This is the third part of “The Medieval; or, Monsters, Magic and Myth.“ Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this promo post now belongs to a large-but-redundant book sample called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted and divides into over thirteen posts, whose collective chapters/subchapters compile one half of the larger total volume; i.e., Volume Two has three modules—one bigger module for part one (re: the Poetry Module), and two slightly smaller modules (the Monster Modules) for part two—for which the volume halves are roughly equal in size (subject to change).
Update: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out (5/1/2024)! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!
Click here to see “Brace for Impact’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
“Monsters, Magic and Myth”: The Eyeball Zone; or, Relating to the Gothic as Commies Do
“If only you could see the world as I’ve seen it through your eyes!”
—Roy Batty, Blade Runner (1982)
Picking up up from where “Green Eggs and Ha(r)m” left off…
This piece was written and invigilated in a handful of hours in regards to my sex work, but also a family issue (the catalyst for this piece). It’s an unplanned pregnancy or “quickie” (which both often are) whose flow state explores the usual Gothic playgrounds, except its own alarm bells focus on interpersonal relationships in the broader context of ludo-Gothic BDSM during class and culture war—how we can relieve stress and address praxial concerns that we leave behind; i.e., to be consulted when we become overstimulated (or don’t exist anymore) relative to our own web of relationships (which lends this subchapter a more autographical feel, as it requires me to speak from experience, which I’ll do when I discuss my history with Zeuhl, as well as my other exes): a buffer when our walls go up, a “glory hole” to peep through and engage with while the blinders are on. Like the damsel under attack by the banditti and saved by the gallant knight, then, we workers are survivors of trauma.
Except, living with it as in and around us, we can select any facet of the damsel (or similar) roleplays: to a) speak theatrically to larger cryptonymic issues during calculated risk, but b) nevertheless acknowledge that we are human and can still be triggered through our coping mechanisms (rape play), syndromes (mirror, virgin/whore, compartment, etc) and cliché slogans; i.e., “ignorance is bliss,” per the Gothic, illustrating macabre hypotheticals in spite of our desires’ own psychomachy wanting to resolve relative to capital’s “new normal”: the swooning damsel thoroughly ravished (opps). Our sex-positive forms can subvert that travesty through an iconoclastic theatre that preserves the mood and look, but alters the context; i.e., it protects the bound “maiden” as a powerful vampire slut who cannot be harmed provided their subby mode is understood by all parties (which is what my book and its exhibits with other sex workers are ultimately about). If someone violates that, then they are an abuser and not to be trusted with power again, but per fetish gear/aesthetics, sits on the same surface: the virgin and the whore intermingled with the tiger and the lamb, the cop and the victim, etc:
(artist: Mercedes the Muse)
Ludo-Gothic BDSM is holistic—a multimedia hermeneutic. So when power aggregates to defend capital-in-decay (which it does by design), the solution arbitrates in different forms on different scales, forms and functions per an aesthetic of power and death—in short whatever one feels like (in the spirit of the eyeball and vagina as lubricating organs, this subchapter is a little gnarlier and schlockier—hence my exhibiting of the wonderful Mercedes, a schlock queen). A given iteration, per person, isn’t always a dominant or submissive one, then, but does require mutual consent as the realm of the sub guiding the dominant away from unironic demon BDSM’s fatal nostalgia linked to capital; i.e., Radcliffe’s demon lovers and implied mutilation fantasies, vis-à-vis Cynthia Wolff. As usual, the key to catharsis and stability is paradox; i.e., the dominant surrendering power unto the sub as non-abusive in a larger system that precludes harm, mise-en-abyme. This requires productive interpretations that flexibly speculate to avoid canonical, singular enforcement of dogmatic roles through sex and force; e.g., the damsel needing “protection” from a cis-het man when such factors are tied to a systemic problem linked to profit: the male family annihilator killing his clan because he can’t “protect” (own) them or surrender his own power.
To that, I’m literally a common-law doctor of Gothic love in multimedia forms; i.e., the Metroidvania, which concerns power relations according to socio-material factors amid Gothic/medieval poetics. As such, my praxial/therapeutic desire with this impromptu session/subchapter is the same all the others: to advocate for the oppressed, developing Communism and class-cultural consciousness in Communist configurations that abjure the nuclear family model as relayed in object lessons. I apologize for yet another pit stop, then, but I really want to supply it before we go into “Medieval Expression”: as something to engage with between workers in flexible relationships; i.e., that allow for different configurations (numbers) and types (qualities; e.g., FWBs, metaphors, business partners) of relationships to overlap. Reality becomes something to invent, serving worker needs:
For example, I mentioned in our previous subchapter “doing a Communism with Harmony.” But per “Medieval Expression,” this will come up in relation to the imaginary past as something to engage with and cultivate for workers based on older forms while we roll along. As such, the praxial idea is creative successes (something we’ll focus on in Volume Three): to gather and collect the usual factors as points of view to perform, process and synthesize, then release back into the world; i.e., like Blue Öyster Cult’s “Harvester of Eyes” (1974) minus the, you know, unironic harm and death:
Harvester of eyes, that’s me
And I see all there is to see
When I look inside your head
Right up front to the back of your skull
Well, that’s my sign that you are dead
My list for you checks off as null
I’m the harvester of eyes! (source: Genius[1])
In turn, Gothic roleplay scenarios that are partly hypothetical, partly not (half-real) work through disillusionment, grudges, shame, guilt, frustration, and discouraging factors, etc; and require a series of opinionated interlocutors during a dialogic, an argument, conversing together instead of one side being a sock puppet/sound board. It’s a back-and-forth, a negotiation meeting each other halfway, an honest discussion concerned with investing energy to achieve the desired effect: equality and deprivatization, a mutual agreement to meet the needs of both sides without an obligation to the state’s heteronormative nuclear model; i.e., paying rent under a wage-based arrangement that favors the man, relegating the woman/monstrous-feminine to the ignominious position of sex object compelled to surrender their labor without pay as defined by capital. Meeting your basic needs (food, shelter, enrichment) is not a wage under capital, and money within capital grants whoever has it an unfair advantage that classically favors the man. Women’s work is historically unpaid; Communism precures payment per negotiations that allow for a variety of exchanges that ultimately express creative and morphological freedom as pointing towards a post-scarcity world.
Capitalism requires cruelty to function. Hence, the cultivation of the Man Box teaching boys to be cruel from a young age: be cruel, get a prize. Except this is not a natural behavior because it goes directly against our older evolved behaviors of cooperation and teamwork to survive. So, it must be stoked, fueled and incentivized by us versus them during crisis and decay as cyclical in a centrist refrain; i.e., one that grants good and evil an elemental coding function under capital; i.e., the creation of an enemy alien (a stranger) to fetishize and kill in a dimorphically sexualized, settler-colonial scheme. As such, humans aren’t cruel by nature; they’re taught to be cruel to serve profit during settler colonialism at home and abroad. Accustomed to the Man Box, boys grow into young men, then adults who maintain a cruel streak fueled by us versus them; they fall prey to guilty pleasure, wishful thinking and the pleasure principle as Pavlovian. They’re always chasing that fix and cannot conceive of anything outside of it: a murderous flow state whose headspace is conducive to violence against the enemy as alien. In turn, the enemy is “out there,” so that is where men go—to war and for marriage (military exogamy and war brides); i.e., war booty to drag back to the ancestral home as restored from a mysterious decay through far-off bloodshed.
The problem with chudwads is they don’t know how to love anything except through force, and as a result feel utterly alienated from the world unless it matches up perfectly with what is sold to them. Except this is always unsettling to them, unsatisfying by virtue of them a) constantly feeling surrounded by enemies they must rape and kill, and b) somehow owed the right to treat the world as something to rape, destroy and rescue from “dark forces.” So long as they kill state enemies, it will “get better”—except it never does because it’s all a lie meant to disguise how capital decays on its own (“the cake is a lie”). The promise is largely the adrenaline of fight or flight as a drug to fuel their killing efforts. They become a hammer surrounded by nails. As such, their masculinity becomes toxic (watch out for so-called “parodies,” as they are often endorsements in disguise; e.g., Saxon Hale from TF2, 2007) and they lose the ability to fairly negotiate or humanize others, beating them down while feeling self-centered, dogma infantilizing them by appealing to their vanity and self-importance as centralized in heroic stories; i.e., the monomyth; e.g., Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone. But for every “noble” king (all knights are cops from castles and all [canonical] castles/cops are bad) there exists a “lesser” man sitting in his shadow—an envious “Boromir” longing for what Capitalism routinely promises but cannot deliver on by design; it can design simulations of reward, however. Men unable to relate to their wives retreat into these places (e.g., Everquest, 1999), seeking “the ring” as something to win through treachery and by the sword, the manly men spilling buckets upon buckets of unhappy “orc” blood.
The Ring of the Enemy. “Tis a trinket that Sauron fancies.” Per Cartesian edicts within Capitalist Realism, the neoliberal franchising of cartographic refrains like Tolkien’s portray the classic monomyth as a built world; i.e., one to escape into by white cis-het men and conquer for fantasies of power that mirror settler colonialism’s day-to-day operations as displaced (the videogame as a war simulator since the 1980s). As such, these same men adhere to the nuclear model in their interpersonal accords; i.e., they fancy “the ring” through marriage as a compelled gift assigned through dogmatic institutions distributing socio-material factors: to serve the status quo per smaller eyes seeing as the panoptic and myopic Cartesian eye does—to dominate, own, conquer and rape through power (wage and labor) theft as entitled by the usual culprits of indoctrinated state enforcement. It becomes a map to cover in blood, the ring a suitably vaginal metaphor penetrated by an enterprising male digit. To free the slave from a ring that cannot be removed, we have to sever the contract and “castrate” the slave: snip-snip goes the wee-wee.
Again, the system is entirely unnatural and compelled, and only able to teach men (and tokenized groups) to “win” love through violence—to become protectors that ultimately trap those forced to identify as women in prison-like homes. Castles. But men cannot appreciate what they have because they are always looking for enemies; their wives become Madonnas to put on the shelf, the man chasing the whore as any monstrous-feminine person (which is why you see so many conservatives secretly paying to sleep with twinks, catboys and other [often] effeminate men; i.e., there must always be a “woman” to dominate). But even the 1:1 ratio is untenable, insofar as it’s far less fair to the female/monstrous-feminine side, who quickly must adapt to survive against the marital decree as martial: “what is owed.” Capital can’t deliver on that because not everyone will agree to it; but the elite can condition as many men as they need to maintain their ranks for a given generation. Thanks to Cartesian thought, colonizers tend to think of themselves as rational “thinking” beings that hold dominion over “emergent beings; but humans are animals and absolutely can be conditioned (“broken,” as Meerloo puts it). Far better to face this problem as early as possible, calling out Tolkien’s fantasies for what they (and similar stories) are: “Goldilocks Imperialism” that conditions boys to be cruel into adulthood.
In response, liberation from the state and its proponents is our natural right, the thing to ask for when those with power cry towards us, “It is not yours save by sorry chance! The ring is mine, it should be mine! Give it to me!” Except we’re the ring, the sex object, the promise. Resisting such forces includes other workers having conceded to state force, but also echoes of capitalistic regressions towards fascism; i.e., as a post-capitalist apocalypse that leads to further scarcity in a world devastated by Capitalism (the “desert of the real” not an illusion at all, but a barren wasteland felt inside the counterfeit, the rotting map of empire). Breaking the spell of Capitalist Realism, then, ultimately takes discipline, restraint, accountability and patience; i.e., as something counterintuitive to build on intuitively according to sex-positive values as second-nature: through native speaker intuition cultivated by community projects on different registers.
For creative endeavors but also any relationship, expectations must be tempered and negotiated fairly between both sides for things to work; i.e., by those who understand the value of negotiation (my exes did not—were, as Bay puts it, “totally cooked”) and open communication prior to entering talks to achieve new agreements (that compromise between workers, not workers to the state); i.e., not treating one side as powerless and voiceless (talking over them). You have to find people not in denial or prone to blame others, but those who take responsibility for their part in things, thus are ready enough to face things as clearly “not okay.” We start there and build/expand off that to widen one’s social network/support group; i.e., as part of a larger potential community and its negotiations and communication. A Song of Infinity to bolster our ranks and our hearts against the disastrous charms of capital.
In turn, healing must be approached with a willingness to participate, not to agree automatically a priori or expect the other side to. It goes both ways, of course, but still must consider the present dysfunctional factors (commonly expressed as a lack of sexual desire towards one or the other, but also a willingness to spend time together) and inequalities that make negotiation untenable. A wife is not a cat (or some other pet), and a husband isn’t a doormat, but however browbeaten the side with money (a wage or inheritance) and means (a residence, which classically would be a castle; and transportation) seems, they have more material control thus are the dominant in BDSM terms.
(exhibit 34a1a1: Model and artist, top-left collage: Lil Miss Puff and Persephone van der Waard; artist, bottom-left: Lil Miss Puff; everything else: Mercedes the Muse. Pastiche is remediated praxis, which expands during dialectical-material conflict amid liminal expression—a “poster pastiche” whose mise-en-abyme involves people, monsters, and monsters-as-people through oscillating degrees of irony and its lack. For the umpteenth time [from Volume Zero]:
Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about [source].
Here, that’s shown in the collage above: as a smaller historical-material pattern I’ve assembled to speak to larger patterns harnessed by workers who partook in my project; i.e., to speak to our collective rights as stunted by Imperialism, but also reclaimed through the Gothic hyphenation of pleasure and harm, of ludo-Gothic BDSM expressed in classic forms. Said forms endlessly update using a war-like hauntology workers wage with theatrical props: Mercedes’ pistol or gasmask, but also her fetish gear at large communicating the larger connection; and Lilmisspuff’s enjoyment of Tolkien and goblins within a mommy-type position as submissive to her husband, but for me, topped a client from below.)
Except, this goes beyond “just roleplay” and into reality as invoking scenarios of roleplay informed or otherwise involving everyday life caught up in war narratives: the toy box as alive in Gothically poetic forms; e.g., the goblin dance, the torture dungeon, a playground of intramarital strife to work things out inside relative to larger issues and smaller symptoms as comorbid: to face and debate our shortcomings, stupidity and other externalized challenges expressed in human-to-building form. The side with power needs to respect the side with less in order to achieve mutual consent. Otherwise, it’s merely compelled labor. It needs to be mutually consensual, lest the theft of power becomes abusive, harmful (rape). These proceedings can drag out, and invest such as time (sunken cost) as can spoil the goodwill between both parties. A man who admits he was wrong, can apologize, can listen and adjust will adjust; i.e., the less you fight or act in bad faith (sissy subs trying to haggle with the dominatrix to steal through false tribute), the easier it is to adapt. But it’s human to make mistakes built around love fenced by trauma; e.g., it took me ten years and multiple exes before I reached the right point in my life to write Sex Positivity. I learned how to be the woman I always was, thus saw the world through a woman’s eyes.
As such, I learned different things about men, about my closed-off/closeted former self—i.e., there’s nothing men hate more than being told there’s a route to relationships and sex than the one they’ve convinced themselves is correct and have spent their whole lives biting the bullet to. Alternatives challenge their narrow, heteronormative worldview. Again, full transparency up front and a frankness in terms of what both sides have to offer is best (not triangulation, when the side with power feels frustrated). This is not taught in schools or canonical media because it fosters equal relationships, which aren’t useful to capital; i.e., it liberates labor (which again, under capital, is dimorphically sexualized to serve profit) from an unpaid/uncompensated arrangement: the nuclear family model.
So such proposals (and the media that supply them) are banned, restricted or otherwise censored, making them an entirely extracurricular ordeal, a de facto education challenging state dogma and Capitalist Realism. This is not hypothetical, but based on real dysfunctional relationships that fall back on said model dogmatically instead of engaging with it in a critical, active manner conducive to mutual understanding and liberation. We forsake sex coercion by virtue of sex-positive action, including the former’s bad-faith acting, play and education: the abject illusion of saying what someone else (the mark) wants to hear. Saying “will do” instead of doing what is required is an action, specifically an enabling mechanism. You have to meet it with a demand or there’s no incentive to change. And if the abuser refuses to change, there is no shame in walking away to expose the abuser as a false protector—i.e., while protecting oneself, and to make amends and sustain an actionable praxis that prevents harm: the protecting of workers by abandoning the nuclear bloodline (and its chronotopes) routinely crashing down (up in smoke); i.e., swapping them for parallel societies challenging narcissistic state forces/proponents. Indeed, my galleries are full of such protects tied to a larger epic that exhibits all of them in different ways; i.e., each in term, solo, or all together to make a different argument about the same issues plaguing workers sexualized, fetishized and alienated under capital:
(exhibit 34a1a2: Artist, all: Persephone van der Waard [top-right, top-left, bottom-left, bottom-right]; model, top-left: Jadis; bottom collage: Blxxd Bunny; and bottom-right: Itzel. Each monster is a cryptomimetic, BDSM gradient of expression and unequal power roles amid a shared, dualistic aesthetic of power and death; each emblematizes mutual consent as a pact, a performance, a playful agreement that turns the flesh into art of a particular kind: the memento mori as a sexpot, a destroyer, a horny slut, an Amazon or Medusa [or some combination of these things]. What matters is that all of these “ghosts” [of the performer, of the counterfeit] are sex-positive.)
There is a historical-material cycle to this whose coiling double helix can be viewed in past relationships and familial dramas swooping in and out of real life; e.g., from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables (1851) and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, to my great grandmother saying, “do your hunting where the money is,” my grandmother going to college to find a husband and education, my mother going to college to escape her husbands and find intellectual (ace) stimulation and enrichment, and me going to college to find (whether I meant to or not) a Communist education and queer love. As such, learning occurs between individuals part of a larger collective enslaved by capital; i.e., John Donne’s infamous question, “for whom the bell tolls” being incumbent as much on our interactions with people (dead or alive) as media about people (also dead or alive).
Lessons of past successes and mistakes within capital (and hauntologies of capital) can yield fresh achievements under capital; i.e., as something to develop into a better system, one relationship (thus negotiation) at a time: the combination of sex and art, business and pleasure, security and freedom of expression through the respecting of those normally without power and rights, thus a voice that branches out in all directions. The unspoken must be heard through a pedagogy of the oppressed that acknowledges and upholds their lived reality as generally alien to the side accustomed to power under capital (e.g., me versus Cuwu—both of us abused, but they as the person who lives with the trauma of sexual rape, compared to my emotional rape). This requires humility and maturity from the dom, which again, is sadly not taught by capital for reasons of profit; i.e., bad BDSM, which instead of rape prevention, precludes agency amid unironic power theft and abuse:
Support to one’s spouse, partner or friend should not be the surrender of one’s rights. Cuwu taught me that by first seeing in me qualities that spoke to a good student, but also victim. If this cannot be supplied, then a given relationship is untenable; i.e., by a stubborn partner with power refusing to listen to the side without power and instead taking out their own frustrations out on: attacking others by venting to the point of triangulation, of unironic harm. Recognizing that both sides are at an impasse is important, though, as it gives them the chance to consider separation as a healthy and vital next step. It took me ten years and many relations (working and/or romantic) to hash out this methodology. But ultimately it was beneficial because I cultivated a system, Gothic Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM, which I developed in motion; i.e., while calibrating my search parameters and expectations to mete out said system, mid-development.
Introspection is vital to changing the draft for the better. In evolutionary theory, this is called adapting. Failure to do that leads to system (relationship) death. The host dies, the parasite/enforcer dies, the body dies, the environment, and so on. It’s about balance. And staying the same is an issue if problems exist, meaning they will survive if things continue to go on, unaddressed. Those with mechanical, actionable power (doms) must be held accountable when consent and consensus disappear—for the sub only has power when mutual consent exists. This doesn’t preclude the ability for the sub to negotiate poorly with the dom (or other subs), but their lack of material power during unequal power exchange must be acknowledged and respected for new exchanges to take place, thus have the relationship not only continue but progress in a healthier direction. If things are sick, then no amount of comfort food (actual or in media form) will resolve things; i.e., band aids for bullet holes.
(source: AH96’s “Kinney Survives ED 209,” 2018)
Except, the person with power must be the one to make concessions (“with great power comes great responsibility”), and it is entirely possible to be a bad partner and still materially and/or sexually provide. This canonical, heteronormative (or homo, queer, etc) expectation of obedience under a material provider is not a discussion and the oppressed must be heeded to make it one. If a wife/sub is depressed or otherwise “hysterical” or down in a hole, the notion of choice becomes further moot by virtue of that being the byproduct of multiple trespasses between them; i.e., chronic neglect of their concerns, which to be fair can stem from their inability to communicate as likewise induced by capital. Women are taught not to “talk back.” Thus, the killer remains at large, Medusa’s anguish ongoing (the ghost of the counterfeit).
But beyond theatrical doublings of socio-material arrangements, these and the large factors of Capitalism (its tree twins) exist in dialectical-material conflict: the workers vs the state, spectres of Capitalism and Marx, as endless. It’s a mercy to openly face that and deal with it, but also empowering and delightful to acknowledge human failings as a species amid the individual mistaking of this (the dungeon) for that (the home); i.e., as something to lessen the odds of actual, unironic harm. “Death,” then, is only the beginning—of the fall of the venerable imperial house (e.g., “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 1839) to raise a new, more inclusive and less elitist cathedral within/upon the old one; i.e., one with all the ornaments and might of Hell divorced dualistically from state copies: the ghost of the counterfeit given a home to breathe, speak out, expand and absorb capital (to assimilate it instead of capital assimilating workers).
On a local level, if a partner pulls away and/or becomes hostile, it is a sign that something is wrong. To solve the problem, you have to compromise within your abilities and power as part of the problem to solve. Even in my case, when I was being abused, I still had the power to plan my escape, but this took a willingness on my part, a courage that had to develop, then execute. But in times of crisis between parties, things will invariably get messy. This is what’s called “not being ready” for a relationship. And it can come about from lack of experience, but also the experience of tragedy or otherwise life-threatening, -changing, or -altering factors that cause people to fall in and out of love. Ideally, relationships are stronger (last longer) if they’re founded not on infatuation and lust by themselves, but first and foremost rest on shared core values and open communication (which doesn’t preclude lust and infatuation, of course; e.g., I adore Bay and Crow as my partners, and likewise relish my friendships with Mercedes, Bunny and Harmony, etc). Lacking those, a relationship will die not prematurely but in a predictable fashion that could, if these values were present, last longer. Luckily they can be improved upon and rewritten to achieve stability but you have to put in the work and go from there afterwards. Otherwise, it’s “too little, too late”—not just for two people once in love, but for the workers of the world during state shift; i.e., when the world as we know it ends “first slowly and then all at once”: the portal to Hell opens up and the forces of the furious dead envelope the living space as overrun with generational trauma—a demonic possession yielding to gnarly shlock rigged and shot in hostile chronotopes.
(exhibit 34a1a3a1: Source, right: Ron Magid’s “Unearthly Terrors: Event Horizon,” 2020. The Gothic is the quest for the Numinous, or destructive power in different forms and functions. Per Capitalism, these forces are like a black hole that cannot be seen past, but whose awesome gravity is felt at all times; per Communism, those of us in the Imperial Core must look past the myopia [and Faustian bargain] of Capitalist Realism to face settler-colonial horrors before they overwhelm the Earth during state shift. The threat is real but felt in fictional palimpsests hauntologically invoked, making the grim-and-graphic allusions to Dante’s Inferno during Event Horizon [the original Hell sizzle reel, which is fucking gross: don’t say I didn’t warm you] become a latter-day image of damnation—a cult-classic to timelessly reinvoke for purposes of seeing through state illusions during rituals of extreme torture, death, rape and decay as martyr-esque; i.e., the glass-eyed stare of the crucified’s paradoxical jouissance, but also the forbidden sight of the blind prophet as looking with different eyes that the ones in our skulls. It’s a nexus of the crisis; i.e., the nucleus of state power made unstable, alien, fearsome—an Id, graveyard place to walk around inside and through calculated risk, bump into the Great Destroyer as a walking castle/torture dungeon. Linked to hypermassive objects like Capitalism, these encounters routinely annihilate anything they come into contact with: a psychosexual, faux-medieval [Neo-Gothic] visual refrain not unlike Jeff Water’s “Second to None” [1994]: “Welcome to my world / I hope you see there’s no way out / I’ll take you higher / So just scream it—scream it out” [source: Genius]. Gothic Communism takes the same cosmic matelotage and applies it to a “queenly” [genderqueer] Medusa to scare the Straights with.)
This might all sound unfair and hopeless; but the one thing counterterror/asymmetrical warfare has going for it (apart from the hubris of colonial forces, “high on their own supply”) is the power of invention through necessity as the mother thereof—to call through need, but also eventual mastery of magic to pull our asses out of the fire; i.e., “The power will come to me whenever I need it; one day it will come to me when I call!”; e.g., Schmendrick summoning “Robin Hood” to save him from the reality that bandits, living under kingly abuses, are far less noble and more opportunistic than Captain Tully would like to advertise. The way to hoodwink them is through likeness of themselves they’ll want to court, threatened but curious by this odd appearance (a bit like Hamlet, staring at his “father’s” ghost):
State forces default to brute force—a bullish goon-like slugger cracking skulls for state fat cats. Yes, professions exist in any field, but the state values sheer results—i.e., lethal force and raw cruelty—ruthlessly administered versus surgical precision. Capital doesn’t require precision because profit is historically “efficient,” meaning it generally occurs (under neoliberalism) through the usual bourgeois trifectas: manufacture, subterfuge and coercion. Compared to our creations, state doubles of Gothic poetics will always be fearful and dogmatic, hence stupid and unable to contend with our cryptonymy through anything other than brute force (including disguises). But per my arguments, you can’t kill “Medusa” through military optimism; you have to address it theatrically at an interpersonal level as something to humanize and befriend (or reap the whirlwind during state shift).
In turn, this requires engaging with creative forces that even a little lightning rod like me, buzzing with creative forces amid a similar flow state to my thesis, can’t easily control despite the easiness of the writing and invigilation at this point (and I should hope so after doing this for as long as I have); if anything, I’m just a conduit for them running through me, riding out the storm inside of and around my little princess body.
Overall, creativity is the ability to materialize and express through merging disciplines that speak holistically to complex problems and elements of the human condition among colleagues/comrades-in-arms (my partners, muses and cover models, invigilated in my books but also on my website through mutual action giving them something normally alien to sex work under Capitalism); i.e., bricks in a wall, gargoyles on a shared grim cathedral made by cuties united in a higher cause (Gothic Communism, which includes human sex-positive expression through Gothic poetics). For instance, Mercedes blends sex work, BDSM, performance art and filmmaking into a unique combination that shifts shape depending on the current delivery method, but remains focused on the same topics (namely expressing human rights in familiar schlock and desecrating American institutions and zeitgeists):
(artist: Mercedes the Muse)
By comparison, I paint in a cinematographic way over photogenic models (with light and shadows as makeup) who tend to be queer leaning, politically radical and gyno/androdiverse. I combine this with my writing and music/film expertise, holistic approach to Gothic studies, love of exhibitionism/voyeurism and sex; but also can team up with people like Mercedes to make compound statements. It’s expressive and fun, but also flexible, organized, demonstrating teamwork on a social level vital to good praxis (versus petulant cis-het men, who get mad at their wives or their pets, useful for barking orders but not at creating things. Killing is easy. Creativity takes effort and humanity to achieve):
(exhibit 34a1a3a1a: Artist, top left: Blxxd Bunny; bottom-middle: Marlon Trelie; everything else: Persephone van der Waard. A creative process is always a chain, transformatively borrowing from different contribution factors. The completed picture, bottom-right, took many steps to achieve: Bunny took a shoot for me to paint them with [not gratis but in exchange for my labor to be featured in this book] and to which my original painting used a different series of poses from the same shoot. However, having lots of extra photos to use, I hired Marlon to paint Bunny based on a commission sheet—i.e., one I deliberately threw together to build on Bunny’s original pose; Marlon sketched out the piece per my instructions, to which I gave feedback; they supplied the final painted figures; I completed the background and lighting for the final render before invigilating it inside my book and on Bunny’s special page on my website. Yes, money changed hands during the operation, but likewise boundaries were negotiated and established; i.e., to be involved with, and displayed in, this project. Faced with insurmountable problems, there’s nothing that workers united under intersectional solidarity can’t do.)
In regards to the above exhibit, what Gothic Communists do is ultimately propaganda expressed through poetic intuition, mutually consensual tit-for-tat (something in return for something else as optional, voluntary and negotiated by both parties; i.e., despite the inevitable imbalances that will routinely come up during trade, especially the giving of Gothic ideas of subversion and disguise) and cryptonymic double operations (that show through concealment, or vice versa). It allows for the expression of monstrous synonyms, insofar as the function is maintained through a legion of simulacra; or, as Volume One puts it:
Conscious rebellion also includes the Gothic mastering of madness and monsters present in the evolution of the female detective/damsel-in-distress into holistic, inclusive forms, merging into increasingly liminal/queer iterations (the imperiled twink) that transform themselves, and the material world around them, as things to “quote” imperfectly on purpose; i.e., to invoke gender trouble (whose progression and praxial friction we’ll examine throughout this roadmap, but also in Volumes Two and Three; e.g., the “Conan with a pussy [except not bigoted]” concept seen in exhibits 84a and 112). As something to expound upon ad infinitum, our Gothic-Communist making of gender trouble is two-fold, then: to one, synthesize old terms with our individual/collective artistic output and exhibits; and two, invent new terms and codes (this book is full of such things) that likewise “do the trick.” Development towards Gothic Communism will constantly put us in uncharted territory that requires updating the lexicon as needed—i.e., by pulling out old classics, but also making new ones to adjust to the social-sexual, linguo-material “growing pains.” All of the synthetic terminology outlined thus far should be a clue. All the same, it generally comes from older language that was (and is) used to maintain the status quo (source).
In short, whatever works insofar as it cultivates a conscious and empathetic intuition confronting and interrogating state trauma.
To that, if the body is sick, you must find the cure; but if the abuse that led to the sickness also makes it presently impossible to implement solutions, then again, the impasse appears. This includes transgenerational problems; e.g., mommy and daddy issues, inherited settler-colonial trauma, community mistrust of state forces (as they rightfully should) and so on. When these repressed factors come to a head, Medusa can read her ugly head (the bad side); if the Medusa becomes blind to suggestion by virtue of said abuse (triggers), negotiations become impossible and the impasse again appears. It becomes a question of crossing the Rubicon, then—of open, honest communication by facing the music of something a long time coming: a failure of tolerances, of those dead-set against confrontation with hard truths. Capitalism sucks donkey dick.
The confrontation, for the puller of the Black Veil, animates the thing behind the veil—the rotting statue—as restored to a mobile and speaking condition; restoration of the foundation is done to achieve systemic catharsis and forgiveness, not assign blame (which isn’t required, given the elite’s clear-and-obvious role amid the cryptonymic back-and-forth’s clear-and-present danger); i.e., when one side, the other or both lose interest/aren’t attracted anymore (always a bad sign, the proverbial “beginning of the end” when falling out of love). And this can be terrifying to codependent couples and those who know them and want them to be happy. It requires an impartial mediator[2], but can result in unwanted side effects that, however unpleasant, constitute progression through motion: going through Hell as a liminal space (to move through) wrought with conflict on the surface of and in thresholds, but also the potential to learn from past mistakes (ours or other’s) in simulacratic, object lessons: xenomorphs and dragons, echoes of mad Saturn devouring his son (the Pale Man, below), black angels furious and delicious. Dance with the devil and they’ll “gift” you with “fatal,” delicious wisdom—threatening imprisonment and liberation both at the same time, all at once.
Like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, like Samus plumbing the Zebethean depths—love becomes something to fall in and out of. It can feel like a private hell, one without windows while you grapple and scrap with a dark figure in a dark room. It completely sucks when the thing you loved dies, surviving in a monstrous form that stares back at you from the abyss, suddenly alien and devouring you; but you can stare back, undaunted while defiantly meeting new aliens who love and respect you as equals, and making your own abysses to harbor useful truths. It becomes something to learn from and bravely dive into—to learn things you’d never learn if you didn’t, to experience joys and hardships, sorrows and delights normally relegated to the halls of Gothic fiction; i.e., its dream-like nightmares.
As for me, I learned with Constance (and later with Zeuhl) that I love hard, but also fall in love quickly and out of love with great effort. But this isn’t a weakness, merely something different that I eventually learned how to apply with compatible comrades; e.g., Bay, Mercedes, Harmony and Crow. They joined me on this quest, the lot of us grappling with a Greater Destroyer in a dark room threatening all of us—a Numinous defiler I liken to Capitalism while citing C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain (1940):
Now suppose that you were told simply “There is a mighty spirit in the room,” and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger [the tiger]: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words “Under it my genius is rebuked.” This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous (source).
In human fashion, there is a historical-material counterpart to this numen, a Communist double yearning to be free. Love, then, is something that survives Capitalist Realism to challenge bourgeois illusions, before, during and after death (the same goes for hate, in capitalist forms). Bay will love me forever and I don’t doubt it for one moment; they loved my work and support it (when Zeuhl asked me to stop talking about Gothic things, I knew they were pulling away from me).
As such, what we build together lives on in ways I’ll call “true love.” Zeuhl was ultimately false, but even with them, they led me down a dark road that brought me to brighter places/greener pastures (re, Milton: “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light”); i.e., camping canon to develop Gothic Communism as a school of thought to rival Lewis or Radcliffe’s, one that I learned from a younger, more innocent age, into “a sad and wiser” one:
(model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl, 2017)
The music they showed me (e.g., “Blue Monday,” 1983) and the authors they shared (re: Cooper and Jarman) have helped contribute to something better that I am raising with braver souls. I’m doing great work, having left Zeuhl in the rearview mirror while moving forwards (I could expose them—to name and shame them—and will always have that power should I choose to; but I have better things to do, and want them to live privately with the knowledge that they fucked up and I won, in the end—i.e., that I survived them).
So as the bombs fall around us and the planet heats up, I’m not sad at all. I feel united across space and time by people I’ll share my final moments with—to make our lives memorable and the envy of milder folks as the bullets fly and the bombs fall, fusing us orgasmically together through trauma as something to face, kicking the state in the balls while we go out with a bang/on our own terms: “We’re Romeo and Juliet, we’re Bonnie and Clyde! We’re the lovers of Teruel[3]!” We’re born to die, but how we meet that end and what we leave behind is what ultimately matters/makes for good praxis. “People die, buildings burn, but true love lasts forever[4].” We don’t just wrestle in the dark with unknown forces and pleasures, then; we duel with them, fighting back in glorious, scenic exchanges:
(exhibit 34a1a3b: It might beg the question, “Why a rooftop duel during a rainstorm?” The answer isn’t just because it’s exciting to watch [which it is], but because that’s how things feel for those who see the world that way—i.e., while being drawn, through their own trauma and deep-dark desire for love, towards things that speak to what has become a part of us, and which shapes our view of the world through a broken mirror and mask [the dual operation of cryptonymy]. Life imitates art and vice versa through cryptomimesis as a historical-material operation with dialectical-material polarity. I felt that pain as a little girl and found safe harbor in the mise-en-abyme of the Neo-Gothic sanctuaries I came across; i.e., a larger pattern I felt across media at large—the music and footage of The Crow combined with Metroidvania and other Gothic fictions. It became a concentric, half-real graveyard dug ghoulishly up and made love to with other necromantic weirdos drawn moth-like to the same hellish flames [there are numerous interpretations to any word, but especially “necrophilia”; we stick to the sex-positive ones]. I wouldn’t change a thing.)
As such, pleasure amid struggle becomes something to dive headlong into with reckless abandon; i.e., like my cat does, anticipating my thrown pillow but cutely still wanting to be involved, to be by my side.
Capital hurts us, and people as extensions of capital hurt us, causing us to hunch and anticipate future pain. Only in “death”—through lived and theatrical struggle and pain (calculated risk)—does our life rise to its greatest potential. Zeuhl taught me that; I’m simply returning the favor—one given from the former apprentice outdoing the master in a way that subverts their harmful lesson: ludo-Gothic BDSM was learned from their cruelty and care (the former which they proudly declared were lessons to begin with. Whatever helps you sleep at night, my dude). They tried to erase our relationship from the face of the Earth—to bury it, thus deny me closure while riding off into the sunset with their future husband (who, as it turns out, was something of a spineless bimbo); so I have documented it here to have my delicious, beautiful revenge—one had with cuties sexier (and kookier, sometimes) than they were, but still cautious; i.e., Cuwu granting me permission to use photos of us on OnlyFans and elsewhere, provided I left their real name out of it (hence the alias). So I did, curating a gallery of mementos of Medusa (while never showing Cuwu’s eyes, much in the style of that monster) that I, like an old lover, can pull out of my aging billfold and show off with pride to a younger generation (and which Bay watched me insert into this manuscript with glee). To Zeuhl, though, I can only say to them, “Suck it, ‘Trebek’! Suck it long and suck it hard!” (don’t fuck with a multimedia expert and Gothic nerd, biznatch).
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
Per Shakespeare, everything that has been said already has, life “but a walking shadow” caught in a framed narrative’s mise-en-abyme/cryptomimesis. As such, life in death is an endless graveyard that often expresses in popular media—from novels, movies and videogames, but also performance art—in orthographic/audiovisual terms. We, the so-called “poor players,” huff and puff as we “strut and fret” our hour “upon the stage and then [are] heard no more.” Classically this is to make the Straights (sword-happy Scotsman, Macbeth) lose heart dressed in borrowed robes; but for us fags, the endless yawn becomes a place to play and express ourselves mid-trauma, inside the necropolis—i.e., “letting things breathe” while meeting friends and lovers to confide in, versus one’s aging family members in the middle of the night after we’ve ostensibly grown up. In the process, we leave behind these markers of ourselves abjuring Keats’ 1819 “Ode on a Grecian Urn[5]” for something a little more hands-on: “We totally boned” with bones (and boners) through fields of “grass” to play “ball” on (for those of you telling me to “touch grass,” I’ve touched plenty, you jackanapes).
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
“Misery loves company” and it takes time to build trust for those previously harmed; earning Cuwu’s (and they mine), I blasted their vociferous snizz to a mutual clamor that literally speaks volumes. As such, the more we plough, dig up and fuck around with trauma in safe, psychosexual forms, the more comfortable we become showing others our scars, our vulnerable strength. In turn, there becomes so much more to say and fun to be had (e.g., me, three volumes and hundreds of exhibits/multiple relationships later); i.e., which Zeuhl—pushing their head into the sand—refused to do (as did Jadis and Cuwu). As such, my holistic rumination and constant revisiting of Gothic sites of trauma (whose manufactured reunions include my volumes testifying to former and ongoing relationships with seemingly “dead” things—my exes, but also those I relate to now living with trauma) eventually reached maturity (albeit after ten years of academic hardships, and my introduction to relationships running along that same fabled track). In the interim, all of the above helped me explore campy “rape” and “murder” fantasies while dying slowly (as people normally do) and learning as I do[6]; in turn, these gave me a chance to stick it to Zeuhl, pounding Bay’s pussy and thinking to myself, “Yeah, take that, Zeuhl, you bitch!”
We might, on some dark, unconscious level, always feel angry with those who harm us and want to harm them back; Gothic playgrounds give us a theatrical means of letting off steam without damaging anyone and finding ways to move forward, building a better tomorrow through good praxis; i.e., a pedagogy of the oppressed that serves as our devil’s workshop made from old parts, the bricks and bone(r)s building a new “torture” dungeon to escape unironic torture with. This includes people who volunteer to be the punching bag—letting you “beat up” their pussy (and other holes) in ways that you and they might not be fully aware of, but which isn’t so surprising in hindsight. Who doesn’t want to say “fuck you” to a shitty ex? Try it, babes; it feels so goddamn good.
Furthermore, if you ask them to consciously help you work through some shit, some people might say yes (we’re all freaks, one way or another); i.e., because that kind of catharsis feels good for you, but also because it might help them as the healer or the “victim” needing their own calculated risk. It all comes together in that respect. So long as that stays in the bedroom and you treat each other like people at all times (respecting mutual consent), then getting a leg up from an eager and willing cutie de facto playing the ex/Great Destroyer getting their ignominious comeuppance, not dancing but straight up fucking on your worst enemy’s “grave” ipso facto (evoking the Gothic master-trope, live burial, in a classically erotic manner[7]), it’s all fine and good. Go down, down to Goblin Town, my dudes! Make “Tolkien” gay to spite your exes breaking your heart!
Everybody does this to some extent. In my experience, Zeuhl would grumble about exes and tell me about their deck of “spank bank” images they’d rifle through, as I dicked them; Jadis and I would, me rage-fucking their tank-like snatch when I felt mad at them, thinking about likenesses of past exes to get through their abuse; and Cuwu would talk about their ex and trauma and I would talk about my exes and trauma while we hooked up to process our feelings, mid-fantasy and during conversations about trauma as something to perform, consume, and address with the Gothic, with BDSM, with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll:
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
Everybody living with trauma who can find a way to love again generally measures and metes out grief as something to grieve through psychosexual combat and catharsis. Just remember your safe words, boundaries and aftercare before, while and after you “link up. “Hurt, not harm,” babes.
On and on, until we’re old and grey, shit happens/people do shitty things and act like it’s all good. And these are informed by copies-of-copies inside a hall of mirrors inside a palace of mirrors on a planet of mirrors (and so on). Time is a circle, with people stepping into the archetypal roles exemplified onscreen (e.g., Kyle Reese’s various resurrections in the Terminator films—from twunk, to twink, to hunk). Such interconnected, cross-medial/transgenerational dramas affect all of us, requiring healthy boundaries and values that, when cultivated and upheld, we implement to self-protect and care for the group, acknowledging pain while prioritizing our own health and well-being to help others with. In other words, there is triage involved, and preference; i.e. the queer persons found-family vs the nuclear model I very much caution against in any and all relationships. Capital is unstable by design—aging horribly during a given generation’s rise and fall, turning workers into unthinking and inflexible machines per a heteronormative (dimorphic, Cartesian) dialogic: the fall of a generation as sacrificial by design, one king eating his own children as efficient profit. I intensely dislike this by virtue of experience, but also because we need to devise our own structures and machines—horizontal systems that we and our actions embody and uphold, taught through our object lessons; i.e., as possessed and intuitively understood during life as a chaotic series of multiple interactions happening on multiple fronts and dimensions all at once in a loop.
As such, the desire for things “to be good” becomes realistic only when the conditions are there for it, which we must supply while moving workers and the world away from manufactured scarcity (and the other trifectas and monopolies) towards a better world: one ultimately rarefied by a Gothic-Communist aesthetic as a means to think, exist and create. I see a problem, and write, write, write (and invigilate) to solve it. This takes a willingness to partake of sample biopsies to render not just tough love (as required, not as dogma) but object lessons, which both requires energy and effort to materialize. I live for it, solving complex problems through my creations made alongside my friends; i.e., to show you glimpses of a better world that exist right here on Earth, this very moment: through our delicious squishiness, but also friendships and relationships at large. Return to nature as something to bond not just with workers, but animals—aka, Mr. Squirrel: not Tolkien’s sorry “burrahobbit” demonizing Cockney folk, which Peter Jackson paraphrased as an “over-sized squirrel”; nor the female/monstrous-feminine Numinous or Gothic Communism, really. Just a motherfucking squirrel captured on camera (consider this a palette cleanser/aftercare after having Medusa’s fat cock down your puny human throat hole).
(exhibit 34a1a4: Artist: Lydia, who explains as Britishly as possible: “He so chonk; he’s standing on one of those things you put grave flowers in. He was using it to hoard food: li’l grave fridge.” To which I was reminded of T.S. Eliot’s funerary “The Waste Land” [1922]:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain [source].
Never mind that Eliot dedicated the “I. The Burial of the Dead” section to Ezra Pound, a fascist sympathizer [thus fascist]. The poem still speaks to healing from the trauma of war as a modernist ordeal—the chaos of city life merging with the transplanted flowers plucked up from the likes of Flanders or some other mass grave linked to the nation-state; i.e., as a war machine designed to grind workers up for profit. That’s all it does.)
This Humanistic medicine/education issues from ludo-Gothic BDSM as founded by me: on a system of thought as intuitive and developed; i.e., as everything connects to everything else according to whatever connections we (and our cultivated social-sexual habits) choose to make; e.g., like my books as galleries but also their ideas, ipso facto, per a priori value statements: the universal valuing of worker rights. I will always advocate for the oppressed, but especially the monstrous-feminine. It is my preferred client, but also my desired mode of existence. The best job in the world my job, then: one of counselor, lover, mother, protector, educator, slut, artist, and writer—a Renaissance girl whose galleries and cathedral-esque codexes extensively explore the world as Gothic through the Gothic; i.e., pulling things apart, seeing the world through each other’s eyes, at home in the home-as-Gothic-castle: the screaming chateau-as-gâteau-homunculus (the cake-like person as fortress-like, “torturous” and delicious) howling in pain and pleasure per psychosexual “harm” haunted by harm during confused fight-or-flight responses: “Hurt, not harm!”
Like Ripley stuck in the Nostromo, I continuously volunteer to be topped because, as a little girl, I felt the healing transformative power of calculated risk; like Mandy‘s demon bikers, the Black Skulls, I fucking love it when playing with fresh consenting cuties as adults!
(source)
Love you, babes. Now, finally, without further ado, onto the fun palace!
Actually, a slight delay. Onwards to “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” which let’s reiterates the previous subchapters in relation to some Marxist signposts and liberatory sex work exhibits. —Perse
Your Commie Mommy,
—Persephone
Footnotes
[1] From Genius:
According to Buck Dharma, “Harvester of Eyes” is about former U.S. Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas. The following is from CompuServe’s American Academic Encyclopedia:
Abe Fortas, b. Memphis, Tenn., June 19, 1910, d. Apr. 5, 1982, was a prominent Washington, D. C., attorney and presidential advisor when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965. Johnson’s subsequent nomination of Fortas as chief justice was blocked by Senate foes of his activist stand on civil liberties, and the nomination was caught up in a clash between the executive and legislative branches. In 1969, following charges of questionable ethics and conflict of interest, Fortas resigned from the Court. His arguments in GIDEON V. WAINWRIGHT (1962) established the right of the poor to legal counsel.
What’s all that got to do with “Harvester of Eyes”? Not much, the song is mostly nonsensical satire that appears to be about some eye-collecting madman. However, it was Fortas’ Senate nomination hearings which inspired Richard Meltzer to write the song’s lyrics. When Fortas’ avoidance of service in World War II was questioned, he responded that he had ocular tuberculosis–which inspired the lyrics, “I’m the eye-man of TV, with my ocular TB” (ibid.).
Except I would argue, it’s not nonsense at all, but satire performing to powerful and abusive men in BÖC’s usual poetic weirdness: judges, however stupid they sound, kill people thanks to a systemic power imbalance. It’s perceptive eyeballs, not blind ones (re; Jameson’s Postmodernism, 1991).
[2] I am hardly exempted from this. E.g., Zeuhl and I, and me not wanting to break things off, trying to be polite and a good ex, but also hoping we’d get back together (on account that Zeuhl literally said we might when they broke up with me). As a result, I floundered; I needed a mediator (Ginger and Lydia) not “to make things work,” but to survive the terrible conflict that ensued.
So I get it. People want satisfaction, the frustration of that raising its own temples of discontent. But there are no guarantees in life. It can get incredibly messy when you’re attached to people who fuck you over. Things “seemed good” with me and Zeuhl (partly because I foolishly ignored warning signs); then they weren’t because Zeuhl pulled the rug out from under me. It led me to question the whole of our relationship, its veracity and worth. Except it wasn’t pointless, but it can feel that way when someone isn’t being honest with themselves or others, or trying to make their actions seem unplanned, but also feel ashamed for what they did to an unsuspecting victim. Zeuhl was all of those things towards me as the victim, and as a result of their actions I will never talk to them again; but I had to reach that stage, too. Instantaneous death might seem preferable to dragging things out, but sometimes we aren’t ready for that, even if in hindsight it makes sense or if we want them to in the heat of the moment.
Having history complicates things, in that regard. I had lived with Zeuhl in England and we’d been through a lot together (trauma bonds make for strong glue). All the same, it was fun while it lasted and I have no regrets. Plus, I walked away with my dignity intact and wrote these books detailing how they loved and hurt me. I’d say I came out on top, then. Relationships die, but the messy love we shared will haunt these pages. Zeuhl wouldn’t let me share them with the world in picture form, but I can say with confidence that, however bittersweet I feel about them as a whole, the good moments I detail next were good. I loved them with all my heart, and went all in; they pulled away in the end for selfish reasons. They killed it; I fought like hell. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. That was just the point of my life I was at. When I look back on it, it almost seems quaint: they didn’t want to be with me, were taking advantage, and had the desire but not the words or the grace to separate peacefully.
In short, Zeuhl continued to help me and use me after the break—twisting the knife whether they meant to or not, but also helping me learn (e.g., my website, online dating advice and helping me set up my Fetlife profile, etc). It sent me careening into Jadis, but Jadis was also a learning opportunity despite the harm they caused (which to Zeuhl’s credit, they were partly present for as a means of solace). Two things can be true at the same time; a cutie can help and harm you. This isn’t a defense of Zeuhl, but merely a fact: I suffered at their hands and benefitted from their actions because I slowly learned how to stand on my own two feet; i.e., to take what they (and my other exes) did to me and transform it into a message of Gothic healing and hope, of calculated risk doomsaying about state shift to promote Gothic Communism. I couldn’t have done that, on some level, without capital abusing me, but also my exes (that’s nothing to be proud of, on their ends, however).
The basic mechanics seem simple enough; the complications are often emotional, thus invisible or alien to those not under the same spell. Each case is unique, in that respect—a sex bubble/cuddle puddle that you both share until one of you leaves the other alone inside; i.e., The Golden Egg being the 1984 novel that The Vanishing (1988) was based on, and which I eventually wrote about*. While you feel that sheltered connection, the world is your oyster. When it stops, it’s like walking into a brick wall. To that, it well-and-truly sucks to finally realize you were the take-out cheeseburger in a college town primped for international exchange students; but then again, I got more than my fair share of “full helpings” (of sex) from Zeuhl (so many creampies, and in the world’s fuzziest, tightest pussy imaginable), plus enough funny stories to fill a book. When you feel it together inside the bubble, you cherish it; when one of you leaves the bubble, you feel scared and alone but also afraid of going outside for new partners; then finally you burst the bubble to sally forth (“saddle forth,” to use a Zeuhl malapropism) onto new adventures. When you do, the events you experienced and the scary feelings you once felt will appear to you again in new joy and understanding.
*Persephone van der Waard’s “Gothic themes in The Vanishing / Spoorloos” (2020).
I’d like to express that next, if I may. It’s a protracted footnote in a very long volume in a very long book. But I will place it here all the same for someone to find. Again, no identifying photos of Zeuhl (e.g., only a hand or a shoulder). For all the smack I’ve talked, it’d cause nothing but harm to them, which I don’t want; but I also don’t think they’re a good comrade and don’t want to include them as an example of sex positivity (which I don’t think they are). So I’ve chosen to detail it in purely written forms (or exhibits of things other than them). I couldn’t have managed that until now, so let’s do it!
A quick sidebar before we proceed: First, there’s only so many ways you can say “fuck you” to/about an ex before it gets old, or at least not cathartic. I chose to avoid writing an entire book dedicated to Zeuhl for these reasons. Still, dragging their cartoonishly silly effigy out to the curb every so often before teeing off on its big balloon-like head is satisfying. Even so, that won’t be the point, here. Instead, I want to evoke some nicer memories about Zeuhl to illustrate my own skin in the game.
This ballad’s plaintiff nature aside, then, it serves as a remembrance to bury the old fucker once and for all (or at least until I need to summon them again to make a larger point tied to my work). As such, it really isn’t meant as a “hatchet job” (though it does feel good to dismember and dissect the painful memories of them a bit, and give voice to the good ones); but if for some reason my fair-and-balanced recollection seems unfair or somehow “jilted and unhinged” to anyone, know that Zeuhl did everything they could to earn these exact words.
This time, I’m going to say a few nice things to their figurative “corpse” before setting it on fire and blowing it up again (which is symbolic of me—secure in my new life and goals—feeling comfortable enough to let go a little, not indicative of any violence being done towards Zeuhl. I do not condone that. In the theatrical spirit of Prince Vegeta towards his frenemy, Goku: “No one kills Kakarot but me!” In the words of Cara Cunningham, “Leave Brittany alone!”
Got all that? Good! At long last, on March 14th, 2024, I shall tell my and Zeuhl’s tragic love story to the world… —Perse
Zeuhl and I met in Manchester, England while attending MMU for different programs. We’d been introduced briefly after flying in, our housing program officer having everyone say hello in our hallway flat. I liked what I saw but didn’t have enough time to really take them in or plan a rendezvous. Instead, Zeuhl made the first move.
(exhibit 34a1a3a1b: Various photos of my initial arrival at Manchester in September 2017.)
Bear in mind, I—the proverbial Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—was incredibly homesick and—in true adult fashion—crying on the phone to my mother about my room; upon arrival, I discovered it was unfurnished and I only had my leather jacket to sleep on. Bogus. Ma told me to ask one of my roomies for some blankets: “Now go ask the cute French girl to hook you up!” (Zeuhl’s future nemesis, I should add—they hated the French girl with a passion, though to this day I haven’t the slightest clue as to why. They never spoke, and when I tried to get them to, Zeuhl promptly flipped me the bird and shouted, “Fuck that bitch!” Okay, then).
So I asked the French girl down the hall for a pillow, to which she anxiously lent me one. Turns out, Zeuhl had overheard, and the next morning at the Student Hall, it all came to pass…
After a lonely night’s sleep, there I was, standing in a crowd of peers the next morning. All of us were enduring a forced inauguration; i.e., being overseen by MMU’s then-dean, a well-dressed middle-aged man giving a trite, cliché speech to welcome us internationals to his school (and for giving him all our money in tuition, travel and living fees). Eager to get my induction ceremony over with (glorified paperwork), I suddenly heard a small voice speak next to me:
“I have blankets.”
Somewhat surprised, I turned to see the owner of the husky voice and behold, a pale horse! Not the awesome picture of death incarnate, but a stout, bespectacled and shapely androgyne/princex eager to make my acquaintance (and not wearing a bra). Zeuhl introduced themselves to me, and invited me to their room. It was directly across from mine (and literally selected at random: “All the gin joints in all the world, they gotta walk into mine…”). So we agreed to meet up after the assembly and passport exchange. Cool. I did errands at the city center for the next several hours, then stopped by later in the afternoon and knocked; they answered, smiled and let me inside.
Over the next few hours, Zeuhl and I hung out—them sitting on the edge of their tiny bed (not really big enough for two) and me in a single chair in front of them (the rooms were small and cramped, like jail cells). We talked about ourselves for a bit, when I noticed some magazines on the countertop behind me; I noticed they mentioned polyamory and turned to Zeuhl to remark that I was poly (I’d met someone genderfluid at undergrad who exposed me to the practice); Zeuhl said they were too, so I suggested if they needed someone to “do stuff with,” that I’d be happy to help. May as well try! I figured. Much to my surprise, Zeuhl smirked, laughed* and replied, “Well, I’m not for closing any doors!”
*Zeuhl had a quick, full smile and easy laugh—something I discovered I could extract from them with ease, and to which sounded like music to me. Also, once we started fucking on a regular basis, I relied on this ability to make their pussy squeeze my dick during sex (the way to a cutie’s enby heart is through their laughter). I don’t want to chalk it solely up to my charms, though; I think on some level, Zeuhl had me pretty well-figured—had already sized me up and made it easier than it could have been otherwise. But also, we had a lot in common, and they made me feel good in ways other than just sex. It was a perfect storm, really—one that led to some wild-and-crazy times, but also my education. I’m not kidding when I say that Zeuhl mentored me about genderqueer politics.
After that surprisingly easy exchange, Zeuhl told me they were worried because they’d left their laptop in the Student Commons, having walked away from it after their mother told them some bad news: that she’d just been diagnosed with cancer and was starting chemo treatments. Luckily I had an old laptop (with Windows XP on it) that I’d taken with me on the plane, and had brought some ripped DVDs on the hard drive. One was Forbidden Planet (1956) and I offered to watch it with Zeuhl to help them relax; they agreed, and offered me some snacks in exchange (caramel corn). Set up for a nice night, we set about watching one of my favorite movies as a kid growing up. This bitch loves her some Robby the Robot!
Zeuhl and I sat on the edge of the bed, then the middle of it, which was so small that our sides touched for lack of room. Zeuhl had on some dark tights. Partway through the movie, though, they suddenly said without any hit of ceremony or guile, “My legs are hot. Can I take off my pants?” To which I, surprised but not bothered, responded in the affirmative. After that, I spent the next little while glancing down next to me, looking at the dark spot between Zeuhl’s legs because I thought they had panties on but couldn’t tell; i.e., they looked see-thru, except I couldn’t say if that’s what I was seeing or if it was their bush (the room was dark, with only the laptop screen surrendering just enough light for me to make them out, next to me).
I wanted to be a gentleman, though (still in the closet, remember), and kept my thoughts to myself… until I swiveled my head slightly and looked sidelong next to me, shoulder level, to see Zeuhl glancing at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read (the motive, not the appearance). Our heads turned and our eyes met. Both sides shyly surveying the other but not announcing it out loud, I felt a profound and sudden sense of déjà vu (the same thing basically happened with my first partner, Constance, except we were watching Rosemary’s Baby at my folks’ place; we only got halfway through that movie, too, before we switched to sex).
Reading the room and sensing an invitation to make the first move, I looked for “an in” and noticed Zeuhl’s septum piercing. I had an epiphany and suddenly remembered having talked to a girl on the bus, back in Michigan as an undergrad; i.e., breaking the ice by mentioning how I liked her tattoos and getting an effusive, eager response. So I said to Zeuhl, “Nice piercing! Do you have any others?” (I did like the piercing but also wanted to break the ice). Zeuhl beamed like the Sphinx and replied, “I have two pierced nipples!” I asked them if I could see them; they nodded and removed their shirt to show me. Sure enough, they weren’t kidding. Two pierced nipples, puffy from the procedure. I asked (without hesitation, this time) if I could suck on them; Zeuhl broke into a happy smile and cried, “If you want!” To which I did, most enthusiastically.
After that, we fucked (I don’t remember if we finished, but we used a condom) and lay naked in bed together listening to one of Zeuhl’s favorite bands, Natural Snow Buildings, while they told me about the esoteric tattoo on their body. Then they teased me as we spooned, remarking how I was being “so cute” glancing repeatedly down at their crotch during the movie (turns out, they had a big full bush, so thick you have to push through it like a thicket to get to the goods). I didn’t realize it at the time, but they’d been counting on it; and I—holding their warm wiggling body with my dick pressed between their buns—couldn’t complain (I had gotten lost the day before, exploring the city as the sky rained on me, merging with my uncontrolled tears). But I didn’t realize that I was the blanket Zeuhl had quickly acquired to make their stay in Manchester more comfortable. Like Odysseus and the sirens, I got taken for a ride, but at least it was a comfortable one!
(exhibit 34a1a3a1c: Many of the books I borrowed from the MMU library and which Zeuhl shared with me as well. Fun fact: It was basically impossible to find three-ring binders in the UK; they only had these fucking stupid two-ring binders with no pockets!)
After that, we fell into something of a routine. I got some American money exchanged at the city center (thirty minutes from our housing block) and purchased my own blankets (and a “brelly”) that I had to carry home in my arms (exhibit 34a1a3a1b). Zeuhl and I slept in my larger twin bed that night (or thereabouts), trying sex with condoms for a bit even though my sexual history was limited and they’d had a hysterectomy. After we discussed all of these things—and the fact that I’d had Hep C but had gotten cured in 2016 (though the antibodies stay in your bloodstream forever)—we had sex again. And I, without asking for Zeuhl’s permission, did something I’m not proud of: I took off the condom while under the sheets and fucked them bareback. But I told them afterward.
Initially they seemed shocked, and said, “Why would you do that?” in a small, quiet voice. But we both quickly decided afterward that it had been done with both of us knowing that contracting an STI or them getting pregnant was impossible. So ultimately their response (in the same conversation) was, “Well, you were naughty!” To which we proceeded to have much more sex in the days and months ahead (so many times, I lost count, but into the triple digits). Turns out, the event brought us closer together (not that I would recommend anyone do what I did—it violated Zeuhl’s agency and ultimately was wrong of me): I became less anxious and found that my dick—which had been a little shy around Zeuhl—suddenly stood at full attention whenever playtime was nigh. As quickly as it had happened, my gaff was water under a very forgiving bridge.
After that, we experimented, trying new things; i.e., sexting with Zeuhl right down the hall, and both of us getting so worked up that they asked me if they could come to my room to fuck. I said yes, to which they soon entered; i.e., poking their head through the door wearing a silly cartoon smile (what we would later call “parade float”). They had on a pretty black dress, and spun to show it to me. Then they sat down on the front of my bed, hiked up their skirt, lay back and spread their legs and hairy pussy for me. We chatted happily about how exciting and new it all was, talking conversationally as I took out my hard dick and shoved it lovingly into their wet hole and started to fuck them (for reasons previously explained, it went in more easily that time). I learned they loved creampies, but really loved to suck dick and swallow cum. So one time when I was close, they had me pull out, which I quickly did, the “metal” still hot; just as fast, they quickly swiveled on their butt, scrambled to their knees, and took my whole dick into their mouth—closing their pretty eyes and breathing slowly through their nose as I moaned loudly and came down their throat. As I did, I could hear Zeuhl gulping noisily as they swallowed every last bit of my cum; I watched them do it and remarked to myself how happy Zeuhl looked.
It’s not something I want to speculate on—save that it’s a precious moment to me (one among many others) that I acquired spending time with someone special who eventually hurt me; i.e., needing a big loan from me (which, to be fair, they paid back) that we had to negotiate with another eventual ex of theirs living in Britain (a twinkish, anxious musician—let’s call him Todd—Zeuhl met through their photography work and frequent flights to England to stay with him), and to which money was often something that came between us—to the point that, when the other partner failed to acquire a living situation until our lease was nearly up, I was just about ready to hop on a plane back to America to finish my thesis at home (re: “I feel used!” I told Dale Townshend, in his office; to which the other replied, “Nicholas, this sounds like bullshit!” He took no prisoners, that one. Bless him). But Zeuhl, when hearing my confession, cried “No!” and pulled me close to them. Eventually Thing 2 got a place in Wellington (a 20-minute train ride from MMU) and Zeuhl and I carried all our shit (that Todd’s friend’s truck couldn’t take the week before) with us to a train station. As we did, we stopped periodically to rest, convening briefly at the local Spar convenience store on Oxford Road to get drinks; we drank them greedily with the sun on our faces before pressing on—onto our new home… which had no furnishings or internet.
Fuck.
We gradually got things set up. A week or so later, we walked several miles together to a used furniture store (the only place they sold tables and chairs not in pre-packed sets) and bought Zeuhl a worktable/shelf and wicker chair for 14 quid*. Then, we carried them back home through Wellington (a train port in between places, mostly for tourists), getting raspberry ice creams from a nearby truck and leaning against our hard-won table and chair in the town square, eating happily together. It was one of my favorite moments of us together, and one that I’ll never forget.
*Until that point, we slept and fucked on the floor. Workwise, I’d been sitting with my back to the wall every night, prepping for the upcoming IGA 2018 conference, for which I wrote “All that We’re Told in the Eternal Shadow (within Shadows) of the Hypernormal, Worldwide,” while typing on Thing 2’s spare laptop (for Zeuhl had accidently destroyed mine by spilling Uncle Ben’s rice sauce on it, requiring me to use the school’s computer labs for the rest of the semester, which I no longer had access to) and using a heavy-ass plywood model of a theatre diorama Zeuhl inexplicably had me help them carry from the Photography Wing apropos of nothing… but which did make for a good improvised table, I’ll admit (and which they never let me forget).
(exhibit 34a1a3a1d: Various fun photos and remembrances: some of my favorite [or available] foods; a photo when Zeuhl and I ate out after first becoming an item; the aforementioned table and chair from Wellington; and of course, Sisyphus the slug making his nightly journey across Todd’s floor.)
After that, we got home and Zeuhl set up their workstation. Over the following days, I helped them figure out how to light the gas stove; I encountered a slug crawling on the tile floor night after night (who I dubbed “Sisyphus” for his courage); Zeuhl and I hung out with Todd; Zeuhl and I fucked repeatedly on the floor (to which afterwards they looked up to the ceiling and thought it was leaking but then looked embarrassed, realizing my cum had leaked out of their pussy and dripped onto their foot). We had so many adventures, and I remember them all like they were yesterday (with Zeuhl, and all my cuties).
I remember them and feel at peace knowing Zeuhl gave me these despite paradoxically hurting me more than anyone else. If Jadis was my most antagonistic ex, Zeuhl was my “Scarecrow,” the one I’ll miss the most. But I don’t miss them anymore because the best parts of them live inside me and now in this book. They didn’t want me to include photos of them, so I won’t; but I have included these stories/exhibits in this footnote—less to spite them (though sadly they’ll see it that way) and more to celebrate the love that we shared. We met on September 16th, 2017, and started fucking about 48 hours after that; I shyly said “I love you” to them, while fucking them doggystyle several weeks later (wherein we became an item); we cried in each other’s arms in a dark, lonely hotel room (fucking in front of a mirror) before I flew home, August 2018; Zeuhl left me for their husband on early September (the 9th, I think) 2019; our friendship hobbled along until March 11th, 2023. We haven’t spoken since, and I’ve spent a lot of time since, writing this book to heal from their abuse. Let its culmination be my best revenge.
I suppose I could have done this or that differently, but I was just the unicorn in Zeuhl’s pocket. Furthermore, in the end, the exact path I took led me to my partners, muses and friends, as well as this book becoming something I have worked hard to build. And while the real Zeuhl didn’t have the guts to take part, their friendly “ghost” (simulacrum) is the little shadow of a rabbit, happily munching the greens and flopping in peace, their fur sleek and their little nose wiggling. Is that forgiveness? I guess it is. You were a bastard, Zeuhl, but I loved you, and the best parts of you will live on in this book. I only hope since then you’d learned not to lie to others or stab them in the back/take advantage of them (weeping as I read this; but not with shame: my heart is not of stone and I remember you, bunny, warts and all).
To Zeuhl: Be well, comrade, and may you live the rest of your days in peace.
(exhibit 34a1a3a1e: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl [mostly off-screen] at Persephone’s brother’s 2019 wedding. Frozen in time, several months before the breakup, I had no idea what adventures lay ahead—who I’d become after Zeuhl. They were my world, and surviving its destruction made me stronger than ever. I suspect they knew but didn’t have the guts to break up with me on my birthday after my twin brother’s wedding. Whether that’s a kindness or not, I do not know [but will say that the last time we had sex—on my birthday the day before they left for home—was a night to remember]. All the more fitting given I’m someone accustomed to tumult and rancor, but also love eternal:
The remaining years of Raymond and Agnes, of Lorenzo and Virginia, were happy as can be those allotted to Mortals, born to be the prey of grief, and sport of disappointment. The exquisite sorrows with which they had been afflicted, made them think lightly of every succeeding woe. They had felt the sharpest darts in misfortune’s quiver; Those which remained appeared blunt in comparison. Having weathered Fate’s heaviest Storms, they looked calmly upon its terrors: or if ever they felt Affliction’s casual gales, they seemed to them gentle as Zephyrs which breathe over summer-seas [source].
Fucking A.)
[3] As Berlin says (mockingly) to Ariadne, in Money Heist, season two (2017).
[4] As Sarah says (fondly) of Eric Draven and Shelley Webster in The Crow (1994). Their love mirrored Brandon Lee and Eliza Hutton’s, she widowed by his untimely death, on set in 1993, but their love—and the love of the story as a class-war effort (more on this in the Undead monster module)—carries on as an essential part of children, adults and children again. Lee said as much, paraphrasing one of his favorite authors shortly before Lee was killed on set:
Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, and yet everything only happens a certain number of times. Only a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood? An afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being you can’t even conceive of life without it. Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet, it all seems limitless (source: Analog Jones and the Temple of Film’s “The Crow (1994) Brandon Lee’s Last Interview,” 2020).
In this sense, a person’s spirit “lives on” in the music, the miniatures, the mayhem of the performance expressing larger turmoils—of workers liberating themselves using Gothic poetics to speak to the human condition as one trapped between capital and commune.
[5] Specifically the lines about the male lover (the hunter) chasing the female lover (the quarry):
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (source).
[6] As Seneca said on his deathbed, “I’m still learning.” So am I.
[7] Despite its “inherited confusions (re: Baldrick), the Gothic tradition indisputably mergers trauma, pleasure and centuries of human history and theatrical practices into the same messy chronotope (me): the castle a living residence and an aesthetic that speaks to past, present and future crimes, legends and romances tied to sex and force. This isn’t just Bakhtin speaking to the Brits, but a historical precedence that, per the Western tradition, goes back to Rome—specifically Roman cemetery prostitutes. As my friend Mira explains,
Mira: Prostitution was legal but they were seen as so filthy by the town guards that the only place they could operate was graveyards.
Me: Talk about abjecting sex.
Mira: During the day they’d make money by being rent-able mourners for funerals, and at night they’d deliberately wear makeup to make them look like corpses or ghosts and hook up with guys in mausoleums. The rent-able mourner thing is just smart. You’re only allowed there anyway so make money where you’re needed. Show up, cry, get paid. Shit, I’d do that.
Mira went on to provide this fun source:
The Bustuarie used chalk on the backs of headstones to advertise their prices, and engaged in sexual acts within tomb passages and secluded plots. Graveyard prostitutes could be found throughout the Roman Empire, and even in the outskirts of Londinium (modern-day London). Their clientele was made up of grave diggers, eager pseudo-necrophiliacs and vulnerable mourning widowers. They were exquisite navigators in finding the emptiest of mausoleums, the softest of burial plots, and even the cold slabs of tombstone that presented an opportunity for intimate discretion.
There were even stories of fair-skinned women resting on ancient tombs with gold coins upon their eyes, not as a payment to the ferryman to cross into the underworld, but payment by the God Orcus for her lustrous services. With a reputation for sexually satisfying the God of the underworld, the Bustuarie were able to provoke the interest of any young Roman wishing for an experience bordering the boundaries of death and love. However, what of precaution and disease when in the presence of a prostitute surrounded by death? (source: B.B. Wagner’s “The Graveyard Prostitutes of Rome and Beyond,” 2020).
Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, but also a psychosexual means of making ends meet (so to speak) while addressing one’s social-sexual-monetary needs on a complicated spectrum; the Gothic is a playground to play with dead things as historical-ahistorical, social-sexual material markers of paradoxical trauma and pleasure hyphenated. It existed with the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the Graveyard Poets who capped off the Renaissance, and survived anew with Walpole’s “rape” castle onto ever new-and-evolving simulacra adopted and adapted for an increasingly capitalist world; i.e., as something to escape in some shape or form. Gothic Communism isn’t the ghost of the counterfeit furthering the process of abjection, but a reversal of said process to weaponize said ghost against the state during class and culture warfare—to cryptonymically seize the means of undead, xenophilic production in no uncertain terms (despite the masks and theatre), hence reunite with a possible post-scarcity world that never quite was but could be in one possible future: Gothic Communism!