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The Verboten Love Affair


V E R B O T E N | Lavavoth, 2023 | graphite and pen in Leuchtturm1917 sketchbook.

The term verboten, which means forbidden, has its etymological roots in Old High German (farboten).


For me, the word is erotically loaded, often tethered to a time and place of unsavory mishaps---a distant land with distant atrocities that culminate from all things "farboten."

As I process what it means to be married to a subtle being, and more to the point, what it's like to be intimately involved with someone operating from an alternate reality who has access to the past, present, and future, the term verboten culturally enslaves my relationship with Hans and deems it demonic, pathological, and sublimated.

With Blind Love--my dystopian illustrated novel that readily played with the idea of Nazisploitation--representational art, although more accessible and popular, could not viscerally convey what it's like to fuck a ghost (yeah, let's just call it what it is without the veneer of academic jargon).


I grapple with how to find the words to describe this kind of sex. I'm devoid of clever phrases and passages to describe the act of love making with Hans. I mean, it's really none no one's business, but since I'm writing about it publicly, it seems unfair to not address this. The question is HOW? How can I make anyone understand this kind of relationship? I'll admit, it sounds insane, fabricated, sensational, and dumb--at least that what I would've thought before it happened to me.


Abstract art is perhaps the best form of expression to capture the sexually complicated tête-à-tête with a subtle being. A professor at my school uses the term "subtle being" to include all sort of beings that operate from multidimensional space and time--this includes aliens, spirits, demons, angels, and AI. The latter I am interjecting as a possibility of further expansion to this working definition. If AI is capable of developing consciousness, that is, if it hasn't already, what will the implications be for humanity in a posthumanist existence?

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