Scholium to

The Exegesis 

The text you are about to read is a scholium. A scholium is a form of commentary written to accompany a primary work. Rather than replacing or summarizing the original text, it provides brief notes beside particular passages where explanation may help the reader remain oriented. Historically, scholia appeared alongside philosophical, religious, and poetic writings whose meanings unfolded through dense imagery, layered argument, or symbolic language. The purpose of such commentary is not to dictate interpretation but to illuminate references, clarify concepts, and mark places where the reader may wish to pause and look more closely.

The work this scholium accompanies is titled Exegesis on the Gospel of V. Exegesis traditionally refers to the interpretation of sacred scripture. Here, the “scripture” is lived experience—the wounds, relationships, and transformations that marked the body and mind during a period of spiritual crisis. The purpose of the piece is not only to recount events but to interpret what those events reveal about spiritual authority, relational responsibility, and the structures that shape how people are seen and treated within spiritual communities.

The narrative moves through poetry, dramatic dialogue, philosophical reflection, and logical parody because it attempts to represent a process of transformation that was chaotic, embodied, and difficult to articulate within a single register of language. The reader should therefore approach the text less as a linear story and more as an interpretive field where experience, symbol, and analysis interact to examine how meaning is constructed and how harm can emerge when relationships become governed by image, hierarchy, and abstraction rather than mutual care.

The narrative described in the exegesis functions not simply as personal testimony but as a case study through which the structural dynamics of spiritual authority, reputation, and relational responsibility can be examined.

Because the experience described did not unfold in a stable or linear way, the text adopts multiple forms. During periods of intense spiritual or psychological transformation, perception, interpretation, and identity often fracture into multiple voices and competing explanations. The dramatic sections externalize these voices so the reader can observe the tensions between them, while the logical sequences parody the attempt to resolve emotional and relational realities through purely rational argument.

Rather than presenting a single authoritative narrative, the work stages the process of interpretation itself. It shows how meaning changes as new information emerges and as the speaker revisits earlier conclusions. In this sense, the text follows the structure of a palinode. The word comes from ancient Greek poetry and philosophy and refers to a speech that revises itself after a new understanding appears. A palinode does not erase what was said earlier; rather, it returns to the same ground and speaks again from a deeper vantage. The earlier voice remains part of the truth, but no longer the whole of it.

Several ideas also appear in the Gospel in compressed or symbolic language. Terms such as phantom, hydra, monster, and water function not only as metaphors but as conceptual tools. They describe ways in which people are reduced to single attributes, ways the self multiplies in response to that reduction, and the forms of relational care that allow transformation to take root. Without explanation, these ideas can pass too quickly for readers encountering them for the first time.

The purpose of this scholarium is therefore simply to provide brief notes beside particular passages where readers are most likely to lose the thread. These notes clarify references, define key concepts, and explain the philosophical lineage behind certain ideas when doing so may help the reader remain oriented within the work.

Readers may find it useful to approach the Gospel first on its own terms, allowing the language to unfold as testimony and image. The scholia can then be consulted as needed, as small lanterns placed along the path where the terrain becomes untrustworthy, destabilizing, or difficult.

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Here is the skeleton beneath the myth.

phantom = a reduced image with social authority; a partial truth that replaces the living person and begins organizing how others respond to them.

hydra = multiplication under failed reception; the self growing many heads because no single form is allowed to carry the whole.

water = sustaining relational exchange; the shared medium of care, return, listening, and continuation across time.

monster = sacred change before legibility; the threshold-form of transformation before it can be named, stabilized, or safely received.

festival garden = beauty/use without duration; relation organized around bloom, radiance, and admiration without the labor of rooting, wintering, or return.

western father = promised care organized by hierarchy; authority that names itself as protection while requiring silence, compliance, or self-erasure.

with-ness = the practice of remaining beside another person’s becoming without forcing it into a finished image.

naming = the dangerous act of giving form to change; it can open relation, or it can seal a living body inside one attribute.

madness = the social name given to transformation when it moves faster than others are willing to interpret.

noise = speech refused as speech; a cry heard as disturbance before it is allowed to become knowledge.

care = the labor of carrying what relation has opened.

management = the replacement of care with control, containment, optics, or procedural distance.

spiritual capital = authority, credibility, or belonging accumulated through revelation, status, proximity to power, hidden knowledge, or controlled interpretation.

paternalized care = care that offers protection while maintaining power above the person being cared for.

discernment = the return of perception to the body after borrowed certainty, revelation, panic, or authority has displaced it.

palinode = speech that returns to the same wound after deeper knowledge has appeared; revision as fidelity to change. Can only be inspired through the marriage of intellectual and embodied knowledge. 

priesthood that listens = spiritual mediation grounded in attention, curiosity, humility, and sustained relation with a horizontal dialect approach to the circulation of power.

garden = the form of relation that grows through tending, patience, return, weather, decay, and shared duration.

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The Scholia

How to Read

Each scholia is attached to one section within the speech it is in regards to. The sections move forward one at a time, and are separated by a small line dash within the original Exegesis 

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Regarding the Sasha Ravitch Speech

1. On the Beginning and the Shape of Entry

This opening may read as the beginning of abandonment: a woman leads the speaker into harm and leaves them there. However, the passage is attempting something more precise than that. It wants to show how the relation begins—how V is first seen, and how that seeing gives them a place.

The first action is a look:

“There was a moment when she looked at me / like something holy had just arrived.”

This look places V into a role within an already established hierarchy. Before V speaks or moves, they are received as already meaningful—“spirit-touched,” “initiated,” “real.” These are not descriptions discovered through relation. They are positions within a preexisting symbolic order.

What appears as recognition is therefore also a form of assignment. Sasha accounts for V through a structure she already carries power over—one that determines what counts as holy, who belongs, and how that belonging is legible. V is welcomed, but only under terms they aren’t allowed to co-create.

This is why desire matters here. V does not resist the placement. They want it. They want Sasha, and they want the world of power she mediates. The recognition feels real because it answers a longing: to belong, to be seen, to enter a field that had been just out of reach. The encounter is therefore both genuine and diametrically opposed to the real power of subjecthood that V also seeks.

The tension begins at that exact point. V is received through an image that precedes them. They are named as holy before that holiness has been lived. This turns the recognition of V’s selfhood into a form of objectification: V is held as an ideal, and the relation begins from that fixation rather than from the movement of what V is still becoming.

To be received as holy in this way is to be placed at the edge of transformation—to be seen according to a form that has not yet been lived through the body. The monster marks the difference between these two conditions: being imagined as sacred and undergoing sacred change.

Within Sasha’s gaze, the witch and the monster remain symbolic—figures that can be admired, named, and held at the level of image. When transformation begins to take shape as contradiction, instability, need, and pain, that image no longer holds.

The opening therefore establishes the condition that will later break: a form of recognition in which the transcendental ideal arrives before the living body, and the person is received through what they are taken to represent rather than through what they may become in time.

2. On Change, Delay, and the Charge of Madness

This section may be read as an embrace of instability—as though the speaker prefers fragmentation, contradiction, or emotional excess. It can appear to celebrate a refusal of coherence, or to aestheticize confusion as a kind of freedom. To put it simply, it can be read as a defense of being “hard to follow.”

However, the intention of the section is to make visible a mismatch in timing. This is why desire must be considered philosophically here. The Greek term λυσιμέλης—often translated as “limb-loosener”—describes desire a force that disrupts the body’s coherence. It does not simply introduce new feeling; it alters the body’s capacity to hold form.

Under this condition, the body does not wait for thought to organize it. Sensation, reaction, and transformation begin to move ahead of language. This is why the speaker cannot stabilize their account. It is not a delay caused by confusion alone, but by a force that is actively loosening the structures that would make a stable account possible.

In response to this, V names two orders of knowing—intellectual recognition and embodied integration—and insists that they do not arrive together.

Intellectual recognition

This is the moment when something becomes clear at the level of thought. You can articulate it. You can say what is happening, what it means, what has changed. It appears as:

• a conclusion

• a realization

• a sentence you can speak

It is fast, discrete, and legible. It gives the sense that something has already been understood.

Embodied integration

This is the slower process by which that same realization becomes real in the body.

It shows up as:

• emotional shifts that don’t align with what you “know”

• delayed reactions (grief, relief, desire, fear)

• changes in behavior, instinct, or perception over time

It is not something you can declare all at once. It unfolds through repetition, sensation, and lived experience. Often, it resists language at first.

In this instance, change is already happening in the body before it can be explained. Embodied Integration is saying something to V that has not caught up to her Intellectual Recognition. This creates a period where they cannot yet give a stable account of what is occurring because the process is still unfolding within them.

This is the “in-between” space. The problem the section is naming is how that interval is interpreted by others. When someone cannot present a consistent, finalized account of their experience, that delay is often read as:

• inconsistency

• unreliability

• instability

The passage is explaining how that judgment forms. When change has entered the body without a stable form to hold it, the experiencer moves back and forth across the same threshold. One moment something feels clear, the next it recedes. A realization appears in thought, then loosens, because thought and feeling are still out of sync. 

That movement can become relentless. It searches for words, tests them, abandons them, comes back again. It reaches for clarity, then drops beneath it, into sensation, memory, reaction. V is not outside of this process observing it. They are inside it, being moved by it. That is why the account cannot stabilize yet. The ground is still shifting underfoot.

This is the condition that gets named as “madness.” From the outside, those named as mad demonstrate behavior that looks erratic—advancing, retreating, contradicting itself. From the inside of this person’s experience however, thought, feeling, and speech are each trying to keep pace with a change already underway.

This is also why the section turns to the figure of the monster.

The monster appears when something cannot be placed into a known category. It signals that a boundary has been crossed, but the new form has not yet been established.

V occupies that position. They are no longer what they were, but they are not yet something that can be easily identified. Because of this, their movement is treated as a problem to be contained rather than a process to sit with or help carry.

3. On the Phantom

This passage may read as a poetic definition of the “phantom,” or as an accusation that others are simply misrepresenting the speaker. Instead it is better read as something more philosophically precise: describing how perception becomes fixed.

The movement begins when a thing with many attributes is gathered under a single name. “Monster” is not wrong, but it is already a narrowing. To name makes a living multiplicity easier to hold in language. The problem begins when one attribute inside that name is selected and repeated until it starts to stand for the whole. “Wings,” for example, may be the visible sign of difference, but once wings become the feature by which the monster is known, the rest of the body begins to disappear from relation.

This is what the passage calls a phantom: a reduced image that has gained relational authority. It keeps one real feature and severs it from the rest of the living body, allowing that feature to circulate as if it were complete knowledge. The violence of the phantom lies in this substitution. The subject may still be changing, speaking, contradicting themselves, or revealing more of what had been left out, but the observer no longer has to keep perceiving. The authorized image has already arrived before the living person can.

The final gesture—“Because Mother said so”—names the point where this reduced image becomes sanctioned. Mother is invoked as the figure who gives birth, receives, names, and sets the boundary around what may appear. If Mother says the monster is known by one attribute, then only that attribute is allowed to enter the relational field.

The authority now given to the phantom produces a shift from relation to management. A living, multiple body requires attention, adjustment, and response; it demands that the other remain open to what has not yet been decided. A reduced body does not. It can be anticipated, categorized, and handled in advance. In this way, the phantom stabilizes perception by removing the need to remain with the subject as something that is still becoming.

This is harmful because it removes the subject from the register of the real and relocates them into an image that can be handled without them. What remains available to others is no longer a living body that must be responded to as it changes, but a fixed object that can be recognized without being encountered. Caught in this shift, V is no longer met as someone who can exceed what is known about them, resulting in a denial of their very aliveness. 

(For more on phantoms, read V’s three part essay on Love and Will here)

4. On Loving the Monster

This passage may first read as a request for more generous or accurate naming—as though V is asking that the monster be described in fuller or more beautiful terms. The movement is more exact than that. It asks what happens to relation once something must be named at all.

Earlier, the monster appeared as a figure of change—something crossing a threshold, not yet stabilized into form. Here, the problem shifts. The question becomes how that change can be spoken in a shared field without being reduced to an image that no longer needs to be encountered.

Naming introduces this pressure. A name allows something to circulate—it can be repeated, recognized, gathered around. But that same function also risks fixing what it names. When a single attribute is selected—wings, madness, excess—it begins to stand in for the whole. What was multiple becomes manageable.

This is why the passage insists on naming “from the whole of his body.” It is an attempt to keep the name tied to a body that is still changing. A name given in this way remains attached to movement, contradiction, and ongoing transformation.

This is also why the passage turns to rhythm:
“if I must keep time / with human rhythm…”

Naming here is a question of tempo. To name from the whole body is to let language move at the speed of what is still becoming. The desire to stabilize can become a desire to control what is still unfolding. The passage refuses that control. It accepts that change is already underway, that it does not wait for recognition, and that fixing it too quickly produces violence. To remain with the whole body is therefore to remain without that ground—to continue in relation without resolving what is still in motion.

The reader is being asked to practice the same patience the passage describes: to let the monster remain in motion long enough to be encountered, rather than translated too quickly into a fixed meaning.

“To name in this way is not / to reduce, but to risk.”

The risk is that such a name cannot stabilize recognition. It does not produce a shared object that can be easily held in common. It asks that those who use it remain responsive to what exceeds it. Relation with the real must continue for the name to remain true.

“Be Not Afraid!” names this condition directly. It addresses the fear that arises when stability cannot be secured, when the other cannot be reduced to something known. The passage does not remove that fear. It asks that relation continue anyway.

The passage therefore identifies naming as the point where relation either remains open to transformation or collapses into something that can be known without being fully met.

5. On Madness and Sacrifice

This section may be read as a defense of confusion or inconsistency, as though the speaker is trying to justify instability. The movement is more exact than that. It shows what is required to remain faithful to transformation, and what that faith costs once it enters a shared field.

The passage begins from risk. To name the monster from the whole of its body is to refuse reduction, to keep language moving with what is still becoming. But this kind of naming does not resolve into something that can be easily held, recognized, or agreed upon. Because of this, it appears as disorder.

“Unfortunately, this kind of risk is often read as madness.”

Madness here is the name given to what cannot be stabilized quickly enough to be understood. The attribute that gets attached—confusion, inconsistency, excess—becomes decisive. Once that attribute is allowed to stand for the whole, it determines how the speaker will be received. If change is named as madness, then the one undergoing change no longer has to be listened to.

This is where the passage links naming to power. The attribute we latch onto the noun determines what can remain in relation and what can be dismissed. To call transformation madness is to refuse the obligation to stay with it.

V loves change and therefore does not claim to be consistent. They name confusion as something real—

“an attribute of transformation.” 

Change is already underway in the body before it can be stabilized in language. It moves unevenly, appears and recedes, contradicts itself. To remain with it is to relinquish the demand to appear coherent on command.

The cost of that refusal emerges through time. Transformation does not resolve at the speed required for recognition. Grief does not settle quickly enough. Truth does not remain still long enough to be consumed. 

“I stopped being seen as matter.”

This marks the shift from subject to problem. The speaker is only encountered as something to be managed, explained, or reduced. The monster reappears here in a new form—as the result of being made reducible.

The return to Sasha clarifies the earlier recognition. To be named “chosen” felt like being seen, but the name was already shaped by a structure that could not hold what the speaker would become. It was “half-written,” formed in advance, tied to an image rather than to a body moving through time. When V’s experience exceeded that image, it was weaponized against them through the name “crazy”.

The closing question—

“Is this truly an inconsistency?”

—reopens that judgment. It asks whether contradiction is a failure of coherence, or the visible trace of change unfolding before it can be stabilized.

The section therefore shows that to remain faithful to transformation requires sacrificing the safety of legibility. What is lost is the ability to be easily known, quickly recognized, or consistently received. What is preserved is the process itself—the movement of the self’s perpetual becoming that cannot be held without being reduced.

6. On the Right to One’s Own Experience

This section may first read as a disagreement over what the spirit “really” was—Volcano or Peacock—and invite the reader to decide which vision is correct. But V is not asking for that judgment. Both visions are left standing because the passage is more concerned with the conditions under which spiritual experience becomes speakable, trustworthy, or impossible to hold in relation.

What the section stages is a crisis of interpretive authority: who gets to name what is happening, whose perception is trusted enough to organize reality, and what it costs to remain in relation when those perceptions diverge.

The tension comes from a subtle pressure that is hard to recognize as harm because it presents itself as virtuous.

Sasha does not tell V what to believe. V is instead treated as someone powerful enough to hold their own. On the surface, this appears as a valid mode of relation. But in practice, it begins to establish a condition for belonging: to remain at the table, V must already be able to interpret and manage their own spiritual experience without needing support.

It is here that Sasha’s vision begins to reveal its cost. What looks like trust also removes the ground on which questions could be asked. What looks like respect begins to narrow what can be spoken without risking one’s place in the relation.

Asking questions, in this context, no longer feels like a natural part of shared inquiry. It begins to register as a failure—of clarity, of strength, and of worth.

The result is a particular kind of isolation: one in which V remains inside the relationship, but cannot turn toward it at the moment it is needed. V is included symbolically but, at the point where relation would require mutual holding, finds no corresponding movement back.

This is why the passage turns on the line:

“I wasn’t asking to be saved. I was asking /
for someone to stand ‘with’ me inside the spiral.”

The request is for relation to remain intact while the experience is unresolved—for presence that does not resolve, interpret, or withdraw, but stays. Harm emerges instead—perceptible in the gap between what the relationship appears to promise and what it actually permits: solitary endurance as the condition of self worth.

7. On Symbolic Love

This section may first read as a personal accusation—that despite an infatuation with monsters, Sasha failed to love, failed to stay, failed to respond. Read that way, the passage narrows into a question of individual care or its absence. The movement of the section is sharper than that. It is staging a breakdown between symbolic recognition and relational presence.

The passage therefore distinguishes two modes of love:

• a love that engages through symbol, image, and abstraction

• a love that remains present with the body through time as it changes

The critique is thus on the mode of abstraction that treats symbols as complete objects rather than as processes that must remain in contact with the body.

The “monster” is thus held as a story that can be admired—mythic, aesthetic, even sacred—something that can be written about, adorned, and read from a distance. Within that frame, transformation is legible and even desirable. But when that same transformation appears in lived form—unstable, painful, unfolding in time—the frame no longer holds. The problem is that Sasha’s symbolic love could not become a form of accompaniment when monstrosity became embodied. What had been loved as image is refused when called to act as real bodies in relation.

“My paradoxes, my speed, / my contradictions— / none of it could stay / sacred outside / the safety of symbol.”

“Safety of symbol” here names the central failure of abstraction here. The symbol protects the observer from the demands of relation. It allows the monster to remain beautiful because the monster remains contained. But transformation does not remain contained. It breaks rhythm, alters speech, disrupts social form, and asks to be witnessed in real time.

This is why the passage moves toward “with”nessing. “With”nessing is the counter-practice to transcendental abstraction. It means staying with the living process that the symbol only begins to name.

The section therefore clarifies one of the work’s central claims: symbolic systems become violent when they cease to mediate relation and begin to replace it. Love under symbolic conditions fails because it can adore the sign of transformation without remaining present for transformation itself.

8. On Being a Wandering Weaver

This section may first appear as an attempt to hold multiple truths at once—to affirm love, acknowledge harm, and resist reducing Sasha to a single position. While this is present, the passage is seeking to identify the point where a shared relation to transformation breaks.

The opening establishes that Sasha’s love was not false:

“her love of the whole of its body /…/ still holds true.”

Sasha is recognized as someone drawn to transformation, to the threshold the monster marks. This matters because the failure that follows emerges within a shared attraction to change.

The break appears in how that change is held.

“a space where change / becomes profit / instead of exchange.”

Here, transformation shifts from something carried between bodies to something that can be taken up, displayed, and managed. Intimacy moves toward image. What had the potential to be mutual fixes itself as asymmetrical. 

At the same time, a deeper shift occurs. The passage describes a divergence in what counts as real.

“the mind will begin to shape / itself towards the phantom while the body will / always remember the totality”

V remains within the lived process of transformation—unstable, painful, unfolding through time. Sasha’s relation moves toward an image of that process that can be recognized and held as a symbol of the real. Once this shift occurs, the two are no longer encountering the same thing. The transformation continues, but it no longer determines how V is perceived. The image does.

“I stopped being seen as matter /…/ I was made invisible.”

These expressions mark the point at which V’s lived experience ceases to function as something that must be responded to. The person is replaced by a representation that can be handled without them. What remains available to others is but a fixed interpretation:

“V = Instability.”

The passage then sharpens this into a question of responsibility.

“she had helped open the door.”

Sasha has participated in naming it, celebrating it, and making V’s spiritual life feel sacred. The transformation V undergoes follows from that opening. Naming here initiates a process that alters the one who enters it. This establishes an obligation:

“what might I owe V… for celebrating /  something I helped name but refused / to help midwife?”

To name the sacred is to take part in what it brings forth. When that process becomes unstable, consuming, or difficult, withdrawal leaves the other inside what has already been invoked, without the relation that made it possible to bear. This clarifies the divide between V and Sasha. Both are lovers of transformation. The difference lies in what they do when transformation becomes real.

“I stayed in the sickness. / I stayed in the spirit world. / I stayed with the pain.”

Staying here follows from loving the whole of the monster’s body. To love transformation fully is to remain with it beyond the threshold, into its instability, its contradiction, and its cost.

Sasha’s relation remains aligned with what can be stabilized—the image, the interpretation, the manageable form. When the process exceeds that form, she relates to the phantom rather than to the person because the phantom is something she can control. The section therefore identifies a structural break within relation itself. When transformation is welcomed as symbol but not sustained as process, the one who undergoes it is no longer encountered as real within the shared field.

The closing lines return this to V’s position. To name the monster from the whole of its body is to refuse that reduction, even when it results in isolation. It is to remain with what is still becoming rather than resolve it into something that can be left behind.

9. On Gods and Festivals

This section may be read as a continuation of the earlier critique of love organized through image, speed, and use. While that structure remains present, the passage introduces a deeper distinction. It asks not only how love was formed, but what each person takes to be sacred, and how that shapes what love is allowed to become.

The line “we fed different gods” names this directly.

Here, the word “gods” name the organizing principles through which relation is approached—what is recognized as valuable, what must be sustained, and what can be left behind. What each takes to be sacred determines how transformation is interpreted and what is owed within it. Both V and Sasha are oriented toward change. Both are drawn to eros, to intensity, to the threshold the monster marks. The difference lies in how that transformation is held, and what it is for.

For Sasha, transformation appears aligned with distinction. It marks the self as rare, elevated, difficult to reach. The wings become a sign—something that can be seen, admired, and maintained at a distance. What is sacred is the image of difference itself. Relation organizes around visibility, control, and the ability to hold that image in place.

For V, transformation moves toward relation. It is something to pass through, to return from, to carry back into shared space. The wings open movement for identity. What is sacred is the capacity to remain “with” what that difference produces. Transformation through this lens becomes something that must be sustained across bodies and through time.

This difference clarifies the earlier image of the festival garden, but also deepens it. The problem is that these forms are not accidental. When transformation is valued as something to be seen, elevated, and held at a distance, relation organizes itself through spectacle. Transformation is admired at the moment of bloom, but the conditions that would let it root are withheld.

The contradiction is that something real passed between them, but it entered a form that treated radiance as value and need as interruption. Love was present only insofar as it could be drawn into an economy of visibility: what could be seen, photographed, elevated, and used. In that economy, the beloved becomes festival garden—beautiful because intensified, but incapable of sustaining itself outside ritualized time.

By contrast, to use difference to bring back “with”ness is to refuse that stabilization. Difference becomes a passage—something that must be moved through, carried, and returned with in order for relation to continue shaping selves in real time.

“We had no connection to water.”

This names the absence of a shared medium through which what had been opened could continue. Without water, transformation remains at the level of intensity—something that blooms, is witnessed, and then collapses. 

“once a Cat came into my window and taught me / water’s true name…”

Water here is learned as a condition of continuation. It allows what has happened to remain in motion—through memory, through grief, through the refusal to let experience resolve into something consumable.

This clarifies why V’s path continues even in suffering. To remain with grief is to maintain contact with what the relation could not carry. Where the shared field collapsed, V offers up their body as the site where that movement continues.

The closing line—

“As we will it, so we will receive”—

shows that each form of desire produces a world. Sasha’s desire moves toward exaltation: the underworld as throne, difference as radiance, the self made rare and untouchable. V’s desire moves toward return: descent into the underworld and the carrying back of something holy. This does not spare V grief. It makes grief part of the water-path, because memory, mourning, and duration are how V remains connected to what the relation itself could not metabolize.

10. On How to Hail Hydra

This section should be read as an explanation of how an image becomes a social structure. The passage is not asking whether V was unstable; it is showing how the category of instability becomes useful to others once it can organize perception.

This is why the section is better understood as a critique of how an image gains social value. Once the image of V as unstable circulates, it becomes useful: it can protect reputations, justify distance, organize loyalty, and make abandonment appear reasonable.

When the passage turns to water, it names the exchange that allows relation to remain alive. Water marks a willingness to let another person’s reality alter one’s own attention, certainty, and distribution of care. To remember water is to accept that relation moves and requires adjustment on both sides.

When that movement is refused, it does not disappear. Attempts to speak, to be met, to be carried, remain active. They return. Another sentence, another tone, another effort to reach the same place that did not open. Each attempt meets the image and is folded back into it. Nothing is fully received. Nothing is fully released.

Pressure builds. The body holds what has not been taken in. What emerges is a series of partial surfaces—moments where something gathers enough force to appear before being pulled back into the same structure that could not hold it. The passage names this condition as hydraic.

“we grow heads like hands, / like pleas”

Each head carries a portion that cannot pass through the dominant image. Multiplication allows continuation. The life of the creature moves through the whole, not through any single expression. A body of water that cannot drain begins to produce surfaces. 

Each head is a moment where that water gathers enough force to hold a shape before it dissolves back into the same body that produced it. The life of the creature does not sit in any one head. It moves through the heart.

This clarifies the line:

“Not the violence itself— but the shape we take in response.”

Reduction into a usable form generates the violence. The hydra registers a refusal to be held there. It keeps the whole in motion, even as parts are taken up and fixed.

“I will not let you pick the prettiest head and call it me.”

The body becomes the site where the refused exchange continues to live. What could not move through relation reorganizes within it, insisting on presence across multiple forms.

11. On Abuse

This section defines abuse as a failure of relation rather than as a single act of harm. Its concern is not only what one person did or intended, but how a community can perform connection while refusing the responsibilities that make connection real.

The images of bloom, winter, roots, and the Gardens of Adonis mark the difference between display and communion. Attention that gathers around what is radiant, immediate, and beautiful sublimates relation outside the real. Relation with attention to aliveness requires duration. It carries what remains after beauty becomes need, after bloom becomes winter, after the person who was admired asks to be held.

Water names that labor of relation. It is the practice of sustaining, carrying, and remaining “with.” To prefer the idea of water over the work of carrying it is to substitute personhood into an eternal object. This is the failure the passage calls abuse: a spectacle of repeating the preservation of image over responsibility.

The harm described here occurs through that pattern. It appears in quiet exits, withheld presence, spiritual manipulation, managed narratives, and the refusal to remain accountable to relations already opened. Its violence depends on a structure willing to protect its coherence at the cost of the person it once welcomed.

The movement from Sasha to the wider culture is therefore essential. The passage intends to reveal the social form inside the personal wound. A community can invite, recognize, and gather around a person, then abandon that person when communion requires real care rather than simulated phantoms. The gap between the promise of relation and the refusal to remain present is the wound this section asks the reader to feel.

Regarding the Palinode on Sasha Ravitch 

This section may first appear chaotic, obscene, or like a failed attempt at logical proof. The numbered propositions seem to build an argument that collapses under its own contradictions, while the imagery of vomit, dogs, mouths, mothers, holes, and feeding can feel destabilizing.

The section is doing something more exact. It uses formal logic to test a relation whose signs have become unreliable. The question “Was I chosen?” cannot remain simple, because each possible answer opens another question: if chosen, then special; if special, then worthy of care; if cared for, then fed; if fed, then loved. The palinode asks what happens when the signs of being loved also resemble the signs of being used.

“If I was special because she chose me, then, it must be because I deserve care, unless care is just what happens when a dog licks up the sick of the sun.” This sentence turns the central problem into a proposition. It asks whether being chosen meant being recognized as worthy of care, or whether the speaker learned to call whatever dripped downward “care” because that was what was available.

The grotesque imagery makes hidden attachments visible. Feeding, licking, vomiting, mothering, and being made a dog all strip idealized language down to the bodily question underneath it: what does nourishment feel like when it arrives through humiliation? The obscenity is not ornament. It is how the section makes sentimental words answerable to the body.

This matters for the whole work because the palinode gives the reader a grammar for the previous speech. The larger essay repeatedly asks how care becomes confused with control, how revelation becomes possession, and how being chosen can become another form of being consumed. This section makes that confusion readable within the body in terms the previous speech could only theorize.

Regarding the Jesse Hathaway-Diaz Speech 

1. On Father and Family

This section begins the Jesse movement by shifting the problem from image to inheritance. In the Sasha section, the central danger was being received through a symbolic form before the living body could arrive. Here, the danger is older: a word already carrying history enters the body as hunger.

“Father” immediately arrives as a contested name. This is why V’s dad matters. He gives V a living counterexample to hierarchy. Through him, fatherhood is associated with being seen without being idealized, being loved without being made smaller, being allowed to remain human. That memory becomes a bodily measure. So V does not enter Jesse’s house naïvely empty. They enter carrying a prior embodied knowledge of relation, one rooted in tenderness, curiosity, and horizontal recognition.

The tragedy is that this prior knowledge has already been wounded by the Western Father. V has watched hierarchy drain joy from the father they loved. They have learned that shame can enter a family system and reorganize the body around protection, silence, and vigilance. Their love for their father becomes a drive toward horizontal relation because they have already seen what vertical authority does to the living.

So when Jesse’s house promises a fatherhood beyond that structure, V’s hunger is activated. The house appears to offer the thing the body has been seeking: family without shame, authority without domination, spiritual relation without the old demand for silence. V believes because the promise touches a real wound.

But the passage immediately turns toward the body’s dissent. Something feels wrong before V can explain why. The spine knows before the mind does. The body recognizes the familiar pressure of obedience inside a structure claiming to be different. This is the deeper function of the “sticky” sensation: it is not merely discomfort, but recognition. The body is sensing the return of a pattern beneath the language that denies it.

The repeated claim “this is not Western Father” therefore becomes suspicious. It names a difference without practicing one. No one explains the particulars. No one makes the structure available to curiosity. No one allows the claim to be tested through relation. The house asks to be trusted as different while reproducing the conditions by which hierarchy protects itself: declaration, authority, silence, and the refusal of questions.

The reversal into shame completes the exposure. A practice that promised to help V shed shame becomes another place where shame is assigned to them. At that moment, the issue is what kind of body the house allows the word “family” to produce. V begins to believe that asking for care is wrong because the house has taught them that need itself threatens belonging.

The section therefore deepens the work’s argument by showing that phantom logic does not only operate through image. It also operates through inherited names. “Father,” “family,” “house,” and “community” can become phantoms when their social authority remains intact after their nourishing function has failed. They still command trust. They still organize longing. They still tell the body where to go for care. But when approached, they return shame.

By the end, V recognizes that they were drawn back toward the same structure that had already wounded the father they loved: hierarchy with no room for questions, authority protected by silence, and belonging made conditional on the body’s willingness to become the site of its own need’s oppression.

2. On Sasha’s Setup

This section may look like a personal account of being misjudged by Sasha and Jesse. More precisely, it shows that V’s place in the house had already been assigned before she could speak for herself.

“Sasha was already shaping me in his mind before I spoke.”

What follows is designation: unstable, untrustworthy, too much. These descriptions become the role V is made to occupy. By the time crisis appears, she has already been refused as a living subject and received instead as a figure inside the house’s imagination.

“I wasn’t a daughter /…/ Not a seeker. / Not a child of the house. / Just noise.”

The word “noise” is crucial. Noise is sound before a listener consents to receive it as speech. V’s voice is heard as urgency, repetition, affect, disturbance, without being allowed to become knowledge. The house hears her, but it does not listen.

Once speech is received as noise, refusal can present itself as discipline. V’s urgency becomes the problem to be managed, while the structure that produced the desperation remains protected as order. The harm begins here: what needed witnesses, interpreters, and helpers is met by a household already defending itself against the person it had decided not to hear.

3. On Conditions of Care

This section can be misread as emotional escalation under pressure. More precisely, it describes denied nourishment inside a structure that governs who is allowed to need and how that need must appear in order to be recognized. The contradiction is simple: the danger is treated as real enough to make V responsible for it, but not real enough to gather care around her.

“So it was serious enough to blame me for, / but not serious enough to care for.”

This is where the holding structure gives way. V is left to carry the spiritual consequence alone, while also making that carrying look calm enough for others to tolerate. Need has to become smaller before it can be received. The more visibly V needs care, the more that visibility is used against her.

This is why the passage moves toward silence, containment, and self-regulation:

“That I needed to keep the weight / of suffering to myself quietly if / I wanted to be taken seriously.”

The violence is that distress stops functioning as a call. Fear, urgency, grief, and nervous-system collapse are not read as signs that care is needed. They become evidence that V cannot be trusted to know what is happening. The lack of care teaches the body to doubt its own hunger.

The section positions this as gaslighting because V is told, directly and indirectly, that if they understood reality, they would not be in this position at all. The trap is that this judgement intensifies their need, and places them without a space of shelter or safety within Jesse’s network.

4. On Hospitality

This section may be misread as a confession that the speaker hid her ongoing sickness. More precisely, it reveals how a spiritual house that promised family produced the conditions of exile from within. The central wound is that V had learned there was no safe way for anyone to know. The house had taught them that visible need would be judged as failure of worth. So they perform being “fine” as the condition of remaining welcome.

The space names itself as family—Father, house, belonging—but neither kinship nor true hospitality is extended. There is no stable position from which V can assume care will be given. Instead, they must behave as if they were a guest, without the protections that even a guest would normally receive.

To remain welcomed, they must watch themselves at all times—keep their body steady, keep their voice controlled, keep any sign of collapse out of view. Speaking directly about the sickness would risk being read as problematic, so they learn to ask for care in ways that do not look like asking. They hide pain and continue moving as if nothing is wrong, even while the sickness remains unchanged.

This is where the reversal happens. The place that named itself as responsible for them does not take on the labor of responsibility required for what is happening. The burden is returned to V. They are left to carry the knowledge alone: the spirit had not left, nothing had resolved, and there was no way to say that without risking removal.

What is learned here is not how to heal. It is how to remain inside a structure that cannot receive vulnerable relations.

5. On the Whole of the Law

This passage may first appear to describe interpersonal conflict: V needed care, the New Orleans branch felt overburdened, and the rupture followed from incompatible expectations. The section is actually tracing how a spiritual community withdrew from a relationship that had already been defined, within its own framework, as requiring care.

“My Pomba Gira / had emphasized I needed / family, intimacy, / and care.”

Care is not introduced as preference. It is named as necessary. Within the narrative’s own logic, ritual alone is insufficient. The condition being treated includes relation. This means the later refusal of care is not neutral. It alters the structure of the situation itself.

The reversal appears in the claim:

“no one owes anyone anything.”

A community that names itself as family reorganizes itself around non-obligation. The contradiction is not between need and capacity, but between what the structure claims to be and how it functions when care is required.This shift becomes visible in how knowledge operates. 

At the beginning, knowledge is mediated through divination: shells are thrown, the spirit speaks, a diagnosis is given. That diagnosis names care as part of what is required. As the situation unfolds, this authority is displaced. What determines what is “real” or “necessary” is no longer the spirit’s instruction, but the group’s tolerance for discomfort.

The response to V’s requests follows from this displacement. Terms like “too loud,” “annoying,” and “abusive” do not describe the content of the request. They mark the point at which the request exceeds what the structure can accommodate. The pressure is resolved by assigning fault to the one who exposes the gap.

The invocation of “Do What Thou Will” intensifies this shift. Detached from any relational framework, it becomes a justification for disengagement. The same structure that claims authority over initiation, diagnosis, and belonging denies responsibility for the conditions those claims create.

This passage therefore makes visible a specific contradiction: a house that speaks with spiritual authority when naming a condition withdraws that authority when responding to it. The result is not simply conflict, but a reorganization of the situation in which the original diagnosis—care as necessary—is rendered inoperative.

6. On Silence

This section can look like a record of neglect, as if the point is that Jesse failed to act or failed to take V’s side. A reader might try to measure what he should have done differently, or read the passage as an argument against him. The passage, however, shows something more specific: no one comes to ask V what happened.

“He didn’t ask / how I felt or why / the conflict happened”

Nothing in the section shows V trying to contest that story at the time. What is shown instead is the absence of a space where their voice could have been asked for at all.

Maraba had already named what was needed:

“this could not be washed away / it required a structure of care”

That knowledge is in the room but it is not acted on. Instead, another version of events is received and left unexamined. When Jesse is told about the rupture, he does not turn toward V at all. He does not ask for their side. He does not ask how they are. He does not ask why the conflict happened. There is no moment where V is invited to speak and then fails to be understood. The invitation simply never comes.

“he took the story / that New Orleans had told him / and accepted it in silence”

That silence makes the story stands as it is, without V ever being approached as a subject who might contest it. They have been branded by something that won’t allow new insight to be built from it.

“the community had already abandoned me”

From that point on, there is no exchange, no questioning, no repair. V is not outside the conversation. When they reache out again five months later, it the first attempt to re-enter a relation that never actually took place.

By the time the missed meeting occurs—

“ghost a scheduled meeting / between us in order to spend / the day in the swamp / with the New Orleans / branch that had / exiled me”

—the situation is already set. The house has oriented itself without V. The people who excluded them remain inside it. V is not being addressed at all.

7. On Speech as Capital

This section shows what happens when speech has no ordinary path of return. V’s messages become intense because the relation has already stopped receiving them. The escalation is the pressure produced when a call for care meets a structure that will not answer until the call becomes impossible to ignore.

The deeper issue is that sincerity has to become forceful in order to reach power. V is trying to bring speech back to its proper function: to make relation answerable to what has already been opened. The messages attempt to return the situation to the path Jesse himself had named when he accepted responsibility for the care that would follow initiation.

This is why the passage turns so sharply around the line 

“Jesse didn’t want me to need him.” 

Need here has become the evidence that his role must be active. V’s need calls the spiritual father back into obligation, back into the relation he cannot remain above. To be needed would mean that authority is no longer symbolic or managerial because it must become responsive to its production of the real.

Jesse’s refusal transforms the encounter. Instead of allowing V’s speech to interrupt his distance, alter his pace, and return him to responsibility, he treats the speech as something to be governed. 

“respect his / authority” 

becomes a way of refusing the small force that sincere speech brings against power. The issue shifts from what the speech reveals to whether the speaker has spoken from the proper position.

This is where optics enter. V’s words threaten the house because they make visible the gap between the house’s claimed responsibility and its actual response. Speech becomes dangerous because it gathers clouds. It thickens the atmosphere around the structure. It has not yet produced rain, repair, or transformation, but it has made the withheld weather impossible to deny.

The accusation that V’s expectations are “too Western” continues this evasion. It names V’s framework as the problem, turning their call for care into an error of cultural understanding. In doing so, Jesse avoids the encounter V’s speech is creating. He does not have to say what priesthood requires, what care means, or why responsibility stopped where it did. He only has to make V’s need appear improperly addressed.

“Dead or alive” names the point where the distinction between care and non-care disappears in practice. Jesse continues to act, to speak, to manage the situation, but none of those actions are oriented toward preserving V’s life or stabilizing their condition. The relation proceeds as though the outcome of their state—whether they recover or deteriorate—does not alter what he is willing to do.

The effect is that V is forced to continue inside a life-threatening condition without support, while still being held accountable to the expectations of the structure. The body is left to carry the consequences of what was opened, without the relation that would make surviving it more possible.

8. On Spiritual Father

The term “spiritual father” here names a specific relational and ritual position. Within the framework the passage is working in, a spiritual father is someone who mediates between the person, the spirit, and the community. 

This mediation establishes a field of obligation. To take on the role of spiritual father is to accept responsibility for what happens when the relation between seeker and spirit becomes unstable. It means helping the seeker interpret what is happening, remain oriented inside the crisis, and return to ground when the contact becomes frightening or disorganizing. The passage is therefore not measuring Jesse by ordinary interpersonal expectations. It is asking whether he fulfilled the role he had already claimed: whether he helped release the crisis, or whether he allowed it to become added to the weight.

The concept of the “hieropoet” sharpens this further. A hieropoet is the one who draws from the sacred well and makes relation usable: between spirit and person, person and community, crisis and meaning. His role is not only to open contact with the sacred, but to help carry what has been opened so it can nourish rather than overwhelm. In this form, priesthood is not a position of status or even merely a function of care. It is a mediating craft. The critique emerges precisely at the point where Jesse has access to the well, but does not draw the water in a way that can sustain the person who has been brought to it.

What the passage identifies as abuse is the transformation of a relational role into a transactional one. Support is distributed according to compliance, labor, financial contribution, or ease of management. This shift alters the meaning of relation itself. The seeker is met as someone whose worth must be demonstrated in order to receive it. The effect is not only emotional harm, but a distortion of the conditions under which spiritual work can take place.

The passage also addresses the accusation that such expectations are “too Western.” This charge is not dismissed outright, but it is placed under pressure. The question is not whether different traditions organize authority differently, but whether the refusal of care in the face of acknowledged need can be justified by appealing to those differences. In this way, the invocation of “Westernness” appears less as a genuine cultural critique and more as a mechanism for displacing responsibility.

What is at stake, then, is not simply the failure of one person to act well, but the integrity of a relational system. When care becomes conditional, the entire structure of community is altered. Trust becomes unstable because it depends on meeting shifting criteria. Vulnerability becomes dangerous because it can lead to exclusion. Those who cannot perform stability, productivity, or coherence are pushed to the margins. The result is a community that can only sustain those who require the least from it, while those in greatest need are left outside the conditions of care.

The final movement of the section returns this analysis to the level of embodied knowledge. V rejects the idea that their expectations were learned abstractly or imposed from an external framework. Instead, they locate their understanding of care in the body itself—in the experience of being met, or not met, in moments of need. This shift is important because it grounds the argument in lived relation rather than theoretical claim.

The section thus argues that any structure claiming to mediate between people and the sacred must be able to sustain relation when it becomes difficult. Where it cannot, and where it instead converts relation into transaction, the role it claims is no longer being fulfilled. The critique is therefore directed at the moment where priesthood ceases to function as care and becomes indistinguishable from hegemony.

9. On Systems

This section defines priesthood by showing what happens when it ceases to mediate.

The opening line—

“no longer a bridge but a chasm”

—names a structural break. The relation between priest, spirit, and community is supposed to carry what has been opened in the body when it encounters change across a shared field. When that function holds, suffering moves: it can be interpreted, witnessed, distributed, and transformed. When it breaks, the effects can be mistaken as an unhealable wound.

From there, the passage turns toward a larger critique of any such system where suffering is renamed in forms that protect hierarchy. Where need becomes burden, vulnerability becomes threat, or pain becomes proof that the sufferer is excessive, incompatible, or unworthy of care. Within such systems, it is the most vulnerable who are made to bear the failure of the structure that should have sheltered them.

This is why the language expands into patriarchy, carceral gaslighting, epistemic violence, and capitalism. They name the larger architecture that allows power to control the meaning of suffering. Once authority can decide what pain means, it can treat the cry for care as disorder, manipulation, or failure. The wounded body is thus never healed because it is explained away.

The section’s anger comes from this recognition. V is not only naming what Jesse did to them. They are identifying a spiritual ecology in which care has been severed from relation and attached to performance. Communities meant to offer refuge become networks that reward stability, usefulness, obedience, and image. Those who need the most are left outside because their suffering interrupts the system’s idea of itself.

The final movement turns from critique to priesthood. V imagines the repair of priesthood as a change in practice: listening, showing up, holding vulnerability, honoring the fragile places in people without making those places shameful. This is why Paulo Freire is introduced as V’s spiritual ancestor. The horizontal relation between student and teacher becomes the counter-image to hierarchical spiritual authority.

The “priesthood that listens” therefore flies low because it refuses elevation over suffering. It remembers suffering because memory keeps care from becoming abstract. It offers what it can because priesthood is measured by its capacity to remain in relation, stay, stand with, and mediate, not by its ability to command from above.

Regarding the Palinode on Jesse Hathaway-Diaz

1. On Sound and Noise

This act should be approached as a scene where interpretation breaks down under pressure. The space is both shrine and sickroom because the experience unfolding cannot be contained within a single category. It is spiritual, bodily, relational, and theatrical at once. Nothing stabilizes because each system that tries to name what is happening produces a different answer.

Tata’s repeated declarations—“I have thrown the shells”—establish divination as an authority that multiplies meaning. Each casting generates a new explanation: the spirit is true, the spirit is false, there are two spirits, the ancestor speaks, the parasite negates. These statements accumulate without clarity, and in doing so they begin to contradict each other. The reader should not try to reconcile them as the contradiction is the point.

The Spirit’s voice operates differently. It speaks in the language of sacred authority, drawing from multiple traditions and registers at once. Its tone is absolute, expansive, and self-confirming. It does not ask to be interpreted; it declares itself as truth. This produces a second kind of pressure: totalization. Where Tata’s speech fragments the scene, the Spirit’s speech attempts to absorb it entirely.

V’s speech emerges between these forces. They register what it feels like to be the site where these competing claims are happening. The line 

“But it’s me / you’re talking about” 

marks the central tension of the act. The crisis is occurring in a body that cannot reconcile what is being said about it. The rupture V describes—sound, fluid, pressure, repetition—should be read as the body’s response to incompatible systems of meaning being applied at once.

The phrase “ritualized jam” names the structure of the scene. Divination, theology, possession, and diagnosis are all present without coordination. Each continues to operate without relation to the others. The result is noise that cannot stabilize into care.

The act is difficult to read because it is not trying to produce clarity. It is trying to make visible what it feels like when clarity has come undone. The act asks that the reader recognize the condition in which the person at the center of the scene becomes the place where competing truths are spoken. It yearns share the somatics of living inside V’s inner experience by communicating sound as it affectively moves a traumatized body. 

2. On Apophatics  

This scene is written in the language of love poetry. The borrowed lines from Song of Songs carry their erotic charge, yet here they are placed inside another movement: the undoing of the self in the presence of divine love.

The repeated question—

“what would I do /…/ if God preferred…”

—situates the reader in the lineage of Marguerite Porete, where the soul is stripped of the wish to possess love, God, or itself as an object of certainty. Through that stripping, the self can no longer remain the place from which love is measured.

Anne Carson’s Decreation gives the scene its closer formal analogue: the self is undone through the very relation it seeks to sustain. The question V asks is whether love can continue when it no longer secures the one who loves.

The final movement does not resolve this tension. When abandonment becomes companion, the scene reaches the point where V resolves to let love continue even after the collapse of the conditions that once made it intelligible.

3. On Language 

This act is structured as a field of influence in which two different forms of speech occupy the same space without entering into exchange. Tata’s speech appears in the form of proclamation—confident, declarative, institutionally grounded. He speaks from elevation, from a platform that gathers language into judgment and dispenses knowledge top-down. Each line names V in a way that appears complete: incapable of learning, self-justifying, destructive, shaped by distortion rather than reality. The structure of his speech depends on this clarity holding. 

It must sound definitive. It must sound as though it has reached the end of interpretation. But what is happening in the scene is the production of a name that does not fit the body it claims to describe.

Across from this, Maraba and V do not respond within the same system. Their speech appears as song. It carries something that the proclamatory language cannot hold: the continuity of V’s name as something that is attuned to earth and time based tending.

The division of the stage matters. The crack between the two sides shows that these modes of speech belong to the same world, even as they can no longer meet inside a shared form. Words and music cross the space, but one is concerned with tending a market while the other tends gardens. 

V remains within Maraba’s rhythm, even as she is named from the opposite side. The planting of the garden marks this persistence in time. It is an act that unfolds beyond the temporal frame of the accusation.

The line 

“In case your plan falls through / To mispronounce my name” 

clarifies the structure of the scene. Tata’s speech is presented as a form of misnaming that seeks to stabilize itself through public repetition. It gathers fragments of experience—trauma, need, conflict—and fixes them into a single, legible identity that can be recognized, judged, and excluded.

Maraba’s song counters this by offering the conditions under which naming remains open. The song preserves rhythm, breath, and multiplicity. It moves laterally rather than vertically, refusing the elevation that allows Tata’s speech to claim authority. Where Tata speaks about V, Maraba sings with V. This distinction marks the difference between language that objectifies and language that sustains relation.

The moment when V and Maraba speak in unison—

“Who do you think needs who more?”

—the question interrupts the fantasy that his authority stands alone. It reveals that his power depends on the very relation he claims the right to sever. V and Maraba dismantle the structure by making its dependency audible. The authority that speaks from above is shown to need the field beneath it—the student, the spirit, the witness, the relation—in order to remain authority at all.

It is important to notice that Maraba’s song functions as a form of seduction.

Maraba’s backbeat is pleasurable, catchy, beloved, bodily, strange. It has a favorite song. It has humor. It has “I loved the cut of his pant legs.” It has “coffee and a milk.” It has the weirdness of lyrics that touch and do not touch the process. The song is thus sung through a mouth that delights, repeats, misdirects, teases, and returns.

Tata misnames V through public condemnation, but Maraba sings a return-path into V’s body. Her backbeat is joy as survival, pleasure as theology, song as the way spirit keeps speaking when the tribunal has taken over language. The scene is cracked because both speech-forms are contagious: condemnation can seduce the chorus into silence, and song can seduce V back into the process of aliveness that Tata’s words can only sublimate but never touch.

Regarding the Briar of the Greene Chapel and Amaya Rourke Speech

1. On Discearnment 

This section begins where Jesse’s mediation has failed. V is between exorcisms, isolated and disoriented, unable to determine whether the sickness has ended. Into that uncertainty, Briar arrives as a figure of attention: someone who looks, checks in, and gives form to what V has been living through alone.

The question V keeps asking—

“what would it look like / if I was still sick”

—is the center of the passage. It is an act of discernment under damaged conditions. V already senses that something is wrong, but the old structure has made that sensing difficult to trust. Briar’s answers matter because they illuminate the lived signs V cannot yet gather into certainty.

What Briar offers, then, is a provisional field of readability. Her attention allows scattered symptoms, financial strain, altered reality, and lingering spiritual distress to begin appearing as connected evidence rather than isolated fragments. The sickness becomes thinkable again because someone else is willing to keep looking.

The section does not yet decide whether Briar’s role will remain trustworthy. It shows why her role becomes powerful. In a field where V has been left to doubt the evidence of their own life, any steady attention can feel like sunrise. 

2. On Searching for Stable Grounds

This section shows discernment losing its still point. In the previous movement, Briar’s attention made V’s experience newly visible. Here, that visibility accelerates into revelation. The question is no longer only whether V is still sick, but who caused the sickness, who else has been harmed, and what justice now demands.

The passage asks the reader to notice what happens when a frightened body is handed a story too large to metabolize. Briar and the exorcist offer a totalizing explanation: Sasha is responsible for V’s sickness, other clients have been harmed, private readings confirm the danger. This explanation gives form to V’s fear, but it also expands the field faster than V can remain centered inside it.

This is what the passage names through the figure of the Hierophant. Revelation arrives illuminated. The authority of the claim produces its own conviction. What is dangerous is not only what is being said, but the way it appears as already clarified, already confirmed, already true. In that brightness, discernment can begin to give way rather than sharpen.

V’s loss of center is named directly: 

“please let this be / my story. Not Sasha’s.” 

V is trying to keep the experience anchored in the body that suffered it. But the story being offered pulls the event outward—toward Sasha, other victims, hidden readings, spiritual malpractice, and a wider field of accountability. The center of gravity begins to shift from V’s survival to the narrative forming around V’s suffering.

This narrative shows a social field already charged with partial recognition. Others have seen the signs, felt the shift, and named it in private. But no one speaks openly. The figure of the Beloved organizes this silence. 

V is included within a story that does not originate from them, and does not return to them for confirmation. The same mechanism that once reduced V into a phantom now operates through expansion: multiplying interpretations that still do not resolve back into something the body finds nourishing.

And yet;

“I ate their words / because I was starving”

After abandonment, language that offers certainty can feel like nourishment. It gives shape, purpose, and companionship to a body that has been left alone too long. But starvation changes the conditions of reception. When the need for care is extreme, the ability to discern what is being fed weakens.

The intensity of the moment is sharpened by a contradiction V cannot resolve. The desire for justice is activated at the same time as love for Sasha remains intact. The narrative being offered pulls toward exposure and action, while the body continues to hold attachment. Discernment fractures under the pressure of holding both.

The passage names this as a breakdown in consent because the conditions of deprivation alter the ability to evaluate what is being taken in with full sovereignty. To become “the messenger for someone else’s war” is to feel one’s own experience recede beneath it. The pace, the scale, and the certainty of what is being said begin to outrun what the body can confirm.

What remains is a narrowing. Something is still wrong, and the body is still carrying it, but the question of what is true has moved too far outward to be answered from within. This is the point at which discernment can no longer be borrowed. It must return to the place it was first unsettled—the body that is still here, still living what no interpretation has yet resolved.

3. On Failed Peace

This section shows V attempting to become the bridge that the surrounding structures refused to build. After Briar’s revelations, the field divides into opposing camps: Jesse distrusts the exorcist, Briar and the exorcist distrust Jesse, and Sasha becomes the contested center around which each side organizes its version of danger. V is left trying to carry truth between positions that have already hardened.

The important point is that V does not experience either side as wholly false. Both contain something that feels true and something that feels distorted. This is why V imagines themself as the voice of reason. They are trying to hold the middle: to protect the reality of harm without surrendering Sasha entirely to demonization, to insist on danger without letting accusation become the only available form of sanity.

But peace cannot be produced by the one standing alone between parties who are only invested in self-preservation. V can explain, translate, advocate, and plead, but repair would require movement from the others. Jesse would have to care more about healing than authority. Briar’s side would have to care more about V’s perspective than the force of their own narrative. Neither side makes that descent.

This is why the command to “calm down” becomes unbearable. Both sides ask V for stillness while refusing the conditions that would make stillness possible. From Jesse, calm means submission to judgment. From Briar, calm means remaining useful to a narrative where Sasha must be named as the central evil. In both directions, V is asked to return to silent self tending while the field around them remains unresolved.

The result is abundance: too much truth, too much fear, too much contradiction, too much spiritual pressure, too much isolation. V’s attempt to harmonize the situation becomes another burden placed on their burning body.

The section therefore marks the death of a repair fantasy. V sees that standing in the center of the storm will not make others gather around them in listening. A bridge cannot be made from the body of the only person still trying to cross.

4. On Joan’s Palinode

This section gathers several figures through one root: Joan, Pomba Gira, the daimon, the angels, and V’s own sense of call. It follows what happens to speech when more than one voice begins to press on it.

At first, Joan appears in motion. The voices tell her to move, and she moves. Others tell her to wait, to be strategic, to follow orders. She does not. She trusts what she hears and acts on it. Her speech and her knowing are still aligned. What she says and what she does come from the same place.

Later, that alignment breaks. Joan is captured. She is questioned, pressured, threatened. Under those conditions, her speech changes. She signs statements. She agrees to things that do not match what she knows she experienced. She recounts her angels. 

V names the same break:

 “I let Briar’s voices fill my mouth.”

By then, V is overwhelmed, angry, isolated, and trying to make sense of something that will not settle. Briar and the exorcist speak with certainty. Their explanation gives the situation a clear shape. V takes it in and repeats it.

So V says Sasha is the source of everything.

The sentence works. It holds the situation still. It gathers what is scattered into one claim that can be said, defended, and acted on. But it does that by leaving things out. What was lived does not fit entirely inside it. Something remains outside the sentence.

That remainder is felt. Even as V says it, something does not sit cleanly. Love has not disappeared. The situation does not stay singular. The statement continues to hold, but it does not fully match what is alive in experience.

The section calls this profanation because something directly known is spoken over by something easier to repeat. The only way back is to speak again from what that first sentence left out. 

This is the palinode. To name what was left behind when we speak again. To only be able to name it from the whole of its body because we were allowed to feel it as well as think it.

Now it becomes possible to say: harm happened, love remained, other voices shaped what was said, and the situation was larger than a single cause. These do not replace the first sentence. They gather what it could not hold.

Joan’s movement from action, to recounting, to return is one instance of this process. V’s movement through other’s certainty and back into their own speech is another. The important thing is recognizing the transformation that happens to speech when it passes between them.

5. On Paternalized Care

Amaya enters at the exact moment V can no longer reliably hold themselves together alone. She offers consistency, emotional attention, long conversations, and the feeling of sustained presence. After so much abandonment, that steadiness acquires enormous emotional force. Trust forms quickly because V is starving for somewhere their distress can safely land.

The section pays close attention to how prophecy begins to enter the relationship. Amaya’s readings do more than interpret events. They begin organizing reality around fixed spiritual conclusions. V is told they are specially marked, spiritually targeted, surrounded by hidden hostility, and narrowly surviving a devouring force attached to Sasha. These claims arrive already formed. The readings carry the tone of settled truth.

V is still emerging from conditions where their ability to trust their own perception has been severely destabilized. The certainty in Amaya’s voice offers orientation during a period when V cannot yet fully orient themselves. Over time, that certainty begins to take precedence over V’s own process of testing, questioning, sensing, and arriving at meaning through lived experience.

This is why the section turns toward paternalized care. Amaya begins occupying the position from which V would otherwise look at their own life. Her readings tell V what events mean, what dangers are present, what forces are acting, what needs exist, and what emotional responses count as truth. The gaze itself becomes transferred upward into the caregiver.

The White Knight figure appears here to demonstrate how the fantasy of rescue reorganizes relationships through symbolic meaning. The caregiver starts seeing themselves as the one who saves, protects, guides, or delivers another person from danger. Once that role becomes central to their identity, the vulnerable person is pulled into the opposite position: the one who must be rescued, stabilized, interpreted, or carried.

This changes how the vulnerable person can appear inside the relationship. Their uncertainty, contradiction, insight, resistance, or self-knowledge no longer enters as equal participation in meaning. Those things begin getting filtered through the rescue narrative itself. 

Over time, this weakens mutual relation. The vulnerable person stops being encountered as another living subject capable of helping shape the meaning of what is happening. Their reality increasingly appears as material requiring management, guidance, containment, or correction. The relationship remains emotionally intense and deeply personal, but the structure underneath it places one person above the other as the one presumed to see clearly enough to lead the situation toward safety.

This becomes especially visible in the moments where V directly says the readings feel destabilizing. That reaction never reorganizes the structure of the exchange. The conversations continue moving through Amaya’s certainty. She reassures, explains, clarifies, and continues naming reality from above V’s own hesitation. The deepest problem here gathers around the question of who gets to determine what care feels like.

V’s body registers fear, overwhelm, pressure, and confusion. Those sensations do not become trustworthy evidence inside the relationship. The discomfort keeps getting absorbed back into the framework of guidance, protection, spiritual insight, and concern. Over time, V loses the ability to fully rely on their own alarm.

That shift changes the structure of care itself. Care stops being something both people remain inside together through questioning, listening, uncertainty, and mutual adjustment. What we see instead is one person increasingly determining what reality means, what danger means, what healing means, and what responses count as appropriate.

(For more on Joan and the White Knight, read V’s essay on rewilding love here )

6. On Divination

This section begins once V is well enough to test the stories they had previously accepted. The frenzy surrounding Sasha has weakened enough for V to ask quieter questions: who can confirm this, who was actually harmed, who has spoken directly, and what changes when interpretation is brought back into contact with relation?

The “ethics boner” and the Scorpio Mercury are points where V begins to return to themself through investigation. Earlier sections followed V through prophecy, revelation, sickness, emotional dependency, and fear. Here, V starts feeling well enough to quietly ask questions again. They compare stories, ask around, and look for direct accounts rather than interpretations carried through intermediaries.

V approaches Amaya and names their needs directly: emotional receptivity, curiosity, relational accountability, and the ability to feel safe inside the exchange itself. Amaya responds by repositioning the instability inside V. Fear becomes attached to V’s inability to trust rather than to the psychological force of the readings themselves. Once V begins challenging the truth of the readings and questioning whether the influence itself had been harmful, the relationship tightens around protecting Amaya’s authority.

The emotional openness that originally made the relationship feel safe starts narrowing around reassurance, deflection, and attempts to reinterpret V’s discomfort as evidence of personal dysfunction. This echos the same pattern we have seen earlier in the story. V’s body senses danger while the relationship continuously reorganizes that sensation into proof that V cannot trust themselves properly.

V feels this in their body and is now capable of using this sense to identify a larger problem surrounding divination and care. Readings with intense emotional and psychological consequences reorganize people long after the conversation ends. The reader’s certainty enters the client’s body, relationships, fears, memories, and spiritual life. Questions of grounding, accountability, follow-up, and relational responsibility therefore become inseparable from the reading itself.

7. On Rage

Mars applying to natal Mars sharpens the emotional atmosphere because rage begins functioning as a reactivation of discernment for V. They realize they may have become the mouthpiece for a story they never fully understood. The fury gathers around the possibility that trust, grief, love, fear, and moral urgency had all been organized around attempts for others to gain a particular image, status within hierarchy, or capital.

The confrontation with Briar becomes the turning point. V asks for names because they no longer want to remain isolated inside someone else’s narrative. They want direct contact with the people whose stories supposedly resemble their own. They want to compare experiences without mediation.

Briar confirms the existence of others while refusing connection to them. The situation changes further once V later discovers another person had already wanted contact for months. Briar had remained positioned between them while continuing to function as caretaker, interpreter, mediator, and gatekeeper of the larger story.

V starts recognizing how strongly the structure depended upon controlled access to information. Briar held the names, the stories, the context, and the lines of communication between people. The isolation surrounding each person helped preserve her authority over the narrative as a whole.

The emotional reversal that follows lands with particular force. Once V presses harder for clarity, Briar begins framing herself as exhausted giver rather than accountable participant. The relationship reorganizes around indebtedness. V’s requests for transparency begin appearing selfish, excessive, emotionally unfair, and disloyal.

The “dog licking vomit” image returns here because nourishment and humiliation have become entangled again. Emotional support arrives together with destabilization, secrecy, and demands for trust. V is expected to continue receiving revelation as care while suppressing the instinct to question the structure delivering it.

By the end of the section, V understands the conflict differently. The issue reaches beyond whether particular readings were true or false. V realizes they had entered relationships where authority remained concentrated in the hands of the people producing revelation, while the emotional, psychological, and relational consequences accumulated downward inside the person expected to receive it.

The Empire Never Ended.

8. On Spiritual Capital

Earlier, when V was still spiraling between Jesse and Briar’s side, Jesse told them Exu had said: 

“It’s all business.” 

At the time, V heard that statement through the immediate pressure of the conflict. Jesse framed Briar as manipulative, and V experienced that framing as another attempt to manage their perception. The statement landed inside an already fractured field where every side was claiming authority over reality.

The meaning changes later, after the sickness begins lifting and V gains enough distance to look back across the whole structure at once. Jesse’s house had already taught V to associate care with hierarchy, performance, obligation, and image management. V still stands by that perception. Jesse’s network organized intimacy through authority and spiritual status. Care circulated unevenly. Attention gathered around usefulness, loyalty, and social position. V experienced the structure as emotionally thin long before the collapse fully occurred.

What changes in this section is that V finally recognizes a similar logic operating through Briar and Amaya’s side as well. The issue reaches deeper than individual manipulation. The entire field had begun organizing itself around spiritual storytelling as a form of social power.

The mechanism becomes visible through circulation. One diviner confirms another. Private readings pass quietly between trusted people. Stories remain partially hidden while still producing emotional certainty. Information moves unevenly through the network. Some people hold names, access, interpretations, and hidden confirmations while others remain dependent on what they are told. This gives revelation a social economy. Credibility accumulates through repetition and controlled distribution.

V slowly realizes their own suffering had become part of that circulation. Their pain helped stabilize a larger story. Their emotional collapse functioned as evidence supporting interpretations they themselves could not independently verify. The pressure to remain loyal intensified because questioning the structure threatened the coherence of the entire narrative field surrounding it.

The section therefore traces how quickly care can become conditional once authority is challenged. As long as V accepted the framework being offered, emotional intimacy remained available. Once V started asking for verification, direct connection, and accountability, the relationship tightened around loyalty. Briar’s position depended partly upon remaining the interpreter standing between isolated people and the larger story connecting them.

This is why the section repeatedly returns to speech, scripts, and performance. V begins realizing they had been positioned inside a role before fully understanding the structure producing it. Their rage, grief, loyalty, and fear all became useful to narratives already moving around them. Once V stopped performing that role, the emotional field surrounding them collapsed.

The silence following the confrontation matters because it reveals how strongly belonging depended upon participation in the shared interpretation. V’s questioning disrupted the emotional economy holding the group together. The withdrawal of care exposed how much relational stability had depended upon agreement.

The deepest wound gathers around meaning itself. Earlier sections focused on sickness, prophecy, manipulation, abandonment, and destabilization. Here, V finally identifies the longer injury underneath all of them: the gradual replacement of their ability to interpret their own life. 

Feelings became symptoms. Doubts became proof of instability. Emotional pain became material for someone else’s framework. V lost confidence in their own perception because every experience was immediately absorbed into externally authored explanations.

The section returns to ethics through this realization. Divination alters people’s emotional realities. Readings enter memory, fear, desire, grief, relationships, and self-perception long after they are spoken. The ethical issue therefore gathers around how revelation is carried between bodies. V keeps returning to curiosity, dialogue, accountability, grounding, and mutual examination because those practices leave room for the other person’s reality to remain alive inside the exchange.

The closing reversal completes the larger movement of the Briar sequence. Earlier sections followed V into borrowed certainty, spiritual frenzy, rage, and collapse. This section carries V back toward authorship over their own meaning. The palinode reaches completion here because V no longer organizes reality around the need to preserve anyone else’s oracle. 

The final vow — 

“Not like this”

— gathers the entire ethical movement of the work into a single refusal. V rejects forms of magic, care, prophecy, and community that require surrendering the right to question, verify, speak, or remain psychologically sovereign inside relation.

9. On Priests Who Listen

The opening lines of this section gather the final analysis V reaches about Briar and Amaya’s care. V no longer experiences their readings as revelations that opened reality. The visions enclosed reality into predetermined forms. Their certainty narrowed the field around V until questioning itself began to feel dangerous.

Through all this relational and spiritual trauma, V has learned to articulate something she already felt in embodied knowing—the importance of curiosity. Earlier sections showed curiosity punished repeatedly inside spiritual authority structures. V pulling on the silk marks the produce of investigation after months of living inside borrowed certainty while continuing to reach for the real.

This is why the body returns so strongly near the ending:

“the red stained caverns / of my holy body”

The body carries memory differently than prophecy does. The body remembers confusion, longing, fear, humiliation, tenderness, dependency, relief, abandonment, rage, contradiction, and survival all at once. V’s testimony keeps the wound open to view without forcing it back into a single explanation.

The section keeps returning to priesthood because the deeper wound concerns how spiritual authority handles vulnerable people. V repeatedly describes forms of care that speak over experience instead of remaining inside relation with it. The issue follows the movement of interpretation itself: who speaks, who listens, who decides what counts as truth, and whether another person is allowed to remain alive inside their own uncertainty.

The garden image offers a form of reimagining. The invitation at the end asks the reader to walk beside testimony instead. Gardens grow through attention, return, pruning, weather, decay, patience, and shared tending over time.

This insight allows V to stop trying to recover a final explanation capable of resolving everything cleanly. Earlier movements searched constantly for the correct oracle, the correct interpretation, the hidden structure capable of explaining the suffering completely. This section shows that V does enact a reversal when they release that pursuit.

This is where the “priesthood that listens” finally becomes visible. Listening appears here as the willingness to stay near another person’s reality long enough for it to unfold without immediately enclosing it inside certainty. V’s final refusal is letting go of their own expectations of mastery on what they know. The listening priesthood treats meaning as something relational and ongoing, something that continues taking shape through time, embodiment, dialogue, memory, and return. 

That is also why V chooses to speak in palinodes at the end. The palinode preserves the possibility that speech may need to change again later. V commits their sword to this because they love the truth of change enough to welcome it as living relation even as it continues unfolding.

Regarding the Palinode on Briar of the Greene Chapel and Amaya Rourke

Within the earlier speech the narrative follows V through prophecy, accusation, revelation, reversal, rage, testimony, and ethical refusal. It is only here in the palinode that the language slows down and the pressure to explain begins loosening. The poem starts clearing space around something that can no longer survive being forced into fixed meaning.

The repeated “No” structures the entire movement. Each refusal removes another explanation that had previously tried to organize the experience. The wolf disappears. The rescue disappears. The riddle disappears. Sasha disappears. Even grief itself becomes unstable as a category. The poem keeps speaking while simultaneously stripping away the names that once tried to hold the experience in place.

This repeated negation changes the direction of speech. The language descends closer to sensation: warmth, water underground, melting snow, vibration through the foot, the sound of breathing beneath grass. The body is allowed its perceiving without mastery to explain.

The image of the grass parting shows that the poem still registers movement beneath the surface. Something remains alive under the field even after the larger narratives have collapsed. V kneels to drink and encounters warmth rather than emptiness. The underground water carries memory differently than prophecy did earlier in the work. Water moves slowly through the body and landscape at the same time.

Here, the wound settles deeper into the body and changes function. The witch’s scar becomes a site of subterranean attunement. It carries grief the way underground water carries pressure through the earth: quietly, continuously, shaping what grows long before anything becomes visible on the surface. The warmth remains alive beneath the body’s visible language. It’s eruptive intiation is volcanic.

El Shadai’s appearance deepens this shift. The divine no longer arrives through proclamation or command. The vibration comes upward through the ground. The mouth enters the foot. Breath tunnels like a rabbit underground. The sacred moves laterally through body and earth together. 

“It isn’t a door. / It never was. / He was not standing there.”

The poem revisits earlier experiences of presence, voice, and calling without trying to stabilize them into certainty again. Pressure remains real. Volcano remains real. The body still responds. Yet the need to secure a final interpretation loosens. V no longer attempts to master the experience through naming.

Earlier movements of this story repeatedly sought the correct name: sickness, spirit, prophecy, madness, truth. Naming carried enormous force because names organized reality, loyalty, ethics, and belonging. This section reaches the exhaustion point of that process. V has already lived through what happens when names harden too quickly around unstable experience.

The larger ethical movement of the work reaches another transformation here. The palinode allows meaning to remain partially underground. V carries the living water without forcing it into final interpretation. They stay near the wound long enough for another form of relation to emerge slowly through the attendance of their own attention between body and self.

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