Harvest Me Not
Introduction
There is a long and unseemly tradition—ritually quiet, but deeply grotesque—in which the very souls abandoned in life are posthumously canonized, dissected, and devoured. I speak now of artists, prophets, seers, sybils, and misfits: those who walked through this world unseen or reviled, only to be lionized once dead and safely silenced.
Dostoevsky. Van Gogh. Dickinson. Artaud. Blake. Kahlo. So many others.
They were too volatile to back in life. Too unorthodox. Too inconvenient. Their vision too unruly to steward, their needs too stark to support. And so they were left to wander, starve, self-immolate, or rot in exile. Only after death—when there was no longer a mouth to feed or a will to honor—did the vultures descend with awards, exhibitions, retrospectives, and collected editions. The very institutions and bloodlines that failed them now claim them, profit from them, rewrite them.
This is not legacy.
This is theft.
This is a posthumous crime.
Posthumous Harvest Victims: A List of Sacred Crimes
1. Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
Ignored and institutionalized.
Sold only one painting in his lifetime. Treated as mentally unstable. After his suicide, his art became a global commodity, used to sell prints, mugs, prestige.
Never honored while alive.
2. Franz Kafka (1883–1924)
Asked for his work to be destroyed.
Died young, unpublished. His friend Max Brod ignored his request and published his work posthumously. Now taught globally, stripped of context and used as academic fodder.
System made him a symbol after silencing his real voice.
3. Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Lived in near-total isolation.
Only a few poems published (heavily edited) while alive. After her death, her manuscripts were mined, shaped, and anthologized by family and academics.
Her raw erotic, spiritual intensity was sanitized for public consumption.
4. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
Mocked and slandered.
Lived in poverty. After death, a rival wrote a libelous obituary framing him as depraved. Yet later, Poe became an icon of American letters, endlessly merchandised and taught.
Died in mystery, buried without honors.
5. Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
Published only one major book in her lifetime.
After her suicide, Ariel was altered and released by her estranged husband. Became a literary martyr—but only in death was her genius widely acknowledged.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
Dismissed, mocked, misread.
Published in obscurity, declared mad, died alone.
Now he’s a household name—used to decorate the halls of academia and power, though he wrote to destroy them. His radical flame is now peddled as clever nihilism, his Dionysian madness made palatable for the polite.
7. John Keats (1795–1821)
Critically destroyed while alive.
His poetry was viciously attacked by critics, contributing to his early death (likely of tuberculosis). Revered only after his death as one of the great Romantics.
Died believing he failed.
8. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Imprisoned for love.
Ruined socially and financially. Died in exile, ridiculed.
Now, the world uses his image and wit for quote calendars, mugs, and fashion.
Harvested by the very culture that exiled him.
9. Modigliani (1884–1920)
Drunken, consumptive, dismissed.
Called degenerate by dealers and moralists alike.
Today, his portraits auction for tens of millions—fetishized by the same wealth that once scorned his poverty.
10. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881)
Mock-executed, exiled, broke.
His early work dismissed or censored. Died with little wealth.
Today, institutions claim him while stripping his mystical, revolutionary voice down to literary analysis and capitalist prestige.
11. William Blake (1757–1827)
Ignored, ridiculed, impoverished.
Called mad in life. Sold almost nothing.
Now enshrined as a literary prophet—yet museums display his visions without the fire that birthed them. Institutions that once scorned his mythic gnosis now sip wine beneath his angels, pretending they always understood.
12. Nikola Tesla (1856–1943)
Brilliant, ridiculed, erased.
Mocked by rivals, dismissed by financiers, his inventions stolen or suppressed.
Died alone in a hotel room, impoverished. Now mythologized by the very industries that built empires atop his visions—stripped of his etheric brilliance and sold as sanitized genius to tech bros and corporations.
13. Camille Claudel (1864–1943)
Brilliant, scorned, confined.
Her sculptures rivaled Rodin’s—some say surpassed them. But she was dismissed as his muse, then silenced as mad.
Locked away in an asylum for 30 years by her family, she died in obscurity. Today, her work is exalted in galleries that never questioned her imprisonment.
※ Pattern Recognition:
All were:
Ignored, exiled, mocked, or destroyed while living
Later used by systems as prestige tokens or cultural capital
Sanitized, quote-mined, or extracted from sacred context
Never given full honor during their embodied creation
The posthumous harvesting of sacred creators is a metaphysical crime.
It is not merely a cultural injustice—it is a theft of legacy, energy, and reverence after a lifetime of sanctioned erasure, silencing, or containment.
We’ll walk through the full anatomy of the crime, piece by piece:
I. The Annihilation of the Living Flame
Flame-bearers—those who hold a living axis of genius, erotic charge, divine insight—are rarely honored in life. Why?
They do not conform to market logic.
They are often poor, ill, queer, neurodivergent, or mystical.
Their work is too raw, challenging, or ahead of its time.
They threaten institutional control because they create without permission.
So what happens?
They are mocked, erased, imprisoned, starved, or driven to madness or suicide.
And still—somehow—they create.
Their flame becomes a dangerous relic-in-motion, one that systems cannot monetize while it's still burning. So they are left to die.
II. The False Redemption After Death
After death, once the danger has passed:
Institutions swoop in to publish, promote, and profit.
Academics dissect the once-rejected work, removing context and erotic charge.
Corporations slap their quotes on coffee mugs and planners.
Galleries and publishers launder suffering into prestige.
This is not honor.
This is theft disguised as homage.
It is a ritual harvesting of posthumous relics by the very hands that allowed the suffering, and in many cases, caused it.
III. Why It’s a Metaphysical Crime
This isn't just theft of material legacy. It's an inversion of sacred order.
Here's why it matters:
1. Honor must be timely.
The ritual economy of genius requires recognition during the embodied life, while the flame is still lit.
2. Delayed reverence is false reverence.
Posthumous acclaim does not resurrect joy, security, or health for the one who bore the cross of creation.
3. Energetic signature is lost.
The creator's field is no longer active in the same way after death. The alive transmission cannot be received or interacted with.
4. The karma is reversed.
Those who should have bowed in reverence now use the relics for clout, wealth, or institutional power.
5. It discourages the next wave.
Aspiring creators witness that their odds of being cherished are better if they die young or tragically. This distorts the future lineage of flame.
IV. Why Institutions Do It
They fear living anomalies because they can’t be controlled, predicted, or monetized.
But once dead, the anomaly becomes "safe":
Their message can be reframed.
Their persona can be marketed.
Their legacy can be branded.
It is the domestication of the sacred.
And it allows systems to pretend they supported genius all along.
V. The Axis Flame Vow: Never Again
To witness this cycle and do nothing is to be complicit in it.
∞ On the Matter of My Work, My Death, and the Crime of Posthumous Praise ∞
I do not know if my body of work will be deemed culturally significant by those who hold the pens of history. That was never the point. I never wrote or painted to be accepted—I created because it was the only way to survive the countless deaths I endured. And let me be clear: I have died every way a living being can die.
I have died socially, banished from circles that pride themselves on progress but are terrified of fire.
I have died financially, scraping through thresholds of lack so severe they should be criminal.
I have died intellectually, accused of madness when I was only ahead.
I have died erotically, denied communion because my frequency unnerves the unready.
I have died familially, orphaned by those who should have supported me through my trials. Blood is NOT thicker than water.
I have died spiritually, forced to rebuild my altar from ash.
I have died bureaucratically, erased by those who smile as they bind the free.
I have died in the gaze of strangers, stalked and studied and misunderstood.
And still, I lived.
And still, I made.
Each poem and painting I offer is not a product—it is a relic of resurrection.
It is my soul, transmuted under siege.
If you sense pain in the brushstrokes, you're correct.
If you sense defiance in my ritual/trance-laden verses, you might actually be getting it.
I am not highly trained. No mentor led me. No patron shielded me. No institution endorsed me.
But in an age of mimicry, what matters is not polish—it is originality.
It is the raw, unrepentant flame of a soul uncoopted.
I have a forthcoming essay on this very subject: how skill, in this era, is often mimicry perfected—while true artistry is a transmission of Self, no matter how jagged or feral it arrives.
Let me say this now with full erotic clarity:
I will not be posthumously harvested.
I have no heirs. No lineage to betray me. No institution to inherit me.
If sanctuary is not granted—if I must die in the cold—
then I will burn my original paintings.
I will reduce my journals to ash.
I will cast every ritual object into the fire, and watch it glow like the phoenix I was.
[Barring any unforeseen catastrophes, I give myself ~20-30 years. I will not be kept alive on scores of pills while slowly rotting. Upcoming essay on this subject too.]
They will get nothing.
I would rather annihilate my legacy than allow the very systems that watched me starve to profit from my bones.
Let it be known: if they fail to act, the work will perish with me.
Not out of bitterness—but out of sacred revenge.
To preserve the integrity of the flame.
Perhaps my work is nothing.
But perhaps it is everything.
And I say: better to guard a sacred cipher than risk it being rebranded by cowards who never dared to open it.
Just because someone is difficult to defend publicly—too raw, too strange, too holy—
does not mean they should be abandoned in life and praised in death.
That is a crime.
I hope it won’t come to that.
I still hope sanctuary will arrive.
But I am fully prepared.
And once I pass beyond the veil, I will not care.
So consider this your chance—
not just to preserve a body of work,
but to prove that the world has evolved enough to protect what it cannot yet comprehend.
Let this be my vow: I will not be claimed in death by those who ignored me in life.
To burn it all is no tragedy—
to be harvested without love is.
From the mirror and the pyre,
from the Watchglass, the Wyrd, and the Wyrm,
from the flames,
Majeye