the press of a touchplate. The room into which Qsshflrrch led me was a cornerless lozenge coated with some kind of metal. Bubbles containing fungi for consumption and other purposes protruded from the walls. Walls, floor and ceiling were decorated with nodular sculptures that reminded me somewhat of patches of brightly coloured vomit, or possibly the innards of some pulverised invertebrate. Perhaps this last association was prompted by the fact that about the room were dotted vessels containing preserved specimens of worm young, dissected or intact. There was the usual worm furniture, which I shall not take the time to explain now – imagine something in the nature, again, of abstract sculptures. I did notice something unusual about this furniture, however. Like the vomit-like objets d’art previously mentioned, this furniture was not only sat upon the floor, but also protruded from the walls and hung from the ceiling. Qsshflrrch was later to explain and even to demonstrate, that this was the result of sh-his own ideas on design, culminating in sh-his collaboration with those bodies in charge of worm gravity technology. This design for a room which was, thanks to the manipulation of gravity, effectively all floor, had won sh-him much acclaim and helped boost sh-his position in society a little. The design was now, apparently, catching on in the city.

Qsshflrrch ensconced sh-himself in the item of furniture I have come to call the toad-stool, because of its resemblance to that fungus. There was another toad-stool opposite shi-him, but since the inverted hoods of these articles are very uncomfortable to me, and generally contain a pool of analeptic – to worms, at least – slime, I declined to seat myself therein. Instead I unfolded the cane-seat which I carried and have found useful when visiting in worm society, and perched myself on top of that.

“Why are you here?”

This slurping whisper opened our conversation. I was perplexed by the question, which seemed to have sneaked up on me from behind.

“I mean that as a question you should ask yourself,” shi-he continued, “Why are you here? Where can you go from here? Do you intend to traverse infinity? We are both here now. It is the meeting of a new angle. I wish to trace the lines of this angle outwards. I am concerned with your consciousness and mine. I have become a passive existence in your first person. Yet I remain my own first person. I am a reflex angle that is its own universe of awareness. There is always a physical line of why to these meetings.”

Recording these words I am reminded again of the frustrations of rendering Worm into English. How elegantly Qsshflrrch had accomplished sh-his metaphorical conjuring trick in sh-his own tongue, yes, as if it were all done with mirrors, and how poor are my own attempts to convey this. But it is bad from for a writer to make excuses in this way. I must simply do my best.
“I suppose I’m here because, well, quite simply, I felt drawn to worm literature.”

“And to my work in particular?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of seed do you find in my work?”

“I think yours is one of the few genuinely dissenting voices in the field of modern worm letters.”

“Ah, deftly nuzzled! I think you understand one half of my work. That is good. You stand amongst worms in a place where they are blind. I feel a touch of anti-gravity in this. But there is something you do not see. Look around you. The shadows curve away in their dark serpentines. You may be in trouble here. Once you step into the serpentines of worm philosophy they start to move and coil and take you with them. I must ask you now, have you ever experienced ‘purple’?”

“Perhaps you don’t know what it’s like to live alone on an alien planet. I believe I have experienced something of comparable depth to ‘purple’. I think I can translate your work.”

“I wonder. It is not just ability. It is readiness to move with the new twists that will come. It is readiness to let go of the positive and float in the incest of shadows.”

We both fell into a chill silence here. Having read much of Qsshflrrch’s work, I was afraid I knew what shi-he was hinting. I was overcome by the lonely feeling that I was being tempted by a devil in a world where no authority exists to say the devil’s words are anything other than reasonable – a dull feeling of being utterly lost. It was at that moment that something happened which was to change the direction of our talk somewhat. As I gazed at the floor, something entered my field of vision, swiftly and noiselessly, that made me shrink back in fear, almost falling off my seat. It had jittered into the apartments like one of the ghastly breaths of air from the uninhabited caves beyond. It was a sickly white myriapod, long-legged, perhaps a foot in diameter and possessing the disconcerting ability to change directions without turning, as if it had no front or back. Such things, I suppose, have withdrawn from the densely populated city centre. It disappeared again soon enough, but left me with an unshakable creeping feeling that travelled from one part of my body to another in horrible shivers.

Qsshflrrch must have noticed my reaction.

“It’s probably harmless. These things pass through. Worms have forgotten the darkness of the wild inner earth. I have always wanted to be at the edge where things become ragged and structures dissolve. Strange that to be on the edge is to return to the most ancient. It is not impossible that I will be eaten here. I need to feel all that emptiness and darkness out there. Since they have been monitoring my behaviour, it is the only way I can find substitutes for ‘purple’ and inspiration for my art. Between wormkind and death there stands detachment. Death is non-existence, therefore it does not exist. It is the interstices of our thoughts, a stranger that makes us strangers to ourselves. If we are to identify with ourselves with sharper focus, first we must make death a presence.”

It was at this point that Qsshflrrch chose to divulge that shi-he had actually perused a certain amount of human literature. Of the works shi-he had read, shi-he had appreciated parts here and there, mostly for their impenetrable strangeness. Shi-he felt that shi-he could not properly understand them, however, perhaps, shi-he added pointedly, because of poor translation. It seems human literature had only ever been translated into worm via some other, non-human language. But there was one quote that shi-he had latched onto. If I was surprised at this quote it was because it was so obvious: To be or not to be, that is the question. Qsshflrrch found this to the most admirable, multi-faceted and resonant phrase in all that shi-he had read. So taken was shi-he with it, that shi-he intended to make it the title of sh-his next work, on a theme largely undealt with in worm literature, to wit, the late topic of sh-his conversation, death.

For a while shi-he grew animated as shi-he spoke, but then, as if sobering from the influence of sh-his own words in disgust, shi-he trailed off in mid-discourse. We entered upon another silence, which I can only describe as mucoid, a silence in which I became intolerably aware of the sour stink of worm, which I should have been used to. Qsshflrrch’s complexion underwent a change. Beneath a sickly white, a dark, sluggish blue deepened. Shi-he swayed almost imperceptibly. This silence was a pit, a membranous ravine of profound and stagnant revulsion. The sides of the ravine were a rubbery jelly that breathed a mucilaginous mist. In ancient times on Earth, four bodily fluids – blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy – were thought to determine one’s health and moods. Now I felt myself sinking slowly and soundlessly in some non-human liquid fouler, darker and more miry still than melancholy’s black bile. I could not break the silence myself, but only wonder when it would end. At last words emerged from the silence like bubbles of gas rising to the surface of a marsh.

“I wonder, is my work of any use to human beings?”

The words seemed infinitely weary.

I sensed that Qsshflrrch was assuming a role that shi-he felt was unnatural.

I frowned, troubled for an answer. The words which finally fell from my mouth seemed to do so almost by default, and I attached little meaning to them, regretted them even before they were spoken.

“Is it of any use to worms?”

At this, the feathery, moth-like antennae on Qsshflrrch’s head, which I had seen alternately as eyes and, rather incongruously, a wispy, Confucian moustache, began to quiver silently, furling and unfurling. I recognised this eerie display as the worm equivalent of laughter.

“Once again we float in space,” shi-he susurrated at length, “This is unwholesomely auspicious. Now I have had a chance to grope your contours I am satisfied. I support your studies and your translation. You may find my protection a besmearing curse, but if you have need of seals mine are at your disposal. In fact, I may draw the greater nourishment from our association. A translation will be neither worm nor human. No doubt from this fusion shall breed confusion. But I find such confusion more admirable than the dull fixations of both our species. I want to witness their heads turn in bewilderment as they wonder what has passed them by.”

We had arrived at this conclusion by a logic – if logic it was – both circuitous and elliptical, and for the moment it was I who was bewildered. Our conversation did not stop there, however, and slowly I came to feel that I too had understood something about our meeting that could not be expressed by any direct means. I determined to employ this understanding in my translation. In fact, it was mainly the translation that we now discussed. Despite sh-his delight at the idea of confusion, Qsshflrrch was strangely solicitous about the accuracy of the translation and suggested I consult sh-him on any doubts and send sh-him annotated drafts which shi-he would endeavour to read. Seeming to consider it of great relevance, Qsshflrrch also spoke of the trial and ostracism shi-he had undergone subsequent to the publication of Falling Into The Crevices, a work mentioned in the text of this story, and of sh-his vindication at that trial and the uneasy re-instatement into society that followed. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Overall, it was a fascinating encounter. Qsshflrrch managed to communicate a quiet and somewhat reflective sense of humour, verging on the dry, that I had not experienced elsewhere in worm company. On the other hand, I was also left with a rather disagreeable aftertaste, like a stink that had got under my skin. I could not say exactly why, but I had the distinct impression that here was a creature capable of any deed. I could understand why other worms were suspicious of sh-him, and why sh-his defence at trial had had to emphasise the separation between life and art whilst also stressing that for the art we also needed the life.

However, I remained impressed, despite myself. This was a remarkable worm who had gone far beyond sh-his fellows in the contemplation of the meaning of individuality and identity, to the extent that sh-his thinking in some ways resembles that of humans. Perhaps that is why I found sh-his work accessible, after all. In any case, I believe that Qsshflrrch’s influence is yet to be calculated. Shi-he may well end up affecting fundamental changes in worm philosophy. It is too soon to tell.

I have said that Qsshflrrch’s work is not necessarily representative of worm culture, but because of its relative accessibility and because it provides a counterpoint to worm orthodoxy, it may actually present the human reader with a clearer view of that orthodoxy and provide a more appropriate introduction to worm literature for humans than the orthodox works themselves.

Of course, it may do more than that. It may draw general worm attention to a previously neutral ambassadorial human presence. Where two cultures with entirely different rules meet, it is hard to know what the outcome will be. But I have been drawn on despite myself. Especially after my meeting with Qsshflrrch, there seemed to be no way forward but to lose myself in ‘purple’. I await the confusion that is Qsshflrrch’s delight and whose agent, or pawn, I am.


Jeremy H. Lofty, Frfrspfshuul, Five hundred and twenty eighth year of Yqstlss

Magical Trevor and Kenya

Well, not much to say. I've been extremely down, and as a result have been reading the Tao Te Ching again. lt does continue to fascinate me, but clearly I've got a long way to go before I can live by the way of 'not-doing'. By the way, there are may, many translations of the Tao Te Ching, but my favourite so far is Stephen Mitchell's.


Anyway, my friend Ross came round today and allowed me to copy Ligotti's The Unholy City, which seems very unlikely to cheer me up.


What does promise to cheer me up for seconds at a time is this great site with lots of cartoons, called Weebl and Jolt or something, for the knowledge of which I am also indebted to Ross. Anyway, here are some of the cartoons I liked. They are Magical Trevor, Kenya, and Kenya (live). You might need Flash in order to play them. Hope they get you in a whimsical mood. The lion in Kenya (live) really does it for me.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I Give You… Worms!

Well, I have come to a decision. I have recently passed the seven hundred page mark with my novel The Sex Life of Worms, and the end is still a long way off. That’s seven hundred hand-written pages, so it will shrink down, but even so, it’s an epic of slime and squelching. I have started word-processing what I have written so far, and I have decided to serialise Worms here on my weblog. There are a number of reasons for this decision.


First of all, this novel looks like taking years to finish, and I’m really not sure that there’s that long left for human civilisation, so I might as well start disseminating this stuff now. Also, I have doubts about everything I write, but I don’t know if I’ve ever had doubts like the ones I’ve had about Worms. This could be a (very) flawed masterpiece. Or it could be a novelty with a few good bits here and there. Or it could be a big heap of worms’ excrement. I would like to test it out a little on the real world.


Another reason I want to serialise it is the simple nostalgia for an age when fiction was serialised and when, it seems, writers could actually make a living. I believe fiction still is serialised in magazines and so on in Japan. I am envious.


Finally, perhaps, I think that this is a piece of work that no publisher will want to touch, or if they did, it would very probably be banned. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were banned, anyway, though that’s neither a hope nor a promise.


Okay, here’s another finally. It’s a way of rewarding – or punishing, depending on your point of view – those people who bother to read my weblog. Because such people are few, I have no fear of being ripped off. Anyway, I might start removing earlier parts of the serial after I’ve got some way into it.


The novel is, of course, first draft, and I would like to point out that it needs a huge amount of revising. There is a lot of redundant material in there, as well as continuity problems, bad writing and so on. But the revision will have to wait until I have actually finished writing and word-processing the whole thing. Anyway, I hope you find something there to enjoy.


Ladies and gentlemen, very soon I shall give you, The Sex Life of Worms! Their nasty tricks are beyond belief! Gasp in wonder at the alien perversities that these invertebrates perpetrate!