Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

The Sex Life of Worms (Episode Four - A Jiggle of Mould)

In that place, gazing at the gills of the hogspawn toadstool, those delicate orange ribs whose shadows held a million spores, I was aware of other times and other places. I was taken back to the age of Gymsmuhl, who was before Yqstlss, though I did not know these names. In orange darkness Gymsmuhl inscribed sh-his words akin to fungi, kindling a little more of the glow-worm light of self – enough illumination to crawl through the tunnels of thought and interact with others as individuals only.

At the academy was a master who collected microdilia. Was it a test, an amusement, that occasion? A mollusc shell chased with benthic arabesques and gummed tight shut. Unsealed and it disclosed a trove of sensual treasures, that, until told, I did not guess was food. Whorled and crinkly sponges, gem-shining roe, balls of paste-like substance, jelly helixes, unfamiliar weeds and embryonic unidentifiables, all preserved in a nacreous milky fluid. The master bade me eat. But it was not like eating at all. An aquamarine salty-sweetness peppered with the incense of an antiquity that belonged to a far and wholly separate history. A burgeoning thirst which made me eager for more. Textures and shapes both exquisite and seemingly indigestible, like swallowing geometric diagrams made jelly. These things slip through.



Did I dream of undersea microdile civilisations, of monarchs quick and deadly in their sinuous water-squirming as wild centipedes, with gills and frills streaming like silken banners along their length? Did I glimpse in my imagination their weed-girded gardens of pearl? Did I wonder about the realms of upper air, where all wormkind is naked and lost? And at the cold stone pews of examination, did the sheer stone before me provide an inkling of the chasm of eternity and inaccessible worlds therein, ancient and dizzy in their otherness?

After all, I am purple-sick.

A glistening hatchling beaded with curling pearl reflections in skin-saliva and threaded with my own feebleness, trembling amidst the fixities of this age. Superior genes resting precariously on oblivion. Even flat surfaces spin with nausea. Perhaps flat surfaces most of all. The enigma of time and growth. Outspread scrolls and documents form a pavement, pile up like rock strata. I crawled into this, receiving name. The dizzy clockwork of the academy hard and sharp all around while in courtyard gardens grew the fungi of antiquity. My pipette excelled like vertigo. My ambient pieces were placed in the steamrollered journals of time. The critics polished off their notices with lip-smacking lyrical flourishes praising the slime-kiss of my acid-trail. My pipette, without credentials, was outstanding. Accumulating articles. Spinning my own mantle.

What happened?

Qsshflrrch, author of Acid Meditations. The tip of my pipette like a tender, burrowing head, eating away the curving letters on the scrolls, as worms first ate away the stone to excavate a city. Letters themselves like tiny curling worms, eaten away into nacreous oblivion. An anatomy of tunnels and the worms therein. Peeling back the flaps of skin. Extracting the organs like the fungal shrubs of an ornamental garden. Here where the tunnel curves, I am pulverised. Purple veins smeared into rock, coated with a sickly, spittle light. A blight in the reviews that spread like spores. The pipette of an uncredentialed master – philosophically corrupt.

Beneath the solar crack, wasting like a sun in darkness. Billowing flares, nebula-coloured tracery of gills, pendulums of fire which circumscribe the bubble limits of this floating eternity. There is a trickling away, a closing in. Sealed forever in the unstable moment. The bubble elapses and leaves the residue of me behind. Continuously stranded. There is a shifting and a running out. This breathing is paralysis and escape. Alone is an eroding island. Space debris, the ghosts of flaking skin. A chain of bubbles made by time and respiration. These links are heavy. I trace letters in the ever-collapsing, a bridge I build as I cross upon it, falling away behind. This is the inner-sanctum of my writing. Is this quiet, empty place out of bounds? There is a stipple of outer light on the tunnel wall.

*****

Refused service at a fungi bar – is this too literary for you? (You can imagine me in a dusty hologram with my tentacles protruding from my mantle in twisted bunches like comets’ tails.) The massy pendulum of fate, that I should like to describe as worm-eaten, had swung again, this time doubling me up with a winding blow.

I sought to console myself with solitude, outside the bounds of time and duty, but could not remain forever in that slippery, shifting abeyance. Instead I had to return to the slippery, shifting pyramid of worm society. In true literary style – how painful! How delicate! – as if composing an inscription, I took stock of my situation and proceeded with emergency measures. The first of these was to stop by a little potato-hole of a dried-fungi shop close to my apartments and buy up as much in the way of provisions as possible in a single transaction. Next I put in a call for an appointment with my mentor, Dr Jsshloamgs. I also took certain measures in the form of contingency planning and mental preparation.

My work-shift was on the ennead time track and there was still some leisure remaining to me. In a swaying stupor, the centre of a looped vibration, I revolved upon the unprecedented thing that had taken place. Nothing but the dripping of the unsculpted apartment walls. I say unprecedented, but perhaps not unsignposted. Yes, now that the matter had congealed about me I saw that lesser clots of ambiguity had been floating about in time’s arteries before. There had been times, cloudy in my recollection, when worms of one calling or another had examined my seal book and their antennae had curled as at something fiercely putrid, puzzling, or both. Technically, there was nothing wrong with my book. I knew this. I was thoroughly conversant with the rules. And knowing what I could in theory get away with, I liked to keep my seal book as neat, which is to say, as empty, as possible. How I relished those blank, shiny pages! I had no stomach for actively seeking out patrons and guarantors. And I mistakenly assumed that in a society with few absolute rules, worms would take a rather passive attitude to prosecuting the theoretically elastic rules that otherwise abound. I thought that a benefit-of-the-doubt principle would come into play, meaning that I was left to my own devices, was allowed to pass without let or hindrance, as long as I did nothing actually to snap the elastic. Now it seemed my personal fastidiousness in keeping my seal-book free of unnecessary clutter had caused a social anomaly to arise. Something in the hydra-like way this anomaly undulated its tentacles gave me pause of a most septic nature. Perhaps it was not merely the guillotine swish of my neatness. Perhaps there was something else.

As if the guillotine of my neatness had rebounded upon me, I was sliced in two, and the unknown something tickled about my feelers like transmissions from the farthest corners of the universe. I immersed myself for some gelatinous duration in the slime pit, suspended slow and clammy-unctuous as exfoliation. I had not changed the slime in the pit since my last major discharge, some separated-by-shadow ago, and it was marbled by all manner of cloudiness. In that stagnant and rock-enwombed amnion, my senses, without distinction between them, identified themselves with a white streaking like a jiggle of mould gelled into stillness. At great length I emerged, then re-submerged, repeating this procedure a number of times.