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 Gr
