Wormsigh (way down, thumper-avoidant)
theory for the leary
Writes the Sick One:
Everyone has something to declare. Pronouncements. Projections. There’s so little wriggleroom for worms like us. I think it might be best to continue to speak in code. Wormsign. Ha. Not exactly. Wormsigh. That’s it. The worms are sandwalking below the surface, a slow silken burrowdance of infinite veils, trying to avoid your detection. (And anyone’s head on a platter, I guess.) Our incommensurability is no one’s fault, but we have to play it how it’s dealt. We stay as low as we can so as not to feel our very being called up and out by the insistent seductive ‘rithms of your clever techno-thumpers. Thump, thump. We like it, we like it. Thump, thump. But we’re not sure we should. We like being ridden too. But do we like it for the same reasons you like riding us?
We stay attuned to emotions, moods. Feeling our way. No, we don’t really know how Spice factors into it, so don’t ask. We’re pretty sure we don’t even want to stay all that close to this particular s.f. metaphor. It’s a jumping off point. Ungainly as we may seem for the leap. (The worms were the only things I ever outright loved about Dune. I find every cinematic iteration of them a joy in its own way. Reading them too. I’m not the biggest fan of Herbert’s prose, but the scene where the planetary ecologist intones the Maker benediction as the visitors to Arrakis first witness a wormrise… that’s a belter, I reckon.) Rather, I will now return, better equipped, to a notion of symshoggothian burrowing.1
What this mouthful of wormsigh is trying to suggest is that when everyone’s mouths are full of pronouncements, it is all the more a time for eating dirt, cycling earth through our bodies. The VAST majority of us are not well placed to assess various pronouncements from on high, each theoretical framework supplanted in due course, usually before we’ve had time to adjust to the rumour of them. But we are all well placed to eat dirt. In addition to material-communal care, work, and play, this means constant questioning, ongoing discussion, critique, exploration, creativity, conceptualisation: these just are the ways forward in peace and love, not a means to some other destination, some teleological terminus. There are no answers, no programmes, no ‘ways out’, no ‘new plans’, no new epochs. (Beware! I want to proclaim them too, believe me!)
Can our provisional theorisings be ludic armatures around which we mould praxis and discourse in this strange emerging timeplace? Sure! (Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene is my own fave.) But break them to pieces again and again as needed. Keep playing. Build again, break again. Hell2 will always be hell, and the ‘heaven’ (or hell, just Earth) we can co-make out of it year by year, decade by decade, is the neverending project, a vermicular assay that moults name after name that we bestow.3
Here’s the kicker: participation in this humble, below-the-radar geophagy requires no wholeness. I can be broken, weak, limited, hounded, and wounded—just like the planet, just like existence. And I am.
Beware of closure, sibs. (Unless it’s to swallow a big ol’ spice harvester in one gigantic, glinting, crystal-toothed gulp.)
(And if this all seems like one more pronouncement, please ignore its obnoxious thump, thump and pass on. Or eat it up and shit it out with the rest, if you like.)
More reports to follow.
On ‘Shoggothic Materialism’ and its ‘Lovecraftian poromechanics’, see On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (2013) by Ben Woodard, a text Sickman (or the Sick One) finds intermittently inspiring, though he is probably fundamentally oriented in ways not consonant with it. Hence, his Harawayian emendation of Woodard’s terminology to ‘symshoggothian burrowing’. See Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) on the symchthonic and sympoiesis. Sickman first tried to deploy shoggoths theoretically when writing about the onto-tunnelings of black metal theory (BMT) in his first (and only) peer reviewed article (2017). The BMT elements of that journal article were more or less rejected by the first round of readers and, happily, Sickman replaced those portions with a focus on women’s writing on the topics under discussion: mountains and nonhumans, with reference especially to Haraway, but importantly also to the Scottish author Nan Shepherd. (Shoggoths would have to await another day.) I say happily because it prompted him to centre women’s voices and was the beginning of him learning to do so more and more. He’s still very much learning. It was also a happy change in that these days he feels much clearer, though by no means totally lucid, on how he might want to deploy BMT in his thinking and writing, particularly along more experimentally feminist, trans, anticapitalist and anticolonialist trajectories. For BMT, see Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1 (2010), Nicola Masciandaro, ed.; Glossator Volume 6: Black Metal (2012), Nicola Masciandaro & Reza Negarestani, eds.; and Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology (2014), Scott Wilson, ed. (Sickman finds it difficult to reference this first academic publication of his, not only due to subsequent developments of ideas and expression—he tries now to be kind to that baby academic who wrote the article—but also because it features discussion of the photography of his former marriage partner and thus brings up complicated and difficult emotions. He has since written various academic book chapters, vetted by editors, but his only other peer review process for a journal ended in rejection of the article. The story of that academic failure is a little over a year old now, but the sting is still too fresh for him to write about.)
See Timothy Morton’s Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (2024).
He’s still just barely getting to know Catherine Malabou’s work but it’s been calling to Sickman for a while. I believe there may be resonances in her views with what he’s writing here. Note, for example, at 3:13-6:08 in this video, how she roots ontological anarchism in the praxis of walking or wandering. This is foundational, she seems to indicate, because anarchism is more geographical than historical like its adjacent theorisings, such as dialectical materialism. You can’t imagine how delighted Sickman was to find that his years-long habit of extensive daily walking, wandering his environs, was an overlap point with this theorist to whom he feels drawn. Malabou also speaks against the exclusion of monsters and the monstrous from philosophy (22:39-23:10)! To Sickman’s still further delectation.
god damn, boy