Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

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