The fly is a bit of winged shit that fascinates as much as it revolts. As airborne putrescence, they are threshold creatures that seem to inhabit an inverse universe where all values have been reversed. Decay is useful. Shit is precious. Their beginning – as maggots – is our end. The fly’s sound suggests something out of place. It provokes our sense of melody in a misophonic outburst without orderly sequence. As a type of auditory pareidolia, it is swollen with Electronic Voice Phenomena where the buzzing and whirring noises easily substitute for the whispers of possessed children or transmissions from alien intelligences. But these intelligences do not want something from you. As already hinted by the non-Euclidic patterns of their flight, they do not care about us in a way we can imbue with sense, meaning and purpose. To the fly, it is us who are double-natured: a threat, but also a source of food and a place to lay eggs, both death and the future, as the fly is not only attracted by faeces, but also human sweat from which it can derive proteins. Flies have long been associated with magic or thought to have magical powers, usually deriving from their relationship with devils and demons. In European Christianity, it is not only the filthiness but also the sneakiness of flies that suggests the power of the devil. The fly on the wall. The demonic associations of flies are focused in the figure of Beelzebub, Satan’s second-in-command. Originally a Philistine god, Beelzebub became a major demon in the Abrahamic religions. In Christianity, he is often portrayed as one of the seven princes of Hell, commonly representing Gluttony. Literally, the name translates according to the Dictionnaire Infernal as “Lord of the Flies” where the zvuv of the name’s Hebrew and Arabic transliterations refers onomatopoetically to the fizzing and droning aural noise of the fly. Maybe it is these demonic connotations combined with the utter meaninglessness of the fly and its anal-erotic attraction, our fascination with what repels us, that has attracted artists from the Cramps to Yoko Ono to the fly and its maddening triviality. But as they move through our world in negative, flies are not only connected to noise, evil, the formless, and all kinds of rot. They are also a source of healing. Napoleon’s medical officer during the Egyptian campaign reported on the beneficial aspects of treating wounds with blow-fly larvae. Mayans exposed the blood of livestock to the sun in order to produce maggots they would apply to wounds to help them heal. This points to another characteristic of the fly besides its double nature as a threshold creature that exists as a kind of automatic writing between figure and ground: the fly wants to transmute the world. In a world of compost, it wants to turn shit into life, the lowest into the highest, that which is useless into something sustainable and in this reversal of values, they become carriers of an intent to change the world. The gnawing and gnashing of their feasting and searching is the sound of a world turned upside down. It is this demonic intention that makes something happen when listening to the fly. The sound is a harbinger of what we become after ourselves, an impregnation of possibility with ear-maggots that hisses inside our skulls about becoming other, becoming animal, becoming compost, becoming that which we are not able to think and put into words. The rest is noise. Kasper Opstrup is a writer and researcher based in Copenhagen. The Danish translator of Alexander Trocchi and William Burroughs, among others, he is currently working on a project about Cosmic Futurism while finishing a monograph with the tentative title An Imaginary Kingdom in the Wastelands of the Real: On Art, Esotericismand the Politics of Hope. His most recent books are The Way Out: Invisible Insurrections and Radical Imaginaries in the UK Underground from 1961 to 1991(Minor Compositions, 2017) and the edited anthology Unexpected Encounters – Possible Futures (Antipyrine, 2019).

The fly is a bit of winged shit that fascinates as much as it revolts. As airborne putrescence, they are threshold creatures that seem to inhabit an inverse universe where all values have been reversed. Decay is useful. Shit is precious. Their beginning – as maggots – is our end. The fly’s sound suggests something out of place. It provokes our sense of melody in a misophonic outburst without orderly sequence. As a type of auditory pareidolia, it is swollen with Electronic Voice Phenomena where the buzzing and whirring noises easily substitute for the whispers of possessed children or transmissions from alien intelligences. But these intelligences do not want something from you. As already hinted by the non-Euclidic patterns of their flight, they do not care about us in a way we can imbue with sense, meaning and purpose. To the fly, it is us who are double-natured: a threat, but also a source of food and a place to lay eggs, both death and the future, as the fly is not only attracted by faeces, but also human sweat from which it can derive proteins. Flies have long been associated with magic or thought to have magical powers, usually deriving from their relationship with devils and demons. In European Christianity, it is not only the filthiness but also the sneakiness of flies that suggests the power of the devil. The fly on the wall. The demonic associations of flies are focused in the figure of Beelzebub, Satan’s second-in-command. Originally a Philistine god, Beelzebub became a major demon in the Abrahamic religions. In Christianity, he is often portrayed as one of the seven princes of Hell, commonly representing Gluttony. Literally, the name translates according to the Dictionnaire Infernal as “Lord of the Flies” where the zvuv of the name’s Hebrew and Arabic transliterations refers onomatopoetically to the fizzing and droning aural noise of the fly. Maybe it is these demonic connotations combined with the utter meaninglessness of the fly and its anal-erotic attraction, our fascination with what repels us, that has attracted artists from the Cramps to Yoko Ono to the fly and its maddening triviality. But as they move through our world in negative, flies are not only connected to noise, evil, the formless, and all kinds of rot. They are also a source of healing. Napoleon’s medical officer during the Egyptian campaign reported on the beneficial aspects of treating wounds with blow-fly larvae. Mayans exposed the blood of livestock to the sun in order to produce maggots they would apply to wounds to help them heal. This points to another characteristic of the fly besides its double nature as a threshold creature that exists as a kind of automatic writing between figure and ground: the fly wants to transmute the world. In a world of compost, it wants to turn shit into life, the lowest into the highest, that which is useless into something sustainable and in this reversal of values, they become carriers of an intent to change the world. The gnawing and gnashing of their feasting and searching is the sound of a world turned upside down. It is this demonic intention that makes something happen when listening to the fly. The sound is a harbinger of what we become after ourselves, an impregnation of possibility with ear-maggots that hisses inside our skulls about becoming other, becoming animal, becoming compost, becoming that which we are not able to think and put into words. The rest is noise. Kasper Opstrup is a writer and researcher based in Copenhagen. The Danish translator of Alexander Trocchi and William Burroughs, among others, he is currently working on a project about Cosmic Futurism while finishing a monograph with the tentative title An Imaginary Kingdom in the Wastelands of the Real: On Art, Esotericismand the Politics of Hope. His most recent books are The Way Out: Invisible Insurrections and Radical Imaginaries in the UK Underground from 1961 to 1991(Minor Compositions, 2017) and the edited anthology Unexpected Encounters – Possible Futures (Antipyrine, 2019).