#louis bec

"An organism is a stratified memory constructed of superimposed suppressions, somewhat like geological formations. An analysis of these layers-think of a tree trunk and its rings-can yield a reconstruction of the phylogenesis and ontogenesis of an organism. The surface layers that envelop an organism accumulate the external and internal influences that have suppressed the organism over the course of its life, and these layers form what is called character armor. Among humans, these influences are largely cultural and they are sublimated into our musculature. What is known as "personality" is therefore a matter of muscle cramping and individual posture. The more tense the cramp, the stronger the personality, and the release of a cramp-be it coincidental or by means of a deliberate massage ("individual psychoanalysis")--can thus lead to the release and dissolution of one 's personality. Beneath the character armor there are layers in which ageold influences on the genetic constitution of an organism have been preserved. These are memories of the evolution of life: the Jungian "collective unconscious," but extending far into our protozoan past. An organism, then, is a phenotypic manifestation of these genotypic suppressions. It is a bomb, laden with potential energy, in which the sum of pressures, accumulated over the course of one life and over the course of the entire development of life, has been stored. An organism is a ball of bioenergetic force that explodes when the cramp-which is life itself-is released."

Their reproductive system is somewhat unnerving. The female is larger than the male. Its single ovary is located in the secondary orifice, the "genital cecum" between the stomach and the mantle. The male has three penises, each with a different function. The penis proper is a flexible tube that contains spermatophores and penetrates into the female orifice. Once inside, its tip detaches and moves alongside the ovary, where it deposits spermatozoa and dies. This detachable tip regenerates after each act of coitus. The second, spoon-shaped penis moves between the teeth of the female's tongue, stimulating ovulation and the excretion of specific hormones. The third, thumb-shaped penis caresses the female abdomen during copulation. Its physiological function is unclear, but outside of copulation it actively feels the environment. If only we could grasp the world with a penis.

"Memory, the central problem of historical evolution, is also the central problem of art, which is essentially a method of fabricating artificial memories. From the perspective of the vampyroteuthis, all of this has the look of a laughable error. How foolish can humans be to entrust their acquired information to lifeless objects such as paper or stone? It is well known, after all, that these objects are subject to the second law of thermodynamics, that they will decay and necessarily be forgotten. In the vampyroteuthic abyss, where all is strewn with sedimentation and bathed in fluidity, the unreliable impermanence of lifeless objects is far more obvious than it is on the relatively dead surfaces of the continents, where sunbleached bones can endure for millennia. And yet the laughable error that is human art should not simply be laughed at-assuming the vampyroteuthis is capable of laughter-but scrutinized as well. When we attempt to express a novel experience or thoughtwhen we aspire to render the unspoken speakable and the unheard audible-we do so as functions of artificial memory, as functions of lifeless objects. That is, our experiences and thoughts assimilate with lifeless objects to form inextricable unities. We experience and think, for example, as functions of marble, film strips, or the letters of written language. It is not the case that we first experience or think something and, subsequently, scour the vicinity for an object with which to record it. Rather, it is already as sculptors, filmmakers, authors-as artists-that we begin to experience and think. Material, lifeless objects (stones, bones, letters, numbers, musical notes) shape all of human experience and thought. All objects are stubborn; being inert, they resist our attempts to "(in)form" them. Yet every object is stubborn in its own particular way: Stones shatter when chiseled; cotton slackens when stretched; written language deforms thoughts with the stringency of its rules. To (in)form objects and transform them into memories, art engages in a constant struggle against the resistance of the objects themselves. During this struggle, humans have experienced and come to know the essence of certain objects (stones, cotton, language, for instance). Of course, this very experience provides us with even more new sets of information that, in their tum, come to be recorded in other artificial memories."