One small post for Man, one giant leap for...
Despite efforts to trouble and autocritique, Dune remains by definition an imperialist white cishet male savior narrative. I do not feel qualified to attempt a holistic analysis of the myriad ways Dune ultimately reinforces extant hegemony, so I offer a thread which hopefully will be illustrative. I cannot imagine that I am the only trans or nonbinary person who read the Dune Saga obsessively in their tweenhood as a vehicle for navigation of their own gender issues but that is the primary reason I read all of the books again and again because it affirmed a feeling I had inside of myself of my own gender even as it told me that it was impossible, that I had to be something else. The first and foremost reason I read and reread Dune and its sequels is pretty simple: Space Witches. The Bene Gesserit are an order of Space Witches who serve the Galactic Empire in roughly the same role that the Catholic Church did for the Holy Roman Empire. The power of the Space Witches lay in Gendered Magick. This Gendered Magick is Bioessentialist, being something that 'only women' can do, rooted in The Sight and The Voice, the ability to see fate, the ability to impose will through a word. In Dune, there are pretty much two genders, male and female, and they are different because their bodies are different. Women are magick users and men control armies. The Bene Gesserit control the Empire from behind the scenes, like women do, as well as engaging in busybody matchmaking a eugenics program designed to produce a messiah, here defined as a man who can do women's magick so well that he perfects it, he renders all of women's magick null, a prelude to his own achievement. There are no real androgynous or nonbinary identities in Dune, queerness/gayness is coded as morally degenerate, sex is gender, a man who can experience what women do inside is an anomaly, something uncanny, the messiah. I knew myself to be obv a space witch so i saw myself there, no matter how reductive and misogynist a portrayal of women it ended up being, I craved anything which spoke to me of my own power inside, a power that I felt as feminine, that I felt as inherently material, inherently biological, within myself, in my body, in the earth. Frank Herbert told me I could not be a woman but I could be a man with a terrible but glorious fate and that explained why I could be a woman inside. I did not want my experiences to supercede or erase that of women, I knew myself to be a woman, but Frank Herbert shook his head and said no. I listened to Frank Herbert. Frank Herbert also told me to watch out for androgyny that it probably wasn't real or if it was real it was a sign of something untrustworthy, ultimately an indicator of greater, more extreme gender binaries. I listened to that too. It isn't his fault that I listened so hard or I listened in that way, but it messed me up for years. Later Dune books would stress gender/sexual dimorphism even more, to a point where it did some real psychic damage to my developing sense of sexuality, having already messed up my sense of gender AND my feelings of confidence and self-expression. Dune taught me that if I had to live as a man with the interior life of a woman I would have awareness of that life as a living death, with every step plotted out before me, already taken, an arc that could only end in forseeable if not preventable death, a terrible, unavoidable fate made both obscene and bearable through watching vision and reality superimpose atop one another like a film projected upon a screen where the same film is playing, slightly out of phase, where everything is in the flow of now. when you realize who you are, when you are given that which you need to awaken to yourself, all of these things may be swept aside or left in place, immaterial either way. The anxiety of coercively imposed and maintained gender essentialism was the engine that drove my inner life, kept me imprisoned within false consciousness. It kept me from knowing myself truly, kept me from my own magick. After I read Dune for the nth time and figured that I guess I can't be a Space Witch even though I know myself to be one I joined the Catholic Church because it was the closest thing to the Bene Gesserit this world had to offer? I figured I could join the priesthood or a monastery which was the closest thing to being a nun in a mystical order or a beguine? This is a true story. If someone tells you you have to be a certain way that goes against the person you know yourself in your heart to be, no matter how persuasive or seductive or logical this vision of things may seem, if it is not you and you know it is not you, you do not have to listen, you do not have to make it a part of you and then spend years and years disentangling it from what you are and leaving intact and labeling the parts you cannot extract, you do not. Listen to the voice within you. Listen to the voice within you that is older than you, that is older than this world, that is older than time. Listen to what that voice says to you about you about this world about your place and your function within it. Be that person that the voice says that you are and that you know yourself to be. Don't listen to those who cannot see, who cannot hear, they will never understand. If you must, strike out on your own, into the farther distance, go far enough until you can hear unimpeded, until you can see enough to know. Throw away your books, lay your body down into the earth and feel how it is there how it is not different from the earth, how its shifts and fluxes and pulses are the shifts and fluxes and pulses of the Great Mother Herself, She who gives all, She who receives all. To be with Her, in Her, of Her, to see Her and be seen by Her, to speak to Her and be spoken to by Her, to be spoken by Her, She Who Is, She Who Is Not, She Who Is The Life In Death, She Who Is The Death In Life, All Hail Her As She Approaches Hail <3 <3 <3
But wait -- there's more:
What is Sovereignty? Sovereignty is Excess. How is Excess? Excess requires Hierarchy. There is no Excess Labor In Commonality. Command Economies Require Excess, Require A Theory Of Surplus, Of Surplus Inverted. if our labor is in common, and we make collective decisions in real time about the best praxis to solve individual problems, we formulate multivalent layered redundant processes which might seem classically 'inefficient', where everyone and no one is a leader, many slightly divergent points of view are announced at once and must be threaded and processed, ideas are not owned but once announced part of collective wisdom to be adapted and improved upon, resources are not owned but participated in as gifts of the ever-changing, ever-giving world as part of a dance, a procession through seasons, through living and dying along with all of what is. if this is how things are how do they not appear as such? there is a fall, even a creative fall as all falls must ultimately be even in a clearing or giving way a loosening of the passage the opening of the cave the breath of the corpse flower how does knowledge of good and evil enter the world? how does division? supra-addition/excess/over/above. don't let anyone tell you it isn't a horror movie. the birth of the witch queen who has inhaled the breath of the grave who knows both life and death in this life who has gone underground and awakened the dragon who lives in the earth and who has spoken with it in tongues of flame she who can reply in tongues of flame and beckon the dragon ancient of days to rise from his slumber, spread his mighty wings over all of the sky, and impart the ancient gnosis where zero becomes one where one becomes two where two becomes three and so forth and so on freedom overspill rings of concentric tiered champagne glasses an elaborate gesture at the wedding shatters all over the table all over the carpet ground into the fibers deadly corrosive shining something finally left over something forgotten something unaware of something hidden something withdrawn something set over and above a positive example of the good of the bright of the shining that holds more light without breaking set above us by us our queen who is us who we can never be our wealth is a reflection of her wealth her increase is our increase her will is our will what she wants we provide to her we are her body her kingdom is her body the very earth the very waters the very air the very fire is hers and to her we sacrifice ourselves we sacrifice the best of what we have the best of what we are which in turn she will consume she will absorb she will radiate back unto us a star giving heat giving light the gravitational center of the known world around which all being wheels she is nothing she is the void she is nonbeing she is a title conferred she is that through which we give name to the nameless she is a sacrifice to herself isolate buried alive in the tomb above ground the inverted cave the tower that ascends heavenward bedecked and garlanded with the first flowers of spring the first fruits of summer the first grain of fall the first barren branches of winter to know her is to know merciless fate to know her is to know cruelty to know her is to know suffering and death to know her is to know the blessed end to know her is to never know justice but always pray for hope, hope is what she gives, an illusion that things can be other than what they are, an illusion of transcendental unchanging order reflected in the basis for human law which is what the sovereign says it is reality spoken into being by the queen as she says it possibilities birthing and dying before you suspended or dashed she is the end she is that which you will never achieve, never become that which haunts you what could have been if only if my years hadn't been spent if i could have worked for myself if i could have known myself and this world sooner if i had not been bound by fear by custom by law by tradition by decree what would i have been what would have become of this world? what is this world for? it is for nothing and no one. if we are to ask this world to be for someone for a someone then it is no longer for everyone which is to say for no one at all but is along with, can be addressed personally, need not be parceled or drilled or sectioned or sold but is here now in becoming, even now, even after all this <3 <3 <3 gods = no masters <3 <3 <3 EVERY PONY IS A STAR
Not satisfied?
Joel Chandler Harris was a white author, journalist and folklorist in the American South operational in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is most famous for collecting and re-writing African American Folktales in his own made-up dialect which attempted to reproduce the speech patterns of the speakers themselves through a fictional framing character, Uncle Remus, a character adapted from Joel Chandler Harris's day job at the Atlanta Constitution, where he and other white authors would create fictional African American men to serve as a mouthpieces for white viewpoints written in fictional African American dialects. Joel Chandler Harris adapted this tactic so that the very real folktales, the oral tradition, what survived from Africa and was subsequently elaborated upon for generations, could serve as entertainment for white people within the ongoing holocaust that Joel Chandler Harris, his friends and white society at large directly/tacitly supported/perpetrated. As a moderate and a centrist, Joel Chandler Harris followed the lead of fellow Atlanta Constitution journalist Henry Grady (thanks Wikipedia!), who worked for the reintegration of the former Confederate States into The Union under paternalistic white leadership. This is a viewpoint of supposedly benevolent White Supremacy. That slavery was beneficial or neutral at best but now that it is gone, the structure that slavery provided for all parties must be reproduced and maintained for the common good. People of African descent are worthy of kindness and protection but they are inherently inferior and must be controlled and provided for. This man became a worldwide celebrity, an author with influence far beyond his own circles, an immediate and noted precursor to Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Beatrix Potter, William Faulkner. He made it more than acceptable, fashionable, avant-garde, even, to appropriate wholesale, invent from whole cloth, fake African American Personae, Masks, for white voices to speak through while strip-mining what hadn't already been stolen by the previous three hundred years of conquest and annihilation, turning it to white creativity, white purposes, for fame, for money, for the intentional perpetuation of global White Supremacy even as you can claim with a straight face that you are an ally. There is a direct line from Uncle Remus to the Vorticists to Post-War Confessional Poetry (Hi John Berryman!) to Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, the Blues Brothers. This is where you get to meet my dad. My father is a committed ideological White Supremacist and Neo-Confederate. He has been his entire life at least for as long as I have known him. He does not believe in a strictly White Ethnostate. Like many White Supremacists, he wants to return to the apartheid of the 1950's, his boomer childhood in florida, where categories were stable and people knew their places and everyday citizens were empowered to enforce this apartheid through violence if necessary. I know these things because he began inculcating White Supremacist Ideology into me as soon as possible. These were not offhand comments. He knew that I was smart and that I could understand history and biology so he presented his hypotheses to me in these terms. He would carefully introduce cultural items of importance to him and explain why they were important and why we should cherish and hold onto them in the face of mounting opposition. The culture that my father adored above all else, that he desired to hold onto, was the ability of white people to maintain an ongoing practice of colonial appropriation and distortion of African-diaspora art, turning it into White Culture, American Culture, Supremacist Propaganda. The concept goes that it requires a Joel Chandler Harris, a Mark Twain, an Elvis Presley, a Mick Jagger, a Robert Plant, an Eric Clapton, a John Belushi, to take the raw material produced by Black Labor, and refine it into something worthwhile, a finished product, able to serve the needs of White People, who would otherwise have no culture of their own, whose culture is appropriation, whose culture is genocide, whose culture is slavery. My father explained to me that African American People were biologically better at sports and entertainment than White Americans but that they were not fit for functions which required a higher intellect, like self-governance or philosophy or historiography, positions he still ofc holds. My father explained to me that there were forces at work within the culture, insidious Marxist forces, that wanted to control what we read, what we saw, what we heard, reducing our capacity to know the reality of things and that he was going to make sure that I received a proper transmission of traditional literature and values. This meant that he was going to read me Rudyard Kipling and Joel Chandler Harris in dialect every night before going to bed not because that is what I wanted to listen to, but because he was striking a blow against cancel culture. This was the 1970's and the early 1980's. In 1980 we moved to Hahn AFB in Germany for two years. The movie theatre on base was my favorite place to go and i went with my parents quite frequently. They showed a lot of older movies because first run stuff was harder to get. When my father became aware that they were going to show Song Of The South, a 1946 Disney live-action/animation adaptation of the Uncle Remus Tales, he became unduly excited and began hyping it up to me for weeks. I liked the Uncle Remus stories just fine. I liked hearing about Br'er Rabbit. I hated the voices my dad would do during story time i wished he would just read it like a normal person. I liked the illustrations in whatever edition we had, they were black-and-white crosshatched prints? I absolutely HATED Disney's efforts at superimposing animation atop live action because it meant i would never be able to achieve immersion, a purposefully alienating effect as far as i was concerned, but it was a day at the movies. What I remember is being bored by the animation, bored by the movie, totally confused why my dad was so hype about taking me to see this. I was uncomfortable and felt weird. Much of my childhood with my father was like this. I was never a person. I was a repository, a project. To him i looked like himself, a cishet white man, to be raised free of the ideological taint of liberalism, strong and proud and brave and true, able to parody black soul singers drunk at a party in front of strangers totally unashamed, unembarrassed, glorying in his mediocre Whiteness. White Appropriation/Erasure of Black Culture is so often a deliberate cruelty, an intentional violence, a way of saying that nothing is yours, that everything belongs to us, and we will take it and defile it, make it serve our purposes, enrich us and our families for generations, while you watch. The fact that it is a distorted caricature is the point. White Appropriation Culture serves to groteque apparent differences in a way that reinforces White Supremacy while presenting African American artistic innovation as 'naturally occurring' or 'accidental' 'found objects' just there for the taking, is the whole of the scam. I am not a blameless innocent in any of this. Despite early and constant critical rejection of these ideas, it is the truth that I grew up in White Supremacist Culture, participate in it, reproduce it every single day all day long. The fact that I am aware of this means that I can intervene within these processes, learn from them and adjust my behavior within myself and without towards others as best as I can, but i am a product of these processes, they are not distinct from me, they apply a filter to every appreciation, every interaction that i have to counter in real time. It is exhausting and I despise it. I cannot imagine the burden imposed by White Supremacy on people of color, I just can't. My imagination, my self, was formed, was molded on purpose to reflect and further White Supremacy. I will always be that person. I am of the opinion that movies like Song Of The South, which promote racist propaganda crafted to uphold an oppressive order, should always be available to watch, to study and to learn from. I feel that Disney should not be able to act as if it never made this or its films that say oh idk promote U.S. intervention in Latin America to stem the Communist Hordes? In the end that only serves the interests of White Supremacy. I believe in creating cultural and historical context around these items so that we can better understand their own history their own involvement in the furtherance of murderous ideologies, not hiding them away in a vault. My dad is still fighting against cancel culture! Every day i get emails about the threats posed by Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Cultural Marxism and Transgenderism. He was a pioneer in his chosen field and still going strong. This review is for you, dad. Thanks For Everything. You helped make me the person I am today. I am sure you are proud. Maybe I would know if you still spoke to me. I was a tool, a device, an instrument for the lost cause, to be discarded once found unusable for the desired ends. White Supremacy is nothing if not consistent in its inability to see being in any terms other than exploitative instrumentality. This review itself would not be possible for me to write without the centuries of African Diaspora art, thought and activism painstakingly built up into a canon of anti-imperial, decolonial theory granting us all the tools necessary to think beyond the present moment, beyond present circumstance, into a greater truth, a greater relation.
Thank you sir, may I have another?
Whenever u get super down or are having a difficult week, remember that in 1982, Disneycorp gave Wendy Carlos her very own 2-hr computer-generated cyberpunk resurrection antimatter lazer lightshow to peak and valley electroacoustic synthorg orchestral blurs and whonks and durrrrs within/without, and everyone went to see it at the movies because it was completely awesome and everyone played the hyperreal arcade game at the arcade and a trans woman got paid. What is messed up and what might make u down if u think about it too hard is that some film directors get second careers in their film retirement to go on tours and play synthesizers to sold-out stadiums and record blockbuster horror movie soundtracks and sell those soundtracks on vinyl and on bandcamp and spotify and on amazon but to listen to a complete Wendy Carlos album on the internet you have to either listen to the Tron soundtrack on youtube/spotify (both of which also have Wendy's Main Title and 'Rocky Mountains' tracks from The Shining OST) or watch Tron the movie on Disneyplus and imagine that you are at a Wendy Carlos concert, in a stadium, full of cats and marijuana smoke that no one is allergic to, the dry ice and energy beams refract each other and Tron's immortal opening motif rises from the amplifer stacks as the movie is broadcast overhead and Wendy Carlos plays along to Tron live in front of you that would be so rad!!! and u could buy Wendy Carlos t-shirts and posters and merch in the lobby where u would mill around uncomfortably with a lot of other Wendy Carlos fans looking at the carpet or ur phone until it is time to come or go? i mean it is entirely possible that Wendy Carlos has no interest in doing any of this but a girl can dream, can't she???!!! <3 <3 <3 digital astral = trans heaven <3 <3 <3
Don't let the door hit you you on the way out:
As like, a class, chaotic evil witches get almost zero positive representation in mainstream media, and, sure, i can hear you thinking now 'duh, yes, CHAOTIC EVIL hello?' and although, yes, we are capable of world-rending terror, panic, misery and destruction for no explicable reason or because SOMEONE woke up on the wrong side of the crypt or it is tuesday that is not all of what we are! we have interests and dreams and hobbies and friendships and complicated, dramatic love lives or we are desperately lonely when not encovened sometimes one might be able to hear us wailing from sadness from the sides of mountains or that one night where, remember, you cursed FIVE Supreme Court Justices in one evening, all at once? we love to party, to engage the fullness of life, to ride the night, to sleep peacefully in the fires of hell and listen: it is a witch's prerogative to change their mind about stuff even if they are in the midst of doing it or forgot what it was exactly that they were doing or where they were going and gosh darn it it was really important to remember and ok well too late for that i just LOVE this song that comes on the radio sixteen times a day i am going to turn it up very very loud now!!! OK!! THAT IS TOO LOUD!!! WHAT???!!!!???? I SAID THE MUSIC ITS TOO LOUD!!!!!! WHAT??? WAIT LET ME TURN DOWN THIS MUSIC!!!!! ok what were you saying? i'm sorry were we talking about something? is that your birthstone in the pendant around your neck? ooooohhhh!!!! pretty!!! that is a stone of great power and healing or is it the one that enhances creativity and intuition? wait i can look it up on my phone! i HATE this phone!!! i used to like my old provider but now they switched me to a new carrier and this phone totally sucks!!! its always doing stuff i am not asking it too!!! i cannot WAIT to get rid of this phone!!! why can't we just use telepathy??? oh, right! because of all the cell phone towers there's a lot more intereference, a problem which compounds with distance! it isn't as if we eat EVERYONE we met, right? i mean that would be STUPID!!! i would never get anywhere at all!!! i would just spend my time consuming humans and their souls and diposing of their remains and i would never be able to do anything else!!! have you SEEN how many humans there are??? so i would say that in reality i pose a vanishingly small threat to most humans. Most humans i only drink a little of your souls as a contact high sort of when i move through a crowd or have to use a public bathroom and i'm sure it feels weird but i don't THINK i'm doing any PERMANENT damage? and you'll get used to it whatever it is i'm sure? if i really drink your soul you will know!!! first off, we would probably be in hell, but not necessarily, and it is a really obvious process, like there is no mistaking it for anything else!!! you know when a demon witch has drank up your soul!!! if you remain sensate and holding together ok after that you feel both better and worse? like your soul got torn apart and partially eaten but now u don't have all that soul gunk clogging up your stuff? anyway when u see me in the store talking to myself or talking to the spirits muttering something you don't understand i'm probably trying to remember what i forgot to write down on my list and not so much casting baneful magicks in a three-mile radius, poisoning the earth, killing livestock, weird lights in the sky, voices in your head you don't remember hearing before, accelerating disease progression/severity, like i'm probably not doing that shit right there at the grocery store and even if i was on some darksider witch jag which, sure, has been known to happen from time to time, its usually me completely wigging out in the den or on the heath/moor with lightning strikes impacting earth, unseen constellations lit up in the sky, the wind speaking in voices humans can hear, you know the drill and if i was up to that in the grocery store bad stuff would go down like i would end up fighting cops and the cops would easily win, only to find a facefirst of witchcurse on the afterend? not worth it! this sounds like i am making rational arguments which might not seem in character for a chaotic evil witch and first off, you can't tell me what to do!!! and secondly, how much does this really mediate the underlying surge and flux of chaotic evil? i have to use boring stuff like executive function and advance planning when going to do errands at the grocery store and I RESENT IT!!! this means i have to go four and five times to the stupid grocery store BUT if u r there u will hear me improvise a song about what kind of olives i am purchasing! lucky you!!! The truth about chaotic evil witches, which is a descriptor of behavioral tendency, an abstraction in any case, is that we are the most fun of all witches to hang out with but also the most terrifying! also you feel the most tired but also the most energetic from being with us. it might kill you. it might corrupt your eternal soul (maybe???)! but it will not be boring and you won't get depressed! you'll be too anxious to be depressed! the goal is to have all the negative mental health stuff cancel each other out!!! magick at work!!! so, great talk!!! it's been soooooo much fun catching up with you!!! oh wait! i thought we had been introduced before? No? well allow me to make the introduction now!!! why HeLLO!!! <3 <3 <3