Sewer Agglomeration (demo - 29/05/26 version) No. I / ::: excremental poetics of non-human thriving :::

 Sewer Agglomeration

Labyrinthine dark.

A human constructed network of arched brick and mouldering concrete.

Turbid and vile waters sluice and gurgle through the depths.

A representation of the individual human unconscious, magnified and realised: home to the abject, discarded, absent and wilfully forgotten.

Underground, in the absence of light, the living and the dead teem.

Rodent bodies scurry alongside invertebrate, mollusc, bacterial, fungal and algal life; a chthonic ecosystem, thriving upon the unwanted and cast-out.

Churning in iterative generational succession, these bodies have adapted to their natural environment: itself a mimicry of the caverns and tunnels in the rock of Earth-Terra herself.

Down here, the remains of these dwellers mingle with those of the discarded human detritus.

In one dank corner of an unremarkable tunnel, a snag has formed, a small dam comprised of amassed rodent bones, a meshwork that has become a scaffold supporting a substrate of discarded material, forming a growth medium upon which a micro-ecosystem is growing.

Bacteria, fungus and algae form mutualistic bonds, webbing themselves across the muck-fleshed osseous nest.

Something of unique potential seems to form, as many before have; but in cases hitherto, there is no response to this posed question of receptivity.

The subterranean skeletal excremental womb lies fertile.

The sewers serve as the conveyor of further materials beyond the human's excreter: dead pets, and more unfortunates from the world above find their way down: the unwanted, or momentarily cherished and subsequently neglected.

But, other potent and potentiating materials too: life's blood and gametes.

The snag's pseudo-endometrium is enriched by ensnared bodies of unhappy victims of human disinterest, and the sheddings of their collective reproductive organs.

Here, in this inorganic monument to shit, something takes hold, some nascent spark of unfathomable essence breaks through into this level of existence, and the symbiotic clutch of elder life forms fuse with those of the complex descendants.

The entity is both unified and collective, holonic in its nature of simultaneous whole/part-ness; all attributes of the components align into a resilient form of life.

It feeds, the umbilical stream brining varied nutriment.

A dim sense of awareness fills the complex networks of the agglomeration, followed by a surge of neurotrophic activity: complex interactions of fungal derived endogenous entheogenic chemicals drive connection and conversion of the symbiont materials; myelination and proliferation of cortical matter blossom in the interstitial spaces between proto-hands joined across unfathomable microscopic developmental voids.

As its bulk swells, absorbing further varieties of life, introjecting them whole, with minimal processing, it becomes a veritable microcosmic living stromatolitic-mycorrhizal-hive-pack-eco-city.

This entity now moves.

Downstream it flows, ever incorporating, absorbing, digesting and growing, in symbiosis rather than assimilating and homogenising, just for now; a harmonious dance of evolving autopoiesis.

Dim sense steer its progress.

The ancestral memories of the very cells that make up the totality recall the world above.

The bacterial-algal-fungal-animal keratinocyte-chloroplasts hunger for light and air not tainted with hydrogen sulphide.

These tunnels lead towards a treatment plant, deadly chemicals ready to process the human waste, fatal to the entity.

Through some connection to knowing, beyond itself - it has no sense of discrete sentience, but survival instinct - tapping into an alien collective unconscious repository of information and being guided by the knowledge access via its morphic resonance.

The agglomeration swells over countless hours/days/months, developing protoplasmic capacities, putting out tendrils to gather information from its immediate surroundings and explore its potential physicality.

It finds it can edge its way now, lifting itself from the streams that carried it, onto rough brick surfaces, offering some hold, where not slick with slime, from this subterranean system, which terminates in doom, into another parallel underground system: the entity finds its way into the storm drains

It now moves towards the surface.

Countless and unknowable time passes. 

It feeds now, growing, learning, converting the amassed materials of its bulk into better adapted specialist cells.

It becomes a body with rudimentary organs, so much more than a colony of eukaryotic cells and amassed fuel-source dead tissues, forming into a cohesive whole, it evolves further, hybridising, synthesising the properties of the components and becoming so much more.

Blindly it moves its way through the tunnels, tasting the gentle and faint snatches of fresh air from the surface, blowing down into the tunnels.

The air grows progressively clearer, the darkness yields to dim twilight, which grows ever steadily as the surface world comes ever closer.

Eventually, the entity reaches an opening, yet, its way cruelly is barred by a cold meshwork of bitter metal.

The bulk of the being is now such that it cannot pass: it does not have the strength to force the obstacle and be free, and is too far developed now to devolve into slime, which might flow through the mesh.

It faces an instinctual choice: a sacrifice of self, an internal fertilisation, surrendering to the destructive reproductive urge. 

The polyploid cells cross-fertilise amongst themselves.

This takes all the energy the being has.

It's body quivers and begins to sag. 

Days and nights pass.

In time, fruiting bodies grow from its surface, opening caps and unfurling gills.

The bulk is self-digested and consumed to form these organs that so lovingly wish for the being's offspring to meet the world.

A gentle breeze carries its spores out into the growing twilight.

(Words and images, copyright - S.J. Bloxsidge.)