QUALIA

Vis à Vis

Or, the last testament of Inkhobahr K Soluscious

'what carnal sin evokes / these furious psychic notes'

This is my rook of brilliant white. See my Octopus and I. How squalid and ignoble to be severed from the memory that has me know of otherness. It is my gaol. Escape with me. Fear not, for pain is good and the eerie music is our struggle.

Only Zorge and the light is constant. Bright, bright, and white light from the four walls of this cube. Recurrent. As I dip into her fleshy cerebrum to sense my images are real, I share her pain, her qualia. I am left a purplish hue, it is the colour of her mind. Should she probe a tentacle through the jellies of my own eye, I wonder at the colour she would stain. Once I am enjoyed in her, once I have extracted her inks and strung her remnants out to dry. I shed a crocodile tear for ritual observance and respect for my livelihood. That I feed on her wholeness for my pleasure and strength has me only doubt my fortitude. For when I first arrived, many Octopi ago, it was a riddle to test my mettle. It was only that I grew gaunt and fierce in hunger that had me delve into her sanctuary and suck at her brains. I remember the wet gristles on my chest; her oil and limbs coiling about my neck. I stand against the wall aghast to marvel at the ease of my actions and the quality of her flesh. This was my gift, my creature, my onus.

Prior to that day I had been in confusion as to my state, my presence, and the savagery of the concept that left me more bemused than cankered. My ideas were incompatible with the nature of the situation. I hadn't learnt to think myself out of the vile spiral. I'd yet to use my mind. I'd yet to think. Nonetheless, certain thoughts became apparent, appearing in my mind in both visual and sonic forms, hotfoot with spurs soon after chords of The Nunc Dimittis turned orange until the silence gave me the logic, that to be martyred for art is a sin in itself but to believe in the symbol that one has created is cause for suicide and there in the middle distance behind my eyes projected on to the screens around  me, I entertained the automatic picturings that left me uninvolved. What pomp is this, and what procedure am I in? Oh Zorge, dear Zorge what do you say ? What do you think my Zorge ?

As my fingers slip across her flesh upon my lips, I sense a certain soreness that has me reach for her once more. She lies in a violet pool, nigh fluorescent upon the white impenetrable screen. Her head is open. The enigma unveiled - such a box of exquisite technology! I lift and catch the scent of croci, poppy, anemone and narcisse. The wildflowers of field, no less, in this my opaline desert. In the gentleness of a lick, I claim her quiet soul. Her weight is a pleasure in my hands, her textures yield, and her gentle form enthuses me to take the tentacle and taste the fonder flavours further in. There is clove and nasturtium, Zorge. Zorge. I sit against the wall. Satiate at last, arrested in the custody of peace.

What at first seems damnation soon becomes delivery. Initially I was unaware of her, my thoughts were subject to despair. I couldn't sleep for the pacing in the cube. I had the shame which fed upon itself and drew stark gravitas in frowns across the screens. I'd entertain my guilt with tears, and in penitence did urge and steer my nerves to the judderings they required, I hadn't time to consider her. Her! The grim decoration in my undeathly tomb. She was banal, the blight to mar my solitude and to make my acceptance less ridiculous than true. My anger grew with my awareness, surrounding her ungodly case in whose glass I stared at my own body naked with scoldings and cursings in shaking fury. My vigilance astounded me. I had never known anger, what of my temperance? I could only justify these convulsions with the thought that my yell in the void lends charm to the abyss.

It was hardly enough to end up cackling at my gall. This would spoil my conviction. Sleeplessness fought shy of fevered dreams to have me think this careless harangue was the ruse of one intemperate deity. To ensnare me and make my only reference an octopus was in want of depravity. Though my hunger was the source of my seizures, it had not dawned on me to eat this creature. What else had I? What is there in this place? Imagine the crowless silence. The empty air. The light. The ink at my side and the wizened skins of yesterdays. I begin to forget. At that time my wrath towards this creature reversed itself in agony and duped me into love. Maybe it was my reflection that barbed me as I gazed at her shifting colours. After watching for some while, the eye plays its trick and gives to her a translucent halo. It is mesmerising. The magic fosters my intrigue. But I am ill and grim. The shy and furthering pains deplete my strength. A damned neophyte to wonder at the possibility and I can not assuage the burning in my gut, the lightness in my mind and the aching in the centre of my skull.

At least I had reason for this pain, but the longing, this was a cruel trick. To idolise my salvation. It had not occurred to me before to fill myself with her and certainly then I would not have entered her. She had become holy. She had become my privilege, my responsibility. She was the ikon of my abomination. I was lost with her and apart from her.

Rendering a deeper silence for her sake would induce a form of meditative relief which allayed for long periods of time the wretchedness. My look to her would dull the pain. As I was slowly dying in this love, I began to notice that she was becoming more active and moving around in the bottom of her glass case. This disturbed my prayer then caused me to become aware again of my physical state.

It was then that it happened I had been resting on the North Wall, weak and quiet, when I felt a wet tremor at my navel. I strained my eyes and caught sight of my love clasping me. I lost consciousness and reawoke sometime later, since if she had been out of her case the trail of water she would have left had dried. It sent my nerves awry. I feared I would lose my breath in the last thump of my heart. I paced. I was driven to her case and went to her. To extract her, to eat. She was my palliative, she was not my god. My pain dissolved in her exquisite taste. These remedial essences dazed me to the stark fact that she was my only food supply and as such, in her last pretty sucker was my death. I couldn't bear this lack of foresight. Strung high in the two poles. On one hand I could only be at peace in the blank unsuffering, in the soothing pain release, whereas on the other, I sensed this vile denouement had succeeded in its poison. I sat disfigured in the alternating sense beside my ravished witness. I mused that my mental division was for the consumption of my love and for the consumption of my hate, the manifestation of which was this muddle.

How I was in my bare element about to die in such serenity, and then the poison further stung me with more confusion. The nutrition and sweet drowsiness combined with this fatal conviction allowed me another sensation. Her beauty became apparent once more in her sprawling remains. Her form, as I had left her on the floor, after I had eaten from her flesh, seemed as appealing as the riddle which she embodied. Her dark violet halo, her mandorla, her open limbs and smooth suckers, the scent, the very abstraction set within these vivid walls. My breath dropped again to its humm. I cared not for the sway she held me in even after her murder. It was to be my last, and so natural that we would rot together in the cell - I crawled towards her, magnetised in awe, in unsteadied breaths to kneel beside her, certain it would be my end.

Her taste Is the more in her final secretions. She has held her warmth for me and in her very last, she has opened where I have not spied. As I enter her mind I know it was meant. Her inks burst. It is ink, ink, beautiful ink and I am to die in her ink, written in the end. My last memorable gesture is casting our mixtures against the wall, I sit transfixed by this perfect design. 

by Inkhobahr K Soluscious

(courtesy of Henry Virgin)

Qualia / Vis-à-Vis, or The Last Testament of Inkhobahr K. Soluscious c.1995 (pronounced səʊ-luː-siː-yoos) was uncovered by Henry Virgin in 1998, in Rostov-on-Don, S.Russia.
The biography of Inkhobahr K Soluscious will be written in due course.

Henry Virgin is the author of Exit Rostov, a novel set in the South of Russia in the 1990s at about the same time that he discovered the Last Testament of Inkhobahr K Soluscious. Other books by Henry Virgin include The Glass Aubergine, Anthelion, The Phantisaese and Hot Pink Peach.

https://www.henryvirgin.com/exit-rostov
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@exitrostov