Our sexual fantasies and dark imaginations can terrify and confuse us, eroticizing our ego’s moral defences and binding us in torturous mythologies of subversion and innocence. Our self-righteous inner nun or monk play out their dry flavours of bubbling rage and delicious restraint. Yet our shame, confusion, compulsive restriction, or a sense of profound violation betrays this pious practitioner, blowing us open in various states of abject excess. The fig leaf will not fit. Without drawing in the imagination that runs below these ruptures, and cast out of Eden, we burn underground, or get lost in a no-man’s land of distraction, blinded with confusion and crippled by awkwardness. This workshop series borrows Thomas Moore’s account of Sade’s Justine and the Libertines as a framing mythology, where violation is understood as essential to the therapeutic process that deepens us into the backsides of imagination. Such dungeons are the fertile and necessary under-grounds, through which we can meet and make sense of life’s initiatory ruptures. Somatic strategies help us identify the prima materia of our egoic narrative, with its narcissistic or heroic upper-world desires. Breaking into the inadequacy of this to account for all of who we are, we descend into the embodied erotics of touch, instinct, dark imagination, and excess. Sheltered in the chambers of our container, we parse out the difference between fantasy and imagination. This frees us from the need to literalise what moves through us. Cultivating a dark-eye as gourmands of under-worldly styles we meet the poetics of our relating - their tortures, sacrifices, and inconvenient delights - with a more loving and creative attention.

Workshop 1: Small Ruptures and the Loss of Innocence

Prima materia and Vesseling, and an introduction to Embodied Consent.

‘Vice, of course, is relative…. it is quite common for a person to believe strongly in the virtue of selflessness. Many of us have been brought up in the absolute certainty that selfishness is a vice. but when you listen to the life stories of a selfless person, you hear bitterness about that virtue, and you notice typical signs of repression. The selfless person is often subtly controlling and self-serving’ - Thomas Moore ‘Dark Eros’

Workshop 2: Animal Bodies, betrayal and Instinct

The Blackening: Violation and the Necessity of Inferiority.

‘To avoid the inferiority of pre-adult perversity we turn to gender. We pursue opposites and thereby avoid the inferiority of a style before opposites. We get up from inferiority by repressing the primal in sexuality, turning instead into a highly sublimated culture of gender.’ - Thomas Moore ‘Dark Eros’

Workshop 3: Sex on the Battlefield

More Blackening, Descent, and the Power Dynamics of Love.

‘In one sentence in one scene from one film, Patton, sums up what this book tries to understand. The general walks the field after a battle. Churned earth, burnt tanks, dead men. He takes up a dying officer, kisses him, surveys the havoc, and says: I love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than my life.’ - James Hillman ‘A terrible love of War’

Workshop 4: Inner Dungeons and Imaginal Swell

Into the Blue: Imaginal Intimacy and Blue/Cruel nights with Soul.

‘A Monk takes to the monastery to protect his virtue, the libertine, to safeguard his vice.’ - Thomas Moore ‘Dark Eros’

Workshop 5: Loves Tortures

From White into the Rubedo, towards Aesthetics of Addictions and Compulsions.

‘Libertines and virgins need each other because each in itself is incomplete in itself. They are opposites of a polarity that is destructive, not because of the quality of its components, but because of the distance between them’. - Thomas Moore ‘Dark Eros’