This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (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 the original blog posts will not have)!
Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” 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 at the bottom of the page.
Picking up from where “Back to the Necropolis” left off…
“A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis”; or, the Broad-Strokes Nature of Holistic Instruction: Camping “Rape” as Food for Thought Regarding the Monster Modules
Per my thesis statement, Capitalism sexualizes everything in a heteronormative (vertically arranged, sexually dimorphic) scheme; canon achieves heteronormativity by essentializing biology, ecology and geography (economics, etc) in equal measure in order to achieve and maintain a Cartesian outcome: domination of the natural world (and workers) to serve profit. This happens through the routine gendering of Nature vs Society (vis-à-vis Raj Patel and Jason Moore) by Cartesian thinkers; i.e., in ways that men like Francis Bacon and René Descartes started, but continue to remain relevant under Capitalist Realism as a more recent affair that neither patriarch lived to see: a raping of nature as Promethean, meaning in this case “primed for abuse, ad nauseum.” Nature is Medusa; Medusa must obey and die (over and over).
In turn, said Realism yields neoliberal fantasies (often videogames) that present nature as good or evil in essential terms, and by extension, gendered ones that are biologically and ecologically divided along problematic moral categories whose territory is geared towards a settler-colonial outcome: the mapping and execution of conquest, thus genocide through us versus them, reliably framing “us” as human and “them” as inhuman through various black-and-white binaries that serve capital, thus empire (source).
—Persephone van der Waard, “A Note About Canonical Essentialism” (2024)
Please note, I wrote the Monster Modules over a year-and-a-half ago. The raw theory is there, but the historical arguments aren’t aimed at specific recipients of state violence so much as I try to holistically consider all of them per intersectional solidarity as something to achieve together during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., built on older monstrous histories: learning to camp rape and find our power during liminal expression/Gothic counterculture as a sex-positive force. Think of my various staged critiques being aimed at the middle class as the gatekeepers of capital, decaying and tokenizing (non-white and gender-non-conforming traitors of class, race and culture) to attack the elite’s enemies by virtue of profit requiring enemies to exploit: nature as monstrous-feminine; e.g., Sigourney Weaver’s GNC, Tim-Curry-tinged 1983 shoot with Helmut Newton clearly having inspired their 1984 possession as the Gozer of New York: Zuul being Medusa-by-another-name.
(source: Kino Images)
As such, a lot of what follows paints in broad strokes regarding said history as it applies differently for various exploited groups; i.e., under the same predatory system relative to our Four Gs, Six Rs, Gothic mode of expression, etc; e.g., masks and revolutionary cryptonymy as something we can weaponize for ourselves:
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
In short, these modules have a symposium style-flavor I want to preserve; I won’t be stressing particular theories like cryptonymy or terms like monstrous-feminine, as we’ve already talked about them extensively across multiple chapters and book volumes. Instead, I’ll be focusing on holistic expression per the monster classes as dualistic poetic devices. Any oppressions I express here, then, should apply intersectionally to white women, people of color, non-Christians, GNC people, disabled persons, etc, but it will apply to each differently! I want to focus on universal liberation vis-à-vis iconoclastic art, generally by considering sexuality and gender expression as canonically enslaved per the process of abjection; i.e., as attacking the ghost of the counterfeit through cryptomimesis, the narrative of the crypt and Cycle of Kings, etc, as forever serving profit. I’ll try and mention these and other past concepts at least once, and consider locations—e.g., castles, prisons, what-have-you—but the monsters remain the main focus, here (simply pick your poison and go to town, lovelies).
(artist: Les Edwards)
Likewise, my focus challenges Capitalist Realism by camping Marx with Gothic Communism as a genderqueer BDSM-meets-ludology hybrid in the Internet Age; i.e., as something to take advantage of for workers by workers. To that, Marxist analysis with Gothic poetics dates back to the man himself, but also contemporaries; e.g., Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) writing about the exploitation of serf numeration as a predatory necrometrics designed to enrich a predatory mid-level state official. There’s truly nothing new under the sun as far as that goes and the Internet is a powerful tool for finding whatever you need (until today I had no idea who Helmet Newton was, for example). So take whatever I supply here and close-read whatever you like—from Gogol’s vintage grift narrative to the anti-Semitic themes of the cover art for Uriah Heep’s Abominog (1982, above). Go nuts!
This isn’t hard to do; monsters are everywhere and always maintain a dualistic, dialectical-material potential. Yes, Capitalism sexualizes everything (my PhD thesis) per the dialectic of the alien (from Volume Two, part one), but said dialectic still manifests differently (and per various double standards) depending on who’s relating to whom, mid-struggle (from Volume One, “Healing from Rape”); i.e., as a given monster type through a given monster function; e.g., white women vs black men as zombies to humanize or dehumanize, or queer men as “vampires” feeding through sodomy on different prey groups to achieve complicated results: the whore, the demon, the rapist working as “dark predator” and prey in ways that code police violence as something to give and receive in canonical scenarios. As such, said violence becomes something to preemptively attack workers with, preventing their liberation by using dogmatic instruction meant to serve profit. As such, law and order canonize through state force and terror (often regarding sex) while invariably decaying as a result of itself (colonies always die; fascist ones die faster). Fear of that in the likeness of the cop and victim is a vital survival tool for us to weaponize against the state:
(source tweet, Katastrophe: December 14th, 2018)
Again, my instruction is multi-media, repetitive and holistic, not microscopic or myopically “total” (such completions are impossible, me and my friends’ work simply adding to all the others who came before). As long as you keep that in mind, you (and your constellations) should be able to apply what I write here to any disadvantaged group through any text/medium you want; i.e., not just the undead receiving/giving trauma and feeding psychosexually on it, nor demons shifting shapes and granting forbidden power and knowledge, nor the natural world as being to some degree undead and/or demonic, but newer ideas I’ve coined since writing these modules regarding the same profit motive: as something to critique among all media and labor under Capitalism. In short, I want you to be intertextual and extratextual in your applications, but also excessive, shameless, and unafraid to try new things again; i.e., “bein’ extra” provided it’s sex-positive per various concepts we’ve already discussed being continuously part of a larger theoretical structure to camp canon with in a practical sense.
For example, you should do your gold-star best to keep Sarkeesian’s adage in mind while synthesizing praxis: enjoy but do not blindly endorse canonical media, mid-consumption; i.e., as something to normally dissect for profit while shoving one’s head in the sand as a kind of self-important history (re: most speedrunner documentation, for instance, is settler-colonial—chasing immortality through world records tied to profit that ignore state atrocities all along the watchtower).
In other words, no matter how cool someone seems or touts themselves as, don’t act like this guy[1] (next page) without some degree of irony that critiques profit and its heroes. We’re here to kill our darlings (as a matter of critique), not worship them! Rags-to riches is bullshit, installed by the elite to force people not only to fight for scraps, but deify the entire opportunistic, manufactured process of scarcity and salvation; i.e., neoliberalism 101 per rigid inflexible minds incapable of fighting for anyone but themselves as part of a bourgeois Superstructure! Look around you. See that culture full of so-called gods of the sport, the Pantheon-grade colosseum and gladiators’ kayfabe? American or not, it’s “Rome” brought back to life in a 21st-century world, capital married to Cartesian thought raping Medusa on a global level; i.e., as a death sentence foisted onto workers and nature’s labor value converted into monetary forms tied to police violence: all the heteronormative divisions of settler-colonial sex and force wreaking harm, thus profit as something to count, name and repeat until the world ends. Until that happens, Medusa becomes a token slave, forced to mother her abusers while “threatening” them with kayfabe-style Snu-Snu: anti-predation for the oppressor and predation for the enemy (which is anything that doesn’t serve profit).
(artist: Yves Balak)
To this, sex positivity shouldn’t be a mystery monopolized by corporate guilds, a trade secret denied purposefully by dogmatic institutions in favor of crueler models of exchange (monetary value and labor/wage theft). Per revolutionary cryptonymy (e.g., “flashing”), though, we’ll still have to paradoxically guard ourselves while trying to teach people less knowledgeable than us; i.e., to be more involved, thus active and engaged with, the world around them in a pro-worker sense: to actually risk getting hurt while building towards something better (which is what sex-positive relationships ultimately boil down to). People who refuse to do that in any shape or form—who blame and attack anyone but themselves and Capitalism—are doomed to not only live alone in their self-centered universes (which is what videogames classically are), but cause harm wherever they go in pursuit of their so-called “legacies” while cementing themselves within capital prison-like realities (that isn’t a commentary about this exact person, below, but such clubbism and divisive sport mentalities are designed to foster us-versus-them animus favoring the usual predatory benefactors, weird canonical nerds, as naming everything after themselves, mid-rape):
So ends the tangent. Any like it will be made holistically in respect to a given chapter’s core themes and ideas, but also the book’s at large. And while I can’t stress every idea here in this opening due to time and word constraints, keep your eyes peeled nonetheless. They’ll surely pop up, and each-of-them grant special properties, extensions and intersections of all three monster types (which function modularly but often intersect) while developing Gothic Communism across all our lives; i.e., expressed by different members of the proletariat defending themselves and nature from state abuse/police violence while relating to each other in monstrous language that humanizes the alien: as something to reclaim through our own labor value/unequal power exchanges, including our guilty pleasures making us blush merely at the thought of saying them out loud!
Mind you, the embarrassment is ironic, canonical chagrin stemming from asking for something we’re expected to take by force; i.e., coercively under unequal socio-material arrangements prioritizing white cis-het men (and token groups) as the universal clientele per Cartesian thought having evolved into Man Box/”prison sex” forms. It’s these canonical behaviors/roleplay scenarios that iconoclasts play around with, mid-camp; e.g., during anal vs plane-Jane PIV sex as normally monopolized by capital. At first blush, they don’t look so different under Gothic scenarios:
(exhibit 34c1a2: Capital loves to have their cake and eat it, too; i.e., to threaten actual destruction if one deviates from “correct” forms of sexual activity while simultaneously abjecting and cashing in on “incorrect” ones: “black Bibles” to thrust in workers’ faces [often as cultural exports; e.g., Bible Black (2001), above]. These, in turn, are sold back to the middle class through a nuclear family model that is allowed to sin in the bedroom, provided it stays in the bedroom; i.e., it relegates to exploitative fantasies whose dogmatic elements punish the usual victims of state force outside the family home [often at school and society in general as invaded by dark prurient forces during moral panic]: as witches to prostitute to the fearful as fascinated with them, treating such prurience as throwaway pleasure blindly aping Hawthorne, not administering sex-positive lessons that actually challenge Puritan ideals [thus Capitalism under the Protestant work ethic]!
As usual, though, such spaces become places to camp—to try new things while just as easily [for many newlyweds and extramarital couples] trying sex at all for the first time. It’s normal to be nervous, the idea scary for most virgins because capital treats it as a tightrope to walk; i.e., as ignorantly as possible, leading to dangerous conflations conducive to scared brides submitting to their husbands’ knife-like dicks, thus patriarchal dominance. While the Gothic’s mutilative element has been commonplace since Radcliffe to Freud, subverting this unironically violent Amazonomachia generally requires a shy experimentation that frankly is cute to watch: “Can we… try anal?” Aw! Sure, babe!
To that, reversing abjection and humanizing the black[2], GNC whore [and sodomy as a non-rapacious activity] becomes yet another experiment to try before giggling about it together after an admittedly nice time: “That wasn’t so bad!” No, it generally isn’t, which can turn peoples’ worlds upside-down for the better insofar as they realize, post-anal, that “God” isn’t going to smite them; i.e., God’s not real, so what else isn’t? Apart from the snow-white bridal “reward,” what else can be reclaimed to liberate workers from capital, the middle class, menticide and the process of abjection?
Such dances with the ghost of the counterfeit not only open the mind, but help it heal. It’s not a slippery slope [though the argument is present, when used by bad actors] but a complicated act of self-discovery that, once ventured, helps past victims heal from rape as committed against workers by police forces; e.g., wives and women’s work; i.e., the home as something to police and expand into capital, at large, as nuclear. Each liberation is, to some degree then, unique. If yours includes anal or rape play [consent-non-consent] then that’s ultimately a good thing because you’ll know what works for you! As such, you become more emotionally and Gothically intelligent, which extends to class and culture war often enough.)
When camping canon, said exchanges should illustrate mutual consent (and one’s basic human rights at large) through ludo-Gothic BDSM and castle-narrative; i.e., as something to pass along into the future as already dead, waiting to wake up once more, then consciously haunt the living as already haunted passively by imperial abuse experienced at home and broad! To this, here’s a modular (cruel-angel’s) thesis statement to keep in mind per the Monster Modules’ subsequent essays and symposiums (indented for emphasis):
Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it (and its trifectas, monopolies, etc) using the same threatening aesthetics of power and death, decay and rape.
Poetically there’s not much difference functionally-speaking between feeding and transformation. As a kind of power/knowledge exchange, each has a rich, unique history woven into itself; i.e., as someone’s or some society’s older preference serving as monstrous code to proudly shape into cryptonymic cultural forms with their own double operations: showing and concealing or vice versa regarding the Gothic’s usual erotic medieval paradoxes.
These, in turn, remain cursed by mouth-fang and dick-knife hyphenations/doubles (tokenization) that, once shown mid-mise-en-abyme, can’t be unseen: the undead as the classic unthinking (and addicted, ravenous) slave to state dominion, the demon as the wily contractor to such inequalities, and the animal as forced to endure a cruel stewardship thereof; e.g., the black Nazi Jew, witch cop, TERF, etc, as hogging the graveyard as an odd, paradoxical site of psychosexual rapture, healing and release camping rape; i.e., as normally a dogmatic, xenophobic tool—of punishment, of us-versus-them, temptation, dangerous confusions and straight up kink—posturing as “necrophilic” camp that we must make campy in the same spaces: a pedagogy of the oppressed healing from rape, thus police abuse as all around us, the graves our cradles less to crawl out of and more to make love inside. To survive, you have to work fast in the crypt, telling good actors from bad while playing with trauma as a historical-material loop decaying inside of itself.
(source film: Cemetery Man, 1994)
Rape isn’t unique to Capitalism, then, but Capitalism exploits rape for profit, which always leaves a bloody footprint for us to double (think Danny escaping his rampaging father by walking backwards in his own footsteps during The Shining‘s [1981] hedge maze scene, except the camera man also had to do it[3]). In turn, its ubiquity is something to challenge through ludo-Gothic BDSM liberating worker minds during calculated risk: the moribund body and graveyard coalesced through a concentric cycle of exchange. Such complicated theatre (and prostitution) dates back to Rome and the ancient world (re: B.B. Wagner’s “The Graveyard Prostitutes of Rome and Beyond,” 2020), expanding into the Middle Ages, the Neo-Gothic (from the Graveyard Poets, Matthew Lewis, etc) onward to a cryptic hauntology beyond Great Britain; i.e., relishing in corpse sex theatre (and other unspeakables) under neoliberal Pax Americana‘s anxious inheritance foisted onto fresh workers to threaten them with (menticide): the ever-growing army of the elite’s undead!
In turn, harmful versions of said therapy mirror the abuse as “activity” and “area”; i.e., sex in funerary places historically overlapping as burial grounds and sites of masochistic rapture—as a nightly, “almost holy” meeting place for extramarital affairs (adjacent to taboo elements like rape, suicide, cannibalism, incest, nightmares/sleep sex, murder and so on) classically tempting young men of the cloth with the forbidden-yet-constantly-advertised forbidden pleasures of the flesh; e.g., the film adaptation for Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1986): sex is fun when you’re breaking the rules; it’s healthy when no one’s being harmed or forced/taken against their will (the empty threat of God smiting you for doing the nasty in His decaying house being a potently Numinous aphrodisiac).
Irony is always the deciding factor insofar as something is sex-positive or not. Furthermore, such curious privileges extend to anyone and everyone in the Internet Age—to partake and enjoy a “necrotic,” rape-fantasy ecstasy having been camped rather pornographically since Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Rocky Horror and present-day works: live burial (“burying the bishop”) a psychosexual means of feeling at home with one’s trauma as inescapable; i.e., a patriarchal system designed to benefit white cis-het Christian men that—however tokenized or gentrified it seems—will always decay in ways they can’t rely on to exclusively protect them, either (spectres of Marx seeking revenge through praxial success exposing the bourgeoisie for the murderers they and theirs are; re: a pedagogy of the oppressed, a voice of the rat/damned snitching on capital and the elite)!
Simply put, the exchanges are anisotropic, working as much to camp canonical forces (and move power towards workers) versus harming us with dogmatic sites of older psychosexual crimes—of gargoyles scaring the faithful, fearing “God” as much as overtly secular as not (capitalists famously walking the tightrope; e.g., Ronald Reagan’s Christofascism). However damaged we are from past abuse, camping this fact feels more and more homely and correct, in practice; i.e., once you go black, you can’t go back, babes (the dialectic of the alien a powerful means of catharsis and self-defense)! Camping canon is often “rapacious,” sexual; i.e., anger/gossip, monsters and camp (the basics of oppositional synthesis) with sex (and force) getting your attention in reliably Gothic ways: “Help! I’m an undead demon and I’m being ‘raped’ animal-style to Rocky Horror’s ‘Time Warp’!” Guess we should investigate, right?
(artist: Tago Van Tor)
More to the point, “rape” is an acquired taste; victims of rape (whatever the form) experience medieval-coded, regressive fantasies of “rape” they ideally want to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM to avoid actual rape (and overall harm) in the future. In turn, praxial catharsis occurs through iconoclasm while healing from rape in xenophilic ways that involve nature as monstrous-feminine in fetishized, cliché sites of death, damage, decay and rebirth. As such, exploitation and liberation occupy the same shadow zones’ theatrical spaces, the latter weaponized through the same linguo-material devices canonically waged against workers by traitorous forces; said workers reclaim these in public-to-private theatrical “danger disco”/rape-castle operatic spaces (and bodies) mapping trauma out: as something to immersively dance/party with (re: cryptomimesis, or fucking with the dead as a bad, Matthew-Lewis-style echo), adopting sex-positive strategies that resist capital/profit: by misbehaving as a matter of good sex education challenging profit as a matter of fact.
In the Gothic, naughtiness is generally built on genuine trauma. To avoid war and rape as systemic harm leading to generational trauma/stolen generations, we must learn from the dead as something we embody through our Wisdom of the Ancients. Like a Gothic heroine in a castle, the liberatory ideal is exploration leading deeper inside—to heal from police atrocities, tokenistic exploitation, and compelled perversions occurring through feminism and genderqueer politics (and other minorities) in decay (e.g., TERFs, queer and Afronormativity, Zionism, etc) leading towards genocide, thus grim harvests.
“No body, no crime,” says the state, denying atrocities however much it needs to continue its dark feast. State cannibalism and disempowerment dismember what can ultimately be reassembled, though, strung together composite-style and speaking to its own murder and/or rape by the hands of others (e.g., Emily Portman’s “The Two Sisters” [2010] and similar murder ballads with changeling elements); or it can appear like a ghost, a simulacrum speaking to such lies as ultimately visible, mid-apocalypse. Cryptonymy is cryptonymy regardless of shape or size (a castle-like body or body-like castle denoting trauma as mirror-like; revolutionary or complicit, cryptonymy is about hiding in plain sight, then, generally as a means of good or bad habits synthesizing praxis in ways the state cannot manipulate or dissect (e.g., Child of God, 1972) as its fear and dogma normally do: useful criminal flesh[4] reduced afterwards to a useless unalive state, something to criminalize and scapegoat per criminogenic conditions, then incarcerate, judge and rape through law and order as usual: “all road men, gangsters, proper naughty boys and all that bollocks!” as Charlie Hunnam says, in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman (2019).
If the latter is a kind of intolerant, stalker-grade Count Dracula you do not want to be friends with, proletarian undeath and demonic poiesis reflect our being marked with trauma and yet still being able to function healthily with others to encourage universal tolerance but, per Karl Popper, exclude bigotry and harm; i.e., to not rape others as the state/capital do by design (regardless of venue). Whatever the monster type, there’s always a double for the state and vice versa projecting onto the same troubled surfaces and into the same thresholds—them, to blame others with and us to expose them as harming us.
To that, the state will always invoke self-defense as a matter of castle doctrine. They love plausible deniability and DARVO under settler-colonial conditions; i.e., playing the victim and the underdog rebel while treating us as terrorist, Nazi-Communist, what-have-you. Our monsters go against such systemic features, including high burdens of proof routinely and reliably defending the powerful as people extending from the state as centered around wealth and power always flowing up.
In a world of grand illusions, there’s no “seeing the light” as completely naked. Per cryptonymy, there’s always something hidden and something exposed that you must navigate by playing with proponents of good vs bad faith, play and education, BDSM, etc (which we’ll introduce here historically before unpacking fully in Volume Three: as something to make new histories with regarding the state as something to defend or dismantle). Intent matters less than socio-material outcomes, which those in bad faith cannot conceal (another topic for Volume Three); it’s always dualistic/dialectical-material, a historical-material trail of psychosexual rituals raised from the wreckage—of trauma as something to express, confront, negotiate with as a power we can reclaim. But it’s always a likeness of itself, an estate of unrest, a restless ghost (or some other egregore; e.g., Banquo’s zombie-like spectre, from Macbeth: “Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake / Thy gory locks at me!” source) of rape to camp; it has to be or it simply becomes invisible, thus conducive to profit through the perception of order as lawful, good, stable.
Per the Gothic, though, ghosts don’t stay dead; they get up and move around. It becomes something to invite in (or be invited into, that curiously polite quality of vampirism going both ways), then interrogate insofar as what ails them more or less ails us, too—Capitalism as a castled site of violent lies to survive and spatially thread, from mazes to labyrinths.
In turn, these become, per C.S. Lewis’s Problem of Pain, a dreadful, uncanny confrontation with a spirit of some small-to-mighty configuration; i.e., less a tiger in the room and more an echo that might be a tiger but just as much yields a general feeling of unheimlich. For or against the state, such likenesses are commonplace during cryptomimesis as a kind of puzzle to solve, a murder most foul (so-called “foul play” through intended gameplay in service to profit) testifying badly for itself across texts (the 1998 Ringu, above, coming from an older book). It becomes charged with corruption as data to expend like dark lightning from its sexually changed surfaces. Even so, entropy is the vector and the clue, the obfuscating reality of existence as meant to confuse us, but which we can weaponize against our confusers per the same historical-material effects during our revolutionary cryptonymy penetrating the spectral membrane: Schrodinger’s hot piece of vengeful ass!
(artist: Grobi-Grafik)
No matter how violent, antagonistic or intangible they seem, then, puzzles are solved by playing with them; history-towards-development is no exception. To that, the Gothic’s complicated, often-combative history of rape and its modular-to-intersecting preferences/poetics[5] are what we want to outline and explore here, but time is a factor. Sometimes we’ll focus on cryptonymy, others on hauntology or abjection, medieval poetics at large (e.g., a confusion of the senses, of boundaries during the dialectic of the alien) etc. Furthermore, from zombies to vampires, ghosts to composites, cyborgs to lycans, we’ll survey an example for each module taken from some of the most die-hard legends, just like I did in grad school; i.e., fluctuating between a looser symposium style and various essays that adhere to this larger module thesis argument amid smaller interesting-but-not-always-wholly-constant tangents and hot-cold Gothic extremes: a preferred alternative favoring the irrationally violent cluing the audience into a presence of decay state illusions have repeatedly tried to conceal since the Enlightenment—self-destruction, of state proponents punching themselves in the mirror-like face (re: “We have found the enemy and he is us.”).
(source: Broke Horror Fan)
As such, consider the above module thesis argument as a kebab skewer—a follow-through to achieve common ground, but also food for thought; i.e., something to go into your little brain baskets (and holes, mid-skewering of your meat) as you holistically try to weigh the historical function of monsters in the manner that I’ve carefully arranged here: as expressing and exchanging unequal power (“rape”) under duress during oppositional praxis while consuming and learning from/as the past, yourselves. It becomes vital forbidden knowledge we can reclaim when healing from rape by playing with “it” in quotes. This includes its odd sediment, doubles, hyphenations, etc; e.g., knife-dick play while looking for Mr. Right—our paradoxical salvation in a mock-up of our theatrical demise badly aping our deaths, our rapes, our confused pleasure-pain responses (versus Man Box types “finding religion” as just another grift/assimilation tactic, especially in kayfabe circles or executive positions; i.e., a redemption arc rehabilitating abusers; e.g., Hulk Hogan or George W. Bush) in search of a palliative Numinous, a Communist Numinous that engenders emotion/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness as a kind of second-nature dexterity towards being a better human and class/culture warrior on the side of the proletariat against the state and all its class traitors: dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit, giving Medusa a hug.
One more thing as far as that goes: Simplicity is a simply a different means of abstracting trauma and power in ways useful to praxis; i.e., just an arrangement and interpretation of monsters at a given register that we can apply as needed. You already have complex and simple theory to combine with the Poetry Module; what follows is a historical inspection and hopefully future application towards fresh histories. Per the regulation of sex and force for or against the state and its Cartesian dialogic, monsters aren’t just threats (“Alright you primitive screwheads! Listen up!”); they’re poetic lenses that concern power as something to paradoxically shift away from state forces, mid-struggle. They are, like power more broadly, something to interrogate by going where they are through performance and play. This concerns war and rape, decay and feeding, transformation and fatal knowledge. All exchange per various human tissues as poetic material—from brains, to flesh, to blood, to cum, and others things we won’t touch on as much (e.g., shit).
In turn, all overlap; all are modular and dualistic; all are psychosexually anisotropic insofar as power is concerned, because sex and force are power insofar as they are perceived through monsters as us-versus-them arguments—in short, how we function as monsters, how we feed, decay or transform, etc, mid-exchange. State power aggregates for profit to induce praxial inertia, and by extension a decrease in emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural awareness. We must aggregate against all of these variables, thus the state’s trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital: through ludo-Gothic BDSM as our castle-narrative to weave into the future regarding something we won’t live to see—a kind of “bucket list” to give back to future generations in very sexy-macabre ways; i.e., a “spit roast” that likes the very idea before the pole(s) go in—a piece of meat with agency and rights negotiating its own “rape” in ways that liberate all parties from profit and sexual harm, but play with the poetics, nonetheless; e.g., the captive fantasy with appreciative irony per ludo-Gothic BDSM. As such, the calculated risk should constitute a subversive act of illustrating mutual consent per intersectional solidarity between workers united against the state: to make “rape” impossible by putting it in quotes as a mutually consensual act!
(artist: Reiq)
Last but not least, this cruel angel’s thesis cannot reify alone; it takes friends to repeatedly perform these arguments—i.e., relative to state proponents trying to pit us again each other on the same stages, in the same undead, demonic and/or animalistic costumes constituting state force and decay (sickness) weighed against ours taking root to achieve the opposite function: liberation from rape through iconoclastic art as Gothic counterculture, including sexuality and gender identity through performative struggle (something we’ll adumbrate here and expand on much more in Volume Three). For us, Medusa is androgynous and monstrously humanized; both undead, demonic and/or animalistic, they are able to see, feed and exchange power and knowledge despite this seemingly blinding and otherwise crippling monstrous status (demons being more vocal than undead, but banished to hellish spheres).
(artists: Fox Fux and Carly Sparx)
On our sexy mirror-like Aegis, then, Medusa smiles to deliver their best revenge against the state in various operatic forms. Often-musical, but always theatrical (from classical to industrial, heavy metal, punk to rap; to movies, videogames, novels and performance art), Medusa never settles down; they put “rape” in quotes, saying to their enemies harvesting them, “Can’t kill me, bitches! That all you got?” It’s that or state shift; i.e., when Mother Nature goes grim and actually fucks our brains out. So pick your poison—voyeurism or exhibitionism—until then, sweeties! Capitalism is doomed, regardless!
Footnotes
[1] From Papa Lobster’s “From Controversy to God: The Evolution of Tokido” (2024; timestamp: 8:57).
[2] Again, from a settler-colonial black-vs-white argument with pre-Enlightenment histories that predate settler-colonial racism; i.e., “black” as pure non-English, non-Christian stigma, thus incumbent less on skin color than the dialectic of the alien simply meaning “different” tied to older institutions where race argumentation wasn’t the primary focus.
[3] Garret Brown writes, “As Danny backs up stepping in his own footprints to fool Jack, I had to back up ahead of him also in his footprints! To accomplish this I had to wear special boots with Danny-sized soles nailed to the bottom so I wouldn’t make the footprints any bigger!” (source: “The Steadicam and The Shining Revisited,” 2022).
[4] I’ve previously written about this excision of value regarding flesh; re: “Critical Review of Fred Botting’s ‘Future Horror (the Redundancy of Gothic)'” (2017):
Botting’s obituary perpetuates themes of meaningless substance, writing how ‘any anchoring substance is scraped away [as identity] slides precipitously across surfaces.” Mankind merely becomes the sum of so much superficial clay slapped on and removed with such astounding alacrity as to rob this interchangeable tissue of all meaning. Consider the surgery scene Botting initially evokes, where a British woman is being cosmetically operated on: “The skin is lifted and excess tissue scraped from under the cheeks [while a hose likewise suctions] gelatinous globules and bloody ooze pumped from the [woman’s] thighs.” Yet, this trope of meaningless flesh isn’t exclusive to our immediate age. I recall how the lifeless body of Matthew Lewis’ ill-fated prioress was beaten, trod upon and ill-used, in The Monk (1796), “till it became no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless and disgusting”; or, consider Lester Ballard’s ignominious demise, in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Child of God (1973):
He was laid out on a slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open and the brains removed. His muscles were stripped from his bones. His heart was taken out. […] At the end of three months [Ballard] was scraped from the table into a plastic bag.
In both instances, the flesh of the authors’ victims is squeezed so tightly that it oozes between their white-knuckle fingers. However, Botting confidently asserts that, in modern times, “the terrors of the night are replaced by the terrors of the light”—as though this is an idea exclusive to that temporal region. Yet, Lewis or McCarthy both seem perfectly happy exploring those naked realities Bottling attributes exclusively to our own present.
In The Monk, Sister Agnes and Father Ambrosio exemplify this. The former describes the unveiled horror of a present moment, not some obscurity of the long-dead past, when she says, “…often have I at waking found my fingers ringed with the long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant.” Likewise, the latter, tortured by the Inquisition, tries to deny the existence of a God, but laments, “those truths, once [my] comfort, now presented themselves before [me] in the clearest light.” Manifest in said light, there is always some present horror for any writer to explore. These respective anxieties aren’t in the future. There’s no linear progression leading to a bright, over-exposed annihilation. Gothic fiction isn’t redundant because the past and future are in the present, and always have been. Thus, I can hardly agree with Botting when he writes, “the future produced in the void of the present [is] both horrifying and thrilling. But it is far from Gothic” (source).
Botting is a dumbass.
[5] E.g., vampires and demons both can feed, exchange power and transform, but each module historically emphasizes/stresses these individual poetic qualities more than others do, mid-intersection, and in specific unforgettable visualizations/monstrous shorthand.