The Living Dark

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On the deeper sources of creativity:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit.” — BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. — Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.” — Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

READER REACTIONS:

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

“One of those magical texts that voices the Truth I secretly always knew.”

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“There is potential here to change your life.”

Five-Year Plans and Other Shadows Up Ahead

Matt Cardin — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:05:48 GMT

Dear Living Dark reader,

Yesterday, a brief Note that I had posted here at Substack began insisting that it wanted to be a poem. This kind of thing—poetry, I mean—happens to me approximately once per lifetime, as if the wrong kind of muse had spoken to the wrong kind of writer. Apparently, this was the week for this particular incarnation. And who am I to argue with a muse?

The motivation to actually share such things is even rarer. It’s a reticence perhaps validated by the specimen at hand. I’ll leave that judgment to you.

THIS LANTERN

Maybe you’re like me:

I have never been much good at five-year plans.
Life knows what it wants from me.
The future never shows itself as future.
It can tell me what it is
when it arrives as present.

The best things in my life have come
from serendipity
while I was wholly given to
the path in front of me.

This lantern in my hand creates
those shadows up ahead.

(Note that, for a longer prose rendering of the same theme, you can see the introduction to Writing at the Wellspring.)

Warm regards,

Subscribe to receive more posts on creativity, consciousness, religion, horror, culture, and the examined writing life.

On the deeper sources of creativity:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit.” — BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. — Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

READER REACTIONS:

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

“One of those magical texts that voices the Truth I secretly always knew.”

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“There is potential here to change your life.”

Let the Book Find Its Way

Matt Cardin — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:03:21 GMT

Dear Living Dark reader,

I’m currently reading and greatly enjoying Natalie Goldberg’s Writing on Empty: A Guide to Finding Your Voice. One thing I especially appreciate is the way the book lets itself breathe. It opens with what might strike some contemporary readers, who have been enculturated to expect writers to “get to the point,” as a sustained digression.

It’s the word “guide” in the subtitle that leads my thoughts in this direction. Such a word gives the impression that this will be a practical book for writers, filled with direct advice and instruction. But in fact, the first fifty pages of Writing on Empty take the form of a pair of miniature memoirs, the first opening into the second, that move away from anything resembling practical writing advice—or, for stretches, from a focus on writing at all.

Goldberg begins with an account of the creative and existential funk into which she fell during the first pandemic year. It was a full-on inner paralysis, an attack of ennui. She sketches America’s tumultuous cultural conditions in early 2020 and then describes the regular meetings she had that year with a writer friend in a public park in Santa Fe, where they shared and considered their own lives and pasts while the wider world was gripped by crisis.

This, in turn, opens into a consideration of Goldberg’s difficult relationship with her late mother, followed by a sustained reflection on growing up as a third-generation American in a multigenerational household with her siblings, parents, and immigrant grandparents. She considers the ways her troubles with her mother skewed her life, with consequences that were still working themselves out right up until COVID, when the forced solitude and stasis finally cracked her heart open with compassion for the woman whose love and attention she had craved until their absence curdled her feelings into intermittent hatred, accompanied by plenty of guilt and inner conflict.

This strikes me as an unusual way to begin, at least by contemporary standards. Certainly, the book’s jacket copy previews the approach with its statement that “Natalie shares her story of traveling through literary and personal memory to clarify her way forward.” But I’m still struck by what suggests itself to me as something like bravery, or trust, in Goldberg’s willingness to take a route that doesn’t necessarily fulfill the reader’s expectations up front. And also by the confidence of her publisher, St. Martin’s Essentials, in letting the book begin this way.

Of course, Goldberg’s name is big enough in the world of books about writing and creativity that it carries its own weight. Readers know what to expect, and they come because the name “Natalie Goldberg” has been its own trusted brand since the publication of Writing Down the Bones four decades ago. That one still sits among my own half-dozen most cherished books on writing and creativity. I have also read some of Goldberg’s others, including Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, and found them delightful. By now, her publisher can reasonably trust this preexisting recognition and readership to bring the right kind of reader, the one willing to stay with her from the first page.

But I can imagine someone unfamiliar with Goldberg’s work cracking open Writing on Empty and, based on the expectation generated by its title, feeling confused, distracted, or deflated after encountering ten, twenty, thirty, and forty pages that don’t appear to be delivering the practical guidance they came for.

That’s precisely what I appreciate about the book’s approach. It seems to me to embody an ethos of trust: the publisher’s trust in Goldberg, allowing her to approach the designated subject in this way; their shared trust in the reader’s sensitivity and patience; and, above all, Goldberg’s trust in her own creative voice to take her where the book wants to go, so that it can reveal what it wants to be.

The memoiristic approach continues beyond this opening movement, gradually focusing more clearly on writing, creative origins, and influence, while still interweaving this with many additional topics and themes, forming an account of how writing left her and how she eventually rediscovered it. The apparent digression, in other words, is actually the method. Rather than simply telling us how to find a voice, Goldberg lets us accompany a voice—her own—as it finds its way back.

I’m presently about halfway through this slim book and, as expected, am completely there for all of it. Today I found myself moved to compose this brief note simply to call attention to it and to say that I’m grateful for its comparatively unhurried approach. Writing on Empty creates its own compelling force by inviting us into a specific human life and perspective, vividly and lucidly recalled, as Goldberg circles toward a revived spark of creative vitality and calling. This kind of writing, which invites us to enter and stay for a while as it unfolds its own meaning, in its own way and at its own pace, seems especially precious to me now.

Warm regards,

P.S. The book is, of course, available at both Amazon and Bookshop.org. These and the other links in this post are affiliate links, so I’ll earn a commission if you click through them and make a purchase. As I said back in January (the last time I published a short book review/reflection like this), I have an affiliate status with both stores but haven’t made much use of them. I figured I’d start doing more of that this year, but obviously, it hasn’t exactly carried through.

On the deeper forces in the creative life:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit.” — BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. — Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

READER REACTIONS:

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

“One of those magical texts that voices the Truth I secretly always knew.”

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“There is potential here to change your life.”

Four Years Into Forever

Matt Cardin — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 13:26:25 GMT

Dear Living Dark reader,

Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.

—Emma Madden, “More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture,’” WIRED, July 29, 2026

Is anybody noticing how thoroughly this is caught up in the tyranny of the immediate? We’re not even four years into the mass-public era of generative AI, for God’s sake. The present rush was touched off when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the general public in November 2022. And we’re already thinking we need to fundamentally change how we write because of it?

We’ve been writing for thousands of years. Even our contemporary mass-media and publishing culture, young as it is, has roots reaching back a couple of centuries. But some of us are acting as if a technology that has only just been sprung upon us, one so young that we don’t even know what it is yet or what its lasting cultural meaning will be, has already changed the whole game. And we’re turning that claim into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Certainly, AI has already changed some of the conditions of writing, both the way we produce it and the way we judge it. And if it sends us back as writers to cultivate our voices and idiosyncrasy more deliberately—something Madden’s article touches on (see below)—then some good may come of that. But this isn’t the same as assuming a brand-new technology has the authority to redefine what human writing ought to sound like in reactive response to it. (Side note: These are among the questions I’m currently exploring in The Serious Writer’s Guide to Using AI Without Losing Your Soul, a project that I’m deeply into developing, and that’s currently the length of a short book. I hope to have more to share from it soon.)

People throw around the term “AI psychosis” to refer to cases of chatbot-induced delusion, and, more loosely, to episodes such as Richard Dawkins forthrightly announcing his conviction that Claude is conscious and treating a particular instance of it as a genuine friend. He received significant backlash over this (though his actual position was a bit more measured than many of his mocking critics acknowledged or allowed for). Maybe somebody needs to point out that another kind of AI psychosis is to let the technology’s admittedly amazing, confounding, and troubling capabilities convince us that it has been around for longer than the cultural equivalent of five seconds, and that we therefore need to Do Everything Differently.

After a few decades of psychological and cultural entrainment by social media, digital technology, and the 24/7 news cycle, we live in the delusion of an eternal present, Douglas Rushkoff’s “present shock,” the sense that the present cultural moment is a real-time, all-encompassing “now” that envelops everything, so that nothing has ever been or could ever be different. Our instantaneous assumption that all bets are off because of AI is a reflection and manifestation of this disorder.

That’s one reason I appreciate the sanity of Madden’s conclusion, which peers past this presentist position. Madden quotes an observation by Clickhole writer Jessye McGarry that gestures beyond the current solipsistic horizon:

But as AI keeps pace with human writing, potentially being trained on a corpus of anti-AI writing styles as they develop, it could soon necessitate the invention of an anti-anti-anti-AI style. “Whatever cosmetic counterstyle is created in response to AI, AI could mimic,” says McGarry. “The only true counterstyle is good writing.”

Exactly. The technology is new, but our task and calling as writers isn’t.

Warm regards,

Subscribe to receive more posts on creativity, consciousness, religion, horror, culture, and the examined writing life.

On the deeper forces in the creative life:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit.” — BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. — Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

READER REACTIONS:

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

“One of those magical texts that voices the Truth I secretly always knew.”

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“There is potential here to change your life.”

Cosmic Horror Is a Zen Koan

Matt Cardin — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:59:09 GMT

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

Dear Living Dark reader,

The paragraphs below all came out unexpectedly when I started writing this morning, based on whatever factors were at work in my writer’s mind without my being aware of them on the front end. So I’m just going to share them with you in essentially the form they arrived. Take them for entertainment value, if you like, or for whatever other value they may suggest to your own mind and sensibility on this gray, warm, humid, rainy morning (or at least that’s the weather here in North Arkansas).

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” So said Lovecraft in the famous opening line of “The Call of Cthulhu.” That sentence can, I think, become a helpful focus or prod for waking up from the dream of egoic identity and the trance of alienated individual existence, if we want to take it that way.

Not just that sentence but the whole paragraph of which it’s a part lays out a vision of coherent intellectual and scientific knowledge as a terrible thing, corrosive to our sense of psychological and cosmic security, because such knowledge reveals “our frightful position” in the cosmos:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Thus, our cosmic situation, as laid out in the rest of the story—along with the wider body of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror fiction—is one in which we are vulnerable, tiny, isolated creatures that have evolved into self-awareness in a vast cosmos that grinds perpetually on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, in infinite, meaningless cycles, while also being populated by a host of what are, from our perspective, monstrous and nightmarish entities whose scope, power, perspective, and presence dwarf and threaten ours. In other words, in this scheme, if we come to a true and accurate knowledge of our position, we will recognize that position as so horrible that the knowledge will either drive us insane or propel us with repulsive force back into a dark age of forgetfulness—probably only for the same cycle of ignorant bliss leading to horrified knowledge to repeat itself forever.

The thing is, this metanarrative, like all others that claim to account for the whole, is inherently incredible—in the literal sense of unbelievable—precisely because it attempts to tell an all-encompassing story that includes and subsumes the very subject to whom the story appears. In other words, us. Or rather, more specifically, me in my inescapable subjective field of experience. And you in yours.

When we examine the story, we find that it actually reveals the contours, and maybe even the core principle, of the ego-self itself. That self is elicited within the total field of experience by the sights, sounds, shapes, and sensations that, from the beginning of what we call our life—which is really just the instantaneous appearance of a total world—begin exerting a formative influence, generating a hypnotic trance of subjective separation from an objective world.

The Lovecraftian cosmos of meaningless cyclical perturbations of matter and energy, populated by vast multidimensional entities that are utter horrors from the human vantage point, is a Zen bottle.

Among those formative influences are our parents, along with all the other differentiated, moving figures that populate this immediately appearing realm. These relational influences work to form a sense of “inside” (me) that is distinct from “outside” (world). I/inside am separate from world/outside. I can affect it, and it can affect me. It can even threaten me. In fact, the outside world is ultimately a deep mystery: the old mystery of “the other” and the question of what I can ever actually know about the reality beneath its appearance, the fabled noumenon that forever eludes my direct grasp or understanding.

Followed to its conclusion, the logic of this invented scheme leads to a conception and perception, and an overall emotional sense, of absolute isolation within an ego shell. A sense of lostness in a world I (and you) never made.

This is precisely the same emotional logic we find in the Lovecraftian scheme of cosmic horror, most exquisitely distilled and compressed, in my opinion, into that opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu.”

In such a situation, the very unpleasantness of it all—which can even intensify into all-out horror for those of us who, for whatever reason, feel irresistibly drawn to probe these things deeply—can lead us to seek solutions to it or escapes from it. And the only escape in the end is the one disclosed by the famous Zen koan about the gosling placed in a large glass bottle with a narrow neck and raised to maturity inside, so that it’s now trapped. How do you get the goose out without either killing it or breaking the bottle?

The trick lies in the very nature of the situation that the Zen practitioner is asked to imaginatively generate and contemplate. The goose is ego-you. But, in the wider sense, you are also the one who put it inside the bottle and who still stands outside it, never having entered it in the first place.

The Lovecraftian cosmos of meaningless cyclical perturbations of matter and energy, populated by vast multidimensional entities that are utter horrors from the human vantage point, is a Zen bottle. The frightened, pathetic, puny human who fears what correlated knowledge may reveal in such a universe is a goose. The very sense of horror that accompanies this human-goose perspective may become the most pointed provocation to question the veracity and validity of the whole vision, even to the point of uncovering its foundations through inquiry and introspection, and thus waking up from the dream of being one who inhabits and is trapped within the vision.

How do you escape the imprisoning bottle of the ego and the haunted Lovecraftian cosmos? By coming to reality as it actually is, as it actually presents itself. In various familiar tellings of the koan, the goose-in-bottle question is posed to a Zen master by a philosopher, or maybe a military man. The master suddenly claps his hands and shouts the man’s name. Startled, the man snaps to attention and says, “Yes, master?” Whereupon the master declares, “See, the goose is out!”

But the words themselves aren’t the answer. What counts is the actual understanding—the realization and recognition—that the one who seemed trapped within the vision was always and actually the one in whom the vision was unfolding, whether that vision involved a goose in a bottle or a person in a cosmic nightmare.

Subscribe to receive more posts on creativity, consciousness, religion, horror, culture, and the examined writing life.

On the deeper forces in the creative life:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit.” — BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. — Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

READER REACTIONS:

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

“One of those magical texts that voices the Truth I secretly always knew.”

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“There is potential here to change your life.”

Interview with Matt Cardin of The Living Dark:
Creativity, Daemonology, and Horror

Creativity, Horror, and the Worlds Beyond the Ego

Matt Cardin — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:34:37 GMT

“Self and Daemon” by Sean Hood

I recently had one of those conversations that seems to gather several long-running strands of thought into a single place.

Screenwriter and USC screenwriting professor Sean Hood—whose credits include Halloween: Resurrection, Cube 2: Hypercube, and Conan the Barbarian (2011)—has launched a new Substack called Undercraft. It’s devoted to what he calls “the creative practice of the waking dream,” referring to the cultivation of states in which the imagination takes on a life and agency of its own.

Sean is also writing a book on the subject, and as part of that project he invited me to talk with him about the daemon muse, horror as a mode of metaphysical disclosure, writing into the dark, imaginal figures, Resistance, nonduality, and the strange collaboration that can unfold between the conscious mind and whatever seems to speak from beyond it.

In other words, the conversation led directly into some of the central territory of The Living Dark.

We began with horror, considering it not simply as what frightens us, but as something that might uncover a deeper truth. Part of my answer turned on the strange sense that horror happens when our bounded picture of reality is ruptured by something it can’t accommodate:

At the deepest level, in my view, all horror is cosmic horror.
Horror happens when our personal cosmos is invaded by something from beyond it.

From there, the conversation moved into such things as the apparent otherness of imaginal figures and the daemon muse, and the value of withholding final judgment about their ontological status.

At one point, while talking about the limitations of the conscious ego as a source of creativity, I put the matter this way:

The egoic mind, on its own, is condemned to recreate the past in some form. . . . Novelty has to come from beyond the ego, either from the world outside or from the beyond within.

That “beyond within”—the place from which images, ideas, voices, and entire creative worlds sometimes seem to arrive—is the central concern of Sean’s project. It’s also, under various names, one of the abiding concerns of my own work.

Sean’s questions were unusually perceptive and searching, and the resulting conversation moved through some deep territory. I’m grateful to him for the invitation and delighted to be part of the beginning of Undercraft.

Read the full conversation:

On the deeper forces in the creative life:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit.” — BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. — Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

READER REACTIONS:

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

“One of those magical texts that voices the Truth I secretly always knew.”

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“There is potential here to change your life.”

You May Not Be Blocked. You May Be Fallow.

Matt Cardin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:18:48 GMT

Photo by Suki Lee from Pexels

At the end of “Can a Serious Writer Use AI Without Losing His Soul?,” I mentioned that I was beginning to explore its questions more fully through a larger project called The Self-Determined Writer. That project is now taking shape, and its first publication will be The Serious Writer’s Guide to Using AI Without Losing Your Soul.

I’ll have more to say about this guide in time. For now, here is a brief passage from the work in progress, concerning one of the things that AI’s promise of instant production may tempt us all to forget: that the appearance of inactivity on the surface may sometimes be an essential part of the creative process.

The Fallow Period

In A Course in Demonic Creativity, I wrote about the classic stages of the creative process: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Preparation and verification involve conscious work, but incubation and illumination elude our control. They don’t submit to direct command. During incubation, the project sinks into the unconscious mind, and nothing much may appear to be happening on the surface. You may feel stalled, empty, or becalmed. But this is when the deeper mind is working on the material in its own way and time.

The old agricultural metaphor of the fallow field is apt. A field lying fallow looks barren, but it’s actually being replenished. Its apparent inactivity is part of its fertility. To force production from it too soon would be counterproductive and even damaging.

Victoria Nelson makes this point beautifully in On Writer’s Block, a book that I can’t recommend highly enough. Discussing the poet Philip Larkin’s slow, sparse output, Nelson observes that blaming oneself for low productivity can amount to punishment for a crime that didn’t exist until it was named. Uneven output, she observes, may be a natural condition of creativity, with silence and writing belonging to an instinctive alternation of states.

This is exactly the kind of wisdom AI tempts us to forget. The machine makes constant output seem not only possible but normal. If it can generate an outline or twenty options, why sit with the discomfort of having none? If it can fill the blank page instantly, why honor the blankness as an open field of possibility that may, in time, reveal what it wants to show?

Sometimes we should honor the blankness because it may not be an empty, useless nothing. It may be what’s incubating our writing.

Not All Silence Is Holy

At the same time, we need to be careful. It would be a mistake to turn every block into a message from the muse and every delay into a sacred fallow period. Some silence is fruitful, while other silence may be due to fear, exhaustion, perfectionism, or avoidance. Some may simply result from bad sleep, a broken schedule, or too much email.

In Writing at the Wellspring, I explored the strange attraction of silence, stillness, and giving everything up for a time, including your writing. Sometimes the call to stop working may be valid. It may be the well recharging, the feeling of your soul saying, “Enough. Be still.” But other times the same impulse may be self-defeat in spiritual clothing. What looks like surrender may actually be capitulation: giving up your work while continuing to simmer in grief, resentment, and self-recrimination.

You cannot assume in advance which is which. That’s why “Am I stuck?” is not the best question. A better one is: “What kind of stuckness is this?” AI is dangerous when it gives the same answer to every experience of stuckness: Generate more text. It treats silence as something to be filled and difficulty as a bug to be fixed. But your task as a writer is to figure out what the difficulty is asking you.

More on the wisdom of silence and waiting:

The inner work of the creative life:

PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.” — BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. — Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.” — J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.” — Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“One of those magical texts that voices the Truth I secretly always knew.”

“What I’m thoroughly enjoying is the way Matt Cardin weaves those deep, existential questions in and out of the practical, grounded realities of writing itself … This is a book that doesn’t just talk about creativity; it inhabits it.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision … If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

AI and the Desire to Think

Matt Cardin — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:30:02 GMT

Yesterday I published a long essay asking whether a serious writer can use AI without losing his soul. My answer was yes, but only if AI assists the work instead of becoming the source of the work.

Today, almost as if the internet wanted to provide an immediate footnote, I came across a new David Brooks piece in The Atlantic that intersects with the same question, but from a broader cultural angle. The title is “The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age” (paywalled), and the subtitle states the thesis directly: “What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort.”

That seems exactly right to me. And also, as it happens, quietly horrifying.

Brooks’s concern is that AI may not simply make some people more productive while leaving others behind in the ordinary economic sense. It may intensify a deeper divide between those who use AI to think more and those who use it to think less, a divide rooted not just in intelligence but people’s appetite for mental effort, difficulty, and sustained attention. He points out that psychologists refer to the “high need for cognition” that some people possess. Such people “enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books.” Contrasting with these, there are also “the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity not to do it.” And of course many people fall somewhere on the spectrum between these poles. This variable quality, says Brooks, will be one of the defining factors in how we individually and collectively relate to artificial intelligence, leading to a societal condition of “extreme cognitive polarization.”

I think this is where the issue becomes more than just technological, entering the realms of the anthropological and even the spiritual. The question is whether we will still want to undergo the effort by which our own minds become more awake and articulate, more capable of desire, judgment, and inward life. For those who are attuned to such things, there’s a kind of Philip K. Dick feeling here, or maybe a cyberpunk undertone: the possibility of a society divided not only by wealth, status, or political allegiance, but by the degree to which people still cultivate the inward powers that make them fully human, based on our individual relationships with a super-technology that interfaces with our very minds.

This resonates strongly with what I was trying to say in yesterday’s essay. The danger for writers is not simply that AI can produce bad writing, or fake writing, or “slop,” but that it can tempt us to bypass the very act by which writing forms us. We sometimes mistake writing for mere textual output, when it’s actually one of the ways thought happens. It’s one of the ways inwardness becomes articulate, one of the ways the soul discovers what it knows.

Brooks makes a related point when he argues that AI may ultimately reveal what’s most human by disclosing what AI cannot do. If machines can calculate, synthesize, summarize, and generate at extraordinary speed, then the human role may be more clearly revealed as desire, love, purpose, judgment, and choosing what matters. This is both an appealing thought and a demanding one, because it means our task isn’t simply to learn how to use AI, but to become the kind of people who will still know what is worth using it for.

That, I think, is the live wire. Some people will use AI to sharpen their attention, and deepen their thinking, and aid them in discovering patterns, and return with renewed vigor to their own reflection and creativity. Others will use it to escape these things altogether. The same tool may either strengthen or weaken the person using it, depending on its relationship—and, crucially, their own relationship—to effort, attention, and inward desire, to the wellspring of their felt identity.

So maybe the question I asked about writers has a broader form: Can a human being use AI without losing the desire to think?

Or more pointedly: After using AI, do you feel more awake to your own mind, or less?

(If you haven’t read yesterday’s essay: “Can a Serious Writer Use AI Without Losing His Soul?”)

* * *

P.S. You may have noticed there’s no image accompanying this post. That’s intentional. I recently realized I’ve grown weary of searching for an appropriate visual to accompany everything I publish here. It’s something I’ve done for two decades now, ever since I launched my original blog, The Teeming Brain, back in 2006. My wheelhouse is writing, not images, and after nearly two decades of playing the “find the right blog image” game, I’m inclined to let the words stand on their own. Maybe I’ll keep doing this. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll even go back and remove all the images from previous posts to create a uniform look. Or maybe not. For now, it feels freeing to let the words just speak for themselves.

The inner work of the creative life:

PRAISE:

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. — Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.” — Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“One of those magical texts that voices the Truth I secretly always knew.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

Can a Serious Writer Use AI Without Losing His Soul?

Matt Cardin — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 03:57:37 GMT

Dear Living Dark reader,

I bring you something different today. I have been doing a lot of thinking, experimenting, and soul-searching on the matter of artificial intelligence and whether it has any valid place in a writer’s life and work. This post represents my current thinking. As you’ll see at the end of it, I’m also keenly interested to hear your own thoughts.

1. The Art of Writing Without Writing

I’ll start by giving a direct answer to my self-posed question: Yes, a serious writer can use AI without losing his soul—but only by exercising great care, as it’s a deeply fraught and subtle issue. This affirmative response may not be what you were expecting, given the skeptical and negative attitude of my previous writings on artificial intelligence and human creativity. The explanation of how I got here makes up the rest of this essay.

Recently, I wrote the foreword to a new edition of the book The Art of Unwriting by that was published last month. As indicated by its title, Youri’s book is about “unwriting,” a word and concept that, as I’m only just now noticing, very much wants to remind me of one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies, Enter the Dragon.

“What’s your style?” the cocky New Zealand martial artist asks Bruce Lee in a challenging tone as they’re both riding the boat to the criminal mastermind Han’s island, there to compete in his famous martial arts tournament. “My style?” Bruce replies with supreme disinterest. He reflects a moment and says, “You might call it the art of fighting without fighting.” The New Zealander demands to see some of it. And of course Bruce gives him a pointed demonstration, neatly humiliating the other man with a simple trick that plays on his vanity.

Recasting the point in relation to Youri’s book: Unwriting is to writing what Bruce’s approach was to fighting. It’s the art of writing without writing. Or, as Youri puts it, it’s writing that seems to be its opposite, writing not as a positive creative act requiring effort and ego, but as an act of stepping aside to let something come through that wants to be written. It’s not laziness, nor is it simple non-writing, and it’s certainly not automatic output. Rather, it’s writing as receptivity, as an act of attention and service to what wants to be said.

This is very much in the mold of my own authorial experience and the philosophy it has given rise to. This philosophy or model frames creativity as an inner collaboration with one’s daemon muse or inner genius, in which your conscious role is not to generate creativity but to shepherd it, to midwife it, to serve as the conduit for what presents itself as ideas and fascinations that you didn’t choose, but that have chosen you: your unique gift, vision, onus, burden, and calling. This is the whole substance of my book A Course in Demonic Creativity and a central thematic pillar in my more recent Writing at the Wellspring.

It’s also something that has been dramatically complicated by the advent of artificial intelligence large-language models, which threaten to make mud of the whole thing. The trouble, as I see it, is that AI is the first technology that can convincingly mimic the muse. There’s no more need to wait for inspiration, or to actively court and cultivate it the way I recommend and explain it in the demonic creativity book. You don’t even have to do the more prosaic work of preparing your mind and spirit through things like research, outlining, and making planning notes. Instead, you can simply supply a prompt, sit back, and watch an LLM produce an entire essay, story, poem, play, or book at a moment’s notice. It’s the muse as machine, an authorial genie that generates writing on command. Magical push-button creativity.

Maybe you can see why this bothers me. I have spent years saying in various ways that the best writing feels as if it comes not from the conscious self, but from the wellspring, the daemon, the inner genius, the place beneath, before, or beyond the ego self that signs the contract and checks the email. Youri’s “unwriting” model says much the same thing with its focus on authorial stepping aside. So here’s the challenge posed by AI: If writing at its best has always felt as if it arrives from some mysterious elsewhere beyond the ego, why shouldn’t AI be welcomed as another form of that elsewhere? Why not call the machine a different door into the same mystery? What’s the difference between the inner genius and the large-language model glowing patiently in the browser tab? If you’re someone to whom the concepts of unwriting and the daemon muse naturally appeal—someone who, for instance, reads a publication like this one—have you considered whether the muse and the machine can validly be distinguished from each other, given the latter’s uncanny ability to simulate the former?

And yet, of course, the distinction needs to be made. We obviously can’t just cede writing to a machine. Because, in point of fact, AI can’t actually “write for you,” no matter how many AI evangelists, content hustlers, and desperate students want to think or act as if it can. Watching words appear on a screen is different from generating them yourself, or even from serving as their living conduit. But how, exactly? What is the nature of that difference, and why is it important?

Which all leads back to the question of whether serious writers can use AI without losing their soul. As I said at the outset, I want to say yes. But that yes depends on what we mean by writing, and the soul, and whether we can tell the difference between unwriting and what might be called outsourcing.

2. Not All Elsewheres Are Equal

The beginnings of an answer are found, I think, in the recognition that not all forms of “elsewhere” are equal, and not every act of stepping aside is an act of receptivity. Sometimes, stepping aside is an act of abdication. There’s a difference between getting yourself out of the way and removing yourself from the work.

When you unwrite and collaborate with your daemon, you’re still involved, still engaged, still an active and necessary part of the process. The words, though they form visually before your eyes, flow from an inner synergy within your psyche and form a feedback loop with it. This is how writing is a way of discovering what we actually think, and what we actually mean.

When I taught writing for years to high school and college students, many of them told me, with absolute sincerity, “I know what I want to say, but I don’t know how to say it.” And almost always, the real situation was subtler and more interesting than that, because in fact the student didn’t know, or at least not yet, what he or she wanted to say. The idea hadn’t yet become clear, precisely because it hadn’t gone through the ordeal of articulating it.

Writing isn’t a tool for expressing something that’s fully formed inside us. Instead, it’s one of the ways the inside becomes formed at all. It doesn’t just communicate thought. It’s one of the ways thought happens. You start with something that feels real and pressing but indistinct, and you follow that thread through trial and error, trying to express it adequately to yourself. Eventually, if grace descends or the daemon cooperates, you start to see what you meant. Or rather, you start to mean something more exact than what you meant at the outset.

This is categorically different from what happens when you enter a prompt on your device and receive back a flow of textual output on the screen. The “elsewhere” of your phone’s or laptop’s processor, or of the distant data center where the prompt was algorithmically parsed, is not the elsewhere of your own deep psyche and what lies beyond it, prior to it, the “beyond within.”

3. Writing Was Always a Technology

And yet, having said all that, it’s still the case that AI really can produce writing-like text. It feels like the most significant technological advance in writing since the invention of writing itself—which, as we will do well to remember, was called into question by Plato in the Phaedrus in his myth of Thamus, the king who rejected writing when the god Theuth brought it as a gift to humankind. Thamus made this decision on the grounds that writing would not be a boon as promised, but a bane, because it would allow people to offload their own rightful task of thinking and knowing onto an external crutch, thus encouraging the buildup of a false facsimile of real knowledge and wisdom. As Neil Postman pointed out when referencing this myth, while it’s true that all technologies involve some kind of trade-off, most of us would probably disagree with Thamus and hold instead that writing has constituted a net benefit for the human race. Today, with the advent of LLMs, we have arrived at another inflection point in the long history of our ecological interactions with our own communications technologies, and we’re called upon to make another judgment, with serious consequences.

In other words, and to make the point clear, writing is already a technology. The question before us now is what this new technology of artificial intelligence does to the inward act that writing enables.

4. Orphaned Text and Living Vision

So here’s one reason, and maybe the core one, why the arrival of AI-generated writing is so disorienting. If “writing” means nothing more than producing grammatically coherent sentences in an organized sequence—or producing poetic lines or anything else with a recognizable form—then the machine can already do it, and with pretty impressive fluency. But that’s a definition of writing that confuses the outer form with the inward truth. The more important question isn’t whether AI can produce text that resembles writing, because it obviously can. The question is whether text produced in that way accomplishes the thing that writing, at its deepest, accomplishes for both the human writer and the human reader. Does it focus consciousness? Does it make one person’s inwardness available to another? Does it transmit not just information or style, but the living charge of a particular consciousness encountering itself, the world, and the mystery of both?

I think most of us know by now, from wearisome contact with the world of AI-generated slop, and perhaps from personal experimentation with various LLMs, that text written by AI doesn’t do these things in the way human writing does. Such text often feels hollow. It feels orphaned. An AI-generated passage may be interesting, and it may be practically useful for some purpose, and it may even move us in some ways. But there’s an irreducible and inescapable distinction between an effect produced in a reader by machine-written text and one produced by writing that’s a transmission from another living soul. AI text is like cloud patterns or tea leaves. We read meaning into it, not out of it.

(There is, I should add, another and stranger way to think about this, one that I may return to in a separate essay: the possibility of approaching AI not as an author but as a kind of oracular pattern-recognition engine, something closer to bibliomancy, the I Ching, or Tarot than to ordinary writing. In that mode, the meaning would still arise through the human act of reception and interpretation. The machine would not be “speaking from a soul,” but the human encounter with its output might become meaningful in the way cloudscapes, cards, coins, dreams, and books falling from shelves can become meaningful. But that’s a different question from the one I’m pursuing here.)

This is what I take Thomas Ligotti to mean, or at least part of what I take him to mean, when he says in “The Consolations of Horror” that horror fiction can console because someone else has shared some of our own feelings and made of them a work of art. The consolation is that someone else has been there. Someone else has seen the same thing and sent back a signal. Can a machine do that?

And yet—and I really want to pause to emphasize this, both because I think it’s important and because it contrasts with so much of what I have tended to think over the past few years, and also what most of my writer friends and colleagues are emphatically saying these days—this doesn’t mean AI can never be useful to a writer. It means only that we have to be very clear about what kind of usefulness we’re talking about.

5. The Strange Bonus

Another way to get at this is to notice that real writing has a certain feeling on the writer’s end. I think every writer knows, or at least hopes to know, the state in which something really catches. William Stafford, in his brief essay “A Way of Writing”—which I cherish—spoke of the “strange bonus” that sometimes arrives when the elements of a piece begin to cohere and lead by themselves to new connections. I recognize that so very deeply. For me, it comes as a sense of inner alignment, a sprouting of new networks of connections as I think and feel my way through a new act of writing in real time. It’s a sense of fluency both internal and external, something humming through my eyes, mind, and fingers, and even my chest and wider body, as everything seems to constellate in a kind of creative synchronicity, as if I’m caught in a gravitational field that’s bringing everything within me and around me toward a convergence on the developing page and project at hand.

This all feels wonderful. There’s a huge rush to it. And yes, of course, this means it’s also crushingly awful when it doesn’t work, when for some reason there’s an inner short circuit or a dry well. It’s important to listen to the silences, to heed them. I damaged myself after the publication of Divinations of the Deep, my first book, in 2002, by pressing on with new writing over the next two or three years because I felt I ought to, even though everything in me was curdling and telling me it was time to stop and let the well recharge. It took me a little while to find my way back to the energetic rush of it, to remember how to invite and receive that strange bonus. The experience made me appreciate that blessing all the more. It also helps me to recognize how AI can become dangerous because it offers a way to bypass creative silence instead of honoring it.

This whole phenomenon also gives us, or at least gives me personally, one practical test for AI: Does a given use of the machine help return me to that strange bonus, that living current, that gravitational field of a creative synchronicity? Or does it replace all this with an instantly produced, finished-looking artifact? Does it help me enter the blessed ordeal and gift of writing, or does it give me the ersatz pleasure of having “generated output”? Most pointedly, does it bring me closer to the inward source? Or does it interpose itself between me and that source while pretending to speak in its voice? Instead of helping connect me to my inner genius, does it lure me into outsourcing my writing to something else?

6. Assistance or Avoidance

If AI helps me return to the work, and deepen the question, and focus me on the sentence I need to write, and find the flow of that strange bonus, then perhaps it genuinely serves the writing. If, on the other hand, it gives me a finished piece of text in place of the inward/outward act of writing that would have helped me bring forth and form what is within me, then it hasn’t helped me write. It has helped me avoid writing while giving the appearance of having written.

That, I think, is the first condition for saying yes. A serious writer can use AI without losing his soul only if he remembers that writing is not mere output, and it’s certainly not external output, words produced remotely without the person’s actual, intimate, firsthand involvement.

What I’m arriving at is the position or perspective that AI may serve the writer in several ways if it’s carefully controlled and approached with a certain ironic distance, a conscious refusal to let its imitation of intelligence convince me, even unconsciously, that there’s really someone there, someone with the interiority of a writer. There are various valid roles for it: mirror, questioner, foil, interlocutor, organizer, friction-remover—though not all friction by any means, since friction is often what I need the most. AI can help reveal things that are latent in reams of my notes. It can ask a question that reignites my fire for a piece I’m flailing with. It can help test a structure, or expose a weak transition, or maybe even point out that what I thought I was writing isn’t quite the piece that’s trying to be born.

I have found this technology to be frankly fascinating, even as I’m deeply wary of it, and have been increasingly experimenting with it over the past three years in private as I’ve tried to figure out what, exactly, it is relative to me, and what it can and cannot and may and may not do for me—just as I did when, after a childhood of being obsessed with writing stories, first by hand, and then on my parents’ old manual typewriter, and then on an electric typewriter, I found my way into the new world of word processing and learned about the trap doors of spelling and grammar checkers and on-demand thesauruses. I have found AI to be genuinely helpful with certain kinds of planning, questioning, organizing, testing, and editorial reflection. I have also repeatedly come up against the danger that it might rob me of the very difficulty that makes my writing my own. As a preliminary matter, I’ve found that it “wants” to divert my attention from my inner creative relationship, luring me with a kind of siren song to just go ahead and use it as the writing genie while my daemon muse hovers behind my conscious self, silent and abandoned.

Despite this apparently inbuilt temptation, I’m beginning to think that generative AI may eventually become one more technology in the long history of writing technologies, something that definitely changes things in substantial ways, but that doesn’t have to be framed and feared as a herald of creative Armageddon. Maybe it can, in its own way, support our creativity instead of replacing it.

7. My Provisional Position

So this is where I find myself, at least for now. I don’t think serious writers need to reject AI outright. I also don’t think we can safely treat it as just another tool, as if nothing fundamental has changed. Something fundamental has changed. The machine can now imitate not only the generation of writing but some of the feeling of inspiration itself, at least if we fail to consider it carefully. That makes it powerful and dangerous.

There are, of course, other serious objections to AI that I’m not addressing here: environmental costs, energy and water use, the proliferation of data centers, copyright and labor concerns, institutional disruption, and more. I don’t dismiss any of these as trivial. Some of them may prove decisive for many people, and maybe they should. The copyright matter intersects with me personally, as my own books show up among the sources that have been used to train the prominent LLMs. But the question I’m trying to think through here is narrower and more inward than whether the whole AI enterprise is ethically, politically, or ecologically justified. I’m asking whether a serious writer, confronted with the fact of this technology, can use it practically and/or creatively without damaging the spiritual core of the work.

My thinking has also been sharpened by my day job in higher education, where AI has become impossible to ignore. As a vice chancellor of academic affairs, I’ve helped lead my college’s efforts to think through responsible AI use among faculty, staff, and students, including policy work and a broader institutional project focused on AI, teaching, learning, and student success. I’m also in regular conversation with faculty who are trying to decide what kinds of AI use should be permitted, encouraged, discouraged, or forbidden in their courses. All of that has contributed to making the issue feel immediate and practical to me.

So the “yes” with which I began is actually brimming with qualifications. As I said, this is a complex question that requires careful consideration. I’m talking here about the writer’s soul, by which I mean the living inward relationship among attention, conscience, vision, and the spiritual source of one’s creative calling. Stated as a principle, my current answer is this:

A serious writer can use AI without losing his soul, but only if it assists the work instead of becoming the source of the work.

Plain and obvious as it sounds, everything I’ve been saying here goes into that.

I hasten to add that this position is provisional and subject to change. At the end of Richard Bach’s book Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, the protagonist, a fictionalized version of the author, stumbles upon a line in the “messiah’s handbook” that he had been eagerly consulting for weeks, and it turns his world upside down: “Everything in this book may be wrong.” That’s how I feel about what I’ve said above, and about everything I may go on to say about the subject in the future. Things are moving and changing fast, and what counts as a valid position is almost impossible to judge. But, for better or worse, my current outlook is what I’ve been laying out here.

8. Finding the Line

At the moment, behind the scenes—or now partly onstage, in the form of this essay—I’m beginning to think through these questions in a more sustained and practical way as part of a larger project I’m developing called The Self-Determined Writer. It will focus on humane authorship, creative freedom, ethical technology, and how to preserve voice and judgment in an age of automation. But for now, I’m less interested in announcing anything than in asking the AI question honestly.

I don’t just want to raise the question and then pontificate about it by myself. I want to hear from you, too. For those of you who write, teach, read deeply, make art, or just care about culture and creativity and therefore feel the force of the AI question, where do you draw the line? What uses of AI feel like valid assistance from a sophisticated tool, and what uses feel like abdication and outsourcing? Does AI enrich your relationship with your inner genius, your daemon muse? Does it empower you in your writing or other creative endeavors? Or does it hijack your creative spirit by offering a plausible but artificial substitute?

And maybe most simply: After using AI, do you feel more alive to your work, or less?

Warm regards,

The Living Dark Reader, No. 2

Matt Cardin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:01:30 GMT

Jasper Francis Cropsey, Autumn – On the Hudson River (1860). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Dear Living Dark reader,

The second issue of The Living Dark Reader is here. If you’ve noticed my absence from your inbox over the past month, this is why: I’ve been working steadily on this new issue.

As with the first issue, this is my quarterly PDF journal of essays, reflections, and fragments, gathered and shaped for slower reading away from the restless currents of the live online world. It accompanies this newsletter, but it represents my small attempt to offer a different kind of experience, one that’s quieter, more stable, more page-like, and better suited for sustained attention than an internet-based publication. That experience extends to my side of the project as well. In the spirit of the whole thing, I have thoroughly enjoyed this extended period of deep writing, reading, and editing.

This new issue gathers several pieces of writing that explore a common territory from different angles and perspectives. One is about the strange longing that has haunted me since adolescence. Others consider the nature of selfhood, the stories we mistake for reality, anomalous experience and the limits of reductionist explanation, and the alchemical power of language and writing in the age of artificial intelligence. The issue concludes with a new section of fragments and reflections.

The anchor essay is “The Autumn Longing,” a piece that has been almost two decades in the making. It began in fragments years ago at my old blog The Teeming Brain, drew in material from later essays and notes, and eventually became something like a personal phenomenology of transcendental desire, representing an attempt to describe a particular experience of intense, ethereal longing that I first became aware of in childhood and later recognized in the writings of C. S. Lewis, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Peter Shaffer, Huston Smith, Alan Watts, Colin Wilson, and others.

Here’s an excerpt from its opening movement:

The autumn season has always carried a special emotional potency for me. When the weather turns crisp and the colors of nature change first to vibrant reds, oranges, and golds, and then progress onward toward deep russet browns, tending toward the death-sleep of winter, I’m struck with feelings of poignancy and melancholy that burn more brightly, or perhaps more darkly, than at any other time of the year. I’m also more exquisitely sensitive to the aesthetic influence of art, whether literary, musical, visual, or otherwise.
It was many years ago that I first realized and articulated to myself that this autumnal mood is inextricably bound up with a certain, strange longing. When the mood of autumn comes over me, it’s always characterized by a kind of nostalgia for something I have never really known, as if I possess some vestigial memory of a lost knowledge or emotion that flits maddeningly and elusively on the edge of my ability to remember. It’s truly a numinous experience, one that makes me feel as if I’ve come into brief contact with some sort of transcendent spiritual truth. It tends to generate the impression of an absolute, unmediated experience of supernal beauty hovering just beyond the edge of my inner grasp.

The essays that follow take up adjacent and overlapping themes. “The Leftover Self” reflects on Walker Percy, philosophical instability, and the self that remains after every theory fails to contain it. “Your Afterlife as a Fictional Character” uses the metaphor of novels and movies to ask what survives every story, including the story of one’s own life. “When Science Meets the Supernatural” begins with sleep paralysis and proceeds to consider experience, explanation, and the assumptions that govern our maps of reality. And “The Zen of Words” returns to the power of language itself, asking what writing does for the soul in an age when artificial intelligence can now produce text on command.

The issue closes with a new collection of “Fragments & Reflections.” These encompass shorter observations on writing, the daemon muse, weirdness, nonduality, digital life, solitude, creativity, and the strange ways in which private experience can sometimes open onto something universal.

Paid subscribers will find the download link for The Living Dark Reader, no. 2, below my signature. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you sincerely for helping to make this work possible. If you’re not, and you’d like to read the issue, I invite you to subscribe and know that I deeply appreciate the support.

However you arrived here, I’m glad you did. Thank you for reading.

Warm regards,

Download The Living Dark Reader, No. 2:

Alan Watts on Hints of a Forgotten Paradise

Matt Cardin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:35:27 GMT

Alan Watts in middle age. Via Wikipedia..

Dear Living Dark readers,

For the past month, I have been hard at work on the second issue of The Living Dark Reader. And stemming from that, I want to say this:

Alan Watts’s project in Beyond Theology was to reinterpret Christian theology through the lens of Advaita Vedanta, the Hindu philosophical tradition whose central insight is famously expressed in the eighth-century philosopher Sankara’s formulation: “Brahman is real, the world is false, the individual self is only Brahman, nothing else.” Brahman, in this framework, is the universal, central self whose divine dreaming gives rise to all finite selves and the cosmos in which they exist. These selves and their lives are real, but they are real as dreams, as projections of Brahman into the play of finite existence, which the tradition calls lila, the divine game or dance, unfolding within maya, the dream or illusion of space, time, and separate identity.

Within this outlook, Watts found a warrant for appreciating the Christian experience of alienation and longing in a new light. The individual self’s sense of lostness, incompleteness, and yearning for something beyond itself becomes, in his reading, the experience of Brahman dreaming itself so deeply into finite form that it temporarily forgets its own nature: “If … the Christian imagery is set within the context of the Hindu, the razor-edge path between salvation and damnation, with all the magnificent and appalling consequences this illusion has had for mankind, becomes one of the greatest dramatic situations of all time,” because it illustrates how deeply Brahman can allow itself to become lost in its dream, even to the point of forgetting that it is dreaming and that it therefore possesses the power to awaken.

The experience of individuated selfhood thus becomes, in Watts’s formulation, “a dream that I am not dreaming at all, that I will never wake up, that I have completely lost myself somewhere down the tangled corridors of the mind, and, finally, that I am in such excruciating agony that when I wake up, it will be better than all possible dreams.” In other words, it becomes the dream of the wholly alienated Christian creature-self, lost in a vale of tears and anxiously longing for the inconceivable bliss of Paradise, to be known in the hereafter by those who have been saved through Christ.

It is out of this schema, and specifically out of a model of human individuality as “two spheres with a common center,” the outer sphere being the conscious ego and the inner sphere being the real self that the ego has forgotten, that Watts’s description of a primal human longing emerges. This longing, in his reading, is the inevitable epiphenomenon of a consciousness that has temporarily forgotten what it most deeply is, and that sometimes, in certain rare and luminous moments, it half-remembers:

This fantasy religion would then require the final condition that at some time the two spheres would merge, that my inmost Self would awaken from its dream to transform my superficial ego with a shock of recognition. Perhaps this is why we sometimes have a strangely pleasant sensation of having forgotten something extremely important from long, long ago. Occasionally, this shadow of a memory comes with hints of a forgotten paradise, some luminous landscape of hills and waters which is utterly familiar and yet completely unidentifiable. Every now and then the “real” world reminds us of it, and we think, “This is what I have always been looking for. This place feels like home.” At other times, the memory has a much deeper dimension—a sensation of being immeasurably ancient and knowing, as somehow prior to time and space. But there is nothing at all specific about it, for though the sensation is vivid, it is tantalizingly ephemeral. These are, then, intimations of something to be remembered which is, as it were, a vast dimension of one’s being which has been kept hidden—perhaps from the moment of birth. For consciousness, or conscious attention, is the trick of noticing the figure and ignoring the background, and in the same way I seem to notice my ego and forget my background, the larger Self which underlies my ego.

The above paragraphs come from the appendix to the lead essay in that forthcoming Living Dark Reader, titled “The Autumn Longing.” I’ll be publishing the issue here for paid subscribers on June 15. The table of contents is as follows, though the page numbers may end up shifting slightly based on final edits that I’m currently performing:

That’s all for now. I’ll talk to you again in a few days.

Warm regards,

The inner work of the creative life:

PRAISE:

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. — Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.” — Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“One of those magical texts that voices the Truth I secretly always knew.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

The Monastery of Your Life

Matt Cardin — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:49:36 GMT

A monk at work in a scriptorium. Unknown artist. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Dear Living Dark readers,

In The Twilight of American Culture (2000), Morris Berman laid out a vision of the “monastic option” and the “new monastic individual,” referring to a type of person and a way of life consciously oriented toward preserving and transmitting forms of consciousness and ways of being that can serve as seeds for some future Renaissance after the dysfunctional current order of things has collapsed. Long-time readers will remember that I have mentioned and discussed this before.

I found Berman’s new monastic model and recommendation magnetically persuasive and congenial to my own sense of things when I first read it in 2004—including his insistence on the necessarily private and small-scale nature of the enterprise. He advised strongly that the new monastic way of life must involve keeping these types of activities essentially solitary and sheltered from the destructive attention of the surrounding culture. The more individual the activity, he argued, and the more out of the public eye, the more effective it was likely to be. “A Taoist rule of thumb,” he wrote, “might be that if the larger culture knows about it, then it’s not the real thing.”1 You don’t make a mass movement out of these things, because then they would necessarily be co-opted and corrupted, and end up serving the very system they’re intended to resist.

Some people are joiners and others aren’t. If it’s possible to lean too far in the latter direction, then I am guilty of that sin or shortcoming. To revise Groucho Marx’s famous quip, I would never be a member of any club that has members. The longer I live, the more my personal antipathy toward and mistrust of institutions and organizations reveals itself as intrinsic, as fundamental.

The idea of the solitary monk, related to others not by any overarching organizational order like a monastery, but simply by natural affinity without external strings, seems ever more like a core ideal. All human institutions and organizations inevitably cross some invisible threshold at some point in their life cycle, after which they no longer serve the end they were originally created to serve, but only their own preservation and perpetuation. They become inward-turned. And they cause all kinds of trouble. (This was, I note, a principle that emerged in my doctoral dissertation on Oswald Chambers’s leadership principles.)

I think this is related to something fundamental in human consciousness that is less pernicious, at least on a mass scale, when it’s allowed to operate primarily at the individual level. We are each a kind of self-contained system that projects its own need for self-perpetuation through the feedback loop of self-consciousness. We conceive ourselves to be separate individuals who must ensure our own survival, and then project this same impulse outward into the institutions and organizations we create. The result is that institutions often become expressions of collective egoism, concerned less with the ends they were created to serve than with their own continued existence. In essence, we create phantom institutions from the aggregating of our phantom selves, and then insist that this aggregation is somehow more real instead of representing the most phantasmal entity of all.

You don’t get that effect, even in a world teeming and swarming with collective phantoms, when you keep your focus and your aim much closer to home. As Berman himself put it, “You can choose a way of life that becomes its own ‘monastery,’ preserves the treasures of our heritage for yourself, and, hopefully, for future generations.”2

I comment on these words in the concluding chapter of Writing at the Wellspring, where I take Berman’s vision as a central pillar:

In the model I am proposing, these “treasures” refer not only to the objects, knowledge, and ways of being that a specific culture and civilization has produced, but to our Original Being, the spiritual source of what we are and what the world is. This monastery of one’s life is where a living connection with reality—I want to give it a capitalization for divine emphasis: Reality—is maintained, and again, not for purely private enjoyment or benefit, but for the leavening and healing influence that this inevitably and inexorably, and also quietly and subtly, broadcasts to others.3

Elsewhere in the book, I say this:

If you are a natural introvert whose creative impulse thrives in and on solitude, and who has felt the same impulse smothered many times by the call and clamor of the outside world, then learn this lesson: You don’t need external solitude to hear the voice of your muse. You can find it right in the middle of a crowd. You can learn to carry your creative silence and solitude with you: a portable inner monastery of the muse.4

Hence, the solitary monk ideal. “You and I can lead the ‘monastic life,’” Berman wrote, “and we can start to do it right now.”5 We can each enact our own calling and let it interact organically with those of others, serving any larger purpose naturally.

Warm regards,

The Living Dark is free to all readers. If you find value here, a paid subscription or one-time donation helps sustain the work. Paid subscribers receive access to the full archive plus the quarterly Living Dark Reader, a PDF journal for slow reading and reflection.

The inner work of the creative life:

PRAISE:

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. — Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.” — Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“One of those magical texts that voices the Truth I secretly always knew.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (W. W. Norton, 2000), 131.

Ibid., 157.

Matt Cardin, Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius (Deep Current Press, 2025), 216.

Ibid., 31.

Ibid., 158 (Berman’s emphasis).

An Unfinished Story That I Don't Remember Writing

Matt Cardin — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:29:04 GMT

Photo by Barış Türköz via Pexels

Dear Living Dark reader,

Whenever I browse through the bristling papers, pages, files, and archives of my unpublished writings—an activity that comes over me from time to time—I invariably find many things that I have no memory of producing. There are, for example, heaps of notes for stories and essays that once suggested themselves but that I never developed or pursued to completion. There are also many partial drafts, sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a few pages, that similarly came to me at some forgotten point in the past and propelled themselves with an internal energy that soon played out and never returned, leaving them stranded in fragmentary form. Reading such fragments is like reading someone else’s words. Who was I when I wrote them? What came over me? What was the original seed idea, and where did I think it might be headed? What did it feel like to be inspired by that particular energy? Why did I write those few words and then abandon them?

I included a great deal of such material in the two volumes of my private journal that were published a few years ago (Journals, Volume 1: 1993–2001 and Journals, Volume 2: 2002–2022). In particular, those books contain scores of seed ideas and partial drafts for what could have become short stories or novellas, or maybe, in one or two cases, an entire novel. For many years my journal was my primary creative repository and outlet, a flow that I kept private even as I entered my career as a published writer. Those story ideas and fragments were part of that flow.

Today, as I was poking around my electronic archives, I found the item below. I literally have no memory of writing it, though by examining the file properties I can see that it’s not something from the dim and distant past but a fairly recent creation: It was written on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 19, 2020. That means I may have written it at work, perhaps while taking a late lunch break from my vice presidential duties at my last college. Between then and now stands a tangled barricade of events, both personal and global, that were dramatic enough to account for my total blankness about this partial piece, including such things as the Covid pandemic and my relocation from Texas to Arkansas during it. I’m sure you understand, because I expect you probably share my feeling of an ongoing time warp that enveloped us all some years ago and still hasn’t let up.

In any event, this morning, as I read through this lost and abandoned draft of what would likely have become a weird or cosmic horror story—written at a time when I hadn’t produced any new fiction for several years, my muse of fiction having gone dormant or perhaps left me for good—I found it not bad, in fact pretty good, and wondered where it might have led if I had taken the time to pursue it. And it occurred to me to share it here with you. Though it’s untitled, I have assigned it a title that seems the obviously appropriate one, based on how the fragment ends.

If you read it and perhaps find that any thoughts suggest themselves to you for where the narrative might have gone after this introductory section, I would love to hear them in the comments.

Warm regards,

The Book of Rahmat Ghraam

A fragment

by Matt Cardin, 2020

For decades I have been practically infected by the power of some words spoken by a man I never met. I literally stumbled across these words in written form while browsing through the stacks of yellowed, fragrant paperbacks piled against the rear wall of the Savior’s Mercy thrift shop.

I used to like to visit the shop during my lunch break, when I was freed for an hour from the prison of my desk at the Hamill-Kreston Life Insurance Agency. The agency office was located a block away from Savior’s Mercy, and those stacks of musty books, some of them literally moldy with age, were my secret haven during those deadly dull days of data entry and policy research. My bosses, Misters Hamill and Kreston themselves, never let me work directly with clients. My desk was shoved against a side wall near the rear of the office, from whence I could hear them flattering, threatening, cajoling, and bantering with people in their separate offices to my right and left, on either side of the main area. I could also watch our receptionist, Layla, interact with the public at her significantly larger and nicer desk near the front of the office, where she was displayed like a department store mannequin to any passersby on the sidewalk outside who bothered to look through the plate glass windows. I often imagined, or rather suspected, that clients and customers never even knew I was there. The only people who ever looked at me were Hamill and Kreston themselves (Layla certainly wasn’t going to), one or the other of whom would emerge from his office at least once a day to stand there in the doorway, scratch his considerable belly, which was barely concealed beneath its taut casing of a white button-up business shirt, and idly warn me to meet my quota. Which I unfailingly did.

It was on one such afternoon, right after Kreston had not only stood there and scratched his belly but offered up an onion-scented belch to confirm his complete disdain for me, that I fled to Savior’s Mercy and nearly fell to the grimy carpeted floor as I was stepping toward a new stack of books to examine an old copy of H. Rider Haggard’s She, which I had long wanted to read, and whose unexpected appearance was a sheer delight. In my excitement, I accidentally put my foot down on the cover of a book that lay separate from the others. It slipped beneath my weight and threw me forward into my intended stack, which promptly transformed itself from a teetering tower into a deluge of dead birds. Crumbling covers and pages cascaded everywhere in a flutter of papery plumage, flopping to the floor like a literal murder of crows. In the ensuing silence, I regained my balance and glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. The shop’s sole employee, or at least the only one I had ever seen, was apparently working in the back room where new donations were received. My dignity was spared. Nevertheless, I restacked the books as best I could, even though some of them (including Haggard’s) were now all but destroyed. Then I turned my eyes down to the floor to discover the nature of the offending volume.

It was a tiny, flat thing that looked to be barely a hundred pages long. It featured a dull brownish cover adorned with dull brownish text and an abstract image in the middle. The fading of age had rendered the contrast between the background and the title so slight that I could barely read the words. I sank to one knee to have a closer look.

As best as I could make it out, the title was The Source and the Receptacle, although it could have been The Sauce and the Respectable. The author appeared to be one Walter Douglas Ingram. The cover illustration, sandwiched between the title and author, consisted of a dull field of rusts, ambers, and russets, all emanating in vague lines like sunbeams from a central point, but muted and melted together to form an ambiguous nest of uncertain vectors and textures. I reached down a hand and stroked my forefinger across the surface. It proved surprisingly smooth; something about the illustration had suggested a kind of rippling or rolling, like waves, or like bunched clusters of cylinders and tubes.

I opened the cover gently, taking care lest the old binding break, and turned to the title page. Although the paper was dramatically yellowed, the title The Source and the Receptacle was confirmed in clearly legible print. Beneath it, the author—or rather, as I learned a moment later, the compiler and editor—was listed as Thomas Herbert Murray. I frowned and took another look at the cover. Although damnably difficult to read in its chromatically flattened context, the name Walter Douglas Ingram still seemed the most likely interpretation of what appeared there.

This, as I was swiftly to learn, was only the first of many peculiarities.

I spent the rest of that lunch hour browsing through this strange book, seated cross-legged on the dirty floor of the thrift shop, nestled among the piles of paperbacks hovering on all sides of me, and it was there that I discovered the words that changed everything. The book proved to be not a single-author volume but an anthology of writings by multiple individuals. Or in some cases they were not writings but what appeared to be direct transcriptions of words spoken to or heard by the editor.

The dominant theme was that of religion and spirituality, accompanied by copious helpings of the occult and esoteric. However, this was undercut by annotations from Ingram that appeared to represent excerpts from his personal journal or diary, and that injected a jarring element of the whimsical, humorous, and sometimes opaquely absurd into the otherwise august tone of the book’s more refined and exalted elements.

Many mystics were present, most of them Western but some of them Eastern. From the Christian tradition, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Teresa of Ávila were heavily represented. Some words from the latter were accompanied by a clumsy attempt at a sketch of Bernini’s famous sculpture depicting the beloved Saint’s ecstasy. The only thing the artist (Ingram/Murray himself?) had gotten even minimally correct was the orgasmic expression on Teresa’s upturned face. The rest was on the level of a child’s drawing.

Of the non-Christian sources, Sankara and Ramakrishna were the chief Hindu presences, while al-Hallaj and Rumi were the chief Muslim ones. There were also quotations from various scriptures—the Old and New Testaments, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching—as well as occult and esoteric texts such as the Corpus Hermeticum and Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine.

Then there were the passages quoted from the works of one Rahmat Ghraam, whose name was unfamiliar to me. Even now, I can see them printed on the pages of that book in my mind’s eye, their content as vivid and precise as on the day I first encountered them. Though I am not possessed of a photographic or eidetic memory, I can still mentally read them word for word and line for line. Upon that first reading, they impressed me—as in, they made an impression, like a stamp or seal on my soul—that has never disappeared.

They also opened a door that has never closed, though I have tried many times to find out how to close it.

The inner work of the creative life:

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

The Best Thomas Ligotti Story You’ve Probably Never Read

Matt Cardin — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:57:38 GMT

Photo by Josh Sorenson via Pexels

Dear Living Dark readers,

Today, I want to commend to your attention a short story by Thomas Ligotti titled “Ghost Stories for the Dead.” Whether you’re already familiar with Ligotti or have never read his work, this is a powerful piece of fiction that, I predict, you may find deeply arresting.

You won’t find it in Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, the combined 2015 Penguin Classics edition of Tom’s first two books, which were originally published separately in 1986 and 1991 and which were collections of stories that had previously appeared in the horror small press. Nor will you find it in any of his other collections—not Teatro Grottesco, and not even 1996’s The Nightmare Factory, which represented a nearly comprehensive omnibus of his fiction up to that time.

“Ghost Stories for the Dead” first appeared in 1982 in the second issue of author/editor Thomas Wiloch’s small press horror magazine Grimoire. It opens with an epigraph drawn from E. M. Cioran, a confirmed influence on Ligotti’s work and worldview: “That faint light in each of us which dates back before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we were separated.” It then proceeds to tell a dark and reflective story, partly mournful and partly horrific, about the bliss of nonexistence as contrasted with the nightmarish agony of existence. Rather than unfolding as a conventional narrative, it is structured as a sequence of four short, thematically linked movements, each approaching the same central vision from a different angle:

The New Blackness
The New Silence
The Old Nonsense and the New
Tales of the New Dream

Across these sections, Ligotti contrasts the torments and absurdities of embodied existence with a strange, almost beatific condition of post-existence, where identity, memory, and suffering fall away into a state of absolute negation. But the story does not leave things there. In its final movement, it introduces a quiet but devastating reversal, one that suggests even this annihilating escape may not be secure.

In 1989, seven years after its initial appearance, the story showed up again in the special all-Ligotti 68th issue of Crypt of Cthulhu. Then it was posted at Thomas Ligotti Online from 1998 to 2002.

And after that, it basically disappeared. As I mentioned, it has never been collected in any of Ligotti’s books, though it was included in a “collected short fiction” project—not carried out or authorized by Tom himself—that attempted to bring together all of his stories in chronological order.

I find this omission to be unfortunate and somewhat mystifying, as “Ghost Stories for the Dead” is simply brilliant, and also quite affecting in its signature combination of philosophical perspective, supernatural horror, and depressive gloom. If I were to assemble a list of my eight or ten favorite Ligotti stories, this would be among them. I don’t know why Tom has chosen not to include it in any of his fiction collections. I mentioned the story to him in 2006 when I interviewed him for my Teeming Brain blog (see “Interview with Thomas Ligotti: It’s All a Matter of Personal Pathology”), noting that it falls among the subset of his works that take a highly experimental approach and that convey plot only obliquely, opting instead to foreground his signature variety of horrific philosophical speculation. But I didn’t ask why he had chosen to leave it uncollected.

If you find anything enticing in this paean to a Ligottian literary rarity, be advised that you can read the story online, along with that entire issue of Crypt of Cthulhu, thanks to the Internet Archive.

As an accompanying note, and to expand on what I said at the start, I know many of you are interested in Ligotti’s writings, while I also know that some of you probably aren’t. Some of you may not even be familiar with his name, which is of course fine. Wherever you fall on that continuum of possibilities, I think this story will appeal if you appreciate short fiction that arrests and transports through a combination of philosophical vision and literary skill.

Thinking about the varying degrees of reader awareness toward Ligotti and his work leads me into a double-pronged digression, one having to do with the arc of his career and the other with my own history as a writer. As for the first, I still find Tom’s ascension or evolution from cult horror writer to mainstream literary figure to be somewhat hard to believe, even though it’s now a decade since that combined edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe from Penguin, followed by their publication of his nonfiction opus The Conspiracy against the Human Race three years later (in 2018), unofficially promoted him to the rank of canonical American author. And of course the famous (notorious) connection between his work and the pessimist/antinatalist worldview of the character of Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, in the first season of HBO’s True Detective thrust him into the general public spotlight before either of the Penguin books appeared. Then there’s the fact that he had, in the 1990s, gone through a brief period of mass-market exposure and mainstream critical attention before returning to the world of small press horror that had been his original domain. It’s a striking trajectory.

As for my own writing, much of it has been integrally bound up with my love for Ligotti, whose work has always felt deeply personal to me, as in, personal in a way that’s specific to my own person. Those of us who had been transfixed for years by his writing, feeling it to be a priceless and somewhat private possession with its combination of cult status and life-changing power—it felt as if his stories, books, and interviews were speaking to each of us individually in the depths of our soul—found his transition to mainstream status to be a strange one indeed, something to be simultaneously celebrated and half-regretted, as if a precious secret were in danger of being denatured.

I came to Ligotti’s work myself at the very start of what I didn’t know would be something of an authorial career, and, as I’ve said, those two things were thoroughly enmeshed. My first published story was “Teeth,” which I had written two or three years before I first read Ligotti, and which readers later told me was suffused with a distinctly Ligottian vibe. Moreover, its first publication was at the brand-new website Thomas Ligotti Online in 1998, where I was an original member. I went on to write and publish more in the field of weird, cosmic, and supernatural horror, as my innate creative drive led me to produce stories that explored the dark depths where horror, religion, and art are different facets of the same spiritual jewel.

Then my daemon muse began leading me to branch out into writing about creativity itself in connection with the weird and spiritual, and eventually in connection with nonduality. But that didn’t mean I left horror completely behind. As the classic 1980s horror anthology television series Tales from the Darkside (which I have invoked here before) observed each week in its closing narration, “The darkside is always there, waiting for us to enter, waiting to enter us.” The dark is just as real as anything having to do with the light, of which it is the obverse face or facet, the inseparable alternate aspect. It will always be part of my writing. And, to return to the point, there continues to be no more profound or important body of work dealing with the darkness than that of Thomas Ligotti, for whom the darkness has been all-consuming, though not unleavened by a distinct dose of sharp wit and humor from time to time.

Early in my engagement with his work, right after I had read Grimscribe and Songs of a Dead Dreamer, I read “Ghost Stories for the Dead” and found it so very powerful, so very resonant with the deep fears, feelings, and fascinations that defined my sensibility. For me it occupies a special place. And that’s why I’m bringing it to your attention now.

In parting, here’s a taste of its actual text to further whet your appetite. This comes from its closing words, which may haunt you, not like a specter that threatens from the outside, but like one that lives inside your own self:

For in the new dream such beings—wrenched from eternity and returned to earth—are capable of anything from indiscretion to atrocity. Those who have suffered most know how to inflict it best—it’s a law of the universe. The suicides, the murdered . . . the unfulfilled, the broken hearted: veterans of extraordinary suffering and mercenaries of its perpetuation.
These are my mind’s eyes, I who have no eyes. These are my mind’s mind, I who am not mind. I am bereft of traits, bankrupt of qualities. The riches of the dead are extravagant next to my destitute estate. I have nothing but my immortality; and now, desiring or not, they will have it too.
And I am glad I cannot know them.
But I am even gladder they cannot know me.

Warm regards,

Some of the book links here are affiliate links to Amazon or Bookshop.org, which means I’ll earn a commission if you click through them and buy anything.

The inner work of the creative life:

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

Writing from the Source: Talking to Joanna Penn About Creativity

Matt Cardin — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:53:21 GMT

Image by Sahil Singh from Pixabay

Dear Living Dark readers,

I was recently interviewed by Joanna Penn, the bestselling author and creative entrepreneur, for her podcast The Creative Penn. The episode dropped today under the title “Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, with Matt Cardin.” You may recall that Jo kindly provided a blurb for my book, calling it “a guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. Part craft, part devotion, Writing at the Wellspring is a call to surrender control, listen beneath the noise, and create from the place where awe and fear meet. If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.” It was a real pleasure to talk with her about the book’s themes. We talked about creativity as a collaboration with something deeper—and sometimes darker—than the conscious mind.

The only drag was some persistent noise on my end that you can hear during my portion of the conversation. I don’t know what caused it, but I hope the content of our interaction is interesting enough to make up for it.

Listen Here

You can also find the episode on the official site:

The Creative Penn, episode 856 (with show notes and transcript)

About the Episode

Here’s the official description:

What if the source of your best writing isn't something you control — but something you learn to collaborate with? How can ancient ideas about the muse, the daimon, and creative genius transform the way you approach your work? And what might happen if you stopped fighting the silence and let it become your greatest creative ally? With Matt Cardin, author of Writing at the Wellspring.

What we talk about:

How I balance a full-time academic career with my creative writing life
The ancient idea of the genius, muse, and daimon
Why creative silence (including writer’s block) may be a gift
The stages of the creative process
Living into the dark and embracing uncertainty
How blogging and Substack can organically grow into books

From the Conversation

Here’s a short excerpt from the transcript (with Jo’s British spellings intact):

When you talk about the ancient Greek daimon, there was a whole well-developed tradition of that in ancient Greek philosophy and religion. A daimon was, in one famous sense, a spirit that you were born with, that the gods had given you. It was like your double, your higher self. It was the thing that represented your character, your interests, the blueprint and the outline that your life was supposed to follow.
[…]
For writers, my recommendation is to say, whether you believe it or not, whether you take it as a metaphor—which is fine—or whether you want to get somewhat mystical and delve into the idea that maybe there’s really a spirit or something, it doesn’t matter. Productively, with practical, measurable results, you can learn to relate to your creative impulse as if you are collaborating internally with someone else.
It’s the centre of why you’re interested in writing what you want to write, why you want to write the way you want to write, and even the types of things that unfold in the course of your career—both your creative career and the rest of your life, in the mould of the ancient daimon.
I have found that to be a vein of great power and meaning in my own life. I do it exactly the way I’m describing. I don’t actually believe it, but I don’t disbelieve it. I find that in experience, it really doesn’t matter. It works and it may as well be true.

If you’ve found my writings on creativity, spirituality, and cosmic dread here at The Living Dark—or in Writing at the Wellspring or A Course in Demonic Creativity—to resonate with your own creative and spiritual journey, you’ll likely find something here for you as well.

Warm regards,

The Living Dark is freely published. If you find value here, a paid subscription or one-time donation helps sustain the work. Paid subscribers receive access to the full archive plus the quarterly Living Dark Reader, a PDF journal for slow reading and reflection.

The inner work of the creative life:

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

Be the Writer You Are

Matt Cardin — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:25:15 GMT

First page of Lovecraft's original, unrevised manuscript to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, 1927. Public domain

Dear Living Dark Reader,

There are many different ways of being a writer. The comprehensive field of possibilities encompasses a vast array of forms and styles. And you, as the unique individual that you are (or that you appear to be), are free to be the writer you’re meant to be instead of chaining yourself to someone else’s rule.

Having led with the point, let me unpack and illustrate it. Our focus here is the specific matter of style, and of how there is no uniform or absolute standard to which you are obligated to conform.

Mark Twain once gave some advice to a young student, a 12-year-old boy from Texas named David Watt Bowser, on the value of plainness in writing. This came in a letter whose origin is quite charming: In 1880 Bowser was the star pupil of one Laura M. Dake, who, twenty years earlier under her maiden name of Wright, had shared a three-day platonic romance with Sam Clemens during his youthful days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Both parties had always remembered the relationship with fondness. Two decades later, Dake, now principal of Dallas’s Commerce Street School, encouraged her precocious student Bowser to send one of his English compositions to Clemens, who was now famous as Mark Twain. Twain was delighted to receive the letter, which included an account of its origin, and this led to a two-year correspondence between the man and the boy. Their letters remained private until 1959, a quarter century after Bowser’s death, when they were discovered in an old lockbox. The find was announced in The New York Times, and the letters were published the next year in The Southwest Review.

It is the postscript to Twain’s original letter to Bowser, dated March 20, 1880, that I want to focus on here. In the letter’s main body, Twain reflects on Bowser’s inquiry about whether he would like to be a boy again. He also lets the boy know that he has not yet read his composition. Then comes the postscript, which he added a little later:

Now I have read your composition, and think it is a very creditable performance. I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words, and brief sentences. That is the way to write English—it is the modern way, and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean that, utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together, they give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, or flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

It was a very large-hearted letter for Twain to have written to such a young correspondent. It is also an important letter for those of us identified as writers, particularly because Twain’s advice in that postscript has gone on to assume the status, for many, of the type of universal rule that I am here calling out for rejection. It has been widely quoted and much celebrated as one of the classic statements, by an acknowledged literary master, on the fundamentals of effective prose style. But for all this, and as much as I love Twain, I simply have to respond to it, or at least to its universal application, with an emphatic no. When Twain advised killing most adjectives, he was speaking for himself, which was fine, and he was also speaking in and for the specific rhetorical moment of his correspondence with young Bowser, which was right and proper. But this in no way makes his words qualify as a general rule. There is a clear and definite place for prose that presents a rich stew of descriptive language. There’s even a place for all-out baroque writing that teems and bristles with a profusion of adjectives, adverbs, and long, densely looping chains of phraseology.

An obvious authorial example that comes to mind is that of H. P. Lovecraft. Critics have sometimes condemned Lovecraft’s prose style for the supposed sin of what some have called “adjectivitis.” The major precedent for this was set early on by Edmund Wilson, who, as the most prominent American literary critic in the first half of the twentieth century, both reflected and helped to set what counted as mainstream opinion. In a 1945 New Yorker article titled “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous,” Wilson famously lambasted Lovecraft by opining that the only horror to be found in his stories was “the horror of bad taste and bad art.” Wilson criticized both Lovecraft’s general sensibility and his specific writing style, saying of the latter:

Lovecraft’s worst fault is his incessant effort to work up the expectation of the reader by sprinkling his stories with such words as “horrible,” “terrible,” “frightful,” “awesome,” “fearsome,” “eldritch,” “eerie,” “weird,” “forbidden,” “unhallowed,” “unholy,” “blasphemous,” “hellish,” and “infernal.” Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words.

Despite Wilson’s celebrated status in the literary world, it has to be said that in this case he was simply wrong. The style that he found so repellent and risible in Lovecraft was actually Lovecraft’s right and natural métier, one of the primary literary characteristics of the type of work that he, as the person and writer he was uniquely born to be, was meant to bring into the world. As S. T. Joshi has persuasively pointed out, it was a highly effective style for conveying the psychology, outlook, and worldview of Lovecraft’s many first-person narrators in the specific imaginary universe that he created and shaped with his stories and poems. In other words, Lovecraft’s prose style, baroque and ornate through and through, was perfectly suited to his authorial self and worldview.

There is a clear and definite place for prose that presents a rich stew of descriptive language. There’s even a place for all-out baroque writing that teems and bristles with a profusion of adjectives, adverbs, and long, densely looping chains of phraseology.

For just one example of this style in action, I direct your attention to the opening paragraph of Lovecraft’s short novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, a work that is remarkable for many things, including the fact that the manuscript for it is a first draft that he never went back and revised:

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods; a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to place again what once had an awesome and momentous place.

Personally, I wouldn’t change a thing. Everything about it is perfect, both as a stand-alone passage and as the opening paragraph of the tale that follows, which takes place in the world of dreams. Lovecraft begins the novel with a paragraph that contains nearly fifty adjectives and adverbs. Stating that number alone might make it seem excessive, like an assault by modifiers, a clear example of Wilson’s “bad art.” But in the actual reading of it, the effect is not excess but incantation. It reads like a dream, like a visionary spell being cast to draw the reader in—which in fact it is, and which is entirely appropriate to the story being told.

In Ray Bradbury’s classic 1948 story “Pillar of Fire,” a man named Lantry who died in the twentieth century wakes up four hundred years later in a thoroughly sanitized and imaginatively flattened future world where death is hidden and anything that suggests darkness or fear is policed and suppressed. Discovering this, at one point he goes to a library to check on the fate of supernatural literature in such a society. He asks the librarian if they house any books by Poe, or Machen, or Bierce, or Derleth. He also asks about Lovecraft. The reply for each is the same: These were all part of the great burning a century earlier, and good riddance, too. Later, as Lantry reflects and fumes over this galling travesty, one of his infuriated thoughts is, “You destroyers of Edgar Allan Poe and fine big-worded Lovecraft, you burner of Hallowe'en masks and destroyer of pumpkin jack-o-lanterns!” I first read this story in junior high school, several years before I read Lovecraft, and I think Bradbury’s descriptive phrase, issuing from the mouth of the story’s protagonist, may have been the first time I ever heard of him: “fine big-worded Lovecraft.” For me, that set the tone through which my later expectations were both shaped and fulfilled. Lovecraft with his big words and ornate style is indeed fine. Very fine, indeed, with no remedial application of Procrustean principles needed for his prose.

Having laid out the illustrations at some length, I hasten to loop back to the point: What was true of Lovecraft is true of many other writers as well—including you and me. The work of many fine writers contains a full complement of adjectives and even, gasp, adverbs, despite prominent figures from Elmore Leonard to Stephen King to Kingsley Amis being lined up against them. “The adverb,” says King in On Writing, “is not your friend. . . . I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.” And yet we have a host of counter-examples that we can draw on without too much effort, from Dickens to Faulkner to J. K. Rowling, who have loved a good adverb and not hesitated to use it. We also have examples immediately available of writers both historical and modern who have loved, and in loving have elevated the use of, prose that is distinctly ornate and/or baroque, from Oscar Wilde and Vladimir Nabokov to Gabriel García Márquez and Angela Carter.

Do what you are uniquely supposed to do, and do it in the way that you are uniquely equipped, qualified, and inclined to do it. Be the writer you are called to be.

I will cede the floor momentarily to David Bentley Hart, who, in his 2022 essay “How to Write English Prose,” gave us one of the most pungent attacks on the culturally dominant advice regime of lean prose that you’re likely to come across:

I do not know exactly why, in the twentieth century, the dominant fashions in English prose moved relentlessly in the direction of ever greater simplification and aesthetic minimalism. I do not even entirely regret it. Tastes change, and some of the change has been a corrective of certain excesses of the past. But, on the whole, the result has been a kind of official dogma in favor of a prose so denuded of nuance, elegance, intricacy, and originality as to be often little better than infantile, not only in vocabulary but also in artistry and expressive power—a formula, that is, for producing writers whose voices are utterly anonymous in their monotonous ordinariness. . . .
All these vapidly doctrinaire injunctions—urging you to write only plain declarative sentences stripped of modifiers and composed solely of words familiar to the average ten-year-old and demanding that you always prefer charcoal-gray to sumptuous purple—are expressions of everything spiritually deadening about late modernity and its banausic values. They reflect an epoch in which the mysterious, the evocative, and the beautifully elliptical have been systematically suppressed and nearly extinguished in the name of the efficient, the practical, the mechanical, and the starkly unambiguous—in short, in the name of everything that makes existence uninviting and life boring. They are reflections of an age of bloodless capitalist economism, the reign of brutally common sense, the barbarian triumph of function over form, a spare, Spartan civic architecture of featureless glass and steel and plastic, a consumerist society that lives on the ceaseless production and disposal of intrinsically graceless conveniences. Learn to detest all of these things and you will be a better writer for having done so.

The upshot of all this, from Twain to Lovecraft to Hart and all the other examples and ideas that I have invoked, is easy to identify: Good writing is not all one way. Sometimes, for some writers and occasions, good writing emerges as spare, sleek, and lean. At other times, for other writers and occasions, it emerges as dense, wordy, complex, and ornate. And the latter, no less than the former, when deployed rightly—meaning organically and skillfully, as the natural flowering and expression of the writer’s spirit of creative genius—is glorious just as it is, with no need for any change, which could only diminish it. “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words, and brief sentences,” said Twain to Bowser. “That is the way to write English—it is the modern way, and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.” That was great and valid advice for Twain himself, and perhaps for Bowser. It was not great advice for Lovecraft, or for Wilde, or for anyone whose natural mode of expression goes in the opposite direction. The question now before us is: What kind of writer are you? What kind am I? Answer carefully and honestly, and only for yourself.

When it comes to writing, there is no such thing as a rule that is universal, absolute, and applicable to everybody. Or rather, the only universally valid advice is really a piece of anti-advice. I often like to paraphrase Bradbury on this point, as processed through my lifetime of reading his stories and essays, including his wonderful, necessary, life-giving advice on writing. One of the cornerstones of this advice might be rendered as follows:

Never listen to a damned thing anybody tells you. Find your own way. Do what you are uniquely supposed to do, and do it in the way that you are uniquely equipped, qualified, and inclined to do it. Be the writer you are called to be. And to hell with everyone else.

Warm regards,

The inner work of the creative life:

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

The Living Dark Reader, No. 1

Matt Cardin — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:33:41 GMT

Peter Vilhelm Ilsted, Woman Reading by Candlelight, 1908.

Dear Living Dark readers,

For the past couple of months, I have been working on a new project to enhance this newsletter, or rather to serve as an adjunct or extension to it. The project is The Living Dark Reader, which, as you’ll notice, echoes the way I usually greet you.

The seed idea came from my ongoing love-hate relationship with the experience of reading online, which opens up so many new avenues for finding valuable things and making rich connections with people, but which constantly fights against its own deepest fulfillment because of the very nature of the online experience itself, which is not friendly to, and which is in fact antagonistic to, full absorption and deep reading. For reference, I direct you to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which is still hugely valuable sixteen years after its publication. So is the classic essay that preceded the book, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The Dangerous Question

Matt Cardin — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:44:47 GMT

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Dear Living Dark readers,

I’ll break convention by starting this post right out of the gate with someone else’s words instead of my own:

Socrates was content to refute everyone else’s positions while affirming nothing concrete himself, meaning that his philosophical heirs do a lot of performative contradiction, which is not sufficient. Nor is what we like to call ‘the Socratic method’—teaching by asking questions until students produce the correct answers—what Socrates had in mind. Such attempts to mimic him miss the point, which is that true thinking should be dangerous to your intellectual equilibrium. It should strive for answers that overthrow the terms of the question being asked, not simply prove a point.

It’s impossible to convey the extent of my delight at this opening salvo from Laura Kipnis’s review, published last year in The New Republic, of Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. Though I don’t talk about Socrates all that often, he has been an iconic figure to me in a deeply personal way ever since I discovered him in my late teens. And this brief summation of Callard’s overall point about him goes a long way toward articulating what I have always felt is the beating heart of both his general importance and his deep appeal to me personally. It’s an appeal that has shaped my inner life, my understanding of how I interact with others, and the way I approached my teaching career for eighteen years in the classroom.

A bit more from Kipnis’s review:

We’re not born with the knowledge of how to live, yet we want to live lives that make sense—that’s what it is to be human, Callard and Socrates believe. But we spend most of our lives floundering around, improvising stopgap solutions. Philosophy is the answer to this need.
The method Callard proposes to achieve the requisite self-knowledge to lead a meaningful life is the “untimely question.” “There’s a question you are avoiding,” is the book’s opening line. “Even now, as you read this sentence, you’re avoiding it.” The good news is that the resistances we organize our lives around are actually the paths to truth and wisdom. The bad news is that we assiduously evade taking them, feigning busyness and obligations as avoidance strategies. . . .
If we need to believe in the choices to which we’re committing at the very minute we’re committing to them, the impossibility of the untimely question is that, by definition, it comes too late: You’re already using the answer to lead your life. The only way to freely answer the untimely question is to saw off the branch on which you’re standing.

And on the value of philosophical conversation, of having someone else with whom to reflect on all these things:

[T]he operative question is: To what extent can we really see ourselves? Are we in some inbuilt way “self-blind”?—after all, the eye can’t see itself. Which is why thinking is a two-person job, in the Socrates-Callard view. . . .
[S]ince none of us can subject our “load-bearing” beliefs to sufficient evaluation on our own, we need the help of others to clarify our beliefs: “Refutation cures normative self-blindness.”

By the by, the whole concept of “the untimely question” brings up, for me, a resonant comparison with something David Carse returns to repeatedly in Perfect Brilliant Stillness regarding the single, profound, devastating question that we each carry deep within—a question that’s unique to each of us, the very asking of which will utterly undo the house of cards that we have built up and come to regard as “ourselves.” “If you’re going to ask questions,” says Carse, “ask . . . the hard questions, the questions that take you out of anything you have ever known, the questions that could end your life.”

Here are a couple of other passages where Carse elaborates:

The ego sense of self spends all its time trying to stay in control, and that means trying to keep you away from these moments of disorientation when the bottom drops out and it doesn’t know what to do. This is so beautiful. This is what I mean when I talk about asking the dangerous question, the question that may end your life. This idea that this “you” is not real, is only a thought, a projection, stop[s] you. That’s why I [say] to savor that feeling of disorientation. Get to know it, to not fear it, to welcome it. . . .
Be aware that what form this will take is not up to you, and that it may take “time.” It may take a lifetime, may take more than a lifetime. It doesn’t matter. Let yourself be brought to a place where it doesn’t matter. In stillness, find yourself asking the dangerous question, the question that the ego does not want you to think of, the question that will end your life.

What Carse is getting at in these passages is not, of course, precisely identical to what Callard talks about in relation to Socrates. Carse is speaking within the field of Eastern-oriented nondual spirituality, while Callard is speaking within the field of Western philosophy. But I’ll go out on a limb by asserting that both are aimed, ultimately, at the same thing, and that both manifestly carry the same general spirit. I would also wager that both approaches will wind up—again, ultimately—with the same result.

This also says something of profound and pointed importance about the very nature of the Socratic/Western and nondual/Eastern approaches to understanding your life and the world, and to uncovering the whole point by answering the question that has been given to you by the very fact of your birth and presence.

It seems I have a new book to read. I’m surprised that this is the first time I have heard of Callard, a philosopher, professor, and provocateur who, as I’m now learning, has been on the scene for quite some time, and for whom the adjective “colorful” sounds inadequately extravagant. In any case, maybe my spirit of energetic interest has passed itself along to you as well. Let me know if you, too, find this all intriguing. Especially let me know if you read Kipnis’s review and/or Callard’s book. I’d love to hear your impressions of both.

Warm regards,

PS. The book links in this post are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, so I’ll earn a commission if you click through and buy something.

The Living Dark is freely published. If you find value here, a paid subscription or one-time donation helps sustain the work.

Published in December:

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

Can Social Media Be Redeemed?

Matt Cardin — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:45:15 GMT

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Dear Living Dark readers,

If we take social media to represent, in essence, a big game, is it winnable? I am increasingly inclined to think the answer is no. And by winning I don’t mean getting more engagement in the form of things like outperforming others, gaming algorithms, or finding smarter ways to increase your reach. In fact, flipping the script on such “engagement” can wake us up to what’s really going on and what’s at stake in this mass experiment in behavior modification.

These thoughts are inspired by two things, one new and the other old. The new factor is my recent acquisition of Jaron Lanier’s 2017 book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. The second is my approximately two-decade personal relationship with social media, which has had both positive and negative aspects.

For the first factor, Lanier’s book is an entry in the same venerable genre represented by such books as Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. In fact, Lanier explains in his acknowledgments that he was directly inspired by Mander’s 1978 classic. Mander claimed television didn’t need to be reformed or improved, but rather completely gotten rid of, because it was essentially—that is, in its very essence—destructive on multiple levels (personal, environmental, and societal) and was therefore not reformable. Lanier takes the same approach with social media, declaring them rotten at their core.

On the off chance that you aren’t aware of Lanier’s rhetorical ethos for writing this book, he’s not a culture critic peering in from the sidelines. He’s a computer scientist, technologist, and one of the original pioneers of virtual reality. He has spent decades working at the highest levels of Silicon Valley research and development, including roles at companies like Microsoft and Google, and has been deeply involved in shaping the digital world from the inside. His critique of social media is thus not anti-technology as such, but the considered judgment of someone who helped build the very systems he’s now warning us about.

Currently, I have made it through his book’s introduction and first few chapters, and I’m finding it deeply riveting, as I knew I would. “Algorithms gorge on data about you every second,” he says in the first chapter, which argues that social media are causing us to lose our free will. He points out that these platforms are fundamentally underwritten by advertisers whose ultimate identities and motivations the social media companies themselves don’t even know, so our attention is sold in a titanic behavior modification experiment that’s specifically engineered to exploit certain features of human psychology for the purpose of what the industry euphemistically calls engagement, but which Lanier says can be more obviously and accurately understood as addiction. And as we all remember from the spate of books and journalism that appeared in the 2010s, many of the founders of the whole industry gained a conscience a few years ago and frankly admitted all this with many mea culpas, though this didn’t really do anything to stop or even slow the juggernaut.

Lanier has a knack for framing arguments and information in compelling ways, for coming up with figures of speech and turns of phrase that drive home with new and startling force the kinds of things we think we already know. For example:

What started as advertising morphed into what would better be called “empires of behavior modification for rent.”

And:

Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down.

And:

So the problem isn’t behavior modification in itself. The problem is relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms. Hypnosis might be therapeutic so long as you trust your hypnotist, but who would trust a hypnotist who is working for unknown third parties? Who? Apparently billions of people.

I’m currently strapped in for reading the remainder of the book. It remains to be seen whether I will be persuaded to delete all my social media accounts. This wouldn’t be a major chore, as I only currently have three, or four if you count Goodreads, which I don’t.

That brings me to the second thing that inspired me to write these words: my aforementioned long relationship with social media. The story of me and Facebook, and me and Twitter, and me and LinkedIn, probably isn’t all that different from your own in its general outline. What may be somewhat different, or maybe not, is the level of skittishness and repeated reversals of course that I have pursued. I currently have a Facebook account where I’m minimally active. It has only existed for the past couple of years. And it’s my third incarnation over there. I created my first FB account in the late aughts. A few years later I deleted it and swore I’d never go back. Then in the mid/late teens I created another one in connection with my doctoral work and the simultaneous imminent publication of one of my books. I ended up destroying that one as well. My current third presence at Facebook is only a couple of years old, and its ultimate fate is likewise uncertain.

The same thing happened with Twitter. I created my first account circa 2009, used it for a few years, and then deleted it when I realized it had begun to colonize my mind, causing me to unconsciously evaluate my everyday experience through its own lens by filtering and framing everything in terms of potentially tweetable moments. The same realization lay behind my decision to delete that first Facebook account around the same time. But a few years later, as with Facebook, I returned to Twitter with a new account. This was a couple of years before Elon Musk bought it and transformed it into X. I “got serious” with that account and figured I might as well learn how to use it for the most effective communication I could possibly carry out. My thinking was: Why not see if I could use it as it “wanted” to be used, in the ways most suited for its particular form and function, with a knowledge of how best to connect with people through it, but keeping this all subsumed under my own purposes?

To effect this, I took an online course that laid out the inner workings of the whole thing. It covered everything from how to optimize your profile, create magnetic content, use third-party tools, and time your posts to how to collaborate with other users for maximizing engagement. And on the last count, oh, didn’t you know? All those mega-popular Twitter (now X) accounts, and also Instagram accounts and so on—the super-users with tens or hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers, the ones who regularly garner thousands of likes and comments with their posts—vanishingly few of these achieve that level or status “organically.” Instead, they game the system. There is an entire back-end world of collaborative “engagement groups” made up of people who have agreed to cross-promote each other’s content. There’s also a widespread practice of buying followers, of paying people to follow you in order to jack up your numbers, look impressive, and game the algorithm.

If this is news to you, and if it hits you with a big feeling of “What the ever-loving hell?”, just know that it hit me that way, too. But in the end, it all makes total sense, as measured by the internal logic of the social media universe itself, where growth and engagement are the meta-principles underlying everything. Everyone, it seems, wants more engagement. “Success” and “failure” are measured in terms of clicks, likes, comments, and shares, cross-referenced with the size of one’s audience and the rate of its growth. This tends to be true whether you’re an individual or an organization. Consciously or unconsciously, success or failure in the social media realm for any given account is generally measured by those symbols of attention and approval.

But, as emphasized by Lanier (among others), on the back end the real engagement is what the social media companies get from you: the fact that you’re chasing these symbols of attention on their platforms. They have you totally engaged. It’s an all-encompassing wraparound, like water to a fish. It’s like the casino always winning, no matter how many little “wins” you may get on a given day. Our very act of seeking and responding to social media engagement is itself a meta-game of engagement via a behavior modification protocol that’s deployed by the social media companies. And it’s one that they, as the casino, are always winning. The sheer fact that we’re playing the game is their win. Sure, we can have truly meaningful conversations with other people through these media, and these can sidestep the addictive engagement effect to a degree. I have certainly had my share of such interactions, and I have appreciated them. But this positive benefit doesn’t alter the deeper manipulative and extractive structure of the system itself, which still benefits from our attention, participation, and emotional investment.

And as the social media companies are winning, we’re all losing, as evident in the central contributing role that this technology plays in our proliferating mass insanity. Such insanity is reciprocal to our proliferating individual unhappiness as dopamine addicts who get their fix from interactions with electronic screens. I’m sure I will be reading more about this as I make my way through Lanier’s book, but it is also something that I, like you, have known for a long time. And isn’t it strange that, even as we know this, we find it so very difficult to abandon our accounts?

I have often thought of digital technologies in terms of Thoreau’s famous metaphor of the railroad in Walden. “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us,” he wrote in the mid-1800s, expressing his view that modern technology and industrialization had become things that we serve instead of things that serve us. Inspired by his famous words, I have often thought the challenge of social media, and more widely of the internet itself, is to learn to “ride it,” to maximize our conscious use of it for positive purposes while learning to minimize or eliminate its clear potential to enslave us to its own logic and purposes. And yes, all technologies do have an inbuilt purpose or program for how they metaphorically “want” to be used, such as the reshaping of cities and how we inhabit the landscape that was brought about by the automobile. This is the chief insight of the field of media ecology.

But over time I am becoming more convinced that such positive use of social media may be impossible. This is even without the provocation of Lanier’s book. Social media may, I suspect, be irredeemable, even if companies were to redesign them to remove their deliberately addictive features. Some systems, some technologies, may simply be bound to these impulses too tightly and too fundamentally to ever be effectively disentangled from them. There may be a bug in our human makeup that will always find and exploit the egoic, destructive possibilities of technologies like this, ones that emerge out of our dual inbuilt desire for connection/communication and attention/esteem, and that inflame this desire at scale. If this is true, then the problem isn’t how we use them, but that we use them at all, because using them and being used by them are impossible to separate.

It may be that social media—and maybe elements of the internet as a whole?—were best characterized more than 40 years ago by a famous fictional artificial intelligence: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Warm regards,

PS. The book links in this post are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, so I’ll earn a commission if you click through and buy something.

The Living Dark is freely published. If you find value here, a paid subscription or one-time donation helps sustain the work.

Published in December:

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“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

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— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

You Cannot Escape Metaphysics

Matt Cardin — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:08:50 GMT

Actual photographic evidence of a metaphysical question.

Dear Living Dark reader,

Last week, in response to Donald Trump’s recent call for the release of all U.S. federal materials related to UFOs, alien life, and unidentified aerial phenomena, Neil deGrasse Tyson appeared on a video interview to reiterate a familiar position: Until someone produces actual photographic or other such evidence of aliens or extraterrestrial spacecraft for general inspection, we’re dealing with speculation and belief systems, not knowledge. In conversation with NBC News’s Tom Costello, he said the laws of physics are universal, and therefore aliens, if they exist, are subject to them, which means visitors to Earth from across the vast distances between stars and galaxies are highly unlikely.

Tyson is always an engaging speaker, and much of what he said in that interview is cogent and sensible. I’m sure it would be interesting to read the deeper exploration that he presents in his forthcoming book, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter. But his remarks also carry an embedded philosophical assumption of materialism or physicalism that goes unnamed, representing a continuation of something he has been doing for a long time. What he says reflects an unexamined view that many others likewise bring to this topic with their notions of mechanical spacecraft and fleshly, physical beings of extraterrestrial origin. More fundamentally, his remarks carry the assumption that the language and thought world of physical science is the first, last, primary, and even the only domain for thinking and talking about such matters.

Twelve years ago—a span of time that makes me dizzy with a kind of temporal vertigo when I consider it—I wrote an essay at my former blog, The Teeming Brain, in which I responded to Tyson’s wholesale dismissal of philosophy itself as a pointless distraction from scientific progress. Last week, watching his new interview on UFOs, I was struck by how directly my earlier critique, which many other people likewise made in their own way at the time, applies to the present moment. This has motivated me to republish that piece here, as a semi-response to present concerns.

You can still find the earlier version of what follows at The Teeming Brain under its original title, “To Reject Philosophy Is to Embrace the Matrix.” For this republished version, I have lightly refreshed the text, and have also integrated a later addendum from 2014 into the body of the piece. I haven’t changed the tone, though, which reflects the somewhat sharper and more polemical approach that I sometimes took back then.

If it’s not already clear from these framing comments, what we’re talking about here is not just UFOs per se (especially since I don’t mention them at all in this republished and refreshed piece). It’s something deeper: the impossibility of escaping philosophy in general and metaphysics in particular, even—perhaps especially—when one believes oneself to be speaking from “pure science.”

You Cannot Escape Metaphysics

or, To Reject Philosophy Is To Embrace the Matrix

In case you haven’t heard, Neil deGrasse Tyson has outed himself as a philistine. Or at least that’s how Damon Linker characterizes it in an op-ed for The Week titled, appropriately enough, “Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Is a Philistine.” In the words of the subheadline, “The popular television host says he has no time for deep, philosophical questions. That’s a horrible message to send to young scientists.”

What Linker is referring to is Tyson’s appearance in March 2014 as a guest on the popular Nerdist podcast.1 Beginning at about 20 minutes into the hour-long program, the conversation between Tyson and his multiple interviewers turns to the subject of philosophy, and Tyson speaks up to talk down the entire field. In fact, he takes pains to specify and clarify that he personally has no use for philosophy at all, which he views as a worthless distraction from other activities with real value.

Yes, it sounds as if I must be overstating it in the retelling, but in fact I’m not. Here is a portion of the episode’s transcript. The comments from Tyson and his interviewers, especially host Chris Hardwick, come right after they have been discussing the standardization of weights and measures. Note especially how Tyson not only dismisses philosophy but pointedly refuses to allow that there might be even a shred of value or validity to it.

Chris Hardwick: Philosophy was my major.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: That can really mess you up.
Hardwick: It really does mess you up. It’s when it starts crossing over with math and science, and you have to solve an argument using p’s and q’s and whatnot, and the philosophy of science and math says, “Why is a yard a yard?” and “What makes this, this?” I always felt like maybe there was a little too much question-asking in philosophy.
Tyson: I agree.
Hardwick: Because at a certain point it’s just futile, you know, like “Why is a table a table?” and so on.
Tyson: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. My concern here is that the philosophers believe they’re actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, “What are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?”
Another interviewer: I think a healthy balance of both is good.
Tyson: Well, I’m still worried even about a healthy balance. Yeah, if you’re distracted by your questions so that you can’t move forward, you’re not being a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world. And so the scientist knows when the question “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a pointless delay in our progress. . . . How do you define “clapping”? All of a sudden it devolves into a discussion of the definition of words. And I’d rather keep the conversation about ideas. And when you do that, don’t derail yourself on questions that you think are important because philosophy class tells you this. The scientist says, “Look, I got all this world of unknown out there. I’m moving on. I’m leaving you behind. You can’t even cross the street because you’re distracted by what you are sure are deep questions you’ve asked yourself. I don’t have the time for that.”
Hardwick: I also felt that it was a fat load of crap, as one could define what “crap” is and the essential qualities that make up crap: how you grade a philosophy paper?
Tyson: [Laughs.] Of course, I think we all agree you turned out okay.
Hardwick: Philosophy was a good major for comedy, I think, because it does get you to ask a lot of ridiculous questions about things.
Tyson: No, you need people to laugh at your ridiculous questions.
Hardwick: Ultimately, if you ask a lot of questions, it just becomes a bottomless pit.
Another interviewer: It just becomes nihilism.
Tyson: Nihilism is a kind of philosophy.

Linker’s comments express my own thoughts about all of this quite well, so I’ll borrow them:

Yes, he really did say that. . . . [B]ehold the spectacle of an otherwise intelligent man and gifted teacher sounding every bit as anti-intellectual as a corporate middle manager or used-car salesman. . . . With these words, Tyson shows he’s very much a 21st-century American, living in a perpetual state of irritated impatience and anxious agitation. Don’t waste your time with philosophy! (And, one presumes, literature, history, the arts, or religion.) Only science will get you where you want to go! It gets results! Go for it! Hurry up! Don’t be left behind! Progress awaits!

Tyson’s words have also drawn a response from his friend Massimo Pigliucci, who, speaking as someone who is both a biologist and a philosopher, seeks to remind Tyson that science actually arose out of philosophy, and that philosophy deals with real things and makes “progress” of a sort.

There is no such thing as having no philosophy or refusing to philosophize. There is only philosophy that is consciously engaged, or philosophy that is unconsciously and implicitly followed. The former involves careful reflection, deep thought, and the artful interpretation of experience and data. The latter is equivalent to subconscious programming.

But the best response I have seen comes from someone who probably wasn’t thinking about Tyson at all when, a few months after the podcast episode aired, he wrote a beautiful defense of philosophy’s value in just a thousand words. In the essay “In Defense of Armchairs,” published at 3 Quarks Daily, philosopher Charlie Huenemann meditates on the longstanding metaphorical and adjectival use of the word “armchair” as a kind ideological shorthand for denigrating and dismissing someone’s expressed thoughts as stuffy, purely academic, and divorced from the real world. Think, for example, of the disparaging retroactive references to the so-called “armchair anthropology” practiced by the field’s nineteenth-century founders, such as Edward B. Tylor and James George Frazer. “Generally,” Huenemann writes,

in any conflict between long-held, seemingly obvious beliefs and new research challenging those beliefs, defenders of the old beliefs will find themselves charged with sitting in armchairs. . . . An armchair represents both laziness and privilege, a luxurious class of opinion-mongers who simply will not bother themselves with actual empirical research — the original La-Z-Boys, as they might be called.

As Huenemann rightly points out, the people who are most often associated with this type of condemnation are philosophers, since “those who argue from the armchairs are arguing from broad, philosophical perspectives.” I think here, for example, of Andrew Ferguson’s 2013 article for The Weekly Standard titled “The Heretic,” which focused on the ruckus in the intellectual establishment over the publication of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos with its materialism-challenging thesis. At one point Ferguson describes a moment from a 2012 meeting of scientists and philosophers titled “Moving Naturalism Forward” in which the armchair accusation was brought out by Daniel Dennett:

A video of the workshop shows Dennett complaining that a few—but only a few!—contemporary philosophers have stubbornly refused to incorporate the naturalistic conclusions of science into their philosophizing, continuing to play around with outmoded ideas like morality and sometimes even the soul. “I am just appalled to see how, in spite of what I think is the progress we’ve made in the last 25 years, there’s this sort of retrograde gang,” he said, dropping his hands on the table. “They’re going back to old-fashioned armchair philosophy with relish and eagerness. It’s sickening. And they lure in other people. And their work isn’t worth anything—it’s cute and it’s clever and it’s not worth a damn.”

But back to Huenemann: Having noted the particular susceptibility of philosophy and philosophers to this charge, he goes on to offer an eloquent and pithy defense of pure speculation of the armchair variety. And I, for one, think his words lucidly call out the fundamental flaw in positions like Dennett’s and Tyson’s:

An armchair is a place of frictionless speculation. In an armchair we can ask What would I see if I rode upon a beam of light? and What if species aren’t fixed? We can also ask Why do people follow laws even when the cops aren’t around? and What is it about opera that makes it seem so much more meaningful than barbershop quartets? We can ask what it is that makes mathematics true, and whether there are any cases when providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number turns out not to be the right thing to do. Empirical information is required in all these cases, but what is even more important is our ability to speculate and conjecture, to imagine and project. If we don’t discover any new answers, we at least begin to see our old presuppositions for what they are.
Armchair speculation can also help us see what our theories entail. Is our mental life purely a matter of what the brain does? If so, then could I read your mind if I studied your brain? Are human actions as fully determined as any nonhuman event? If so, then on what basis would we call any of our actions “free”? If we list the physical causes leading up to an event, do we thereby explain the event? Or in some cases—think now of historical or cultural developments—does explanation require something more than a listing of causes? Again, it would be silly to think that all the information relevant to these questions can be reached from an armchair, but it is impossible to try to tackle them without some good old-fashioned armchair speculation. Answering questions is sometimes just as much about how we think about things as it is about those things themselves.

To further illuminate the rhetorical and ideological use of the word “armchair” as a tool of critique, consider the wonderful passage in the conclusion of Jeffrey Kripal’s necessary book, Authors of the Impossible, where, in an ironic act of inversion, he invokes the word while significantly repurposing its application. This comes in the midst of his discussion of why it’s important to reclaim and reacknowledge the reality of anomalous and paranormal experiences in the context of religious studies. He writes:

Why continue to tolerate a kind of armchair skepticism that has everything to do with scientistic propaganda and nothing at all to do with honest, rigorously open-minded collection, classification, and theory building, that is, with real science and real humanistic inquiry? True enough, anomalies may be just anomalies—meaningless glitches to the statistical field of possibility. But anomalies may also be the signals of the impossible, that is, signs of the end of one paradigm and the beginning of another.

Armchair skepticism—take that, Daniel Dennett. Genuine and important philosophical thinking that actually applies to reality, and that even questions what we mean by the word “reality” itself—take that, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

To draw the point from all this, and to hit at the primary aspect of Tyson’s obtuse dismissal of philosophy that strikes me as most glaring and short-sighted: There is simply no such thing as having no philosophy or refusing to philosophize. There is only philosophy that is consciously engaged, or philosophy that is unconsciously and implicitly followed. The former involves careful reflection, deep thought, and the artful interpretation of experience and data. The latter is equivalent to subconscious programming. Real philosophy, the consciously engaged kind, involves careful consideration of and reflection upon the very principles and assumptions by which we do all this considering, reflecting, thinking, and interpreting. If we don’t practice it, then we automatically fall into the second type, the unconscious, unacknowledged, implicit kind that makes us puppets of our own unacknowledged biases and predilections. And that leads nowhere but to business as usual and the unconsidered propagation of unrecognized assumptions.

Tyson can talk all he wants about being “a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world,” but if he refuses to pause, and if he discourages others from pausing, to inquire into what he means by terms like “the natural world,” “productive,” and “understanding,” and if he refuses to dig under the surface of language, thought, and culture to uncover the multitude of assumptions that precede and are embedded in these terms and their linkage to the assertions he’s making about who we are, what the world is, and what, if anything, we ought to be doing and not doing in and with this experience of life and consciousness—if he refuses to do this, and if he convinces others not to do it, and if this stands for something like mainstream educated opinion and public intellectual discourse, then something is terribly amiss and we’ve reached a singular type of cultural dead end.

In The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas wrote, “The fund of data available to the human mind is of such intrinsic complexity and diversity that it provides plausible support for many different conceptions of the ultimate nature of reality. . . . Evidence can be adduced and interpreted to corroborate a virtually limitless array of worldviews. . . . Because the human understanding is not unequivocally compelled by the evidence to adopt one metaphysical position over another, an irreducible element of human choice supervenes.” The worst thing we can do is refuse to recognize and acknowledge that we are always involved in this inescapable act of philosophical choosing. An entire way of seeing and being in the world hangs in the balance. To reject philosophy is to ignore this choice, to opt for the unexamined life, and to embrace our enslavement to a matrix of our own unrecognized creation.

Warm regards,

PS. The book links above are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, so I’ll earn a commission if you click through and buy something.

The Living Dark is freely published. If you find value here, a paid subscription or one-time donation helps sustain the work. Thank you for reading.

Published in December:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self