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.