Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this blog post now belongs to a promotion 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 Poetry Module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted.
Click here to see “Brace for Impact’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Further Reading: Volume Two actually divides into three modules/sub-volumes, each with its own promotion and release. “Brace for Impact” is the first (re: Volume Two, part one), but there are also promotions for Volume Two, part two’s twin Monster Modules, The Undead and Demons: “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil“!
Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! 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 PDF (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!
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 ally shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
Halfway There: Between Modules; or, Facing the Past to Move Forward
“Here I come, Ramza. Let me show you the power of evil!”
—Velius to Ramza, Final Fantasy Tactics (1997)
(artist: unknown)
Picking up up from where “Facing Death: What I Learned” left off…
As something to use, the Gothic and its poetic expression is torn between commodity and camp, from clothed to nude, from artistic to pornographic. What capital divides into discrete uses, we hyphenate; i.e., a coalition of different practices yielding a practical magic speaking to our basic instincts and higher values as likewise fused; e.g., sex and art as two sides of the same coin. It’s the ebb and flow between collaborators—a strange horny tide under unequal conditions to achieve equalizing results: to pull it off no matter our age, and like another dance, song or some such performance, achieve the levels of pedagogic greatness (and, at times, subtlety and nuance) required to shift the public towards new values and degrees of empathy and wisdom, a past future pushing towards post-scarcity in terms of the all-giving and all-loving side of a mighty mother goddess.
Except, it’s not a tribute to the gods of capital—to make a fire so goddamn big such gods will notice us, take pity and bestow empty favors upon us—but to wake something up inside us, where all gods reside; i.e., inside the castles we raise on the campy ashes on the canonical ones we raze: our bodies and extensions of them and their values, their rights, their power as infinitely belongings to us. Every generation, the spell of capital must hide this fact, bolstering illusions that assist exploitation for profit; every generation, these membranes weaken, the beautiful undead waiting to greet us from beyond the veils of harmful perception. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and from that quintessence a great progeny can rise like a phoenix: either a ghostly Caesar to rule the universe from beyond the grave—and whose gentrifying, patriarchal and settler-colonial system yields a continuation of the same-old stereotypes and megadeath behind humanoid veils disguising present abuses as past tyrants walking spectrally among us during neoliberal refrains[1]—or a fearsome witch queen whose lover-fighter hybridity shocks capital and brings the state to its knees.
Forget the mighty arms of Atlas, holding the heavens from the Earth; give me a lever and ground to stand on, and I will move the Earth! If one voice can do that, produced by a small party of friends united in a common cause, then imagine what a nation of solidarized workers could do. Fortune favors the bold, so fuck those who say “don’t push your luck” in defense of capital; this is our world, our rights, our power to change natural/manufactured scarcity into a thing of the past: “Let us the take the world by the throat and make it give us what we desire!” Not by force, but together as friends united against those who enslave the planet for their own fell purposes; i.e., to hoard resources for themselves, depriving others of their basic needs then telling them someone among them is an alien fetish to harvest, bringing more and more to the kingly pile of stolen tribute. We can escape this barbaric past and Medusa’s wrath, but we must face it to move forward—in short, to learn from it in every form we can, camping canon every chance we get on every stage to get paid (not starve), be included (versus alienated, left out), and be ourselves (avoid impostor syndrome); i.e., “Putting the pussy on the chainwax!”; e.g., David Lo Pan style (wekejay’s “Lo Pan Style (Gangnam Style Parody) Official,” 2013)! We must, or we will not survive; the animals will not survive; the planet will become barren, Medusa’s womb of life a murderous womb instead, achieving the true Great Destroyer role as wrestled out of capital’s hands once and for all. Let’s… not do that, maybe?
(exhibit 34b2a1a2b: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. I don’t normally show penetration for the sake of my platonic friends potentially seeing the work that I put in [so to speak]. However, I wish to make an exception to prove a point: you can show or hide something to communicates images that ultimately mean different things to different people, or the same people at different points in their lives; i.e., something dualistic relative to which direct power anisotropically flows towards. All happen regarding trauma as something to confront, and power as something to perform and play with as such during our pedagogy of the oppressed—screaming through “the gates of Hell” less of a Gothic metaphor in isolation [sex and the orgasm] and more a liminal performance that accounts for all forms inside of the same shadow zone. The table is set, the festivities about to take place.
Our enemies aren’t the only ones with combat training. We’re ready to fight. During the meta duel felt during smaller sex-positive exchanges, our framed narrative must reclaim what’s ours to show the world what the elite fear most: an inability to keep exploiting nature-as-alien, pure and simple. Through the dark membrane, then, our Satanic poetics manifest to do just that—to front a stronger side-in-vulnerability that says, “Take a break; I gotchu, babe.” But you’ve got “to get mad”—to fuck angry and, like Walpole-meets-the-Incredible-Hulk, ironically challenge boundaries through a poetic, psychosexual madness unique to/concomitant on rebellious workers seeking liberation in good faith: through trust, paradox, and mutual action hyphenating monstrous expression to expose real trauma and move past it. Whatever the playlist, whoever’s pussy [or bussy] you “tear up,” fuck with irony!)
On the cusp of disaster (state shift), the bell tolls for us; let’s “toll” back, fucking to a calculated risk’s Gothic aesthetic of power and death, of vulnerability and imperviousness, to—like any good metal song (e.g., Goat’s “Rancid Purgatory,” 2004)—make the food, sex and everything else hit just that much harder. Under capital, the monstrous-feminine is the regular victim; consider this alimony longer overdue.
We’ll explore the long and varied history of such poetic expression, in part two. Stay tuned! Until then, onto “Leaving the Castle; or, Bookending Harmony Corrupted“!
Footnotes
[1] E.g., the Zodiac Braves (such as Velius, last page) from Final Fantasy Tactics (and frankly every game in that long-running franchise): “ancient,” rarefied forms of Malthusian treachery that—as the ghost of the counterfeit—must be suggested, summoned and finally killed for the “true kingdom” to rise and war in all its forms to finally end. Except capital scapegoats its own symptoms behind Faustian “empowering” illusions, which workers must apply in sex-positive ludo-Gothic forms of BDSM that, like the Promethean Quest, chase down empowering “disempowerment”; i.e., that actually go outside the text to give themselves the poetic ability to change things on all registers.