So, as it turns out, my capacity for tyranny is actually fuckin huge and I'm really fucking good at it

I have so many more things to put in my book now

Peace Through Tyranny will be real circa 2048 and it'll still be sued by fucking Hasbro

brideshead, after reading art of cruelty

Charles --if that really is his name, and if that really is what this is all about-- Is not handsome or rugged but he has a certain mass about the shoulders A certain curving volume just at the top of the belly The barest suggestion of pectorals on his scrawny chest. His hip-bones exist admirably underneath the ridiculous high Waistband of the period. He ought to stretch more, as you can see how he is tense around his neck The muscles stand out, kind of, but also the tendons. He wants God. He wants God, but it’s perverse how he wants him. He wants God in terms of wanting all the weights and trappings that have been affixed to God. He has a hint of the deep power of the natural, the ever-present, the cold stream or animal sweetness, but by the time he finds that Charles is in a well which he can’t climb out of. He stands ankle-deep. There is a floor That won’t give way. He goes and he paints in South America, but the warmth doesn’t touch him. All he wants is to be contained, to be embalmed, and so he contains and embalms what he sees in front of him. If there are ever hands which travel down Charles’s spine, they do not open him up but rather make him more tense and bent. Is there a terror in him? There is a terror in him. The walls of the church Charles admires are not things God made, but are stones piled up By hands rather recently In certain corners of England, with little runes on them which stop you from leaving or dreaming And which definitively stop you from getting really intimate with people you love. Not to say that getting intimate with people you love is possible Merely by taking apart all the different stones. Outside the well there are other things stopping you-- But if you can’t even get out of the well, well. Charles, in the well, finds his hands are always cold. He wants God sort of, but he also thinks he wants Everything to stay as it was and for revolutions to stop. He has the capacity to commit little acts of brutality In order to make revolutions stop, or slow. But if someone threatened the stability of the noble peasant’s perilous existence, what then? And does Charles like the underclass of non-rebellious laborers? Lunt? That part of Charles, that ability to serve with a gun in hand… Does that make him trade? Charles is not the kind to like Futurism. There are too many bodies? There are too many bodies belonging to men? He doesn’t actually like war, and he is in the end aware of his own deep distaste for violence But he likes-- I was going to say something trite here, but we press on. Sebastian pisses in Charles’s mouth. Wait, is that right? Is that how this would go? Sebastian pisses in Charles’s mouth. The most satisfying scenario I can think of. I am not sure That was ever who Sebastian was, But it’s nice to imagine Charles on his knees, in the large rich house, begging not for the strap Or the cane (Which are overindulged And don’t make a coherent picture anyway) But for Sebastian to urinate on him, down his face Maybe on the roof or in a bathtub or possibly as they are naked in the field. Charles’s face is taut with his cheekbones poking out, the outline of his skull and his wide dark eyes More enchanting than Sebastian’s features or face Even though as kids we were always more into Sebastian. Charles is the beauty submitting, unbeautiful. Charles is the pathetic boy To feed peaches and piss on. You know you could become him but also revel in watching his degradation and his love For the thing that isn’t a symbol of The thing he thinks it is a symbol of. His knees are bruised. Remember when you thought Brideshead was just about two boys imperiled by homophobia and then you were like a year older And were like Oh no but they’re rich white boys I am problematic Maurice is a better book Even though it is more naive and clumsy in its happy ending. Maurice is the movie you make your boyfriends watch in the part of your relationship where you feel deliriously happy and believe in true love and the promise of a utopia The part where you can put off the future or pretend that you can find revolution in just love Brideshead is what you are thinking about the rest of the time. It’s more of a faggoty piece of media for its sorrow and complication. Being a faggot is seeing the whole shape of the matrix of capitalism and the machine of death And not leaving Oh wow, that’s pretentious. Also can’t you be a faggot and a revolutionary? No, you can’t exactly. One destroys the other. I don’t know that faggots exist In Herland Or once Wittig is all done. Maybe this is a lexical error. Someone correct me, please. I don’t want to be a reactionary. There’s things this model doesn’t even deal with You get closer with Another Country and Rufus and all that? Do you have to go to France? You can’t leave even if you’re in France. So back to the scene with the piss. Cum isn’t really it. Cum’s involved, but cum doesnt convey the utter abandon with which this whole montage needs to be assembled. Somehow piss makes the longing Charles feels to be owned and completed by Sebastian more visceral. You crawl like a dog and are tense before your lover You love him and are cowed by him Rinsed by piss But more and more it is a choice to be cowed by him, there’s no real command or imperative And you crawl back into this largely imaginary container of obligation ever more desperately until you find it is no longer there and you are not needed And also are not even ruined, like you sort of hoped you would be And then you turn to God, because nobody is pissing on you any more and you think that through God you can get that really good sense back, of being owned and belonging. You spend the rest of your life hearing people whisper through windows at you. I guess that’s one way to get to God. Would it be as satisfying, this picture, if it were instead the main male characters from Women In Love? No. That’s because DH Lawrence thinks coal miners and plants are all sexy and objectified and phallic and doesn’t even really want God And probably likes Futurism And probably was actually into piss And like, I don’t know, they’re fascists. You just wish they’d both gotten bashed in the head with that geode or whatever by the woman in the first part of the book. With Brideshead it’s the more complicated Maggie Nelson thing about NUANCE. It is NUANCED because neither Charles or Sebastian is quite beyond the pale into the realm of evil even if they are annoying and flirt with evil and you would not like them in person. And the whole slave/master thing between those two awful men in Lawrence was already so baldly stated. All that wrestling, all those words about white octopi! Evelyn Waugh would be outwardly condescending about depravity and piss, Would deny the whole slave/master dynamic Would resist any sort of narrative about classes of men needing to reaffirm their position And if pissed on at any age I think Evelyn would be dismayed. That is why this is a fanfiction And why it is such a deeply satisfying one.