•BLOGGING STRONG SINCE 2008•
11/17

Transfiguration of the Loathsome

By Christopher Brownsword

I: VORTICES

I.I (SEPTEMBER MMVIII)

The smell of damp crevices mingles with that of decaying vegetable matter, paint stripper, urine, sour dish rags, burnt fuses, cough syrup, faulty drainage systems and vase water partly to repel the olfactory senses and partly to attract them. I draw breath in her shadow and pray the din will not awaken the reptiles which nest silently in her pubic mound, greased with saliva and the sap of plants dissected under a red Sabbath moon. The universe contracts as if it were steel cooling in a fractured cyst. ‘So vast is the quantity of moisture held within the sky,’ I hasten to remind myself, ‘that if not for it being contained by the troposphere it might crush one like a tidal wave.’ I mention nothing of this to her, of course, for an ulcerated mouth is easily dismantled.

I.II (SEPTEMBER MMVIII)

From behind a film of membranous tissue covering her anus small crabs begin to emerge, their pincers hacking through the mucous in order to grant themselves ample space to vacate the cell that for eight weeks has imprisoned them and, moreover, taken pleasure in their anguish as gradually it degenerated into an unspeakable fury. Nightly she would tease them with lengths of broken glass, and I too would join her when the mood took hold. Ah, that has since been relegated to the past: vanquished! The orifices located about my body are not quite so vicious as to deny the crabs a fresh habitat for them to breed. I repeat: my orifices…indeed, I am open to them now; my urethra, my nostrils, my rectum, my mouth and the wounds inflicted upon me by the awakening of sparrows…all are open to these crustaceans. Appreciatively they begin to constellate inside.

Vortices in Dark Sky Magazine

I.III (SEPTEMBER MMVIII)

She is of standard height and due mainly to the insects feeding at her wrists maintains a firm and slender build. Not only are her eyes set back within her skull but owing to the maggots crawling in and out of them they express a sorrow greater perhaps than that of gravel, ligatures and the pituitary gland combined. From the depths of her trachea (filled to the point of paroxysm with static, nails and semen) drones like a used syringe the sacred ovipositor, implanting such vast an array of binary and lice into an open sore – festering on my arm like starlings midway through rotation of an august sky – that each capillary throbs with the hunger of an erect cock to assimilate them. No other scent is comparable when the ovipositor withdraws amidst the scuffle of proboscises except for that of fleur-de-lis. One might even go so far as to suggest this aperture when viewed against a backdrop of sunsets, leprosy and dismembered animals to have declared itself more fragrant than any meadow in spring. Nomads halt their caravans to drink from it. Scorpions find refuge in its depths (therein they mate – the male stinging the female in the abdomen so as to prevent her from eviscerating him during congress). I pull from it a centipede twelve centimeters long, a bat minus skin gripped between its fangs. It resembles a patient treated with high doses of neuroleptics, its mouth atremble, the lips pulled back over the teeth, moist with spittle and emitting stifled cries. I lower it to her feet and it nibbles one of her toes. She whose vaginal tract holds court to a grip more powerful and coruscating than rain as slowly it obliterates the landscape, of which secretions help counter and provide an alternative for (though in so doing chain us inexorably to a cycle of on the one hand habitual need and on the other dehydration), must think mine as much as hers a wasted visage – dying together under clouds of quicklime and cyanide. How exotic then the nematode proclaims itself to be by comparison, my scrotum finding in this parasitic worm a fitting meal and the fungus that has been sent out from the conduits transmitting as if by osmosis the calm of witnessing its brief annihilation after first discovering itself trapped in an air bubble of sorts, both she and I lying ashen…vacant…destroyed…unwept…our mutual drives diminished like boa constrictors having recently consumed in one unbroken gulp their kills – and I the whole while able to content myself with the knowledge that she too might do as much to me when at last the thought occurs, her organs expanding and the flesh that clings to her bones with the tenacity of jaguars in heat ripped to shreds as she seeks to leave no trace of her victim behind. Later she might regurgitate me and in my hands I would bear for her a gift of white geraniums pulled away at their roots minus anesthetic from no place other than her fallopian tubes.

I.IV (SEPTEMBER MMVIII)

‘So, are you going to kiss it or what?’ With only the rarest exception she refers to her cunt each time it enters our conversation in a tone detached of subjectivity as ‘it.’ She exposes and touches ‘it’ absently until the twin folds of the labia take on in measures that are equal to one another the appearance and texture of rawhide. I press my mouth to it as though it were an oxygen mask. I wear it like a second skin. I clean my lungs with its perfume billowed intermittently between my lips. I yell into it as ought the supplicant his heaven. I bite off the clitoris from beneath its hood and swallow it in the manner of a seed so it might fertilize in my craw then cause me to usher forth a militia of clones, thereafter attaching themselves to my body like those wonderful suction cups of octopi. I thus burn as the moth inside its chrysalis, its wings inflated not with air or blood but petrol, whilst she – and this I think to say without my requesting she do so – tastes what little the dogs have spared of me.

I.V (OCTOBER MMVIII)

Her countenance takes to darkening like in summer when clouds begin to gather from a point that, longitudinally, has distanced itself somewhat from the horizon. I saw it from the start: it is all I have ever been permitted to see when ejaculating into her face – the clouds, the darkness – whilst manipulating myself to accept the contrary. Yet the darkness is in front of me now, unavoidable. It is at the corners of my mouth, feeling its way inside. I am emboldened by it, having unconsciously willed it upon myself as a wound precedes the knife.

I.VI (NOVEMBER MMVIII)

Generosity, at least on her behalf, amounts only to the shedding of the endometrial layer and the subsequent smearing of it around my eyes in order that I might find her once the sun goes out and the evening douses the firmament in oils obtained with blessings from the royal crocodile, the curves of her body curling with gentleness and ease into those of my own; our sternums rejoicing…limbs entangled…her tits dribbling sap and honey – the room given over to erasure where in the folds of the curtains gristle is synthesized (my chromosomes dissolving into it). This movement should pain me less were it not for her bowels imparting to my lips the taste of sodium and wheat, of vermin and clay. Regardless, there are times when mouths desire to drink of the haze released from armpits like a procession of rifles moving at a steady gradient towards the sea before kissing into them a tension beyond their immediate rule (the acids therein enough to slake even the most unquenchable of thirsts) and to remain just so until the growth of hair defeats the razors’ pledge then follicles feel their way inside the throat, twisting like vines as the mouth decays and viruses pass through pores along the myriad strands of hair, connecting each body in a vast, uninterrupted circuit not dissimilar to that of electrical currents.

I.VII (DECEMBER MMVIII)

The sensors, hardwired by nano-technology into a central hive, move about within my capillaries. They are like infant wasps, which in the stomach of a caterpillar first solidify their contours around a set of teeth before mercilessly eating their way out.

I.VIII (DECEMBER MMVIII)

Beyond the cacophony and swarm intelligence of helicopters grinding in a weird trance at the threshold, she moves frenziedly on all fours with candles gripped between her fingers and toes. The sky! The…I am naked, impaled at my wrists and ankles by stalagmites to a chair. The sky! The sky! The…the sky…the…moving grotesquely, and, to signal its rightful place, rotating on a fulcrum, it…it ingratiates itself towards us as the machinery clogs beneath our screams, thrusting into us in the meantime the bloodied talons of infinity…the sky…the…and the sound of rain beating against the glass…the sky…the…the sky…the…inlaid not with stars but military satellites! After mounting me she tears out my throat and in the laceration slots a candle – tallow sealing it in place. The room is screened on three of its four sides by lichen, giving off a scent of brothels mixed with abattoirs and fumes. In the name of desolation these lichen nullify one another under a dim bulb wreathed for the occasion in diodes, offal and mint. I am naked, impaled at my…

– Tune in tomorrow for the second chapter of Transfiguration of the Loathsome.

_________________________________________

Christopher Brownsword was born in Sheffield, England on the 11th of December, 1981. Transfiguration of the Loathsome is the first of his short stories to be published; the rest having been either destroyed or lost. His debut novel, a diseased outpouring of ugliness, filth, and degradation titled The Terraced Orchards is currently under development.

10 Comments
Leslee said:

I don’t understand. The story about the fellow burying the dog was okay, but subpar. This *Loathsome* stuff is just disgusting. What Transfiguration? Into words? Sounds like dirty talk to me. The prose is embroidered and clearly, the writer enjoys this, but it’s not good writing. It doesn’t make me want to read; it doesn’t inspire me; it doesn’t do what great writing has the power to do. Great writng, like *The Death of Ivan Ilyich*, or Chekov’s stories, or many of the stories Dark Sky posted in the past have the power to communicate a higher truth, an intersubjective compassion, a sensitivity to other worlds, whether they are the worlds of gamblers, or adolescents, or alcoholic dads, or lonesome middle aged women, or what have you. This post is just “a diseased outpouring of ugliness, filth and degradation.” Why should I read this? I think I won’t. It’s too bad. Really. Please, mr fiction editor, give us something that inspires and redeems, and answers the moral call of fiction: to help us understand, to show us worlds we hadn’t imagined, to teach us something we didn’t know we knew . . .This stuff doesn’t transfigure the loathsome. It just makes us sick.

Brian Allen Carr said:

Leslee,

I’m the fiction editor at Dark Sky Magazine, and I accepted Christopher Brownsword’s story “Transfiguration of the Loathsome” for publication.

I share the opinion that fiction is supposed to inspire. I can tell, by the length of your post, that you were clearly inspired, though it’s clear you think the contrary. You’re welcome, and I’m sorry.

It is not my opinion that fiction is supposed to fuel a “moral calling.” There have been plenty of great works that have, in their time, been considered overtly grotesque. Henry Miller comes immediately to mind.

Is this writing gross? Yes. Is it well done? Yes. You yourself quoted it.

And, remember, this is the first chapter of the piece. There are three more installments. Perhaps you’ll find more redeeming qualities in the subsequent posts. Even Genesis has rape scenes.

Best,
Brian Allen Carr

Leslee said:

Well, I do apologize for the vehement outrage evident in my initial post. And I’m grateful for Mr. Brownsword’s piece for provoking a good opportunity for discussion. Plus, it’s always good to stir things up a bit.

I think this exchange brings up an important issue deserving of continued dialogue – the question of whether writing, or any art, has moral weight and whether the artist has a moral responsibility. It’s the question of whether anything or nothing is at stake when we take up the pen. Whether we are whistling in the dark (no matter how futile, still hopeful), or whether we are simply gazing at our belly buttons in self-obsessed stupor. For the internet, it is the question of whether we disseminate something real, true and worth the time of day, or just vomit in a huge virtual toilet.

I’m not speaking here of morality in the sense that things must be “clean.” Though I have not read much Henry Miller, I am no stranger to the grotesque and the profound uses of the profane in art. Jose Saramago’s Blindness contains some of the most horrific scenes I have experienced, yet it contains a story of profound ethical significance. Joyce Carol Oates is a master of the grotesque, always in service to the struggle of the human spirit. The Iliad (which I might even argue is a better, and more moral work than Genesis, maybe) contains graphic battle scenes, yet our eyes are opened to the truth of war, hubris, heroes and beauty despite (and made more precious because of) the gore. There is a difference between using the profane to intensify the sacred, through tension, and just plain obscenity. As writers and readers, we have the ability and the responsibility to name that difference for what it’s worth, at the very least. And if something is at stake in any attempt at art, then the we can call a work good or bad, beautiful or obscene, true or false, no matter how well written.

As readers, writers and people who are publishing work on the web, the question of the moral power, the transformative power, of writing is one that needs to be considered. If you, or anyone, should decide nothing is at stake and it is all shits and giggles, then, by all means have fun naval (or other) gazing. But if you think it just might matter, then whistle a tune that is beautiful, because it’s only getting darker and we don’t have forever.

Brian Allen Carr said:

Leslee,

I like you. You’ve got zip. Please keep reading Christopher Brownsword’s “Transfiguration of the Loathsome.”

The second chapter is already live. The third and fourth chapters will run this Tuesday and Wednesday respectively. I look forward to your continued readership and comments in this regard.

Best,
Brian Allen Carr

Kristalyn said:

Kudos to Brownsword for providing readers with a violently visceral conversation between ghastly sexual spirits on their infested and decaying bodies. It’s a sad overly descriptive—yet, almost Wikipedian account on the effects of STDS. Although I don’t possess a taste for excessive filth, the piece reeks of neediness (It seems to scream “Who will read, cringe, and object?). The parasitic characters barely breathe beneath their undeveloped personalities and predictable hankerings. The text reminds one of a poor SciFi porn scene description—perhaps your writing would be better suited for such an industry?

Brownsword, what are your aspirations and intentions?

Melek Taus, Portland said:

Re: TRANSFIGURATION OF THE LOATHESOME by Christopher Brownsword

Quoting the post by Kristalyn: “It’s…an account on the effects of STDS.”

Is it?

Kristalyn said:

And the following excerpts are descriptions of …?

…pray the din will not awaken the reptiles which nest silently in her pubic mound…

…ulcerated mouth is easily dismantled…

…anus small crabs begin to emerge, their pincers hacking through the mucous in order to grant themselves ample space to vacate the cell…

…orifices located about my body are not quite so vicious as to deny the crabs a fresh habitat for them to breed. I repeat: my orifices…indeed, I am open to them now; my urethra, my nostrils, my rectum, my mouth and the wounds inflicted upon me by the awakening of sparrows…all are open to these crustaceans. Appreciatively they begin to constellate inside.

…From the depths of her trachea (filled to the point of paroxysm with static, nails and semen) drones like a used syringe the sacred ovipositor, implanting such vast an array of binary and lice into an open sore…

…my scrotum finding in this parasitic worm a fitting meal and the fungus…

…the mouth decays and viruses pass through pores along the myriad strands of hair…

Melek Taus, Portland said:

Reptiles in pubic mounds, crabs coming out of someone’s anus, sacred ovipositors emerging from tracheas and filled with binary…i personally have never heard of ANYONE contracting an STD and having these symptoms, not even as a side effect causing hallucinations or whatever. Besides, not everyone with mouth ulcers has the clap! Personally i think the author is using prose to work out some form of meta-programming, the kind Robert Anton Wilson talks about in PROMETHEUS RISING. I’m sure i’m wrong. But i could list a dozen examples to back up my theory which i’m sure could then be called into question. Whatever theory we make based on our own prejedices we’ll always find evidence to support it (for all i know Brownsword might be involved in the illuminati or some esoteric splinter group and to those others involved in such groups his writing might make perfect sense – im half-joking of course). You think the story is about STDS. Wherever you look in the text you’ll find something to back that theory up. I think it’s about meta-programming. Ditto. You know, there are three schools of thought regarding Kafka 1) that his writing was a commentary on Jewish mysticism 2) it was political sattire 3) it was a form of existentialism. I don’t think Brownsword is in ANY SENSE up to the standards of Kafka or even within spitting distance and I’m sure in a few months his story and this discussion will be long since forgotten about (tho’ he’s let us have our fun, right? how else would we fill those vacuums in our lives?), but i’m sure you understand what i’m trying to say, blearry eyed as i am as i type. Maybe we should try to be a little more open minded about these things rather than acting like cops, showing our badges and guns to someone who upsets what Wilson would call our “reality tunnel” and saying “this is our neighborhood (magazine), so move along, we don’t want bums like you around here”. Just a thought.

Kristalyn said:

Point taken and I agree….defense is necessary for belief but not for truth.

Melek Taus, Portland said:

that wasn’t exactly my point. if any kind of universal, infalible truth exists i’ve never heard/read of it and i’ve definately never seen it for myself. defending something that wouldn’t appear to exist can only lead to frustration and blind violence as desperation takes hold. i’d therefore 100% agree with the bit you said about truth but i think i’ve just described ‘belief’ also. i mean, nothing has caused more bloodshed or misery in the world than people defending their beliefs. my point, badly put as it may have been, was that we should be more flexible in our attitudes. nothing is permanent, nothing is set in stone and the more we cling to a belief system the more rigid we become, and the more rigid we become the more we become closed to new ideas and approaches etc. i think it was gallilao who once claimed the world was round and because his opinion offended the belief system of the time he was put to torture whereas now hundreds of years later we laugh at that same belief system which claimed the world was flat. how far should we go to defend our beliefs and do we feel defense is necessary simply to protect ourselves from the probability that we are helpless in a world whose only meaning is that which we ourselves force upon it? i have my own beliefs but they refine themselves and change from time to time (i make a habit of making friends with people whose beliefs are different rather than similar to my own). often i look back and see my beliefs were ill-formed or could be attributed to my circumstances at the time. i certainly wouldn’t advocate defending them (though ironically it seems i’m doing just that right now ha ha). and who would i defend them against? somebody whose beliefs are different to mine. and what then would happen? we’d create a conflict. the same thing that has been happening on a mass scale since the dawn of time, dividing rather than uniting the human race. well, it seems from beginning about filth this post has brought us to an open forum on humanitarianism. it’s good to know that writing can still provoke and in doing so open up the field to wider discussion. oh, as an aside, a friend of mine tells me that she’s come across the term “transfiguration of the loathsome” in the work of the brittish occultist alister crowley and it has something to do with embracing ugliness and degradation without analysis or using the intellect to interpret it as a means of further enlightening the soul and feeling a deeper love towards the spirit. or something like that anyway. i haven’t read the piece myself but intend to. over and out.

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