Book Sample: “The Medieval: Green Eggs and Ha(r)m”

Posted on by Persephone van der Waard

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.

“Monsters, Magic and Myth”: Green Eggs and Ha(r)m; or, “Fucking’s Fun, Try it!”

“Say… Would you like a chocolate covered pretzel? They’re a bit melty but boy are they exquisite!”

 —Brodie, Mallrats (1995)

(artist: Dr. Seuss[1])

Picking up up from where “Castles in the Flesh” left off…

I’m a medievalist, a Renaissance girl. So I want to go over some things that, per Gothic poetics, have a pointedly medieval flavor. They won’t come up pointedly throughout the volume, but conversationally will be all over the place (“all over the shop,” as Dale Townshend used to gripe, regarding my graduate work); i.e., stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster and sculpted loosely but lovingly like Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, both assembled eclectically but also in contemplating thematically the kinds of nerdy gay things that Shelley and Walpole had in mind. I won’t signpost them, though, after mentioning them here. They’ll be hidden like Easter eggs, albeit in plain sight (you’ll know it when you see it).

Partly it’s a flavor thing. I want this volume to taste different, hit different, but say basically the same arguments. And now that you have access to my pure and simplified theories (Volumes One and Zero), I can stretch my wings, let my hair down, and really have a bit of fun! Seriously, I love monsters, and who ever said scholarship has to be dull? Yes, this module/chapter is the kind of indulgent, flowery writing that scholars absolutely hate (e.g., gratuitous food, sex and food-as-sex metaphors), but I’ll be using it to spice my arguments, not lead them going forward (except maybe this chapter). To that, we want to be picky insofar as we’re mindful about what we eat, but not to the point that we refuse something that can change how we see the world; i.e., the Gothic as our proverbial green eggs and ham (“you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”). Keeping the last page in mind, this isn’t actual food; it’s a metaphor for trying new things like sex, the Gothic, ludo-Gothic BDSM, etc.

Before we get to the fun palace, though, I want to give a ten-page note about our “green eggs and ham,” Gothic castles and draconian occupants in their half-real, dialectical-material totality.

This “note” concerns our aforementioned “castles” (and all their morphological variations). Except, because it’s not baseline, but extreme, intense, operatic, and over-the-top, the Gothic castle is a perfect place to manifest one’s fears, guilt, biases, self-consciousness, and confusion, etc, and then face them with more power or less. It’s a stage-like place of performative torment to confront one’s shortcomings, weakness and doom; i.e., an intervention through a popular paradox central to calculated risk: empowerment through “disempowerment” against one’s self as threatened, often by invaders-in-disguise, evil concentric/cryptomimetic reflections (mise-en-abyme) of an imaginary past, and yes, sexy aliens and armored killers hellbent on “violating” us in ironic and unironic forms (doubles).

We’ll explore that more in “Medieval Expression.” For now, merely remember that this also means the Gothic castle is an excellent place to experience and try new things—a safe space despite all its perceived menace, thus perfect for confronting trauma during liminal expression (Athena’s Aegis and hugging Medusa) and interrogating power through paradox involving big battles; i.e., as Volume Zero explored, the Gothic ostensibly swapping sophistication for crude (vulgar) power but in truth loving complicated cat-and-mouse battles of the mind, praxis, and monsters as sexualized—of psychomachy and psychopraxis, Amazonomachia all working through psychosexual partition, the divisions at odds in a liminal space. The hunt and hunting grounds are brutal but elegant (“…the Gothic art is sublime,” Coleridge says; re: General Character of the Gothic Literature and Art [1818]. For once I don’t totally disagree with him); the ticket forward—developing Gothic Communism via systemic catharsis—is by reclaiming the imaginary past (and its Wisdom of the Ancients) for ourselves: to camp the twin trees of Capitalism, replacing them with our own Base and Superstructure using dark, Gothic [Satanic, etc] poetics; i.e., as a de facto educational device.

(artist: Patrick O’Brien)

There’s a history to this, but a largely imaginary one. Per the Gothic, the romancing of flagship battles isn’t just a Western marquee, but one whose “big splash” yields a ghostly Numinous signature; i.e., the spectre of such counterfeits abjecting the settler-colonial horrors of raped Medusa  (the alien, fetish harvest) through regular spectacle: wartime theatre as glorious, something for the target audience (which historically would have been young white cis-het boys to men of fighting age) to recognize by sight; i.e., like wartime banners and battle standards, whose streaming colors serve as code: for who’s fighting who, who’s on whose side, etc; e.g., Flash Gordon (1934) or Star Wars (1977). Per Lucas’ matelotage upending the 20th century neoconservatism of American science fiction, his antiwar narrative is maritime-themed, albeit in disguise; i.e., it includes playing at war in “space” (whose cold vacuum again acts as a metaphor for the vast crushing depths of the unforgiving ocean): with a pair of dueling warships locked in a fatal chase/sea battle, Star–Trek-style (except where one ship is generally smaller to make things fun and comment on American Imperialism), meaning complete with broadsides, boarding, princesses and duels and other pirate-y clichés borrowed from older, land-based medieval spectacles (e.g., Radcliffe’s banditti and other such artifacts of the Historical Gothic genre she transformed into her signature School of Terror for a white, cis-het female readership).

Unlike Lucas, Ridley Scott ditches a lot of the overtly fantastical and warlike tropes, keeping the maritime themes but merging them with a Neo-Gothic retro-future: a ghost ship and castle-like echo haunting a failed, decaying whitewash exposing all the usual corporate decay anticipating neoliberal dominance in an astronoetic refrain (with sets that are both self-contained, but somehow too big to film in single static shots; they must be captured in tracking shots and assembled later in collages, above). The castle is there, the forbidden power is there, mad Medusa is there. But first, the fresher maze has to superimpose over the older ghost of the counterfeit inside of itself. It has to “wake up.” It’s a very dreamlike film, inviting the audience to vicariously explore a somnambulist BDSM scenario, which is as different from Lucas as Lucas was from Heinlein (the infernal concentric pattern’s closed space vs the Marxist monomyth’s open world/space Western vs the neocon monomyth of competent men conquering “space”): something big “out there” as fighting with something else that’s making us feel out of control. Those hypermassive things are Imperialism and liberation, which manifest currently as Capitalism and Communism by other names, further expressed by Scott as the black castle and the white; i.e., as ancient things to reify and investigate as spectres of “Rome” and of Marx.

In turn, Scott’s skillful and continual employment of the Humanities amounts to an expanded vocation (an occupation or employment) to non-vocational elements of trade in hyperreal forms: murals, hieroglyphs, pyramids, monoliths melded expertly by a troupe of art nerds saving the lives of people currently and soon to be in the line of fire—workers, postponing their own investigation of the regular bourgeois snakes (excuse the term) due to a misplaced investment in capital as “their” home; i.e., a “nice place,” at a glance, but beauty is only skin deep. The praxial idea is to be scarier and more well-connected as a means of survival from the usual deleterious effects, learning from our mistakes in “fatal” forms of Gothic theatre: a place to fuck up royally and live to tell the tale, thus become better class warriors against the elite as well-equipped, shrewd and violent by default. There’s a lot riding on these depositions, the game rigged against workers by the most unscrupulous, unfeeling cutthroats on Earth: capitalists.

Medusa is angry for a reason, no love lost between her and the men who took her head; they’re not a “bad batch,” but rotten to the core (empire decays by design, doesn’t discriminate), treating life as cheaper than dirt, squeezing blood from a stone to chase, chase, chase dollars. To humanize them would be dubious; to settle would be a fatal underestimation: of those who would cradle-rob your grandchild’s crib for a nickel (except “taking candy from baby” applies to how they view all workers) then light it on fire. They prey on vulnerability and expose our flaws to diminish our fortitude. Their prescription? Fear and dogma as something whose waves of terror lead not just to fight or flight, but addict behaviors that pit workers against each other—to ensnare and trap potential rebels with what historical drives us: fear, anger and threats of force, but also liberation, pleasure, and knowledge—curiosity. We’re already “on the edge,” with them enabling our destruction akin to Zofloya handing Victoria de Loredani a vial of her own poison, or Mathilda the portrait that sends Ambrosio spiraling to his doom (and his dreams up in smoke). Make no mistake, these are agents of incredible alienation, thus cruelty.

In short, capitalists are dragons without irony, caring for one thing and one thing only—profit, which requires unequal socio-material conditions, requires unchecked rape, theft and murder without irony towards nature: Tolkien’s Smaug minus the theatre, verbosity or cool factor (the banality of evil). To that, the gloating is unsaid but ubiquitous—an aura of invincibility Tolkien put best in his finest[2] work, The Hobbit (1937): “My armour is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!” (source). It’s not accurate for Smaug and that’s the point, but equally accurate is his possessive and vindictive nature as greed rarefied to speak to capital: “His rage passes description – the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted” (ibid.). To catch my drift, apply this to Sex Positivity at large: capital couldn’t care less, and workers and nature pay the price!

In dualistic terms, we ignite the flames of the dragon for our aims, but enrage theirs to send an arrow into their bare-and-exposed heart. Summoning the dragon just to kill him isn’t the point (Radcliffe’s predatory[3] and fiscal-minded summoning and banishing of the haunted house); understanding “dragon sickness” affecting all parties in a brutal ugly fashion is—e.g., summing up WW1 in the Battle of the Five Armies (which sadly Tolkien tries to rescue the good name of war from in 1954 with the Lord of the Rings novels. Class war isn’t the romance of big battles, Tolkien). To that, I applaud the old fart. Nice job, Tolkien. Have a cookie from beyond the grave.

The moral here is intellectual savagery. Don’t be afraid to kill your darlings, lovelies—to critique your heroes, then chop them up and stitch them back together as new zombies to dance with (which might seem unintuitive, but I assure you, there’s a method to the madness); re: our campy ghosts of Marx. Doing so is vital if we are to unfasten ourselves from the capitalist myopia’s vast, shapeless quagmire—to break “our” icons (given to us by Capitalism), not restore them (thus maintain Capitalist Realism)!

As such, sucking Tolkien off or going down on Radcliffe “as is” does not good praxis make! It’s idolatry for those who want to keep things the same, watching the world burn for profit (which is effectively wanting to just watch the world burn, fiddling whilst “Rome” burns and with it, poor Medusa until she fucks us to death; e.g., the Hollow Knight psychomachy harboring the Pale King and queenly Radiance in the same shell’s bloodthirsty eyes); better to melt that down and learn from it, our minds agile and dexterous through our bodies, sexualities and genders’ combined riches (a small fortune) as our own. Consider the paradox of the conquered, of the archer, and of the tortoise and the hare:

  • slow and steady wins the race
  • in non-linear routes (to the pussy [or other holes]. Generally the in-and-out thrusting is more straightforward, but even then you can come at it from different angles, speeds, depths, and amounts of impact, etc)
  • to win not from crossing the finish line (“cumming” like Eric Liddle from Chariots of Fire, 1981) but also from the struggle of reaching it and enjoying the feelings that emerge throughout!

Keeping all these in mind, one’s devilish “dance” partner isn’t someone to use and cast aside like a piece of meat (unless they actually want that and you’ve negotiated it ahead of time); they’re someone to—for me, anyways—give tribute to with thanks, not recite Richter Belmont’s half of the Dracula speech (“Tribute?! You steal men’s souls and make them your slaves!”). For the high of weird canonical nerds to work, they have to kill, dominate or otherwise harm others through lack of consent. “Paradise” is a unironic boneyard to them; we weird iconoclastic nerds subvert that harm in campy venues of social and monetary exchange (what Volume One calls “humanizing the harvest”; i.e., Medusa as a Big [insert body part here] Goth GF we must rescue from harmful Cartesian bondage).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

To that, Harmony’s massive, tasty buns (not shown, here); dark, church-like pussy and spread-open thighs made me cum so hard I felt like I couldn’t walk—that, in boxing terms (the usual sports-like metaphors that work so well for topping someone, but also getting topped from the bottom, “rope-a-dope”-style), I’d had “my bell rung” and was “down for the count”—i.e., as if my enlarged soul had swelled to stupendous extremes before exiting my body through my dick (the “little death,” through the Eye of the Needle); and all while sweating profusely and panting like a slut, having given Harmony the biggest cum tribute I’ve ever produced and they’d ever received (and all while Slayer’s “Angel of Death” [1986] played on their end—terribly fitting)! “Taking my head” in that way is a sign of respect to and from Harmony—of sharing and “doing a Communism[4]” with a good friend while paying them for their time as we play together in sexual-to-asexual forms of artist-to-muse forms of Gothic artistic exchange (nudism and erotic psychosexual delight a tightrope to walk). To that, my girl cock is obedient and good; it gets soft until I know my partner is ready and willing. That’s how it should be (versus being able to fuck someone no matter what, which is literally not a virtue)!

On one level, we can hardly blame those who harm others; it’s often all they know and are taught (we are alien to them, fetish). On the other hand, they are our sworn enemies and cannot become our friends until they try to change their core beliefs (a very difficult thing to do). Rags-to-riches isn’t belt with many notches, but a vaulted character full of emotional wealth (I’ve always been materially poor [for a white American male] but the cuties I’ve fuck never seem to mind). Each failure isn’t a failure at all, then, but a special chance to learn and change, to do things differently in the future that can still be funny in hindsight (sex generally is): to release pent-up fatal stress (laughter and orgasms mimicking the symptoms of the orgasm as intense physical labor under duress[5]) before the fat lady (Medusa) sings orgasmically to our curtain call. She’s literally a planet and will be absolutely fine; our head, crushed ignominiously between her strong thighs, will not outlive/outlast her orgasmic “death throes.”

I could exhibit that. Except we don’t even have to see her abstractions to understand the larger thing at stake—the world; one look at the weirdness of war-bred child soldiers says it all: baby-brain numbskulls thirsty after “waifus” and howling at the vengeful moon (witnessed inside odd localizations of Japanese media; e.g., “Invitation of a Crazed Moon” from Portrait of Ruin [2006] cryptomimetically touching on total catastrophe as a Western invention embraced by eco-fascist Japanese fandoms [the return of the Shogunate] and tackled by infamous auteurs writing “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis[6]” [1995] tied to a bigger production. From Castlevania to Neo-Genesis Evangelion, then, the Japanese consensus is kick-ass emulations of American rock ‘n roll as thoroughly campy [less so with Megan Man, but I digress]: “Neo-Gothic Bible rock.” Yes, they’re straight-up bops, but the liminality remains indefinitely fascinating inside a capitalist world order).

In other words, love is a battlefield, but also a stage in between reality and fiction; as should hopefully be obvious at this stage, combining sex, nudism and the language of war per ludo-Gothic BDSM (sex as art) is an endlessly productive-and-liminal operation, especially when funneled through the fetishes and clichés of the Gothic—its “Ancient” Romances (stories of high imagination) and real life (the novel: “truth is stranger than fiction”) yielding something special and new (“imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” but “familiarity breeds contempt”) when used in a consciously satirical, campy way.

The Gothic, as we think of its earliest origins, was always campy and about queer sex in a partially ace way (re: Walpole and Lewis)—something whose dialectical-material push-pull survives well into Rocky Horror, Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2009) and beyond (the hero’s treatment of Dracula in the latter film being much more self-loathing in a straight way—a fact hilariously exemplified by the great [non-Dracula] song, “Peter, You Suck,” still managing to sneak in a shameless vampire pun as “hidden in plain sight,” minus the stage makeup). Like our own lives seemingly divorced from it, the Gothic, sex and gender expression are not simply a vicious cycle or comedy/tragedy of errors, then; e.g., something to sing satirically about (Obscurest Vinyl’s “I Glued My Balls to My Butthole Again” [2024] being the “hot new single” to dominate the American airwaves); i.e., that makes us cover our mouths to keep quiet (from shocked, orgasmic laughter), bemoaning to ourselves (and the audience, our partners or whoever’s watching us) in a half-real sphere: “Not again!” (and which the audience double-takes, staring widely as they sputter back, “Again?”). But you gotta learn not to shoot yourself in the foot, and some people really can’t help themselves. No bullshit, it’s literally all they’ve been taught, thus all they know.

For example, my roomie, Beavis, from Volume One, had both a) a father who raised him to be a gun nut, and b) a mother who wanted him to—no bullshit—use a Catholic dating app to meet “good girls” (translation: “hopelessly ignorant and dependent”). In other words, Beavis wanted to have his “cake” and “eat” it, too: an angel in the streets, freak in the sheets who would sire his children after the first date. But he wasn’t smart enough to listen to a certified “pussy slayer” (that’s not how I see what I do, but in jest, the expression more or less translates to “someone who fucks”) and instead decided to keep doing the Romeo thing: loving from afar. Like, dude, I’m all for the “love-by-letter” approach, but nobody chooses to do that—not unless they’re desperate or unable to meet up, in person!

Dating advice through half-real things like Gothic poetics might seem like a like a paradox unto itself, a fool’s errand—”don’t be afraid of fucking up” versus “fortune flavors the bold,” etc—but it’s simpler than you think (and still prone to hilarity and risk): a) keep an open mind, b) find out what you like (and what people who share your interests like), c) communicate your needs while treating people like humans, d) see where it goes. The more open you are without being a creep, the better your odds provided you don’t get preyed on by abusive people (which happened to me multiple times until I learned how to avoid them). So look for opportunity and “go for the gold” yourselves. To the victor go the spoils, except you need to know when to be stubborn and when back off, to… [reads “Polonius’ advice to Laertes”; source: Stage Milk, 2022]. And so on. In a nutshell, don’t act like Andrew Tate (a smaller version of an unironic dragon’s cheap imitation) and you should be golden.

(artists: the Brothers Hildebrandt)

To that, Tolkien’s Smaug the Stupendous (the OG daddy dom, not as “big” as he thinks he is) is both a dated abstraction and precise localization of the spirit of capital (the Protestant work ethic) channeled through the bourgeoisie. Like him, they’re full of themselves—completely vicious, arrogant, and utterly without mercy but able to understand power and force, which workers have: labor and propaganda, tools to camp canon and recultivate and reclaim what’s ours and always was. It’s a team effort, though—each of us encapsulating Communism’s castles, armies, leaders and laborers—one of horizontal configurations issuing demands, commands and ultimatums on human, animal and environmental rights. We can be sweet and fierce as needed, this hell-of-a-fight calling for all our stratagems, elaborate strategies of misdirection, and sexual energy and gender parody that we can summon—in short, all the powers of Hell at our disposal sent capital’s way to level them in broad strokes (and backsides); all our disguises and cryptonyms, spy networks, webs of intrigue, brothel espionage, angles and flair exposed all at once, Aegis-style. It’s literally “how people talk,” meaning some degree of selfishness, pain, lust, fear, lies and superstition are necessary to keep us alive inside capital’s concentric façade.

Like Tolkien’s Barrel-rider and thirteen dwarves, then, we are the proverbial Thief in the Shadows (except, we’re good goblins, wargs, and creatures of darkness that don’t moralize geography or nature into good/bad factions):

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

To that, “eating” so-called “green eggs” is a diagnostic process that welcomes risk if it means a fun opportunity to learn and try new things—to play and have fun with in the process. Why are the eggs and ham green? Clearly if something’s new, we’ll want investigate it. That’s what heroes, detectives, teachers and mothers all to: do make sure something’s safe, then relax and go for it! “Where there’s a whip, there’s a way!” (not the LotR song from the ’70s cartoon, but Vulture’s updated version—a blast-from-the-“past” on their Sentinels album, 2024). Be your own sex(-positive) goblin and see who answers back; the response might just surprise you! Big Booty Goth GFs are real, but you must be prepared to play together in a ludo-Gothic BDSM (thus Communist) sphere. Trust me, I’m a professional slut and career weirdo with a bevy of yummy comrades I call “friend” (“speak ‘friend’ and enter!”) collectively raising Cain, going “dungeon-crawling” together. There’s no friendzone, and a cutie wanting to be your friend is always a good sign (castration fears being the byproduct of antiquated revenge fantasies that Angela Carter[7] and Barbara Creed borrowed from Freud and his ilk).

Like Frankenstein’s mad science, it’s less a science at all and more a social-sexual act of catching lighting in a bottle (sometimes “riding” it, Strangelove-style). Social activities and sexual activities generally don’t work well if you’re too relaxed, tense, or aloof. It’s about balance and awareness (vibe checks) towards yourself and your surroundings’ historical-material mise-en-abyme as things to question and play with in a dialectical-material critique doubling as a fun time; i.e., a clever way of making friends that abjure the nuclear model, Cartesian edicts, settler colonialism, Capitalism, et al. So do that yourselves as a matter of taught habit! Before you know it, you’ll be like me: the next Energizer bunny fucking and building others off their feet, the envy of natural philosophers everywhere while you “ride the lightning”; i.e., seeking not to conquer death (which, apart from being impossible, capitalists don’t try to do; they just horde all the material conditions for themselves and weaponize social conditions that maintain the imbalance) but whose sorcerous “stones” increase qualities of life: by challenging state structures, illusions and procedures. It doesn’t always take much to achieve a new outlook, or put one on a path towards something that changes oneself: a bookshelf, a gallery or person-like device (or vice versa). So tuck in! You wanna live forever, Conan? Eat those green eggs and ham; eat the Gothic!

Removing the Herculean imagery from the question, consider it less as a terrible task that takes a lot of effort and more of a silver bullet: small, but effective (though anything would be if fired through someone’s heart). All that change requires is patience, a willingness to experiment—to frequent queer joints and entertain queer propositions, to hit it off accidentally and see where things go, to wield a cautious optimism where you live to see that day where you find that thing that works like a charm, just what the doctor ordered, etc; i.e., instant relief amounts to a bouquet of medicine, bleeding effigies (“miracles”), wall dildos (a strange quiver), those blue health orbs from Doom (1993) or the wall meat from Castlevania (strange foods), where you heart (or genitals) belong: inside someone else or them inside you, John-Donne-style.

(artist: Mercedes the Muse and a playmate)

Also before we start, here’s a quick (two-page) tangent about Dr. Seuss, just because I can’t allude to Green Eggs and Ham and not talk about the man, himself! I mentioned those emerald eggs and celadon pork flesh because, while I think a great many people (Americans, anyways) hate diets, a change in nutrition (standing in as a poetic device for pro-Communist reeducation at large) is far from impossible. Point in fact, Dr. Seuss himself did it, having once been more racist as a matter of production and consumption, only to change quite radically over time in a more inclusive and accepting direction:

While the vast majority of the works he produced are positive and inspiring, Ted Geisel [aka Dr. Seuss] also drew a handful of early images, which are disturbing. These racially stereotypical drawings were hurtful then and are still hurtful today. […] Mulberry Street was written in 1937. By contrast, the much-beloved The Sneetches was written in 1961 just as the Civil Rights Movement was well underway. Ted wrote The Sneetches as a parable about equality. By drawing bird-beings, he transcended the boundaries and pitfalls of using humans as characters, and allowed all readers to relate to the characters as best they could. On March 2, 2016, President Obama agreed with Dr. Seuss telling a group of interns: “Pretty much all the stuff you need to know is in Dr. Seuss. It’s like the Star-Belly Sneetches, you know? We’re all the same, so why would we treat somebody differently just because they don’t have a star on their belly?” (source: “Dr. Seuss Use of Racist Images,” 2024).

Sure, it’s a bit Aesopian, but that’s not a negative in my book. Less endearing is the dubious, false-smile endorsement from a token neoliberal like Obama (saying “we’re all the same” is valid insofar as we all have human rights, but we still need to acknowledge that we’re not all treated the same thanks to fuckwads just like Obama; i.e., he’s a war criminal [war drones[8], anyone?] and gargles non-consenting balls). Still, Seuss learning to eat crow demonstrates that people can change with the times, meaning they stay “writeable” into adulthood; i.e., their work can change, hence the culture attached to it (Gothic or otherwise).

In other words, it doesn’t matter where the process starts (though ideally it should happen all over the place), provided the Base and the Superstructure are reclaimed and recultivated (which, per Kapital, shape and support each other as, per my arguments, a socio-material event married to Gothic poetics): reimagined in a serialized poetic trend; i.e., looking backwards and proceeding forwards through a malleable, writeable Wisdom of the Ancients: “in the blood” less in actuality (hereditary intuition) and more as a second-nature emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness we cultivate through language acquisition during ludo-Gothic BDSM (native-speaker intuition and Chomsky’s LAD) from moment-to-moment, over time, forever onwards. This takes conscious effort over space and time between an organized, intersectionally solidarized collective (what Capitalism wants to stay unintuitive, like “herding cats,” unable to group together thanks to dogmatic pacification and controlled opposition).

Cautionary arguments about “chameleons” aside, this would seem to apply to Dr. Seuss, whose “later works show an evolution of values and beliefs. Those who knew him believe that if he were alive today he would have jumped at the chance to be a part of the country’s evolving dialogue about diversity and inclusion” (ibid.). Except while I’m generally a tough sell and frankly think that many American cartoonists compose the nadir of morality (are far as such litmus tests go); e.g.,

I’m still fair and open-minded, taking artists and their creations like Jim Davis’ Garfield and Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes into account. Dr. Seuss might have sucked initially but eventually became remembered for his anti-war actions (on par with Bob Ross and Howard Zinn). That’s what really matters; i.e., what we leave behind that makes an impression and is then carried forward. So many of the dickwads mentioned above canonized their work to deify themselves and become multi-millionaires; but Dr. Seuss saw the error of his ways and tried to change. That’s important.

As we’ll see, if it worked for Dr. Seuss, then it can work—indeed, has worked—with famous texts that, through their less-divided relationship with nature under a pre-to-early-capitalist world, are able to pass something “that sticks” forward towards a potentially post-capitalist world. One can hope, but there’s some vital things to keep in mind insofar as reinvented medieval poetics (the Gothic) are concerned before we jump into monsters (and their modules) specifically.

So enough about Dr. Seuss and his silly green eggs and harm; let’s defend poetry and the medieval as monstrous, thus useful to Gothic Communism! Onto medieval expression in earnest! Onwards to the fun palace!

Actually, a slight detour. Onwards to “The Eyeball Zone,” which explores the idea of synthesizing Communism through healthy psychosexual relationships and ocular expression.  —Perse

Footnotes

[1] “Like Norman Rockwell, Dr. Seuss created every rough sketch, preliminary drawing, final line drawing, and finished work for each page of every project he illustrated” (source: The Art of Dr. Seuss, 2024).

[2] He gentrified war in a cartographic refrain that apologizes for capital, post-WW2 (which I discuss extensively in my thesis volume); and his incorporeal, ring-based use of vampirism is interesting as well, which I explore in Volume One; but The Hobbit is an excellent medieval critique of capital, and to which I wrote my best early essay on—re: “‘Dragon Sickness’: The Problem of Greed,” (2014).

[3] There’s no love lost between me and Radcliffe at this point. To see deep that rabbit hole goes, check out my thesis volume.

[4] This isn’t as in-jest as you might think: Communism is where labor value is infinite, regardless of the task, and barter (for us) is done in exchange for labor value, not money or privatization (which impose limits on labor by giving it a set, numerical money value called a “wage,” which it can then steal, trapping labor within a system of theft made to serve the elite); i.e., seizing the means of production, but also recultivating the Superstructure during all of this. Whereas women/the monstrous-feminine are normally reduced to a singular use and low price for themselves—one that capital reaps to maximize profit for the literal/de facto pimp (or other forms of free labor)—class/cultural war aims to return sexual labor (and Gothic poetics) to an exchange incumbent on labor instead of money (deprivatization).

In these cases, exchange-equals-barter for labor value (which again, is infinite; i.e., the exchange value for pussy being highly variable/non-fungible, thus retaining its idiosyncratic, uneven value regardless of its material factors: workers can negotiate unequally to make both parties [of a given exchange] equally happy). This isn’t “giving it away from free,” but for whatever is being bartered for/of interest; e.g., attention, time, touch, and emotional contact with someone you like, and money and material goods maybe involved or vice versa (Adam and Eve were as naked as jaybirds). This barter occurs within capital—not to submit to one’s surrounding capitalists and compelled ownership by pimps (the world’s oldest profession) trying to squeeze profit out of the pussy (or any other monstrous-feminine part). Rather, the pussy is owned by the worker and fairly exchanged, “giving it up” without relinquishing their basic human rights (re: protections from the state), and doing so in attempts to adumbrate a horizontally arranged system beyond the current vertical one.

In turn, teaching and learning go both ways, as do pleasing and being pleased, giving and receiving. There is neither harm, genocide nor profit under Communism (Socialism is a different beast, transitioning away from genocide but still capable of enacting it when kettled by state forces during reactive abuse). Harmony is a “dragon” in quotes, then—never taking too much (re: Cuwu) and me not giving too much by virtue of our informed and negotiated boundaries. Capitalist Realism would frame this as “impossible,” requiring invented disaster to “restore balance” during genocide. Moderacy and centrism, then, are merely settler colonialism with more steps; e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains: “Goldilocks Imperialism.”

[5] I’ve already touched on this in “Medicine,” but Cameron from House says it best (the devil-in-the-sheets fucking with Ozzie twink, Chase):

Sex could kill you. Do you know what the human body goes through when you have sex? Pupils dilate, arteries constrict, core temperature rises, heart races, blood pressure skyrockets, respiration becomes rapid and shallow, the brain fires bursts of electrical impulses from nowhere to nowhere, and secretions spit out of every gland, and the muscles tense and spasm like you’re lifting three times your body weight. It’s violent. It’s ugly. And it’s messy. And if God hadn’t made it unbelievably fun, the human race would have died out eons ago. Men are lucky they can only have one orgasm. You know that women can have an hour-long orgasm? (source: “Occam’s Razor,” 2004).

The discussion is a thoroughly cis-het, amatonormative one—reducing Cameron to the tease in a workplace environment where men are afraid of women much as maritime sailors would have been centuries ago. “Some things never change” because Patriarchal Capitalism likes it that way!

[6] Cover by Ama Lee, 2017.

[7] Again, “kill your darlings”; i.e., even if everyone in Gothic academic quotes Angela Carter, she’s still a second wave feminist, thus has major problems we must critique. As I write in Volume Zero:

Second-wave feminism was (and still is) infamously cis-supremacist and white, and we can’t just rely on a bunch of fancy (and highly problematic) white, cis-het female academics to accomplish the sum of all activism for all workers. Even if Carter wouldn’t have been caught dead in Rowling’s company today, she still died in 1992—one year after Michael Warner introduced “heteronormativity” to academic circuits, two years after Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble and one year before Derrida wrote Spectres of Marx.

To be blunt, Carter’s most famous works feel oddly dated in terms of what they either completely leave out or fail to define, and thereby supply clues to the vengeance of proto-TERFs like Dacre’s Victoria de Loredani that Carter doesn’t strictly condemn. As Brittany Sauvé-Bonin writes in “How Angela Carter Challenges Myths of Sexuality and Power in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ & ‘The Company of Wolves'” (2020):

The men in de Sade’s stories exercise sexual perversions which enforce annihilation. However, it is the women in de Sade’s stories that are seen as even more cruel as once they get the rare opportunity to exercise power, they begin to use this power to seek retaliation over the submissiveness they were forced to endure in society (The Sadeian Woman 27). Carter bluntly concludes that “a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster” (27). Due to women being oppressed for so long, when they get the opportunity, they can retaliate in the most extreme ways (27).

According to Henstra, this has resulted in critique by other feminists including Andrea Dworkin, who have concluded that The Sadeian Woman displays a “complete disregard for the actual suffering endured by Sade’s – and pornography’s – victims” (113). Carter chooses to focus more on how women had an outlet to retaliate that de Sade had openly introduced. While some of his women suffered, some of his women indeed inflicted the pain. Hence, Carter rationalizes de Sade’s work by saying “pornography [is] in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical [harmful] to women” (The Sadeian Woman 37) [source].

Again, what is a woman, Carter? And what did they do with this outlet? The vast majority turned it against other minorities more disadvantaged than themselves—i.e., from 1979 into the present (source).

[8] He endorsed the things, pushing for their manufacture, sale and use, then lying about the death toll (which demonstrates intent). As Jessica Purkiss and Jack Serle write in “Obama’s Drone War” (2017):

Obama embraced the US drone programme, overseeing more strikes in his first year than Bush carried out during his entire presidency. A total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush. Between 384 and 807 civilians were killed in those countries, according to reports logged by the Bureau. The use of drones aligned with Obama’s ambition to keep up the war against al Qaeda while extricating the US military from intractable, costly ground wars in the Middle East and Asia. But the targeted killing programme has drawn much criticism.

The Obama administration has insisted that drone strikes are so “exceptionally surgical and precise“ that they pluck off terror suspects while not putting “innocent men, women and children in danger.” This claim has been contested by numerous human rights groups, however, and the Bureau’s figures on civilian casualties also demonstrate that this is often not the case (source).

All presidents lie for the state because the state lies to function. No god, states or masters, my dudes.