sp/sx
by mar ovsheid (check out her writing + art here)
A snake grows anew from its own insides-out, the dead, extraneous parts of self continuously being left to collapse into dust. Even below the world’s compacted trash and fossil-rocks and cold oceans there is an endlessly recombining core, one that occasionally erupts skywards in a spectacle of destruction and creation. In sp/sx, the self-preservation instinct keeps its dominant eye on its own pleasurable containment, while sexual middle continuously eliminates the lifeless aspects of the inner and outer environments and refines its most ecstatic elements. However, unlike those with sexual as a dominant instinct, for sp/sx the resulting intoxicant is largely for the self. Gold mirroring itself within a mountainside, guarded by a half-blind, ever-seeking serpent eating its own tail.
Phantom lightning splits my spine and drives desire, fascination, and anguish into a fistful of dried poppies. Their ragged necks are bound together by lace veins, with dreaming heads full of hungry seeds that want to pull you down into an ecstatic sleep.
Without a primary focus on attraction (sx/sp, sx/so) or a social instinct to induce awareness of one’s place in the collective (so/sp, sp/so, so/sx), when lightning strikes sp/sx it is often unexpected, halting and obsessive. Whether in the realm of relationships or personal transcendence and reinvention, the promise of dissolution and renewal becomes compulsive. The impulse is to capture the object of attention and draw it back down into the cavernous self, where air and exposure can’t steal its vivacity. Prometheus seizing the flame and cradling it selfishly between his heart, hands, and eyes, where it can stay forever untarnished and scalding.
It'd be nice to trend vampiric, to find a taxi and a dance floor and exchange fevers via blood-binding. But on the outskirts, I keep the starlight cupped in my palms, refining dense pools of moonshine until they break up and bleed out and disappear. I've got a couple hotel matchbooks saved, and tell you to strike the flowers into smoke and swallow their vanishing memory into you. Fall backwards into your own shadow, beneath the shifting impressions of underground oceans, subterranean weather, fountains full of ghosts who've forgotten their own names.
Self-preservation dominance and the lack of the social instinct in sp/sx produce a particular flavor of annihilation terror. Sky deities are cruel thieves; the thin air of society a choking force that threatens to bleed the concentrated electricity from the substance or object of desire. With a lessened sense of renewability in comparison to sx/sp, what the world takes can never be regained, and sacred lakes are drained for the public’s thirst and for the sake of broad-appeal. For this same reason, sp/sx tends to be unaware of their own value as a human being, since fully participating in the social instinct feels like a threat to the rare, truly intoxicating material the individual holds inside. Forfeiting the gold to the elements would degrade its value into nothing.
If you can't, or won't, or you have to leave like storm clouds always do-- cut through the lifeline on my left palm, bottle the blood for fermentation, and name a sinkhole after me. Once the rain saturates the earth and weird bones are starting to show, fill the well with broken glass and subtle objects of sublimation. Toss a lit match into the pit and curse the sky and press the dead posies into the worst pages of your heart, for me. I'll wait for the lightning to strike twice.
Integration comes through the actualization of the Promethean myth; to share that devouring spark, despite the threat of exposure, unbearable vulnerability, and likely destruction of comfortable self-containment. The world is more than a bandit-in-the-night, the social-self is regenerative and stable, and through availability to the higher form of the social instinct, sp/sx can be freed from its chains and find greater value in its own refined riches. The snake doesn’t fail to grow new skin, the volcanic islands of the earth are among the more fertile for life, and the sky isn’t waiting to open up and steal your soul away.
