PREFACE TO BIG BROODER
Chooken is a character in my very ambitious fantasy/horror novel-in-progress, in support of which I hope very soon to start selling digital prints of some of my artwork. This has led my first series of prints to take shape, titled Results Matching Fewer Words. These are original character illustrations, using mostly digital painting but also augmented by traditional painting elements. I was a painter in just traditional media until very recently, so I underestimated just how huge this first digital piece of Chooken really is – it can probably be printed as a 3 square metre poster and lose none of its hi-res crispness. As for this essay, it is about three things: Chooken's role in the world of my novel, its overlap with other characters' roles, and also a lot of my own commentary on certain cultural issues from our own world, which inspire the direction of the novel itself. More pieces from Results Matching Fewer Words will be viewable soon in 2023, and they can be enjoyed independently of all reading, but if you think you might also enjoy this text on my story-writing process, then you're welcome to read on. Just a warning: it gets a little heavy at points, even heavier than Chooken, with the subject of whom I now begin...
BIG BROODER
by Badger
Humphreys
"And the Golden Grouse came
there," – Edward Lear, Verse V, The Quangle Wangle's Hat
"Why do you come, yellow
bird?" – Abigail Williams, Act III, The Crucible
Why indeed?
Ladies and gentlemen, layers and
broilers, I present to you in this digital painting Mr. Capital C Citizen:
Chooken.
Chooken. Chooken. Chooken. The
Way, the Truth, and the Bird. Whether you favour his left wing, or his right
wing, you are most pleasing to the Bird. Chooken is Culture, your
saviour-in-chief from the bloody and brief, as in 1651 philosopher Thomas
Hobbes described all of our nature to be, unless salvaged by culture. Born into
this salvatory of sorts, many of us at times complain of social contracts we
never literally signed, but deep in our bones we fear life without them, and it
is this 'mixed bag' feeling that reminds us all: we are in Chooken's dominion,
and spots and all, it is still much nicer than the outer
wilds.
The above is the
self-proclamation of Chooken, except he downplays culture's drawbacks more than
I, and certainly more than Hobbes, who conceived of culture's shaping of
government as a Leviathan, multi-faceted like the scales of a prehistoric
crocodile, no less monstrous in its own ways than nature itself. But Chooken
will tell you no such ugly truth about his chequered apparatus. 'Just walk
between the raindrops, and you'll never get wet' is the word from the
Bird.
Detractors have called Chooken a 'malpheasant', because of all the
cultural malfeasance going on (you've seen some of this lately, I'm sure). Some
of these 'malpheasanters' have gone further, branding Chooken a 'Right
Cock-up', and replacing 'Chooken' with 'Cock-up' as the official English
diction for his entire species. About his biology, what some take this to mean
is that, whereas a developing galliform is a cockerel, and a mature galliform
has been a cock for a while, a Cock-up is a corpulent creature that has been a
cock for far, far too long, such that he is probably no longer a galliform at
all, and is merely playing at being one. The Latin name for such a creature
is Gallimimus – 'he who mimics the chicken' – but
not to be confused with the Gallimimus of our established
fossil record, which appears in Jurassic Park and in its day
could run much faster than Chooken. With enough exertion, he can teleport
though, so no biggie. Make no mistake though, Chooken is himself a
biggie. One of Chooken's similarities to that dinosaur is that whenever sighted
he has been said to be very large indeed by modern bird standards, over five
feet tall if not more, which he feels grants him parity with modern humans, as
well as 'parroty', which means his success in the parroting of human ways,
especially their tendency to parrot one another. Chooken's mimicry, of both
bird and human, messenger and receiver, is perhaps what has facilitated his
evolution, over some millennia, into an avatar of the mercurial principle of
culture itself, as which he is wont to introduce himself whenever sighted. That
principle, along with whatever mysterious force truly animates it, was called
the 'weltgeist', or world-spirit, by Germany's Enlightenment philosophers,
though whether a term for such ineffable sanctity can be stretched to apply to
Chooken is debatable. An earlier definition of 'weltgeist' did, however, simply
mean the spirit of worldly humans, those preoccupied by secular materiality,
perhaps even to the point of boorish impiety, so maybe the Cock-up is a
weltgeist after all.
Chooken is overtly worshipped in some circles – indeed,
since their artists can depict him using only circles, they
regard him as downright holy poly. Some of these congregations are made up of humans, not surprisingly.
After all, so much of human socializing revolves not around groundbreaking, but
around imitation, of which Chooken is a most voluptuous totem – Chooken is the
sincerest form of phattery. Chooken doesn't just take the cake – Chooken is the
cake. Espousers of this appraisal have even claimed that if you were to bisect
Chooken's body, his cross-section would reveal neatly stratified buttercake and
jam, just as red and yellow as his exterior. How to vanquish a spirit
so-embodied is anyone's guess.
In the so-called New World, there is a place called the Golden State,
for its mineral wealth, and there in a grove of 1000-year-old redwood trees,
you can find a towering statue of a bird, which many influential humans have at
scheduled times gathered to venerate, in exchange for continued prosperity.
Many take this idol for an owl, but Chooken will assure you it's him. Gold in
the ground, red in the trees – the yellow and red Chooken is propinquitous to
places so-coloured.
I read a book once about Easter egg traditions that touched also on
magical birds, including a folktale from among the West African Hausa people,
which told me of the Fufunda, the Sunbird and King of all Birds, who lives in a
land of red and gold, so close to the sun that it roasts all humans to a crisp
who do not find shelter in the Fufunda's shadow. This mythical sun-screening
bird is a bit like the function of culture as protector from nature, which
Chooken claims to metaphorize. The damning role of the sun in this myth is an
interesting inversion of the sayings we've all heard that equate sunlight with
moral salubrity, such as 'sunlight is the best disinfectant', referring to
hidden malefactions dragged out into the open, or the expression 'to throw shade',
meaning to condemn the malefactors to a sunless punishment. Such conception
treats the sun as a symbol of virtue, the bright side of culture, and shadow as
a cultural pariah, which feeds into an attemptable allegory of Hobbes'
nature/culture dichotomy that treats culture as a refuge of sunlight and nature
as an encroachment of shadow. Such an allegory fails, however, to represent
Hobbes' pessimism, through which, as I've mentioned, he regarded culture not as
sunny and good, but rather as merely the lesser of two evils, the worse being
nature. The Sunbird, therefore, serves far better to allegorize the bleakness
of Hobbes' landmark societal insight, for in this allegory, the deadly sun is
the brutality of nature, and culture, though a shady place physically as well
as perhaps morally and spiritually, is simply the only survival option we
humans have. So it's little wonder we grin and bear so many of culture's
internal iniquities. Are many of us not just a bit too compliant though? One's
chosen degree of cultural
non-compliance has profound ramifications for all, and the degree that I
personally recommend is woven into this essay.
The conception of human culture as only thriving thanks to its hiding in
the shadow of something Other, or perhaps even beneath that
Other – it paints our whole culture to seem like something of an underworld,
doesn't it? Not only does this resonate with my own experience, but I also feel
our underworld home has many successive layers, a little like Dante's hell,
though more tedious than torturous, if we're lucky.
Here are three layers into which I can divide my own experiential
underworld. The innermost is detailed in one of my yet unpublished essays,
where I equate my art practice, and perhaps that of other artists, with the
life cycle of a forest, part of which is an underworld of detritivores that
transform decay into renewal. In this metaphor, my painting studio is that
underworldly part of the cycle, in which my pain is sublimated into my
painting. I suppose this would make the exhibition of these paintings the
metaphorical vernal growth springing from detritus, Persephone escaping Hades,
bringing enjoyment to the hearts of others – and sales, even. But as of 2023, I
have been subsumed by my studio underworld for seven years, owing to my sheer
depth of pain, and the wellspring of paintings therein. That said, I will
begin marketing my artwork at the end of this year. As for the full story of
all that pain, the other essay I just mentioned delineates it best, as it is
largely an autobiography – but I will touch on the pain later in this text as
well.
The second layer of my underworld is Australia, where I was born and
still live, despite being of rainy Scottish descent, which means this country's
heat gives me migraines. Earlier this year, during his podcast on the free
speech platform Rumble, the now embattled Russell Brand touched upon the culture of
Australia. "I like Australian culture," he said, "or
rather, I like that thing you Australians do instead of
culture." When I attended an art school in South Australia, I was lectured
on this cultural stand-in – 'dire prosaicism' is how the lecturer described it,
by which he meant Antipodean culture's wry resignation that perhaps it is
beneath the northern hemisphere in more ways than just geographically. This
grim self-awareness is prevalent in my hometown of Adelaide, South Australia,
where one of my peers once described my 'burgeoning' art career as that of a
tiny beetle who lives under a fridge and expects the world to attend
exhibitions held there. He was quite right, for while the internet enables me to
circulate printed copies of my work, I have now accepted that the only
bricks-and-mortar galleries fit to purvey my very large traditional paintings
are either interstate or international.
Then there is the third layer of my underworld, by far the most
expansive. You are in it, assuming you are human. With further
regard to the comment likening Adelaidean artists to negligible insects, my
feeling is that we are far from the only victims of the Kafkaesque – I think
all of global human culture is a bit like the dark, dripping, insect-friendly
condition that one discovers by peering under something, be it a fridge or a
Sunbird, or any significant shadow-caster. The moister its underbelly, the better
– there's a reason the word 'culture' refers not just to human enterprise but
also to mould.
I did not invent this underworldly outlook. I think its credit might go
to some guy called Plato, with his allegory of the cave, which helps us to
discern that our most fundamental reality is largely obscured from our bodily
senses, its only perceivable elements, however seemingly numinous, being akin
to mere puppets in a shadowplay, projected against a dank and dripping wall of
the cave we mortals are all born trapped in. Later in this essay, I touch upon
Gnosticism, the holographic universe theory, and positive disintegration, which
can all be viewed as founded on Plato's cave allegory. Such ontological
concepts can serve to inform one's chosen degree of cultural
non-compliance.
Culture being as drippy as it is, Chooken's mantra of weaving between
the raindrops certainly holds water. But middling success at such artful
dodging is only human, as is the growing feeling, over the course of a human's
life, that all humans are set up to fail no matter what– puppeteered by false
hopes, and ending up as firewood. All the more maddening is the ambiguity of
Chooken's reward system – he's certainly no bluebird of happiness, and some say
even that bird was a Meanie anyway. No, for a human to ace the
game of culture is no guarantee of any personal sense of fulfillment; this
game's winners are merely Chooken's prized tools, and a nagging sense of gilded
hollowness is often their only consolation. I call these tools 'robopaths',
people who follow culture's fickle direction to a slavish degree, annihilating
whatever self-direction they were born with, and which perhaps they'd have been
better off trusting. In light of this, the most autonomous among us will refuse
to play the game of culture at all. Being rained on beats being reigned over,
they say – damp firewood is
harder to burn.
I, who personally love the rain, recommend autonomy only in moderation,
however. Free radicals promote cancer in both the human body and human society.
Where I am posting this text on Chooken, you can also find some of my artwork
depicting Wagtail, the demonic harpy giantess, another character of mine who is
partially inspired by the 16th century countess Erzsébet Báthory. Both Wagtail
and Báthory exemplify the perils of radical over-autonomy. Báthory is recorded
to have plunged headlong into a life of jaw-dropping sadism, stemming in part
from her belief in a core tenet of Calvinist Protestantism: the idea of the
unconditional elect, predestined by God to enter Heaven at the exclusion of all
others, from which the countess concluded that she, a depressive who had always
felt outside the elect, was free to torture as many innocents as she fancied,
convinced that not even her complete refraining from this could earn her God's
good graces. Wagtail is defined by the same evil resignation to delight in
mutilation, but more on that in a while.
Moderate autonomy like mine is probably autonomy enough. I am a
transwoman, which is remarkably accepted in the West today, albeit often for
the purpose of virtue-signaling and rarely compassion. I am a Christian, which
is the real love that daren't speak its name in the West today, I'd say. And I
am a visual artist of the kind who spends 14 weeks on a 3-square-metre digital
painting of Chooken. This semi-compliant midground, betwixt radical and
robopath, is too liminal for my critics, but to me it means balance. Living
liminally, as I do, is not for the faint of heart, for it is a life of
bridge-building between all who cleave to virulent extremes, which is often
nerve-wracking, given that these tribalists will attack a liminal from all
sides as they span the rift. This embattled exercise in balance is, I
believe, the ideal starting point of every 'positive disintegrator's' journey,
for such a quest is one of personality-shaping through adversity. This
concept deserves elucidation, before I return straight to Chooken.
Positive disintegration is a theory of personality development invented
by the Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dąbrowski. He observed, as have I,
that the majority of human society is born into, and remains forever imprisoned
by, a state of 'primary integration', dictated by two factors, the first being
the biological survival impulse, which is utterly selfish if not constrained by
the second factor, which is the outsourcing of all moral conscience to current
social conventions, in other words, herd mentality, or groupthink. Scottish
comedian Billy Connolly is believed to have coined the terms 'beigism' and 'beigist' to refer
to many primarily integrated people's preoccupation with
inoffensiveness. At the best of times, groupthink can herd the primarily
integrated to do a whole lot of good, but they cannot truly be credited with
this beneficence, for groupthink is a hollow vessel, pliable by whatever
ideology with which current social engineers decide to fill it, and so too are
the primarily integrated. If their controllers happen to be malcontents, bent
on reshaping the world in their own image, then an excess of authoritarianism
ensues, or even outright tyranny, and history clearly shows us that the
primarily integrated will always comply with this – 'dead fish going with the
flow.' To their credit, most of these conformists are unimposing beigists
lacking the excess neuroticism to make them robopaths, whom I define as
ultra-conformists that bully the rest, but even so, thank goodness for the
third factor!
The third factor is the psychological property Dąbrowski called
'developmental potential'. Most people do not possess this property in
sufficient amounts, but to those who do, it is not only painfully obvious when
the flow of convention is maleficently directed, but they also have the inner
strength to resist it, any and all attacks from conformists only making them
stronger. On injury they thrive, as long as it doesn't kill them. This is the
path of the positive disintegrator, who breaks free from primary integration,
and it is usually marred by depression and reclusion, characteristic of the art
studio underworld I have described, but that is only its negative beginning –
as long as a disintegrator survives all incurred persecution, their trials will
have positively transformed not only their own self, but equipped them with the
transformative bridge-building power I mentioned, perhaps enough to even heal
some of the societal fractures that brittle conformity has exacerbated. The
most beneficent of social engineers have always undergone positive
disintegration, though each might have their own terms for it.
Positive disintegration is discouraged by mainstream counselling, for it
is certainly not for everyone; in past societies, it was the role of the
shaman, who would disappear into the wilderness, and be torn to pieces
spiritually, returning reassembled to the community, with ample spiritual
guidance to impart. In the secular nowadays, it is often the role of the
artist. Dąbrowski identified overexcitability, the above-average neuronal
sensitivity common to many artists, as a good measure of developmental potential.
My own experience of this trait is one of exhilaration and grief with less
comfort in between than that enjoyed by a strictly average person. This
sensitivity amplifies all incurred abuse into eternal echoes – a rich fuel for the growth of both
art and self, and so I wholeheartedly forgive my abusers for supplying it. I am
related by blood to the most heinous of these, a pure robopath, whose hammering
over three decades has turned me to steel. Yes, even she is forgiven, for I'd
be a marshmallow without her, and not positive disintegrator material. Most
good artists have a robopathic abuser in their past, though whether I'm good
enough to build bridges with my art remains to be seen.
In any case, it's no worry of Chooken's whosoever culture molds each of
us to be, for culture has use for us all, from the most clockwork of oranges to
the baddest of apples. We are all eggs in one handbasket – Chooken's
handbasket, hopefully not headed for Hell. Whoever you feel you have freely
chosen to become, Big Brooder is hatching you.
A rooster who broods is one thing, but the folklore of the Middle Ages
tells of very rare egg-laying roosters. Rooster eggs,
conceived perhaps by the bird's drinking of serpent venom, were said to hatch
into monsters, like the basilisk or the cockatrice, oft-conflated for both are
deadly dragons. Tragically but understandably, in 1474 a Swiss rooster was
burnt at the stake for sorcery, his precise crime being the laying of an egg,
which was burnt at the stake along with him. Now, imagine a sorcerous rooster
of weltgeist proportions, and what disastrous demons he might
summon, be they colossi of Earth-shattering scale, or the most maleficent of
social contagions, or worse – a malpheasant indeed. Notable mystic Terrence
McKenna famously warned us all, "culture is not your friend," and the
malpheasanters say that neither is
Chooken.
If you've read this far, you will have noticed my elucidation of Chooken
is weird, seeming in part to cast him as a character in my novel-in progress,
but with numerous breakings of that fiction's fourth wall, via which he is
perhaps an avatar not only of the culture within my novel's world, but also
within our own. This is because Chooken, among other things, is a faery
bird, and like so many faeries, a trickster, prone to fourth wall breaks
whether intentional or not. This cannot be said for most other characters in my
novel.
The liminal position of the faery trickster is one of immense
existential fluidity, compared at least to humans, whose position within
existence is usually much more fixed. Charles Fort (1874-1932) was an American
collector of anomalous phenomena, for the purpose of confounding materialist science, and some of
these so called 'Forteana' feature random apparations and disapparations,
befitting of a faery trickster. I have followed a good many contemporary
paranormal scholars this past decade. I recall one of these, Gordon White,
interviewing another, Jack Hunter, a specialist in Fortean studies, during
which Hunter put forth a conception of existence as a sort of 'reality slider’,
fixing that which is generally considered 'most real' at one end, and fixing the
most nonsensical 'make-believe' at the other, whereby Fortean phenomena, and
anything else liminal or tricksterish, can slide back and forth willy-nilly.
This by no means implies that the strictly make-believe is in truth 'unreal',
but rather that its existence is just as fixed as ours, just in a position
quite distant from our own, hence the potential importance of liminal
beings as messengers. Pablo Picasso is quoted as saying, "everything you
can imagine is real," by which this painter was echoing the ontological
proposition of Parmenides, that "all is one'' and that therefore nothing
can be outside of reality. Parmenides was a Greek philosopher from the 6th
century BC, preceding both Plato and his mentor Socrates. I have taken to
sometimes calling Hunter's conception the 'Parmenidean slider', but goodness
knows how much more ancient than Parmenides the concept truly is – that of the
wildest of thought forms being just as fundamentally existent as we in our
little Platonic cave of mere materialist measure.
I'm not sure how often Chooken himself travels, in an obliging messenger
role, from humanity's 'real' end of the slider to the 'unreal', and back again.
If I mentioned a Parmenidean slider to him, he would probably picture a
burger-like hors d'oeuvre. However, within the geography of the material world,
he is known to use his liminal capacity to teleport, so a human can maybe catch
him as he does this, and perhaps even convince him to assist them somehow, as
in the vanquishing of a demon from beyond. Good luck with that
though.
This said, the protection of humans from demons might be more relevant to Chooken than he'd have you believe, his own perpetuity quite possibly contingent on human well-being. To explain why, I'll have to take a little detour into my conception of the soul, which undergirds both the world within my novel-in-progress, and my ontological interpretation of our own world, that I share with you the reader.
I'll introduce that conception
using this premise (by no means invented by me): when the soul learns of itself, this too is God learning of
Himself (or Itself, if you'd prefer God
be referred to without gender).
One of the principles of our world's most stable religions is animism,
the belief in the soul, of which there are a vast and unknown number, all
emanating from the most powerful and hopefully loving source, commonly called
the one true God, or a similar term. This belief will typically assert that we
humans are not our material bodies at all, but our souls. Our bodies tend to be
the easiest part of our being for us to perceive, but this only makes them the
proverbial 'tip of the iceberg', whence follows that proverb's most commonly
resultant mistake: that our invisible part, the soul that is our true identity,
is of little to no significance. The truth is the inverse: our material bodies
(mine, yours, every human's), along with all our material surrounds, are little
more than an illusion, like the projection of a holographic image, and our
souls are the projector, as too is the God of which each soul is but a
fragment. "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter," to quote
Yoda, who speaks for God in the hearts and minds of many an ironically
atheistic sci-fi fan.
Contingent on this animistic belief is the idea that God cannot know
Himself, or Itself, directly; rather It can only identify Itself through
comparison with Other things, things that God is not.
This is why God bothers to create what we call the material world at all: to
project souls from Itself, each a fragment of the original God, and place them
in this projected Other environment, this videogame or holograph, and through
these many souls' interaction with this mere projection that God is
not, God comes to understand, by differentiation, what God is. Over
the course of our lives, many of us humans come to better understand our own
souls and those of fellow animals, and as we do, this is in truth the very same
process as God coming to understand Itself, for we souls, we
emanations of God, we projections of God, are truthfully one and the same as
God. Sadly, this is all too easy for an individual soul, or God-fragment, to
forget, and the materialist worldview is the result of many souls going dead to
this much vaster reality, that of God and Its souls as the projector of the
holograph, and the material world as merely its
projection.
The theory that our material world is a holograph was developed
throughout the 20th century, and by my lifetime has been distilled into
easy-to-read books, like The Holographic Universe (1991) by
Michael Talbot. A universe-sized holograph is not only thoroughly immersive but
equally deceptive, for when you are in it, there can be great difficulty in
accepting that it is in fact just a projection. All matter within it behaves just as matter
should, be it a solid, a liquid, a gas or plasma. For evidence of our material
reality's true nature as a holographic projection, we had best hope to
glimpse something from outside the projection passing through
it like a stereotypical ghost, which we may first interpret as 'less real', but
on second thought, 'more real' than our projected materiality, for in truth,
this something is from the realm of the projector itself. This
realm is popularly termed the astral plane or spirit world, where all such
immaterial somethings primarily reside, as do God and all of
Its emanatory souls, us included – and so, we too, being primarily soul not
matter, are also astral residents, though we tend to be distracted from it by
our own material projection for as long as our human bodies stay alive within
it. Thank God this distracted condition is only temporary! Personally, I am
horrified by the scientific pursuit of curing the human body of death in all
its forms, because all this would mean is our permanent distraction from
a far greater and truer reality than the holographic universe we know all too
well. The simulated reality depicted in The Matrix (1999) is
roughly analogous with the holographic universe theory, with the possible
exception that its creators were imposter gods, a concept I'll get to when
I mention Gnosticism in a
while.
The interesting thing about the faery bird that is Chooken, and other
faeries like him, is that whilst on the one hand they demonstrate an
existential flexibility nigh-unparalleled, that of the 4th-wall-breaking
trickster, on the other hand this talent comes at a strange price: faeries,
Chooken included, do not have souls, or in other words, they are
projections without a projector. How they appear at all within our
holographic reality, or its counterpart in my novel, is impossible for any soul
to ascertain, which might even imply that God, the everlasting soul-emanator,
is also at a loss with regard to knowledge of faery origins, but maybe not.
Faeries themselves, including Chooken, do not seem to know how it is that they
exist. One thing can be semi-deduced from this bizarre situation: should there
ever come to pass, either in our own material world or that of my novel, some
sort of apocalypse, like that foretold in the Christian Bible's Book of
Revelation, then this would entail all souls' return to God forevermore,
in turn meaning no more holographic materiality, which is the one and
only reality faeries are known to occupy!
This would explain why, throughout folklore, many a faery's chief
pursuit is the acquisition of a soul for its very own, through which it can survive the material
world's end. One means to this end might be for a faery to marry a human,
ideally one saved by Christ, and through toiling, in sickness and in health,
for the success of that union, that faery's own soul might develop. I am
reminded of the medieval Swedish folk ballad Herr Mannelig, of
which there is a great recording by the contemporary Swedish folk rock
band Garmarna. The song is about a troll woman (a type of faery) who offers all
kinds of riches to Sir Mannelig, a Christian man, in exchange for his hand in
marriage. He refuses, calling her devil-spawn, and she flees shaking and
wailing.
I can relate partly to the Christian in the song, but my sympathies are
mainly those of the troll woman. The word 'troll' here, it's worthy of note,
does not refer to her appearance or character, but simply her species of being.
It shouldn't take too much of a digression from Chooken, for me to explicate my
affinity with this other creature.
Here's a truth everyone knows but that most of the primarily integrated
in the cultural West are too afraid to say: transwomen like myself, even after
having greatly beautified ourselves through surgery, are still repulsive to
most people when it comes to romantic partnership, even though said
beautification allows us to pass as women reasonably well, just as well as
whatever glamour a troll woman might use. This is my own firsthand experience
as a transwoman who passes in public. It doesn't matter how sterling a
character I might in all other respects manage to be – my status as a
transwoman is a deal-breaker. Nor does it matter that I have never been one to
approach coupling haphazardly – quite the extreme opposite, in fact. For
reasons I'll explain near this essay's end, I have always saved myself
entirely for one life-partner, my wife, who will have hopefully tried hard to
also save herself for me, and with whom our primary reward for such saving
would not be that which a gutter-mind presumes, but rather a union of
psychologies – that of two illustrative authors, each rediscovering their own
storytelling vocation in the other. This exclusive basis of shared creative
passion narrows my search by a lot, but even so, among women who meet these
very specific criteria for partnership, the fact of my looking a lot like a
woman, but not quite entirely, is enough to nullify all our potential for the
union just described. Fortunately, or so I thought seven years ago, there is a
small percentage of women on Earth who are accepting of transwoman partners
(I've known a few in Adelaide even), and so clearly my solution has always been
to find one of these among the
somewhat broader category of those sharing said creative passion.
By 2016, at the age of 27, I sincerely thought I had identified a best
friend who lived alongside me within this very exclusive overlap. She
was a very public trans advocate, as well as a self-described seeker of the
lowest possible partner count, and we had already bonded over years of
illustration enthusiasm. 'Profoundly thoughtful, talented and interesting,' was
my best friend's description of me. And so, there could be no doubt: if she
couldn't accept a transwoman like me as her partner, then no one can. As fate
would have it, I had only begun transitioning with hormone replacement in late
2015, and had not yet had any beautifying surgery at all, and for this my most
beloved friend very nearly called me the same devil-spawn that Herr Mannelig
labelled the troll woman, although what my friend said hurt more: 'My interest
in you has fuck all to do with physical desirability.'
These are the words of the most public advocate for
transpeople I've ever known, written privately to none other than a
transwoman whom this advocate herself described as a close friend (one of her
circle of just 12 other close friends in 2016). After this betrayal, I recoiled
from all my friends, not just this trans advocate, but all of them, even those
whose hearts I know to be gold. This coming November of 2023 shall mark the end
of my seventh year of near-complete reclusion. If I have interacted with you at
some point in this timeframe, however briefly, it's because I truly value you.
For the first three years of the seven, I did so much 'shaking and wailing'
like the troll woman in the song that in 2020 I had to start using SSRI's, to
prevent my crying and to properly work; I stopped using them after almost three
years of numbness, and now, a whole year later, their numbing effect has been
so cumulative that I still haven't recovered my ability to cry, an exceptional
feat, considering that my hormone replacement normally makes one prone to
crying.
And the above story, layers and broilers, shows you the
reeking two-facedness of trans advocates. I mentioned earlier that their public
support of transwomen is entirely for the purpose of virtue-signaling, and this
is one cast iron proof, one of many that everyone can sniff out in their own
lives if they have half a mind. And who really benefits from virtue-signaling
on transwomen's behalf? Not me, that's for sure. It makes my life worse
actually, because it creates the false public perception that society looks
after me, or favourites me even. I should think the answer is obvious: it is
the trans advocate who benefits from virtue-signaling, because over the past
decade in the cultural West, the cult of Neo-Marxism, also called the Woke cult, or ‘Wokeism’, has gained
significant sociopolitical sway, and it has done this by pushing a system of
social credit that incentivizes virtue signaling. In short, grab a bullhorn and
shout, ideally in front of your local parliament, that you care about your
closest transwoman friend, and people will credit you with their belief that
you actually do. This the psychopathic essence of Wokeism: pretending to care
about someone more hurt by life than you are, so that you yourself look
good, and hurting them even more in the process.
But my little story here doesn't even begin to cover the worst of this
vainglorious cult – no, I have only exemplified here Wokeism's function as a
mask of beneficence, behind which festers a far more Satanic evil than merely
breaking your close friend's heart forever. That's nothing, really
nothing, compared to what Wokeism truly is. I know one thing for
sure: of everyone who is in any way a contributor to Wokeist consolidation of
power, I can say in all truthfulness that their souls are in deep jeopardy, much
more so than any troll woman's. But I will return to Wokeism's true identity
later in this essay. For now, here's a clue to it. My trans advocate friend,
whose natural hair colour is similar to mine, has in recent years taken to
dying it the same pale blonde as that of Gellert Grindelwald, as portrayed by
Johnny Depp in the Fantastic Beasts film franchise – this character's
appearance was, in turn, blatantly influenced by David Bowie's 'Thin White
Duke' persona of the mid-1970's. Both Grindelwald and the Duke were
identitarian totalitarians. I wonder what this says about Wokeists who
willingly choose to resemble them?
Back to the sunnier subject that is the Bird. I'm not sure yet if
Chooken cares much for the winning of a soul for himself. It could be that his
routine breathing of opium vapour relieves his very real dread of never having
one. 'Papa Somniferum' he is called by some, after papaver
somniferum, the opium poppy's Latin name. At the very least, Chooken
has surely given the problem some thought. If he has any means at all of soul
acquisition, the most likely would surely be for him to assume an active role
in helping humanity fend off the many dreadful demons intruding upon
materiality. A wise extenuation on his part, since these demons' preferred
channels are the darkest facets of the very culture of which Chooken boasts he
is the avatar. These demons are as much Chooken's blame as the Devil's, some go
so far as to say.
In Chooken's defense, he is really a very nice bird, he claims. He has
his own public house, which is even called the Nice Bird Lounge, although, being the haunt of
faery birds, the place shares a great deal of their indeterminacy, and most
humans' resultant trouble in locating it makes it more of a private club –
still very nice though. It's unspecified whether the Nice Bird Lounge is itself
a nice lounge, or if it is only the birds themselves who are nice, or if both,
whether the nice birds and the nice lounge are independently nice, or if the
niceness of one is conferred by the niceness of the other, and in this case,
from which of the two the niceness originates. Chooken won't clarify, lest his
own nice bird status be called into question.
And you question it at your peril. Chooken will have you know he is a
real swashbuck-buck-buckler, too happy to regale anyone with his exploits. He
is the Chook that keeps on Chooken, not a mere watershed moment, but a
watershed eternity! His pioneering has simply never peaked, and all this from
humble beginnings in standard toil – no wait, the Bird himself never did any
standard toil, rather Standard Toil was the name of his first corporation. It
is said to have mined for giant truffles somewhere deep in the Hollow Earth.
Whether through mining or trading, the Bird accrued a mountainous gold
reserve, upon which have been based other currencies, both faery and human, at
least in times of relative peace. In wartimes, Chooken has allegedly done even
better, founding his own investment bank, Chooken Sacks, to assist all sides of
a conflict in whatever ways currency can. To any accusation of ruthless
profiteering, Chooken will point you to his most charitable fronts, like the
Bildabird Coop, which he chairs in hopes of uniting all businessfolk under a
banner of less cutthroat execution. Chooken will assure you that all such
ventures are very nice, very nice – absolutely no harpies
allowed, although malpheasanters claim he never keeps a close eye on said
ventures, so it's possible harpies might be running some of them.
If one chances to party with him at the Nice Bird Lounge, one redeeming
quality of the Cock-up usually does show itself in flying colours: whatever
domino effect Chooken has precipitated from time to time, he has certainly
never meant any harm. Typical fare at these parties are a
Scottish-Australian parrot who always brings plenty of Iced VoVos and Venetian
biscuits, a white owl who stocks the cigars, and a swan who provides
much of the crystal. The Fimble Fowl can be found opening bottles with her
corkscrew leg. It's a progressive place: the dove that daren't speak its name
is always welcome. Even Greta Thunderbird is welcome, though Chooken has them
play the music extra loud to drown out her apocalyptic squawks.
Delicately delivered
criticism you might just get away with, to which the Bird may
turn the other Chook. After all, he does always aim to please, does Chooken. He
really just exists to warm the cockerels of the heart. If he could, he'd buy
the whole world a cock. 'Opiates for the masses!' is his beaming response to
any problem too massive to be fixed, but if this fails to satisfy, he is
well-known to sulk.
Many a human and other mortal creature has throughout centuries sought
to recruit Chooken in their fight against evil, but has found that wrangling
him for this purpose is in itself a fight very nearly as dolorous. First comes
the hurdle of merely finding him. Faery birds are almost impossible to locate,
as are their watering holes, and even the wiliest of gate-crashers to his
Lounge have found him to be elsewhere at the time. Faery birds do a lot of
travelling, even more than most ordinary birds.
The second hurdle is that when chanced upon, Chooken's outlook on
'fighting the good fight' is a dismissively Daoist one, 'no light without
shadow', and all that. "The Green Knight is but a detritivore, not a
devil," sayeth the Bird, "and primavera is his upside. You'll
see." For the Bird himself to play cowboys and Indians would simply be far
too vulgar a display of power – "you don't want this roc
rocking the boat," he'll demur, "lest everyone end
up overboard." But the boat is already sinking, and to
make the malpheasant notice culture's disequilibrium, one must outright vilify
him for it, to the point of hurting his feelings.
The third hurdle is to impel the Bird to act, rather than
comfort himself with partying. Under the blue moon of a harsh critic's success
in showing Chooken the true evils of his dominion – the Nightside of Eden, as
occultist Kenneth Grant called it – Chooken will invariably cough out his
present lungful of opium and stare scandalized at said critic, before flying
into a little rage about 'so many ungrateful eggs in his nest', then retreating
finally to his hoard of Nice things, to weep into his reflection in the shiny
ones. "Cluck off!" this means, and not long after, the partying
resumes.
During these brief mopings, Chooken may remind himself of a certain
snipe, or woodcock, who long ago was charged with the guarding of the shamir,
an incredible being as old as all of humanity, although its form was that of a
tiny worm. The shamir had the power to bore through diamond, and so King
Solomon of Israel had it stolen from the snipe, to be used in the shaping of
Jerusalem's First Temple, the later reconstruction of which was the scene of
Jesus Christ's world-altering trial. Although humankind's salvation is said therefore to flow
from this temple, Solomon himself could never have built it at all without the
shamir, which he could only locate with the help of Asmodeus, a prince of Hell,
and just one of a great host of demons for whom, under the aegis of Solomon,
the means of Earthly summoning was conceived. Another of these demons was Baal,
Lord of the ancient Canaanites, a subject to which I'll soon return. And so
according to this story, both a great light and a great darkness came into the
human world, the two sides of the coin that is culture, both conflatable with
one early bird that could not hold onto its worm. It is said the snipe killed
itself after losing the shamir, but Chooken, even when weeping over culture's
demons, never leaves his own party for long enough to despair so utterly. But
for as fleetingly as his moping lasts, there is a window through which perhaps
the very harshest of critics can rouse Chooken to serious
action.
Maybe Fruitbox is one such rooster-rouser.
You can learn the basics about Fruitbox Puddefatt the reliquarian, and
her best friend Fairenough the Easter Bunny, from the text accompanying an
Instagram post I made in December 2022, showing a section of my first big
acrylic and oil painting with them both in it. My earliest-ever doodles of the
characters who would become Fruitbox and Wagtail are from when I was still at
university in 2011, and my first fantasy novel, which centres on them, has been
brewing ever since, very gradually, owing to the priority of my art practice. A
Silmarillion-esque backstory to their world, and the weltgeists that have
shaped it, has been on my backburner since 2007. Chooken himself is a character
I began developing as far back as 1997, when I was just 8 years old, so he could
well be the oldest character to figure in my novel-in-progress.
The core of Fruitbox and Wagtail was conceived as a game of cat and
mouse between an anorexic super-nun and a cannibalistic super-witch, whose
respective superpowers are drawn from opposing sources – the one from
miraculous starving, and the other from Satanistic gorging. I'd say I am
probably more of a character writer than a world writer, as I have definitely
observed their world flowering outward from around this character core.
Beginning with the claustral tone of much gothic horror, the story has gradually
expanded into an 18th century saga of nation-building and shadow-government, in
which Fruitbox's official assignments have to do with removing various
obstacles to statecraft, but she is increasingly distracted by Wagtail's
half-hidden mass crimes of pure evil.
The dualism of
Fruitbox and Wagtail was first inspired by my love of the Hansel and Gretel
story and its variations. Throughout 2020, while breaking my back
painting One and Others I (which prominently features both
Wagtail and me), I must have replayed the recent movie Gretel
and Hansel by Oz Perkins at least thirty times. It influenced that
huge painting's yellow-based colour scheme. The archetype of the
'kinderfresser', or child-eater, like the gingerbread hag in this most classic
fairytale, is the seed of all that is Wagtail, although as I have been fleshing
out her character, I have assigned to her far fouler sins than mere child-eating. ("Art
is what you can get away with," said Warhol.) Another influence on my
characterization of both Wagtail and Fruitbox has been the black metal music
genre, particularly its atmospheric and symphonic subgenres, which have greatly
flavoured the intensity with which I seek to imbue the struggle of the nun and
the harpy, both in their novel and its painted illustration. The 2001
album New Obscurantis Order by the French black metal
band Anorexia Nervosa feels almost like a soundtrack to my
long development of these two polemical combatants. Making artwork of Chooken
and his company serves as my relief from these grimmer
subjects.
If only there was more such relief to go round. In our own world, the home of you the reader, the horrors of the harpy giantess are indeed perpetrated voraciously against humankind, but not by her amazingly, rather by humans alone, although with my Parmenidean outlook, I feel it beggars belief that very real demons aren't behind all this. I am referring of course to one of 2023's hot-button topics: human trafficking in general, but more specifically, the trafficking of human children for the vilest of purposes. It seems synchronistic to me, that in 2023, my beginning to release texts like this one, about my novel-in-progress that amplifies the child trafficking issue in a fantasy-horror setting, has coincided with the release of the movie Sound of Freedom, that sleeper hit you've likely heard about, which focuses on the very same issue, but in horrifically down-to-earth real life. This new movie portrays the real-life actions of Tim Ballard, a U.S. government special agent who has for many years made it his mission to rescue victims of the child sex trade, a global industry said today to be so booming that it will soon be worth more than the entire illegal drug trade. I like opioids as much as Chooken, so I find this flabbergasting. (Don't worry, I stopped using them after two years so as not to turn into Chooken.)
As an artist and
novelist, I am interested by the many parallels between real-life child
trafficking and its counterparts in paranormal fiction, in particular its
reprehensible end goals in either or both settings, some of which, it might
sadly be argued, are even viler than the lascivious one Sound of
Freedom is about. At this point in this essay, here follows an
idea-soup comprised of just some of these mirrorings. Whilst in 2023 I am
preoccupied with turning my illustrative painting into a living, both that
visual art practice and such writings as this combine to guide the necessary if
motley process of ultimately concretizing my novel. So, if parts of this
idea-soup seem up-in-the-air to the point of irrelevancy to the novel, please
consider that this is simply how inspiration works for me.
I can scarcely begin this idea-soup without first thinking of the
boy-traffickers in Walt Disney's Pinocchio (1940), who tempt
young wastrels with a nihilistic theme park where they are transformed into
donkeys to be sold into slavery. This movie, about an animated wooden boy, is
where I got that 'firewood' analogy I used earlier when discussing degrees of
non-compliance. Based on the even bleaker The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883)
by Carlo Collodi, it's frankly difficult to decide which is worse: the fate of Pinocchio's donkey-boys,
or that of the boy-whores to whose plight fin de siècle New York turns a blind
eye, in The Alienist by Caleb Carr (1994) and the first season
of its television adaptation in 2018. Also springing to mind are the
Gobblers, in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, whose
child-snatching, mysterious at first, is of a quite literal soul-destroying
purpose.
I cannot mention Pinocchio without giving a nod to
Swedish-American illustrator Gustaf Tenggren (1896-1970), whose art direction
defined Walt Disney's early feature-length films in the 1930's and early 40's.
My respect for Tenggren's art style comes from his pride of place within the
shadow of his even greater Swedish predecessor John Bauer (1882-1918), who is
my favourite visual artist of all time, even though he drowned at the age of
just 36, before properly transitioning from his job as a beloved storybook
illustrator to the fulfillment of his fine art painting career. But Bauer's
illustrations of gnomes and trolls are a legacy more than enough
treasured, especially for an artist so sadly short-lived. In his own way, he is
the equal of Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), English fairytale illustrator par
excellence. Since I was a child, I remember dreaming in
Bauer's eerie but comforting art style, as stolid as Rackham's is florid. Much
of Bauer's work depicts children drawn into the thickly wooded realm of Scandinavian
folklore's hidden beings, so it shares in much of the character of faery
changeling stories, which are essentially the European folkloric dimension of
child-trafficking. Brian Froud, perhaps the most well-known contemporary
emulator of Bauer's creatures, is best remembered for his art direction on the
two Jim Henson classics, The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986),
the latter's plot having its basis in faery changeling lore. In 2023,
Swedish developer Dimfrost Studio released the videogame Bramble: The
Mountain King, featuring perhaps the most overt inspiration from John Bauer
that I’ve yet seen in digital media, as well as that from Theodor Kittelsen
(1857-1914), Bauer’s Norwegian equal.
Tenggren's playful take on subjects as dark as child-trafficking,
as typified by the Fox and Cat characters in Pinocchio, has greatly
influenced my own character design. In this vein, I love to riff on
animals with Tyrolean-style tobacco pipes, wearing bowties and dress gloves,
wing-tipped brogues and gaiters. My characters Chooken and Fairenough evidence
this, and I especially like juxtaposing their sartorial jubilance with the
morbidity of my other characters, who seem more inspired by the look of FromSoftware's Dark
Souls videogames.
In European folklore, the faery changeling phenomenon is a bit
like Pinocchio's child trafficking in that the faery snatchers
of human children almost always select boys, although usually while still
infants. It has been guessed that these very young human males are expected to
grow up to father faery-human hybrids. When abducting human adults, it is women
who are usually selected, surmisably also for roles relating to faery
reproduction, whether as mothers, wetnurses or midwives, whom the faeries
apparently need at very short notice, or else they would surely abduct these
women while still in their own infancy, so as to raise them into such roles, as
is the case of the abducted baby boys. Who can explain this discrepancy? Maybe
the faeries just enjoy having human boys around more than human girls. (Peter
Pan could play his panpipes for the fairies whilst still just a chubby baby,
after all, as was beautifully depicted by Arthur Rackham in his artwork
for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) by J.M. Barrie.) As
for the exchangees, the faery 'children' left behind in the stolen babies'
human homes, some are in fact not faeries at all but magical duplicates of the
abductee that dissolve into nothing before long, and others are indeed real
faeries but not specifically faery children, rather geriatric faeries seeking
to use the human crib as an aged care facility – these wizened creatures might
be magically disguised as the abducted baby for a while, before their true ugliness
increasingly shows. But many of the faery exchangees are indeed real faery
babes, simply deemed expendable compared to the infusion of humanity into faery
bloodlines. The importance of this might have to do with granting the faeries
immunity to the element of iron, their exposure to which is normally injurious
or even fatal, or to grant them some other property which they lack but humans
take for granted – a soul perhaps?
The age-old faery abduction phenomenon, not just involving changelings
but in all its varied forms, correlates with the mostly much more recent
phenomenon termed 'alien abduction', which usually features supposed
extraterrestrials. Between these two very broad categories of abductor, the
defining boundaries have always been fuzzy, owing principally to both
categories' purported use of screening, the suppression of the abduction's true
appearance by the impressing of screen memories in which the perpetrators can
look like literally anything. Both the Easter Bunny and Jesus Christ, for
instance, have been reported to be in cahoots with certain alien abductors,
perhaps owing to a screening attempt by the perpetrators to appear more
benevolent. And of course, child trafficking is as much a pastime of
extraterrestrials as faeries, if not more so.
Exemplifying this is the documentary Love and Saucers (2017),
which reveals the story of one David Huggins of Hoboken, New Jersey, whose age
would be around 80 now. By his own telling through many paintings, he has been
an alien contactee his entire life, particularly in his youth, during which his
seed was used to fertilize an entire baby factory of alien/human hybrids. The alien
conductors of this factory were of several types: the diminutive Greys, by far
the most typically reported by abductees globally, as well as mantid beings
(resembling giant praying mantis), some kind of little furry hominid with
glowing yellow eyes, and lastly some giant extraterrestrial women, who looked
human except for their very long nails and Grey-like faces. One of the latter,
named Crescent, supposedly served as the mother of David's half-human multitude
of offspring. Within our planet's abductee community, similar stories of hybrid
breeding programs abound.
As a prestigious faery bird, Chooken has no doubt brushed shoulders with
whichever members of wider faery society are responsible for systematic human
kidnappings. When eventually pushed by Fruitbox to do his own digging into the
matter, it could well be that of the most grievously ill-fated children who
find themselves in Wagtail's clutches, a great many are faery abductees who
'fall off the back of the truck,' so to speak, which would make Chooken
culpable, if indirectly, for these younglings' doom. Chooken might also know more about
extraterrestrial abductions than he lets on. Among his regalia you can see in
this essay's accompanying artwork, there is a grid of badges that refers,
from left to right, to deliciously meaty burgers, to the planet Saturn,
associated with a most ancient kinderfresser (which I'll mention again), and to
flying saucers, for which the most innocent explanation is that Chooken, a weak
flyer, simply loves aeronautica (the saucer badge is, after all, grouped with
badges of an eagle and a biplane).
If there is any sense of levity to be found in stories of
paranormally-operated baby factories, that levity is certainly absent from the
human world's depressingly real-life counterpart. Current human-run baby farms
have been reported in Nigeria, Thailand, India, Guatemala and Egypt, and
goodness knows however many other places they might be discovered. Some of
these are multi-generational elaborations on the most basic child-trafficking
model, whereby children are not only seized and sold for heinous purposes, but
the females among them are exploited for the harvesting of future generations
of child slaves. Tim Ballard himself has spoken of his rescuing of children
from one such West African baby factory, who may otherwise have fallen
victim to organ harvesting for the purpose of black magic practices in the
region. Many children born in baby factories are allowed to live at least,
though their fate is either prostitution or hard labour.
From the mention of Africa, and human trafficking for the purpose of
child labour, my studies have drawn me to the appalling history of the Congo,
both historic and present. From the mid-1870s, the African land of the Congo
was the target of a proposed 'altruistic and humanitarian civilizing' effort by
King Leopold II of Belgium, whose true motive was to make himself the sole
owner of what would come to be called the Congo Free State, a country-sized
corporation operating from 1885 to 1908, in which the occupying Belgians
harvested ivory and rubber for Europe's own gain, and 50% of the local
Congolese were subject to forced labour, mutilation, rape and murder. The most
enduring symbol of the 23 year Congo Free State is undoubtedly the mass
severing of the labourers' hands, many of which were the hands of mere
children, as is clear from studying photos of the numerous survivors. This was
the doing of the Force Publique, a gendarmerie consisting largely of Africans
recruited from elsewhere on the continent, whose duties included presenting
their Belgian commanders with baskets bulging with hands, supposedly proof that
any labourers who hadn't met their
rubber quotas had been executed. In truth, the soldiers were promised better
treatment for the more hands they collected, and so the hands became a currency
in their own right, disconnected (in more than one way) from the number of labourers
actually killed, hence so many survivors. Staggeringly, this is far from the
worst of the atrocities committed in late 19th century Congo – this hellscape
inspired Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) for a bloody
good reason.
The Belgian occupation of the Congo continued long after the atrocities
of Leopold's reign, right up until 1960, by which time the ore of the Central
African Copperbelt, existing largely in Congo's Katanga province, had been
extensively tapped for its metallic resources beyond just copper. In the 21st
century Democratic Republic of the Congo, one such metal in ever-growing demand
is cobalt, named after the kobold, a baneful goblin of medieval Germanic
folklore, and with just as sinister connotations as that bad faery, for
nowadays as much as 40% of Katanga's cobalt miners are also minors
– child labourers as young as six, forced to dig for the
cobalt-yielding ore with their bare hands. Mercury poisoning can result from
this, of which one of the many unpleasant symptoms is pseudobulbar affect,
which causes uncontrollable laughter like that of Joaquin Phoenix's character
in Joker (2019). A seemingly overlapping symptom of prolonged
mercury exposure is called erethismus mercurialis, a delirious condition
identified among 19th century hat-makers, whose materials included a great deal
of felt treated with mercuric nitrate – this inspired Lewis Carrol's Mad Hatter
character, who in turn inspired the Mad Hatter who appears in DC Comics along
with the Joker. Fittingly, I would say both of these Batman adversaries can
readily be likened to goblins, or kobolds who, via cobalt mining, can easily be
associated with mercury poisoning, in turn re-associable with said comic book
villains, completing a metatextual circle.
The goblinesque child abuse in Africa's cobalt mines predominantly
serves business interests in China, which doesn't surprise me, for China's
government, being of collectivist authoritarian outlook, doesn't even view its
own citizens as humans whose individuality ought to be nurtured, much less give
a damn about an African child's most basic quality of life. And the fruits of
this exploitation? Well, for one, cobalt helps humans all over the world
to fly, which is to say, it is of cobalt-based super-alloys that
the jet engines of our aeroplanes are partially constructed. Another use for
cobalt is in the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power our mobile
devices, like the iPhones I see most of us using (though I personally haven't
had a phone in six years), or the MacBook with which I am writing this essay. Apple's website describes these
products as 'helping you do all kinds of things in all kinds of places' – just
like a magical high-flying faery bird, though as with Chooken, the depressing
side is not hard to see if you look.
Did anyone see the 2015 movie Pan? I know it was a box
office bomb, but I liked it – I was looking forward to it well before it came
out, even. Revisionism of classic make-believe is one of the ways to my
heart. Pan's fleet of flying pirate ships reminds me of those
flown by the robot pirate antagonists in Rayman 2: The Great
Escape (1999), one of my favourite videogames of all time, the colour
scheme of which has especially influenced my own use of colour in my paintings
traditional and digital. The pirates in Pan also exemplify
what happens when costume designers lean heavily into Arthur Rackham's
miscreants for inspiration.
Anyway, I mention Pan because its villain is
a fictionalization of the historic pirate captain Edward Teach, better known as
Blackbeard. Similar to the bearded tyrant Leopold's legacy of child labour and
abuse still extant in Africa today, Pan's Blackbeard is also
big on child labour, not for cobalt but 'pixum', or fairy dust, another substance
that aids humans in flying. With their matchingly capacious beardedness, both
villains are caricatures of patriarchal condonement of evil. History's Captain
Teach was even the beneficiary of such condonement from a higher patriarch,
King George I of Great Britain. As the Golden Age of Piracy (1650 to 1730)
escalated in ferocity, George attempted to deter it by offering a complete
royal pardon, available to all pirates who surrendered themselves during the
period from late 1717 to mid 1719, and this Blackbeard accepted in June 1718,
though he very soon returned to piracy and was slain at sea just five months
later. The unfeeling character of much historical patriarchy is laid bare here:
King George, like King Leopold and Blackbeard both, was not primarily concerned
with the evils at play in the world, and was clearly willing to forgive even
the world's most infamous pirate captain, just as long as British commerce was no
longer interfered with. Commerce first, morality second. As mentioned, my
novel-in-progress takes place in a fantastical 1700s, in which the same
priorities direct the minds of statists, hence why Fruitbox's pursuit of
Wagtail is most definitely not part of her official duties,
and she is in fact warned to ignore the harpy entirely, almost as if the
kinderfresser is a protected class. But why exactly? Could it be that there is
some high value of power to be drawn from child predation, and in both Fruitbox's
world and ours, the elite class care more for harnessing this power than for
the sacred safety of children? This sure seems to be the outlook of the one-percenters on
Jeffrey Epstein's elusive client list, who assumably enjoyed trips to his
'pirate island' of sorts, before it was sold off following his suspicious
'suicide' in 2019, that is.
When I rewatched Pan in 2023, and saw the
Jolly Roger flag design, with its classic skull and crossbones, I could not
help my mind from drifting to the subject of secret societies, like the order
of Skull and Bones, founded at Yale University in 1832, many of whose members
past and present have evidenced a knack for far-reaching feats of social
engineering. Skull and Bones, also called Order 322, has produced pivotal CIA
personnel, three US presidents along with some of their confidantes, and
numerous leaders of prestigious institutions across the country. The Order used
to worship Eulogia, the goddess of eloquence, and one of those three US
presidents was George W. Bush, so perhaps it was Eulogia who guided him to say
things like, "the human being and fish can coexist peacefully," and
"families is where wings take dream." Chooken concurs – his big fat
wings have taken many dreams, mostly the dreams of others.
The number 322 in the Order's name is a reference to the year 322 BC,
when the government of Athens, the birthplace of Western civilization as we
know it, transitioned from a democracy to a plutocracy, which is to say, no
longer controlled by the entire people but by only the richest among them. This
alone speaks volumes of the elitism that defines Skull and Bones and other such
modern secret societies, their members not wholly unlike earlier century pirate
captains who'd stop at nothing to hoard maximal treasure, be it literal gold or
the socio-politicking it can fund, and so it's no wonder these elites are
viewed by conspiracy theorists as pursuers of present-day global
totalitarianism. It is from this cloistered stratum of international-level
influencers that the Bohemian Club (founded in 1872) chooses many of its
members. I'll note here that Golden Age pirates were actually more progressive
gender-wise than both Skull and Bones and the Bohemian Club: female pirates
were sometimes allowed, whereas these tricentennial cliques have been exclusive
boys' clubs for most of their existence.
The Bohemian Club has an owl for its logo, linkable to the goddess
Athena and therefore Athens, though whether to its ancient democracy or
plutocracy, I'll let you decide. This club is the very same flock of elites
that I mentioned earlier, who gather once a year in July at Bohemian Grove, for
a forested meeting of minds, over which that 40-foot bird statue presides, its
presence the stage for a mock child sacrifice. Members of the Manhattan Project gathered
here in September of 1942, to give Oppenheimer's marvelous atom bomb their
blessing. I don't know about this bird idol's counterpart in my novel, but
in real life at least, this bird is not in fact Chooken, but rather
an owl suspiciously named Moloch (meaning 'king'). Suspicious,
because the name Moloch is interchangeable with Baal (meaning 'lord'), the very
name given to the demon for whom the ancient Canaanites once immolated many
real children in exchange for a good harvest.
In 2015, Islamic State destroyed a monumental arch built by the Romans
at Palmyra, Syria, in the 3rd century AD. At the time of its construction, this
arch served to glorify the entrance to a much older structure, a Temple of
Baal, its oldest foundations dating from the 3rd millennium BC, where children
and babies would have been customarily fed to the furnace beneath a bronze
statue of Baal in bull form. Anyone opposed to Satanic murder rituals, however
temporally distant, would probably not be too offended by the destruction of
this particular type of cultural heritage, but under the auspices of
UNESCO's apparent wish to revivify the demon Baal's presence on earth, work was
begun in 2016 on both the reconstruction of the decimated arch and the restoration
of the ancient temple beyond. Most curiously of all, in 2016 a 20-foot marble
replica of the Arch of Baal was sent on a grand tour of various Western
cultural centres, including London, New York, Florence, Geneva, Washington D.C.
and Dubai, in some cases strategically timed to coincide with governmental
summits – it all resembled some kind of far-reaching magic spell. Clearly
the Baal-lovers among the elite who funded the demon's return wanted as many
humans as possible to be influenced, however subtly, by this 21st century
renewal of ancient kinderfresser worship.
My Baal-inspired line of thinking is that perhaps all organized abuse of
children, whatever its form or severity, and whether in our own world's history
or fantasy fiction, is in essence fueling the very same eternal demon. In all
narratives, it seems consistent that when tyrants pay demons with the currency
of children, a great vitality of some kind is the bargain. Of course, whether
or not the power gained can truly be considered a bargain depends entirely on
whether the human traders value their immortal souls, which I believe are
hell-bound if they sacrifice human children. That these malefactors so
willingly damn their own souls in this way is a hallmark of Gnostic ideology,
the subject of which leads me to the most prolific kinderfresser in all known
history, which I'll get to after this brief digression.
Both history and fiction are replete with kinderfressers, many interpretable as echoes of the ancient Greek myth of Chronos, who devoured his own children out of fear that they would grow as patricidal as himself. Chronos (or Saturn, in Roman myth) was also a god of the harvest like Baal, from which came his association with the principle of time. We all know what it means for our work to be time-consuming, but what we tend not to think about is time consuming us. My favourite paintings by Francisco Goya are his fourteen Black Paintings, from between 1819 and 1823, one of which is Saturn Devouring His Son, depicting very nearly as nightmarish an ogre as any from real life. The latter are exemplified by the American Albert Fish, condemned to the electric chair in 1936, for the cooking and eating of one very unlucky 10-year old girl, whom Fish boasted was the most recent of 100 children he had butchered in his 65 years. Researching historic ogres depresses me (would you believe?), and it is only to compare them with their fantastical counterparts that I bother with this at all. Here follow some examples of those from cinema in my lifetime. There is the Pale Man in Pan's Labyrinth (2006), his quarters piled high with the shoes of children he has devoured, and whom director Guillermo del Toro claimed was a metaphor for the Catholic Church's predatory side. There's Gary Oldman's iconic Count in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), with his red silk robe and massive odango hairstyle, casually feeding a stolen baby to his three monstrous brides. There's the titular Satanist of The Witch (2016), abducting the protagonist's baby sibling, and then mashing the youngster with an oversized mortar and pestle, its mushy remains forming the magic salve that makes witches' brooms fly. There's the portrayal of Baba Yaga in the 2019 Hellboy, who tries and fails to serve Hellboy child soup – that movie's better than everyone thought, I say. Such kinderfressers are all outliers, freak loners, which to me makes them less terrifying than instances throughout history of the cultural normalization of child-eating, even to the point of its condonement by cultural institutions.
From there I return to Gnostic ideology, which discounts the worth of
both God and the soul. The main tenet of Gnosticism is that the material world
is an illusion, like the holographic universe I have mentioned, but not created
by the one true God, rather by a malevolent false god, called the Demiurge, for
the purpose of tormenting the humans trapped in it. For over two millennia,
Gnosticism has challenged any orthodoxy, such as most of Christianity, that
claims our material world is
indeed the work of the true God, and that we are in constant contact with Him
via the emanation of our souls from His being. If Christians throughout history
have in fact been mistaken, and this God to whom they have claimed connection
is in fact the Demiurge, then the connective soul they have each always claimed
to possess is likewise called into question regarding its value, if any.
There is a major positive aspect to Gnosticism that oughtn't be
overlooked. In short, this is the freedom to construct new realities preferable
to the one in which we find ourselves, but if we cannot first optimize this
current world, what makes the Gnostics among us so sure that these proposed
utopias are achievable? More often than not, these propositions are the good
intentions paving the road to Hell, as the simulated reality of The
Matrix (1999) showed us all. Terrifyingly, the premise of that film
could soon be a reality, if it isn't already of course.
So far in history, Gnosticism's questioning of the soul's existence and
worth has chiefly led to the devaluation of the living human body, for if it
has no sacred soul then why must it necessarily be respected? Enter the Devil,
in his sleek Gnostic vehicle. According to Christianity, the spirit of Satan is
the enemy of all humanity, who throughout social discourse seeks to corrode the
idea of humans as vessels for souls emanating from God. This idea of their own
sacredness is what protects humans from harming one another, and so when
stripped of it by the institution of atheistic, Gnostic and Satanic
ideologies, humans are potentially reducible to mere meat products.
This is the essential character of all communist government, founded on Marxist
leftist ideology.
No greater and more terrifying kinderfresser has ever existed, at least
in known history, than the governmental application of Marxist leftism. Satan,
or Baal, whatever you call him, has rejoiced in many cannibalized children via
the communist institutions to which this means of state government has led. The
economic philosophy of Karl Marx (1818-1883) underlies all leftist
political machinations from his own time to our current day, but scarce few
leftists today are aware that this ideology is not, at its core, economic
but Gnostic, for it was founded on the ontology put forth by Marx's
Gnostic predecessors of the German Enlightenment, primarily Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel. My own contemporary educator on this hidden reality is the
mathematician James Lindsay of the New Discourses podcast,
which I highly recommend anyone reading this go check out on YouTube. If I
recall, Lindsay has referred to both Marx and Hegel as 'dark gnostic wizards'.
This is putting it
whimsically, for they were the progenitors of 20th century Satanistic mass
murder.
One reason I singled out Albert Fish for mention just before is because
of his claim that it was China whence he first got the idea to eat kids, via
the recommendation of a fellow kinderfresser, one Captain John Davis, who had
sailed to Hong Kong in 1894, and become accustomed to the taste of child meat
during an alleged famine there. According to the horror movie Dumplings (2004),
customary kinderfressers have existed in China for at least 1400 years, largely
escaping prosecution thanks to their prey being disguised as innocent-seeming
dumplings, in truth filled with the meat of aborted human fetuses. Set in
the early 21st century, Dumplings focuses on a 64-year-old
dumpling maker who still looks attractively 30 years younger, all through the
rejuvenating powers of fetus meat, which she easily acquires through the dark
repercussions of China's austere one-child-policy. This movie is claimed to be
borderline non-fiction, and this doesn't surprise me, given the Chinese
Communist Party's human rights track record.
Institutionally condoned cannibalism in 20th century China was a feature
of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). This upheaval was the backdrop
for the Guangxi Massacre, over the course of which well over 100,000 citizens
were put to death in myriad gruesome forms (that body count means about one in
every ten people in my hometown of Adelaide). Almost 500 of those murdered were
cannibalized by numerous fellow citizens. This was not only condoned by the
region's deputies of the Chinese Communist Party, but some of these officials
even actively participated in the cannibalism, along with the thuggish Red
Guard and any of the local peasantry who held grudges against their more
fortunate fellow peasants, who tended to be those killed for meat. This was all
quite organized, the victims' bodies neatly divided up according to the number
of diners, and nicely sauteed or barbecued for the pleasure of the
glorious revolutionary class, peasant and official alike.
Perhaps the sickest part of this was that there wasn't even a famine in
the region at the time. This was cannibalism empowered purely by class hatred,
of the ferocity that can only be stirred up by the anti-human Satanism of
Marxist leftism, from which collectivist authoritarianism springs in all its
forms, one of which being communism. It is darkly amusing that the evil gnostic
wizard Karl Marx, father of communism, is known to have complained of 19th
century child labour under capitalism, which he likened to blood-sucking, when his own leftist
economic philosophy led to a wealth of literal child-eating less
than a century later. Mark my words: wherever there is communism, there is
cannibalism. Frankly, I see these two demonic c-words as
synonyms.
The Ukrainian Holodomor, or 'hunger plague', is a particularly glaring
example of communism's affinity not only with cannibalism in general but
child-eating specifically. Of the 5 million estimated to have died from this
man-made famine (1930-1933), a quarter of this number are thought to have been
children – that's about 1,250,000 children, only just less than Adelaide's
entire population, including adults and children both. Many of these 5 million
starved to death, their corpses then eaten by their starving neighbors, but
some were murdered for their meat, particularly the children, who were hunted
in the streets by the most desperate of the famished. I have even found
accounts from the Holodomor of children eating morsels of other children, doing
their very best to keep their munched-upon friends alive. Historians widely
believe this famine was not only man-made but deliberately so, its resultant
cannibalism traceable to the same old reason of class hatred as in Guangxi. A
somewhat more innocent explanation is that the Stalinist USSR woefully
mismanaged the collectivization of its agricultural sector, which included
Ukraine, but that was only the half of it. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries
who had instated what would become Joseph Stalin's tyranny, there was a jealous
hatred of the kulaks, land-owning peasants, no different from other peasants
except that their farms had thrived a little more. Ukraine, long considered the
breadbasket of all Europe, was particularly known to harbour kulaks, and so the
Soviet collectivization process was weaponized against them, the result being
the hunger plague, rightly considered genocide.
Soviet control of Ukraine lasted from 1922 until 1991, during which time
religious belief both pagan and Christian were severely discouraged. This meant
that the country's tradition of pysanky, intricately painted egg-shells at
Easter time, was as good as banned. There has been a resurgence of this almost
lost art practice since Ukraine regained independence, and especially since the
current Russian re-invasion of the country by Vladimir Putin for no particular
reason. He said at first it was to conquer Nazis in the breadbasket, and now
he's saying it's to weed out transpeople like myself – next he'll be saying the
Easter Bunny himself is spreading wrongthink there. As I've said in other
writings, the character of Fairenough, who is my own take on the Easter Bunny,
is a serious creator of painted eggs in the Ukrainian style. In that pysanky were suppressed
during times like the Holodomor, and also in that Fairenough is a staunch
supporter of Fruitbox, who symbolizes survival despite starvation, I have
sought to develop a heroic duo that speaks of Christian sustenance in the face
of collectivist malevolence. The two can also be enjoyed for their fashion
sense.
The supreme irony of collectivist authoritarianism like communism is
that its proponents have habitually aggrandized it by claiming it operates on
the beneficent principle of 'no citizen left behind', yet under communism, each
and every individualist and libertarian, free-thinking and enterprising, is as
a rule always left behind. The ultra-conformity of
collectivist authoritarianism functions by creating a tolerated ingroup from
which all citizens fear being excluded, and it is this fear that makes them controllable
by centralized authority. All of the most diverse, educated, self-directed and
free-spirited of citizens are always outgrouped by the
hyper-subservient ingroup, who are incentivized to distrust, abuse, betray,
ostracize, persecute and violate the outgroup, and in some cases, quite
literally eat members of the outgroup – that is,
'when the chips are down', to quote Heath Ledger's Joker (The Dark
Knight, 2008). And make no mistake, in a society governed
by fear rather than freedom of enterprise, the chips are always going
to be down – sometimes so much so that the communist ingroup ends up
completely emptying their freezer of free-thinker meat, at which point these
institutionalized cannibals have no choice but to eat their own. This is not
hyperbole – this is history!
Collectivism's forever rampant hypocrisy of leaving so, so many behind,
of failing to collect people even though collecting people is its entire
proposition, was perfectly summated by Princess Leia in Star Wars (1977):
"The more you tighten your grip...the more star systems will slip through
your fingers". The solution to collectivism's forever failure is likewise
forever available. It is to always recognize that the human individual is the
most concise and correct unit of measurement for larger society's overall
health. In short, every group is only as healthy as each of its individual
members. Modern Western society has thrived to the envy of others because it
has consistently valued the individual as its most sacred and vital of building
blocks. It is elsewhere, outside of the cultural West, where all the most
heinous human rights abuses in modernity have taken place, because it is
outside of the cultural West that the Satanism of collectivist
authoritarianism, which values neither humanity nor individuality, has been allowed to take root. If we do not
value each human individual for what they truly are, the vessel for a most
sacred soul emanating from the one true God itself, then what's the harm in
abusing other humans en masse in the name of some spurious utopian end goal?
Under the Satanism of communism, humans are just meat puppets, so why not eat
them if necessary? This goes especially for the children, who are the least
skilled and therefore most helpless.
But communistic child-eating is a problem for the 20th century, right?
And for the cultural East, right? We Westerners are surely safe from it
nowadays, right? Well...
That 1972 song by T. Rex says, "you won't fool the children of the
revolution," but when I look at their ilk in the cultural West of the 21st
century, I see almost nothing but fools. You see, because
Marxism has been rightly thwarted in the cultural West throughout modern
history, it must always wear a mask of beneficence to make itself appealing to
a fresh batch of useful idiots. Marxism's old 20th century mask was that of a
saviour from economic inequality, which appealed to much of Eurasia's working
class majority, but culminated in mass cannibalism in the cultural East,
thoroughly justifying its broad rejection in the cultural West. By contrast,
Marxism's newest and most current mask is its abandonment of the working class
in favour of identity politics, to which can be applied the umbrella term of
Neo-Marxism, also called the Woke cult, or 'Wokeism'. Wokeism is intended to
appeal to cultural minorities, who have in yesteryear faced savage
stigmatization in the cultural West, and mostly still do everywhere else on the
globe. As a Western transwoman, I belong to one of these minorities, and let me
tell you: Wokeism, even in the cultural West where it has accrued maximal socio-political
power, does not protect or help me, a transwoman, in any way at all. So
to all you Western Wokeists out there, this should be enough to inform you that
the most classic of Marxist tactics, that of disguising the totalitarian push
as altruistic advocacy for the less fortunate, is just as much at play in the
free world today as last century, but this time round it is you, Wokeists
of the West, who are the useful idiots propping up Marxism's goody-goody mask,
for among the working class of today there is a great plurality who know
history and therefore refuse to so much as touch this devil's mask
again.
Wokeists will struggle to believe me when I denounce their movement so
brusquely, and I understand why, for Wokeism, like all cults, is an echo chamber: it
seduces the most susceptible to become members, then has them coerce all their
friends to join too, under threat of ostracism, which can only lead to every
educated and dissenting opinion being utterly cut out of each member's life,
their complete brainwashing being the result. If you feel in your heart of
hearts that this is you I'm describing, then consider this: an
acquaintance of mine this past decade, who is a transman, would often say of
Western society, 'Transwomen need the most help and are given the least.' He is
absolutely correct, as I can verify. I belong to what is far and away one of
the most aggrieved of the cultural minorities in the West that Wokeism claims
to protect and assist, and have received no such beneficence whatsoever – quite
the opposite in fact, for the Wokeists in my life have ostracized me for being
a Christian and therefore an anti-Marxist. I am for this reason ideally
positioned in Western society to unmask the Woke cult's true intention: to
institute the very same collectivist authoritarianism, Satanistic and
anti-human, with which this cult's Marxist predecessors have always tried to
conquer civilization.
Whether you are Woke, non-Woke or anti-Woke, if you are a Westerner
reading this, I know you shall have seen, in your own place of living, numerous
branches of corporate and government over-reach that increasingly bungle and
ruin personal freedoms for all, empowered by Woke cultism, all done in the
beneficent name of protecting minorities. I repeat for a third and final time:
I AM one of those minorities, and I say to you, this 'beneficence' is an
entirely hollow virtue-signal, nothing but a mask for pure evil. Do not be
fooled by this mask in the West today, as so many millions in the cultural East
have been, both past and present. Your compliance with this wolf in sheep's
clothing can only lead to mass abuse, and with sufficient exacerbation, mass
cannibalism – I repeat, this is no hyperbole, if you know history! Simply put,
wherever there is Wokeism, there is Marxism, and wherever there is Marxism,
there is communism, and history shows that communism is a synonym for
cannibalism. Be warned!
Now, I know that nihilism is a plague upon the early 21st century both
in the West and the East, in large part because the Artificial Intelligence
takeover of all human purpose now seems inevitably nigh, and this is often what
gives way to compliance with cultism. Hanna Arendt, 20th century Jewish
political theorist, credited the rise of the Nazi tyranny to what she called
'the banality of evil', a forever widespread phenomenon that can be
characterized by the very same nihilistic compliance of which I now speak. (Important note: Nazism and its
twin fascism are also forms of authoritarian government based just as much in
Marxist collectivism as is communism. In case you're wondering why I have
attacked communism the most, quite simply this is because communism is the only
form of collectivist authoritarianism in the West today that still wears a
beneficent mask, the mask of Wokeism, which has fooled so many Westerners this
past decade, even some of my dearest friends – even the one I love the very
most, from whom I am resultantly estranged. The other two demon children of
Marx have worn no masks in my lifetime, you see, and are therefore universally
condemned and scarcely a threat anymore.) If you are a Westerner who
struggles today with nihilistic compliance, perhaps even feeling
altogether eaten up by it, then I suggest you look outside yourself
and think about all the children of the 20th century who have been literally
eaten because of the spread of the banality of evil, by the allowance
of nothing but good old compliance. The robopaths among us are always the worst
offenders in the area of compliance, because their sense of self not only
relies on their being ultra-conformists but also on bullying others into
ultra-conformity as well – my very own triple-decade abuser is one such
robopath, as I before mentioned, and I owe my very survival of her torturous
domineering to my having the inner strength of a Dąbrowskian positive
disintegrator. As of 2023, I have forgiven her, even though I doubt I can ever
fully recover from her. Robopaths, by nature of their rigidity, cannot free
themselves through change. As for you, whomever you are who have read this
far: please, do not further contribute to the totalitarian tiptoe
under Wokeism's guise, or the current kinderfressers it institutes and
empowers, whether figurative or literal, will be most pleased with you, for it
is only by your compliance that all their grisly dinners are served.
I return now to Wagtail. In my fantasy-horror novel, just as in our own
world, ordinary humans and the powermongers they serve are responsible for
child trafficking in all its most widespread and banal forms, but as for its
forms most extreme and peculiar, this is Wagtail's purview, and I hope to God
her crimes in my fiction have no counterpart in reality. Sadly, this may not be
so.
I've already mentioned the Joker of DC Comics a couple of times in this
essay, and have use for doing so once more. The appearance of this character
was originally inspired partially by the grinning face of actor Conrad Veidt, in his role as Gwynplaine in the
1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs, in turn based on Victor
Hugo's 1869 novel of the same name. The character of Gwynplaine has a grotesque
and permanent open grin owing to his deliberate deformation by depraved
surgeons when he was a child. Hugo called these surgeons comprachicos, meaning
'child-buyers' – highly skilled anaesthetists and precision-mutilators of
youngsters, who are then sold as court fools for the elite, or as freaks in
travelling circuses. Within his fiction, Hugo paints them as a cultural reality
of the 1600's, but as for their rumored grounding in various lost arts of our
world's true history, ascertainment is likely impossible. Of course, elective
transmogrification is a perfectly legal if niche facet of 21st century society,
its results sometimes no less ghastly than a comprachico victim, except in that
the altered subject is a willing participant.
The 'involuntary transformative surgery' theme crops up a lot in horror
fiction. It is a perhaps heavy-handed punishment for criminals, labelled the
Remade, in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy of weird fiction,
from 2000-2004. I did make a shortlist of this trope's examples in film, but I
have amputated it from this text – anyone who consumes such content will
already know most of the titles. Usually the trope has one redeeming feature:
anaesthesia is employed. Which brings me finally to the abominations of Wagtail
beyond mere child-eating, which impel Fruitbox if possible to exterminate her
forever.
In the world of Fruitbox and Wagtail, the harpy giantess is known as
a crucifactor, that is, a pain harvester – a practitioner of
vivisections, sorcerously prolonged, for the purpose of pain amplification, to
heights so seemingly impossible as to generate an astral energy source more
potent than any mere physical technology can provide. These operations
disassemble a mortal's body so gradually and peculiarly that, without the
magical component, the victim would be saved relatively quickly, by loss of
life induced by so hellish a mixture of agony and malfunction. As for whence
that magic is itself obtained, the crucifactor most likely acquires it from the
very same energy accumulated by prior pain harvests, which begs the question of
how the very first crucifactory was achieved. It is surmisable that all the
most evil sorcery in the world is manufactured by an existential loop as
baffling as this, much like in many a context more mundane, an obnoxious person
uses circular logic to justify their position. Circular logic, and thus
circular magic, are both demonic in origin, as defined by every demon's maxim,
which is always something like 'I am ruler because I ought to rule, and I ought to
rule because I am ruler'. Wagtail's victims are varied but, true to her
character's roots in the gingerbread hag, her favourite and most energetically
lucrative subjects have always been children. When they are finally reduced to
culinary form following crucifactory, the harpy may even have found a way, most
bizarrely, of further locking the child’s conscience within the food, so that
even her dining on it is a pain they sense in full. Now you know why Chooken is
moved to tears when Fruitbox's demand for aid eventually gets through to him –
the Bird and all his company simply must join her in the fight
against the harpy, and against whomever else utilizes her dreaded
harvest.
A bit like Chooken, I feel called to help fight the gravest of
anti-human evil going on today. I fully admit that I cannot fight it in the
most literal warrior sense, because I'm not a special agent like Tim Ballard.
But even J.R.R. Tolkien, his name forever associated with highest literary
heroism, called himself a coward in real life, better suited to training horses
for war than to partake in warfare directly. Herein lies my point: I don't have
to be a literal fighter of evil, but rather, I can be a literary one.
It's not too late, for I do not doubt that today's proliferous forms of child
abuse will still be around for years to come, and so with my fantasy novel and
its accompanying illustrative art practice, my hope is that I can fight this
maleficence by helping to spread awareness of it. I do not fear, either, that
my work's fantastical content might obstruct this real-world message, because
so many customers today have numbed themselves to real-world strife, and so it
is escapist media, like fantasy novels and artwork, that is quite simply
the only way of reaching them!
I recently listened to a talk by Eduardo Verastegui, producer and actor
on Sound of Freedom, about his first meeting with Tim Ballard
in Los Angeles, and how excited but also saddened he was by the true story
behind the screenplay. "Yes it's very sad," Ballard responded,
"but you know what? It's more sad now that you know
it, if you do nothing. What are you going to do?" To
this, Verastegui said what he has reiterated in numerous interviews by this
point, "well, we're filmmakers. We have a weapon of mass instruction and
mass inspiration: movies. Movies move people. Movies can start a
movement." My dream is that one or two decades from now, my novel and its
characters and imagery will one day form the basis for a movie as well, or
perhaps a really immersive videogame, since they seem to be replacing movies in
the hearts and minds of many growing up today.
Curiously, Netflix, Amazon, and Disney all passed on distributing Sound of Freedom, even though it has so far grossed over $170 million in the US alone, against a budget of less than $15 million, which means it could have really helped Disney out right about now, following their recent billion dollar loss resulting from numerous Wokeist flops. But no, a lucrative movie about protecting the sacredness of children that resonates with the masses – that's simply not what the big media companies of Hollywood are all about nowadays. Makes you wonder, what exactly are they all about? This has made many an online commentator's imagination run wild. One thing's for certain: Disney is indeed no longer Walt's family-oriented company, which once put out masterpieces like Pinocchio, focusing on a child escaping the evils of child-trafficking.
Some people think today's stories of global child trafficking operations
are overblown, little more than conspiracy theories, but I have no trouble
believing they are mostly true. Why? Well firstly, among my own peers, I have
heard far too many firsthand accounts of domestic child abuse to have any
doubts of its normalcy, and so I have come to assume the same of its equivalent
forms under criminal organization.
Secondly, my own experience, not directly of these crimes, but of human
nature as a whole, is such that I can intuit the trafficking issue's validity.
One of my favourite truisms is 'how you do one thing is how you do everything.'
For instance, in a world where it is ever-increasingly rare, I have saved
myself entirely for lifelong marriage to my one true love, resolving to
be alone for all my days if this life-partnership is denied to me, and it
is with this very same conviction that I have spent the past fifteen years
teaching myself how to paint well, always holding off on the marketing of my
artwork, until I am maximally proficient, and therefore certain not to
cheat one single customer with regard to the work's quality. I believe in
making something the very best of itself, or not bothering with it at all. I am
a hardcore libertarian, wishing for everyone to live as they please, and so I
don't necessarily recommend my way of life to others, but my point is: this is
my approach not just to one aspect of life, but to all. How I do one
thing is how I do everything, and for all of us, this is
so.
I have heard it said in the world of commerce that only the top 10% of
anything is a worthy product, and sadly my lifelong experience of people also
aligns with this. It's true that I'm only just now turning 34 years old and have
always been stuck in South Australia, so I've not had the broadest sampling of
humanity so far, but at any rate, most humans I've met have been very
unintelligent and immoral. My own IQ is in the low end of the top 2% of the
measured populace, and I have come to believe there is significant correlation
between stupidity and evil. 'Evil is stupidity rigorously applied,' I've heard
it said. Not only have I silently identified this sorry majority, but for my
first 26 years, many of its members have seen fit to abuse me with zero provocation,
for nothing but my sensitivity in all its forms – my intelligence, my openness,
my kindness, my transwoman status, and my high standards both romantic and
artistic. These have typically been complete strangers in the street, seemingly
jealous that their own vicissitudes had disallowed them softness and niceness
like mine.
If that truism I mention is indeed true, then this toxic vulgarity, to
which so many humans have subjected me, is not just present in these abusers'
treatment of me, but in all else they have ever done and are going to continue
doing. And so can I naively believe that the activity of child exploitation is
off the table for all of these wretches? No I cannot. I know in my gut that
there are plenty of these trafficker scum on Earth today, more than enough to
organize most elaborately.
As for my own past abuse by random South Australians, it has thankfully
always been of a much less horrific nature than that of trafficking's victims,
but still more than enough to fill me with everlasting feelings of disgust and
fear, echoing throughout all my subsequent days of relative peace. This abuse
abated in 2015, by which time Wokeism's stranglehold on Western cultural
institutions had caused society's tide to turn on my many and varied bullies. I
do not believe any of them had a self-directed change of heart, rather that
Wokeism is simply an even bigger bully than they are, which is why I disapprove
of it, even though it claims to be on transpeople's side – two wrongs simply
never make a right. Never. All totalitarianism gains ground in this way, as
I've now said at length.
I have always had faith that deep down, every human is a brilliant soul
of purest light, and that it is only this material world's great hardships that
make them dull and cruel. This is why Christian forgiveness is so valuable: it
is the assertion, from one soul to another, that each soul is still intact, no
matter what its human mind and body have said or done. It's just an assertion,
of course, by which I mean that a scarce few sins may in truth be
unforgivable – Jesus seems to imply this about child exploitation at one point in the Bible. The most severe test
of my faith in the soul's eternal goodness has been these past seven years,
2017-2023, ironically after almost all the societally condoned bullying of
people like me had died down.
I've mentioned this test already, but I have more to say now about its
spiritual and artistic dimensions. I am a Christian, a demisexual, and a true
romantic. These three terms have distinct definitions, but within their overlap
they share my one bottom line: I accept one life-partner, refusing all others,
and if life doesn't allow me that one life-partner, then I am alone my entire
life. No ifs or buts. I have only one whole heart to give to one other, not
fragments of a shattered one to give to many. I have offered it to a few people
in my time (all women), but only to one of these has it been given, and once
given, my heart cannot be taken back, even if its one recipient utterly betrays
me.
Almost all the others to whom my heart has been offered have been
allosexuals of some kind, meaning they have intended to have more than one
partner in life, in some cases a lot more, making them incapable of exclusive
life-partnership, with me or with anyone. Some of these women were both
attractive and attracted to me, owing to my somewhat broader appeal
before my transition, but I had to decline them on account of our differing
values. Prior to my transition in late 2015, there were only one or two exceptions
to the prevailing allosexuality I encountered, and these exceptions seemed as
oriented toward life-partnership as I am, but 'one or two' is nowhere near a
large enough pool from which to draw a partner who also meets one's other
criteria. And that's smalltown Adelaide for you.
Remember, I'm a libertarian, so I have never condemned the choices of
any of the allosexuals I've met. Indeed, for most of my twenties, my friendship
was as open to all walks of life as can be. When I had entered adulthood, I had
struck a secret deal with the universe: on libertarian grounds, I would condemn
nobody for their choice of life path, I would uphold them all in kindness,
however alien to me were their choices, and in return, perhaps the universe
could grant me my life-partner. It did this, in a manner, as I've touched upon.
I got to know this person over seven years, 2010-2016. Throughout this time,
the person as whom she presented, whenever in my company at least, was the
partner for whom I was perfect, and who was likewise perfect for me. This
presentation, however, was a lie, the evil motivation for which I still do not
understand, even to this day, although I have identified Wokeism's influence of course, as I
mentioned in my passage about the troll woman. My heart is still with this
traitor, and it always will be, and so I must live the rest of my life alone.
Even if she was to take up contact with me again, I would allow it only as a
possible friendship, never a partnership. I will not risk further abuse.
This has changed me. As said, for seven years now, I have been a
near-complete recluse, managing grief through artwork. As said, I will soon be
in contact with more people again, but only for the purpose of marketing this
artwork. With anyone not directly involved in this business, the artistic
medium itself is my primary communicator.
Today, I am still a libertarian to the very end, and I still believe in
the goodness of the human soul, but my faith in its physical manifestation via
human words and actions has been almost obliterated. And since the universe did
not hold up its end of our bargain, I am now free to blabber, as in this essay,
about my hard-earned distrust of my own species. (Yes, my species is human, by
the way, in case my name has confused some!)
This loss of faith in human goodness has further sobered what was
already a very gothically toned art practice. 'From dark of heartness to dark
of artness.' To this deepening of my art's gloom I can probably credit
my identification of child-trafficking as one of my novel's major themes,
and likewise that of its accompanying artwork (though its direct depiction will
be seldom if ever). This is silver lining indeed, for the oeuvre I'm developing
would lack meat on its bones without this theme. Grief has been a great gift
for the integrity of my work, Dąbrowski's idea of growth through suffering in
full effect.
The life-partnership I have always sought, in the eternal absence of
which I now manage to work quite well, has three core elements, as I've said:
Christianity, true romance and demisexuality. These properties still fill my
existence, even without any life-partnership, for they are inextricable from my
art practice. I'll explain.
Besides its number one focus on forgiveness, Christianity emphasizes the
efficacy of life-partnership as by far the most stable foundation for raising
the happiest of children, their individual talents most lovingly nurtured,
enabling them to prosper as adults, free from interference disguised as support
by the meddling state government, which itself benefits enormously from adults
such as these, through taxation of the prosperous. As Vivek Ramaswamy very
recently put it, "the nuclear family is the greatest form of government known to mankind."
So far in my life, I have entirely postponed the marketing of my artwork until
a date now very imminent, but I've always received praise (and jealousy) from
anyone who has glimpsed some of it before now – what few of them have realized
is that whenever they praise my artwork, they are in fact praising the stable
upbringing gifted to me by my two Christian parents, still married today after
40 years. This link will always exist between Christianity and my artwork and
novel-writing, even though officially I intend to publish it as horror fantasy
for anyone interested, religious or not. I predict there are plenty of
Christians who will like it a lot less than plenty of non-religious
people.
What I call 'true romance' is defined by the origin of the word
'romance', meaning a tale told in the Roman-style, in other words, a story so
striking as to be memorable across all time. Most 21st century uses of the word
'romance' are bastardizations of this original meaning, applying the word to
any and all human relationships that have some degree of intimacy. For a true romantic,
the majority of these are not romantic at all, for there are really only two
ways to embody memorable storytelling that pertain to human relationships: one
way is to live the life of the stereotypical godless rockstar, fornicating ad
nauseum, and the other is to save oneself entirely for one true love, whether
attaining them or not. Of course, there are other ways to be a true romantic
that do not involve human coupling at all, such as devoting one's entire life
to one's art practice, sacrificing all else one could enjoy, to ensure the
long-term greatness of its product. Art-making is arguably a much truer romance
than any that takes the form of human coupling, for whereas that coupling might constitute
a memorably striking story worthy of endless retelling, art-making
literally is that retelling. Understandably, when one cares as much
about true romance as I do, they will naturally seek it both as a relationship
and as a storytelling profession, ideally combining the two, as in the
life-partnership of two illustrative artists that I have always sought, but
must now do without.
As for demisexuality, for a word so foreign to so many people, it's
actually very simple to define. Demisexuality is a symptom of my neurotype,
which means my brain simply cannot process love for multiple romantic partners,
and my living my whole life as a true romantic is therefore scarcely even a
choice. Much more of a choice is the Christianity-inspired use of a
life-partnership as the basis for optimal child-rearing. I've always been torn
by whether I want to raise real kids or just spend said partnership making
art-babies.
One thing's for sure though, I do not expect to ever raise a child now –
now that my heart has been given to someone who does not want it. There's no
way I could raise a child alone, even after earning a fortune from my work. And
so, art-babies it is!
In my stupidly large digital painting of Chooken that you can see at the
start of this essay, there is an anti-Wagtail badge pinned to the lower left of
his green sash – it looks a bit like the Ghostbusters' logo but with Wagtail
instead of a ghost. This, we can assume, is a design Chooken has underpaid some
artist to create for the insignia of his anti-trafficking operations, which
seem also to be underpaid in his attention, such that it's a distinct
possibility that Wagtail's minions are themselves operating Chooken's
anti-trafficking operations, for the very same trafficking purposes they are
supposed to combat. Now you know one reason the 'malpheasant' truly earned that
moniker.
When finally roused, however, Chooken is a pure warhawk,
and as such might just save the day, if only Fruitbox and Fairenough can snap
him into it. In 2023, one of my favourite playlists contains the song
'Professional Pirate', sung by Tim Curry in Muppet Treasure
Island (1996), and 'Battle Hymn' (1982) by Manowar. I
thought recently, the former could well characterize the dubious camaraderie
within Chooken's Nice Bird Lounge, and the latter Chooken's crowing at the dawn
of war.
I relate to Chooken's sluggishness in shifting gears. I spend long
periods just drawing and painting; then I spend equally long periods just
writing. Whenever I make the shift from the one to the other, I feel like the
rustiest, most talentless bumbler under the sun. But by the time I am wrapping
up this essay on Chooken and his role in my art and novel, I don't feel so
bad.
Right now, if I look just beyond my laptop screen, which is surrounded
by inspirational toys, I see one in particular that I've had since 1997: it is
a plush toy of Victor Varilrix, the chicken pox chicken, that accompanied the
pushing of the Varilrix chicken pox vaccine on my age group in Australia that
year. I don't know how widespread Victor's presence was or is. He was not sold
to the public as far as I know; the only reason I got one is because my dad was
a doctor, and drug companies like to give plushies of their mascots to doctors
(à la the oxycontin plushie featured in Netflix's show Painkiller that I just watched). I think
Varilrix was just that one company's name for the vaccine, and whilst I know
Varilrix has been sold in both Australia and the UK, I have never ever seen
them giving out Victor plushies anywhere but Australia, nor anytime since 1997
– as a matter of fact, Victor doesn't even seem to be branded merchandise, just
a limited run of throwaways someone at the company decided to order on the
cheap from communist China. There are no cheap Victor knock-offs, because
Victor himself is the cheap Victor knock-off.
But to me Victor has meant so much more, for when I was still a kid I
renamed him 'Chooken', and he has since been the inspiration for my original
character of Chooken, although over the past 26 years Chooken has festooned
himself most gildedly, and realized a whole new countenance via my own art
style, to the point of resembling very little the preceding chicken pox chicken
– in fact Chooken's spots are not pox at all, he'll have you know, but
permanent feather colouration. If anyone dares claim Chooken to be a mere
pastiche of some forgotten pharma promo knick-knack, I remind you that
Winnie-the-Pooh's image had similarly imitative beginnings: his appearance in
A.A. Milne's books came not even from Edward, teddy bear of the author's own
son, as many believe, but from Growler, who was the teddy bear of the son of
Milne's illustrator, E.H. Shepard. Chooken's likeness to Victor Varilrix is far
more muted today than the likeness shared by those three bears. Incidentally,
after decades of fruitless searching, I managed to find a couple of other
Victor plushes on eBay in 2022, both from sellers within Australia; I only
bought one because the other one's eyes looked angry. This second Victor, still
in pristine condition, now sits next to the greying Chooken behind my laptop's
usual spot – together they look like a decorated officer and a private. They
also remind me of Rataxes and Basil from the 1989 animated Babar. I
recently rediscovered that show on YouTube and watched the episode with the
Weeping Wonderbird. Chooken laughs a lot more than that bird – when he does, he
sounds a bit like the southern ground hornbill of lower Africa, which makes a
very funny noise if you ask me.
No more writing for now. I have to make the shift back to the digital
painting, and hopefully finish a baker's dozen of print designs in the Results
Matching Fewer Words series. Then I'll have to shift back to my even
more arduous traditional painting practice. If you'd like to support my art or
my writing, you'll soon be able to, when my first ever prints go up for
sale.
Thanks for reading. I leave you
with an excerpt from what might become a banned book, if Wokeism has its
way:
'God chose the foolish things of
the world to shame the wise. God chose the weak things of the world to shame
the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised
things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are,
so that no one may boast before him.'
– 1 Corinthians 1: 27-31, The
Bible, New International Version
'Good things happen when bird
people do something.'
– Chooken
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Humphreys 2023
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Humphreys. Please do not reproduce any of it without first asking me nicely. X
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