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Decadence Comics (Emix Regulus, Lando, Stathis Tsemberlidis) will be exhibiting at Safari Festival, August 12th at Protein Studios, London. Let us know you’re coming here.

#Decadence Comics #Lando #EMIX REGULUS #stathis tsemberlidis #Breakdown Press #Safari Festival #Comics #Illustration

‘meat horror, archaeological findings, psychic invasion and lycanthropy’

Real Meat

Inside, inside, between and inside I have been for some time. My meaty cylinder: squeezed from a nozzle attached to a great pumping machine secured to a nest of squealing pig bits and brackish water spurting from a shining vat, folded into whiteness, encased, showered, salted and heated in its flaky shell, perforated from others, packed, driven, stacked and handled, surrounded now by the wide, softening blue, under a most regular lid, almost smoke puffed, meekened with curtains.

The same sounds happen every day, and have been happening since I was dropped and forgotten in these chasms through which come to me only glimmers of life, and as such, they remain images, perfect in their partiality, as is the petal of the rose, before one sees the thorn, the bee, the caterpillar, worse – the shears, the sales, the arrangement with other roses as love. And so the morning shuffling, the humming and whirring of appliances, water landing filling splashing glugged, thighs chafing under a dressing gown, knuckles rubbed into eyeballs and the kaleidoscopic leap within, bills landing. And then the beginning of demands, the voice shifting into the daily effort to comfort and make safe, how the hand runs along the hair, a kiss, a spill, a tear, a man.

How I had dreamt of being part of the richness of their world, real meat. A limb, a member, protected, incorporated. What intimacy is possible without ingestion? What closeness without total unity? I want to breathe what they breathe and with them, laugh as they laugh and along, be tucked into a basket and stroked, their pet, or be promoted to a pillow and bed and sleep alive among the feathers, an equal, regular. That this is a kind of suicide only confirms to me once again that suicide is the only possible and logical choice that can be made. I want to confidently use their idioms and know their roots. I long to surrender to the wicked thrust of time organised by forces so great, so omnipresent as to feel entire and natural. To tread a trodden path, to venture no further into the surely snake-laced grasses beyond was to at last accept acceptance as a strategy. For so long I had been flung against the most violent modes, unable to find solace even, or especially, in the cool chambers of my shell. Now I want only to sit inside the biggest fiction, some homely ancient toadstool.

I am found! A hand accidentally plunged deep into the recesses of the wide, softening blue. A cry! Laid on the cold counter and lit from above I am inspected for mould or other decays, for hardening or odours. I hold myself taut: this is my chance. Found intact, chemically preserved, my adoption begins. Thrilled, my meat heats and pounds, throbbing in the most unusual places. I am approaching the image, the distance between me and it is sealing as the one becomes the other. I am overtaken by a force so strong that it must be truth, love, true love.

The part of me I leave languishing in the recesses, that I abandon for ascension, is now only a glimmer at the bottom of a well in the face of a flood, in the face of the interminable waves carrying me home, lulling me. That I can be dashed against the rocks, sucked into a whirlpool, eaten by monsters, simply drown and bloat, I forget. Total destruction is the necessary risk and the mark of devotion. I forget my own meat, its weight and resilience, its ability to float, its lovely cool shell despite its composition from waste. Whatever I was in that wide, softening blue, be damned – the memory of the white nozzle, the stainless steel, the skins, the masks, the gloved hands, the teardrops, the pennies, the hairnets, the genitals in the office. Just look into my spigot squeezed flesh, my plastic scarred outsides, the naturalistic dents in my crust as if I have broken through my own boundaries victorious, and see me. Roll! I do not want to remember my porkish siblings, my infinity of twins, our inevitable fates, our grim trajectories, the impossibilities of our lives. I am so unimaginably far from the muddy origins of my being, from the rivulets of dirt patterning the belly I was stripped from, from the snouts cheerfully snuffling the trough, from the added flavours, the basins of preservatives, the textureless brown pulsing from a duct, the heaving siphons, the cellulose wraps.

That I now find myself here, smiling under the liquid neon vibrating in the tubes, surrounded by wood and cotton and feather and stamen, signals my union with the image and promises my forthcoming inclusion, the coming ropes that will tether me at last in that soft and permanent stasis. That it might be considered strange to seat me with them at their table was for them, of no concern. I have passed the inspection. It was this that told me I would now be enclosed in their tribe, safe forever within my family. I helped at meal times drag the table towards me, crushing my insides, to allow the members to file in on the other side. I helped push it again the towards them, crushing their insides, to allow the rest to file in on my side. And so with the rhythm of the drag and the push, the pull and the satiated mellow, did I become crushed and crushing, vigilant and invigilated as any good member.

One in particular took to me, and I to her, with her luscious hairs in stripes and tubes on her back, or cones and towers on her head. Did something in their patternings recall some memory of my origins? Granted, an unwanted recollection, but the familiar, no matter how gruesome, still comforts – in as much as it does not shock. The same pain inflicted with regularity on the same spot upon the body is still a kind of stability. Was this attraction in fact an attraction only to the private recognition that what had hurt me before, could not hurt me again? Was it the true celebration of another, or simply the thrill of relief? In any case, it gave to me the sense of myself as a thing unbreakable. This hitherto unimaginable sensation was all the more bolstered by my new position.

I was sure of my new position because she poured me juice and explained why, as she braided her hair into two white ropes, wound them around her neck and pulled, juice was important. The body is a factory you see, she said, and vitamins are incentives for the cells, which are workers. You have a body, she told me, though it is different to ours. She put the juice on me!

I was sure of it because when I laughed along at the man’s attempt to nourish, I was welcomed, and when the woman grumbled about the mess and ineptitude, a bitterness came into the room and I sensed it along with the others and encouraged it.

I was sure because I was sent along to the institutions with a handkerchief and a cheerful shove. There I giggled and bullied, experimented and rubbed things against myself, competed and compared all things constantly, sung solo upon a stage, endured fractions and the puberties of my contemporaries. Unchanging, my popularity was legendary.

And yet in my private hours, few as they now were, so scheduled was my life, something crept over me. I found myself oscillating between terrors and anxieties, yet I was never able to, between the physical activities and the enforced socialising, between the ball games and the little agonies, to reach inside them and pull out their gleaming truths – the very truths which would have liberated me, or allowed me to begin to liberate myself, or at least to start conceptualising my liberation.

It was in one such hour, finding me pensive and open, encouraging the rigid thoughts into a flow, that my kin held out her face and limbs to me, both furrowed in a look I did not know. Shrinking instinctively back into my shell I asked from within it, what? Her face and limbs said nothing, she only sucked her lips and swallowed. She asked then if I was cold, and next if I was ill, tired, sad, lonely – all of which I replied to in the negative. Offering me a sliver of green apple she inquired then whether I was hungry. As I was once again replying that I was not, I realised that this question was in fact an entryway into her desire to express and sate her own hunger. Do you know what you are? she ventured as she curved the knife again into the apple. Again, I replied in the negative. You are small, she said, much smaller than me. To prove it, she, ignoring my protestations, picked me up and brought me to her gleaming face, she tossed me in the air and caught me, she pressed me to the window, she traced, giggling, the cold flat of the knife over my edges. She placed me inside a dark box reeking of rot, wherein I began to spin whilst being blasted from all angles by a phenomenal and steadily increasing heat, until my very core was near molten, almost oozing out of its barely protective shell, until I was wailing in torment, my screams echoing around the cell, returning to me, weaving with the screams they originated from, as well as with new ones, and echoing again doubly, triply, infinitely until all was but a mania of pain, pain’s echo and pain’s echoing echo. And then – nothing –

– relief, which I had never before felt in such magnitude, a magnitude so monumental as to reveal to me the face of bliss itself, to reveal to me that perhaps bliss is only the cessation of pain. I had been given a gift! She was, of all of them, the most fine. Despite my near-destroyed body I was almost languid in my revelation, happy as an idiot, learning nothing. Then, once more! from my defenceless languish was I snatched, returning to me, or returning me to, terror, and terror’s terror. Pounded, crushed, torn, I was decimated.

And came a darkness so total.

Here in the deepest hollows of another. Is this the incorporation I’d always dreamed of? No light falls upon me, only an enfolding darkness which tightens with every spasm as I am forced to move against what remains of my will, what remains of my body, lacerated by acids, drained and dissected, compressed into breathlessness, crushed, dashed, separated. My dissolution was more violent than my birth. What I feel to be my final act approaches, and with all my might I propel my remains towards it, I sharpen to a point, I will be an arrow and pierce myself out, out, out into the commodious air, beyond all that lures me, beyond the fetid cavity over which I hover, beyond the fetid cavity into which I fall.

#infundibulum #emix regulus