Book Sample: “‘The Fun Palace’: Opening and Medieval Expression, part one”

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”: Medieval Expression; or, “Welcome to the Fun Palace!” (Opening)

Hello, are you looking for me? I’m the one to ease your pain
Just call me “the doctor” and I prescribe cocaine
I’m your reason to live, I’m your church and I’m your pastor
C’mon, you’ve got nothin to lose, it’s time to bring you up a little faster

It’s time to kill, let’s have some fun

You’ll fight but I’ll win, ’cause I’m second to…
None (source: Genius).

—Jeff Waters; “Second to None,” on Annihilator’s King of the Kill (1994)

Picking up up from where “Heaven in a Wild Flower” left off…

This subchapter is the fun palace (“the media madman,” Zeuhl would insist)—a place to not only think like a Gothicist/poet, but perform and play as one to achieve a variety of sex-positive medieval effects per ludo-Gothic BDSM: selective absorption, magical assembly and a confusion of the senses all adding to an ongoing Song of Infinity hugging us as alien, rotting and beautiful. We’ll introduce them, then go over oxymorons, the Black Veil, and other terms/devices that help achieve paradoxical empowerment and worker liberation through sex-positive calculated risk.

Due to its size, I’ve decided to divide “the Fun Palace” into three parts:

  • Part one, “A Song Written in Decay” (this post): Outlines all of these points, and gives an example of mise-en-abyme through a disintegrating Song of Infinity exemplified by Lewis and his spiritual, academic-prone descendants—namely Hannah-Freya Blake and myself as coming from a lengthier Galatean, gallows-humor tradition not entirely foreign to Gothic academia.
  • Part two, “‘Red Scare’; or Out in the World“: Seeks out further examples in between my friends and I for this project specifically—namely the relationship between past media orbiting Red Scare (from Star Wars‘ rebellious allegory to American Liberalism and subversive potential in The Abyss to Chernobyl, and more) as also including non-academic sex worker friends’ old photographs and warlike, often-red symbols that contain Communist potential whose Gothic maturity can be built upon during our day-to-day relations.
  • Part three, “‘With a Little Help from My Friends’; or, Out of this World”: Explores an-Com rebellion (the dismantling of the state) as actively expressed between current sex workers using ludo-Gothic BDSM to inspire and invigilate a more recent (and actionable) portrait of rebellion; also inspects the classics—from The Wizard of Oz to Big Trouble in Little China—as things to learn from with our current friends as sharing a similar love for the imaginary past as rebellious for monstrous-feminine rights.

(artist: Bay)

Keep your panties on, Hippolyta. First, let’s do a little prep to make sure you sally forth prepared… A few side points, if you please:

First, this entire section aims to explore poetry as an osmotic process; i.e., how our experiences inform our points of view, or language as imbricating with that of others through media (e.g., me shamelessly stealing words and scenarios from a hospital show I’m watching at the moment, then including them among a wide collection of eclectic things; i.e., things important enough to write about and spend time with, meaning consuming as part of my hobbies[1] and profession as one-in-the-same: investing in popular media as the place where wider cultural values [and crimes] are stored in idealized, but also concentrated forms relating back and forth).

This is a volume about the Humanities, which is my domain; so, I’d be more than a little remiss if I didn’t try to scrape different popular media together based on my formative years (experience) and education (expertise) to explore how we communicate using the Gothic; i.e., the go-to means for talking about unspeakable subjects (rape, incest, live burial and suicide, to name a few) using “how people talk”; e.g., puns, ironies, metaphors, quotes, fragments, pop culture references, homages, memes/jokes, monsters, myths, legends, and old wives’ tales; i.e., not that they literally cannot be said, but that they pertain to ways that people normally speak regarding complex, giant issues (a running theme in this book): differently and in ways we’ll merge as a point of practice. This includes the language of war and sex in BDSM forms, a dialogic imagination (vis-à-vis Bakhtin) whose signature headspace, atmosphere (mood, vibes, terror/horror, tone poems, etc) color and fun collectively aim—as much as its precision-amid-vagueness can aim—to unite things that capital has divided (triangulating TERF-style Amazons against labor). For that, the medieval (and its tendency to default to paradoxes by doing multiple conflicting things at the same time) is perfect! Next stop, Paradox City! 

(artist: Sailor Gundam)

Note: We all like to show off differently regarding monsters and sex as things to hug and respect; i.e., cryptonymy’s anisotropic double operation, “showing to hide, hiding to reveal[2]“; e.g., I love Amazons/mommy doms and invigilating strong bodies that are masculine and feminine (the monstrous-feminine), but hesitate to exhibit my hard dick because of personal trans-woman hang-ups (and desire not to brandish it in front of my platonic friends who actually read what I produce). As such, there’s an infinite number of ways to tease and excite through asexual nudism and erotic monster sex. Likewise, it becomes as much a means of chaff and distraction as it does a kind of code to express our true selves with while blinding and disillusioning our would-be killers; i.e., our “pocket sand” to fight dirty with (“All’s fair in love and war,” babes) and our little allies to lovingly call upon, including all means at our disposal in the wider tussle that is universal liberation from state enslavement:

(exhibit 34a1b2b: As I write of Robert Asprey in Volume Zero,

From his War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History (1994): “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it.” In other words, the state’s monopoly of violence—Max Weber’s maxim, “a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (refer to our thesis statement for the full definition)—can be challenged [source].

This applies to what we create and what inspires us that cannot, on its own, necessarily fight back, but can still contribute to the struggle; i.e., our food and familiars; e.g., a food cart my partner visited today being inspirational and delicious, and my very-round pet cat wanting to be included in whatever I was doing at my desk.)

Due to the chaotic nature of what is effectively a poetic brainstorm, I won’t have time to cite everything here (or later) and may mention some things previously discussed. Take it in stride, but bear in mind: there’s lots of fun and handy stuff in here that you should absolutely keep in mind throughout the rest of the volume and indeed, the entire book.

Furthermore, I wrote the “Brace for Impact” module backwards, starting with this subchapter, followed by the “Medicine,” “Time,” and “Teaching” chapters before expanding seriously on “Teaching” and “the Medieval.” It wasn’t a race, but an attempt to collect as much “pollen” to synthesize as much “honey” to catch readers with; re: people like monsters and sex tied to imagination, which is limitless even if our individual experiences ultimately are not.

Doing so has since required that I divide Volume Two into parts one and two—again, not a problem, insofar as it has become the biggest, best Gothic Cathedral me and my muses could raise. Except prior to writing what was originally just called “Monsters, Magic and Myth,” I needed to draw upon a side of myself that I hadn’t used in years; i.e., thanks to academic conditioning from old dinosaurs scared of poetry and sex. Doing so required me to wake my poetic side up (and to sleep afterward, lest the child consume it’s mother, or vice versa, a familial cannibalism). It will be quite a switching of gears and codes, after which I’ll feel used up, not good for much after until I sleep it off. But you might too after drinking this concoction; i.e., a witch’s potion; e.g., a bit like Sancho Panza after consuming Don Quixote’s cursed “healing draught”: “He expelled violently from both ends and the blanket upon which he lay was fit for nothing after!” The medieval is a place for crude humor beyond just raw sex, rape, and death, but all manner of earthly things celebrating these ironic combinations as marketed and sold without shame; i.e., Gothic/”goth” sex positivity during its various creative successes synthesizing praxis for the masses; e.g., cock-warming demon sluts, slutty goblins, naughty nuns (always a classic) and so much more cultivating emotional/Gothic intelligence and sexual health during class/culture war (the Gothic basically puts sex next to anything it presents: sex demons, sexual awakenings, etc). Sharing is caring and the Gothic, when sex-positive, loves to back it up, spread it around and pay it forward. 

(artist: Jinedem)

Second, this portion outlines our aforementioned medieval devices, which—through the Gothic’s tendency for raw, unfiltered paradox—will show you the way forward while appearing unrelated: the recognition and observation of various assorted dots for you to connect (at your leisure), which per the Gothic is common; e.g., sexy things (“uwu what’s this?”) versus profound and Numinous (“owo what’s this?”). In the spirit of fun, I’ve laid them out conversationally and one at a time (“a trail of breadcrumbs, like in a fable”) while defining them on the fly but have, similar to Volume Zero, emboldened and color-coded them for your convenience (this being said, the emboldened words without color are signposts). The underlying points are based on my theoretical arguments, but the texts I choose to highlight them with have all been chosen at random; i.e., just about anyone can be a poet/medievalist developing Gothic Communism, because popular media under Capitalism is thoroughly Gothic, thus full of things (monsters) we can all play with!

Third, much in the same spirit of the entire book, this segment is partly a visual/reading guide, partly an appeal. It was difficult to write, insofar as the sheer abundance of Gothic metaphors opened up something of a Pandora’s Box that, while fun, was a bit… arterial: overwhelming[3] and tricky to close once breached. I could have closed it sooner but partly wanted to convey something through my love of words expressed here as a master poet, Gothicist and wordsmith: their various refrains and patterns indicative of a rambling verbose flexibility that defines my profession. I don’t wish to show off during a pointless jaunt, but demonstrate the selective, neurodivergent pride I take in my work; i.e., my love in playing with language as a learning device (despite not doing it as much in this book as I would secretly like). For the purposes of educating my readers in a variety of ways besides just listing complex theory and simplifying it, I hope said love comes across. —Perse

“Welcome to the Fun Palace!” part one: A Song Written in Decay

For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to reproduce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration (source: my grad school notes).

—Chris Baldrick, “Introduction” to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (2009)

To quote Mary Shelley’s Creature, “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct” (source). She may as well have been describing queer existence, which—per settler colonialism as heteronormative—is relegated to the underworld as a midden of tremendous unspeakables, refuse and rot, but also (if you have a knack for it) tremendous joy as something the normal world of straight folk hasn’t the slightest fucking clue. We want to bring that to them, but first you gotta bring it in; i.e., for a big old hug: of the sick, disintegrating alien in all of us as reflected on queer-tinged tapestries’ mise-en-abyme (and maybe beaten a little with a hard stick). Part one looks at that through academic origins and venues; i.e., Lewis, Hannah-Freya Blake and I (all walk into a bar).

We’ll get to that, in a second. First, let’s unpack our points relative to where they are used. Vis-à-vis the neoliberal trifecta, Capitalism isn’t configured any way except for money to flow up to the smallest group of people to the widest possible margins. By extension, the state (and any aspect of it; e.g., the police or the medical industry) justifies its own existence by virtue of an imaginary or theoretical threat (us vs them) that necessitates the state through its various trifectas and monopolies driving up heteronormative/settler-colonial fear and dogma to universally alienate and sexualize workers per monstrous language that serves profit and maintains Capitalist Realism. When reducing people to numbers or objects[4], the profit motive will always shrink that, teaching us to attack what it needs us to—ourselves—through organs woefully immiserated, but also bleeding internally thanks to sources inside and out.

Capitalism cheapens life, hence language in all its forms, and by extension gentrifies material things necessary for our survival and enrichment (which the Gothic combines): food, education, monsters, our organs (both literal and figurative), etc. With Gothic Communism, we’re brokering for something better (access) using “what we got” as not expendable: our poetry as tied to our bodies and nature in ways we can afford to trade back and forth; i.e., linguo-material exchanges not surrendering our power as workers but—per BDSM—trading in power-as-unequal in terms of expressing the inequalities/comorbidities that Capitalism foists onto us, including its resultant pain and stress; its reoccurring panic, doubt, suspicion, nausea, paranoia, and other such harmful feelings. Except, they indicate harm as much as give it, the paradox being that by listening to our heart, we can heed its warnings as separated by us, post-exam, from false omens.

(artist: Jocelin Carmes)

In turn, we can do one of the Gothic’s specialties (one might say “the oldest trick in the book”): using the dialectic of the alien to pull down sick harmful barriers and install fresh healthy ones (the bare[5] skeleton, left, quintessentially symbolic of the medieval Grim Reaper during the Black Death) that make us selectively absorptive and able to contain and process trauma to source, contain and heal from; i.e., a deliberate confusion, thus blending of, the senses that frees them to see more clearly than Capitalism wants: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste[6]“; e.g., the eye-opening power of monstrous sex that, per Shakespeare’s slutty faeries, is wholly druglike and BDSM-infused. This “boundary selection” is not only useful for challenging the state’s “boundaries for me, not for thee” mantra during selective/collective punishment through the denial of shelter and other basic human rights[7] (if that seems cruel, that’s because it is); but it happens through another Gothic staple: the scary room of death/Black Veil, but also the homunculus; i.e., the castle as something giant we live inside, and whose giant’s belly of the beast is concentric in both directions (anisotropic) and phenomenological/analogous of an organism during liminal expression: full of bright spinning alarms, choking smoke and encroaching darkness collectively symbolizing systemic distress less as discreetly organic or inorganic and more a combination of the two.

The result is reality being thrown into question, what normally seems solid suddenly feeling gaseous and unable to support our weight. It can be quite exhilarating to suddenly feel one’s boundaries disintegrate—to cleave through them like fog—but if taken too far can also make us feel unmoored, adrift and disempowered: floating in the purgatorial void as something with which to tumble through until we die, if we die. The basic idea with addressing state-sanctioned impotency (menticide) is to fight madness with “madness” (calculated risk). So if the state’s disorienting conditions offend us and make us feel out of control, then our target addressal of their vacuum grants us fluency of their absence of gravity. Swimming natively through space as the “natural” ground state for our kind (those treated as monstrous-feminine by the state), we can grow accustomed to its strange conditions, thus empowered; i.e., Edward Said’s pleasures of exile: one’s home as foreign—a place to restore while existing in limbo, perdition, purgatory (and similar such Dante-esque states of existence). Getting our “sea (space) legs,” we can focus on the enrichment of our dark forces to then heal our imperiled world with, but we have to acknowledge it as such, first.

In turn, our flush infusions are collective, thus able to address systemic problems provided intersectional solidarity is achieved on an intuitive, second-nature level: from praxial synthesis to catharsis, a new baseline per Gothic Communism as a historical-material fact once achieved. This happens through targeting children as more sponge-like and playful, but also by showing teenagers and adults that it’s not just ok to play with Gothic things during ludo-Gothic BDSM to gain some feel for medieval intuition; it’s absolutely essential. A “torture” castle of doom is, oddly enough, the best place to foster empathy because that is where we can express chattelization, alienation and similar abuses in ways that can’t actually harm us (the pearly castles are the worst); per the Gothic, it’s a buffer and a passage, a valve to open and close in memento mori, oft-funerary language. Such calculated risks aren’t “for the dead,” but those who survive as needing to acclimate to mortality as soon as possible by hijacking medical language as torturous (thus more able to understand what’s at stake).

Such subversion becomes, oddly enough, a way of life—a language to speak easily and “naturally” with, post-acquisition; i.e., to become one with the world as a Gothic chronotope still occupied by nature as bird-like in ways Indigenous cultures still speak of; e.g., “Birds,” Bay explains, “are very important to Tikanga Māori; including the Tūi’s[8] songs warning of danger and of war—to, as I put it, call the warriors home and to battle against our foes. Through art, and the useful myth of Gothic ancestry as a counterterrorist device, such things are personified through art to make us better stewards of nature; i.e., by identifying with it as routinely hunted and harvested to extinction by capital: treating all as alien-fetish prey they may reap until such beauties vanish from the face of the Earth.

(artist: Amber Harris)

In turn, we shake off the yolk or the snare by virtue of fooling our hunters, but also persuading them (through animal magnetism, among other things) to see us as monstrous-feminine humans. Accuracy is less important than empathy as having socio-material results that foster cryptonymic labor and propaganda against state doubles.

Authenticity aside, systemic trauma is isolated and expressed in Gothic theatre, which workers can synthesize through daily habits that allow proletarian praxis to occur successfully. From most complex to most simple, good praxis requires a successful pedagogy of the oppressed, which requires synthesis, which requires the Basics (from Volume One): anger/gossip, monsters and camp.

Ironic or not, castles are the most famous and camp-prone Gothic location (from Britain, anyways). It’s not just castles, though, but anything capable of operating in terms of any aspect of the Western home/nuclear family unit as compromised; i.e., as alien (doubled) and fetishized, especially in medieval, dated forms reflecting on societal decay as barbaric, torturous and regressive: the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection (unironic xenophobia) threatening an invader demanding access from outside (“Let me in!”). According to these criteria, our “torturous” camp can manifest through any location; i.e., to inherit and reenact shelter through as disintegrating thus dysfunctional, disempowering.

(source: The Darkest Dungeon II)

Except also in turn, Gothic empowerment is rooted in “disempowerment” as something to reenact through ironic fetishes; i.e., the aesthetics of death, unequal power and alienization (which the state wants to monopolize and ultimately prevent: our reclamation of their power): rape/death fantasies and play that, when ironic, actually empower the subject by making them feel in control through calculated risk; i.e., psychosexual theatre and ludo-Gothic BDSM; re (from our teaching section): “a dark freaky church where no one gets hurt and there’s lots of sex, it’s the Neo-Gothic in a nutshell.” Trauma manifests through the body and depictions of the body in “ancient,” castle-like forms, to which “rape,” “torture” and “sacrifice” are very different in quotes than without: a “prison” that sets you free, a “torture dungeon” that restores your passions and your health, a “dangerous” place (often a castle in some shape or form) fronting as Capitalism decayed that opens your mind once inside.

As a result, their “dangers” paradoxically become medicinal[9] and empowering (re: the palliative Numinous) without harming others, thus able to heal a society that is sick with Capitalist Realism; i.e., the state as a myopic/panoptic, cartographized sickness, a cancer that affects institutions, but also officers of that institution and symptoms as half-real; e.g., the chirurgeon’s leeches and trepanation devices (above) but also (for an example we’ll discuss far more often) the Nostromo from Alien, Ripley the warrant officer and the monster inside (castles, Amazons, Medusa and mad science—all Gothic par excellence) all begot from the company’s displaced abuse commenting on real-life horseshit (“That goddamn company! What about our lives, you son of a bitch!” To which capital would respond: “You’re workers. You don’t have lives!”).

Along with the buckets of slime and fake blood (the lubricants of the ancient world, fun fact), such calculated risks reflect us as existing inside inherited confusions; i.e., within symbols at war and wherein state trauma (and worker rage) is not far-removed from a given production. So while Medusa and her magic cannot die, they can get sick. So can myths and monsters at large, which requires “poison” to cure them; i.e., the reclaimed monstrous-feminine as a subversive, paradoxical means of reunion with nature-as-furious that enrich them to move again once stuck in the voracious mud: consuming us (and our friends) through a cryptonymic presence of unseen-but-palpable woe (next page). We must liberate, thus uproot ourselves through ironic calculated risk—not to a pre-capitalist state (feudalism) but for us to proceed towards a post-capitalist paradise (the paradox of “forgetting” how to imagine something better that hasn’t happened yet).

Such a tug-o’-war is generally hard to conceptualize, and per neoliberal refrains like The NeverEnding Story[10] (1984, two pages), become something to frame as fear and dogma to anything outside of Capitalist Realism: “People without hope are much easier to control,” Gramork says; but the wily cunt forgot to mention, “False hope does just as well!” Ende’s novel foreshadowed neoliberal hegemony that, in 1984, was well on its way to becoming the New World Order (which would echo into the fatal, essential nostalgia of postmillennial stories echoing Red Scare pastiche/moral panic through Giorgio Moroder’s excellent film score [Still Watching Netflix’ 2020 “The Full Dustin and Suzie NeverEnding Story Scene” having fifty-two million views, by the way[11]]: disorder appears, so scapegoat a Nazi-Communist “corruption” in the shadow zone[12]):

“First, do no harm” requires us being the watchdogs/whistleblowers to challenge state hounds obedient to profit and genocide—to expose the latter while our friends say to us, “Get ’em, girl!” (I can be a good girl to my friends, and a nasty bitch to protect them; i.e., I dislike weird canonical nerds, but like the overenthusiastic dog chasing the mailman, will happily take a bite right out of capital’s ass to expose them). The idea of post-scarcity is to reach towards something difficult to reach through awesome barriers (often with really bitchin’ music, as Moroder shows us during classic fatal nostalgia from childhood favorites, above), which has another metaphor per the Gothic that goes with it: natural philosophy or the Numinous, also called the fire of the gods/mysterium tremendum. The Modern Prometheus may have been written in 1818, but it’s only just beginning. Per the Gothic, “home” is inconclusive and vague, always imprecisely under attack and needing to be defended from ghostly invaders that, seemingly incorporeal, have a profound physical impact on our mental, physical and sexual health. To flirt with them is to invite disaster.

Like Communism, though, a Gothic castle is always incomplete, in continuum, but seems to suggest its full potential as a powerful, unmappable palimpsest each and every visit. Yet the veneer of formless, vague imprecision is, suitably enough, misleading. Again, it’s the usual paradox of seeing through Satanic darkness (visible) to bypass shiny state illusions (ACAB), but also suggesting the whole with a starting quote that leads mnemonically to unspoken elements historically concealed; i.e., clue phrases (our Easter eggs) Sex Positivity supplies in a chapter of a volume of a book as a fraction of a larger history in small, one looking backward curiously to go forwards boldly towards post-scarcity’s written things and other technology married to the past as liberated from capital: food, graveyard and sex metaphors combined in very raunchy, thus medieval ways that, like it or not, survive anisotropically well into the present; e.g., vampirism for or against the state (so-called “staking,” below); i.e., popular media encompassing ancient forms of entertainment as food-like in vitalistic ways: sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, which frankly extends to monsters, myths and magic, but also castles and cathedrals, mad science and various other psychosexual things to get the hang of (and taste, concerning forbidden things; e.g., pussy cream coating your dick which goes back into your mouth when she kisses you).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Since Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Gothic has dealt in voyeurism as an exhibition to challenge dogma: “Abashed the Devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined His loss” (source). The call of the Gothic towards Communism, then, is felt across all media—be that novels, cinema or videogames—as haunted by things we routinely recognize and respond to (usually sex and violence in different forms, above). When playing with the Gothic to interrogate power and trauma yourselves, take what is useful and leave the rest. It only feels unintuitive and/or mad/rare because Capitalism discourages it, treats it as the exception. The proof is in the pudding—our pudding—as abused along viral, cryptomimetic copies of itself.

Our endlessly deliberate (and productive) mixing of metaphors also merges with Hogle’s double operation of showing to conceal (from “The Restless Labyrinth”) as something to reverse: concealing to reveal. Walpole did it with castles and “Gothic” as a style; Romero does it with zombies; Otto did it with Latin placeholders to denote a mysterium tremendum as not being God but, per C.S. Lewis, evoking an uncanniness of the divine in “the other room.” The same idea personifies with blindfolds, orthographizes with words, manifests with architecture and maps, spatio-temporally with the chronotope, and blends between/across them collectively as liminal expression holistically useful to containing and suggesting through perpetual incompletion: the structured chaos that is Gothic Communism. It’s a hyperobject too big to suggest, and opposite Capitalism’s liminal hauntology of war (the castle-as-omen to a grim harvest tied to fatal nostalgia), is deliberately obscured by those in power to stay invisible using big obvious forgeries that, seemingly formless like mist, appear like a vampire to envelope and drain us. But they can’t suppress it, leading it to haunt the presence as spectres of Marx that, per artists like Giger or Lewis are surreal, campy or a bit of both: serious-silly (e.g., Monty Python’s “Camelot” or Blue Öyster Cult’s “psychedelic doom boogie”).

Capitalism will adopt any shape to defend itself, including within the Gothic as yet-another-revenue stream (whose blood, sweat and tears come from labor as something to siphon out of their bodies). We can likewise transform, switching gears to build whatever is required wherever we need to achieve our goals in any media form. Except whereas capital hides itself from workers, workers hide rebellion from the state. Boundaries and divisions are little more than curtains in the Gothic that we can push aside, but also drape over our creations like a funeral pall the enemy is too lazy to check; i.e., seeing a castle or statue that, through the power of Gothic poetics and human imagination, springs to life in ways that survive across lives. It becomes a data that conquers death and speaks of it, mid-senescence (deathly blossoms symbolizing our flowering minds as necrobiomes in small parts to a larger one, of a larger one).

Faced with that, our friends might adopt the medieval as a critical lens, challenging Capitalism’s universal alienation with reverse abjection to open their closed minds; or equally suitable use chronotopes, cryptonyms and hauntologies in a similar fashion/combination that serves Gothic Communism not merely as something to suggest and whisper but develop as loud as a cumming banshee. This must be done holistically—by combining things that, when surveyed like a toy chest, can themselves be combined together to come up with fresh inventive solutions to old problems using “ancient” symbols: monsters as critical lenses, but also critical ways of using a given lens; i.e., to hold or view it in such a way to achieve a desired effect; e.g., Hogle’s cryptonymy or Bakhtin’s chronotope (or both) when reuniting with the “past” of our own future as something to revive in the present, brick-by-brick, reflection by reflection, as something to return to (e.g., part of exhibit 1a1a1c1 from Volume Zero) that couldn’t have been made back then, but rather must be reassembled into its new self after the Gothic has aged, matured enough to try again:

(“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” [“The Eighteenth Brumaire“]. To this, the oral traditions of the stage play can be especially medieval, thus plastic and vivid. Macbeth’s fatal vision isn’t just “A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain” [Macbeth], but a copy of a copy of a copy in an endless nightmare loop. The yawning hall of kingly mirrors shadows him as shown guilt and revenge of a smiling past victim that somehow is all around him, having already won. The psychomachy [“mind battle”]—of this reunion with the past by the anxious, sleeping mind—imitates the Gothic Communist’s own futile grappling with the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern as a narrative of the crypt that outlives us to haunt future generations with, putting potential class warriors to sleep. The imagery is the same, but the context is altered through the performance as a meta-narrative: 

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing [ibid.].

Macbeth’s notable lack of cheer at the prerecorded nature of history needn’t be prophetic, provided the nightmares are reclaimed and used by us to awaken future workers to a class-conscious approach within Capitalist Realism; i.e., an altering of prior historical-materialisms [and all their fatal crypts, tyrants and black knights] as something to collectively escape through an actively reclaimed Gothic imagination/”darkness visible.”)

Such a reunion never ends, insofar as it raises the question of intimacy with things old-and-hitherto-tried (feudalism) and old-but-yet-to-manifest (Communism), but suggesting themselves through the kinds of make-believe haunts that GNC people have constructed and occupied since Shakespeare, Walpole and Lewis (and their gratuitous, outrageous theatre stretching “on to the crack of doom”); i.e., on various registers all at once.

This yawning concentrism means the relationship occurs between us and nature as exemplified by us, mid-synthesis; i.e., between friends, family and lovers, but also co-workers, FWBs and total strangers regardless of how fast we work—straight to sex, or asexual to varying degrees of artist and muse, but also muse as artist per a collective endeavor. We all respond and provide differently and it all goes into the same melting pot’s succulent heraldry/mise-en-abyme:

(artist: Alphonse Mucha)

In turn, “death” paradoxically becomes a memory “living on” while endlessly grasping at itself through the evocation of larger unseen forces; i.e., that actual medieval standards can seem “new” by virtue of “ancient” placed in quotes through a novel attempt at Gothic maturity to do something different with Gothic poetics; e.g., my book’s challenging of capital surveilling us (which isn’t really that novel, is it, consider the novels of the past—pun very much intended—often did as much). The stress and thrill of observation makes it hard to tell who is looking and why (the state’s panopticon vs worker eyes and spies).

It bears repeating that this goes both ways, insofar as time becomes yet-another-boundary serving as part of a deathly reconnaissance. Therefore time is just as arbitrary to whatever degree is needed; i.e., we can heartily play and fuck with death, time, space, fluids (semen, blood, urine, or their assorted poetic and occult/alchemic variants) and memory bleeding optically together as needed to reach towards difficult-but-imperative truths, struggles, and outcomes (rememory jogging memory to achieve widespread catharsis). Fucking is fun by itself, but with all of these becomes exquisite, scholarly and salubrious! So don’t be a prude; learn to indulge in seemingly “masturbatory” acts that blend pleasure with revelation as gossip, campy and monstrous (to borrow from Volume One).

To that, voyeurism through monsters (the passing of data back and forth, as much as the literal theme of watching a given exhibitionist) is a consensual revolutionary act reaching towards ostensibly unreachable things in Gothic language (often made onstage with props, costumes and “rape/death” achieved through more immediate effects: offal from an abattoir[13]). Fighting state-sanctioned rape is consent, in that respect; i.e., we have rights to protect us from the state as the ultimate rapist, the latter taking down those rights in order to abuse us; e.g., denying us our ability to use the palliative Numinous (and similar sensations) in “another castle” as one signpost in an endless chain that requires workers united together to successfully challenge the state’s half of a double-helix spiraling into the void (matricide and patricide both being classic theatrical devices that, per the Gothic, address different things: rising concerns of a disillusion of the nuclear family and medieval family units, but also violent staged arguments[14] about/of family ties more broadly alienated and atomized by Capitalism).

So while I am a medievalist and specialize in the Gothic at large, I’ll say again (and not for the last time) that I couldn’t have written this volume in one go or by myself; i.e., without writing Volume One and Zero before it, proceeded by my postgrad work, my master’s, my hobbies, my friends, my upbringing pointing me towards those peoples, places, and adventures. They’re too complex to map out fully and that’s what makes it fun. Likewise, all cathedrals require a group to raise, an army aligned against another in some shape or form (for us, workers vs the state). Composed of trial and error upon older examples, it’s all connected, fleeting and unique per venture, but also never stops because Capitalism is always a threat to those I hold dear as working with me (and each other) to protect workers and nature from Capitalism. What matters is an intense poetic reaction—a jouissance (“playfulness,” often likened to an orgasm) to such factors (e.g., the butts of my muses; god, I love butts) as something that—when the feeling as such is recognized (e.g., my author’s foreword from Volume Zero accounting for the exhausting delight of such labors)—becomes something of a lover or a midwife: to  miss dearly and hold onto, not letting go until it is done, then (at times) gladly release until one longs for it again (more with sex than babies, though some people like those). Like sex, pregnancy and childbirth are exhausting (especially as you get older[15]).

Through the various warlike sensations, seemingly endless birthings and mind-numbing ejaculations spill purple prose to and fro; i.e., hazy-yet-vivid ornamentations (to touch upon something tremendous, the issuing sensations of which—like striking oil—spray forth in all directions), our memory blurs through osmotic closeness (and, at times, neglecting our daily needs; i.e., forgetting to eat or sleep in ways that—whereas traditional pregnancy’s cravings seek out edible food—we seek out knowledge as something that feeds our curiosity but not our bodies) to something we can only suggest, try as we might.

As such, our vibrating garden’s praxial goal is not just to write up a storm, then ejaculate and jettison material for mere fun alone (not that doing so would kill us), but through fun (and ceaseless metaphors) lead to an operatic, musically monstrous empathy both synthesized and synergized to account for Gothic maturity of expression on all fronts; i.e., as collectively understood and embarked upon time and time again—it’s a bop, a righteous jam. As such, when we reach towards the unreachable, we grasp for that which Capitalism routinely denies us through myopic, umbral tortures: friendship, warmth, food, etc, including poetic interactions that yield the actual out of the fabricated. It becomes something to leave behind as a document of itself—no longer alive but rife with potential to “walk again”: an endless graveyard of dry bones, each castle a clackety piece of a skeleton[16] of ever-compiling of knowledge, a circulating library (to use an old Gothic term, generally as an insult to the books being circulated) that is generally quite pulpy and bigoted[17]:

(artist: Michel Whelan)

Except our Ship of Theseus is haunted by all manner of spectres offering up fatal knowledge that kills capital; i.e., spectres of Marx in all shapes and forms oxymoronic (false copies that, like Walpole’s Otranto, have a dubious origin story but a noble goal: escaping barbarism). There clearly isn’t a monopoly on empathy as expressed through monsters, magic and metaphors—including big ones (castles), but also schools of these things playing with the ghost of the counterfeit; e.g., Radcliffe and Lewis’ Schools of Terror and Horror, but also intimations of general-purpose “necromancy” or goth culture as a psychosexual, monomythic (adventuresome) performance with kayfabe[18] elements: “Zombie Marx or Zombie Twain? Choose your fighter!”

(source, photo: Bay)

Nevertheless, our juggling and balance in whatever contributions we can supply is important. Again, don’t suffer for your art if you can help it. But also remember that trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird. The idea is to combine them in ways that alleviate sickness, stress, tension and harm, but also avoid predation by perfidious elements in our daily lives coming from structural abuse: the Gothic castle as a beacon to attract and house the like-minded while the state tries, as it always does, to dominate us through its own victims.

Yet despite having previously discussed martyrs as a powerful form of reverse abjection, it’s not something that should be shot for each and every time. It’s done out of pure necessity and frustration, which we want to move away from. A classic (thus sacrificial) state of grace is no substitute for systemic change. We need to be more constructive and inventive when the options are available; i.e., to offer up enriching poetic gestures that lead to socio-material change without us dying routinely and en masse as a result (as the rats who follow the Pied Piper do). “Magic, myths and monsters” means taking what we need and putting things that seem like they won’t fit together together and passing through barriers that, for the Gothic, is a piece of cake (see, below). As the kids say, it has “pull” (the gravity of what Matthew Lewis [next page] lovingly called “beauteous orbs[19]“).

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Keep in mind, this magical assembly isn’t a question of literal miracles, but lenses of critical thought that, when played with in personified forms, yield post-capitalist possibilities. Pieces of my enemies went into this project, words and images from shows, parts of my friends (e.g., Cuwu’s booty and curves, above). Gothic Communism is about raising not just absorption, but exchange in order to communicate and form new bonds—in short, do whatever we need to adapt. Capitalism has its sword, first and foremost, and hides it with tricks; we, as counterterrorists, have our tricks to disarm Capitalism—not just one, even, but a veritable bag of tricks that comes quite handy in penetrating difficult barriers for ironic reasons. So Odysseus, while ever the trickster, claims to have invented the Trojan horse per Homer[20] (with Athena’s help materializing it), we can reply in kind: “You have you sword, I have my tricks.” Except our tricks anisotropically reverse the flow of power away from the state and in workers’ direction; i.e., by disguising revolution as its own splendide mendax, one to help not “Rome” rise, but Communism (“You thought it was Rome, but it was I, Dio”)! In our hands, monsters make the impossible possible again; they unite against the state and say to those who come next, “You’re not alone, but armed with a palimpsestuous Song of Infinity to challenge empire as tragically and thankfully brief—a thing that won’t last the night.” Also, it guards our castle-like pussies, bussies, what-have-you from Greek-like forces bringing harmful gifts; i.e., “Boys will be boys; girls will be mothers.”

(artist: H.W. Pickersgill)

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” For iconoclasts like Matthew Lewis (as in, equally “bad” likenesses, we shall see), this is somewhat sarcastic and glib. For them, the Gothic becomes a shoddy-on-purpose printing house used by weird iconoclastic nerds; i.e., a naughty place to upend trauma dumping as a stigma, thus bond with “trauma” in quotes regarding repressed desires and survived, unspoken anguish.

Even so, the Gothic has always been a middle-class luxury in this respect—i.e., performed not by kings or the bourgeoisie, first and foremost, but those on the cusp of such powers fearful of partially imaginary forms; e.g., Walpole was the son of the first British prime minister, and Lewis—while being an MP—was not an executive officer. Even so, both men loved them some medieval rape fantasies; i.e., with Walpole having his own castle containing a boxed-up manuscript of The Mysterious Mother—a double-incest tragedy[21] privately distributed in 1768 but published publicly after his death, in 1791[22]—and Lewis’ infamous The Monk becoming so scandalous as to become eponymous with the man, himself (full name: Matthew “Monk” Lewis). The tradition had to evolve, coming out of the invention of terrorism during the Reign of Terror being yet another crisis pushing labor to violence that the elite capitalized on to regain control (re: Crawford’s “Invention of Terrorism“).

For us fags, though, Walpole and Lewis had access to the privilege of those closer to earth, more in touch with cloyingly profane things they dispersed into public discourse; i.e., “the almost-holy” spoken not “in vain,” but as something that was reifying through the existence of monsters as pop-culture icons not unlike they are today (though far less firmly attached to profit in the neoliberal sense; e.g., The Monster Squad’s poster pastiche): a thing that cannot be monopolized.

To that, the so-called “Male Gothic” was and has always been a) gay-as-fuck, b) firmly in-cheek per a freakishly long [“phallic”] tongue (e.g., Real Honey Ma), and c) invested in magic, sex, and brutal, horror-style death from a queer perspective. Except it was classically penned by cis gay men (with Walpole in the closet, and Lewis also closeted but far more open about his raunchiest stories being [for the time] quite risqué). As such, the term “Male Gothic” is incredibly dated, requiring the umbrella of representation to expand ever outwards after terms like “homosexual,” “transsexual” and “transgender” having all come to the fore (originally published: 1870 and 1965[23]) despite capital’s best efforts to eradicate them and their monstrous brethren. We always come back, baby!

(artist: Graham Humphreys)

As such, the shoulders of a given author’s giant forebears play an important role—one in a long chain of mise-en-abyme channeling dark wicked currents; i.e., monsters as cheap, easily replicable cryptonyms speaking about rape through “rape” (to varying degrees of irony or its lack, above). It becomes a bad game of telephone, of copycat done with shared relish: a dark echo speaking to ghosts (of the counterfeit) to reverse the process of abjection with glee. Don’t believe me? “Monk” Lewis started his infamous book with an imitation of Horace; a Gothic PhD I knew put an imitation of Lewis in her thesis; and now per the same Galatean tradition, I’m doing the same in my book.

Let me show you.

First, Lewis quotes an imitation of Horace at the preface, readily acknowledging his book’s sordid nature

Go then, and pass that dangerous bourn
Whence never Book can back return:
And when you find, condemned, despised,
Neglected, blamed, and criticised,
Abuse from All who read you fall,
(If haply you be read at all)
Sorely will you your folly sigh at,
And wish for me, and home, and quiet.

Assuming now a conjuror’s office, I
Thus on your future Fortune prophesy:—
Soon as your novelty is o’er,
And you are young and new no more,
In some dark dirty corner thrown,
Mouldy with damps, with cobwebs strown,
Your leaves shall be the Book-worm’s prey;
Or sent to Chandler-Shop away,
And doomed to suffer public scandal,
Shall line the trunk, or wrap the candle! (source).

as well as his own position and class

Respecting me and my condition;
That I am one, the enquirer teach,
Nor very poor, nor very rich;
Of passions strong, of hasty nature,
Of graceless form and dwarfish stature;
By few approved, and few approving;
Extreme in hating and in loving;

as well as his own precocious age and love for something he knew others would shit upon precisely because of its camping of canon (re: Broadmoor):

Again, should it be asked your page,
“Pray, what may be the author’s age?”
Your faults, no doubt, will make it clear,
I scarce have seen my twentieth year,
Which passed, kind Reader, on my word,
While England’s Throne held George the Third.

Now then your venturous course pursue:
Go, my delight! Dear Book, adieu!

In short, Lewis dates his work, then gives a list of everything trashy he crammed into its pages (often poetry and supernatural horror stories—eat your heart out Hirohiko Araki):

The first idea of this Romance was suggested by the story of the Santon Barsisa, related in The Guardian.—The Bleeding Nun is a tradition still credited in many parts of Germany; and I have been told that the ruins of the Castle of Lauenstein, which She is supposed to haunt, may yet be seen upon the borders of Thuringia.—The Water-King, from the third to the twelfth stanza, is the fragment of an original Danish Ballad—And Belerma and Durandarte is translated from some stanzas to be found in a collection of old Spanish poetry, which contains also the popular song of Gayferos and Melesindra, mentioned in Don Quixote.—I have now made a full avowal of all the plagiarisms of which I am aware myself; but I doubt not, many more may be found, of which I am at present totally unconscious (ibid.).

In turn, this staged gallows’ series of rape jokes/other implements of poor taste[24] becomes something to imitate much as he and Walpole imitated (badly, on purpose) “Gothic” manuscripts that critiqued present tyrannies; i.e., through the ghost of the counterfeit’s inappropriate laughs timed for maximum, well, laughter (e.g., Parody Place’s “The Shining Gets a Laugh Track,” 2007)!

Moreover, it was a blasphemous tradition carried forward by the likes of Gothic scholars nowadays; i.e., weird iconoclastic giga-nerds; e.g., Dr. Hannah-Freya Blake asking me in 2019 to consider their PhD’s poem as a cryptomimetic imitation of Lewis’ original imitation—of dancing with the dead (as I expand Castricano’s argument to allow for):

Go then, and pass that deadly scrutiny
whence post-grads emerge in despair or victory:
and when you find, condemned, criticised,
applauded, rejected, and/or verified,
that I have, in fact, survived:
let me sleep without ungodly dreams
of Bleeding Nuns with bones that gleam,
of beauteous orbs, vice and violence,
of Ambrosio with Matilda in hellish alliance –
all that my sanity long suffered in silence.

Assuming now a doctor’s office, I
thus on your future Fortune prophesy: –
soon as your novelty is worn away,
and darkened memory fades to grey,
once more into the breach I’ll fray
to pick apart that Cheshire grin
that makes many a-devil fall sick of sin –
for only madness finds a method
to hear the laughter in monstrous treads,
and see the humour in haunted heads.

Now then your venturous course pursue:
Go, my delight! Dear thesis[25], adieu!

I went on to put it in my postgraduate work; Hannah went on to write a spooky cookbook (far more fun than a PhD, or at least less torturous):

(artist, Mia Carnevale; source)

Within such recursive, live-burial refrains, we queers are often the butts of our own hopelessly nerdy jokes telling beautiful, tasty lies (“the cake is a lie”). Sometimes those

  • don’t treat us well (as Lewis’ rebellious nature followed him around for the rest of his life)
  • per the Gothic academic tradition, are not easily found (re: Walpole’s Mysterious Mother, but also Hannah’s PhD—not being available online, even by title; i.e., not being listed as a publication on their LinkedIn, unless I missed it somehow)
  • are composed of fragments of references and in-jokes (with Hannah’s Twitter bio being full of memes)

Even so, this recursive, imitative, and yes, self-depreciating dialogue (the rape joke as self-imposed, -cutting and -inflicted, but also punching up at the upper crust; e.g., John Belushi’s, “I’m a zit! Get it!“) has expressed itself through disintegration-in-jest; i.e., something that requires the luxury of privilege to trace fancy manuscripts that deliberately deconstruct language (vis-à-vis Derrida) to offer up new palimpsests[26] that comment on inevitable decay and avoid-on-purpose any so-called “transcendental signifieds” (re: “Structure, Sign and Play,” 1966) imposed by capital; e.g., my maternal predecessors passing their Galatean wisdom onto me—from my great-grandmother to my grandmother to my mother (the last of whom taught me about Russian history and the real Vlad the Impaler[27]): often, per Lewis and Walpole, but also womanly war stories alluding to rape.

Like a doomed bloodline haunted by rape, such destinies (as things to meet) really do go on forever; like a Kevin Smith movie, it plays with dogma in ways that piss off the old folks using regular pulp: “Mention you’re the Metatron and people stare at you blankly! Mention something out of a Charlton Heston movie and suddenly everybody’s a theology scholar!” For GNC people, ludo-Gothic BDSM is not so different—i.e., working with pulpy garbage to sing truth to power palimpsestuously (even “incestuously” vis-à-vis Walpole’s Mysterious Mother as a kind of rapey “your mom” joke)—save we’re doing it to fuck with the Straights (including Smith) and make a post-scarcity home for ourselves while speaking to our own rape under capital. It’s possible to do both; indeed, it’s actually quite effective, insofar as making strange-but-cool friends goes. Who wants to be normal or safely famous[28] (a defense mechanism, the allegory of “madness” making our enemies underestimate us, but also for they and we to enjoy what we produce as a fun game)?

Or sober/clothed, for that matter! The Gothic often has a hard-drug-like, strip-tease quality to its infernal, repeating medicine (clothes: “Now you see me, now you don’t!”); and, while not to lend unnecessary credence to total unadulterated hedonism, our Song of Infinity speaks to “cheap” desires that, through endless replication, escape the high cost of prison-like conditions by painfully subverting them[29] (which, there’s still a time and a place for understanding if not condoning that, provided the conditions were different). I also think that, provided one’s intake is informed by morals and moderation not granted by an oppressive barbaric system (e.g., Ambrosio and The Monk reflecting queer panic in a late-1700s England, which Lewis commented on as much as a nerdy 21-year-old MP was able), a little shameless indulgence and excess never hurt anyone (again, in moderation). This is doubly true if repeated excursions thereof (and their assorted footprints) lead to something better across media, jumping from medium to medium: from Walpole’s OG Otranto and Lewis’ queerly sacrilegious namesake, to Konami’s “Demon Castle Dracula,” Castlevania (and other Metroidvania, of course) to my book, ever onwards into the increasingly gay and parthenogenic[30] future clobbering capital right in the bollocks.

(artist: Emery Exp)

We’ll consider “acid Communism” (and “total derangements” of the senses) in Volume Two, part two. The whole point of the Poetry Module is it really doesn’t matter how betterment occurs provided the theories we’ve explored are palatable (spiced properly) and nutritious, but conversely that our spices and nutrition respect these theories to better assist in Gothic Communism’s greatest paradox (or certainly most imperative): of reviving a retro-future of our own past that Capitalism never allowed to exist.

These ideas pertain, then, to the Young at Heart as feeling alien, fetish, rotted; i.e., preyed on in an unfriendly residence; e.g., the Overlook Hotel’s shared, priceless idea that no one is too old to play with monsters, magic and myth. With a bit of a smirk, the echo explains how we aren’t just magically adults who, suddenly entering adulthood at eighteen, slave ourselves to the grind until we drop dead; we’re, like Jack Torrance puts it, home (which for us is sick, so we ward off actual harm with black humor that nevertheless speaks to the truth of our condition stuck on repeat: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”: aped ironically by my currently million-plus-word project). Whether expressed as boulders or pebbles, campfires or conflagrations, in novels or videogames, such overtly Communist sentiments are sorely lacking from modern life. Using the Gothic to develop Communism as learned from older palimpsestuous echoes, we must regain control of what we make and put back in over the course of our lives as a locomotive (dated and nutty) investment in the future. Again, it’s a mood, a vibe check, a way of life expressed in “deathly” paradox:

(artist: Ickleseed)

The Gothic’s mise-en-abyme—its crumbling affect, monstrous-feminine spirit, and ghoulish disinterment, living in raunchy decay[31]—doesn’t take someone like me or Lewis to do; nor does it take a wealthy atheist[32] nerd like Percy Shelley writing “Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the imagination'” in a partial and flowing blurb[33] like “A Defence of Poetry” (1821)! Contrary to Percy’s arguments and those of the same generation (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, etc), Walpole and Lewis’ spiritual successors show us that anyone can play with monsters, magic and myth, thus be a poet; i.e., as things to excavate and present as “archaeological findings” (vis-à-vis Jameson’s “archaeologies of the future,” even though he hates the Gothic[34] and reserves literary critical power to fantasy and modern science fiction—more on that stupidity in Volume Two, part two’s “The Future is a Dead Mall”) regardless if some culture dickwad benefitting from slavery says they’re worth a lick (re: Coleridge, who hated Lewis; we’ll cover him when we look into Jameson).

Volume One posits the Gothic’s patterned cryptonymies as a revolutionary site for queer folk to work their magic during the usual grim harvests:

While Baldrick also argues how the likes of Walpole use this dichotomy to both erode the presumed “superiority” of classical culture and to fear the medieval world as a dark and brutal place amid this ghost of the counterfeit, I posit that Baldrick is astoundingly incorrect in assuming that

[u]nlike “Romantic,” then, “Gothic” in its literary usage never becomes a positive term of cultural revaluation, but carries with it […] an identification of the medieval with the barbaric. A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages [source: “Introduction” to Gothic Tales].

Yet, this incorrectness stems from the invented, imaginary past as “medieval” in ways that potentially rewrite the conventional wisdoms regarding said past… which Baldrick conveniently ignores. Indeed, the kinds of stories Baldrick is writing about were predominantly written by white, cis-het men and women centuries ago, when queer discourse was in its infancy and racial bias was phased out of the conversation through regressions to a pre-fascist 15th century that was more interested in enjoying one’s privilege and playing silly pranks (source).

We want to bring that forward in ways that kick assertions like Baldrick’s right in the balls. In short, we fags exist in a state of decay that heteronormative agents do not, thus have the belly for a bit of gross excess and bad taste. “‘Disintegration,’ you say? Mondays, am I right?” For us, it’s just Tuesday.

As such, consider this passage my everyday defense of the Gothic, and by extension, Communism as expressed across its ouroborotic mode: forever unfinished but alive and beautiful in its chaotic, crumbling and splendid ornamental branching despite the Gothic’s many critics standing in the way of Communist development. Our works survive us, thus mark our place like gravestones, in concentric graveyards of increasingly larger size. I will die and leave my work unfinished, because Sex Positivity is more than just a book; it’s an idea and a very old one! Hugging the alien as something that’s rotting but looking for some love; i.e., a little novel, maybe you’ve heard of it, called Frankenstein. I liken myself as echoed in Shelley’s portrait—the monster as much as the woman who birthed it:

(artist: Richard Rothwell)

But my work, however incomplete, lives on as a beautiful composite of a joint effort: my years of schooling, research and writing/illustrating married with the human (thus beautiful) experience of others also struggling to survive through their true beautiful selves forced to feel undead. So whether I finish every volume I want to write or never write another word, I can die happy knowing my work will live on through other natures’ warlike struggles, its caterpillars[35] and butterflies. Gothic Communism is ultimately out there among all of us, waiting to finally be built no matter how many times the champions of capital smash it down in defense of the status quo. We just have to be playful, osmotic (and brave) enough to reach for it, again and again, using fresh bricks to make it out of as taken from the neoliberal (capitalist) world around us: an alien sex castle of “rape” that, like a misfit toy would, cultivates class consciousness while liberating workers using badass (“fucking metal!”) iconoclastic art. Sometimes, it can feel empheral and mad, but there’s a method to the madness, meaning it’s not mad at all, but in on the joke, however sick or ostensibly depraved it all seems. In that sense, we’re all size queens, darlings (and not always prone to using the holes canon prescribes—our “war vaginas” and “war assholes” being “ravished” most heinously by Mommy’s little helper giving us the D)!

To that, meeting “the right person” (girl or otherwise) is both quite complex (which part two of this subchapter shall explore) and as simple as giving them the D in whatever hole they want it in; i.e., once both sides’ boundaries are established—in effect, sticking it to capital by proxy. “Lady Justice was has been raped, money tips the scales again,” sings James Hetfield, only not.

(artist: Temporal Wolf)

Now that part one of “Medieval Expression” has laid all these ideas bare, part two (“‘Red Scare’; or, Out in the World“) will continue exploring them beyond purely academic circles; i.e., to look to more plebian and earthly but no less vital examples of weird iconoclastic nerd culture: the sort contained between me and my friends’ shared alienation and liberation through this book as a living document; i.e., one concerning sex work as a profession seeking legitimacy and emancipation from SWERFs while doing work and getting paid for it to thwart capital’s total privatization of sex worker bodies (“if you scratch a SWERF, a TERF bleeds”; source tweet: itshoneylive, 2024). Sex work isn’t just work, my dudes; it’s paid work.

Footnotes

[1] “My blog concerns the Gothic, but also sex, metal and videogames (not quite sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but certainly healthier). I’m also an atheist, and write about that in this post. In any case, I wanted to briefly cover these areas of interest—why they’re so important to me, but also how they tie into the Gothic according to my overlapping tastes” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Sex, Metal, and Videogames,” 2021).

[2] Me expanding on Hogle’s outlining of the procedure in “The Restless Labyrinth” to outfit it for class and culture war’s revolutionary cryptonymy during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

[3] The paradox of genius being a tightrope with madness, insofar as it stems from an illogical fear of one’s inspiration never coming back versus coming back a little… too often; i.e., less forgetting how to write and more us feeling a persistent, steady drive to take advantage while the gettin’s good. Per the Numinous, these anxieties extend to Quixotic feelings of isolated grace (dementia), but also an elusive “white whale,” the endless questing for a non-existent planet, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Holy Grail, the City of Gold, the Fountain of Youth, etc, not just as unattainable, but folly (which also is an architectural term regarding towers that tend not to stay up). But once you catch the bug (what I’ll call “jouissance”), forget about turning it off; it henceforth becomes a periodic itch you randomly get and that’s pretty much that. It straddles the fence between pleasure and pain, fun and annoyance. But it’s also hypomania, hence when one is most productive. Anything in excess is bound to disappoint in that regard; i.e., like Midas’ touch, sounding good on paper but in reality being a giant pain in the ass. Like sex, though, I miss it when it’s gone, and through ease of access can experience something that, if it happens too often, quickly overstays its welcome.

[4] I.e., people are numbers that cheapen life to produce maximum dollar signs: to gamble and collect like poker chips. Similar to the unironic approach to war language and a shortage of “free brides” to go around, rape becomes ubiquitous within endless war as filled with monsters. Genuine rape and its honest practitioners are everywhere, including popular culture; i.e., Said’s Culture and Imperialism exploring Orientalism; e.g., so-called “harem romances” (with their own princesses, assorted royalty and palace guards, bandits, wizards, etc). Meanwhile, Capitalism is designed to always have the money flow up. “Trickle-down” is generally an individualized occasion, not a systemic one; i.e., whistleblowers poking and prodding at Capitalism as a cancer that defends itself (and its endless settler-colonial war chest); e.g., my book as a concentrated effort that nevertheless is extracurricular.

[5] “Bare” insofar as ossuaries were common and generally iconized postmortem, whereas the dissecting of dead human bodies was considering sacrilegious (and after the Iconoclasm during the Reformation led to its weaponizing by Cartesian forces; i.e., medicine serving the state, not workers).

[6] From A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

[7] The state depreciates and keeps people deprived of any amenity through paywalls while robbing them in crisis and decay of their labor and wages. It will take/steal as much as possible short of killing its worker population outright. Generally they’re expendable (e.g., Alien) through efficiency. However cheap life is, then, Capitalism ultimately requires it to keep operating.

[8] “The Tūi birds,” Bay explains, “have a cosmopolitan distribution, including in Papaioea/Palmerston North in Aotearoa, New Zealand [a lot of diphthongs]. ‘Papaioea’ comes from Māori in the area exclaiming, ‘How beautiful it is!’ in reference to the location of the settlement next to the Manawatu river when it was established. Depending on where the birds are found, they’ll even have different accents.”

[9] Per the British tradition as carried over and transplanted elsewhere, medieval language vividly speaks to power in ways that remain barbaric and dated in the present space and time (e.g., corporate or Hollywood royalty little more that gaudy pirates, czars and racketeers). This expands not just to tell-tale mythic elements like the Medusa, but the medieval and medicine, misunderstanding and superstition: the likes of zombies and vampires as critical lenses tied to older historical beliefs; e.g., actual bloodletting, lobotomy, mercenary surgery (committed by certified quacks but also relics of the Dark Ages: renegades, banditti, blackguards) as yet another thing to poetically revive as an echo of its former harmful self—call it a shared psychosis. Its echopraxis tackles conflicting belief systems, hidden material problems (cover ups; i.e., buried waste), and dramatic, social-sexual considerations using the same symbols to critique current dire administrative problems. This can be sexual rape, but also rape as bodily autonomy removed through the barbaric practice of modern medicine centered harmfully and panoptically around profit over people: the state’s brokering in flesh as a classic trade in punishment (the pound of flesh) and pleasure (slavery and flesh traders) but consumption through so many of these things; i.e., the state consuming raw flesh in ways that reduce workers to pieces of meat to be carved as the state wishes.

[10] Originally from the German title, Die unendliche Geschichte (1979). Note the agglutination in the English localization.

[11] Neoliberal escapism is a powerful drug for workers terrified of state shift and Communism; like an addict, they will kill to acquire the drug, and defend their dealer who supplies it: capital.

[12] What the Duffer brothers, born in 1984, treat as magical realism to encase Capitalism in amber, trapping us along with it. It’s praxial inertia par excellence—all from two people who barely lived to remember the 1980s while alive. For them (and their bigoted antics on and off set*), they are just another pair of Pygmalions/hauntological conmen to challenge the snake oil thereof. Just look at those pedophile beards (Jon Lajoie’s “Pedophile Beards,” 2008):

*From Constance Grady’s “The Stranger Things Creators Were Accused of Verbally Abusing Female Employees” (2018):

This isn’t the first time the Duffers have faced criticism of their treatment of female employees. They were widely lambasted after the release of Stranger Things’ most recent season for joking about pushing one of their young actresses into doing a kissing scene against her will.

Fifteen-year-old Sadie Sink (who plays Max on the show) said in interviews that she found out that she’d be doing a kissing scene when she showed up on set the day of the shoot:

“The kiss was not written in the script,” she said. “I get there the first day of filming the Snow Ball, me and Noah [Schnapp] are walking in, seeing the decorations and stuff. One of you — I think it was you, Ross — was like, ‘Oh Sadie, you ready for the kiss?’ I’m like, ‘What? Nope! That’s not in the script. That’s not happening.’ And so the whole day I was stressed out.”

“You reacted so strongly to this. I was just joking,” replied Ross Duffer. “And you were so freaked out I was like oh, well, I gotta make you do it now. That’s what happened. That’s why it’s your fault” [sweet Jesus, what a gaslighter].

Teasing or not, Ross Duffer’s response that Sink being uncomfortable with the situation is what inspired him to push forward with the kiss struck many as inappropriate. Summarized one Twitter user, “The director, an adult man, saw that a teen girl was uncomfortable with a situation, which made him MORE EAGER to put her in the situation.”

Sink later walked back her characterization of the kiss in an interview with The Wrap, but when pressed on whether her response was coached, a publicist intervened. The controversy soon died out (source).

The same problem extends to the children—Sink being pressured to silence herself “for the good of her career,” but also Noah Schnapp; i.e., the queer-coded character whose (admittedly milquetoast) sex-positive legacy was utterly compromised by supporting genocide (The Kavernacle’s “Noah Schnapp Has DESTROYED His Career by Supporting Israel,” 2024).

Simply put, there’s no outside of the text, kids; bigotry and genocide onstage, bigotry and genocide offstage. Power aggregates, so we gotta push back together by breaking the very spells that lead to unironic moral panic, the enabling of sexual assault, and genocide denial, etc; i.e., by roasting their weird canonical nerd attire as the cosmetic of white American men being universally protected by Hollywood’s silver screen; e.g., roasting their glasses [Jon Lajoie’s “Rapist Glasses,” 2008] and owning ours as a sex-positive counterstatement [Harmony Corrupted, next page] that—like John Carpenter’s They Live (1988)—sees through corporate bullshit.

[13] Which Ridley Scott used for the “birth” scene, filling Kain’s fake chest with buckets of the stuff. The birth scene isn’t just unabashedly Freudian and a go-to movie for Gothicists everywhere since it released; it’s a veritable bloodbath, putting the “torture” in porn-as artistic at a primal level—i.e., transgressing as it does by tapping into a rather animal, nigh-primordial vein. No one does gore quite like Scott. It’s almost holy.

“Almost holy” is honestly a rather pithy slogan for the whole Gothic, bastardizing churchly architecture and language to carry their power and meaning over when brokering its own wages of sin (sex) divorced from church bullshit; Gothic Communism extends that divorce to the state: a post-capital resurrection, rebirth, and revival, post-Iconoclasm. Nothing is sacred but human rights, whose social-sexual protections extend to nature as expressed through monsters. Iconoclasts talk about these things to borrow their power, to retain and imbrue its fleshy or stone-like elements with one’s own mark, often as bruise like, through discipline and restraint, through the flesh as mortified, rotting and caned, but also impossibly alive and vivacious. Doing so grants it an air of elegance and profanity well known to the Gothic: the miracle of the statue weeping blood (which Castlevania literally turned into a rock ‘n roll song to slay monsters to: “What a horrible night to have a curse.”).

[14] I.e., duels, including of dueling monsters during Amazonomachia. These require and express often as actual foils, literally dueling like swashbucklers in a play on a stage; e.g., Ripley dueling the Alien Queen (the Dark Mother) for the status quo in Aliens. Similar to that, we fight in the halls of power as expressed through medieval poetics, facing the consequences of inaction should we fail to act; i.e., our lose-lose versus the state, and their goading, Lady-Macbeth-style: “What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness” (source). This canonical usage threatens being “too much like a woman,” which we shall see, Lady Macbeth demands shortly after to be “unsexed,” to become like a man; i.e., a phallic woman (a concept we’ll return to during “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph,” in Volume Two, part two).

[15] The medieval is a rough-and-tumble existence; even when conjured up, post eulogy (the living dead a—you guessed it—paradox), it still demands essence. So make sure to take care of and look after yourselves when beckoning Medusa (aftercare). See to your needs not just through food, but things food can’t satisfy that the Gothic can; i.e., odd comforts for those touched by powerful things (seeking power again to feel in control, but not burn up like Icarus chasing the sun; re: calculated risk): to distract and wile away/whittle down the hours with wordplay (time becomes vague, as such) yet lead us where we need to go; to stimulate but not overstimulate. This can be for any nervous organ, be that the brain, or more overtly sexual organs riled up by a touching of the senses; i.e., not physical alone, but anything that makes the system “go haywire.” This wild brainstorm, if caution is not heeded, can become a frenzy of fixation, of building a charge perpetually waiting for release: both keyed and drained, but lopsided wherein the scales tip too far and the energy or spirit (what-have-you) is stored too much in one side, the imbalance seizing the engine. Again, it’s all about give-and-take to better distribute what’s available where it needs to go. Doing so is an endless but all-important balancing act.

[16] The Gothic is a strange, giant lover to be sure, an old headspace that breeds strange thoughts. Dissection of a large dead thing more undead/mostly dead than totally dead and inert, its autopsy yielding all manner of priceless treasures and treatments to whatever ails us.

[17] I.e., class nightmares—of those inside the Imperial Core capitalizing on their personal inheritance anxiety as something that travels across the larger mode’s recycled materials; e.g., from Lovecraft, to Whelan, to various metal bands and beyond.

[18] “A form of ancient popular media that helps people historically relieve systemic stress through individualized forms of psychosexual violence,” one whose therapeutic exercises—boundary-setting and boundary-breaking—we’ll touch upon more in “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph” when we look at the monomyth and Amazonomachia as predicated on psychosexual violence; i.e., which provide a theatrical device that helps children and adults relieve stress in monstrous, toy-like ways.

[19] In reference to the false Madonna’s ta-tas, but I digress.

[20] “The Odyssey must be mentioned in a discussion of Odysseus because without it, a large gap of material is left out of his tradition. On reading it, the warmth and admiration that Homer had for Odysseus is clearly evident. This will be contrasted with the writings of many other Greeks. The other important point to make concerning the Odyssey is that it mentions the Trojan Horse. Odysseus may have gone grudgingly to Troy, with only a small battalion of men, but he ingratiated himself with the important Greek generals and gained their respect and trust. And he was the one who came up with the plan to use the Trojan Horse that allowed them to enter Troy undetected. Of course, it was built with Athena’s help, but the idea for such a sly and cunning invention came from no other than Odysseus. So Odysseus accomplished what Achilles could not: the sacking of Troy” (source: Moya K. Mason’s Odysseus: Fascinating Man and His Many Transformations (2024).

[21] Which Lord Byron, a literal practitioner of incest (who sired a child with his own half-sister), openly praised.

[22] To clarify (from Horden House’s “Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Paintings,” 2024):

A tragedy about incest which suffered from more than the usual attention from pirateers. In the preface the author offered an apology for its appearance in public, claiming “it is solely to avoid its being rendered still worse by a surreptitious edition…He is sensible that the subject is disgusting, and by no means compensated by the execution”. The first edition consisted of fifty copies privately distributed in 1768. Summers (A Gothic Bibliography) gives the first public edition as Dodsley, 1781, but this edition which was not published in a formal sense, but undertaken by Walpole to discourage a threatened unauthorized printing. This was followed by a second edition in 1789. There was a pirated Dublin edition of 1790, reissued in 1791 (source).

[23] From The Psychobiology of Transsexualism and Transgenderism (2014).

[24] Such as murder as a joke; e.g., Pulp Fiction: “I shot Marvin in the face!”

[25] Brits are weirdos who call PhDs “theses” instead of “dissertations.”

[26] “A manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain” (source: Oxford Languages).

[27] When he was four, my little brother wanted to change his surname to Vlad’s posthumous moniker, “Țepeș” (“Sep-esh”), meaning “Impaler” (originally used as a way for the Count’s political enemies to demonize him after his death): “Joe the Impaler.” My mother loved that!

[28] I never “made it” in academia, and Hannah ghosted me (an academic classic); but I still was able to say my piece (over a million words, and multiple volumes—i.e., like Foucault’s A History of Sexuality minus the, you know, predatory elements in his work as an actual rapist), doing so as something to invigilate much like Lewis did: a weird faggot nerd’s magnum opus. No hard feelings to Hannah, though; they were always kind, and also helped me figure out my PhD work before fucking off.

[29] What Ren & Stimpy (1991) would call “whizzing on the electric fence.” Like that show, the Gothic is abject, crude, hilarious and oddly beautiful (and the site for unironic sexual predation in nostalgic criminogenesis; re: John Kricfalusi’s pedophilic tendencies. Trauma begets and attracts trauma).

[30] A queer jest, given how queer folk are often alienated in academic circles; e.g., my grandfather seeing on a bathroom stall at Case Institute in the 1960s: “Kill all fags,” under which someone snarkily replied, “You think they’d be at a biological disadvantage.” The point being, people like us can reproduce, but generally procreate through our academic-leaning work as anathema among straight nerds (Coleridge abhorred Lewis). We’re the joke, and a bad (rape) one at that—one living on in decay as a social disease that is, at times, literal (syphilis and especially AIDs being treated as “queer diseases”) but also the byproduct of constant censorship against us. For us, the funerary language takes on a procession we must inject with our own paradoxical jouissance; i.e., healing from rape as a penance forced on queer culture transgenerationally.

[31] And before you ask, yes, there’s porn of this; there’s always porn of something under capital and the Neo-Gothic “medieval” is no different (source: Ickleseed). Except, the Gothic iconoclast uses it not to make bank or commercialize oppression, but to speak to an imperiled human condition threatened by capital as conveyed through Gothic poetics’ usual senescence and debridement. Naughty-naughty “necrophilia.”

[32] From “Introduction,” by the Poetry Foundation:

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born to a wealthy family in Sussex, England. He attended Eton and Oxford, where he was expelled for writing a pamphlet championing atheism. Shelley married twice before he drowned in a sailing accident in Italy at the age of 29. His first wife committed suicide, and shortly thereafter he married his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who was the author of Frankenstein and the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Among Shelley’s closest friends were the other famous Romantic poets of the day, among them John Keats, whose death inspired Shelley’s “Adonais,” and Lord Byron (source).

[33] Aligning with our arguments, Shelley’s essay is famously incomplete. He set it aside, then died tragically at sea.

[34] Re: “that boring and exhausted paradigm,” quoted frequently in many sources; e.g., Alex Link’s “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots” (2009):

In the midst, of its definitive arguments, Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) pauses to consider the Gothic just long enough to single it out as a hopelessly “boring and exhausted paradigm.” The Gothic, he declares, is a mere “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised” and it should not be mistaken for a “protofeminist denunciation of patriarchy” nor “a protopolitical protest against rape” (source).

[35] Re: our “Teaching” refrain, the caterpillar and the wasp. Jadis often had to explain to children about the short lifespan of butterflies—that they wake up, eat and eat and eat, take a dump and fall asleep, wake up as a butterfly and bone until they croak: “That’s not so bad, is it?” she’d ask them. But furthermore, they have the right to be butterflies, even if for a moment or never but trying to break free under false chrysalises arresting their development (which, for humans, is partly self-authored). The undead struggle—to survive and become what we’re meant to be in opposition to the state rotting us—is ultimately what matters.