My Trip to Venus
There is a certain loose genre of science fiction known as 'portal fiction'. The macguffin in these stories always consists of a doorway to somewhere else: Fairyland, Arcturus (popular), the past or the future, alternate dimensions etc. Imagine my surprise when, by chance, I discovered a functioning portal right here in the City of Glasgow leading directly to the planet Venus, then in close alignment with the Earth. This is a true story.
Last year I happened to be invigilating a poorly attended show in the old Intermedia gallery on King St. After a day watching members of the Transmission committee scuttling guiltily past the window I thought 'fuck it' locked up early and went down to explore the basement space. Luckily I had my mini Mag-lite on me as its pretty black down there. I smashed a padlock and with a bit of shoving managed to get a rotting old sliding door to shift just enough to gain entrance to a seemingly endless series of sub-basements. Although I'd been down there a few times over the years I had never encountered the 'ghost' that allegedly haunts the place. But this time was different. I've always been a little psychic, it runs in the family (my sister is a crystal-healer and my father uses the i-ching to tell fortunes) and sure enough I felt the fear rise up - this being a sign of the prescence of 'entities'.
By this time my psychic sense had been well and truly enhanced by a line of DMT and a pipe full of top quality grass (Kallisti Gold) so I wasn't surprised to see a beautiful Succubus beginning to form in the darkest corner of a dingy room littered with dead shoes. These creatures are always difficult to describe as their form is a bewitching (literally) reflection of the shifting ur-woman/man all of us keep tucked inside our heads (in my case this meant a peculiarly satisfying admixture of Edie Sedgewick, Jenny Agutter, Lisa Tarbuck and Sheila, the sexy barmaid from the old Shawlands Hotel got up in the uniform of the Salvation Army circa 1974 i.e. a peaked cap, tight tunic and pencil skirt, all in midnight blue with red piping). After we'd made love, she/it beckoned me further into the endless series of chambers. Someone had smashed an irregular opening in the rotting plaster of a wall in the furthermost room, my beguiling avatar beckoned me through...
Of course these portals are not really doors, rather they are hyper-dimensional wormholes that enable 'quantum leaps' as a probabilistic 'wave packet'. In the words of physicist John A Wheeler "there is no space-time, there is no time, there is no before, there is no after. The question 'what happens next' is without meaning".
What happened next was that I found myself on 'Venus' naked and covered in 'entoptic' and 'hieronymous' psychogrammes, lying half-submerged in a warm and softly undulating milky fluid surrounded by a steamy carboniferous swamp (looking much like the Cambrian era is supposed to look). Immediately I realised that this was a 'fictional' representation of the 'real' planet Venus, probably relating to Robert Heinlein's Future History series inspired by chemist Svante Arrhenius's erroneous predictions of swamp-like conditions and constant rain. I was lucky, I could have been stuck in C S Lewis' Perelandra being assaulted by pseudo-christian allegorical imagery of the most pernicious kind.
A peculiar bluish quadruped hove into view. Perhaps something out of Burroughs? (Edgar Rice that is.) It indicated that I should insert my penis into its throbbing sexual organ and as a visitor to this planet it seemed churlish to refuse. Unfortunately the pressure differentials between our bodies meant that most of my lower organs were summarily hoovered out through my penis, a not altogether unpleasant sensation, though inconvenient. The creature galloped off in confusion with myself still firmly attached to its rear end.
Luckily, what we percieve as linearity (or history) is a teleological illusion obviated by the existence (or non-existence until observed, if one adheres to the notion of an observer-created universe) of a four-dimensional space-time continuum.
As the creature galloped along I had time to ponder some of the more curious shifts and by-ways of artistic production here in the City of Glasgow. Dr Neil Mulhollands survey of recent Scottish art and art criticism 'The Language of Flowers'* had touched upon this works 'resistivity' and its 'incestuous relationship with music and fashion' and 'the influx of 'art chancers' desperate to genuflect at the altar of The Modern Institute'. In 'The Key to the Sex Question'* Dr Francis McKee explores how 'this supposed cool, outsider status' had resulted in 'an over-emphasis on formal concerns, to the exclusion of all else, especially sex' and that 'this asemic practice was, in the end, simply mystification'. The so-called 'awkward authenticity' at present flooding the city is a passing fad, a reaction to and a symptom of Darwinian market forces and the usual lottery-enabled folderol. It comes as no surprise to find that most of the works produced latterly in this city will fit nicely inside a cornflake box.
The drugs wore off and I found myself back in a filthy sub-basement in the City of Glasgow covered in a vile ectoplasmic secretion and stinking of sex. It was the end of an era, the death knell. King St was about to be turned into some kind of 'art superstore' with attendant up-market bars and (for fuck sakes!) a 'comedy club'. The fashionable and well-heeled were (with the help of the council) about to descend and begin to psychically strip-mine the area of any remaining positive energy. Fortunately for me a strategic blowjob at an opening the night before had cemented my place in the upper echelons of Glasgow's notoriously clique-ridden art scene.
Jim Colquhoun, Starkness 23 Gueules 128
*Coelacanth Press 2006/5 respectively