essay

Return Of The Worm

First published in EROS Journal, Issue VII, 2014

NOTE: This text was originally published in EROS Journal, Issue VII: The Interior. A version of it was performed with Pond Scum Light Show and Ash Reid at IMT Gallery London at the request of artist Mark Peter Wright for the event Is It Eating You?

Set in a pastel-hued suburban swingers nest - a faux-roman residence complete with bubbling hot-tub and a tv-set in every room! - the 1986 monster movie Terrorvision imagines the re-unification of a generationally alienated American nuclear family through a goo-laden process of extraterrestrial ingestion. The film begins in the shiny tinfoil confines of a waste disposal unit on the distant planet Pluton, where a facility tasked with the recycling of intergalactic household pets has been charged with the industrial termination of a particularly nasty specimen. When Plutonian sanitation workers eject the pulsating remains of the beast into the cosmic ether, it transpires that by some infernal serendipity an extremely powerful home satellite dish on Earth has mustered the ability to channel the lump of volatile space garbage directly into one unlucky family’s living room. Here, its parts are reconstituted in the manner of a bizarre television signal and we see for the first time the cyclopean magnitude of a gelatinous critter hell-bent on eating every course from the familial menu, from good old gramps to green-haired granddaughter. It does this by reducing its prey to a bubbling ooze, leaving behind only belt buckles and crumpled shoes. Once inside the monster, the family members appear to move freely as part of an interconnected, arterial slime lattice, their hydra-headed form re-materialising now and again to placate and ultimately ensnare relatives who suspect that something untoward may be occurring within the household. While the home-life of this family was blighted by arguments and domestic tensions prior to the alien’s arrival, its members’ newfound intimacy within the creature’s stomach provides a blissful co-existence lubricated with viscous spittle. That the monster is able to traverse the home by way of an enhanced telecommunications network, passing from room to room via data transmission, lends this oddball caper a portentous, atavistic resonance in a milieu of accelerated communication.

Much more than a thoughtless rehash of The Blob (1958), Terrorvision constellates some silly ideas pertaining to the imaginal spaces of ingestion and how these impossible locales - intestinal architectures and their votive habitation - might postulate improbable but compelling instances of post-species connectivity through fantastical projection. This isn’t entirely discordant with the myriad ways in which the guttural tract has been continually re-imagined through human history as a residential interior.

Presently, nothing chills my blood like the irregular report of a fatal shark attack on a daily news feed. Floating alongside coverage of escalating pandemics and corporate misconduct, these sensationally morbid celebrations of our species’ physical vulnerability not only serve to misrepresent and demonise many of the gurning fish bastards in question, but belie a fearful fascination of predation still humming in our contemporary epigenetic make-up.

One case seems to remain with me above all others. On January 13th, 2010, Lloyd Skinner, a 37 year old Zimbabwean tourist was dragged out to sea whilst swimming at Fish Hoek beach, Cape Town, South Africa. Gregg Coppen - a witness, but perhaps more importantly, a twitter user - would practically write many journalists headlines for them when he flamboyantly described the event: ‘Holy shit, that shark was huge, like dinosaur huge’. It wasn't Coppen’s beach blasted hyperbole that resonated most with me however, but the chillingly simple and haunting testimony spoken by a relative watching from the beach: ‘He was there, and then he wasn’t there anymore’.

In my impressionable mind, Skinner was still there. In a way. Embodying a concrete presence within the digestive tract of a particularly well evolved chubbed-up flesh tunnel. When my mind makes those kinds of irreverent leap into a mode of speculative occupation - the last moments of sentience passed in the quivering gut of a subaquatic monster - I’m momentarily forced into a peculiar recognition of my own body, and a renewed sensitivity to the world that envelops it.

Writing in 1930 for the ethnographic journal Documents, the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille would propose a darkly poetic understanding of space. Opposed to the cool mathematics of Cartesian geometry that sought to figure space as a rational construct quantifiable by the distance observed between things, he proffered the hellish image of one fish gobbling another, illustrating his article with a genuinely creepy photograph of a dead-eyed river critter, its gaping maw sucking down the body of a much smaller fish. Bataille characterised space metaphorically as an unruly agent; devouring, consumptive, incarcerating, eventually drawing his poetic reverie inwards, toward an evocation of the human ‘cell’, the evolutionary prison by extension of which we were destined to pursue architecture as a projection of our own image, an elaborate petrification of the human form pre-determined by anthropic constraints.

Now, I’m interested in the myriad ways that we’ve come to envision spaces of digestion, the elaborate techniques through which these acidic, inhospitable territories have been visualised, explored, colonised and made habitable. My own childhood was rich with this imagery, from Methodist Sunday-school retellings of the supposedly benevolent whale that carried the recalcitrant prophet Jonah safely in its stomach to Ninevah, to the technicolor cartoon renditions of a wolf sleeping peacefully in the dappled sunlight of an overarching tree, his stomach sliced open to reveal the seven still live goats he’d eaten some hours previously in a macabre tale originally collected by the Brother’s Grimm in the 19th century.

Our folklore is saturated with instances of symbolic cannibalism, and our understanding of the metaphorical implications of digestion take a more complex turn through stories of intergenerational consumption. Marina Warner writes of the ‘unholy combination of infanticide and cannibalism’ as a ‘divine prerogative of the patriarch’, the jealous father seeking to suppress the usurping potency of his offspring. Citing Hesiod’s Theogeny, a poem that recounts the origin myths of the Olympian deities, Warner retells the story of Kronos, chief of the gods, who, after hearing that one of his children will supplant him, devours them one by one. Zeus alone is able to survive due to the ingenuity of his mother Rhea, who fools Kronos into eating a giant appetite-quelling stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. Here we find all of the tensions of familial struggle dramatised as a culinary episode. In more optimistic accounts of the story, Zeus is able to administer a purgative, forcing his father to vomit out the flood of siblings that have been trapped in his stomach.

These tales suspend the process of digestion, recasting the mouth, the oesophagus, the stomach and the bowels as benign and wondrous locales, a kind of free flowing passageway that may be entered and exited without harm. The teeth don’t tear, the throat doesn’t constrict, and enzymes are neutralised, turning the body into a curious, transformative, but cautionary architecture. There’s a prolonged deferral of scientific reality at play here, the messy empirical stuff of ingestion set to one side whilst the free-play of imagination blurs the body into an image world of metaphor and analogy capable of re-articulating an understanding of ourselves, the bodies we inhabit and our potential intimacy with other bodies.

Richard Fleischer’s visually arresting, if plodding and predictable Fantastic Voyage (1966) microscopically transposes a cold war crisis through the body of a dying, defecting Czech scientist whose welfare is the only key to completing a breakthrough in the emergent science of miniaturisation. A team of surgeons and their bulbous submarine are shrunken and injected into the bloodstream of the patient with the purpose of performing emergency surgery on a blood clot with a huge laser gun. Fleischer’s fable imagines the human interior as an incandescent body-politic,  a radiant biosphere within which a new global order is microcosmically negotiated. It draws more heavily from the acid saturated visual culture of late sixties psychedelia - lava lamps and liquid light projections - than it does anything volunteered by the previous 400 years of microscopy. Luminous multicoloured orbs and serpentine reticular fibres flow through the bloodstream in a manner worthy of a Grateful Dead stage show. Whilst the film is set in a future age of advanced technologies, it’s surprising to see the crew’s quaint orienteering equipment; a series of hand drawn maps of the circulatory system and digestive tract that must be traversed to their end. Fleischer casts the body as an intestinal labyrinth, a bestower of knowledge, its revelatory endpoint marking a triumphal new phase in the progression of human technological evolution.

Bram Stoker would effect a similar summation of the intestinal production of knowledge in Lair of the White Worm published in 1911. The novel imagines an ancestral worm-worshiping Roman cult unfolding its dark machinations beneath the quaint normality of everyday life in a Derbyshire village. Seventy-seven years later, the visionary director Ken Russell would re-invoke the worm in his brilliantly garish 1988 film adaptation, replete with chaotic green screen hallucinations, prosthetic panto fangs and gigantic rubbery invertebrate. Both versions of the tale situating the legendary ‘Lampton Worm’ Dionin deep within a maze-like network of potholes, and rocky tunnels, an ominous lair for an insatiable demigod in constant need of placation through human sacrifice. As Russell’s leading lady expounds to an unfortunate Boy Scout victim; ‘to die so that the god may live is a privilege Kevin, and if you know anything at all about history, you will know that human sacrifice is as old as Dionin himself, and every death is a rebirth into a god ever mightier.’ It would appear that submission to the worm-gut plies a cumulative process of species gnosis.

Thinking about this strange intersection of landscape and votive offering, my mind is drawn to a particular form of stone age structure. Lying just beneath the surface of the earth the Souterrain, or ‘fougou’ (from the Cornish word for cave), is an elongated stone-lined corridor that can be found across much of Ireland, northern and western Scotland, and Cornwall. Usually damp, with puddles scattered here and there across its uneven shingle floor, the fougou is a contentious remnant of pagan culture, its purpose long forgotten. The narrow entrance to a fougou, according to the historian Ronald Hutton, will usually show up in cattle pastures, by the drystone walls of farmyards, amongst woodland glades or the thick bracken and uneven boulders of uplands. There’s an archaeological tendency to explain these shallow subterranean passageways as sites of refuge, places in which temporary shelter could be sought in the event of an attack by brigands or marauders. But the main argument over the purpose of these structures concerns whether or not they were spiritual sanctuaries or practical outhouses. The mystical argument would have it that the channel performed a ritual conduit, reconnecting worshipers to the great ‘Earth Mother’, who’s womb could be votively entered through an act of symbolic un-birthing. Descending into the earth for a period of contemplation set the body in an earthen enclave fertile with mud, water and moss; a site of quiet reflection. On the other hand, the corridor is simply a larder, a place of storage for cuts of meat and grain, a huge alimentary canal through which foodstuffs in various states of preservation could progress. In both cases, the fougou seems to become symbolically a place of gestation, whether or not that’s the cosmological development of the spiritual subject, or the procession of food to feed the body of the community, the fougou is caught between foetal and fecal analogies.

It’s so easy to think of the gastrointestinal tract as a huge, alien, autarchic pink worm that sits snugly inside the body, right? Some of the common ailments and digestive unpredictabilities many of us are likely to experience over the course of our lives are grounds enough to conceive this succession of organs as a monstrous, remote and autonomous thing beyond our control; a parasitical agent possessed of its own will and requiring the same reverential placation as Stoker’s Dionin. I must relate: A friend, recently experiencing the turbulences of IBS (‘Insane Bum Syndrome’), thoughtfully created a private Facebook group entitled How’s Your Poo Today? so that family and friends could keep track of his endless battles with a gut that had taken on the character of a malevolent serpent intent on his demise.

The voracious intestinal demigod is a staple of science fiction and fantasy literature, from the spice secreting sand worms of the planet Arakis worshipped as earth deities in Frank Herbert’s Dune, to the cumbersome knowledge-hungry grubs in Paul Verhoeven’s political satire Starship Troopers. Clark Ashton Smith, a talented disciple of the weird fiction author H.P. Lovecraft, would even imagine an alternate reality in which an entire cosmology was founded upon the adoration of a humungous worm (‘The Coming of the White Worm’, 1941). In Smith’s nightmarish vision, a group of priests are deceived into worshipping the colossal Annelid as it rides around the earth on a huge iceberg, laying waste to entire cities. The priests spend their days distracted by their adulations, failing to notice that their number is steadily dwindling. One day, during his prayers by the side of the sleeping worm, the only remaining priest lifts his head from his devotions to hear the faint wailing sound of his accomplices’ voices reverberating from inside the worm's engorged body.

The worm’s potent evocation of processes of gestation and fertilisation seem to speak the same thing, a journey of enlightenment through which a gradual reconnection with the earth and our place in it can be sought. Regardless of scale, the intestinal architecture seems to hold sway over our imaginations as a passage through which peculiar, holistic truths may me sought.

The religion of ancient Rome inherited a form of divination that had been practiced by the Etruscans and other civilisations for around two thousand years before the birth of Christ. Centred on the entrails of sacrificed animals, usually sheep or poultry,  Haruspicy became a form prediction based on the reading of the liver or the intestines. I can only imagine that this was an extremely sloppy affair, the Haruspex, or initiate, lifting the bloody organ into the air, running his fingers intuitively along its bulbous length, trying to look inside, opening one end to the light in order that he may catch a glimpse of the fortune inside.

But perhaps we can turn to a contemporary psycho-sexual, net-facilitated phenomenon to shed some light on this longstanding compulsion to inhabit the innards. Vorarephilia is the sexual fetishisation of being swallowed whole by something - a person or creature - bigger than oneself. A category of paraphilia, it is impossible to enact in real life without transgressing irreversible physical and legal boundaries, resulting in a huge online community of amateur artists, animators and writers producing what’s commonly referred to as ‘soft-vore’. This a kind of cultural gut-flora that thrives in the wormholes of the deep web. Focusing on the ludicrously cute and charming, these artworks, usually sequential, depict all manner of victims descending through elongated throats into swollen stomachs. The swallowed are rarely chewed or masticated, but arrive comfortably inside the belly of their devourer in a state of giddy euphoria or contented sleepiness. One of the most interesting facets of vore culture, especially when encountered through dedicated online communities such as 4chan, is the cryptographic annotative lexicon it has spawned. Whilst many characters are able to fully converse with their predators from within the stomach, an unusual array of  symbols usually appears to denote expressions of comfort, warmth and blissful death, from elaborate onomatopoeic gurglings, through oversized droplets of sweat, to toxic clouds of fermented gas bearing skulls. Although vore fetishists are principled in their pursuit of the perfect rendition of swallowing, one that seems characterised by care and affection than any outright desire to destroy the eaten or inflict pain or injury, many online users refer to the fantastical act of consumption as an idealised form of belonging, a radical assimilation through which the otherwise irreconcilable distance of two people may be imaginatively overcome.

It’s within this domain of an online, permissive community focused on the erotic potentialities of ingestion that perhaps the most recent and acute expression of digestive assimilation occurred in the case of computer engineer Armin Meiwes, arrested in 2002 for the murder and manducation of Jürgen Brandes. Both men met in The Cannibal Cafe, a now defunct web forum for flirtatious suggestions of anthropophagy. Meiwes had brazenly posted a personal, stipulating that he was looking for an ‘18 - 30 year old to be slaughtered and consumed’, to which Brandes responded enthusiastically. When the pair met on March 9th, 2001, an ungainly yet ceremonial series of events took place in which the penis was severed from Brandes’ body and partly consumed. Brandes allegedly died of significant blood loss in a bathtub whilst Meiwes read a StarTrek novel in the next room. Over the course of the next ten months he would consume over twenty kilograms of human flesh.

Despite the profoundly consensual nature of the act, Brandes’ sexual and bodily agency were subsequently obfuscated by swathes of media demonisation that forced attention toward Meiwes’ supposed deviancy, reconstituting the case along normative lines that pitted a victim against a killer, as opposed to understanding the case as any kind of expression of trust or intimacy. Despite its hyperbolic and sure-headed intent, the logistics of Brandes’ guttural interment were far clunkier than any fantasy encountered in vore paraphernalia; his remains butchered, pounds of flesh stuffed into freezer bags and stacked amongst frozen pizzas and ready meals. I can’t think of a more conclusive or timely image to complete this litany of examples. A body, striving for intimacy and sexual gratification through human digestion, distributed through the lateral matrices of contemporary domestic infrastructure. From the chat room, to the bathroom, to the freezer, to the toilet bowl.