This Worm Ouroboros

The other day I mentioned the symbolic worm ouroboros in reference to Weird Tales #367 and its authors. That symbol has meant different things to different people. My use is after Camille Paglia in her book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990; Vintage, 1991), in which she called it a serpent and spelled it uroboros. She quoted Erich Neumann in reference to uroboros: "the serpent which at once bears, begets, and devours." (p. 88) That can work for my purposes, but it's not quite what I was looking for.

Here's a longer quote:

To find one's life sensational is to be aroused by oneself. [. . .] Gwendolen [from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde] reading her diary is lost in autoerotic skopophilia, titillation of the eye. If books can corrupt, and we know from Dorian Gray that they can, then one can be corrupted by one's own diary. To be corrupted by oneself is sexually solipsistic [. . .]. Gwendolen is an uroboros of amorous self-study, an Art Nouveau serpent devouring itself. (p. 540)

Remember that "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan is told in the first person, like a diary. Remember, too, that the narrator (diarist) opens a box (book) so that the viewer (reader) might be corrupted.

In thinking about these things, the story "'All You Zombies --'" by Robert A. Heinlein has come into my head again and again. If you haven't read it, you should. It may be the most solipsistic story ever written. As Camille Paglia pointed out, circular ouroboros is solipsistic as are so many people in our world.* In his story, Heinlein foresaw something of our current situation. It's nice to see the concept of solipsism in someone else's thinking on these things. But now I find in rereading parts of Sexual Personae that solipsism and related phenomena, including the subject of today's essay, are ancient, if not prehistoric in their origins. They are also pagan and shamanistic, thus, it becomes apparent, the story "Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas, also known as Mark R. Harrington, who would have encountered phenomena like these in his work as an anthropologist. His story of changing sexes was in Weird Tales in November 1924, one hundred years ago this month.

(*In Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein [1963], the hero tricks the ogre Igli into swallowing himself, and--poof!--he's gone into nowhere. If only he were here with us, Igli could warn the worm ouroboros of the dangers of autophagy at the organismic level.)

Camille Paglia's thoughts on the character Gwendolen gets closer to my idea than the first quote above. This idea is that uroboros is turned inward upon itself and devours itself--inverted, curled like an embryo, self-centered, self-absorbed, it makes of itself its whole world. The image I have of these authors is that they are tagmata in the body of the worm, if not many of them the worm itself.

A third quote is too obscene to reproduce (no pun intended) here. You will find it on page 587. It's in reference to an episode in Moby Dick by Herman Melville. It's obscene but also obscenely funny, in its original and in Ms. Paglia's reference to it. That quote also gets to what I'm talking about in reference to the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. I hate to say it, but that one might be closest of all.

Worm, by the way, is from the Old English wurm or wyrm, meaning "serpent, snake, dragon, reptile." The Indo-European root is the same as for the word weird or wyrd: "to bend."

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In his introductory essay in "The Eyrie," editor Jonathan Maberry mentioned the names of several dozen authors, including Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and China Miéville. Poor Jeff VanderMeer. He got left out. But we should remember that in 2012, he had a tussle with the current publisher, John Harlacher, and the previous editor, Marvin Kaye. Maybe things haven't settled down just yet, even after the death of Mr. Kaye in 2021. We should remember, too, that Mr. VanderMeer wants us to move past Lovecraft, whereas Weird Tales #367 is essentially a Lovecraft issue.

Essayist Nicholas Diak is in Weird Tales #367. Near the end of his contribution, he wrote:

In 2023 Weird Tales celebrates its centennial. The periodical has seen cycles of inactivity and resurrection (not dead, but dreaming), but also high-water marks from the stewardship of unflappable editors, including its current prosperity under Jonathan Maberry. (p. 19)

On his own website, Mr. Diak posted interviews with three other contributors to the Cosmic Horror Issue, three of the five women in fact. They are Angela Yuriko Smith, Samantha Underhill, and Carol Gyzander. Jonathan Maberry wrote the introduction to Samantha Underhill's poetry collection Sadness of the Siren, issued in 2022. Carol Gyzander appeared with Mr. Maberry at Philcon, held in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, on November 17-19, 2023. Angela Yuriko Smith co-edited a collection called Worlds of Light and Darkness (2021). In its pages is a story by Jonathan Maberry.

Speaking of introductions, Jeff VanderMeer, who is married to Ann VanderMeer, former editor of Weird Tales, wrote a not very interesting foreword for Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti (Penguin, 2015). (Mr. Ligotti is far more interesting and erudite.) In his forward, Mr. VanderMeer mentioned Mr. Kiernan, but only in passing. The former covered the latter in depth in an interview conducted in 2012. In a response to a comment on that online interview, Jeff VanderMeer wrote: "I totally agree, Craig. She [sic] is one of my favorite, favorite writers because her [sic] work shows progression and she [sic] isn’t content to stick with just one thing." 

Sic, sic, sic.

In that same interview, Caitlín R. Kiernan appears to have expressed admiration for the work of Thomas Ligotti. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Mr. Kiernan does in fact admire Mr. Ligotti. They both appear to come from the same kind of place and to write the same kind of story, although I confess I have read only one by the former author and only four or five by the latter. Also in that interview, Mr. Kiernan called China Miéville "brilliant." Jeff VanderMeer has also interviewed Mr. Miéville. No word on what Mr. Miéville thinks of Mr. Kiernan. Can anyone find the missing tagma for this self-swallowing worm?

In 2005, Caitlín R. Kiernan published a short story collection called To Charles Fort, With Love. (We knew from just one story, "Night Fishing," that Mr. Kiernan is a reader of Charles Fort.) The author of the afterword in that book, entitled "A Certain Inexplicability," is Ramsey Campbell. Mr. Campbell also wrote an introduction to the first edition of Mr. Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer, published in 1985.

In September 2020, Ramsey Campbell attached his signature to a lie. The lie is part of a letter drawn up by British authors Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Daisy Johnson. You can read the letter and the names of its signatories by clicking here. The letter is tacitly against J.K. Rowling, a woman who has shown herself to be fearless in the face of the most hateful verbal attacks made by followers of a harmful, destructive, and oppressive belief system afoot in our world. She is a woman in the only sense of the word. They call her by a derogatory term, a slur: trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or TERF. That letter, signed by 200 small people plus Ramsey Campbell (we have to admit he has stature), was in response to a previous letter in support of Ms. Rowling, this one signed by 58 writers, actors, musicians, and artists. As usual, cowards outnumber the courageous, and liars the speakers of truth. You can read the initial letter, signed by the courageous 58, by clicking here.

J.K. Rowling writes genre fiction, including short works. I have a feeling, though, that if she were to stoop to approach Weird Tales with a submission, the people behind the magazine--and who inhabit the larger world of contemporary weird fiction--would tell her to go away. She would not be wanted, for she speaks the truth and many of them traffic in lies, one lie in particular.

In this I say thank God for China Miéville. At least his leftism and progressivism are still class-based instead of sex-and-gender-based. At least Marxism is a product of the mind.

George Orwell famously said, "In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Progressives like to think of themselves as bravely ushering in new worlds. They are actually counterrevolutionaries who want to take us backward to that pagan and shamanistic fog of circling and turning years that preceded the onset of history. J.K. Rowling and people like her are the true revolutionaries, for they believe in freedom, reason, and civilization.

To paraphrase a recent presidential campaign, the current and recent Weird Tales appears to  be about they and them. You can decide for yourself who they are and to whom them refers.** You could begin with lists and names appearing in the Cosmic Horror Issue. The original Weird Tales--thirty-one years' worth, from 1923 to 1954--was about you--about us, the readers. Remember what Farnsworth Wright wrote in 1925 in "The Eyrie," the column that in its original form and for its original purpose was a readers' column:

Weird Tales belongs to the readers.

(**Robert A. Heinlein wrote another solipsistic story called "They," published in Unknown Fantasy Fiction in April 1941.)

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I have been writing a lot about the meanings of words. Thank you to the Online Etymology Dictionary for so much fascinating information. I began in that because it's really interesting. After a while, though, it became something else, something really important, and I'll tell you why. If we as writers, readers, speakers, and listeners are to understand each other and communicate with each other, we must agree on the meanings of words. If those meanings break down, then understanding and communication break down, too.

Words and language do not belong to any one person or group of people. They are our common property. No one shall claim ownership of them, and no one shall forbid others from using any word in its proper sense. Nor shall anyone alter the meanings or uses of words, unilaterally or for his own purposes. Each of us has rights, but no one's rights extend into the lives of others. There are rules in every language. Call them law. To misuse words, damage them, vandalize them, do violence to them is to break the law we all must respect if we are to go on. These things are an offense against us all.

There has been a lot of lawbreaking, damage, vandalism, and violence done to our language. This is especially true of a single word: woman. Woman means just one thing. It doesn't mean more than one thing, nor does it mean whatever you want it to mean. One thing, one fixed meaning, one kind of person--woman--to the exclusion of all who are not women. Those who seek to change the meaning of the word seek to silence women, erase women, cancel women, take from women; to deprive them of their rights, their privacy, their safety, their security, their prerogatives and their exclusive privileges as women; to deprive them also of their being and experience as women; to invade the country of womanhood, take it over, subdue it, punish, enslave, or imprison all of its inhabitants, and steal or wipe away everything that was theirs and theirs alone. These invaders and usurpers should be ashamed of themselves, but they know no shame. They will go on hurting people and destroying things by their lies and beliefs and by their system. I think and I hope that the election just past in America has broken the wave of this hateful and destructive belief system. But systems without any built-in limits will never relent. We will always have to remain vigilant.

Next: An Alien Abduction.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley