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Note on Wych Hazel (on the planet Terror)

This prose poem was published in April 1969 in the No 2 issue of Stardock, a small, self-avowedly amateur science-fantasy fanzine edited by Stan Nicholls. My poem was a child of its time and could not have found a better home than that 40-page small mag, alongside an article on Kubrick’s recent film 2001, a Michael Moorcock bibliography, and an advertisement for the (professional) New Worlds sci-fi magazine showing Jane Fonda’s Barbarella resting her hand on the thigh of the blind angel Pygar. The reviewer of 2001 saw sexual symbolism everywhere. In the 1960s it was obligatory to do that, though I must say the ape’s bone-club and the shiny space monolith did not strike me as priapic. 2001 was a great film but not sexual. Barbarella, on the other hand was. Even Jean-Claude Forest’s original 64-page comic book (1964), to which the film is remarkably faithful, is sexy. And that Barbarella should inspire me to write an erotic science fantasy is not surprising, given the times and my fancy for off-beat genres. My own Barbarella, Wych Hazel, whose galactic mission is to boldly go to whatever planets contain intelligent species which are dying out, is undiscriminating. I may have believed in intelligence then, and in the mystical efficacy of sex to cure the ills of civilisation. I was younger. I still read sex as a good paradigm for restorative loving.

Wych Hazel is the name of an attractive shrub, though I knew it as a name long before I saw what the bush looked like. I can’t be the first to use ‘Terror’ (a pun on ‘Terra’) as a planet name. Wych Hazel visits a planet much stricken with plagues, but they are plagues we had already invented for ourselves during the Cold War arms race. Porton Down is still there and now, as I write in 2003, the fear is that international terrorists will acquire biological, chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction and use them against us.

She says goodbye to Aristophanes, by implication an Arch Druidic or Presidential agent on a planet which has recently enjoyed her healing presence; she is off to a binary star system in the galaxy of Andromeda. There, on Planet Terror, she emerges from her space pod, ‘a scallop of irised flutes and facets’, to find herself among ‘leprous lianas and drupes’, … ‘the pores of her beauty intact against [Planet Terror’s] plagues’.

I appear to linger on her beauty, and, in the surreal way that myth-making has, on details like the milk of her breasts, a sacred food for ‘the plagued and scrofulous’. She finds two intelligent life forms. The Gammas are like tailless iguanas; the Thetas resemble large ants, also with small hind-parts, in their case abdomens. The planet is in a mess:

every leaf had erupted in scabby fungi, as if the sap had been driven to madness.

The situation is explained to her by a ‘young cynic from the lizard élite’. Intelligence in opposing species has led to the wilful release of seven deadly diseases. Only a few of ‘the old stock’ on each side have survived, ‘starving on reefs at the opposite ends of Terror’.

Desire in Wych Hazel is an itch to assist. In the flower-power 1960s, sex was the Holy Grail. The vagina was the cup of communion, the penis a magic wand. It was the end, though we didn’t know it, of a brief pagan revival initiated before that time by such works as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, which were the Mishnah and Gemara, twin pillars, of Tom Eliot’s The Waste Land. The lance-and-cup approach of Freudian and Jungian mysticism, and of popular anthropology, had given new life to symbolism. Moreover, the pill had created a bohemia with an enlarged constituency. Everyone had right of entry, whether they wore beads or not. And sex was the legal hallucinogenic, the provider of altered states. Foreplay led through the Doors of Perception into a communion with the Real via the helter-skelters of orgasm and more orgasm. Sex was the mid-20^th century ecumenical Faith, Hope and Caritas. There were books on Sex and Wicca, Sex and Druidism, Sex and Kundalini Yoga. I bought them, have them still. Some I might even have read.

The military were also into mind-bending drugs, but their versions were devised to drive enemies insane en masse. Hence Wych Hazel gazes at a ‘tortured city’ where the citizenry are trying ‘to get out of their skins, stoned by the wickeder LSDs and atropine extracts...’, where ‘the nubile daughters [lie] groaning on their backs as their milky skins [give] vent to the soft plosives of Rocky Mountain Fever’.

When the poem says that the two suns of this solar system

flung their force

content enough if some virulence down below

some newly successful bacteria

would siphon the solar energy

and run it down.

Any form of death,

any form would do,

I was voicing an idea which I’d read somewhere, that perhaps the only end which the laws of the universe implied was extinction. The arrow of entropy (another popular topic) was towards increasing disorder; and life, far from providing local pools or order that momentarily ran counter to the ultimate journey into night, actually aided in the disintegrative ‘purpose’ by helping to use up energy faster. It’s still an interesting idea, that complexity self-destructs. Maybe one day we’ll know. Meaning someone else will. See also my notes on Lunacy (p. 226), on Too Many Children (p.427), and Endnote 45.

Wych Hazel stands against the suicide term in the expression of things. She offers herself to a sick Gamma and he eyes her lovingly:

Her image sped like a cry through his eye, through the retinal ganglia and rods, twisting like a ravished Persephone down the optic nerve, waving at her ghostly twin that flitted past in the crossing hall of his chiasma...

Persephone, in Greek mythology, symbolised the return of fecundity each year. Some parts of the brain handling vision are the chiasma, where sight-lines cross over to the other side of the brain or cortex; the lateral geniculate bodies, relay stations on either side; and, at the back of each hemisphere, an area striata or reception centre. In true Barbarella fashion she urges him to make love to her in order to cure his species of its diseases. She is after all an image of the sacred, and there is a time-honoured suspicion that a healer’s touch heals. One myth of the 1960s was that if the world could only love itself in one great orgiastic love-in, its ills would vanish. It was a minority faith, a wiggy metaphor, but as sincere and for some as efficacious as any other.

She jack-knifed, her baptising as spicy as winter feed or fertiliser.

Till the leaves on Terror repented, mended, and the husks of the old children withered away.

Wych Hazel then goes to the other hemisphere and copulates with the ant-like Thetas. Another way life uses up life is by following the universal law of cannibalism, which she doesn’t like either:

although life checked life,

although among solpugids, snakes, wolf spiders,

life checked life by teething on it,

that was not her way.

‘I,’ she said, ‘submit.’

—Sex as submission. Look at our bondage fantasies, now the genie is out of the bottle. Solpugids and wolf spiders are ugly.¹

Thus her task is done, and she is off on another mission. Good store is put by vaginal ejaculation:

She jack-knifed, her baptising as spicy as winter feed or fertiliser.

It was little mentioned until the 1980s and the explosion of the Gräfenberg- or G-spot. A look at the Internet pages² on the subject will give an idea of the complexity of vaginal orgasm (it’s back!) and the female prostate.

Anti-space: a whimsy, but who knows? Liana: tropical climbing vine; drupe any fruit with a hard stone; areola (pl. –ae): dark circle around a nipple; LSD: lycergic acid, an hallucinogenic drug, from German Lysergsäure-Diäthylamid; atropine: poison extracted from the belladonna plant; mandible: insect’s mouth-parts; ganglion (pl. –a): cluster of nerve cells; area striata: visual region at the back of the brain.

Alan Marshfield

¹ To most eyes Solpugids (now Solifugae, formerly Solpugida), pronounced ‘sol-pyew-jids’ and also called Sun Spiders, Camel Spiders and Wind Scorpions, are swift, golden, desert arachnids, up to two inches long, with humped heads and big, hairy, large-fanged appendages. If you’re curious about naming by categories and difference, take a look at the history of spider taxonomy. It has not been easy. The Athropoda phylum contains the Arachnid class, which contains the Araneida (spider) order (as well as the scorpion, mite, tick and solifuga—my solpugid—orders); one of the spider sub-orders is Labidognatha, which contains the wolf spider Lycosidae family, which contains the Lycosa genus, which contains species with large bodies such as the tarantula (Lycosa tarentula). (back)

² With the usual http://www. prefix, any of the following will do, though the last two are the most enchanting: doctorg.com, then try allhealth.com, mastery.net, libchrist.com, isismedia.org, and a must: radiocbc.ca/programs/ideas/shows/1sexor2/ejac.html . (back)

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