In New X-Men #117, Cassandra Nova taunts Henry McCoy:
You’re a devolver! Where will your ‘gift’ take you next, I wonder? Will you become an insect? A worm? A slithering, incoherent slime mold still trying to charm women with its awkward poetry?
Well, over the weekend I turned into an incoherent slime mold, full of fear and loathing, as if someone had thrown up on my soul. It was as if all my higher functions had shut down. A good time to swap servers for my blog — in between psychotic attacks, I was remapping permalinks with htaccess files. No higher functions necessary for that activity, just autopilot.
But perhaps this could become a passage, a learning experience, if only it were somehow social and only theatrical. In Grant Morrison’s Invisibles, when Lady Manning visits de Sade’s new institute, she sees a horrible place called “The Semi”, full of illness and fevers. A young woman crawls on all fours out the front door, covered in filth. Manning later meets the woman, who is now beaming:
We abused each other, we experienced psychotic, morbid states of shame, disgust, greed, fear and power… the video’s in the library — “Turtle Comes Out of Her Shell” — it’s got me on the front covered in shit, spunk and Scott’s Porage Oats. But… the experience cured my shyness and anorexia. And the lump I had in my left breast is gone completely.
Perhaps.
