Cthulhu Rising

Cthulhu Rising

Material: Acrylic on Styrofoam

Copyright B Purkayastha 2019

The Little Dragon of Medina: A Readymade Horror Story

You want to know why I’m an evil, evil person?

I’ll tell you.

Take a look at this beautiful painting. It’s called "Fellaheen Women by the Nile" and is by French orientalist painter Léon Belly, painted circa 1856.

Lovely women, aren’t they? Graceful as they stand, barefoot in the water, filling their pots.

Well, I looked at this lovely painting, and the thing that came to my mind is not that the painting is so beautiful, or that the women are so graceful, but just a couple of words:

Dracunculus medinensis.

What is Dracunculus medinensis? It’s commonly known as the Guinea worm, and is a charming animal found across tropical Africa and Asia. It’s a nematode, a relative of the roundworm you might have had while you were a kid. And like the roundworm it lives inside your body.

Only, unlike the roundworm, it doesn’t hang around inside your intestines, waiting for you to eat, and then drawing off its share of the proceeds. Dracunculus medinensis is more sophisticated than that.

How? Well, to start off with, the worm doesn’t wait for you to accidentally swallow its eggs so you infect yourself at random. No, it goes out of its way to make sure you give its babies a chance of life.

Here’s how it happens. River and lake water have all kinds of tiny, tiny creatures in them – algae, protozoa, but also several kinds of tiny crustaceans called copepods, like miniature transparent shrimp, which feed on those protozoans and algae. And some of these, Cyclops for instance, can also swallow newborn Dracunculus larvae, which are very, very small, and give them an incubator and home.

How do Dracunculus larvae get into the water for Cyclops to eat? This is my story, so let me tell it to you my way. For now, just keep in mind that the little larvae will grow through two stages inside the crustacean, instead of, you know, getting digested and assimilated. And then they lie there, ready, waiting.

Waiting for what? For you, of course.

Suppose you get thirsty, and there’s no Evian in your fancy water bottle. So you drink water from the river or lake, just like that. If you do, you might swallow one or more Cyclops – you wouldn’t know it, they’re fairly small. And it’s just too bad if you’re a vegan, you just broke your vow.

Anyway, so you’ve drunk river water with a family of Cyclops. It’s not totally impossible that some of those Cyclops have larvae waiting inside them. And the Cyclops are now inside your stomach, where your enzymes, you know, digest the poor things alive.

You sadist.

Now this is what the larvae have been eagerly waiting for. Set at liberty from the copepod-shaped prison, they crawl into your intestines, bore through the wall – not a very difficult job, because at this stage they’re only about as thick as a hair – and find their way to your muscles. And there they rest, feed on your juices, and grow, and grow, and grow.

Boy, do they grow.

Now, the two sexes of Dracunculus look rather different. The male worms are only about four centimetres long at the most, but the females grow more than twenty times larger. That might give you guys with giantess fetishes a boost, but not the poor male Dracunculus, whose only purpose in life is to fertilise his immensely elongated girlfriend, after which she dumps him and he dies of a broken heart.

OK, OK, she moves off to fulfil the next step of her life cycle, and he dies. Fine?

Now, this sex they’re having is happening in the muscles of the body, as I said. You know, your body. The newly pregnant Ms Worm crawls off towards the skin, but not any skin. No, she’s not interested in your face or upper arm or back. Instead, she crawls down towards the lowest parts of your body – your calves, your shins, your feet. And once she arrives at her destination, she begins to fulfil her existence.

And this is how she does it – she bores a hole in your skin with her head end. Not unnaturally, having a hole in your skin hurts a little. No, make that it hurts a lot.  And the worm, by secreting chemicals which cause ulceration and intense inflammation, makes sure it hurts like all the fires of hell.

Hey, you know what Dracunculus medinensis means? The Little Dragon of Medina, that’s what.

So what’s the only way to get rid of this terrible pain? It’s to dunk the affected limb in cool, soothing water. Like, you know, the convenient river or lake nearby. And as soon as you do that, sighing with relief, your friendly neighbourhood parasite sticks her head end through that hole. Almost all her long length of body, all eighty centimetres of it, is basically one enormous uterus, and while she’s been crawling down to your ankle the uterus has been filling up with thousands upon thousands of babies. Now’s the time to set them free.

Yes, each time you soak your agonised feet in water, the larvae swim out in their thousands, doing the breast stroke and hoping to be found and eaten by some copepod. Most won’t succeed, of course, but they won’t need to. If only ten or fifteen of every hundred thousand manage to be eaten, and if only three or four of every thousand of those end up being swallowed with water, the life cycle continues, and the worm family lives happily ever after, amen.

Only it’s not so happy for you now, is it? Dracunculus can’t even be killed by anti-worm medication. You can’t yank the lady out either without her long body breaking, whereupon she’ll flood you with chemicals which might go and kill you with anaphylactic shock. No, that’s right out.

The only way to get rid of the worm is to undergo the same treatment as humanity has been following for thousands of years: Gently wrap the front end of Ms Dragon round a stick (a matchstick will do just fine) and, over a period of many, many days, twist her round and round the matchstick until all her nearly one metre comes right out. Exciting, isn’t it?

You bet it is.

So, it’s easier and better to try and stop the worm from infecting someone rather than cure the infection when it happens. Of course, if people would only drink purified mineral water priced at rates that touch the mountains they allegedly come from, nothing would happen. Or, you know, if they’d only boil the water they drank. But a huge number of people worldwide can’t find even firewood to cook food on, let alone spare it for boiling water. For them, some other solution is necessary.

Some other solution has been found. The WHO has launched a (highly successful - between 2009 and 2012 it caused a 96% drop in infections; what was that about socialised medicine being inefficient again?) scheme involving filters you can attach to the pots with which you gather water from the river. The copepods can’t get into the pots, which means their lives are spared, which is good news for them, and you can’t get the worm, which is good news for you. The only ones losing out are the worms, and yah boo sucks to them.

So – what has any of this got to do with this painting?

Look at this detail from it:

The women are standing with bare feet in the water, and drawing pots of it, presumably to drink. This was in 1856, long before the water filters, before the life cycle of Dracunculus had even been discovered. In fact, back then some “scientists” even refused to believe the creature was a worm (vide Parasite Rex, Carl Zimmer), calling it a lymphatic vessel. So, unboiled water from copepod-rich rivers at a time and place in history where Dracunculus was endemic.  

I’m kind of glad the painter didn’t put any more detail in the paintings. The last thing I’d want to see is all the worm heads poking out of their dainty little ankles.

Oh, so I’m a sadist who’s ruined your enjoyment of this work of art? 

Good.

Thoughts on the nude as art

Statutory warning: everything in this post is my own opinion and more likely than not hogwash.

I still remember the first nude art I ever saw.

I must have been about seven or eight years old. My youngest uncle, then about eighteen or nineteen, and a college student, had brought home a calendar, and showed it around at the dinner table.

It was a calendar of nude artwork (at this distance in time I can’t recall them too well but I’m pretty sure they were by European masters of the Renaissance era), and not the most common thing to be passed around over dinner – not back in the late seventies, when there was no TV hereabouts and a bikini in a magazine ad was about as much skin as one could ever see.

My grandmother, that gracious lady, didn’t turn a hair.  I still remember her looking at one of the paintings – depicting a man clasping a woman from behind and stabbing her between the breasts – and discussing how well the whole thing was painted, how the woman’s eyes were crinkled with agony, and so on. She didn’t even mention the fact that nobody had any clothes on.

This little episode was my first introduction to something that I’d never even thought about – nudity as art. Back then, nakedness had either been something to be ashamed of, or something one didn’t even think about. It wasn’t anything to do with sex, of course, because our parents and teachers back in those days pretended sex didn’t exist.

It was much later – long after I’d outgrown the teenage hormonal rush which made me look at every exposed nipple with a thrill going from my brain down to my genitals – that I began to re-examine the concept of nudity as art, and art pure and simple. You know, like the shift when one person’s dirty postcard became his own art masterpiece. Not, actually, that I needed all that much persuasion to start thinking of nudity as art. Most of it seemed too plastic to show real people anyway.

Is that silicone, or am I mistaken?

Now, of course, there are two distinct subdivisions of art – the naturalistic and the stylised. Now, if you’re anything like me, you’d assume the stylised would come first and give way to the naturalistic at a later date, when techniques and technology developed. By which you realise that I know nothing whatever about art.

The point that stuck in my mind though was this: why was nudity art? Specifically, in probably 80% of instances, why was the naked female form art? (Please understand that I’m not including pornographic or erotic art here.) Starting off with the Venus of Willendorf, a piece of Neolithic sculpture for which my own admiration has been utterly unfeigned since I first laid eyes on her. 

What is it about the unclothed form – and, if you set aside Michelangelo, just about always the unclothed female form – that draws out artists?

I don’t have a specific answer, but let me stick my neck out anyway – the nude as art exists because we are all drawn to the female sex as a nurturing and generative figure. Just like the Venus of Willendorf, which was most likely a fertility figure, ultimately the female nude is the equivalent of worship of the feminine in a form which isn’t readily recognisable as worship.

This can take the form of naked goddesses, like Diana:

Or Kali:

 And don't forget her, either:

Am I the only one wondering how the cloth stays on?

Or it can look like this, whatever the hell it is:

Pubic hair and all

I assume the artist had some kind of mammary fixation. Well, that pretty much proves it. 

I rest my case.

The Venus of Willendorf

 
In a museum in Wien, Austria, there is a little limestone statuette. They call her the Venus of Willendorf.

She isn’t large; only eleven centimetres from head to shin, about big enough to hold in the palm of one’s hand, and that (for reasons I’ll go into in a moment) is significant. She’s also old; very old, as it happens. She was carved between twenty seven and thirty two thousand years ago. Imagine that for a moment. At the time she came into existence, the Pyramids were seven to eight times as far away in the future as they are in our past. The human race was yet to discover agriculture. And yet someone made her, with such extreme care that she remains a work of art to this day.

So what’s so special about her, anyway?

At first sight, she looks like a fat naked woman, with huge breasts and abdomen, and a very carefully carved vulva with prominent labia. Her thighs are thick and lifelike, her large buttocks flat and also lifelike, and her stick-thin arms, which hold on to her upper breasts, bear the clear representation of ornaments akin to bangles on the wrists. She does not have feet, and never did; the feet aren’t broken off, they just never were carved. And she does not have a face. Instead, what covers her head is a series of seven carefully carved concentric circles, for all the world like coils of braided hair. She is a thing of beauty, above all else. But she’s not just a thing of beauty.

While it’s impossible to tell precisely why she was made, it’s possible to conjecture; there are enough clues available that such conjecture isn’t blind guesswork. For one thing, she’s not alone; the period she was made has sent down to us many other stylised representations of women, and only of women. But, while some of the other carvings are less and some more detailed than the Willendorf Venus, they lack the clues that she gives us.

Take another good look at her; and think of the era in which she was made. Back then, humans lived in nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, and life was really nasty, brutal and short. One would be lucky to live till one’s mid-thirties, and there was never any certainty over whether one would live to see the next day. And remember, always, that biologically, a human being is no more than a way for a gene to create another gene. That’s behind the urge to reproduce, an urge which most of us give in to this day. If you aren’t sure whether you’ll live to see tomorrow, it makes sense to reproduce today while you still can. Doesn’t it?

And, who carries out the actual business of reproduction? The man can donate his sperm, but it’s the woman who bears the baby in her womb, brings it forth from between her legs, and cares and nurtures it as long as needed. The woman is the well-spring of life; as it were, the “sacred feminine”.

Suddenly, the Venus doesn’t look like a morbidly obese woman any more; with her swollen breasts and her swollen belly, at which she seems to be looking, she appears to be a lovingly depicted and somewhat exaggerated vision of a pregnant woman, and her meticulously carved vulva is the gateway of future life to come.

And it’s also significant that she was found covered in red ochre paint, as of menstrual blood. Menstruation must have been a most significant occasion in women’s lives, if only because it would stop if she conceived, and was pregnant; and, of course, pregnancy was the very essence of her femininity, the state where she could do what no man could ever do: give birth to a new human being.

Also, remember that the Venus is small, only large enough to be held in a hand. In fact, she seems designed to be held in a hand, her curves sensual and rounded, the flowing lines desiring, almost, to be stroked. Obviously, she wasn’t meant to be left somewhere. She was meant to be carried along...to be, if one might say so, loved.

Therefore, I suppose it’s pretty logical to assume that the Venus was meant as a paean to femininity, a song of praise to womanhood. Let’s assume that for the moment and see where it gets us.

The first thing we should remember, of course, is that imperative to reproduce I mentioned a while back. Since it’s hardly likely that people of the time were so dumb that they hadn’t worked out the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth, it seems logical to assume that sex itself would come to have a special and highly significant, probably ritualistic, place in the society of the time.

And that, directly, leads us to something that – modern legalities aside – should be realised; after the onset of sexual maturity, virginity is a highly abnormal state. We’re programmed to have sex for a reason; and that reason is, primarily, the continuation of the species. Whether said sex is heterosexual, and directly concerned with propagation, or homosexual, and concerned with societal bonding, the fact is that virtually all of us are programmed to have it, and to enjoy it.

Logically, then, since giving birth was a precious and extremely necessary thing for the societies of the time, virginity was not only useless but actively harmful, since it wasted valuable sexual energies. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that being a virgin was pretty much tantamount to being a traitor, because it imperilled the group. And it’s more than likely that young men and women were ritually deflowered and initiated to sex as soon as they reached sexual maturity.

It’s most likely that the reverence for virginity (which is still sputtering along in today’s so-called modern society) is a much more recent phenomenon, one that grew with the emergence of settled communities and the concept of property. Obviously, a nomadic hunter-gatherer society can’t afford to have personal heritable property, or even defined family groups. It’s more likely than not that such societies brought up their children in common, and the children belonged to the group in common. But once a society settled, and became property oriented, a man had to have a reason to work for the future. If he had children, he needed to have a reason to work to pass on the fruits of his labours to the children. And why should he work for children he wasn’t sure were his own?

The solution, therefore? Get hold of the woman early, as soon as she becomes sexually mature, and control her so that she has sex exclusively with you. Whatever children she brings forth into the world will be yours, and therefore worth caring for. And in order to control her sexuality before she is yours, turn her virginity into an iconic state, instead of the stigma it was. Once you make her the custodian of her own virginity, your battle's won.

The attitude is just the opposite, in fact, of that shown by the Venus of Willendorf.

Men are the weaker sex biologically. We live shorter lives, and carry more genetic defects. Men are the weaker sex sexually as well; women have stronger sex drives than men, and biologically are programmed to that as well. The imperatives of reproduction ensure that. And, subliminally, men are aware of it, and, I suspect, faced with the raw sexuality of a woman, they’re terrified.

It wasn’t always like that though. Once upon a time, men and women were perfectly aware of each other’s respective sexuality, and rejoiced in it.

The Venus of Willendorf tells us it’s so.


Further reading:

http://witcombe.sbc.edu/willendorf/willendorfwoman.html (A detailed physical description of the statuette)

http://www.donsmaps.com/willendorf.html (A site with photographs of her from various angles, and a description of how she was found)