Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

The Sex Life of Worms (Episode Five - Dr Jsshloamgs)


Dr. Jsshloamgs – the name holds associations like those of a figure embossed upon the obverse of a coin from such ancient times that coins were still in general use – is the life upon which this life depends as from a silken thread at whose end, all pupal, senseless and limbless, it forms a thrashing sack of striving-to-be. This solitary being, this veritable monolith, is my mentor and my benefactor. I do not hesitate, in my account of sh-him, to dispense with all euphemism and diplomacy. It is not precisely that I have no terror of severing the aforementioned thread. Nor is it that my pipette will automatically tend always towards eulogy. To nuzzle my theme simply, I am somewhere, distantly, but distinctly, aware that in my relation to Dr. Jsshloamgs I am irredeemably a lesser creature. If shi-he should see fit to take exception to my acid dribblings with regard to sh-him, then I can only submit myself to the shredding consequences of sh-his wrath. I must, however, profess my wonder that anyworm could claim offence at a mere inventory of the contents of my mind in which there might happen to exist assorted images of sh-him. Heaped upon this is the consideration, with me quite indignantly strong, that it is stupid and undignified to maintain lies of any kind between worms of intelligence. Let us proceed.

Dr. Jsshloamgs, when not occupied with sh-his duties, resides in a puzzling necrosis of rock cavities within the Haywire Rift. Because of the wild tectonic and other geologic peculiarities of the zone, there obtains there a phenomenon of fuzzy-coloured and rock-crawling lightning which generally discourages worms from making this the place where they coil head tailwards in sleep’s spiral. That lightning is the very reason that Dr. Jsshloamgs installed sh-himself here. Just as many worms frequent the Grottoes of Many-Hued Light in order to immerse themselves in meditations that would otherwise remain unexcited, so shi-he claims that shi-he never knew such crystalline inspiration of mind as when shi-he first encountered the region at a time of unspecified peregrination. Now, it seems, the arc-lightning that crackles almost ceaselessly around sh-his freakish abode has become necessary for the mental clarity and stimulation shi-he requires in sh-his visionary schemes.

There is something indefinably appropriate in sh-his residence here that I might express in these terms: that I feel certain that even before I had ever visited sh-him at home or had any knowledge of that home, that I always seemed to associate Dr. Jsshloamgs with a hoary crack of lightning. Perhaps this is something to do with sh-his shaggy and slime-teasing mane of cilia, for shi-he is of that stage of venerableness at which worms develop such auxiliary appendages in two hood-like, ventral grooves. Or perhaps it is due to sh-his overall bearing of wild and fissured nobility.

Excepting Dr. Jsshloamgs sh-himself, there are few worms who lair in this domain of distorted, molten-shaped and exceedingly sponge-like rock formations who do not have duties connected to the channelling of power from the area, generated by the harnessing of electro-magnetic and kinetic forces, to other parts of the city. Because of the importance of such duties, however, transport to the edge of the zone is tolerably convenient. Thus, Dr. Jsshloamgs habitually returns home by, and I make my occasional visits by, a slime-pod shuttle otherwise used almost exclusively by the workers at the various power plants and those who have business with them.

The time for my appointment had come round and I made, once again, the familiar journey. I crawled from the open lid of my slime-pod when it had achieved a stationary condition at its terminus, and slunk out through the disembarkation archway into the coal-dark, clinker-flinty and seamy tunnel beyond. Through other archways there glue-ily emerged other worms, their luminescence vivid from their recent immersion in slime. They were mere amorphous strangers to me, with flickers of identity here and there in their pigmentation, but otherwise weary as dragging sacks in their third-worm egolessness.

My way was not their way. Many of them turned into wild, bare-rock orifices before we came to the first bridge. It was from the first bridge that the anomalies of the region began. This marked the first chasm, or rather, the edge of the one large chasm in which were closely serried and irregularly streaking splinters of rock making the any divisions of smaller, though still staggeringly deep, abysses. These splinters, like mountains shivered into needles, were also riddled with the faveolate cave-systems mentioned. Since the splinters were subject to movement, the bridges between them were usually resinous and elastic in nature. This resin was also repellent to the lightning that flickered like disporting sting-tails in the abyss and climbed the rockfaces all electric myriapod.

My anonymous companions all having diverged at earlier points, I wriggled on into this semi-wilderness alone. If I had not known the way, I might have done well to follow the flickers of lightning to their point of greatest concentration. One soaring and grandiose deformation of rock gave way to the next, I shuffled over one swaying, sagging bridge after the other, until at last I drew up at the edge of the chasm in which Dr. Jsshloamgs’ lair was set. It is tempting, when viewing that lair from the brink of the chasm, to suppose that the chunk of rock of which it is comprised is held in place by the spokes of the bridges attached to surrounding splinters, for, if these bridges did not exist, that rock would be a perfect floating island in the air. With a freer reign given to the imagination’s frolicking, it seems instead that twisted knot of rock is supported by the phantasmagoria of arc-lightning that breaks forever against its sides in spasmic waves, and this, in fact, is nearer to the truth. For the lightning is only a visible manifestation of the electro-magnetic fields generated by the peculiar formation of rocks here.

I shuddered forward, launching myself over the precipice and across the resinous bridge, like an uneven rope of mucus. My senses seemed to sag in all directions as I did, so that all directions were a dizzy, plunging down. And while still on the most tenuous course of this swaying, I caught in the prickling of my antennae certain articulations at once distinct from the sizzle of the aurora and in solemn harmony with it. It was the voice of my mentor, as centreless and manifold as the sound of flames, if only the corrosion of flames had been damper. Shi-he was engaged in branding the air with a recital from the Exhortation section of The Grand Philosopharch’s Analects.

“We who have forsaken the deep waters in forgetfulness. We who have wheezed and flopped down millennia, heads half-raised, half-bowed in the vapours of the rock-wreathed air!

“Observe – these tunnels inward lead and back unto themselves. Observe – inward is the way of our exploring. For what is ever inward may forever strive and build without collapse…”



The spume of electric waves spangled the air about as those waves broke upon the bellying bridge, a shattering, a reaching up and out, and a falling away into nothingness. As Dr. Jsshloamgs reached the point in the Exhortations about striving without collapse, I gained the threshold of the rocky portal, which seemed the entrance to the centre of the warped vortex of gravity that obtained in that place. The interior of Dr. Jsshloamgs’ dwelling was redolent with a darkness made for feelers, like a pall, with curling through it a tincture of smoke from an odour-lamp now burning. The moment I quivered over the threshold, shi-he turned to the entrance from the scroll in sh-his tentacles, and, as if still deeply absorbed in sh-his recitation, uttered the words:

“What thing is this from unknown caverns creeps?”

I lowered all my appendages.

“No thing without appointment.”

Shi-he regarded me some while in silence, only ambiguous, purring marsh-fires of cyan, mauve and gentian in sh-his pigmentation, until I quite believed sh-his last words had been no affectation.

“The appointment, I remember,” said Dr, Jsshloamgs, “Its spawn escapes conjecture.”

“It is a very simple matter that I come about. I merely request a renewal of your seal, since the last one is due to expire.”

“Your speech betrays you and exemplifies the problem, whether sly or involuntary. I know why you’re here, even if you sport ignorance. Someworm at a fungi bar called The Colony trying to besmirch my name by using me as a guarantor. Someworm bearing your seal. You apprehend, a seal is not a simple thing at all. Everything hangs on a seal, as you should know.”

These words at once distressed and encouraged me. Distressed, because it seemed that, after all, some deep thing was taking place. Encouraged, because these words suggested that Dr Jsshloamgs would now turn sh-his powers of cerebration to the subject and might even be able to apprise me of its nature.

“Do you still compose odours?” asked Dr Jsshloamgs next.

“Only for my own satisfaction.”

“You will have observed that I have been composing myself. Why don’t you empty the burners and show me how your art has developed?”

“I would not presume to interrupt your evocative concoction.”

“Odours are ever ephemeral… One must not care too much to prolong them. Our discussion requires you to compose a new odour.”

I felt disinclined to compose before my mentor, but it appeared I had no choice. I slithered over to where the odour lamp burned, extracted the receptacles from their positions above the flames and emptied them of their current contents. Upon the floor were arranged the materials my mentor had recently been using to compose with – the usual dried humus, fungi, roots and so on.

“Use any ingredients that you find.”

Shi-he was referring, I thought, not only to the specially prepared materials, but to the lichens, slime-weeds and other growths that shi-he had artfully cultivated on the walls of the chamber. Unsure of my own mood, I did not know where to begin. For a tufted dehiscence of moments, my senses oscillated about the cranny-like details of that chamber as if for inspiration. I followed the calcified ramp that spiralled around the walls to the upper chambers, but my senses only became lost in this galaxy of ventricular caves like translucently albino bats. With my senses scattered in this way I laid my tentacles upon a sheaf of dried beetle-spray agaric to use as my stock for the odour. I bent before the odour lamp and filled the receptacle of the lowest burner, swinging it back into position above the flame on the hinged arm. I began my selection of other materials, all the while in sidelong, radar-like observation of my old teacher.



Shi-he had now laid down the scroll from which shi-he had been reciting, and it rolled amidst others scattered on the floor in solemn disarray like the ransacked library of Time. Shi-he seemed poised as if for an address. The glow from the ever-dancing web of lightning outside flickered on sh-his skin, showing where it had become dry and scabrous with age, where unguent had been liberally applied, and where it was flaking off in scales. I savoured all this in silence. At last shi-he spoke.

“What is the progress of your writing?”

“At present my writing is in limbo. I have written, and I think I shall again. All I have written so far seems like a brood of unfertilised eggs. It is there. It exists, but it seems to have no issue in the world. I have had no requests from journals of late, either.”

“And since when have requests fallen off?”

“I understand what you are nuzzling, but can the publication of Acid Meditations have had such a repellent effect?”

“We worms are curious about hybrid and exotic things, and introduce them to the twisting caverns where we dwell. But if we are not careful, even the whorlskin tree that we have trained to darkness may find itself restricted and heave its limbs askew beneath a low cave roof. Do you regret your choice of occupation?”

“I am not sure I understand what you mean by ‘regret’.”

These words for me were one with an aerial, choking sensation. Carefully I picked up a poisonous-white little sheaf of dried axolotl weed and placed some of it in one of the receptacles.

“You could have sloughed your way to the position of Philosopharch.”

“I could have, if the higher academy had not detected signs of philosophical corruption in my compositions. That is not a matter of choice.”

“But do you regret it?”

“Since I cannot control it, what use is it to regret?”

“Your pipette has left a trail behind it, and one that is interesting, if disturbing, to trace. I have known that trail since close to its inception. I have read your letters when they were in gestation. They swelled confidently into philosophical compositions, but there they were turned aside. They veered off, whether by reaction or predestination, into your ambient pieces, from which slimepit of glistening and inchoate corruption, there finally emerged Acid Meditations. It is all one trail. Your existence at the moment consists of the two unbalanced elements of this malformed, lumbering, but brilliantly-coloured thing that is your writing, and your lowly position at the seal office. Such disequilibrium is not good, especially when the large and lumbering half of it is the half so tousled with corruption.

“What is repellent in Acid Meditations is not corruption itself so much; it is what that work is a corruption of. You have confounded philosophy with art, or vice versa, and arrived at a treacherous compound.”

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The Sex Life of Worms Episodes 1a,1b,1c, 2, 3 and 4.