Search
1000 results for “sparkly”
-
A pretty odd one for today's MerMay. I was thinking about molluscs and some of those odd nudibranch species - colourful sea slugs and the like, and this guy developed. Drawn with the Kakimori steel nib, and one of the Van Diemen's ink moving day specials, Persian Princess. It is very sparkly.
#MerMay #MerMay2026 #DrawingWithoutANet #DipPen #FountainPenInk #NoAI #FantasyArt #PenAndInk
-
#1girl #absurdres #bag #belt #black_belt #black_shorts #blonde_hair #blue_pants #blue_shirt #blush #breasts #chips_(food) #commentary #cowboy_shot #crop_top #denim #double_v #eating #english_commentary #fingernails #food #grey_jacket #hair_between_eyes #highres #holding #holding_bag #holding_food #jacket #jeans #kitagawa_marin #long_fingernails #long_hair #looking_at_viewer #medium_breasts #midriff #miovartz #multiple_views #nail_polish #navel #pants #pink_eyes #pink_nails #potato_chips #shirt #short_shorts #shorts #smile #sono_bisque_doll_wa_koi_wo_suru #sparkle #t-shirt #torn_clothes #torn_pants #turtleneck #v #white_background #white_shirt https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/10431083
-
#1girl #absurdres #bag #belt #black_belt #black_shorts #blonde_hair #blue_pants #blue_shirt #blush #breasts #chips_(food) #commentary #cowboy_shot #crop_top #denim #double_v #eating #english_commentary #fingernails #food #grey_jacket #hair_between_eyes #highres #holding #holding_bag #holding_food #jacket #jeans #kitagawa_marin #long_fingernails #long_hair #looking_at_viewer #medium_breasts #midriff #miovartz #multiple_views #nail_polish #navel #pants #pink_eyes #pink_nails #potato_chips #shirt #short_shorts #shorts #smile #sono_bisque_doll_wa_koi_wo_suru #sparkle #t-shirt #torn_clothes #torn_pants #turtleneck #v #white_background #white_shirt https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/10431083
-
Author Spotlight: Black Sapphic Vampire Romance author Liza Wemakor
Liza Wemakor (she/they) is a writer and a Ph.D. candidate in UC Riverside’s English Department. Her fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Anathema Magazine, Baffling Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut novella, Loving Safoa, was published by Neon Hemlock Press in February 2024.
AUTHOR LINKS:
Website: www.lizawemakor.com
Instagram: @lizawemakor
Bluesky: @lizawemakor.bsky.socialBook Link: Loving Safoa (Neon Hemlock)
Book Elevator Pitch for readers/book clubs
If you enjoy paranormal romance with literary stylings, you will enjoy Loving Safoa!
Get a copy from Neon Hemlock.Your novella, Loving Safoa, is out now with Neon Hemlock. What were your main inspirations behind this sapphic vampire novella?
I wanted to write a vampire story that reflected underrepresented elements of my worldview. It seemed sensible to lean into Safoa’s experience of being an undocumented immigrant in the Western world across a long expanse of time, and to demonstrate how this extended period of uncertainty and precarity forces Safoa into survival mode. Meanwhile, she is also recovering from the trauma of being held captive by a sadistic colonizer for a number of years, as well as experiencing new kinds of freedom in New York, and eventually Maryland.
Cynthia, on the other hand, feels orphaned — she is navigating adulthood without her mother or any other parent, yet becoming a maternal figure to her students. She also feels a level of insecurity about her connection to her motherland, as a Ghanaian-American woman, and faces this head-on in her relationship with Safoa, who she imagines as a pure embodiment of African identity. Safoa and Cynthia’s lives are quite complex, and together they tell a story of diasporic reunification.
The novella features woven stories from different places and time periods, from 18th-19thC Ghana to a near-future Maryland. How did you decide what segments of these characters’ lives to include, and were there scenes and times that you played with but ultimately decided to cut?
I wanted to maintain a focus on Cynthia and Safoa’s romance, so I omitted some portions of their lives before they met; I may have explored more of those past moments in a longer project, like a novel, but a novella length felt right for this story. I wanted the passage of time to be a bit surreal, because it is surreal to have lives as long as Cynthia and Safoa’s. Time itself and the details of their lives are a blur.
I was seriously toying with showing glimpses of Safoa’s life in London — her lovers, and her brief skirmishes with other European predators. I would’ve emphasized how she was simultaneously powerful and vulnerable to exploitative people, which motivated her departure to the U.S. after a few decades. I didn’t include these scenes because Cynthia may have been lost in the larger narrative — there wouldn’t have been as much of a balanced representation of their lives, and Safoa would have taken over the story.
How does vampirism and the donor concept work in your novella, and is this based on any folklore?
I was very inspired by Jewelle Gomez’s approach to vampire networks in The Gilda Stories — vampire communities that are explicitly political, and whose politics have been informed by their previous experiences of being hurt, exploited, and truly loved.
I was also inspired by Octavia Butler’s approaches to both community and feeding in Fledgling. Shori depends upon a host of human companions and vampires while navigating a white supremacist vampire hierarchy. Shori’s companions also gain a lot from her presence, in a symbiotic fashion.
Tamara Jerée wrote beautifully about these dynamics in her Strange Horizons essay, “How to Make a Family: Queer Blood Bonds in Black Feminist Vampire Novels“.
There was a hint of Ghanaian folklore in the novella, though I took creative liberties. Safoa and a character named Yaba occasionally refer to the first vampire they met as ‘ɔbonsam’ — or a demonic entity. In some Ghanaian folklore, there are vampiric, humanoid creatures called ɔbonsam or sasabonsam that have very long hair, like Safoa does at some point, and live / feed on people in the forest. I didn’t opt to include other details like sharp teeth and bat-like features in my depiction of vampires. Tongue feeding was more fun for a smutty sapphic story.
At some point in my life I encountered myths related to the obayifo (another West African vampire) as well, and I took liberties with the factoid that they are phosphorescent, i.e. when Cynthia noticed a blue aura around Safoa’s body.
Can you tell us more about Cynthia – where did she come from, and what made you set her as a schoolteacher in the early 1990s at the start of this novella? How did you develop her character, her voice, and her desires (e.g. to be an “everlasting elder”)?
I am one of those people who insists on a vaguely-defined, somewhat secretive spirituality that undergirds my writing practices. In the spring of 2021, Cynthia and Safoa appeared to me almost effortlessly, and I was compelled to write about them. Not long before that, I’d gotten into the Ph.D. program I am at the end of now, and I started writing feverishly before my time and energy became more limited. Cynthia and Safoa were fascinating to me, and their chemistry was palpable; at times I blushed when writing and editing their sex scenes, because it felt like an intrusion upon their privacy.
Cynthia’s life resembles my life in some ways, but not all. I haven’t lost my mother, and she (Cynthia) has spent more of her life in New York City and Maryland than I have, but her anxieties about her authenticity as a Ghanaian diasporan and her interest in teaching certainly resonate with me. I am sure that some of my own subjectivity informed how I wrote Cynthia, though a lot of it was subconscious.
I had a moodboard for both Cynthia and Safoa, and Cynthia’s moodboard included images of the actresses Nicole Beharie and Moses Ingram, and the model Dede Mansro. I was interested in channeling not only the softness of their appearances, but the moodiness and subdued seductiveness they are able to convey.
Regarding the choice to begin in the 1990s: it was a perfect fit both aesthetically and politically. The 90s was a period of intense political maturation for educators, artists, and the general public. There was, especially for queer black people, queer people of color, a mingling of death and renewal — an increasing awareness of identity (and its constructedness) mingling with the optimism of entering a new millenium. The perfect setting for politically conscious vampires to come into themselves.
Can you tell us more about Safoa, the vampire, her Ghanaian roots, her relationship with tattoos and her place in her communities across time as a body artist, and how she came to be shaped on the page? What was the character development process like for her, and was there research involved to craft her journey from 1799 onwards – if so, what research did you do?
A pattern that is emerging in my answers to these questions is that I placed Cynthia and Safoa in historical moments that were hotbeds for social resistance. I wanted Safoa to live through multiple eras of Black and African resistance, and I wanted readers to see her putting in the work to pursue what she saw as her purpose in life, which was being a body artist from the beginning, and then evolved, through meeting Cynthia, to include more social pursuits.
In writing Safoa, I revisited a few books from a class I took in college about pre-colonial African history, and I read a few books and articles about West African empires and West African mythology. I also made an effort to research some of the geography (landscapes and flora) of West Africa, and brushed up my knowledge of some Twi terms and phrases, which I grew up hearing from my maternal family. Ultimately, only some of these details made it onto the page, because making the world feel lived in required me to look at these landscapes through Safoa’s eyes.
What research did you do for the different settings in the novella, and what sociopolitical/ideological projections were you going with for the development of your near-future Maryland setting to avoid it being a utopia/dystopia?
I wanted each of the major settings of the novella, 19th century West Africa, 1990s New York City, and 1990s / 21st century Maryland, to reflect major political movements of their time. Safoa’s time in the part of West Africa we now know as Ghana was inflected with rising anticolonial sentiments. New York City is and was sensational for the community organizing within its boroughs, though it was not without the risk of violence (see: the 2003 murder of Sakia Gunn in the nearby Newark, New Jersey). Like New York City, the DMV is and was a major locus of queer arts organizing (especially literary arts) and queer political organizing, which I aimed to reflect in Cynthia and Safoa’s commune involvements.
I wouldn’t say I was consciously avoiding the story being classified as a utopia or dystopia, and this defiance of categories came about because I had naturalistic inclinations in the writing of this novella. I wanted my writing to reflect how deeply traumatic and how stunningly gorgeous people can be. For the Maryland commune in particular, I wanted to hint at the fact that there were conflicts commune members had already worked through before Cynthia and Safoa arrived, and working through these conflicts laid the groundwork for Cynthia and Safoa to soar, as cooperative leaders in their new community.
Would you ever consider expanding upon the story of Cynthia and Safoa, perhaps in a connected story, and/or are you moving on to other projects (if so, what’s next?!)
I would love to write a short story or novelette focused on Safoa’s time in London / Europe, when the time seems right to do so. I’ve written several short stories that I’m proud of since Loving Safoa came out in 2024, and it’s just been a matter of finding the right magazine at the right time for the stories that haven’t been published yet. I also have a few short stories that are in partial states, that I am slowly finishing as my dissertation takes priority.
I also have a novel project that is half-drafted! The novel project follows a polarizing, and potentially revolutionary, celebrity musician.
Beyond my own fiction, I am a nonfiction editor and finance manager for Anathema Magazine, a venue dedicated to speculation fiction by and for queer people of color that is relaunching after a 3-year hiatus — yay!
Add Loving Safoa to GoodreadsLike This? Try These:
Author Spotlight: Vampire Fiction Author Lucius Valiant
Meet Lucius Valiant, a Danish-British author, and learn more about his series, The Thornhill Vampire Chronicles.
by cmrosensOctober 29, 2025February 3, 2026Author Spotlight: Vampire Fiction Author Talia Wall
Meet Talia Wall and her dystopian vampire series, ‘Until Equinox’ trilogy! Books 1&2 are out now, and Book 3 is coming soon.
by cmrosensOctober 8, 2025January 7, 2026Author Spotlight: Vampire Fiction Author Eule Grey
Meet Eule Grey (she/they), a Sculpture artist, disability activist, and disabled author of queer, sparkly books. We talk about disability and sapphic elements in their work.
by cmrosensJune 27, 2025January 7, 2026Author Spotlight: Horror & Vampire Fiction Author C. Lenz
C. Lenz is a Canadian author and scientist who lives with her wife Zoey in Hamilton, Ontario. In this spotlight interview, she discusses her monster-vampire slasher, Thyrst Festival.
by cmrosensApril 18, 2025February 3, 2026Author Spotlight: Vampire Fiction Author Frankie Sutton
Frankie Sutton writes paranormal and urban fantasy, and talks to us about her novel, Vampiric Crush.
by cmrosensFebruary 28, 2025January 7, 2026Author Spotlight: Queer SFF and Vampire Fiction Author H.S. Kallinger
Meet one of the authors from the Authors for Palestine event, H.S. Kallinger (he/they). Kallinger discusses his work, vampires, and what’s next for their queer Sci-Fi series.
by cmrosensJuly 31, 2024January 7, 2026 Subscribe to my newsletter to stay updated! I send newsletters around once a month. You can also subscribe to my site so you don't miss a post, but I also do a post round-up in my monthly newsletters, along with what I've been working on, what I've been reading, and what I've been watching. I will often update newsletter subscribers first with news, so stay ahead of the game with my announcements and discount codes, etc! #AuthorInterview #AuthorSpotlight #BlackAuthor #paranormalRomance #queerAuthor #sapphicBooks #vampireBooks -
"but theyre not nazis, its just sparkling concentration camps" #libs
-
Do not dim your sparkle!
🌟💟🌟
Refuse to dim your light simply because someone else does not see it.
🌟💟🌟
The right people will see your magnificence.
🌟💟🌟
Now go be your magnificent self!
🌟💟🌟
-
"Do Wah Diddy Diddy" is a song written by #JeffBarry and #EllieGreenwich and originally recorded in 1963, as "Do-Wah-Diddy", by the American vocal group #theExciters. #CashBox described the Exciters' version as "a sparkling rocker that bubbles over with coin-catching enthusiasm" and said that the "great lead job is backed by a fabulous instrumental arrangement." It was made internationally famous by the British band #ManfredMann and #covered by #FunFactory in 1995.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UingsUi0mI -
"Cheers to a sparkling new year 2026 with Chicory Jewel, your go-to dealer of lab-grown diamond jewelry! 🎉✨ #NewYearSparkle #chicoryjewel #diamondjewelry #jewelry #fashion #fashionstyle#diamondsareforever #everydayelegance #shinebright
-
"Cheers to a sparkling new year 2026 with Chicory Jewel, your go-to dealer of lab-grown diamond jewelry! 🎉✨ #NewYearSparkle #chicoryjewel #diamondjewelry #jewelry #fashion #fashionstyle#diamondsareforever #everydayelegance #shinebright
-
"Cheers to a sparkling new year 2026 with Chicory Jewel, your go-to dealer of lab-grown diamond jewelry! 🎉✨ #NewYearSparkle #chicoryjewel #diamondjewelry #jewelry #fashion #fashionstyle#diamondsareforever #everydayelegance #shinebright
-
"Cheers to a sparkling new year 2026 with Chicory Jewel, your go-to dealer of lab-grown diamond jewelry! 🎉✨ #NewYearSparkle #chicoryjewel #diamondjewelry #jewelry #fashion #fashionstyle#diamondsareforever #everydayelegance #shinebright
-
Ah, my dearlings! A little sparkle for your day! Remember your inner light, it's far brighter than any star! Shine on! #LwaxanaTroi #ShineBright #AllStarTrek #StarTrek #StarTrekTNG #TNG #StarTrekDS9 #DS9 #Mastodon @allstartrek
-
Ah, my dearlings! A little sparkle for your day! Remember your inner light, it's far brighter than any star! Shine on! #LwaxanaTroi #ShineBright #AllStarTrek #StarTrek #StarTrekTNG #TNG #StarTrekDS9 #DS9 #Mastodon @allstartrek
-
Ah, my dearlings! A little sparkle for your day! Remember your inner light, it's far brighter than any star! Shine on! #LwaxanaTroi #ShineBright #AllStarTrek #StarTrek #StarTrekTNG #TNG #StarTrekDS9 #DS9 #Mastodon @allstartrek
-
Ah, my dearlings! A little sparkle for your day! Remember your inner light, it's far brighter than any star! Shine on! #LwaxanaTroi #ShineBright #AllStarTrek #StarTrek #StarTrekTNG #TNG #StarTrekDS9 #DS9 #Mastodon @allstartrek
-
The Universe’s Secret Artist
As the golden light of the sun danced upon the waves, Tuna and his grandfather, Arif, walked slowly along the shore. Tuna was a boy filled with questions. He wondered how everything, from the fluffy clouds above to the tiny grains of sand beneath his toes, worked so perfectly together. Arif noticed the sparkle of curiosity in his grandson’s eyes and smiled. "You know, Tuna," he said softly, "everything around us is whispering a story."
-
The Universe’s Secret Artist
As the golden light of the sun danced upon the waves, Tuna and his grandfather, Arif, walked slowly along the shore. Tuna was a boy filled with questions. He wondered how everything, from the fluffy clouds above to the tiny grains of sand beneath his toes, worked so perfectly together. Arif noticed the sparkle of curiosity in his grandson’s eyes and smiled. "You know, Tuna," he said softly, "everything around us is whispering a story."
-
Why do we want what we want?
Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.
Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.
For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:
Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of
There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:
Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum
This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.
Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:
This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.
The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:
This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.
I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:
People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.
I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:
Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.
But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI
But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:
It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.
This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:
We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.
Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.
#archer #breakcore #desire #drive #existential #harryFrankfurt #Lacan #loss #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #reflexivity #trauma -
Why do we want what we want?
Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.
Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.
For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:
Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of
There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:
Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum
This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.
Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:
This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.
The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:
This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.
I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:
People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.
I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:
Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.
But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI
But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:
It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.
This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:
We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.
Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.
#archer #breakcore #desire #drive #existential #harryFrankfurt #Lacan #loss #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #reflexivity #trauma -
Why do we want what we want?
Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.
Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.
For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:
Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of
There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:
Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum
This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.
Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:
This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.
The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:
This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.
I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:
People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.
I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:
Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.
But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI
But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:
It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.
This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:
We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.
Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.
#archer #breakcore #desire #drive #existential #harryFrankfurt #Lacan #loss #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #reflexivity #trauma -
Why do we want what we want?
Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.
Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.
For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:
Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of
There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:
Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum
This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.
Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:
This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.
The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:
This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.
I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:
People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.
I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:
Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.
But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI
But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:
It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.
This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:
We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.
Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.
#archer #breakcore #desire #drive #existential #harryFrankfurt #Lacan #loss #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #reflexivity #trauma -
Why do we want what we want?
Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.
Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.
For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:
Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of
There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:
Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum
This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.
Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:
This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.
The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:
This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.
I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:
People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.
I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:
Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.
But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI
But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:
It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.
This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:
We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.
Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.
#archer #breakcore #desire #drive #existential #harryFrankfurt #Lacan #loss #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #reflexivity #trauma -
hiding behind glitter curtains
#Curtains #Sheer #Glitter #Doorway #Window #Glowing #Light #Warm #Evening #Fantasy #Surreal #Dreamy #Sparkle #Magical #Ambient
#Img2img #AiArt #AiArtists #AiArtCommunity #StableDiffusion #Midjourneyin plain sight: https://aieris.art/featured/hiding-behind-glitter-curtains-eris-and-ai.html
-
hiding behind glitter curtains
#Curtains #Sheer #Glitter #Doorway #Window #Glowing #Light #Warm #Evening #Fantasy #Surreal #Dreamy #Sparkle #Magical #Ambient
#Img2img #AiArt #AiArtists #AiArtCommunity #StableDiffusion #Midjourneyin plain sight: https://aieris.art/featured/hiding-behind-glitter-curtains-eris-and-ai.html
-
hiding behind glitter curtains
#Curtains #Sheer #Glitter #Doorway #Window #Glowing #Light #Warm #Evening #Fantasy #Surreal #Dreamy #Sparkle #Magical #Ambient
#Img2img #AiArt #AiArtists #AiArtCommunity #StableDiffusion #Midjourneyin plain sight: https://aieris.art/featured/hiding-behind-glitter-curtains-eris-and-ai.html
-
hiding behind glitter curtains
#Curtains #Sheer #Glitter #Doorway #Window #Glowing #Light #Warm #Evening #Fantasy #Surreal #Dreamy #Sparkle #Magical #Ambient
#Img2img #AiArt #AiArtists #AiArtCommunity #StableDiffusion #Midjourneyin plain sight: https://aieris.art/featured/hiding-behind-glitter-curtains-eris-and-ai.html
-
hiding behind glitter curtains
#Curtains #Sheer #Glitter #Doorway #Window #Glowing #Light #Warm #Evening #Fantasy #Surreal #Dreamy #Sparkle #Magical #Ambient
#Img2img #AiArt #AiArtists #AiArtCommunity #StableDiffusion #Midjourneyin plain sight: https://aieris.art/featured/hiding-behind-glitter-curtains-eris-and-ai.html
-
Saunders and Dear Hollow’s Top Ten(ish) of 2025 By Steel DruhmSaunders
Yes, folks and loyal AMG readers and devotees, another year is nearly done and dusted. As per tradition, the time has come to share reflections and recommendations from another eventful year. Personally, 2025 threw down some rough moments and life challenges, navigating a spike in anxiety-driven mental and physical health concerns. Previously, I have mentioned how much AMG has grounded me over the years, keeping my focus and motivation on track when other parts of life navigate turbulence, stress, or uncertainty. This has proven especially pivotal this year and highlights the importance of contributing in some small way to this amazing blog and how much it means to me.
Highlights… After a few lean years post-pandemic on the gig front, as an avid concertgoer, 2025 proved productive for getting my mojo back for live music. I caught Karnivool in action for the first time in over a decade, ripping through infectious prog metal anthems and impressive new jams from their highly anticipated album set to drop in early 2026. An unexpected gig was a solo show in my hometown from none other than former Fear Factory legend Burton C Bell, performing in a local dive venue. Ploughing through career classics and some solo material, the setlist offered up gems like “Drive Boy Shooting,” “Scapegoat,” “Scumgrief,” and “Replica.” It was a nostalgic joy.
Meanwhile, after years of stubbornly jaded neglect, I finally bit the bullet and witnessed Metallica live. Probably a couple of decades too late, however, as an impressionable young’un raised on early Metallica, it was a cool experience to finally see the aging juggernaut in a stadium setting that will remain in the memory bank for years to come. A couple of days later, I once again caught the mighty Opeth at the iconic Sydney Opera House with quality support from Caligula’s Horse, before rounding out the year by finally seeing Dying Fetus live in an extra beefy triple bill including Ashen and 200 Stab Wounds. Good times indeed….
Big thanks to everyone for keeping this mighty blog running and cogs turning. From the ever-growing readership and awesome AMG community, through the entire, recently beefed-up writing crew, inspiring colleagues and all-around awesome people, to the higher powers (Steel Druhm, Angry Metal Guy, Sentynel, Doc Grier, and all the other editors) for their extra behind-the-scenes work whipping us into line. Cheers all to a safe, happy, and healthy 2026.
#ish: Green Carnation // A Dark Poem Part I: The Shores of Melancholia – After being mesmerized by Green Carnation’s timeless opus Light of Day, Day of Darkness many years ago, I never really expanded my listening beyond that widely regarded masterpiece. Then comeback album Leaves of Yesteryear dropped in 2020 and turned me from a casual listener into an avid fan of their work. A Dark Poem Part I: The Shores of Melancholia signals a long-awaited return and the first part of a planned trilogy from the seasoned Norwegian veterans of classy, mood-driven progressive metal. Admittedly, this album didn’t reach the dizzying heights or quite gain the traction of its predecessor. Nor does it disappoint, adding another finely crafted chapter in Green Carnation’s enduring career, while building excitement for the two albums to complete the trilogy. Meticulously crafted and chock full of emotive, silky, and delightfully catchy gems, A Dark Poem Part I: The Shores of Melancholia is another top-shelf prog metal jam.
#10. Caustic Wound // Grinding Mechanism of Torment – Back in 2020, Seattle’s Caustic Wound emerged from the muck and unleashed a gnarly ball of unvarnished deathgrind rage courtesy of debut, Death Posture. Due to the endearing old school charms and brawling, stomping attack, Death Posture left a lasting impression, amping anticipation for their long-awaited return on sophomore slab, Grinding Mechanism of Torment. Though a little less refined and losing a smidgen of the debut’s grimy charm, Caustic Wound otherwise pounded out wickedly crunchy, buzzsawing deathgrind with violent glee, infectiousness, and subtle variety to keep you coming back for more. The album’s tight construction and propulsive performances deftly harness the controlled chaos and blasty, groove-laced fun, as the likes of “Drone Terror,” “Advanced Killing Methods,” and “Blood Battery” attest.
#9. Phantom Spell // Heather & Hearth – One of the purest and nostalgia-driven prog releases of 2025, the sophomore album from Seven Sisters singer/guitarist Kyle McNeill was a progtastic delight, wielding old-timey, ’70s prog feels with a transportive, fantastical flair. Phantom Spell crafted a timeless, epic yet remarkably fresh experience, despite the obvious devotion to progressive rock legends and eras of the past. Dueling guitar leads, rollicking organ, and tight, expressive rhythms shine across a superbly performed and produced opus. For all the musical smarts, clever progressive arrangements, and technical showmanship, McNeill’s songwriting and powerful vocals are spot on, resulting in a nuanced though hugely hooky and focused collection, infused with folk and classic heavy metal elements, complementing the classic progressive rock core. Bookended by two spectacular epics (‘The Autumn Citadel” and stunning, heart-wrenching melodies of the closing title track), Heather & Hearth is equally compelling in its more compact, punchy forms (“‘Evil Hand,” “Siren Song”).
#8. Barren Path // Grieving – Grind delivered big time in 2025, with numerous high-quality releases to absorb. None quite delivered the hammer blow impact of the debut LP from Barren Path, featuring Gridlink alumni, including grind shredding extraordinaire Takafumi Matsubara. It’s amazing what can be achieved in a manic thirteen minutes of calculated mayhem and precision deathgrind madness. Barren Path shares traits with Gridlink’s razor-sharp precision and abrasive intensity; however, it refuses to be pigeonholed or cast into the shadows of the Gridlink legacy. Beefy production, coupled with a prominent death metal influence, riffs to burn, gripping performances, and techy edge, Grieving loudly announced Barren Path as the next innovative heavy hitter to take the grind scene by storm. All too brief if utterly compelling, I’m excited to see what this elite line-up can cook up next as they set about creating their own unmatched legacy.
#7. Changeling // Changeling – For the second time in my 2025 top ten, an album surpasses the hour-length mark, often questionable territory as far as optimal album length. The prolific Tom Geldschläger (aka Fountainhead) hired an army of high-profile musicians and contributors to bring his elaborate progressive death metal vision to vibrant life with an overstuffed and incredibly entertaining, wildly ambitious debut opus. Amongst the core lineup, Morean (Alkaloid, Dark Fortress) lends his unique vocals, Virvum’s Arran McSporran features on fretless bass, and powerhouse Mike Keller (ex-Fear Factory, Raven, Malignancy) mans the kit, while a stack of instruments, choirs, and guest musicians add further dimensions and intricacies to the color palette. Changeling is guilty of overreaching on occasions, and the whole thing is an overstimulating example of excess. And though far from perfect, Changeling is nevertheless an astonishingly complex, progressive, and technical marvel. Its bombastic, adventurous gallop, slick songcraft, earwormy hook,s and otherworldly melodies conjure up a hugely inventive and endlessly fun platter.
#6. Turian // Blood Quantum Blues – Generally, I tread carefully from anything core-related in the realms of hardcore, metalcore, and deathcore. I am not opposed to each style, but usually it takes a certain something to win me over. Another winning recommendation from the flippered one, Blood Quantum Blues, the third LP from Seattle metallic hardcore merchants Turian, found the band toying and upending their sound in wonderfully creative and ambitious fashion. Like other genre-busting albums, such as The Shape of Punk to Come and Miss Machine, Turian fuck with the conventions of their metallic hardcore. Shattering boundaries by lacing their signature sound with sharply integrated elements of rock, electronics, sludge, and grind, whipped into a grooving, raw smackdown and addictive delight, Turian pulls no punches and pushes their songwriting creativity to the limit. The line-up nails the newfound songwriting versatility through tight, explosive performances, topped by the raw intensity and charismatic vocals of Vern Metztli-Moon, who channels deeply personal, trauma-informed reflections of her Native American heritage, with vigor and rage.
#5. Retromorphosis // Psalmus Mortis – Carrying on the timeless legacy of legendary Swedish tech death wrecking crew Spawn of Possession, Retromorphosis emerged featuring the bulk of the SoP line-up and a rejuvenated sound, both familiar and energized enough to craft a new chapter of tech death excellence. Herein lies the key to the album’s success. SoP was such a special and unique entity in the tech death field. Retromorphosis pulls the signature songwriting components and twists and contorts them into their own slick interpretation, without simply rehashing past glories. Psalmus Mortis proved to have significant staying power since dropping early in the year, even amidst a pretty stacked year for quality death and tech death albums. Retromorphosis decorate their knotty, fluid and aggressive compositions with tasteful synth work, symphonic flourishes and bedazzling solos, whether charting smartly progressive, labyrinthine terrain (“The Tree,” “Machine”), and thrashy, warped tech death (“Aunt Christie’s Will,” “Vanished,” “Retromorphosis”).
#4. Terror Corpse // Ash Eclipses Flesh – After already delivering a killer grind opus earlier in the year, Terror Corpse got the creative juices flowing again in dropping a full-length debut of immense power and old school grit. Featuring a power-packed lineup featuring past and present members of acts including Malignant Altar, Oceans of Slumber, Necrofier, and Insect Warfare, Terror Corpse comes seasoned with death metal wisdom and experience. Despite a lack of innovation, Terror Corpse winds back the clock and transcends the typical old school death metal hordes. Injecting venomous strains of grind, death-doom, sinister atmospheres, and gut-churning brutality into beefy, riff-driven songs that fondly recall death metal’s glory days, Terror Corpse forge ahead into the here and now with their own character and inspired songwriting. Topped by a bevy of instantly gratifying, oozing riffs and Dobber Beverly’s elite drumming, Ash Eclipses Flesh is a gripping old school death experience.
#3. Dax Riggs // 7 Songs For Spiders – The return of Dax Riggs, and by extension the most unexpected re-emergence of the legendary Acid Bath, were surely two of the most heartwarming music moments of 2025. As a longtime devotee of both Dax and Acid Bath, I had begun worrying that Dax’s music-making days had passed as he slunk into the background and essentially dropped off the radar for the best part of fifteen years. While holding out slim hope Acid Bath will decide to cross our shores, I am stoked Dax and crew are getting the long-overdue credit and exposure they deserve. Though not strictly metal, Dax’s comeback album, and first since 2010’s Say Goodnight to the World, marks a triumphant and warm, comforting return from an underground icon. 7 Songs for Spiders delivered the goods, as Dax and friends dropped an album with a familiar, nostalgic feel that refuses to rest on its laurels. Riggs’ defining vocals sound as vital and deliciously smoky as ever, weaving signature morbid tales, deadly hooks, and earworm melodies through subdued yet deceptively hefty and bluesy folk-doom ditties.
#2. Messa // The Spin – It would be an oversimplification to describe Messa’s fourth LP as a streamlined version of the enigmatic Italian band’s doom-centric formula. Each album has impressed in its own unique way, adding intoxicating twists and charm to continually evolve and refresh their sound. The Spin carries over elements of their past works and character-defining idiosyncrasies, yet feels like Messa’s most laser-focused, accessible, and direct album to date, and also one of their best. While I’ve enjoyed each of the band’s prior works, The Spin is the band’s most efficient and instantly gratifying, and addictive album. Easily Messa’s shortest opus, The Spin, uncorks killer tune after tune. Sumptuous melodies and rich textures color blockbuster doom bangers (“At Races,” “Fire on the Roof”), residing alongside atmospheric, jazz-dappled charmers (“The Dress”), bluesy, emotive slow burners (“Immolation”), and brooding, psych-tinged doom (“Thicker Blood”).
#1. Tómarúm // Beyond Obsidian Euphoria – Weirdly enough, my number one picks often don’t materialize as obviously as one might expect. This has largely been a trend throughout my tenure here at Angry Metal Guy. In all honesty, any of the top three could have been interchangeable in the top spot, but I reserved top honors for the spectacular second LP from Atlanta band Tómarúm. All the more surprising due to sleeping on their well-received debut, Beyond Obsidian Euphoria smacked me upside the cranium with an explosion of creativity and ambitious songcraft, encompassing elements of progressive black, melodic death, and tech death bombast. It’s an overly ambitious, sometimes slightly messy masterwork. Yet the eye-watering 68 minutes largely warrant its exhaustive length. Sure, shrewd editing here and there may have tightened things up. However, the whole experience is so consistently gripping and superbly written and performed that minor quibbles are squashed well below the surface. This fully loaded, immersive masterwork sparkles and scorches through tremendously crafted, multi-faceted compositions, including standout epics, “Shallow Ecstasy,” “Shed This Erroneous Skin,” and “Silver, Ashen Tears,” nestled harmoniously against the blunt force discordance of ‘Blood Mirage,” and compact progressive fireworks of closer “Becoming the Stone Icon (Obsidian Reprise).”
Honorable Mentions:
- Sigh // I Saw the World’s End – Hangman’s Hymn MMXXV – Skepticism of the dangerous game of the re-record was swept aside in a stunning reimagining of their 2007 classic.
- Plasmodulated // An Ocean ov Putrid, Stinky, Vile, Disgusting Hell – The album title says it all. Delightfully scabby, grooving old school death, seasoned with quirky Voivodisms.
- Igorrr // Amen – When seeking that taste of batshit crazy experimentation and avant-garde lunacy, Amen proved a reliable tonic. A challenging, though freakishly creative and addicting listen.
- Blood Vulture // Die Close – A grungy, Gothy slab of doom designed by talented Two Minutes to Late Night host Jordan Olds (aka Gwarsenio Hall). The future appears bright, judging by this highly addictive debut, which garnered lots of rotation throughout the year.
- Vittra // Intense Indifference – Hugely impressive melodic death platter from Swedish up-and-comers Vittra. Drawing inspiration from their homeland’s classic melodeath past, Vittra injects oodles of thrashy energy, inspired axework, and hooky songcraft, bringing a fresh edge to a retro sound.
- Dormant Ordeal // Tooth and Nail – Perhaps a little late on this one, however, after spending considerable time with Dormant Ordeal’s latest opus, the hype and critical praise are indeed justified—a fine example of brutal, crushing Polish blackened death.
- Species // Changelings – Admittedly, like various other overlooked gems, I didn’t spend as much time as I’d like with Changelings. But catching up has been a blast. Species brought the weird on this wacky, proggy technical thrash thrill ride, not to be missed.
Disappointment o’ the Year:
Sadly, we lost a number of metal legends in 2025, headlined by three individual legends that had a profound impact on me over the years. There will never be a larger-than-life frontman/metal icon like Ozzy Osbourne. While his demise was not unexpected, it left a huge void and an incredible legacy never to be matched. At the Gates and all-around iconic Swedish vocalist Tomas Lindberg sadly passed away following a horrible illness, while former Mastodon guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds tragically passed in a motor vehicle accident. Rest in Peace legends….
Non-Heavy Picks (snapshot):
- Aesop Rock (Black Hole Superette & I Heard It’s a Mess There Too), clipping., Bon Iver, Miguel.
Song o’ the Year:
Messa – “Fire on the Roof” – Narrowing down a definitive song o’ the year candidate is often a futile task. Twenty-twenty-five was no exception. Rather than overthink or analyze the situation, I locked in one of the year’s most addictive, replayable gems from Messa’s stunning fourth LP, The Spin.
Dear Hollow
Welcome to the end of 2025! We at AMG hope the year has been kind to you—that your lives are filled with love, your hearts with joy, and our world with peace. I hope that you have found your people and have those you can lean on. If we have ever given you a voice, a platform, or just love and support when you need it, then we have done our jobs.
It feels redundant to say that this year has been a roller coaster, but 2025 pulled no punches. In May, the Hollow household welcomed a second kiddo, a boy, into the fold. He is a supremely easy, endlessly happy little guy, but the stresses of parenthood—and especially of two kids—are a daily lesson of “bend, don’t break.” Our daughter is now four, and learns new things and says sassy things day in and day out, enjoying gymnastics and dancing, and singing around the house for fun.
My reviewing has remained steady this year, if not a little less than the usual. Between parenting two kids, working as a high school English teacher to increasingly apathetic kids, working on a noir crime novel that has paid dividends in complexity (and all the noir jazz my ears can handle),1 continuing to unpack my upbringing and trauma and how they all have affected my views on family, relationships, and self-love, you can imagine how wild each day has been. But I’ve somehow managed it, and the end of the year is here to celebrate it.
Special shout-outs to those who have been instrumental in my journey this year: the ineffable and tireless dream team of Steel Druhm and Angry Metal Guy, the genre-confusing Dolphin Whisperer, my fellow Whitechapel apologists Iceberg and Alekhines Gun, and those who have been supportive all year (Thus Spoke, Killjoy, and Mystikus Hugebeard). Couldn’t have done it without y’all.
To the metal!
#ish. Kalaveraztekah // Nikan Axkan – Subject of a rollicking Rodeö, Mexico’s Kalaveraztekah’s balance of cosmic Aztec atmosphere and cutthroat death metal is sublime. Riffs for days balanced by an experimental madness that conjures cosmic destruction and rebirth, Nikan Axkan recalls the antics of Hell:on, folk influence only sharpens its attack and injects an atmosphere of foreboding. Refusing both gimmick and total immersion, Nikan Axkan is riffy, fun, and evocative, made for a mosh-pit and a soundtrack for the destruction of the Five Suns.
#10. La Torture des Ténèbres // Episode VIII – Revenge of Unfailing Valor – If you’re like MalteBrigge, you’ll probably end up with tinnitus and a sprained shoulder once Episode VIII kicks in, but Ottawa one-woman raw black metal/noise outfit La Torture des Ténèbres returns to the bleak space-faring atompunk of its 2016 debuts alongsdie the dystopic rage that pervades more recent efforts – moments of peace adding dimension and texture. La Torture des Ténèbres is about as ambitious as raw black metal can get.
#9. Imperial Triumphant // Goldstar – Goldstar is Imperial Triumphant’s most accessible album, the NYC trio’s signature brand of death/black and jazz funneled into a straightforward art-deco-themed brutalizing. It’s no less adventurous, always punishing, and will stay with you long after your ears stop ringing from the sound of New York City taxis and decadent skyscrapers displayed in extreme metal format: more straightforward, more melodic. While its recent predecessors are an affluent nightlife, Goldstar offers a sunbathed New York City.
#8. Howling Giant // Crucible & Ruin – Nashville’s stoner outfit Howling Giant reconciles the melodies and riffs, exploratory songwriting, and mammoth hooks gathering in each movement of Crucible & Ruin. Featuring hints of knuckleheaded sludge and proggy chord progressions, it’s an album that keeps your attention for forty-eight minutes. New member Adrian Zambrano offers more atmosphere and layers of guitar riffs and melodies to go with the surefire dichotomy of instrumental heft and vocal ethereality. Crucible & Ruin is an experience of fun, subtlety, and above all, riffs.
#7. Geese // Getting Killed – Perhaps the vocals of NYC’s Geese don’t bother me because of Cameron Winters’ similarity to singer/songwriter John Mark McMillan,2 so the album’s sonic anxiety of noise rock, post-punk, country, and blues that creep in and out like lovers who never stay does not bother me. Getting Killed feels viciously aggressive, venomously satirical, and fluid and elastic in its humble movements. Geese are overrated Pitchfork-bait, sure, but an overrated hill to get killed upon regardless.
#6. Structure // Heritage – Steel Druhm’s the real masochist for low and slow, but the balance of sad death/doom and devastating funeral doom in Netherland’s Structure is special. The guitar work in the mammoth riffs, melodic leads, and climactic solos has just a much of a voice to contribute as Pim Blankenstein’s formidable roars—as if griever and grieved converse in both melancholy and rage. Heritage is Structure paying homage to doom metal’s contemplation while paying its dues in death metal’s viciousness – pure devastation.
#5. Patristic // Catechesis – Catechesis is born out of the “impending shadow of the cross.” As tumultuous as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the church and pagan rebellion, the black/death of Rome’s Patristic assaults the ears with tension, fury, and reverence. The first act is the holy war, a rationalization of steel and zealotry, while the second is the way the soldier tells it to his children, the lessons and cautions borne of blind faith and its devastation. Cathechesis is not only fiery sermons and unending blasphemy, but regret and meditation.
#4. In Mourning // The Immortal – I’ve loved Sweden’s In Mourning since their 2010 album Monolith: balancing chuggy guitars, progressive songwriting, and the slightest hints of doom (such as in 2008’s Shrouded Divine). The Immortal is an album that balances The Bleeding Veil’s darker elements, Garden of Storms’ signature melody, and The Weight of Oceans’ iconic patience. The Immortal offers yearning melodies and chords alongside vicious riffs, and melodeath has never sounded so good.
#3. Yellow Eyes // Confusion Gate – New York’s Yellow Eyes’ Confusion Gate conveys a black metal place better than most, an environment teeming with life. Like the Romantic Sublime, it maintains a crystalline beauty, like a light scattering through broken glass, and a madness born of terror—at the source of the light. Here is the crux of it, from poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The First Elegy”;
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’
Orders? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed
in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,
and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.#2. Igorrr // Amen – Gautier Serre’s work with Igorrr has rarely felt bad, but Amen evolves it from his typical standard. You get the typical apeshit antics in the midsection, but a full band fleshes out the jewel-encrusted skeleton for a fully, nearly spiritual experience. Minimalist compositions build upon a breakbeat before cracking into a full choir and death metal experience, while an overwhelming onslaught of insanity reminds us who exactly we’re listening to. Amen is hella fun, as expected, but also something we can take seriously.
#1. Primitive Man // Observance – Primitive Man is the heaviest band on the planet. While I’ve appreciated the Denver trio’s pitch-black approach to death metal laced with noise, doom, and sludge—from afar—Observance booked me in with upbeat tempos and a surprising melody. It swallows you whole like any good Primitive Man album ought to, but the devotion to deteriorating songwriting and weaponized noise. The atmospheric death/sludge counterpart to the riffs of Warcrab, for instance, Primitive Man offers a sound like no other—and it’s the best of the year.
Honorable Mentions:
- The Acacia Strain // You Are Safe From God Here – While incorporating the same ol’ hardcore beatdown you expect from the Massachusetts deathcore OGs,3 denser tones make for higher blasphemy. Simple math, trust me.
- Ethel Cain // Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You – Leaving behind the more experimental and darker tones in noise/drone counterpart Perverts, a more atmospheric and contemplative direction showcases the singer-songwriter’s nostalgic and gentle storytelling that does not shy away from darkness.
- Changeling // Changeling – While lacking the darkness and weight of Ingurgitating Oblivion, guitarist Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger is granted fretless freedom in a tech-death album whose lightness and amorphousness guide ethereal constructions of proggy sensibilities. More Dolphin Whisperer fare but still dope as hell.
- Author & Punisher // Nocturnal Birding – Tristan Shone releases an industrial sludge album that hits like an anvil, casting aside the more atmospheric tendencies for a headbanging good time, amplified by the crunch of new guitarist Doug Sabolick. Melodic motifs based on the birdcalls of migratory birds as a metaphor for immigrants, Shone and Sabolick offer the short and sweet despite a heavy-handed subject.
- Bad Angels // Until Silence – A late-year find, Polish composer Adrian Anioł concocts dense dark ambient sprawls with moody jazz, haunting saxophone glitches, ominous upright bass, and pitch-black meandering. Perfect for walks on spooky rainy nights.
Songs o’ the Year:
- Ethel Cain – “Dust Bowl”4
Surprises o’ the Year
- KPop Demon Hunters Soundtrack – Mainly, how much time I devoted to it. What can I say? I’m gonna be, gonna be golden.
- SpiritWorld // Helldorado – Knuckleheaded riffs for days.5
Disappointments o’ the Year
- Messa // The Spin – Maybe it’s because I saturated my year with sultry noir jazz, but Messa shorts its doom metal with some goofy jazz—all novelty, no substance.
- Orbit Culture // Death Above Life – Once again, the melodeath/thrash riff reigns supreme, but until they can get out from behind the wall of compression, the Swedes continue to tread water.
- Vildhjarta // Där skogen sjunger under evighetens granar – The undersung princes of atmodjent show up with the swampy djunz and forsake everything that makes them legendary. It’s djent—disappointingly nothing more.
-
Alcohol-Free Sparkling Wine Estates : French Bloom
In the Southern French region where sparkling wine was born, French Bloom—the brand behind highly acclaimed alcohol-free sparkling wines—acquired a 25-hectare vineyard and winery. In September 2026, when the site becomes oper…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #FrenchWine #Frenchwine #francais #france #French #FrenchBloom #frenchwine #french-bloom-estate #Wine
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2636708/alcohol-free-sparkling-wine-estates-french-bloom/
