ERRATUM

Kingdom: Demonalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Acardia
Order: Demianthropoidea
Family: Adamopolous
Genus: Mierrus Hominidae
Species: Mierrus

Apology:

We have endeavored with the preceding entries in this compendium to treat our subjects with the detached objectivity appropriate to scientific writing. Given the ostensibly preternatural aspects of the subject matter at hand this was a task fraught with challenges. It has been our intention, however, from the very inception of this project to place the maligned recipients of our attentions within a context free of the distortions that inhere in so much of both religious and folk representations.

Despite our efforts there can be little doubt that we will offend the sensibilities of some whilst perchance exciting the lurid curiosities of others. But what may strike the gracious reader of this text as grotesque or pornographic has engendered no such emotions within the authors. Just as our colleagues in the separate but wedded discipline of taxonomical biology assign no moral valuations and thus do not flinch at, say, Megaselia scalarsis and its necrophagous proclivities, we too have refrained from quaint moralizing.

As scientists we are, after all, to operate as the eyes of Nature and not her conscience.

It is with professional apologies, then, that we present this our last entry. Here you will find depicted an organism so vile, so fulsome to even the most depraved mind, that we were regrettably but ineluctably compelled towards invective rather than mere description.

Anatomy:

Mierrus, whilst classified as a single organism, is composed of a myriad of constituent parts that operate under presumed notions of autonomy. (Not autonomy apart from the super organism – the existence of which the individual groups seem largely ignorant of – but autonomy apart from one another.)

The groups are in effect biologically identical with one another but do exhibit some degree of difference (see “Behaviour”) as well as distinctions between male and female genders.

The subject’s size is capable of extreme variation; presumably at will, but it is always humanoid in form; horrifically and awfully humanoid.

Behaviour:

As mentioned above Mierrus is composed of a large number of groups operating under dubious notions of autonomy. These groups are wholly dependent one on another for continued existence but act as if blind to or insensible of this fact. Indeed, interactions between groups were overwhelmingly marked by violence.

The features by which these groups attempt to distinguish themselves are essentially arbitrary: the superficial aspects of some groups – size; coloration; et cetera – show minor variations over another; certain groups excel in tasks at which other groups struggle; their vocalizations display unique semantic markers for nearly identical referents. These distinctions, and others equally arbitrary, are the grounds for justifying – in fact, frequently making virtues of – the most reprehensible atrocities imaginable. (Since the time of this writing the groups have evolved – perhaps “devolved” is more apposite – in such a way that any act of justification has been largely abandoned. Meanwhile the assignation of virtues has increased in inverse proportion.)

Violence is not only exported. Often it was observed within groups, the female and young of the species typically – but not exclusively – being the victims.

In this creature at war with itself rape and murder are endemic; genocide is routine; vengeance is pursued at any cost; creativity brings forth the armaments of destruction; the blood of the innocent (what innocence there is amongst them) cries unanswered in the streets; cruelty and deception of every sort is the common currency.

It would seem that a commitment to self-annihilation is the one thing about which Mierrus agrees amongst itself.

Mierrus has means of communicating (if we may debase the word thusly) through the use of many tongue-like organs that writhe together in a perpetually agape mouth and shriek in what sounds like as many frequencies. (As we have already sullied “communication” we will do no further damage and refrain here from ascribing to these individual rackets the word “language”.) At those rare intervals when two or more contrarian tongues achieve a degree of acoustic consonance such that mutual intelligibility at least seems possible every effort is made by these accidental conspirators to frustrate their own efforts and descend once more into a chaotic, chattering din.

Mierrus is an omnivore with a preference for meat. Unsurprisingly, groups prey without discretion upon one another’s young. This in itself is not uncommon in Nature but we frequently observed behaviour associated with this appetite that was almost unfathomably appalling.

One group would sever the heads of the stolen infants of another group and then, under auspices of empathy, serve to the grieved and apparently ignorant parents the brains and entrails of their slaughtered progeny. The ignorance of the “bereaved”, however, is highly suspect. We noticed that many groups advertised or made available – subtly but irrefutably so – their young to rival groups and while they maintained an attitude of dismayed shock throughout the ordeal the sincerity of their sorrow is little to be believed. It would appear that these atrocities must be classified not as acts of kidnapping and murder but of ritualized infanticide and cannibalization.

It must be noted that this behaviour is some of the only intra-group cooperation demonstrated by Mierrus.

In matters of culture Mierrus displays a considerable propensity for the creation and adoption of religious myths and topoi. Such beliefs were very nearly ubiquitous amongst the groups observed and as they are congenial to the affecting of some of their most remarkable perversion and cruelty this may explain their considerable influence. Violence was especially fervent when sanctioned by a religious authority or the (supposed) divine mandate of a god.

Evidence suggests that Mierrus reckons its deities in its own image; a fact that, if true, only serves to further damn its nature.

Conclusion:

This concludes our entry for the daemon known as Mierrus.

To maintain for the period of time demanded of us the proximity to such a monster necessary for the accumulating of this data was nearly a trial beyond words. For Mierrus is a daemon unlike any other. It lives for death, has made an “art” out of viciousness, and glories in its violence. It is this that makes the fiend so ignoble: that it is conscious of what it does.

A certain pity can be extended to the brutish lot of the beasts of the field; they know not what they do. But what sympathies are on offer for a being that is self-aware? For a being that must surely know better?

Perhaps on second thought Mierrus is, if not worthy of our pity, at least pitiful: no promise of damnation to come could surmount the punishment of daily living with itself. Mierrus’ torture is simply, piteously, horribly, that it can never stop being Mierrus. At least Oroboros (see entry XXVI of this volume) had the consolation – specious, to be true, but no less consoling for that – of a finite length of tail to consume.

Mierrus, in spite of all its trying, can’t get rid of itself.

It is with no small measure of terror that we contemplate such a monster making its way into our midst.

-Excerpted from “Essays in Taxonomical Daemonology” , Hume and A. Toore eds. (unpublished)

russian riffing

Every happy family is alike insofar as its members are committed to maintaining a set of shared deceptions; it is in the upsetting of these deceptions that a family acquires its unique unhappiness.

No. 7

At dawn the sky still breaks against the face of the mountains in waves of pale blue mist. The sun emerges as Earth rehearses this arc of its ancient orbit and the waves recede; drawn in to wait again for nightfall. From the vanishing darkness a rooster signals a new day’s momentary triumph.

My punctual alarm clock pierces the sleep that surrounds me and I surface from a dream. Lying in bed I struggle to guard from marauding consciousness the fading apparition of a girl who is at once both as strange and remote to me as a fairy kingdom and the sum of every woman I’ve ever known, loved, cherished, cursed. The ember eyes of this unknown Ur-girl flash finally as the dream is outstripped by reality and I am left alone in the growing glow of morning.

In the kitchen my coffee maker exhales periodic sighs that fill my small apartment with its rich, resuscitating breath. I pour a full cup; I am going to need all the help I can get today. The mountains may be clearing but my mind feels wrapped in a stupefying fog and with half-blind eyes it peeks disconcertingly from its cephalic cave.

Opposite where I live there is a small vegetable garden. Rows of pepper and bean plants, bellflowers with milky lavender blossoms, and a pumpkin patch grow here; all enclosed by a wire fence from which ivy hangs like a shaggy, green beard. Every day with bowed back and dirt covered knees the same old woman tends to this garden. Standing at the window, the cup of coffee cooling in my hands, I observe her.

The old woman lays down her hand spade straightens her back inhales deeply and with knotted gnarled fingers begins turning over a pile of desiccated pepper plants beneath which grow seedlings their stems and leaves as pale with newness as the day seedlings that are being protected and nourished through the decay and death of the plants from which their seeds were harvested seedlings that in a short span of time will lay shriveled on the earth with new life burning under them and the old woman will strip the familiar shroud from their reincarnated selves as she has done since the time before her remembering and give them anew to the creative chaos of the sun.

I finish my coffee. The day is soon ringing with peals of children laughing and singing on their way to school.

- Yeosu, South Korea, September 2007

No. 6

"The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance."

- William Shakespeare, The Tempest (V.i.27,28)

"In war, the physical or idolatrous substitute for the real dialectic of the spirit, one lives by half-truths."

- Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism