The virus is the standard metaphor for the diseased elements of society, which sometimes spread quickly and dangerously, and sometimes cause a slow disintegration, rotting social democracies and nation states. Black metal has been called a virus, and homosexuality and porn culture and the Southern cruisers. The disease the virus causes spreads through the body and constructs a pattern for a new shape. It’s a communal, painful language that can infect us all. Influences connect people, bring us down and together, equalise us. Virus is a bond, after all.
I dig VIRUS out of the word LOVE. I dig it out of I. I’m still looking for a bond. Or is that just something I etch into my memory to get closer to you, to make you a little more me? I’m looking for someone who can bring me closer to something. Dots I can line myself up between. Is that what I’m looking for in you? We share the same virus, I carry it for you, from you, on. Virus captivus.
Let’s turn over the layers of pages, scenes, fabric, texture, character and images from porn, till we come to the iconic Japanese wood-block print Octopi and pearl diver from 1814. In this image, a woman lies on her back by a beach while two octopi pleasure her. One octopus has its head between her legs; the other is by her side caressing her chest and her mouth. Magic, fantasy, ecstasy.
Genitals are already sea creatures. Wet and soft, from birth till death. We can only ever partly understand and grasp this. Like the sound of our voices and the blood that streams from our body, they are human osmosis, just as much connected to the world as to us. They represent something infinite and only partly real to our realist eyes. They are sluggish semi-fungi, partly submerged in water, moist, smooth, slick, perforated, born eyeless. They are half human matter and half imaginary creature. That’s why we have a separate sensory register for tentacles, molluscs and shell-fish. The first time I try to eat octopus I have such a strong reaction I think I’m allergic: I get hot, sweaty, red, salty, foggy. But maybe what I’m actually feeling is sensory empathy, a cannibal cautiousness.
The sex is my internal organ, on the outside. My amphibian part. Genitalia displace my existence, distort the bond between life and death, matter and metaphor, land and sea. I extend myself physically out of myself. Fact and fiction meet and rub against each other, fill me up, smudge me, caress me.
I’ve seen a picture of my own intestines, taken during a gastroscopy while I was at university. It’s a world where all sci-fi dreams meet, directly beneath my own ribs. The doctor shows me the image while I’m still woozy from the general anaesthetic, and I can remember seeing a foggy, strange planet, a soft landscape that coils in toward a narrow iris. I look deeper and deeper into my own spiralling muscle. The doctor gestures and tells me I have an illness that has worn down my intestinal villus. I think it looks like the inside of a tentacle, even though I’ve never seen the inside of a tentacle. I imagine that I have an illness that slowly turns me into an octopus.
I’m completely unconscious during the gastroscopy, even though the general anaesthetic is light and short in duration. You did so well swallowing the gastroscopy, says the doctor. I’m not sure if I should say thank you, as I don’t remember any of it, neither the swallowing or the anti-swallowing. I’m not certain I ever spat it out. But during an exhibition a few years later I see a video of a sword swallower and I have to run out on the street, retching.
The pearl diver has one of the little octopus arms (or is it a mouth) between her lips. Her mouth is open; it hasn’t been forced open, but plays softly and freely with the tentacle. She has opened doors and gates and cavities and holes and let out all the fantasies inside. Maybe the octopi have manifested as an inversion of herself, but with this inversion she is also connected to the sea, the universe and eternity. Magically she has turned inside into outside and is caressed by her own intestines and organs, gels and fluids, bones and tentacles.
This is where magic takes over for logic. Don’t try to follow me, just close your eyes, like the pearl diver. The octopi have emerged from the water, but her organs have emerged from her body too. The body is strung out on the beach now, and the ocean waves and molluscs are washed into and over her. Because they are her, have come from deep inside her, they can give and receive, they can touch her entire inside all at once, caress every single taste receptor. They participate in
