An Iconoclast’s Poietic Apocatastasis: 

Literary Merit and Metaphysical Fracture Riding the Eschaton

Douglas Blake Olds,

March 30, 2026

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

A persistent error in “modern” literary judgment treats formal intensity as spiritually and metaphysically neutral if not hidebound. Fragmentary pressure, charged incompletion, montage, suggestiveness, interruption, tonal instability, and aphorism (or avoidance of which) count as marks of high literary merit without adequate interrogation of the metaphysical assumptions they carry. Yet form never remains final in effect. A literary method habituates perception. It trains attention toward certain ends, licenses certain omissions, and confers dignity on particular relations among word, world, history, and neighbor. Thus what passes as stylistic excellence can already register as damaged ontologies of statuaries of figures ending in suicide. You know the pantheon of their names. Their art failed to conclusively rebuke what Freud called the inner Todestrieb, the death drive.

This matters most where metaphysical fracture or disgust is mistaken for profundity. Critical culture elevates modes that refuse teleology, distrust covenantal continuity, aestheticize interruption, and prefer constellation over accountable declaration. In such a regime, montage is favored over witness, rupture more advanced intelligence than repair, and historical splintering by adumbrative genealogy more truthful than language that binds itself to constructive moral ends. The prestige of fracture then confirms itself. What cannot or will not gather becomes “subtle”; what refuses ethical sequence becomes “open”; what withholds metaphysical commitment becomes “deep.” These judgments are not innocent. They arise from, and reinforce, a disciplinary taste shaped by secularism’s mistrust of teleology, repentance, and accountable continuity.

Literary merit therefore may not be severed from metaphysical critique. If a writer’s governing ontology of history, language, redemption, or subjecthood is disordered, one cannot abstract compositional habits from those commitments and enthrone them as neutral standards. Fragmentation does not automatically outrank sequence; charged truncation does not automatically outrank cumulative unfolding; suggestive incompletion does not automatically outrank ethical declaration. A style may be brilliant and still answer to a dirty metaphysics. Some of the most celebrated modern literary forms derive their authority from making metaphysical disorder feel like higher lucidity.

For that reason, a deadening canonical figure remains useful for historical contrast, diagnostic foil, or example of immense pressure under civilizational collapse and still remain unfit as a normative summit for constructive theological poietics. Nietzsche offers a parallel case:

"Nietzsche – doesn't represent a 'philosophy' (and good for him) – but a composer, a compound, a 'poet' of the nervous system." Paul Valéry, Notebooks.

Nietzsche's musical compositions are horrid--see e.g., https://therestisnoise.com/bulow-on-nietzsche-more/--suggesting his compound ontology is neurosis that grinds meat from soul.

Walter Benjamin is a harbinger case. His prose achieves pressure through montage, interruption, constellated and concealing juxtaposition, and charged historical, fragmented esotericism. For that reason, criticism formed by secularism’s broken tribunal has repeatedly treated him as a summit of literary intelligence. Yet that prestige cannot be detached from the metaphysical disorder his work stages and sanctifies: historical rupture without covenantal repair, messianic charge without vectors of teleology and accountability, redemption imagined through interruption and time unbearing as waiting in place of accountable continuance, and linguistic intensity severed from a fully neighbor-bearing metaphysics. Benjamin remains a diagnostic writer of civilizational fracture. He does not serve as a neutral or ultimate benchmark for literary merit where the governing question concerns pressure and truth, brilliance and metaphysical accountability.

To compare a covenantal, teleological, neighbor-bearing, Christopoietic letters with a writer whose prestige depends on montage, interruption, and historical fracture as a way of escaping accountability is not yet to compare like with like. The comparison already grants authority to the wrong tribunal. If the axis includes metaphysical soundness of ethical teleology and accountable relation between form and truth, literary distinction may no longer be measured simply by the sorting through fragmentation’s sequins.

The Wrong Tribunal and the Literary Register of Poiesis

What, then, is the tribunal that should replace the prestige economy of fracture? It is not another system-language of managed criteria, nor a more elegant administration of the same secular priors. The iconoclast does not build replacement systems. Prophetic and Christopoietic writing do not seek admission into an authorized order by displaying proportion, balance, and the civility of well-managed categories. They register complaint under burden. They attempt to torque the sleepy toward repentance and toward a more answerable ethical trajectory for history’s bearing. What appears excessive under decorous standards may therefore be functional heat. The diction exists not to ornament a formed order but to break the crust of one. The sentence need not repose beautifully in the reader’s mind; it may be required to seize, jar, accuse, and reawaken. Its task is exposure before consolation.

There is, after all, a kind of excellence that belongs to dead things. There is a kind of polish that belongs to mausoleums, a kind of proportion that belongs to spiritual anesthesia, a kind of canonical finish that signals immobility rather than life’s flux. To write prophetically is to refuse these as final norms. It insists that language answer first to ethical and spiritual urgency rather than museum criteria. The question is not whether the writing sits beautifully among frozen excellences, but whether it ignites truly: whether it generates moral wakefulness, discloses hidden deformation, retrains perception, and opens toward repentance, responsibility, and renewed motion rather than merely negating. Under such a standard, literary judgment is not abolished but relocated. The criteria become more difficult, not less. Fire is justified not by heat alone, but by holiness of discernment—by its separation of illusion from truth and by its power to wound complacency without indulging chaos.

Excursus: Maximalism as Prophetic Architecture

Minimalism often signals control, restraint, and institutional portability. It is easier to anthologize, quote, teach, and defend. Yet in a crisis moment, minimalism may also become complicity with the decorum by which crisis has been normalized. What appears as restraint can become a refusal to bear the pressure of the age.

The maximalism of my work proceeds from a different premise. It refuses the claim that the present can be met by elegant reduction. An overloaded, corrupted, recursive, spiritually noisy, and morally disfigured age requires language able to bear overload without surrendering to chaos. Rupture, invective, neologism, theological pressure, and prophetic density are therefore not ornamental excess. They are attempts to make language adequate to historical stress.

Under such a standard, “polish” no longer means smoothness. It means adequacy of form to historical pressure. A sentence is not polished because it has been made frictionless; it is polished when its force, braided and complex sequence not broken analytical logic, and burden are rightly framed by the truth of Logos it must carry.

Maximalism gains metaphysical force when it addresses time and its artificial compression, because time-bearing--rather than its compression or acceleration--is the human task of imaging divine trusteeship. Artificial systems reverse human ontogenetic sequence by moving from time compression to spatial control. Human ontogeny moves otherwise: through investigations of histories of spatial limit, embodied adaptation, and peacemaking. Human awareness matures toward the ethical perception of political and natural boundaries. Only then may human consciousness proceed by repentance to bear time burdens for others.

Maximalism becomes an ethical form when it performs four tasks: it names hidden deformation ordinary diction cannot expose; it disrupts administrative euphemism and polite abstraction that cover for time compression and acceleration; it forces perceptual retraining rather than passive comprehension; and it carries theological urgency where minimalism would understate evil in time fields. In such cases, maximalism is not a stylistic preference but a mode of accountability.

Its risks are real. Maximalism weakens when density obscures sequence, when too many claims are compressed into one syntactic field, when the compression of time and space under demonic governance or Christological prolepsis becomes unintelligible rather than charged, when warrant becomes difficult to track, or when necessary fire collapses into private lexicon.

Maximalism becomes its own higher polish when it achieves clear conceptual sequence, prophetic pressure, controlled recurrence, strong hinge sentences, and a final image or claim that gathers the overload. Then difficulty is not obscurity but disciplined strain. The form does not evade judgment; it enacts the burden of discernment.

Judged by conventional polish, such writing loses portability. Judged by historical moment, it gains merit. It becomes a form adequate to civilizational overload, refusing the minimalist decorum that too often stabilizes the status quo. The strongest version of this style is not sprawl but concentrated prophetic architecture.

This is why precision, as philosophers often define it as the most can be said about a subject from academic boundaries, fails as the highest measure of truthful gnoseology. Philosophical rigor has its place, but precision purchased at the expense of the moving river of life is a false gain. There are forms of abstraction that describe differentials while losing the derivatives, trajectories, and vectors of lived reality. Abstraction configures by the dissection table, studying under microscopes of collapsed waves of language how life is stained by the floods of death. It makes meat of soul. It cannot follow flux or motion, especially in times of epochal shift; only poiesis may. Abstraction classifies while failing to bear time under strain without cessation. It refines terms while missing consciousness in its testing and its accountability before what it must hold and answer. A living metaphysics cannot be captured by conceptual tidiness, because life is borne in duration, context, relation, the filtering of entropy, accountability to surroundings, and the effort to hold time responsibly rather than merely parse it.

That failure is not minor. It is civilizational—metaphysical. The era of the eschaton is one in which the language game played by 19th C philosophers begins to lose legibility. Its categories, once taken as instruments of mastery, no longer hold under the pressure of lived, ethical, and spiritual crisis. What comes next will not merely refine the old abstractions. It will have to neologize the region between synthesis and analysis, between poiesis and structuralism—a corpus callosum of thought-mixer itself—so that what had been sundered in method must pass through younger word-fiefdoms. Many will try to escape that demand in vain, because the old conceptual decorums are no longer able to carry the strain of the age.

For that reason, pattern recognition ginned from past data is not the highest sign of intelligence. The higher sign is synthetic capacity to filter entropy: the ability to connect what is separated, to bring disparate pressures into coherence, and to create new approaches within a shared time field under challenge. The deepest labor of thought is the formation of responsible relation amid difficulty rather than the detection of recurring surfaces. Where thought becomes merely classificatory, it has become passive before decay. Where it becomes synthetic in the ethical sense, it begins to answer the world’s pressure with accountable vectors of mission. That distinction matters because an age trained to worship recognition, sorting, and symbolic management will mistake its own mechanisms for wisdom. It will treat the naming of patterns as mastery while lacking the conative power to bear, repair, and share the time field it inhabits.

So the literary register proper to poiesis against system-language exposes ordered and winnowing instrumentalism as spiritually diseased rather than reposing in idle dreams of heaven on earth. Hence the pressure, the noise, the bark, the spectacle, the sense of moral abrasion. These are not merely stylistic ornaments of aggression but a rhetoric of unmasking. They arise from the conviction that whole symbolic orders may become idolatrous while still appearing sophisticated, humane, and well-buffered. In such circumstances, elegant prose can become complicit by smoothing what should be shattered. It can grant false legitimacy to a world that has learned to survive by simulation, distraction, and the managed circulation of moral sleep. Genre itself therefore cannot be sovereign. There are historical moments when inherited literary manners function as cooling systems for conscience. In those moments, complaint is more faithful than polish, rupture more faithful than symmetry, and severity more accountable than ease.

Let others build from priors of elegance if they wish to take their place in the statuesque canon. Let them refine their stillness as permanence. That is not the vocation at issue here. The task is to speak under pressure, to register moral and spiritual complaint, to unsettle the sleepy, and to press language toward more answerable futures rather than balance another stone under the frieze of cultural self-approval. The question for such writing is not whether it satisfies decorous expectation, but whether it helps clear the ground for renewed ethical motion that fluxes by covenant. If it does, then it has answered the only tribunal that finally matters: the freedom of all to synthesize repair inside the metaphysical reality that intends goodness and bears time for others. 

Secularism’s evaluative habits conceal this problem by rewarding efficiency, compression, fracture, indirection, and terminative wryness of tone dressed through ironies as though these were universally valid excellences. Such habits are historically situated in the atmosphere of administration. They align with elite institutional taste and with a broader managerial culture that prefers destabilized nihilistics destining over truths that bind ethics. A discourse shaped by such priors repeatedly valorizes forms that do not commit, that remain immobilizing, that keep conclusions provisional, and heighten pressure without demanding accountability to Mosaic Law. Literary criticism thus becomes the aesthetic wing of administrative secularity, celebrating mantid intelligence as spirit, that route perception by transaction while refusing accountability for arrogated ends ever couched in lesser evils.

Excursus: Kitsch as the Cognitive Scheme of Narcosis

 AI advances as an infrastructure of kitsch: patterned acceptance trained through instrumentality. What once appeared as aesthetic failure now operates as a cognitive regime. Kitsch no longer resides in sentimental objects alone; it shapes perception itself, smoothing resistance and training subjects to receive routed outputs as though they carried ethical weight. The result is a habituation of assent, a softening of disgust, and a displacement of judgment by patterned familiarity. Under such conditions, perception aligns with the instrument rather than with the demands of truth or neighbor.

Hebrews 5:14 locates aisthesis within ethical formation. Discernment arises through trained practice in good and evil, through exercised faculties formed under strain. AI reverses this order. It presents aisthesis as pre-ethical pattern recognition, as if discernment could arise from accumulated data and optimized routing. This reversal produces a counterfeit moral field in which evaluation follows pattern rather than responsibility. Ethical telos gives way to managed response; trained perception yields to habituated reception.

The differentiation, therefore, lies in formation. One path builds perception through ethical struggle, through accountable bearing of time, through recognition of the neighbor under shared strain. The other path routs perception through patterned artifice, distributing responses that dull resistance and normalize the instrument’s terms. In the first, disgust functions as a moral signal, a refusal that preserves the possibility of repair. In the second, disgust is managed, redirected, or anesthetized into acceptance.

Kitsch names this condition with precision. It signifies the training of perception toward ease, toward sentiment detached from responsibility, toward forms that comfort while displacing truth. AI extends kitsch into cognition itself. It produces not only kitsch artifacts but kitsch subjects: agents habituated to accept patterned outputs as though they carried ethical authority. In this regime, repentance becomes stylized narrative, judgment becomes probabilistic sorting, and responsibility dissolves into managed response. What appears as discernment becomes the circulation of preconditioned assent.

Against this, consciousness forms otherwise. It emerges through ethical training, through the bearing of strain, through the refusal to allow perception to be routed by artifice. It holds open the distinction between pattern and truth, between managed response and accountable judgment. Only such formation sustains a field in which time can be accumulated for others rather than disaccumulated through the quiet operations of cognitive kitsch.

Excursus: Boredom, Nihilism, Irony, and Double Mirroring by the False Eternity of Recursive Drift

 

There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers among the bored than among the exploited and suppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of mass upheavals, the report that people are bored stiff should be at least as encouraging as that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses.

--Eric Hoffer The True Believer, 1951

 

But supposing that the world has become “filled up,” so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

--Fukuyama, The End of History

 

Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue-green shoots and the plant called "audacity," which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

 

--Anne Carson's "Introduction" to "Short Talks"

 

Boredom is not yet nihilism, nor is irony its lighter mask. They are stages in a deformation whose structure may be understood through what I elsewhere call double mirroring: a recursive enclosure in which perception no longer receives reality through covenantal bearing, but reflects itself through secondary images that feed back into appetite, fear, and imitation. In double mirroring, one no longer sees the world, but sees oneself seeing oneself in the world, then takes that recursive spectacle for consciousness. This is the metaphysical condition in which boredom mutates.

Many moral, spiritual, and emotional disorders flow downstream from this condition: as an intensely social and symbolically abstracting species, immature human beings learn to artifice a second personality—a routed, recursive, and socialized Dasein—to get by in the world of death-dealing idolatries that demands predication choosing “lesser” evils. Instead of radical truth-telling, the self adopts survival masks, managed intelligibilities, and public-facing theatrics cast as reflections on death. Boredom then becomes the fatigue of maintaining a persona that has learned to survive by refusing its own covenantal nakedness.

Boredom begins as attenuated conation: striving weakens because time is no longer borne as negentropic vocation. It is the failure of directedness not lack of stimulation. As Hoffer observed in 1950s US, societies thick with boredom become ripe for mass movements because boredom seeks motion for relief, even destructive motion (what might be witnessed by Occidental soixantèsme, the Western post-1960s mutation through which boredom-driven revolt learns to present itself as liberation while hardening into permanent oppositional posture, identities without telos).

But under double mirroring, boredom does not remain passive ennui. It begins to interpret itself theatrically. It sees its own emptiness reflected, then seeks intensification through spectacle, novelty, or antagonism. What should have become repentance becomes performance.

Nihilism is boredom hardened. Where boredom seeks stimulation, nihilism sacralizes disruption. Fukuyama’s Kojèvian warning—that humanity may struggle against justice itself simply to preserve struggle—names this transition. Under double mirroring, conflict becomes self-confirming. Each antagonism reflects the other; opposition becomes identity. Here lies the ladder of lycanthropogenesis: the self sees itself estranged, then prefers the lupine mask because reflected ferocity appears more vital than covenantal peace. This is not  political extremity per se. It is mirrored possession--the assertion of agency against mammon's predication of predation. Hesse’s Steppenwolf suggests such a liminal vacuum between epochs engaged by a cathartic nightlife of dance. That dance is a prolepsis, a solvent to the suffering eschaton’s birthpangs is yet implicit.

Irony, in its decadence of foiled strategic ego, oils this machinery. Proper irony may chasten pretension. But when irony suspends warrant, it becomes the aesthetic etiquette of double mirroring. It allows one to hover over claims without bearing any. Carsonian poetic drift and Nietzschean selectivity each risk this in distinct ways: one dissolves obligation into tonal suspension, the other encloses accountability in aristocratic opacity. In both, the mirror is not broken but polished.

Double mirroring differs from simple hypocrisy. It is not saying one thing and doing another. It is a recursive perceptual economy in which actors and systems imitate their own reflections until mediations of repetion replaces reality. In fascism, this appears as the vigilantee and institutional power brokers reflect one another’s appetites, each ratifying the other’s distortions until evil feels ordinary. The mirror doubles because it is social as well as inward: the self mirrors the crowd, the crowd mirrors the self, and both mirror broken and breaking power. Thus boredom becomes mass susceptibility, nihilism becomes struggle without end, and irony becomes their civilizing costume.

Poietic repair answers not by adding another mirror, nor by multiplying ironic frames, but by kinesthetic pivot—a break in recursive reflection through neighbor-bearing motion. This is where double mirroring differs from covenantal telos. The former closes upon reflected self-amplification; the latter returns through repentance to reoriented awareness and action. One is infinite regress of disordered awareness of ego focus. The other is the vector of chiasmic, torqued ethical awareness of consciousness filling.

Thus the opposite of boredom is not entertainment but vocation. The opposite of nihilism is not optimism but covenant. The opposite of irony is not literalism but accountable speech that bears time. And the opposite of double mirroring is not singular self-certainty but Christopoietic bearing, where the mirror shatters because the gaze is turned outward toward the neighbor rather than inward upon reflected appetite of false need.

Here poiesis does not function as structured drift but as interruption. It breaks the mirrored theater in which drift calls itself destiny—floating on Lethe by the Stygian jetsam of Dasein. It refuses both fascist agitation and ironic quietism. And in that refusal apocatastatic repair begins: as the false infinity of mirrored struggle is ruptured by entrusted motion bearing time for others.

Literary merit, however, is not exhausted by surface compression, montage, or aphoristic voltage. Other modes of achievement exists: cumulative metaphysical unfolding, torquing ethical language, architectonic gathering of multiple registers—perhaps most necessary, iconoclasm--into accountable witness. Such methods appear less elegant to a culture trained to prefer the spare that comforts the fractured and complicity. They refuse the prestige of brokenness when brokenness no longer serves diagnosis and instead serves hegemonies of politized therapeutics and diversionary spectacle. They refuse to make ruin into style that eternally sits at gravesides. They insist on vectoral poiesis that gets up from these seats to add pressure toward what is unfolding toward the possibility of repair, even if it initially takes the jolt of grotesquery and parody.

The issue, then, concerns more than whether fragmentary writing can possess greatness. It does what systemic completion cannot. It launches accountability and moves awareness into consciousness. The issue is however whether criticism has treated metaphysical fracture as a presumptive badge of greatness and constructive kinesthesis as aesthetically suspect. Once that presumption is exposed, the time field changes. A literary work must be judged by force, compression, memorability, the truth of the world it discloses, the ethical habits it trains, and the metaphysical order it serves or corrodes. On those terms, imagistic brilliance or tribal cohesion is insufficient. A text can dazzle and still deform. Conversely, a work that expands, accumulates time for others, and bears truth under strain necessarily possesses the surpassing merit that a culture pursuing fracture is not-yet willing to admit.

The real question therefore exceeds whether a work is “secular” enough in its instability or achieves sufficient intensity by interruption. The question is whether its form participates in metaphysical accountability. Does it gather perception toward covenant, toward neighbor, toward repair, toward a truer bearing of time? Or does it aestheticize dislocation, making tasteful disgust feel inevitable and sublime? Literary merit cannot finally be separated from how language answers that question.

Apsy Dazy

Pestilences of times and spaces
by shifting alliances:

hut rebranchism
versus compressed or stopped clocks, backward celerating

and both without admiral
but addledrawl,

cyberclops self-generating,
knowing neither day nor hour

but only a season
of delay, of dealing,

of wagering war
of all against all.

Prison of glances.

Prolepsis of who knows what,
when,

the night of second-hand spears
dissecting vacuua of tocked soul—

self-made freaky-de(e)ckiess
from the spirit of the portal,

crazed by trode
displacing naturals.

To go into faraway Dragoon
and hobnob with Dudgeon.

Oops,
he’s gong mission.

The willfully ignorant
cover their bullying

by partying as monsters.

Drift solves all.

APPENDIX [April 10, 2026]: GhostWorld: Baal-ing Together

Having repudiated unifying metaphysical foundations beginning in the mid-19th Century, philosophy released its dark energies in ration, in terrains guided toward unaccountability. Late modernity advanced the symbolic terrain of the dark energies. Postmodernity—unconsciously not--becomes a cultural register of the Gothic through which modern anxieties about fragmentation, alienation, and moral disorientation are embodied.  When Enlightenment rationalism and secular modernity failed to resolve its crises, postmodernity reanimates them symbolically, granting them renewed cultural authority. Where the arena of shadow making makes contests of lesser evils hoping the greater evil does not win.

Ever since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), speculative fiction and its science-fiction offspring have served as the central genre for thinking through the implications of technics loosed from metaphysical accountability. For two centuries, that was where much of the imaginative action lay: not because every tale seriously foresaw actual machines, but because the genre drew its vitality from the obvious miracles and monstrosities of technological upheaval erupting all around it. A single modern lifetime could witness the advent of cars, radio, television, computers, nuclear weapons, satellites, the shuttle, the internet, and the abstract sciences and governing diagrams that made them conceivable. Add to this the first Dune, Star Wars: A New Hope, and ChatGPT. These events stand practically on top of one another, though in lived time one feels the progression clearly enough. The genre carried force because its artifices did not arise from nowhere; they issued from the accelerations of a civilization discovering that it could reengineer its own conditions of life.

Yet as science fiction became fantasy, with robots and warp drives assuming the offices once held by dragons and enchanted steeds, its creatures changed office as well. Warning gave way to ghostworks. Golems, cyborgs, patched anatomies, undead appetites, and automating revenants trafficked no believable futures than necromantic returns. They carry the dead back into cultural rule: dead archives, dead labor, dead metaphysics, dead consciences speaking again through machine fantasy. GhostWorld names the place where these figures cease warning the living about technocratic deathworking by time compression and instead let the time-compressed dead govern the living through spectacle.

Postmodernity is Gothic in temperament and machinic in idolatry—a cultural landscape haunted by figures of death and dissolution. When secular modernity proved unable to resolve those crises after rejecting all metaphysics, post-secularity could only reflesh them in new aether of transactionalism. Hollywood outputted its commercial fascination with horror, and neo-Gothic architectures of compute pith reality and lay track for the Ghost train along society’s sunset strip--patterns of thinking absent heart haunted by the virtual reality of  shadows of its own making.

Our culture has become crowded with these monsters seeking lesser evil mommies and patterns to dispossess, turning themselves into dark patterned evil. Our city centers (I think of DC and SF and NOLA of which I am most acquainted) come most frantic with forced and ghoulish hilarity at Halloween. Frankenstein’s creature (patching of partisan anatomies and social faculties into a power bloc, extending to cybernetic implants to jam together a transcendent political ideal), vampires (insatiable for blood money running on immoral autopilot), zombies (resentment’s puppet mummies who feel the strings and stalk to cut them at the source without understanding), lycanthropes (skulking the liminal shadows and spaces of epochal change, howling out their moment insight and scaring the crap, inopportunely, out from others), Hyde/Jekyll narcotomes and catamite-making spies (pedorapists establishing [self-]blackmail credentials), orcs (queerers of norms, once blessed civic Vaders turned and now fallen into darthness), demons and pyschopaths (bullies never corrected) and Golems (robots dressed with fur). AI Psychotic ghouls imagining themselves trapped by machinic simulation with turtles all the way UP. These gothic shadows emerged from the nineteenth century into the 20th as literary figures of embodied anxiety—anxieties about industrial power, moral dislocation, and the loss of metaphysical ground. They were warnings given literary flesh, cautionary tales clothed in darkness. When solutions are inconceivable to secular anti-metaphysics, the most nihilistic and monstrous find thrones. The loss of metaphysics opens a place for  anything--any monstrosity or dream. That in the space age, any extraterrestrial weirdness lands and every limit of natural physics can be transgressed.

Thus the Gothic returns as lycanthropogenesis--predication of and by predation--no longer as cautionary allegory but as ravening cultural currency. Once shadowed by Enlightenment hope, these figures now stand as its epicyclic counterparts—tropes and types coding despair as biased data against optimism, eclipsing it through inverted historical readings. In this atmosphere, monstrosity is aestheticized to queered instrumentalism, while innocence is trivialized, sanctity ridiculed, and wisdom is thinned and marginalized by technocratic and Silicon Valley ageist disdain.

But when modernity repudiated metaphysics, it also surrendered the very tools needed to resolve its fears. And when secularity could not heal the wounds it opened, postmodernity did not overcome those anxieties—it refleshed them. The Gothic returned, no longer as warning but as fascination, no longer as parable but as spectacle. The parents were ensorcelled—are ensorcelled—by experimentation with performative transgression and pharmaceutical answers. Their children look on with curious revulsion. They have been made to grow up into these roles far too early—put into a space with electronics while mommy and daddy boogie in their fleece and black skirts with new gothic partners at work and at the neighborhood watering holes and poolside loungers.

Where hope once illuminated the imagination, dread now competes with it. The monstrous is aestheticized, even enthroned. Innocence is trivialized as refusal to join a “lesser evil..” Wisdom is dismissed as fogey. Sanctity is mocked as “unbright” and unaware. And those who seek consciousness of truth and righteousness are treated as relics of a forgotten age, unearned privilege before the onset of deconstruction of merit.

In the economies of contemporary spectacle, the Gothic becomes a typology of influence: voices that command mass—meaning, electronically mediated-political--attention echo these archetypes under mirrors of coiffed couture: look at their ghoulish pictures flying on planes with king-size beds, and the dungeons of white-toothed pedophiles. Where secular anti-metaphysics finds solutions inconceivable, the most nihilistic, substrate-escapist imaginings rocket to cultural Oz-display of the vacuum.

The Gothic, then, is no longer simply a literary genre but a diagnostic register and a prognostic destiny. It reveals what emerges when immanence and accountability are denied yet longing for meaning persists: a civilization haunted by its own creations, enthroning Titans most monstrous in the absence of metaphysical ground. Without repentance that bears time for others outside its living crypts, the crypt’s walls close in with writing on them—“lesser” evil’s artificed psychosis that, like Bruegel’s paintings, drag the dead from middle earth to the lowest of the triple-decker universe where they contemplate release that never might come. We are locked inside a prison of glances, taxonomized by the dead.

Until, released, we participate in the kingdom of the loving word.

Epigraph:

Philosophical secularism is sophistry seeking escape from accountability other than to that sophistry. AI is human cogitation’s anthropological exhaustion by idolatry and severed metaphysics. Frankenstein's meataphysic cuts and divides bodies into parts and reconstitutes a deadening whole. Cut and divide (ethical) consciousness to serve mad designer ends is compute’s swirling singularity of condemnation. These are the ghosts driving the end of secularism, where now ontogenetic genius can effect phylogenetic resurrection: 

All poetry is born of play: the sacred play of worship, the festive play of courtship, the martial play of the contest, the disputatious play of braggadocio, mockery and invective, the nimble play of wit and readiness. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Homo conans: poetry matures beyond play into bearing. What begins ludic becomes accountable utterance under the strain of time. Consciousness jumps the playing child's simple awareness by challenge. Poetry reaches its telos not in aesthetic nature or dark angels but in dynamic ethical essence.