Dear Living Dark readers,

From time to time it feels worth pausing, not to announce a change in direction, but to articulate what has quietly taken shape. Note the plural in the greeting above: not “reader” but “readers.” I usually use the singular when sending out a new post, not least because it really helps me to imagine that I’m writing to a single, deeply receptive reader who is interested and attuned to my wavelength. (Hey, if it was good enough for Bruno Schulz—who found his writing energy finally, fully unlocked by channeling it into letters to Debora Vogel—it’s good enough for me.) But right now I’m speaking to all of you.

Over the past few years, and largely through writing here in public, certain threads have made themselves unmistakable, as much to me as to many of you. What started as an open-ended experiment in 2022, originally titled Living into the Dark and intended to serve as the next chapter in my regular public writing after I had maintained my previous blog, The Teeming Brain, for sixteen years, has gradually clarified its own center of gravity—not because I set out to define it in advance, but because the work itself has kept asking the same questions and circling the same themes.

What has become clearest is this: The Living Dark is written from a particular perspective or place of seeing. It’s a perspective where creativity, nonduality, dread, and meaning intersect; where the sense of being a separate self in a stable, objective world is called into question; and where art and awakening turn out to be less separate than we’re usually taught to believe (and certainly less separate than I myself unconsciously held them to be for many years).

Again and again, the writing here has found its way back to that threshold. Sometimes it does this through reflections on creativity and the daemon muse, the felt sense that authentic work arises from attunement to something deeper than the everyday mind. Sometimes it does it through explorations of nonduality as a first-person investigation into the self and the world, as distinct from a belief system or a philosophy. And sometimes it does it through horror, the uncanny, and the darkly or weirdly numinous, serving as a legitimate doorway into questions of identity, reality, and waking up.

Over time it has also become clear to me that this space works best when it remains simple. That’s why I eliminated the paid subscription tier last August, after pausing it back in February when I put the whole newsletter on hiatus. That’s why I stopped using the chat features after dipping into them a few times. This leaves no pressure to perform “community,” which is simply not in my personal makeup to be able to sustain—though I’m delighted when real community just happens, as it often has, thanks to you. What wants to happen here is just essays, reflections, intermittent interviews, and occasional works-in-progress, published on their own obscurely self-determined schedule, as they’re ready. This way, the focus stays on the writing itself, and on the shared act of attention it invites.

As many of you know—those of you who have been on board for a while—much of what eventually became my new book Writing at the Wellspring first took shape here, in conversation with readers (you) and through sustained reflection over time. I expect the same to remain true of whatever comes next, if anything ever does. (I am indeed quietly grouping and mulling over uncollected posts and essays right now.) This has never felt like a platform for output so much as a record of inquiry unfolding in real time.

I have recently revised TLD’s short description and About page to reflect this more clearly. In brief, The Living Dark is now described as:

A journal of creativity, nonduality, and the daemon muse, exploring what emerges when the separate self loosens its grip on identity and meaning.

Nothing essential has changed. If anything, this is simply a clearer articulation of what has been happening all along.

If you’ve been reading for a while, thank you for staying with the inquiry. If you’re newer here, please know that you’re welcome to begin anywhere. This isn’t organized as a curriculum or a system, but as a long-form exploration of what it’s like to live and create in full contact with the mystery underneath ordinary life.

That said, sometime next month I’ll be publishing and pinning a “Start Here” post to serve as a brief guide to essential Living Dark essays.

Speaking of next month, as we head into the new year, wherever you find yourself reading from, I’m glad you’re here.

Warm regards,

My new book:

“[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

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden

Available from all the major bookstores—Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, more—in paperback and electronic editions

Purchase Writing at the Wellspring

Dear Living Dark reader,

Can you imagine the following appearing in The New York Times—or any other major mainstream publication—just a few years ago?

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, tasked with investigating U.A.P., has said it has no verifiable information to support reports of a government program to reverse-engineer extraterrestrial materials.

Or this:

In the film, Stratton says “I have seen with my own eyes nonhuman craft and nonhuman beings,” but declined to elaborate before the screening.

That’s Jay Stratton, an intelligence officer who is former director of the Pentagon’s UAP/UFO task force. Both quotes come from yesterday’s New York Times, from an article titled, “A Film About Unidentified Phenomena Gets a Congressional Audience,” with the subhead, “‘The Age of Disclosure,’ a documentary featuring government and military officials, was screened for a bipartisan group of members of the House of Representatives”

The fact that the aforementioned U.S. government task force exists and is openly, publicly acknowledged, and that denials like the first quote above are even being issued by the government, is mind-blowing. These would have been unheard of prior to, say, 2017, which saw the publication of the NYT’s first major UFO story, “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” Even now, eight years after that gateway event, it’s all still amazing.

But only notionally or provisionally so. Because also amazing is that the collective sense of life in America these days, and also, I think, elsewhere, has become so weird, atomized, fragmented, chaotic, and apocalyptic that such matters are just absorbed into the general maelstrom with hardly the ripple of a stone’s drop on the surface. In both the recent and distant past—certainly during all the first four to five decades of my own life—open and serious attention by the government and mass media to claims of nonhuman technology and life forms would have remained perpetually on everyone’s minds and lips. It would have dominated our collective conversation. But today, these formerly shocking reports and developments have rapidly become just another part of the general buzz that envelops us all. Just more lumps in the freakish universal pudding of undifferentiated and oddly humdrum weirdness and disorientation that has come to serve as the psychological status quo here in Present Shock America.

“The unusual bipartisan mix of Republicans and Democrats,” says yesterday’s NYT article,

had gathered to watch “The Age of Disclosure,” which had its high-profile debut at South by Southwest earlier this year. In the film, 34 former and current senior members of government, military and intelligence groups claim that they have knowledge of advanced nonhuman intelligence and contend, among other things, that there’s been an 80-year cover-up of the reverse engineering of technology retrieved from crashes.

Can we really receive things like this with a yawn? Apparently so. Or at least that’s what I expect to happen, based on precedent.

And honestly, I’m able to receive such things myself with a bit more detachment and less agitated glee than I would have been able to as a younger man. I mean, yes, all this stuff is amazing by conventional standards. If you’re not following the ongoing reporting and thinking about it that’s being conducted by the likes of and Jeffrey Kripal, then you’re not witnessing the cutting edge of just how deep the philosophical and spiritual thinking about these kinds of paranormal phenomena can go. But at the same time, when you’ve somehow woken up and noticed that literally everything about this experience of being a self in a world is mind-blowing—that the whole thing should be flatly impossible, and that in fact the sense of being an independent self existing in a universe of separate things and entities is a kind of projection like a movie or dream, and that really there’s just one thing experiencing the infinitude of Itself, and You’re It—when your cosmic egg has blown open like that, the perceived importance or amplitude of things in the dream is now relativized by the primary recognition. Yes, the open talk of and possible eventual verification of nonhuman technologies and intelligent beings is amazing within the dream. So is the general swirl of cultural nuttiness that mutes our amazement. But neither is nearly as amazing as the screen of Being on which these specimens of living cinema are playing.

Warm regards,

The Kindle edition of Writing at the Wellspring is available for preorder. Publication date (both print and electronic) is December 15.

Preorder Writing at the Wellspring

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden

Preorder Writing at the Wellspring

Dear Living Dark reader,

Today’s post is a very slight revision of one that I published under a similar title two years ago. Given the direction this newsletter has moved since then, along with other things like the writing course that I’m currently teaching online to seventy-plus students, it seems like a good time to revisit this piece and its focal topic.

That topic is the distinction between surface story and understory in works of fiction, and the way stories of the weird and supernatural—which was my dark playground for some two decades—are singular in the way they collapse this distinction, resulting in an uncanny type of fiction where the surface narrative and the deeper “inner” narrative are actually one and the same.

It’s also because of this unique approach that stories of the weird are able to speak in a unique way to the phenomenon of spiritual awakening, and even more, to generate an intimation of the thing itself for those who read with sensitivity and care.

A couple of years ago, Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and many others, made a compelling observation about the nature of narrative understory and its relationship to surface story. What he said got me to reflecting on the special case of weird and supernatural fiction, where I think a unique dynamic is in play.

In his blog post “Does Your Novel/Movie Have an Understory?” Pressfield defined understory as “the unspoken story-beneath-the-story” and acknowledged the fiction maker’s maxim, commonly taught in MFA programs and creative writing classes, that understory is actually more important than surface story. Since understory is the tale of a protagonist’s inner journey, which gives meaning to the outer one, understory is “what REALLY pulls the reader/viewer through the drama.”

By way of example, Pressfield pointed to the famous case of Huckleberry Finn, in which the novel’s surface story of Huck and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi River rests atop an understory in which the real villain is not the people who pursue them but Huck’s culturally inculcated belief in White racial superiority, along with the accompanying belief in a divine mandate that Blacks should be enslaved by Whites. As Pressfield put it, “the deeper villain, the Understory Villain, is inside Huck’s heart.”

Pressfield’s deep point is that in this or any other narrative, “the Understory plays out on the landscape of the soul” (his emphasis). He says that in Huckleberry Finn, this means

the beats of the Understory are the moments in real time when Soul Reality, i.e. Jim’s trueness of heart, his kindness, his integrity, and his love for Huck give the lie to this notion that is embedded in Huck’s very cells.1

The dramatic climax of the novel’s understory comes, of course, in the iconic scene where Huck, instead of sending the letter he has written to Miss Watson to turn in Jim as an escaped slave, tears it up and decides that if helping Jim means he will burn in hell for all eternity, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.”

As I was reading Pressfield’s post and finding it deeply grokkable, it occurred to me that in my own favorite type of fiction—namely, weird horror fiction—there’s a very special relationship between understory and surface story. As I tried to articulate this to myself, at first I thought I wanted to say that understory is more important in weird fiction than in other types. But no, that’s not really it, as understory is crucial to pretty much all narrative fiction. Instead, what’s special about weird fiction is simply this:

In weird fiction, understory IS surface story. The two are identical. The distinction is collapsed. It’s not just that on a submerged or subliminal level there is a story playing out on the landscape of the soul. Rather, in weird fiction, the very surface of the narrative is the landscape of the soul.

A couple of classic examples illustrate the point. One is Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann.” The surface story is about the destabilizing of the unnamed narrator’s sense of reality when he rents a room in a house located on a mysterious street that he later cannot find. While living there, through his interactions with another tenant, the titular Erich Zann, he experiences an encounter with a terrifying cosmic or extra-cosmic darkness,

the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth.

And the understory? It’s the same thing. The understory of “The Music of Erich Zann” is the story of the narrator’s sense of reality being destabilized when he encounters that terrifying darkness. The surface story’s antagonist is identical to the understory’s antagonist, and the literal journey of the surface story’s protagonist is identical to his journey on the metaphorical, thematic, and/or symbolic level of understory.

If you explain to someone that “The Music of Erich Zann” is about a man’s sense of metaphysical security being shaken by an encounter with a terrifying extra-cosmic darkness, and this person turns out to be wise in the ways of storytelling and thus inquires, “Yes, but what’s it really about?” the only accurate answer you can give is to repeat what you’ve already said. There is no distinction between what this story is about in its surface narrative and what it’s “really about” on that deeper, implicit level.

Another classic example is Blackwood’s “The Willows.” The surface story is about two men who seek safety on a sandy island when they get caught in summer flooding as they travel down the Danube by canoe. While trapped there, they find that they are in the presence of awesome transcendental forces that inspire dread with their absolute incomprehensibility. Here’s one memorable description of how these forces appear to the human sensibility:

They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of the bushes—immense, bronze-colored, moving, and wholly independent of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not human at all. Certainly they were not merely the moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost—rising up in a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a hue of dull bronze upon their skins.

As “the Swede,” the narrator’s companion, says at one point, these forces or powers seem to be

from another region—not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind—where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance.

And the understory? Again, it’s the same thing. In “The Willows” the understory is the story of these two men having the walls of their familiar world, their personal cosmic orders, knocked down as they are introduced to the reality and presence of those “terrible personalities” with their mysterious “vast purposes.” Again, the “villain” of the understory, and the attendant engine of its inner dramatic conflict and narrative development, is precisely identical to that of the surface story.

In fact, in “The Willows” the Swede gives the game away, so to speak, by directly stating Pressfield’s point about the understory unfolding on the landscape of the soul. The passage quoted above that bears his words about the “vast purposes” of those invisible powers ends with this:

vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul.

This states the matter as directly as it can be stated. “The Willows,” which Lovecraft and other observers, including me, have long regarded as a veritable archetype of the weird tale, states its understory directly and explicitly, right there in the text. The landscape of the surface story with its sandy island in the middle of the flood-stage Danube where the two protagonists encounter the terrifying primal forces or entities of a transcendental reality is simply and literally the landscape of the soul. The two levels are merged, the physical with the spiritual, the literal with the liminal, resulting in an uncanny transformation when the veil of the natural becomes transparent to the numinous glow of the supernatural.

To repeat: In narratives like these, understory is surface story. They are the same. The surface story is a direct, literal instantiation of the understory. I could multiply examples from other weird tales almost ad infinitum. I’ll bet you could, too.

I find this realization to be not a little riveting. It feels like an epiphany, not least because it accounts in large part for the simultaneous attraction that I have always felt personally, as a reader and writer, to both supernatural horror and themes of the spiritual and metaphysical. And I think it might behoove all writers of the form to maintain an awareness of this quality, fact, or phenomenon at work in such stories.

Not incidentally, this same idea plays into Pressfield’s final point in his blog post, which is that writers and their work can benefit from a conscious awareness and deployment of this principle :

I’m working on a new novel right now, I’m asking myself, as I wrestle with its structure and concept, “What’s the Understory? Where does it play out? Is it happening on the landscape of the soul?”

I’ve never really applied these criteria to any story as part of the process of working on it. It’s a helluva deep exercise. I highly recommend it to all of us.

I think I second this recommendation, though I have never actually written anything myself from such a direct awareness of the case. Right now I’m simply finding it fascinating to go back through my favorite works of weird fiction, and also my own stories, and apply this insight. In doing so, I’m noticing for the first time how these stories all, to one degree or another, present the understory right on the surface, since their common core theme is the weirding of conventional reality, with the encounter between the protagonist and the source of the weirdness standing as the convergence point where the two narrative levels become one.

I also note in parting—returning to what I said at the start—that this is why all such tales can be read in one way or another as tales of awakening or enlightenment. In fact, they can also be used or regarded as tools for enlightenment. The collapsing together of one’s egoic life narrative and sense of personal identity with the underlying spiritual/metaphysical/deep ontological reality is what awakening is all about. It is also what weird fictional narratives, read in this way, are about.

There is much opportunity for fruitful reflection here. To experience the deep and true sense of being moved by a tale of supernatural horror and weird, warping realities is to experience a simulation of enlightenment, at least in one of its forms or frequencies. It is to experience both cognitively and affectively what it’s like to undergo the collapse of surface ego into deep self, the apocalyptic fusion of the physical, literal, objective/external world and its objects, processes, and relationships into the underlying field of its sustaining or, as the case may be, undermining metaphysical powers and principles.

As I am sometimes moved to say when I contemplate these things: Caveat lector. Let the reader beware. Only those who are ready to have their illusions exposed and overturned need apply.

Warm regards,

Dear Living Dark reader,

Some time ago, I was reading an absorbing interview with Alan Lightman, the theoretical physicist and author, about his 2023 book The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, when I came across this fascinating passage, where Lightman explains the concept of “emergent phenomena” and why the reductionist approach of physics and chemistry doesn’t work when such phenomena are in play:

This brings up the concept of “emergent phenomena.” In your recent PBS documentary series, you ask biochemist and Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak, “Are we just atoms and molecules?” And he answers: “We aren’t just atoms and molecules; it’s the organization. We are layers and layers of emergent phenomena.”

That’s right. Emergent phenomena are behaviors of complex systems that cannot be understood or predicted from the understanding of the individual parts of systems. The human brain is one of the most fantastic emergent phenomena.

Are there attributes then that we study in biology that are not reducible to chemistry and physics?

Biology studies whole systems, and a living thing is a system. If you try to take away parts of it and reduce it, the way physicists do when they study things, you don’t have a living thing anymore. Let’s say you start with a cell. If you start taking a cell apart, and you study the cell wall, and then you study the mitochondria inside the cell, and then you study the DNA, at that point, you’re getting closer to physics and chemistry than biology. You’re thinking like a physicist or a chemist, which is a more reductionist way of thinking. When you have a complicated system that’s exhibiting emergent phenomena, the reductionist method doesn’t work.1

This comes right after the interviewer has pointed out that, in his book, Lightman says nearly all contemporary biologists are mechanists, meaning they believe “a living body is just so many biological pulleys and springs and chemical flows with no metaphysical spiritus needed,” as distinct from vitalists, who believe “the transformation of nonliving matter to living matter requires some nonmaterial essence or vital force outside the laws of chemistry, biology, and physics.”

As I read—and quite enjoyed—this conversation, I couldn’t help reflecting, as I often do when considering such things, that there is really no difference between the scientific idea of emergent phenomena or properties and the old joke about scientific-sounding non-explanations for what unaccountably happens at some stage of an observed process. According to the joke, such stages are where the scientist quietly inserts, “And then a miracle happens.”

So much of what we commonly take for persuasive and authoritative statements of truth in a culture oriented around science and technology is really just a semantic camouflaging of the fact that literally everything is a mystery. One thinks of Nietzsche’s famous criticism of Kant on the grounds that the latter did not so much offer truths as restate questions disguised as truths. In the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, titled “The Prejudices of Philosophers,” Nietzsche compares this to the words of Molière’s fatuous doctor in The Imaginary Invalid:

How does opium induce sleep? “By means of a means (faculty),” namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere: Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva, Cujus est natura sensus assoupire [“Because it contains a dormative virtue, whose nature is to put the senses to sleep.”]. But such replies belong to the realm of comedy.

Nietzsche’s and Molière’s point is to call out the absurdity of claiming to answer a question or clarify a mystery by using fancy language to essentially restate the question itself in the form of an assertion. Today, if you multiply that approach by something like infinity, you have the situation that exists in modern technological societies, where it is widely but implicitly assumed that, thanks to science, we all know exactly who and what we are, what the world is, how everything works, and how it all fits together, simply because of the multitude of scientific-sounding but ultimately vacuous and question-begging explanations that undergird our collective worldview.

I’m not saying, by the way, that Lightman engaged in any such activity. Though I’m only passingly familiar with his books, he has always struck me as an insightful and perceptive writer and thinker. I’m just pausing here, with you, today, to point out that when we live in an environment where, for example, air-conditioning and central heat keep us comfortable, and where pharmaceutical drugs regulate our bodies and minds, and where electric lights and smartphone screens illuminate our darkness and calm our fears, and where the digital cacophony of a perpetual universe of streaming entertainment muffles our existential questions, it’s all too easy to forget that science is just another language for adumbrating the ultimate mystery of everything, and that technology can serve as a sedative to deaden our acute perception of this mystery.

It’s also easy to forget or overlook the fact that this ultimate mystery of existence and reality is our own mystery. We, ourselves, are the center of the wheel. And at those moments when we reawaken to the wonder, fascination, and longing of it all, what we are really feeling and perceiving, often unawares, is our very Identity, the awesome Absolute in its sheer being, consciousness, and imperturbability. Having assumed the dreamlike perspective of individual beings inhabiting an objective world that is separate from us, we begin to receive intuitive intimations of a higher unity and an awesome, scintillating mystery that characterizes both our inner and outer experience. And it dawns on us that this wondrous infusion of a new felt perspective that inflects and transforms our sense of both self and cosmos is simply the way it feels for a dream character to recognize its simultaneous illusory nature as a separate being and its real identity as the One that has dreamt all this, and that is still dreaming it now.

Or at least that’s how it has come to articulate itself to me, whenever I attempt to verbalize it in my own most honest moments. The other option, of course, is not to try to articulate anything at all, but simply to let the mystery whisper itself and find its confirmation and fulfillment in the sheer wordless sense of it. To which worthy non-endeavor I now gladly hand you over.

Warm regards,

Dear Living Dark reader,

Those of us who write about writing and spirituality, language and waking up, have such an energetic paradox on our hands. It comes to the fore in things like Kenneth S. Leong’s insightful observations in The Zen Teachings of Jesus about the intrinsic relationship between Zen, art, and creativity, and about Zen’s concomitant “right-brain orientation.” Art, says Leong, is ultimately nonverbal and right-brained because it is ultimately not about the abstractness of thoughts (and therefore words) but about the immediacy of the concrete:

Art is not about thoughts. Rather, it is about seeing, listening, feeling, and touching. It prefers the concrete over the abstract. Philosopher George Santayana once remarked: “Art critics talk about art. Artists talk about where you can buy good turpentine.” As we recall from Buddha’s Wordless Sermon (the Sermon of the Flower), those who missed the point were those who were too busy thinking. Seeing and thinking do not go well together. True artists do not spend much time on talks or thoughts. They prefer to be absorbed in the concrete and direct experience of beauty instead of working with its abstractions.

This nonverbal and nonintellectual orientation of art (and Zen) can be more simply referred to as right-brained....

Since most of the activities of people today are left-brained, Zen seeks to restore the balance by being right-brain-oriented, emphasizing nonverbal and integrative activities.1

The point about the obfuscating power of verbal language is helpfully sharpened by Mark Pesce in an essay on language and magic. Starting from William Burroughs’s famous characterization of language as a virus, Pesce observes that whereas other animals experience their world directly, our human experience is “utterly infused with the fog of language.” He elaborates:

We need to be clear about this: from the time, some tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, that language invaded and colonized our cerebrums, we have increasingly lost touch with the reality of things. Reality has been replaced with relation, a mapping of things-as-they-are to things-as-we-believe-them-to-be. Language allows us to construct complex systems of symbols, the linear narratives which frame our experience. Yet a frame invariably occults more of the world than it encompasses, and this exclusion leaves us separated from the world-as-it-is.2

Thus, in our “normal” human state and level of consciousness, it is impossible for us to see or otherwise experience the real world apart from language, since language always “steps in to mediate, explain, and define.” Notably and concomitantly, this also means that any moments of the ineffable reality of the world-as-it-is that we ever do encounter “are outside the bounds of human culture (if not entirely outside human experience) because at these points where language fails nothing can be known or said.” As Pesce characterizes it, from the viewpoint of Zen and other outworkings of the primal human activity to wake up, philosophize, or otherwise see beyond our own horizon, “language stands out as the great interloper, separating man from the apprehension of things-as-they-are.”

These points, both Pesce’s and Leong’s elaborations of them, are immediately and intuitively true. But what do they mean for those of us whose art and calling is writing? The very tool of our trade, the concreteness of it, like Santayana’s turpentine for painters, is words! If language is “the great interloper” that separates us from the natural, given reality of things outside the linguistic cage, and if “true artists do not spend much time on talk or thoughts” because they prefer direct experience, then what of the art form that is in fact nothing but the textual deployment of language, of talk and thoughts?

This dilemma highlights a fascinating point: Of all the different kinds of art, ours is the most purely strange and tricky when it comes to this matter of art and its relationship to primary reality. The left-brained arena of words and logic that forms the hyperspace of mental unreality—the false dominance of the left brain pretending to be the master when it is more rightly the right brain’s emissary; the facsimile of life in and as an imagined world of verbal logic; the mental Matrix in which most of us are unwittingly trapped—is the arena where we work. The use of our primary medium automatically invokes the enemy. Even Leong and Pesce, in communicating their points to us, were using the very medium whose obfuscating and misdirecting nature they were calling out for comment. So am I, right here.

So what’s to do?

I mentioned the solution a couple of weeks ago in “The Zen of Words”: Reality’s transcendence of language doesn’t mean we are rendered mute. Rather, it means the real world and life in general are infinitely expressible in words, especially when we use them artfully as the Taoist finger pointing toward the moon, remembering all the while—and thus passing this awareness on to our readers, whether implicitly or explicitly—that words are in fact pointers and not things in themselves.

Leong offers a lovely insight about this in connection with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which he calls “the Nature Sermon” because of its famous use of birds and flowers to illustrate the point:

The Nature Sermon actually has two parts—one with words, one without. The part without words was taught by nature herself. Note that the sermon actually took place on a mountain. In the midst of natural beauty, Jesus asked his disciples to see and to contemplate what was present and real. Actually, no word is necessary. For nature soothes, heals, and teaches with her silence. All Jesus did was to let the right brains of his audience do their work—to listen, to see, to appreciate, and to be.

But for the benefit of those who were weak in their right-brain abilities, Jesus supplemented nature’s silent lesson with his words....We should consider the verbal part and the nonverbal part of the sermon as being complementary, each lending strength to the other.3

There is significant wisdom here for all of us for whom words and verbal language are our stock-in-trade.

To put the matter provocatively: In our words we can cast a counter spell, a spell of unmaking, to counteract the binding and entrancing power of language that otherwise dominates us and our readers. We can write with the view that we are planting bombs of awakening in other people’s psyches, explosive linguistic devices with an uncertain length of fuse, which will blow up in their own good time and knock out a wall in the reader’s world, revealing the scintillating starscape of an unimaginably wider reality, like Rufus Sewell and William Hurt punching through the outer wall of the titular city-as-trap in Dark City and finding themselves confronted by the roaring gulf of outer space lying unsuspected on the other side of their simulated world.4

Maybe we can write with the understanding that when we are situated rightly in the seat of our art, everything we write serves on some level as a Zen koan. That is, our best writing, the kind we do when we’re really plugged in and resonating in sync with our daemon muse, is a paradoxical deployment of verbal language to wake up the reader—not to mention ourselves—to what categorically transcends such language and can never be understood in terms of it. As writers we can call attention to what lies beyond our words, and beyond all words, using language to undermine its own entrapment and thereby fulfill the real purpose for which it, and everything else, has come into being.

What a strange business this is. And all the more fascinating for it.

Warm regards,

Dear Living Dark reader,

Some years ago I started telling the students in my literature and writing classes that language has an alchemical power. I usually did this when we were studying poetry, although I applied the idea to prose as well.

This always necessitated a pause to offer a brief explanation of the word “alchemy.” Then, once that was out of the way, I went on to explain that there is a positively magical power in language, particularly in the poetic use of it, since language enables each of us to recreate his or her private thoughts and emotions in someone else’s headspace and heartspace. This is particularly true when it comes to lyric poetry, I explained, because this type of poetry is meant to capture and express the writer’s state of mind and mood at a particular moment, and therefore a full understanding of a lyric poem entails not only an intellectual understanding of what it’s saying in terms of the words, concepts, and images, but an actual shared feeling with the author. When a lyric poem “works,” it actually recreates the writer’s inner state in the reader or listener, so that writer and reader are vibrating in sympathy, as it were, and the reader doesn’t just understand the poem “from the outside” but divines it “from the inside” by sharing the actual experience that motivated the poet to begin writing. It’s a veritably alchemical moment, since the poet acts as a linguistic alchemist who uses language to transmute the reader’s inner state into something else.

Of course, I didn’t always get all of that properly said in my classes. The above description is a kind of idealized version of what I wanted to say. Sometimes it came out better and sometimes worse, depending on the specific tone of the interaction I was having with the specific group of students at the time. But my students never failed to find it interesting, and I never failed to find something interesting in their responses. I often used Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening,” which is both a lyric and a narrative poem, to illustrate the point, and the alchemical explanation seemed to help many students gain a better grasp of what Frost was getting at with this textual apotheosis of a wintry longing for silence, solitude, and ultimate rest.

The above recollection is one aspect of the fact that, as a professional writer and former teacher of writing and literature, I have been prone to think frequently about the role of language in life at large. One of the recurring themes in my thinking—occasioned at least in part by some of my grad school studies in philosophy, anthropology, and sociolinguistics, and also by my having been confronted every day at my teaching job by extremely rough and problematic uses of language that were damned difficult to address—has been the question of “correct” language. Is the very idea of linguistic correctness just a culturally imperialistic metanarrative? Is it just arbitrary in the grand scheme of things? Or does it really get at a crucial truth?

And beyond mere technical correctness—as in grammar etc.—what about matters of rhetoric, style, and syntactical choice? How important are these not just to academic matters but to life in general, and not just in a utilitarian sense, but in a deeply human one?

A 2010 essay in The New York Review of Books offers some useful fodder for reflection on these things. In “Words, the British academic Tony Judt talks about the central significance of language in both his own personal life and the life of human culture at large.  The essay is both fascinating and poignant. It’s fascinating because of the insight Judt brings to bear on the relationship between, on the one hand, the clear and skillful deployment of language in both print and speech, and on the other hand, the achievement of a general clarity of life and thought. It’s poignant because he caps the whole thing off by talking about a progressive neurological disorder from which he suffers, and which he says will inevitably rob him of speech. (In fact, he died from it just a few weeks after the essay was published.) “Translating being into thought,” Judt says, “thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.”

He explains that he was brought up in a family where talking and debating were centrally important, and that he was processed through the British elementary school system of the 1950s, when “‘Good’ English was at its peak” and “we were instructed in the unacceptability of even the most minor syntactical transgression.”

The heart of the essay appears in his comments about the close connection between clarity of language and clarity of thought, and the way this connection has been devalued over the past half century of public life:

Sheer rhetorical facility, whatever its appeal, need not denote originality and depth of content.

All the same, inarticulacy surely suggests a shortcoming of thought. This idea will sound odd to a generation praised for what they are trying to say rather than the thing said. Articulacy itself became an object of suspicion in the 1970s: the retreat from “form” favored uncritical approbation of mere “self-expression,” above all in the classroom. But it is one thing to encourage students to express their opinions freely and to take care not to crush these under the weight of prematurely imposed authority. It is quite another for teachers to retreat from formal criticism in the hope that the freedom thereby accorded will favor independent thought: “Don’t worry how you say it, it’s the ideas that count.”

Forty years on from the 1960s, there are not many instructors left with the self-confidence (or the training) to pounce on infelicitous expression and explain clearly just why it inhibits intelligent reflection. The revolution of my generation played an important role in this unraveling: the priority accorded the autonomous individual in every sphere of life should not be underestimated — “doing your own thing” took protean form.

Today “natural” expression — in language as in art — is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better. For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And “style” was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst.

Judt goes on from this to observe that in the modern milieu of social media and texting, “pithy allusion substitutes for exposition,” and people who live under the reign of an overweening consumerism begin to talk like text messages.

The prognosis he offers is grim and unequivocal:

This ought to worry us. When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatizing language no less than we have privatized so much else. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Alice was right: the outcome is anarchy.1

As I said, this all hits home because of my personal and professional positions as a writer and teacher. And also because of my philosophical and spiritual proclivities. I am deeply influenced by a loose Zen-Christian nondual school of thinking, seeing, and knowing, and of course this involves the recognition that reality in itself is fundamentally unspeakable, fundamentally a matter of pure being-ness and first-person apprehension. “The menu isn’t the meal.” “The map isn’t the territory.” Don’t get so distracted by the finger pointing to the moon that you miss the moon itself, the finger being words and concepts and the moon being the living realities they symbolize. And so on.

For years I struggled with the question of whether this semi-existentialist recognition of the abstraction of language and thought from real being, while valid and crucial, might not entail the necessary conclusion that language is unimportant. That’s one of the major reasons why I find Judt’s insights to be so gripping: because he, with his neurological disorder, was faced with the imminent loss of his ability to communicate in words. And this really did strike him—and me—as a loss.

In point of fact, reality’s transcendence of language means that the real world and life in general should be infinitely expressible in words. No matter that the words and concepts are relative realities instead of absolute ones and symbolic realities instead of existential ones. This very fact means a person should ideally be able to describe his or her thoughts and experiences in a literally endless variety of linguistic variations, all of them circling around and pointing toward the realities themselves and recreating in the mind and affect of the equally linguistically astute listener or reader an approximation of those very realities, thus encouraging a “see for yourself” transition to direct looking. Not to be able to do this, to lack the skills and sensibility to state and restate our experience, is to be locked away in a prison of muteness.

I recall being exhilarated as an undergraduate when I read Robert Anton Wilson’s The Widow’s Son and came to a passage in which Wilson presented a character’s speculative imagining of humanity’s first moment of self-consciousness, and the attendant birth of beauty with it. The character imagines an early human who, while suckling her newborn, falls into a deep reverie. And then, suddenly,

she saw for the first time. A single rose, a gorgeous sunset, the intricate design of what had previously been an “ugly” insect—I cannot guess what she saw, but she saw. And in excitement and rapture, she cried out to her mate (whatever form of “marriage” they had in those days) “Oh, look at this, look!” and he looked and he saw. And beauty was created in a world that had been flat and dead and meaningless until that moment.2

The entire history of language, or at least language artfully used, proceeds from that delightful leap to self-consciousness, from that titanically freeing and empowering ability to step back from life and really see it, and to symbolize it in some form that’s communicable to others, so that they, too, can see for themselves by using the symbol for its proper purpose: as the Taoist’s finger pointing toward the moon, which directs attention away from itself and toward reality, serving only as a bridge.

Years ago, I read and loved Colin Wilson’s The Philosopher’s Stone. The entire philosophical thrust of that ecstatically philosophical novel is the value of being able to step back from immediate experience and grasp wider meanings. Wilson writes, “So poets, philosophers, scientists are always having these moments in which they grasp enormous meanings.” He even deliberately presents an instance in which a dull and prosaic-minded character suffers a head wound that accidentally endows him with the ability to induce “value experiences” at will (the novel’s fictionalized version of Maslow’s “peak experiences”). Wilson’s purpose in including this is simply to enable him to make a point about the importance of linguistic expression: “We had found someone who could plunge into ecstasy as a moment’s notice. Here was a Wordsworth without the power of self-expression, a Traherne who could only say ‘Gor, ain’t it pretty.’”3

Everything here, all the words I’ve just written, is merely a longish and rambling rumination for the purpose of getting around to saying the following: Judt was right. The power to use language with self-conscious correctness, and not just that, but with rhetorical beauty, is a real power with real value because it really does allow “the translation of being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication”—which means your and my subjectivity becomes shareable. Our walled-off world of interiority becomes something we can communicate to someone else, and they can communicate theirs to us. There may be, in fact there truly are, wordless ways of doing the same thing—but words are one of the finest and most effective means we have of doing it.

Even more: Words, like self-consciousness, can actually enhance primary experience. The capacity for self-consciousness and the capacity for language being inextricably intertwined, it’s simply the case that the better your ability to reflect upon and express your experience consciously and linguistically, the more fully you know that experience. The very act of reflection creates the reflector. It’s bound up with the fact of individual subjecthood itself, as any student of the Western intellectual, philosophical, political, and social tradition, not to mention any student of Buddhism, can tell you. And the achievement and refinement of that ego self, despite the undeniable and enormous problems it has created—everything having to do with the “nightmare” of recorded/civilized history from which Joyce was struggling to awake—is one of the greatest quantum leaps in the history of the universe’s evolution. It’s the universe becoming awake to itself, and our purpose lies not in fleeing from the ego but in fulfilling the purpose for which it arose. See the pre/trans fallacy famously articulated by Ken Wilber. See the biblical Jesus: “I come not to destroy the law but to fulfill it.”

Our culture now presents us with an opportunity either to rise to, and even above, the opportunity embodied in words and language, or to sink below it. This is what I and every other writer and/or teacher is charged with addressing. Contrary to the widespread utilitarian degradation of education’s purpose in the minds of most people these days, teachers of writing in high schools, colleges, and universities aren’t just trying to enhance students’ communication skills in order to enhance their employment prospects. We are helping to focus their being, to focus Being itself, for the ultimate fulfillment of its purpose, by helping them to develop their linguistic capacities and conscious interior sensibilities to the greatest possible extent.

As you may have noticed, none of the above mentions AI, even though the subtitle of this essay refers to it. That’s because the paragraphs above are actually a combination of two older pieces of writing that I only rediscovered earlier this month, though I have now updated their language (e.g., by changing some verb tenses to past). I wrote them fourteen and fifteen years ago, one in July 2009 and the other a year later in July 2010, during my second and third years as a college English instructor. Previously, I had taught high school English for six years.

In 2009 and 2010, AI large-language models weren’t even on the horizon. But even so, my words above say still say essentially everything that I now want to say in response to the claim, which we’ve all heard, that this technology will help people to express their thoughts more effectively. To restate my point: Thought cannot be separated from its specific form of expression or articulation. If someone or something else does the articulating, that means they’re doing the actual thinking. And this represents a grievous existential loss.

The ancient, intrinsic value of writing as an alchemy of self-discovery and self-formation, and as a cognitive and spiritual shaper of civilizations, reemerges forcefully when machines are able to supplant the purely practical, market-based “writing as skill” approach that has dominated classrooms for decades. In other words, there is an opportunity here for clarifying why we write at all, humanistically speaking.

An artificial intelligence can now write—for example—an essay for you. Or rather, it can do this “for you,” if by the term “essay” we simply mean a set of information presented in a specifically organized form of human textual language. It can do the same with stories, novels, poems, screenplays, and anything else. But what an artificial intelligence cannot do is to give coherent, clarifying, formative voice to your scattered thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and personal vision. It cannot express or articulate yourself. Only you can do that. Otherwise, you’re letting a machine tell you, and others, who you are.

Warm regards,

What is the relationship between art and the rest of our lives? Does art enhance our experiences and relationships? Does it complement them? Enrich them? Illuminate them?

Or is it just the opposite? Do art and life stand in conflict? Does each injure the other, steal from the other, sap the essence of the other? If we feel called to appreciate a certain kind of art, whether writing or music or painting; and if we feel called not only to appreciate it but to practice it, to engage in its creation; and if we assent to this call; and still further, if we actively devote ourselves to this art, investing untold amounts of time in it, maybe even committing the better part of our lives to carving out our home within its mutual embrace—if we do this, are we in fact depriving ourselves and those who ostensibly count as our “loved ones” of the real essence of who we are and what we have to offer?

To put it differently: Is art a vampire? Does it drain meaning and vitality from the rest of our lives to give us the temporary bliss of inhabiting a beautiful otherworld that is inevitably revealed in the end as false and hollow? Is the lure of art a siren song that we willfully misrepresent to ourselves as the road to meaning, the call of the divine, the highest voice we can answer?

Welcome to a well-developed wing of my mind, built on a lifelong vein of tension running through and beneath my inmost affections.

The seeds of this suspicion about art were planted in me early in life by the fact that I was an intellectually and affectively high-strung youth with a voracious love of books, movies, and music, a natural verbal, musical, and literary talent, an innate interest in questions of religion, philosophy, and life meaning, and an inclination and sensibility that, by the time I graduated from high school, and with help from nominally positive feedback in my interpersonal environment, had shaped itself into a self-conscious allegiance to all of the above. I can see in retrospect that this combination of traits, talents, and predilections provided the perfect staging ground for a blowout. Emotional intensity plus creative/intellectual precocity plus external reinforcement equals a lit fuse in the self-obsessed psyche.

It was in college that the lurking danger of this orientation first revealed itself. This occurred in connection with the academic, creative, and interpersonal experiences that became newly available to me at the University of Missouri, where not only my formal studies in communication, electronic media production, and philosophy, but my extracurricular plunge into the works and secondary materials surrounding the likes of H. P. Lovecraft, affected me in ways that are still revealing themselves.

Lovecraft, for example, was an atheist and philosophical materialist who was transported to heights of emotional and aesthetic rapture by art, literature, and scenes of natural beauty, even as his principles told him these things, including his subjective reactions, were really just the mechanistic manifestations of a blind universe that was eternally grinding its way from nothing to something and then back again.

In his story “The Silver Key”—which, to employ a literary generic term that did not exist in Lovecraft’s day, might be accurately characterized as a fantastic autofiction—he gave narrative voice to this aching tension in his life by telling of the agonized disillusionment of his literary alter ego, Randolph Carter (a recurring character in his stories), who had been drawn to myths, dreams, and beauty from childhood, but who found these all painfully undermined by modern science and societal philistinism as he reached the age of maturity:

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether....

He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other....

They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world....

Having perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things, Carter spent his days in retirement, and in wistful disjointed memories of his dream-filled youth.

Eighteen-year-old me first read these things while lying on his bed in a seventh-floor dorm room in Columbia, Missouri, and savoring the enhanced pleasure that always attends time stolen from formal obligations to indulge in private pleasures. But amid the enjoyment, my sense of pleasure at HPL’s sensitive description of Carter’s inner dilemma was mingled with sadness, because, to my surprise, I identified with it. It struck close to home. Right there in late adolescence, I intuited that my childhood ability to lose myself in worlds of imagination and ideas would grow progressively dim as the “real world” of the mundane, the world of jobs and material obligations with its attendant practical and mundane outlook, rose to claim me. As I lay there on my bed reading, that world loomed ominously on the far edge of college and the threshold of societally identified adulthood. For some reason, I was wired to view that world as a realm of utter disenchantment, a place where art, spirit, and intellectual enjoyment went to die.

During my freshman year, I encountered Friedrich Nietzsche for the first time by way of his The Birth of Tragedy, which I was assigned to read in a humanities class taught by Dr. Doug Hunt, whose editorship of The Dolphin Reader, a widely used literature anthology in undergraduate English courses, acted synergistically with his winning personality—soft-spoken, affable, approachable—and his impressive erudition to make him one of my favorite professors. Under his tutelage, I discovered a philosopher who wielded the power to cast a spell over me with his words:

In this sense Dionysian man might be said to resemble Hamlet: both have looked deeply into the true nature of things, they have gained knowledge and are now loath to act. They realize that no action of theirs can work any change in the eternal condition of things, and they regard the imputation as ludicrous or debasing that they should set right the time which is out of joint. Knowledge kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion; such is Hamlet’s doctrine, not to be confounded with the cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer, who through too much reflection, as it were a surplus of possibilities, never arrives at action. What, both in the case of Hamlet and of Dionysian man, overbalances any motive leading to action, is not reflection but knowledge, the apprehension of truth and its terror. Now no comfort any longer avails, desire reaches beyond the transcendental world, beyond the gods themselves, and existence, together with its glittering reflection in the gods and an immortal Beyond, is denied. The truth once seen, man is aware everywhere of the ghastly absurdity of existence, comprehends the symbolism of Ophelia's fate and the wisdom of the wood sprite Silenus: nausea invades him.

This gloomy characterization of true sight, the true penetration of reality, as something that leads to paralysis because of its sheer terror sank its hooks into my soul. I could not stop thinking about it. And I found its fascination to be long-lasting, extending well beyond that first reading, extending in fact to my life beyond college. It was something I returned to many times later in my twenties to reread, ponder, and lament as I was trying to find my place in the world. Sometimes you encounter an idea at precisely the right moment for it to invade and inflect your perception of everything. That’s what Nietzsche did in The Birth of Tragedy, especially since his larger overarching point about art’s redeeming and exalting power only increased my gloom, particularly in connection with his vivid interpretation, borrowed from Schilling, of the chorus in Greek drama as a wall erected to protect the sacred world of art from the profane and prosaic world of the everyday. This notion and vision lodged in my mind and would not go away: that the art and ideas I loved, and the realm of spirit to which they pointed and in which they subsisted, were really just airy realms of abstraction, empty visions walled off from the real world and standing in essence as cruel traps for the mind and soul because they could not fulfill, because only reality can fulfill, and because the reality to which they stand in winsome but deceptive contrast is nothing but a galling grind in exactly the way Lovecraft/Randolph Carter had known it to be.

Though full awareness of it didn’t come clear until later, right then, at age eighteen, I began to have the first intimation that I was doomed, as it were, to feel helplessly, inexorably driven to indulge in false visions that called to me with the perfume of paradise, promising a life of enlightened pleasure and transcendence, but that revealed themselves in the end—and not only in the end but all along, in real time, for one who has eyes to see—as hollow illusions.

At least that was how my undergraduate self saw it, when he thought about it, which he couldn’t help doing with the same obsessiveness that he brought to most things.

After three years of college life, as graduation and matriculation into The Real World began to assume the status of an actual event bearing down on me instead of a future fiction that would never arrive, I discovered that I had unwittingly engineered a crisis. My freshman glimpse of a corrosive despair revealed itself to be not an acute sickness but a chronic one. The world of art and ideas that I had chosen to inhabit, and that I had too preciously spent a great deal of time and energy representing to myself and others as Very Important, seemed ever more empty and impotent in the face of having to figure out how I was going to earn a living. Sure, I had already had several jobs. I had worked for money. I had experienced the world of gainful employment and material necessity. And I had pretty much loathed it. Now I was on the precipice of the final, unavoidable, irrevocable step that would tip me over into a new phase of life that I had enjoyed denying for years. “What are you going to do with your life? How will you get a job?” The very questions felt like they were inserted into my consciousness by a monstrous alien source. That source was the aforementioned Real World. Reality itself was a trap. I wanted to write, and to make movies and music. Sure, you could do that in the Real World. But at what cost to your integrity? And—in light of the awful emptiness of art and ideas that I had been alternately grappling with, denying, lamenting, and grimly accepting—what for?

During the fall semester of my senior year, I took a course in interpersonal communication that was taught by a professor who had become special to me, someone whom I had come to view as a philosophical mentor. Unexpectedly, in his class I found myself confronted with a quintessential articulation of my private despair. It happened around the middle of the semester, when he screened the movie My Dinner with Andre for the class and asked us to write a brief paper in which we discussed the tempo and methods of self-disclosure that Wally and Andre each displayed in their conversation. Today I’m convinced that his real purpose was simply to find an excuse to introduce us to that movie, which remains one of my favorites to this day.

Among the many things about My Dinner with Andre that mesmerized me were the following lines by Wally, the movie’s fictionalized version of the real-life Wallace Shawn, who delivers them as voice-over narration during the opening scene in which he navigates the New York City subway system and the streets of Manhattan on the way to meet his old friend Andre Gregory for dinner at a fancy French restaurant:

The reason I was meeting Andre was that an acquaintance of mine, George Grassfield, had called me and just insisted that I had to see him. Apparently, George had been walking his dog in an odd section of town the night before, and he’d suddenly come upon Andre leaning against a crumbling old building and sobbing. Andre had explained to George that he’d just been watching the Ingmar Bergman movie Autumn Sonata about twenty-five blocks away, and he’d been seized by a fit of ungovernable crying when the character played by Ingrid Bergman had said, “I could always live in my art, but never in my life.”

As you may imagine in light of all the above, this struck me as a college senior, and continues to strike me now, as almost unbearably poignant.

Some years later, I discovered that Wally, or else his friend George Grassfield, had not quoted from Autumn Sonata verbatim but had paraphrased it. The actual lines spoken by Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman’s character), or at least one English rendering of them, are as follows, and they reverberate all the more deeply because they are spoken by a person who is in process of being confronted late in life with the consequences of having sacrificed human love and connection for a career as an artist, in this case, a renowned concert pianist:

It was only through music that I could express my feelings. Sometimes, when I lie awake at night, I wonder whether I’ve lived at all.

It is not immaterial to observe that this view of art and life, and the inner human experience that it expresses, whether as paraphrased by Wally or as articulated and dramatized in Autumn Sonata, is made all the more poignant in My Dinner with Andre by the fact that it comes up moments after Wally has described, again in voice-over narration, what might be called his self-perceived “fall from grace” as he progressed from youth to adulthood:

I’ve lived in this city all my life. I grew up on the Upper East Side. And when I was ten years old, I was rich, I was an aristocrat. Riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort. And all I thought about was art and music. Now I’m 36, and all I think about is money.

In recent years this dialogue has made its way into online meme culture, being passed around and shared by many people as an expression of the spiritual trap of contemporary consumer-capitalist society. Every time I come across someone sharing Wally’s words, whether textually or in a video clip, a little remembered flame of mingled delight and despair blooms within me, and I return to what feels like center, like ground zero of the innate emotional tone or tenor that, in combination with spiritual longing and numinous dread, has characterized the long arc of my life.

At this point maybe you, like me, are wondering about the reason for this spontaneous trip down disillusionment lane. Because that’s what this self-absorbed and strangely logicked essay is: spontaneous. I had no intention of writing about all this stuff, and no idea that I was going to do it. So, what was it that set me off on this meditation about my recurrent lifelong sense of unhappy indecision over art’s function as something that ennobles, enriches, and fulfills or something that lures and then undermines?

The proximate cause was a line from an actor and musician that I stumbled across recently in connection with the fact that my wife and I have been watching our way through all six seasons of Northern Exposure. I first watched this series intermittently during its final three seasons back in the 1990s. Presently, I am being reminded of what a genuinely brilliant show it was. And as is my wont whenever I’m going all-in on a television series, or a film genre, or a writer’s body of work, I have been reading up on it.

One of the supporting characters in Northern Exposure’s fictional world of Cicely, Alaska, is Walt the trapper, a gruff, gravel-voiced older man who lives in a cabin outside town, and who adds his own distinct element of charm to the show’s signature quirkiness. A few days ago, I found myself reading about Moultrie Patten, the actor who played Walt. I was intrigued to learn that Patten was not just an actor but a skilled jazz pianist, and also a former tank commander in World War II who had been awarded the Silver Star. Then I found myself reading, and then rereading, and then pausing to read yet again, a sentence that burst open the well of my memories and brought up all my conflicted feelings about art and life.

The line appears in Patten’s obituary, titled “Actor, Jazz Musician Moultrie Patten Dies in Beaverton,” which was published in Portland’s The Oregonian two days after his death in March 2009. After noting that Patten had been best known for his portrayal of Walt on Northern Exposure, and that he had died of pneumonia at age 89, the obituary says the following:

According to Patten’s daughter, Sarah Goforth of Portland, Patten often summed up his philosophy toward acting with this saying: “Anyone who pursues the arts is really creating another world for themselves, because the one they are faced with does not, in some way, suit them.”

I feel the need to repeat that line in italics, the better to pause and absorb it with you, because of its resonance with everything that I have been going on about here: “Anyone who pursues the arts is really creating another world for themselves, because the one they are faced with does not, in some way, suit them.”

All these years later, three decades after I suffered my youthful college crisis and managed to, after a fashion, get through it, there is still a version of me, call him Matt the Artist, that savors such words and wants to shout them from the rooftops. Yes, says Matt the Artist, that’s just how it is. The purpose of art is to redeem the world by showing us a higher version of it, to make good on our divine dissatisfaction by creating another world that is, in the end, more real than this one, and that reveals and constitutes the natural environment to which our souls rightly and continually aspire. C. S. Lewis had it right with his apologetic of longing: Sehnsucht, the aching, inconsolable longing for an infinite beauty, the very experience of which feels simultaneously joyful and tantalizing, points to something real. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,” Lewis famously argued, “the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” The purpose of art is to seek, to see, and to channel this vision.

But another version of me, call him Matt the Disillusioned, receives such words, both Lewis’s and Patten’s, with a pang of melancholy and a surge of depressive emptiness. He reads Patten’s statement in a way that is ironically inverted from what the man surely intended. You say you want to create another world because you don’t like the one you see? Sorry, but all this does is trap you in a baseless hyperworld of empty emotion, elevating you for a few giddy moments into a space that feels like paradise, after which you realize you have no choice but to come crashing back to earth. Trying to escape the world as given, the world of the infinite meaningless grinding cosmos, not to mention the world of money and politics and the whole societal-material grind with its Gordian tangle of mostly arbitrary obligations, is an act of self-injury. It’s the doom of the Romantics, the fallacy of feeding on your own emotions, of deliberately heightening your affective sensibility, and maybe even your philosophic worldview, with false promises, and in so doing, burning out your soul.

Matt the Disillusioned often recalls the famous lament—which he (Matt, I) first encountered in the same humanities class where he met Nietzsche—that Wordsworth poetically articulated regarding his inability to feel again as he had felt in his youth, to regain the sense of freshness and wonder that had been driven out by adulthood:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
       The earth, and every common sight,
                          To me did seem
                      Apparelled in celestial light,
            The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
                      Turn wheresoe'er I may,
                          By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

                       The Rainbow comes and goes,
                      And lovely is the Rose,
                      The Moon doth with delight
       Look round her when the heavens are bare,
                      Waters on a starry night
                      Are beautiful and fair;
       The sunshine is a glorious birth;
       But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

Today when I revisit those lines, I feel their melancholic force all over again. And I think: Oh, come on, William. Of course you can’t feel the old thrill anymore. By your mid-thirties when you wrote that, you had spent decades burning up your emotions with Romantic surges of intensity for their own sake, reveling in visions of a poetically transfigured world that, no matter how lovely, is just an empty and doomed escape attempt. You would have been better off to forgo the poetic fireworks and acclimate yourself to life on the ground, which may be dreary, but at least it doesn’t disappoint when you accept it for what it is.

There is no real ending to this spontaneous essay that has decided to write itself. The best I can do is resort to that last refuge of the writer who has reached the end of the line, the tail of the transmission, and is groping and listening for what comes next. Which is to say, I will quote from myself.

The issue I’ve been describing has remained active within me for more than thirty years. Naturally, this is reflected in my personal journal, which I still feel strange and uncertain about having made public. Here is a brief steppingstone set of entries across a twenty-year span—with roots extending a decade earlier, but these are the ones I could locate most easily in the moment—where the matter erupted onto the pages of my private self-conversation. The first is one of the scores of story ideas that I recorded in my journals but never brought to fruition:

6/26/01

A story about the struggle between imaginative life and hard “real” reality. Imagination naturally tends toward “walled-off” existence, ultimate escape from the strictures and ennui of daily mundane reality, but imagination is also vapid and unreal. Creeping nihilism: a man unable to enjoy his own greatest pleasure because he recognizes its falsity. And he recognizes the same problem in all beauty, all thought—in short, in everything except brute physical reality. Fineness of thought and imagination good for nothing but recognizing the futility and uselessness of thought and imagination.

Some awful thing happens while this man is transported by some artistic rapture, and his sense of security is forever shattered by the awful realization that such rapture is no protection, and in fact only renders one more vulnerable to piercing horror. (Is there perhaps a final redemption in surrendering to despair?)

“By the time I reached the peak of my artistic powers, I had already fallen into a state of despair at their inability ever to achieve the thing that was their natural goal. The recognition of the contradiction implicit in all artistic endeavor grew on me slowly, over a span of years. It came at odd hours, often, paradoxically, on the heels of my greatest triumphs, when my sense of fulfillment was still glowing warmly in my chest and eyes. It felt like a subtle sapping of my joy, as if a leak had sprung in my bubble of happiness, or as if someone or something were siphoning away my very ability to delight in my accomplishments.”

2/21/02 Thursday 9:05 p.m.

Utter, inescapable despair at the thought that all art is nothing more than a sophisticated sentimentality, a refined expression of longing for worlds that can never be.

Monday, May 30, 2011 – 6:15 a.m.

The ultimate point of imaginative pursuits like the reading and writing of literature, the making and enjoyment of music, and the enjoyment of all art is to transport us more deeply into the now, into the heart of what’s real, life’s depth dimension, the realm of soul. But these can also be employed for escape and abstraction, attempts to seek fulfillment in unreality. The dividing line is so subtle. It can even turn from one side to the other within the same person, in an instant.

My thoughts turn to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and its depiction of Louis’s final philosophical-emotional resting point of hopelessness: Even art came to seem horrifically, intolerably productive of despair, for it stood in Louis’s eyes as a palpable expression of its own ultimate, lying uselessness, since it referred to no truer world and served merely to remind him of life’s shrieking nothingness, its utter, appalling meaninglessness.

This vision has been mythically attractive to me for so very long. But when I indulge it, and it starts to gain its own autonomous momentum and life within me, it poisons and corrodes my life from the root upward.

Monday, February 24, 2020

What comes over me is the sense, the thought, that even if I do end up producing a good story or whatever, so what? What would it even matter? I mean to me or to anyone else. How could it possibly have any significance? The finished product itself, the time and effort that went into creating it, my experience of writing it, the reactions of the people who would read it, my experience of knowing those responses, the impact the story might have on someone—is there anything really worthwhile in any of that? Isn’t there just as much reason not to do it as to do it?

These days, I tend to watch such thoughts and emotions—along with all other phenomena, both objective and subjective—play out like waves unfurling. I don’t invest my sense of identity in them like I once did. They are just the way this particular expression, this relative locus of the Absolute, is karmically destined to play out. Or rather, they are the playing out of it. Not incidentally, so is your response to them, whatever it may be. All phenomena are impersonal and inevitable.

So, is art trap or transcendence? Distraction or divine? Siren song or spirit song? The only accurate approximation of an answer in verbal language is surely that it is both and neither, just as you and I are both and neither—both these individual appearances and not these appearances at all. The whole anguished conflict plays out for a shadow, a phantom, a dream self within the real Identity.

There really is an ultimate fulfillment like Lewis maintained. It’s the fulfillment that I-as-Matt am wired to seek in both the creation and enjoyment of art and ideas, and that I suspect you are, too, since you have read this far into an essay like this one. But the fulfillment is not in those things. It is not in any “thing” at all. And yet they all point to it, for one who knows how to look, and especially for one who knows how to look at the looker.

As I said, there is no end to this.

Warm regards,

Dear Living Dark reader,

Having suffered from traumatizing visionary sleep paralysis attacks for years in my twenties, and having delved deeply into the literature about this phenomenon, I’m nonplussed whenever I read things like the following, which comes from a recent article in The Wall Street Journal titled “If Not Demons, What Causes Sleep Paralysis?” (Note: It’s behind a paywall.)

We know the temporoparietal junction uses touch and feedback so that your brain can figure out where your body is, where it ends and where another's body begins. It's likely that the shadow figure that is a central aspect of sleep paralysis is the result of some sort of electrical disturbance in this part of the brain, creating a creepy or malevolent “other” at the blurry edge of our imagined body.

Hallucinations are the last part of sleep paralysis and the hardest to explain—the goblins or devils or aliens we see when we are trapped in this space between sleep and waking. Unsurprisingly, the scientific basis of these visions remains elusive and challenging to investigate. If I had to venture a hypothesis, it would include some sort of mismatch between the neurotransmitter serotonin and other arousal neurotransmitters that come online as we wake up. These hallucinations are similar to intense psychedelic experiences, which rely on serotonin modulation.

Note the implied/overt materialist-reductionist attitude, the assumption that the shadow figure often encountered in sleep paralysis, and all the other perceptions, represent nothing but brain states. What, pray tell, is the warrant for this? The very act of recognizing it as an assumption is the first step toward recognizing the philosophical hatchet job that is being carried out in such reasoning.

Then there’s this:

Of course, sleep paralysis is not purely a physical phenomenon. Just as the dreaming brain often stitches together a story in search of cohesion, our waking brains seek to give meaning to the strange and terrible sensations experienced during sleep paralysis. Culture and beliefs play a role. If you grow up in a society where folklore blames evil witches, demons or other malevolent forces for sleep paralysis, your experience of it will be different, and perhaps worse, than someone who grows up in a place without these myths.

The idea that sleep paralysis, both the experience itself and its basic characteristics, is generated by cultural beliefs—what has elsewhere been called the cultural source hypothesis—was roundly disproved as a catch-all, comprehensive explanation right from the start of modern SP studies, when folklorist David Hufford, as recounted in his groundbreaking 1982 book The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, found that people in Newfoundland who hadn’t even heard of that country’s traditional lore about the “Old Hag” who shows up and paralyzes you in your sleep still had the same experience. Additional research has confirmed this multiple times over the years. Among people who, on the one hand, are immersed in varying cultural traditions of nocturnal supernatural assault that specify the types of supposed spirit entities that cause it, and among people who on the other hand have little or no notion of such things, the same experience occurs with pretty much the same frequency and—most striking of all—pretty much the same structural characteristics, including waking up or coming to partial consciousness in a state of general physical paralysis, feeling an oppressive weight on the chest or body, being gripped by extreme terror, seeing a monstrous entity or entities nearby that seem to be the source of the paralysis, sometimes hearing strange sounds like hissing or voices, and a few other items.

So, in light of this, why the ongoing recourse by various people to the rhetoric of the cultural source hypothesis, even in its somewhat soft form like the line from the WSJ article? Part of me wants to speculate that this tendency represents an attempt to write out of reality an experience that otherwise blows open the conceptual—and more than that, the experiential—door to “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” As readers of my work over the years are well aware, I have thought about these matters in relation to the general subject of sleep paralysis, and to my own experiences of it, at length and in depth. SP is—let’s face it—one of the most intimate experiences you can have, since it blurs the boundary between the sleeping and waking minds and thus floods us with an overwhelming experience within the theater of our subjectivity.

It may also destabilize our former sense of and/or notions about reality.

The WSJ piece is adapted from the new book This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals about Your Waking Life by neuroscientist Rahul Jandial. At one point in the book, Jandial, after delving quite ably into various speculations about the nature of dreams and nightmares—as in his observation that “some cultures don’t even have a term for nightmares and instead consider them windows to the edges of consciousness”—flatly asserts, “The truth is that nightmares, like dreaming, are the product of neurobiology.”1

It’s one thing to note the self-evident and not unimportant fact that all experiences and states of consciousness have neurological correlates. It’s another to make the blithe leap to asserting that a given experience, especially something as rich and subjectively central as dreaming, is the product of neurobiology. Such a claim is not a scientific assertion but a philosophical one. And yet this clear instantiation of neuromania, as the philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, among others, astutely started calling the drive toward all-pervasive brain-oriented explanations over a decade ago, is still widely proffered and broadly accepted.

I, for one, don’t accept it, on the simple grounds that it doesn’t answer questions but instead gives the appearance of answering them while really begging them. It writes them, and the larger possibilities to which they refer, clean out of its map of reality, and then it assumes that only what it can see from within the boundaries of such an abridged and truncated representation of a world—I’m half tempted to say a philosophically or ontologically sanitized world—is real.

How much more broad-minded and compelling is a position like that of the medical anthropologist and integrative health professor Shelley Adler, author of the 2011 book Sleep Paralysis: Night-Mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection. She considers the subject of sleep paralysis both broadly, as a trans-historical and trans-cultural phenomenon, and specifically, by detailing the field research that she personally carried out in the 1970s among the geographically distributed United States community of Hmong immigrants, where a phenomenon that came to be called Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome had begun to proliferate. (The newspaper accounts of this crisis, by the by, inspired filmmaker Wes Craven to create A Nightmare on Elm Street with its iconic villain Freddy Krueger, who kills people in their dreams.) Adler is careful to lay out her philosophical and methodological position in a way that indicates it is richly open to multiple perspectives:

It has only been during the last two decades that the night-mare has begun to reemerge as a significant figure in American culture—one that can also be recognized by biomedicine, when the entity is conceptualized as sleep paralysis with hypnic hallucinations....

The night-mare’s role has been viewed as significant in terms of religion and spirituality for thousands of years. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, knowledge of the science of sleep paralysis coexists with spiritual explanations, often in the same individual. Given that natural and supernatural understandings of the night-mare have endured for millennia, this is not surprising. Neurophysiological findings regarding sleep paralysis simply do not supplant spiritual interpretations. Scientific developments do not preempt supernatural understandings of sleep paralysis; often, scientific information is incorporated into the interpretation by the individual experiencer (hence the explanation that alien abductors use sleep paralysis to restrain their victims). Near-death and out-of-body experiences also do not lose their spiritual significance when their neurological characteristics are explained. For many night-mare sufferers, science and spirituality are simply not mutually exclusive. By considering the stable set of core night-mare phenomena across religious and scientific traditions, different understandings of these experiences can be explored.2

Adler also goes on to note that “night-mare accounts challenge many of our categories of thought and conceptualization of the world,” and that the intrinsic fusion of biology with culture and psychology in the night-mare or sleep paralysis experience produces “a highly interpretable event” that

cannot be categorized using conventional mechanistic models.…[I[t defies traditional categories and the division of academic disciplines. Because the night-mare does not respect the boundaries we have set—between science and religion or body and mind—our thinking must also defy conventional, reductionist models in order to understand the experience as fully as possible.3

For me, these considerations point to a larger concern with the importance of being honest with ourselves: honest about our experiences—all of them, not just dreams and sleep paralysis—and the widely, in fact almost universally ignored set of assumptions and presuppositions that constitute our Peter Bergerian “sacred canopy” of meaning, the interpretive grid that we erect as a figurative sky to cover and reduce the teeming threat of the world and make it comprehensible. This act of cosmic reduction, while understandable in its motivation, actually sets us up for a great deal of trouble and trauma. For when envoys from that wider realm outside our cosmic canopy arrive, as they eventually, inevitably do, and punch through its fabric to enter our world as intrinsic anomalies that exude an aura of mystery and menace because of their sheer unnameability, we are faced with a genuine experience of cosmic horror like the one that I encountered thirty years ago when I woke up to something more awful than I had ever suspected or imagined. Yes, on the other side of that horror is reality, even enlightenment, even the peace that passes understanding. But it is we who determine whether we first have to encounter it as a horror through which we must pass before we can rediscover our reason for being and our rootedness in, in fact our inseparable, indivisible identity with, the ultimate.

Warm regards,

Dear Living Dark reader,

The following essay appears in my 2022 book What the Daemon Said: Essays on Horror Fiction, Film, and Philosophy. I am reprinting it here, with a few multimedia enhancements specifically added for this online version, because I think its topic, theme, and focus—which uses my spiritually and psychologically traumatic/transformative experiences of sleep paralysis in the 1990s as a springboard to broader reflections on the nature of creativity and reality—will be of distinct interest to you. (For more on the specific nature of those sleep paralysis attacks, including a detailed description of exactly what I experienced and encountered, see this post from my old Teeming Brain blog, which for the past fourteen years has been a magnet attracting hundreds of other people’s accounts of their own SP experiences.)

Before heading into the essay itself, I will pause to note that the rest of What the Daemon Said would probably interest you as well, since it’s not just about horror fiction and film but about the crisis of creativity, worldview, and personal identity that comes to everyone who deeply interrogates his or her life. To this end, the focus on horror is complemented and enriched by an equal focus on various philosophical, metaphysical, esoteric, paranormal, and spiritual matters. Laird Barron called it “a treasure trove for fans and scholars of weird fiction,” while John Shirley described it as “a fine, wide-ranging exploration of the deepest wellsprings of nightmare and chthonic revelation; of the roots of the monstrous and mythopoetic.” J. F. Martel, co-creator and co-host of the formidable Weird Studies podcast, characterized it as “spiritual turpentine.” For more about the book, including links to order it from Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, and elsewhere, click the title above or the front-and-back cover image below:

Warm regards,

Initiation by Nightmare: Cosmic Horror and Chapel Perilous

When the first of many sleep paralysis attacks happened to me in the early 1990s, I had no idea that it was the onset of a period that I would later come to regard as a spontaneous shamanic-type initiation via nightmare. I didn’t know it would shatter the psychological, spiritual, ontological, metaphysical, and interpersonal assumptions that had undergirded my worldview and daily experience for so long that I had forgotten they were assumptions instead of givens. Terence McKenna, among others, has argued that, in accordance with the same principle that keeps a fish oblivious to the existence of water, the perturbation of consciousness is necessary for us even to become aware of the reality of consciousness as such. For me this was confirmed with lasting impact by the experience of waking up one night from a profoundly deep sleep to encounter a darkly luminous, vaguely man-shaped outline of a being that stood over me at the foot of the bed, and that shone with sizzling rays of shadow, and that represented a thunderous and sui generis—intended solely for me—black hole of a negative singularity, a presence whose entire reason for being was to draw me in and annihilate me. In the manner of dreams and daemons, the experience was as much cognitive and emotional as it was perceptual. There was no separation between these usually discrete categories. Nor was there a separation between the categories of self and other, between “me” and the assaulting presence. Horror was literally all there was, all that existed, all that was real—not as a reaction to the experience but as an organic and inevitable symmetry of being. I was not horrified. The experience was purely and simply horror.

When this proved to be not an isolated episode but an ongoing crisis spanning a period of months and years, and when the psychic effects began to leak into the daylight world and contaminate my daily life with a distinct and inescapable background static of creeping nightmarishness, I knew something dire had happened. I had crossed some sort of threshold, and the most likely vocabulary for thinking and talking about it was the vocabulary of cosmic horror, which I had learned from years of obsessively reading Lovecraft, Lovecraft criticism, and a whole host of associated authors.

There was, however, another vocabulary that I could have used, and it would have complemented the cosmic horrific one in mutually illuminating fashion. It was the vocabulary of consciousness change and high paranormal weirdness encoded in the idea of Chapel Perilous as explicated by Robert Anton Wilson. But this did not occur to me until much later.

Wikipedia has a brief article on Chapel Perilous that defines the term in its psychological use as “an occult term referring to a psychological state in which an individual cannot be certain if they have been aided or hindered by some force outside the realm of the natural world, or if what appeared to be supernatural interference was a product of their own imagination.”1 I can’t think of a better succinct summary. But it only “works,” it only carries the appropriate vibe of electrifying significance, if you are aware of the details that lie behind it, including its origin story.

At the time when my crisis unfolded, I had already been enraptured for years by Wilson’s books, vibe, and guerilla ontological charm. Illuminatus!, the Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy, The Illuminati Papers, the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, Prometheus Rising, The New Inquisition, Quantum Psychology, Cosmic Trigger, and several of his other books were canonical texts for me. So I was very well acquainted with his concept of Chapel Perilous, which was a central theme, perhaps the central theme, not just in his writing but in his life. And yet somehow I did not draw the obvious connection between this concept and my spiraling spiritual-existential crisis.

When Cosmic Trigger was published in 1977, Wilson was already associated with the idea of global occult conspiracies due to his co-authorship of the Illuminatus! trilogy, which he and Robert Shea had written with epic satirical intent. In Cosmic Trigger’s introduction, titled “Thinking about the Unthinkable,” he announced, “I no longer disbelieve in the Illuminati, but I don’t believe in them yet, either.” He then explained what he meant by this weird statement, and in doing so, he described a particular state of mind and soul that permanently established the term Chapel Perilous as a core entry in the lexicon of spiritual edge-realm exploration:

In researching occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions (called Chapel Perilous in the trade). You come out the other side either stone paranoid or an agnostic; there is no third way. I came out agnostic.

Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called “I,” cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason, and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.

That’s what the legends always say, and the language of myth is poetically precise. For instance, if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived. You might think you are just waiting for a bus, or wandering from room to room looking for your cigarettes, watching a TV show, or reading a cryptic and ambiguous book. Chapel Perilous is tricky that way.2

Additional valuable explanation came two decades later in Maybe Logic, the 2003 documentary about Wilson’s life and thought, wherein Wilson explained that

Chapel Perilous is a stage in the magickal quest in which your maps turn out to be totally inadequate for the territory, and you’re completely lost. And at that point you get an ally who helps you find your way back to something you can understand. And then after that for the rest of your life you’ve got this question: Was that ally a supernatural helper, or was it just part of my own mind trying to save me from going totally bonkers with this stuff? And the people I know who’ve had that kind of experience, very few of them have come to an absolutely certain conclusion about that.3

To watch and hear Wilson saying these things in real-time, see the 1:39 mark in this clip:

He also shared some of the personal background that lay behind his discovery of the ontologically and epistemologically indeterminate nature of encounters with what seem like supernatural and/or paranormal intelligences and entities:

Around 1973 I became convinced for a while that I was receiving messages from outer space. But then a psychic reader told me I was actually channeling an ancient Chinese philosopher, and another psychic reader told me I was channeling a medieval Irish bard. And at that time I started reading neurology, and I decided it was just my right brain talking to my left brain. And then I went to Ireland and found out it was actually a six-foot-tall white rabbit. They call it the Pooka, and the Irish know all about it.4

To reiterate, in Cosmic Trigger Wilson wrote that when you enter this state—when you cross the threshold into Chapel Perilous and find that although all kinds of bizarre and seemingly impossible things are undeniably happening, you are completely unable to decide whether they are objectively real or purely imaginary—“You come out the other side either stone paranoid or an agnostic; there is no third way.” In a sense, though, nobody ever really leaves Chapel Perilous. The memory of it becomes a living and present part of your everyday experience. When Wilson says that he personally came out as an agnostic, he’s saying he came out with a permanently altered understanding and sense of things. Most people who call themselves agnostics are really just rationalists, hedonists, scientific materialists, philosophically tone-deaf Philistines, and/or intellectually lazy. Their so-called agnosticism is purely a cerebral phenomenon, sometimes sincere, sometimes merely facile, but in either case it doesn’t reach to their cores. Wilson’s agnosticism, by contrast, was existential.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but in the early 1990s my seeming experiences of supernatural/demonic assault represented a kind of epistemological shakedown that was calibrated to result in exactly this same realization of ontological, metaphysical, and cosmological indeterminacy. And it wasn’t until I started to recognize and own this fact some years later, thanks to a wide-focus course of reading and study combined with various online and in-person conversations and interactions, that I discovered there was an existing spiritual and philosophical counterculture—much of it directly associated with the newly minted neo-shamanism movement, as vibrating in deep concord with the reborn psychedelic movement—whose members already knew all about this type of thing. I just happened to be the last one to know.

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The term “Chapel Perilous” comes from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which contains an episode in which Sir Lancelot visits said chapel and successfully resists the seduction attempts of a sorceress named Hellawes. Although Malory’s story is apparently the first time that Chapel Perilous, or the Perilous Chapel, is explicitly so-named, this type of setting—a mysterious chapel where a hero undergoes a trial or temptation while on a sacred quest—was already a staple of Grail legends by the time Malory wrote and compiled his now-classic collection of Arthurian romance tales in the late fifteenth century.

In 1922, T. S. Eliot incorporated Chapel Perilous into the apocalyptic-cosmic doomscape of The Waste Land. In the poem’s accompanying notes, he explicitly referred the reader to another book for explanation and commentary on his central use of the Grail motif, stating that “not only the title but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance.”5

Published in 1920, From Ritual to Romance is a landmark work of anthropological and mythological scholarship in which Weston, an independent scholar and folklorist specializing in medieval Arthurian texts, uncovers ostensible links between the various components of the grail legends and the myths, beliefs, and rituals of Europe’s ancient, pre-Christian mystery cults. She focuses especially on the tale of the Fisher King, which in its primal/archetypal form involves a monarch whose kingdom becomes desolate when he falls gravely ill or becomes impotent and therefore sends out a brave knight—Perceval in some versions, Gawain in others, or sometimes somebody else—to find the Holy Grail, which will restore himself and his kingdom to health. At the far end of the quest, the knight stumbles into the nightmarish Chapel Perilous—which, as noted above, is not always named such, and occasionally is not a chapel at all but a Perilous Cemetery—where he undergoes a severe trial and eventually emerges to bring home the Grail.

Weston’s commentaries and analyses to accompany her summaries of such matters are darkly evocative. She devotes her energies to developing the idea that the ancient roots of the Grail legend in general and the Chapel Perilous experience in particular reside in older stories of a dreadful initiation involving a plunge into the otherworld, with possibly dire consequences extending into the physical realm:

[T]his is the story of an initiation (or perhaps it would be more correct to say the test of fitness for an initiation) carried out on the astral plane, and reacting with fatal results upon the physical. . . . [T]he Mystery ritual comprised a double initiation, the Lower, into the mysteries of generation, i.e., of physical Life; the higher, into the Spiritual Divine Life, where man is made one with God.

[I suggest] that the test for the primary initiation, that into the sources of physical life, would probably consist in a contact with the horrors of physical death, and that the tradition of the Perilous Chapel, which survives in the Grail romances in confused and contaminated form, was a reminiscence of the test for this lower initiation.6

At one point Weston chides some of her fellow scholars for focusing exclusively on the supposed Celtic roots of the tradition in question. Weston argues that this tradition has a far deeper and wider pedigree, both historically and spiritually, than many were accustomed to imagining:

Visits to the Otherworld are not always derivations from Celtic Fairy-lore. Unless I am mistaken the root of this theme is far more deeply imbedded than in the shifting sands of Folk and Fairy tale. I believe it to be essentially a Mystery tradition; the Otherworld is not a myth, but a reality, and in all ages there have been souls who have been willing to brave the great adventure, and to risk all for the chance of bringing back with them some assurance of the future life. Naturally these ventures passed into tradition with the men who risked them. The early races of men became semi-mythic, their beliefs, their experiences, receded into a land of mist, where their figures assumed fantastic outlines, and the record of their deeds departed more and more widely from historic accuracy.

The poets and dreamers wove their magic webs, and a world apart from the world of actual experience came to life. But it was not all myth, nor all fantasy; there was a basis of truth and reality at the foundation of the mystic growth, and a true criticism will not rest content with wandering in these enchanted lands, and holding all it meets with for the outcome of human imagination. . . . The Grail romances repose eventually, not upon a poet’s imagination, but upon the ruins of an august and ancient ritual, a ritual which once claimed to be the accredited guardian of the deepest secrets of Life. Driven from its high estate by the relentless force of religious evolution—for after all Adonis, Attis, and their congeners, were but the “half-gods” who must needs yield place when “the Gods” themselves arrive—it yet lingered on; openly, in Folk practice, in Fast and Feast, whereby the well-being of the land might be assured; secretly, in cave or mountain-fastness, or island isolation, where those who craved for a more sensible (not necessarily sensuous) contact with the unseen Spiritual forces of Life than the orthodox development of Christianity afforded, might, and did, find satisfaction.7

The entire Grail legend, then, at least according to this analysis, can be read as an encoded story about a sometimes dreadful initiation into otherworldly realities with implications extending into the physical world. Chapel Perilous is the primary symbolic site of this defining trial and transition.

But—and this is crucial—is Chapel Perilous necessarily somewhere that you go, even in a symbolic, metaphorical, and/or psychological sense? Or can it perhaps be something that comes to you? In Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur writes provocatively about various types of initiation into daimonic/liminal/otherworldly things, including not just the customary (but shattering) visionary death-and-rebirth experiences of shamans, but the spontaneous initiatory power of dreaming that is open to everyone. Then he suddenly moves on to consider a separate type of initiation, one that is qualitatively different from the rest. He illustrates by referring to the life and work of John Keel, author of, most famously, The Mothman Prophecies. Harpur’s words and what they point to are arresting:

I am led to consider another form of initiation. It is difficult to describe—indeed it may not be appropriate to call it initiation at all since it does not apparently involve the death and rebirth experience of the shaman’s subterranean and celestial journeys. But it does involve a change, sometimes dramatic, in the recipient, usually in the form of an expanded awareness of the Otherworld and a greater degree of wisdom in encountering it.

Unlike the Shaman’s experience of the Otherworld as a daimonic realm entered during altered states of consciousness, this different kind of initiation happens the other way around: the Otherworld enters this world. Our everyday reality becomes heightened, full of extraordinary synchronicities, significances, and paranormal events. People who investigate the daimonic are particularly prone to these—although they can happen to anyone who is engaged on a search for some sort of knowledge or truth (every scholar, for instance, knows how the very book he requires can fall off a library shelf at his feet!).8

He finishes with a capstone statement that resounds and resonates all the way back to the Grail legends with their dreadful daimonic initiatory setting of Chapel Perilous: “In other words, it is a goal-oriented kind of initiation and, as such, might be called a quest.”9

This is riveting. This is revolutionary. However, based on my own experience, and also that of a handful of friends and acquaintances, as well as the testimony of cosmic horror fiction with its vibrant and venerable trope of unexpected and unpleasant liftings and rendings of reality’s veil—as in, for example, Blackwood’s “The Willows” and “The Wendigo,” Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Music of Erich Zann,” Ligotti’s “The Sect of the Idiot” and “Nethescurial,” Klein’s “The Events at Poroth Farm” and “Black Man with a Horn”—based on all of this, I have to wonder whether the kind of initiation Harpur describes, in which the Otherworld breaks through into this one, might happen not because someone has sought it out, but simply because it wants to happen. Spontaneously. Unexpectedly. Inevitably. Unavoidably.

Put differently, I have to wonder whether this initiation might sometimes take place not as the result of a quest, not because you have been pursuing it, but as the result of what we might call a “reversed” or “inverted” quest, because it has been pursuing you.

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Terence McKenna, in talking about the psychedelic undermining and transmutation of a person’s experience of reality (as was his lifelong wont and mission), once gave a really able exposition of Chapel Perilous:

Robert Anton Wilson . . . coined the term Chapel Perilous. This is when something happens in your life and it all begins to fit together and make sense, too much sense. Because it’s coming from the exterior and it seems to either mean that you’re losing your mind or you are somehow the central focus of a universal conspiracy that is leading you toward some unimaginable breakthrough. Along the way to the mystery lie the realms of loving everybody, moving fields of geometric color, past lives, you name it. But these are just milestones on the way. When you finally get to “the thing,” the way you will know that you’ve arrived is that you will be struck dumb with wonder. That you will say, “My God, this is impossible. This is inherently impossible. This is what impossible was invented to talk about. This cannot be!” Then we’re in the ballpark. Then we’re in the presence of the true coincidentia oppositorum.10

You can listen to McKenna’s original verbal articulation of these points in this video:

In July 2012 it was revealed, via a public reading of a portion of Dennis McKenna’s then-forthcoming memoir The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna, that his brother Terence suffered a horrific experience during a psychedelic mushroom trip in 1988 or 1989 that proved so traumatic, it put him off taking psychedelics, except for tiny doses on infrequent occasions, for the rest of his life. This came as a bombshell in the sizable community that pays attention to such things, since Terence was known for advocating “heroic” doses of psychedelics for many years after that in his books and talks, and since Dennis claimed in the book excerpt that many of the things Terence continued to espouse in his later years, including most of his wilder speculations about 2012, Timewave Zero, the alien intelligences of the psychedelic hyperrealm, and the future spontaneous organization of organic intelligence through the global Internet—in other words, the things for which he was most popular—were just show business, just philosophical performance art that paid the bills. The excerpt was read aloud by Bruce Damer to an audience at the Esalen Institute, at an event organized by Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty—host and creator of the Psychedelic Salon podcast—under the title “A Deep Dive into the Mind of Terence McKenna.” It also went out as a Psychedelic Salon episode. But then, rather shockingly, the episode was pulled, and Hagerty put up a note at the podcast’s website explaining that this had been done at the request of Dennis McKenna and the McKenna family, and that the excerpts in question were from a portion of an early draft of the memoir that would not appear in the final book.

What Dennis revealed in that now-lost portion of his memoir was Terence’s horrific mushroom experience. The details were hazy, said Dennis, but apparently the episode involved Terence being introduced to the formerly wise and benevolent mushroom spirit, which he had related to for years as a nurturing teacher, in a nightmarish new guise as it “turned on him” and precipitated a kind of negative enlightenment. He saw the cosmos or multiverse in the stark, horrifying light of “a lack of all meaning”—a phrase he kept repeating over and over. According to Dennis, among the most deeply and transformatively disturbing aspects of the experience was its utter unexpectedness. It caught Terence, a seasoned psychedelic traveler, completely off-guard.

I find this to be extraordinarily fascinating, not just because it offers a revelatory look at a previously unknown side of Terence McKenna, whose life and wisdom have become important to me in recent years, but because it dovetails with a kind of galling perfection with what I described in my horror story “Teeth” as the all-encompassing psychological/spiritual effect on the narrator when he is forcibly initiated into an experience of cosmic supernatural horror. Several days after this inciting event, which occurs when the narrator looks at a mandala and sees it open onto a hellish abyss of devouring teeth, he becomes aware of a catastrophic change in his psyche that involves a vision of his future as

nothing but an endless black tunnel lined with painful and meaningless experiences. . . . Was my life, was existence itself, truly what I now perceived it to be: nothing more than a short interlude in an otherwise unbroken continuum of horror, a sometimes distracting but ultimately vain dream that was destined to end with a terrible awakening to the abiding reality of chaos, of madness, of nightmare?11

That this essentially describes my own real-world internal state when I wrote the words—a state that had evolved inexorably out of those soul-draining nocturnal, supernatural(-seeming) assaults—and that it is now known that Terence McKenna, figurehead of the newly mature and hopeful psychedelic renaissance, and an increasingly important figure in my own intellectual pantheon, may have had a life-changing encounter with just such a soul-sucking vacuum of total, horrific meaninglessness while communing with his beloved plant teacher—that this could happen not only startles me but reinforces a suspicion that has grown on me over time, even as I’ve lived my way out of that mental-emotional-philosophical hellhole.

We’re all playing with fire, those of us who actively perturb consciousness, and also those of us who have such perturbations forced upon us by powers outside our ken or control. In the words of the weekly closing narration from a classic horror television series that I enjoyed in my youth, “The dark side is always there, waiting for us to enter, waiting to enter us.” What I didn’t understand as an adolescent was that this is not mere poetic speech, nor is it mere aesthetic or intellectual entertainment for those drawn to the dark side of fiction, film, philosophy, and spirituality. This is deadly truth.

Wilson spoke of Chapel Perilous in terms of the perceived arrival of a spiritual ally that helps one through a crisis. But there’s another corridor of the chapel where the ally’s aspect is decidedly darker, and it’s damned difficult to see him, her, or it as an ally at all. The fact that the classic ally in the Western esoteric and occult traditions is one’s daemon, one’s genius, one’s Holy Guardian Angel, makes this darker aspect of the experience all the more disturbing. For what does it mean when your own “higher self,” the daemon or daimon who, according to the ancient Western understanding, represents the divine template and design for your life—and which in a modern-day context we can metaphorize as the “unconscious mind,” especially in a Jungian sense—what does it mean when this, the most intimate and personal-to-you of all possible psychological/spiritual realities, appears in the form of a demonic, assaulting presence?

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Dear Living Dark reader,

What are you really, principally about as a writer? And not only that, but what are you principally about as a reader?

These paired questions have become more important to me over the years. And they should be important to you, too. Because the two roles are not separate. Your core orientation in each role, that of writer and that of reader, has significant implications for both your relationship to the books and writers you cherish and your relationship to the things you write and the people who read them.

For me, figuring this out over a span of many years has been a slow discipline of self-understanding. It has become evident over time that my authorial role, first in the form of the horror stories that I wrote and published from 1998 until a few years ago, and then in my writings on creativity and spiritual awakening, has been to articulate and reinforce what my readers already, on some deep level, know. To restate the primal intuitions about writing, art, self, society, and reality that they already feel. Accompanied, yes, by a modicum of practical advice when it comes to the latter type of writing (on creativity and spirituality). But that’s not my principal métier. The role I’m called to take in this writer-reader relationship is a more pointedly inspirational one, an approach more of articulating and confirming than of providing concrete, practical instruction. A role of inciting and communicating a warm-electric glow of affirmation, of “Yes, that’s how it is!” and “I’m so glad someone finally said this.”

Unsurprisingly, I am personally acquainted with the powerful pleasure of reading such writing myself, of reading words that state what I have long been incubating as my own firsthand insights. From Lovecraft and Ligotti to Alan Watts and Eckhart Tolle, and from Ray Bradbury and Natalie Goldberg to Victoria Nelson and Shunryu Suzuki, I have always been riveted by the experience of reading or hearing the words of someone else who clearly, cogently, and sensitively states things that I have already known, or that I have deeply, murkily intuited within the privacy of my inner world. Encounters with these external reflections of my own most private thoughts, feelings, and understandings have been among the most powerfully moving and magnetic experiences in my life.

And beyond even that, becoming self-aware of this phenomenon, and letting it motivate and orient not only my reading but my writing—a shift that occurred over the past couple of decades as my understanding of nondual self-realization and the muse/daimon/daemon/inner genius deepened—has been nothing less than transformative.

Knowing what you are truly, deeply, centrally about as a reader/writer, two roles or identities that are inextricably paired, and bringing this core tone and purpose to bear on your actions in both areas in a way that simultaneously illuminates them and preserves their inherent mystery—this is a goal and an ideal devoutly to be desired.

I encourage you to take some time to tap into your own principal motivations, both when you read and when you write, by reflecting on them gently over time and letting an understanding of what you’re really after on both fronts grow organically.

You are seeking something when you read. There is a general theme that underlies your motivation when you’re drawn to read some particular thing, some specific book, author, essay, article, poem, blog post, or play. Can you see it? Can you state it?

You are also seeking something when you write, both as a general habit, practice, or calling and as the act of working on a specific text on a given day. Some consistent purpose lies behind each individual piece or project. Can you intuit it? Can you taste it?

What is it? What motivates you? What are you reaching for and aiming at? What are you aching to find, understand, achieve, accomplish, or realize? And how are the two arenas where this motive emerges, the readerly and the writerly, related? What do they share? How does this common core, this mutually infusing urge and desire, shape your approach to each separately and the two together? How are they both, in the end—your daimon of the pen and daimon of the page—one and the same?

Even more deeply: What lies beyond and stands before both? And how is it that interrogating these things at this level becomes an exercise in triangulating the very source of your being?

Warm regards,

Dear Living Dark readers,

Today’s post is divided into two brief sections. The first lays out a moving and potentially clarifying metaphor for the discipline of collaborating with your creativity. The second, which comes from my still developing proposal for a book on the writer’s daemon, lays out a vision of the value of writing and creativity in an age of apocalyptic breakdown. I hope one or the other may give you something to deepen your practice and increase your enjoyment of it this week. I also think the first provides a soulful way to think about practicing our art in the context of the second.

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On writing as fishing in the void with your daemon

Rudyard Kipling famously said that when you are in the grip of your daemon, your task as a writer is to “drift, wait, obey.” But what does this look like in actual practice? If you’re like me, you find that specific descriptions of writers in the very act of following Kipling’s advice—writers who are tuned into their creativity and following its spontaneous flow—are fascinating, clarifying, and deeply reassuring.

Just such a thing is provided by the Italian novelist and poet Andrea Bajani in an essay published last year at Literary Hub. What’s more, Bajani wraps it in a memorable metaphor that is, for me at least, one of the more useful ways of describing the writing process that I have ever come across.

Bajani describes in intimate detail his daily habit, which he says he has practiced for many years, of walking seven minutes across town, away from his home, to do his writing in a small, solitary office. Once there, he says his work takes the form of fishing in an inner void. He sits there “on the bank of this void, staring into it, hoping for a ripple, waiting for the line to grow taut, for a word to take the bait.” When something does strike at last, he says that if he is lucky enough to find a sentence or even a whole story, “then we have a meal.” However, sometimes as he seeks to reel the thing in “from the nothing where it swam,” what he finds is just an empty hook. When this happens, he simply “toss[es] everything back into the void” and continues waiting until nightfall, which marks the end of his workday. At that point, “I close my laptop, not a single word added, and leave for home.”

Friends, I find this neat. More than that, I find it lovely. The image of writing as fishing in an inner void, casting a line into a psychic ocean, speaks to me powerfully.

It also links up in interesting ways with the idea of inner collaboration with the daemon muse, which, as you know, is the presiding metaphor for the creative process around here. Tell me: Am I stretching things, making an unwarranted or arbitrary leap, if I frame both Bajani’s daily walk and his act of “fishing in the void” as being motivated by and performed in the service of his daemon? And if I see his daemon reflected at all points in his process?

As I see it, he has successfully divined his daemon’s preferred mode and external environment for working: alone, isolated from his home and wife, situated a short but definite remove from his domestic environment. (For more on divining your daemon’s preferred practical method of working, see chapter 5 of my A Course in Demonic Creativity.)

His daemon accompanies him as he makes his daily seven-minute pilgrimage to his private writing monastery, brooding with him and anticipating the creative encounter that will take place there.

It watches over his shoulder and looks out through his eyes with him as he casts a line into that void. It sits with him at his keyboard, waiting.

Moreover, it is the very thing he is fishing for. As he waits for a strike on the line, for some tangible form to coalesce from the inner deep and take the bait, it’s as if he is fishing for his own daemon in the guise of Proteus, the ancient Greek sea god who perpetually metamorphosed into an infinitude of different shapes.

In other words, Bajani’s daemon is searching for itself through him. It is the motivating force behind his creative ritual, even as it is also the elusive presence swimming in those psychic depths, the idea that strikes on the other end of the line and then reveals itself in some specific form when reeled in by his typing. It is also what sometime slips the hook and leaves him with nothing.

Nothing, that is, except itself, still perched there with him in that silent, solitary office, urging him to complete the ritual, to put in his time, and then to do it all again tomorrow.

You can read Bajani’s complete essay at Literary Hub: “Love Is Space: Notes on Marriage and Creativity.”

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On the value of writing and art in an age of apocalyptic collapse

It’s a question that inevitably suggests itself in an age like ours: What good are things like writing and art? Don’t they stand revealed as comparatively frivolous in a world that is coming apart at the seams?

Civilization is flinging itself to pieces. This is the felt and lived experience of millions, even billions, around the globe in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Since the turn of the millennium, human societies all over the planet have entered a period of intense collective crisis marked by seismic cultural convulsions of a pointedly apocalyptic cast. In such a circumstance, aren’t we being a little too precious, aren’t we acting heedless and self-absorbed, if we give attention to our little creative projects and desires? Don’t bigger and more important things call for our attention instead?

In a word: no. Quite the opposite, in fact. In a world of apocalyptic breakdown, creative artistic pursuits become all the more important. This is especially true right now, when the centripetal forces that have turned contemporary life into a dystopian dark age threaten to smother the creative artistic impulse under the collective weight of a dying civilization. Far from being a time to abandon writing and art, this is a time to seek clarity on what they are for and how they can help us.

Enter the daemon. At this cultural moment, the old concept of the writer’s daemon, the artist’s muse, the thinker’s inner genius, returns with an offer to help us find and fulfill our individual and collective creative destinies in a way that is healing and constructive. To adopt the discipline of the daemon muse by relating to creative energy and calling as a separate, collaborative intelligence is to embark on a kind of monastic path, a way of life that is devoted to sheltering, nurturing, and bringing forth each person’s unique gifts so that they can meet the world’s specific needs at a crucial inflection point in history. Such a discipline may even enable the laying of cultural seeds that will come to fruition on the other side of the apocalypse, in some far-future renaissance.

Moreover, this approach to writing and creativity directly confronts the deep nature of the crisis itself, since one way to understand what’s happening is to recognize it as the inevitable result of a collective daimon run amok and turned monstrous because of fateful decisions, reaching back to the eighteenth century and the birth of modern science and social structures, that excluded the daimon muse and the visionary powers it represents from our collective map of reality.

In sum, as the world grows weirder and more disturbed, the discipline of the daemon muse can enable us to heal that fateful rupture and find a life of meaning and purpose by fulfilling our unique callings right in the midst of a new dark age.

I will share more on this developing line of thought as it shapes up in the book proposal that I’m currently creating.

Warm regards,

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Dear Living Dark readers,

Here’s a brief meditation on a subject of considerable significance for all writers and creators—and also, as it so happens, for all seekers of spiritual awakening: the relationship between you and others, between your personal depths, desires, and dreams, and the world of otherness in which you perceive yourself to be immersed and with which you perceive yourself to be confronted. How can you write effectively to that, in a way that bridges this gap between yourself and others to forge a link and communicate your vision?

This has been an issue of significant, longstanding importance in my own life as a writer and a human being. Here is my current understanding and position on it.

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Creativity involves a hidden paradox. So does authentic spirituality. Understanding it gives you the key to both.

The secret is this: What is most private and personal in you is also what is most universal. What is deepest in you is deepest in all people—and in the world itself. The deeper you look into yourself, the more you find what is most important to everyone. The most private you, “the real you,” isn’t isolated and alone. It’s your secret point of contact with the whole cosmos. When you speak, write, think, perceive, and act from your deepest, truest self, you automatically speak to other people’s deepest desires and concerns as well.

This is the source and essence of creativity on the part of both the creator and the audience. It’s also the meaning of spirituality and religion. Richard Strauss described it as “the source of Infinite and Eternal energy from which you and I and all things proceed,” and he noted that in addition to being the source of the musical inspiration that he received in his highest moments, “religion calls it God.

The practical implications are radical.

In making art, music, or literature, the more you base your work on pandering to others to win their attention or extract their money, the more you miss the mark, because paradoxically the effort to project your motivation outward and shape your work purely for appealing to others serves only to alienate them and make the work sterile. In other words, it has the opposite of the intended effect. Real creative connection with others comes not from chasing after it outwardly but from accessing what is most personal within you and expressing this in some truthful form. “What is most personal is most creative,” said the renowned film director Bong Joon-ho, quoting wisdom he remembered gaining from Martin Scorsese. People will recognize themselves in what you honestly express from your most private self. The psychologist Carl Rogers put it this way: “What is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others.”

The same holds for spirituality. In meditation, for instance, the only way to find what’s real in your life is to inquire back into yourself so deeply that you go beyond yourself. Trace your “I” back to its source, and you find not only your own essence but that of your brother, sister, parents, spouse, children, neighbors, coworkers, friends, enemies, strangers, and all people everywhere.

This changes everything, not just theoretically but practically, and not just in creativity or religion but in both. It fundamentally alters how you see, treat, and relate to everyone, because now you realize that in pursuing your own highest fulfillment, your own greatest happiness, your own implanted destiny, whether in creative endeavors or spiritual ones, you are simultaneously pursuing everyone else’s. Equally as important, you realize that in pursuing everyone else’s good and fulfillment, you are pursuing your own. “Anyone trying to live a spiritual life,” said the beloved spiritual writer Henri Nouwen, “will soon discover that the most personal is the most universal, the most hidden is the most public, and the most solitary is the most communal.”

This is why Ramana Maharshi, the renowned twentieth-century Indian sage, could assert that “realization of the Self is the greatest help that can be rendered to humanity”—because such self-realization is not egoic self-absorption but a going beyond the self to realize your transcendent identity with that which is the ultimate identity of all people and the world at large. It is a true, deep, and self-evident knowing that, in the words of Alan Watts, “the whole energy which expresses itself in the galaxies is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you, whatever that is, are intimately bound up. That in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving, you express that which it is that moves the sun and other stars.”

Writers, artists, and sages have always known this, though some have consciously grasped it and articulated it more clearly than others. I end with half a dozen such articulations that not only state the point but, in so doing, demonstrate it. These are the sources of the quotations above, showing each in its wider context.

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Richard Strauss (composer)

When in my most inspired moods, I have definite compelling visions, involving a higher selfhood. I feel at such moments that I am tapping the source of Infinite and Eternal energy from which you and I and all things proceed. Religion calls it God.

— Arthur M. Abell, Talks with Great Composers (1955)

Henri Nouwen (Catholic priest, writer, professor, theologian)

Anyone trying to live a spiritual life will soon discover that the most personal is the most universal, the most hidden is the most public, and the most solitary is the most communal. What we live in the most intimate places of our beings is not just for us but for all people. That is why our inner lives are lives for others. That is why our solitude is a gift to our community, and that is why our most secret thoughts affect our common life.

— Henry Nouwen, Bread for the Journey (1997)

Bong Joon-ho (filmmaker)

When I was young and studying cinema, there was a saying that I carved deep into my heart, which is, “The most personal is the most creative.” That quote was from our great Martin Scorsese.

— Bong Joon-ho, from his acceptance speech for Best Director at the 2020 Academy Awards

Carl Rogers (psychologist)

There have been times when in talking with students or staff, or in my writing, I have expressed myself in ways so personal that I have felt I was expressing an attitude which it was probable no one else could understand, because it was so uniquely my own. . . . In these instances I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves.

— Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (1961)

Ramana Maharshi (sage)

Realization of the Self is the greatest help that can be rendered to humanity. Therefore, the saints are said to be helpful, though they remain in forests.

— Arthur Osborne, The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi in His Own Words (1962)

Alan Watts (writer, speaker, philosophical entertainer, laughing Buddha)

To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it. You feel, in other words, that the whole energy which expresses itself in the galaxies is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you, whatever that is, are intimately bound up. That in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving, you express that which it is that moves the sun and other stars.

— Alan Watts, “On Being God,” a talk recorded in 1971 in New York City at a conference on Western psychological therapy and Eastern religion

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“There are those select few writers whose fiction, personal philosophies, and ideas generating them are equally rewarding as seen in such masters of the form as H. P. Lovecraft or Thomas Ligotti. Matt Cardin is proving to be among [these]. . . . For writers truly embracing the tough questions and doubt of the inner world, Matt Cardin lights a path in all that dark.” —Dead Reckonings

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Dear Living Dark readers,

First, some publication news: I’m pleased to announce that Volume 2 of my Journals is now a reality. Available editions include Kindle, paperback, and hardcover. Booklife by Publishers Weekly praised the first volume as “epic and intimate, a portrait of a mind and a milieu, with deep dives into the creative mind, the nature of the weird, and how to find one’s way in a world that’s sick.” You can read the introduction to the combined two-volume set right here. If you want to know the private background behind my books and this newsletter, here’s your guide.

Second, a proviso about today’s post: The angle of the essay below is idiosyncratic (even more than usual, I mean). It approaches the subject of creative Resistance and how to understand it—and how to see through it to the deep source of all creativity—from a perspective that is highly personal and, I think, unconventional. Rather than focusing on practical aspects of dealing with Resistance and creative block in daily work, it addresses the matter at the foundational level of the psyche, where these hindrances are attached to the very drive to write itself. (Amusingly and/or ironically, it took me nearly a month to write this thing, during which time I sometimes felt defeated by it and considered giving up. Apparently my personal Angel of Resistance has a snarky sense of humor.)

I note this up front simply to alert you to the fact that the progression of thought in this essay follows its own internal logic. I fashioned it from things that came to me in private journal writing two years ago. On the paradoxical principle that what is most personal and private is also that which will connect most deeply with other people when shared, I trust my thoughts here will speak to some things that are meaningful to you. But if what I describe about Resistance indicating a potential falseness in one’s base creative motive sounds foreign, I hope you’ll at least remain open to the argument and follow it to the end, where maybe we’ll come together again.

Also be aware that what I say in this post interacts in various ways with several recent posts about writing versus not writing and the tension between the desire to create and the desire for spiritual awakening or liberation:

• The Inner Call to Absolute Inertia

• Creativity and Spirituality: It’s Complicated

• The Wisdom of Silence in the Age of Online Writing

• The Endgame of Creative Pursuits: Reaching the Flashpoint of Stillness

NOTE: This is the second entry in a multi-part series. Read Part 1 first. To find all the entries in this series, search for “cosmic creativity” using the search box at the top of this page.

The hollowing out of the creative drive

The concept of Resistance struck me so deeply when I first encountered it around 2009—seven years after the initial publication of Pressfield’s The War of Art—because I had already been grappling with the firsthand experience of it for many years. As reflected intermittently throughout my journals, in the early aughts I began to encounter a pointed, piercing sense of block on my creative output, both authorial and musical. It took an exceptionally insidious form, because it was not just a matter of feeling sterile, incapable, bereft of ideas, or otherwise prevented in any of the usual forms from starting or finishing a given piece of work that I really wanted to pursue. Rather, it was an attack on my very sense of wanting to pursue any given work at all. It felt like a draining of my core motivation, a hollowing out of my creative drive. Simply put, I was hit by wave after wave of felt uselessness, the powerful, spontaneous feeling and accompanying notion that writing a story or essay, or composing a song, or sometimes even writing in my journal, was flatly, absolutely, wearyingly, gallingly pointless.

Being attuned as I am to the wavelength of philosophical reflection, I both inhabited this experience (even as it also inhabited me) and studied it. I strove to understand it without rejecting it out of hand, even as I suffered from it. And it was the suffering that kept me from simply accepting it. I could easily see that there were no reasons to consider it flatly wrong, disordered, or suspect out of hand, because the question of whether creative output was a necessary and automatic good had some intrinsic validity. The thought that nothing really, ultimately mattered about my creative ideas and projects, either the completion or the abandoning of them, seemed to have real merit, theoretically speaking. And yet the living fact that I suffered from a sense of inner suffocation and mounting despair at my growing roster of creative misfires, stillbirths, and wholesale failures to launch took a toll. The pain of it kept me digging for answers, for clarity, for some position of stable, defensible affirmation, whether of my creative drive’s authentic uselessness (in which case I was off the hook) or its authentic value and meaningfulness (in which case I was off-course and careening into personal disaster).

To put some flesh on these bones, here are three representative excerpts from my journal, spanning eighteen years and thus demonstrating that this has been a chronic issue. I share them on the chance and assumption that aspects of them will resonate with things you have encountered in your own creative journey.

From Wednesday, April 4, 2004, around 1:30 p.m.:

What is this that’s going on inside me? I might equally well ask what it is that’s not going on inside me. This feeling of emptiness, of numbness (sometimes), of deadness, of spiritual lethargy, is about as profound as I think it can be. There is absolutely nothing coming up from the depths inside me, no creative impulse like the ones that have always been with me since childhood. Or rather, whenever an idea does spontaneously occur, when some idea or train of thought takes off on its own regarding a movie, song, or story that might be created, or whenever that generalized, nonspecific desire to “create something” comes over me, something inside dismisses it—simply, effortlessly, instantaneously, as if the idea had never really occurred. I could say that “I” dismiss it, except that it doesn’t feel like that anymore. It feels as if the dismissing happens on its own with just the tiniest bit of willful help from me, which exists merely in the form of acknowledging the uselessness of the idea, or rather of acknowledging the uselessness of trying to follow it, work it out, or manifest it in some completed, tangible form.

Next, an entry from exactly nine years later, on Tuesday, April 9, 2013, 6:22 a.m.:

The effort of writing has come to seem an insurmountable barrier that defies and repels me even before I begin. I experience a desperate lack of conviction about the entire act, process, result, and value of writing itself.

The merest thought of writing my own stories, and the thought of the blind-foraging mountain range of epic suffering and discouragement that it inevitably demands, complete with near-fatal disruptions to the stability and peace of my inner state, daily life, and personal relationships—all the wild-swinging moods of elation and depression, and the half-passionate, half-desperate moods of withdrawal and self-absorption—this all leads to a kind of instantly blossoming experience of acedia and anhedonia toward the whole thing, just as soon as the notion arises.

And finally, an entry from seven years later, recorded in my journal on Monday, February 24, 2020:

For many years, most of my life, I felt driven to communicate to other people what I was thinking, through the form of the written word. This was partly a matter of intrinsic pleasure and partly a matter of ego gratification. . . . This egoic motivation was always right there, running equal with the sheer innate desire to articulate, to myself and to others, the thoughts and feelings that burned within me.

So what has happened to change that, to demotivate me on both counts? On the matter of writing fiction, is my lack of productivity these past many years an extended sophomore slump, an interminable round of self-consciousness in which the editor has strangled the creator?  Am I letting Resistance win? . . . Do I need to . . . keep writing, keep the flow going, let sheer quantity produce quality as Bradbury recommended, trusting that something good will come through eventually in its own way and on its own schedule? Do I need to trust the very act of writing? Just consider it endless, playful practice with no end result aimed at?

The thing that hamstrings this line of reasoning—which always sounds good whenever I reiterate it—is the sense that arises, after a few days or weeks of this practice, that it’s all pointless. Quite simply, I begin to wonder, “Why?” And this is devilishly persuasive, not just the question itself but the state of mind from which it arises. Because it doesn’t seem to be resistance as such. Or if it is, then it’s damned well camouflaged.

What comes over me is the sense, the thought, that even if I do end up producing a good story or whatever, so what? What would it even matter? I mean to me or to anyone else. How could it possibly have any significance? The finished product itself, the time and effort that went into creating it, my experience of writing it, the reactions of the people who would read it, my experience of knowing those responses, the impact the story might have on someone—is there anything really worthwhile in any of that? Isn’t there just as much reason not to do it as to do it?

This then bleeds out into the wider question of why to do anything at all.

As you can see, my personal experience of grappling with block, and thus with Resistance, has devolved down over time to the question of basic existential motivation—of why to do, or not do, literally anything. The entry above from 2020 is perhaps my quintessential expression of this phenomenon, stated only to myself until I agreed to publish my journals. I would be interested to hear whether the phenomenon I’m talking about speaks to any of your own experiences.

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Seeing through Resistance

More recently, as my understanding of creativity has continued to deepen and evolve, I have begun to discover new levels of subtlety embedded in this negative/enemy pole of the inner creative battle. In a series of entries that I wrote in my journal over several days in the spring of 2021, when I was becalmed at home with my wife during the isolation of the COVID-19 lockdowns—having recently relocated from Texas to Arkansas during the societal shock waves of the pandemic, which left me feeling like I was ensconced in a liminal hyperspace—I rather suddenly realized that a deep understanding of Resistance, including not only how it works but what it actually is, down at the base level of the psyche, unravels the riddle of creativity at its ontological root. In the place where the apparently independent self emerges from and merges back into the One Self, the Ground of Being, the Absolute Consciousness, this is where Resistance takes form as an ultimately illusory enemy whose very unreality, when perceived, unlocks the door to creativity on a cosmic scale.

Let me unpack the above claim by describing my personal experience in more granular form. For me, the experience of being conquered in this deep way by Resistance, when I examine it closely, reveals itself as a two-stage or two-layer affair.

In the first stage or layer, as I set out to do some sort of creative work, to enact some nascent idea in tangible form—a story, a song, an essay—I encounter a glitch or barrier consisting of the feeling that either a lack of ideas, or a lack of skill, or the nature of outward circumstances (not enough time, too much stress from my day job, pressure from interpersonal relationships, etc.) is preventing me from carrying out the work. Or sometimes, if I’ve been in a blocked state for quite some time, I skip past these and run right into the sense of lethargy, futility, and demotivation described above. However it manifests, what happens is that I set out to do something, to do the work, and find that a challenge to my efforts arises immediately, as if by magic. It’s as if the challenge is one with the creative impulse itself, a corollary to it, an automatic accompaniment.

So that’s the first stage, the top layer: hitting the wall in whatever form. In the second stage, rather than fighting this challenge, I consent to it. This is where, no matter what form the barrier originally took, it morphs into that acquiescent apathy. I embrace an attitude of surrender toward the whole thing, a kind of capitulatory quietism. First I feel the Resistance, along with the suffering of it, the emotional stunting and the crushing sense of frustration and grief. Then I willingly embrace it. I accept the silence, the inability, the paralysis, the muteness. The fight seems hard and the reward of “winning” it seems meaningless, so I sink willingly into inertia.

And so, nothing happens. It has all been an inner drama with no outer result. Anybody watching with physical eyes alone would have seen nothing going on at all, no outward sign of an inner struggle or aborted project. But someone endowed with spiritual sight would have witnessed a slow death taking place.

As you may have noticed, though all of the above represents a detailed inner account, it actually begs a question. This fact comes into focus when I seek to fathom the mystery of what’s really happening, and I find myself returning to the apparently automatic, complementary nature of Resistance. As I said, it’s always right there, as if by magic. This is sufficient cause for suspicion.

The fact that Resistance arises simultaneously with the act, or even the intent, of starting to do the work is highly suggestive. On reflection it seems to imply that something about the way I have positioned myself to work, or maybe the attitude that I bring to it, involves a hidden contradiction. Because truly, why should the effort and intent to do creative work generate its own opposition? Am I missing something? Is something amiss? Could there be something wrong, on some level, with my intent itself?

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Light comes from zeroing in on the act of surrender, the moment of giving in to the obstructing force. At that moment the energy from both directions, the creative impulse and the Resistance that opposes it, is discharged in a kind of culmination, however unhappy. The question is: What appears in the brief flash and its aftermath?

I said above that Resistance wins because I willingly embrace it and surrender to it. But now, as I closely observe the moment when this outcome manifests, I find the matter isn’t quite as settled as it first appeared. Do I really embrace defeat? How truly willing is my surrender? Do I fully assent to the state of being becalmed, silent, and totally “unproductive” as the impetus to create passes away unfulfilled? Or do I instead wallow and simmer on some level in grief and self-recrimination? Am I actually surrendering, which means giving up entirely and thus letting go of the stress, grief, and unhappiness? Or am I just capitulating, which means I give up the fight but still hold on to an inner morass of resentment and grief?

The answer, of course, is the latter. The very fact that my “surrender” results in a state of apathy and anhedonia shows that it isn’t really surrender at all. The apathy arises because the pain is too great. Apathy isn’t surrender, it’s passive aggressive scorn. It’s a defense mechanism. I wouldn’t feel it if I had really let go.

And now, with this surprising recognition of a self-deception at the core of my supposed surrender, the moment of clarity arrives: How much of my creative block has been subliminally entwined with this self-destructive cast of mind from the start? How much is the experience of silence and quietude as suffering just an unmasking of what was already there, a revealing of the programmed thought-emotion that gave rise to, or first emerged in the guise of, the block itself?

Answer: all of it.

Unmasking ego

Follow me here: Resistance, it turns out, is actually a cloaked form of an egoic and therefore artificial desire to create. In other words, an egoic counterfeit, as all things egoic always are. The ego thinks “I must create,” and, being ego, it wants to do this for narcissistic reasons, to shore up its fear-based sense of identity. It wants the self-gratifying and self-enclosed sense of regarding itself, and of having other egos regard it, as creative, brilliant, awesome. So it sets out to write something, to create something, under its own effortful power, for its own narcissistic ends.

But this necessarily engenders Resistance, which is also egoic. Even if we picture Resistance as a truly separate, autonomous force in the cosmos, a true Demonic Angel, it is really, functionally, just the figurehead or archetype of each individual’s personal, private experience of it. Resistance with the capital “R,” Resistance at large in the universe, is the spiritual nexus and absolute exemplar of the small “r” egoic resistance that we each know as our individual selves, the inflexibility of (seeming) separate, autonomous existence within a world of otherness. Ego is like a resistant screen in the river of consciousness, a net or filter through which pure consciousness flows and into which pure consciousness coalesces. It is, in a real sense, a kind of feedback loop. Identifying with it, as almost everyone does, means identifying with a dream of individual identity, a “me plus (or rather me against) the world” outlook.

This inherent, intrinsic, constitutional egoic resistance is inseparable from the Demonic Angel of creative Resistance. They are in fact the same.

The demonic angel archetype of big “R” Resistance is the Ur-ego, the supreme image of self-enclosed, self-seeking self-fulness.

So a momentous discovery has just announced itself regarding the nature of the block that we encounter in creative work: Resistance is the source of both the artificial desire to create and the accompanying sense of desperate inability to do so.

This leads to the jarring realization that my personal portion of it is really a sucker’s game. It’s a deception, a con. It shows me something with one hand and then hides it with the other. It misdirects as it plays multiple parts and dazzles me with a manipulation of my thoughts and attention. And it’s all in a circle, all for the purpose of feeding on my emotional suffering as it reproduces itself in me, in an attempt to alleviate or escape its own suffering by fulfilling its own unfulfillable—because ultimately false—being.

Short-circuiting resistance through authentic surrender

This is why, in addition to the various active responses to Resistance that focus on mounting a creative counterattack, and that Pressfield describes so helpfully in The War of Art, there is another approach we can take that will undercut the whole thing: authentic passivity. On this count, some penetrating words from Eckhart Tolle on the matter of stillness and inactivity apply fully as much here as they do to his focal subject of spiritual awakening:

[I]s there something you “should” be doing but are not doing it? Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment, if that is your choice. Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy of inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won’t. Either way, there is no inner conflict, no resistance, no negativity.1

What Tolle describes here is real passivity and inactivity, fully embraced, in contrast to the false, frustrated inactivity of feeling blocked. In authentic surrender, you let go the notion that you should be doing something.

This short-circuits the Resistance loop, the Resistance con, wherein that Demonic Angel gives with one hand while taking away with the other. Now you’re confounding Resistance because you’re doing something it can never do and never understand: You’re being real. You have stepped off the Resistance ride, and thereby the egoic ride as well, and you’re freely and authentically Doing Nothing.

The outcome of such an act—or rather non-act—is fundamentally unpredictable, precisely because you’re being truly free instead of acting out a mental-emotional program. Before, you were a robot. Now, you’re a person. This distinction is crucial, because it highlights the importance of motivation in reaching this state. You can’t reach it if you seek it for the purpose of escaping Resistance and becoming productive. That merely smuggles the ego in through the back door. To enter this authentic rest, you must truly give up all notion of trying to bring about some predetermined and pre-desired result.

Think again of Tolle’s words, and especially the penultimate quoted sentence above: He says that if you go into inactivity “fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won’t.” This little four-word sentence has continued to resonate in my mind and revisit me frequently on long days and dark nights ever since I first read it in 1999. When you truly surrender to inactivity, activity might eventually return—or it might not. If you really want to see your way through Resistance, you have to find a place within yourself, an authentically open-minded and open-hearted position, from which you can honestly say that if activity never returns, you’re okay with it. It’s fine. You have given up trying to dictate the outcome and judge the results.

It is here that creativity, the real kind instead of the ego’s attempts to ape it, links most pointedly to the deep nature of not only personal but cosmic reality as a whole.

Consider: Why is there anything at all? Why does the experience of self and world, mind and cosmos, the whole play and panoply of Shakespeare’s “sound and fury” exist to begin with? What is the source and reason for the ten thousand things, the dream of the world, the created cosmic order? What gives rise to galaxies, nebulae, stars, planets, life, and the screen or page on which a nominally separate “you” is now reading these words? What is the original and present impetus for all things to exist and be as they are?

Embracing the total inactivity of full surrender reconnects you to this original motivation, whatever it is and however we may try to capture it in words: the matrix of creation, the source of all native motive power, God, the Tao. Surrender to stillness creates an “all bets are off” situation in which the question of if, when, and what you will create, of whether and how you will take action at all, is unanswerable, or rather only answerable in the actual moment of action (or inaction) and creation (or no creation). Action/creation becomes the pure expression of Being itself, seeking either no end at all or—to say functionally the same thing from the human viewpoint—an end that only It knows. If and when you act, you do so simply to act, for motives that are pure because they are not your own.

Or rather, these motives are more deeply your own than any you have ever known before, because they emanate from a level of primordial psychological and ontological intimacy that transcends anything you have previously thought of or even suspected as “yourself.”

In the next essay in this series, we will consider what this non-egoic action looks like and feels like in actual, practical manifestation.

NOW AVAILABLE

Matt Cardin, Journals, Volume 1: 1993–2001

• From the publisher’s description: “Cardin wrestles with profound philosophical and religious issues, absorbing the work of thinkers ranging from Plato to Nietzsche to Alan Watts; at the same time, he speaks of his fascination with such writers as H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Thomas Ligotti, whom he has made a special subject of study.”

• From the review by Publisher’s Weekly’s Booklife: “Lovers of weird fiction will relish Cardin's insights, story ideas, unsettling dreams, and reports on his reading, game-playing, and his fascinating spiritual and philosophical development. . . . The result is epic and intimate, a portrait of a mind and a milieu, with deep dives into the creative mind, the nature of the weird, and how to find one's way in a world that's sick.”

Matt Cardin, Journals, Volume 2: 2002–2022

• From the publisher’s description: “In this second volume of his journals, Matt Cardin continues his ruminations on the subjects he has made his own—the theory and practice of weird fiction, the complexities of religious belief, and the relation between these two seemingly disparate realms. We find fascinating synopses of stories written and unwritten; reflections on films ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious to Chariots of Fire; accounts of bizarre dreams that have plagued the author; analyses of such writers as Thomas Ligotti (whose work Cardin has studied in great detail), Bruno Schulz, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and many others; and intimate glimpses into the fluctuations in Cardin’s personal life. Throughout, the author brings an incisive sensibility to the problems of life, thought, and feeling in the modern world.”

The peril and promise of Substack Notes and other social media

A week ago, Substack launched its new “Notes” feature, which you may have heard about, including from me. As the company’s first foray into social media-style interactions, Notes is a kind of Substackified rival to Twitter. I have been using it for several days now and rather enjoying it, since, as a writer with a newsletter on Substack, it enables me to share short ideas, quotes, links, etc., that wouldn’t add up to a full newsletter post but that can still serve to connect with readers and foster enjoyable communication.

As I have used it, and as I have observed the enormous surge of launch-week activity from all kinds of Substack writers, some thoughts have arisen about the necessity of using technologies and services like these with care. Already, a handful of Substack writers have announced after a week of engagement with Notes that they have decided not to use it going forward, both because it is presently unmoderated and because it represents yet another temptation in this age of uber-online-ness to scatter one’s energy and attention into the digital wind. In one of these cases, the writer said she wanted to avoid the inherent gravitational pull of social media toward converting oneself and one’s writing into products to be advertised in search of subscribers and restacks (Substack's version of the retweet).

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Writing online in the age of ego addiction

I grok these concerns very deeply. Social media really do carry the inherent risk of colonizing our minds with the virus of hustle and self-promotion. So, for that matter, does all online writing, with its potential for delivering instant feedback on how, and how widely, people are receiving your stuff.

This means it is necessary to make a deliberate practice of focusing on the writing itself as an end and a value in its own right, because the other alternative, which isn’t really so much an alternative as a consequence, is to give free rein to your egoic-addictive craving for attention and validation, and thus become its slave, and more than that, its carrier. What’s needed, in other words, is a Buddhist-like freedom from attachment to the fruits of one’s actions. But the thing is, this is a practice and an ideal that may stand in a position of intrinsic conflict with like buttons, restacks, and eyes on subscriber counts.

The wisdom of silence

As the above matters percolated in my psyche during the past few days, something else came to mind, a unit of wisdom from a winsome but mostly forgotten American sitcom from the early 1990s.

Key West ran for a single season in 1993. It was about a man named Seamus (wittily played by Fisher Stevens) who wins the lottery, abandons his blue collar job, and flees his former life by heading south to Key West, where he hopes to fulfill his lifelong dream of living as a writer like his idol, Hemingway. But what he actually does it to become a reporter for the tiny local newspaper in a town full of kooky characters.

A plot strand in one episode has him incessantly pestering his editor, Roosevelt, to give him a column. Roosevelt is a blind man whom the show frames as a kind of caustic wisdom mentor for Seamus’s “hero’s journey.”

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In one key exchange, Roosevelt asks what Seamus thinks he would write about in a column. “Oh, you know,” Seamus replies. “Observations. Insights.”

Roosevelt says, “What makes you think anybody gives a diddly about your observations and insights?”

Seamus, obviously caught off guard, pauses a moment, then says, tentatively, “Well…”

To which Roosevelt replies, “Good answer.”

For all Substackers, bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers, and everybody else who conducts a life of sharing ideas, information, and “content” online, Roosevelt’s question is well worth pondering. What makes you think anybody gives a diddly about your observations and insights, or anything else that you may choose to share? For many people, your “value add" to their daily experience may not seem all that valuable. In light of this, and to repeat, what’s needed is to do the work for its own sake, as arising out of an authentic inner need, conviction, desire, or direction for doing so. (On this count, I might direct you to my A Course in Demonic Creativity, especially the fourth chapter, “Getting to Know Your Creative Demon.”)

There was also another key moment in Key West that rewards serious reflection by all of us who would undertake to write publicly and expect other people to read it, and maybe even sign up to receive it, and maybe even, good Lord, pay for it. The moment occurs at the end of the second episode, which is the one in which Seamus actually lands his newspaper job. After freaking out for the whole episode because he has learned that nearly all his lottery winnings are gone, which means his pointedly irresponsible life decisions are now poised to come crashing down on him, Seamus returns to Roosevelt at the newspaper. They have the following interaction, which is worth quoting in its entirety:

“What you need?” Roosevelt asks when Seamus walks through the newspaper's front door.

“I need a job,” says Seamus.

“You ain’t ready to write for this newspaper,” says Roosevelt. “Don’t know enough, boy.”

“I don’t need to write.”

“What you need?”

“I just need to be near the writing. I need to be around it.”

Seamus ends up accepting a job at $4.00 per hour. Roosevelt tosses him a broom and says, “Get to work.”

Seamus begins sweeping the newsroom floor. After a moment, Roosevelt chuckles and says, “You’re gonna learn something, newshound.” Seamus, still sweeping, nods and says, “Yeah.”

Roosevelt leans forward in his chair. “What you learn, newshound?”

Seamus pauses, looks at Roosevelt, and opens his mouth to speak. Then he thinks better of it, shuts his mouth with a slight smile, and returns to sweeping. Roosevelt nods and says, “Keep sweeping, newshound. You may be a writer someday.”

Like Seamus, all of us who are saddled with the desire to write these days may need to have the wisdom to shut up sometimes and just sweep the floor, just devote ourselves to some useful work, however conventionally menial or minor, while we detach and detox from our inner glory hound and listen in silence to the world around us and within us. If we’re meant to write, anything of value that might come from doing it will arise out of that kind of inner attitude and outer practice, not from a frenetic grasping for validation via shares or click counts.

To conclude with a quotation from one of my favorite fictional characters, Kwai Chang Caine, whose pseudo-Buddhist utterances entranced me during my adolescence when I exulted in reruns of Kung Fu on WGN on Saturday afternoons in the 1980s: “If one’s words are no better than silence, one should keep silent.” (In this case he was actually quoting Confucius, but I didn’t know that at the time.) I can’t think of a more countercultural attitude to adopt in the world at large today. I also can’t think of a more deeply beneficent and healing one for writers in particular, including me, to adopt.

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Dear Living Dark reader,

Recently Steven Pressfield, writing at his blog, made a compelling observation about the nature of narrative understory and its relationship to surface story. What he said got me to reflecting on the special case of weird fiction, where I think a unique dynamic is in play.

In “Does Your Novel/Movie Have an Understory?”1 Pressfield defines understory as “the unspoken story-beneath-the-story” and acknowledges the fiction maker’s maxim, commonly taught in MFA programs and creative writing classes, that understory is actually more important than surface story. Since understory is the tale of the protagonist’s inner journey, which gives meaning to the outer one, understory is “what REALLY pulls the reader/viewer through the drama.”

By way of example, Pressfield points to the famous case of Huckleberry Finn, in which the novel’s surface story of Huck and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi River rests atop an understory in which the real villain is not the people who pursue them but Huck’s culturally inculcated belief in White racial superiority, along with the accompanying belief in a divine mandate that Blacks should be enslaved by Whites. In other words, as Pressfield puts it, “the deeper villain, the Understory Villain, is inside Huck’s heart.”

Pressfield’s deep point is that in this or any other narrative, “the Understory plays out on the landscape of the soul” (his emphasis). In Huckleberry Finn, this means

the beats of the Understory are the moments in real time when Soul Reality, i.e. Jim’s trueness of heart, his kindness, his integrity, and his love for Huck give the lie to this notion that is embedded in Huck’s very cells.

The dramatic climax of the novel’s understory comes, of course, in the iconic scene where Huck, instead of sending the letter he has written to Miss Watson turning Jim in as an escaped slave, tears it up and decides that if helping Jim means he will burn in a fiery hell for all eternity, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.”

As I read Pressfield’s post and really grooved to it, it occurred to me that in my own favorite type of fiction — namely, weird fiction — there’s a very special relationship going on between understory and surface story. At first I thought I wanted to say that understory is more important in weird fiction than in other types. But no, that’s not really it, as understory is crucial to pretty much all narrative fiction. Instead, what’s special about weird fiction is simply this:

In weird fiction, understory is surface story. The two are identical. The distinction is collapsed. It is not just on a submerged or subliminal level that there is a story playing out on the landscape of the soul. In weird fiction, the very surface of the narrative is the landscape of the soul.

A couple of classic examples illustrate the point. One is Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann.” The surface story is about the destabilizing of the narrator’s sense of reality when he rents a room in a house located on a mysterious street that he later cannot find. While living there, he experiences an encounter with a terrifying cosmic or extra-cosmic darkness,

the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth.

And the understory? It’s the same thing. The understory of “The Music of Erich Zann” is the story of the narrator’s sense of reality being destabilized when he encounters that terrifying darkness. The surface story’s antagonist is identical to the understory’s antagonist.

Another example is Blackwood’s “The Willows.” The surface story is about two seeking safety on a sandy island when they get caught in summer flooding as they travel down the Danube by canoe. While trapped there, they discover they are in the presence of awesome transcendental forces that inspire dread with their absolute incomprehensibility. As “the Swede,” the narrator’s companion, says at one point, these forces or powers seem to be

from another region — not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind — where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance.

And the understory? Again, it’s the same thing. In “The Willows” the understory is the story of these two men having the walls of their familiar world, their personal cosmic orders, knocked down as they are introduced to the reality and presence of those “terrible personalities” with their mysterious “vast purposes.” Again, the “villain” of the understory, and the attendant engine of its inner dramatic conflict and narrative development, is precisely identical to that of the surface story.

In the case of “The Willows,” the Swede actually gives the game away, as it were, by directly stating Pressfield’s point about the understory unfolding on the landscape of the soul. His quoted words above about the “vast purposes” of those invisible powers end with this:

vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with mere expressions of the soul.

This states the matter as directly as it can be stated. “The Willows,” which Lovecraft and others, including me, have long regarded as a veritable archetype of the weird tale,2 states its understory directly and explicitly, right there in the text. The landscape of the surface story with its sandy island in the middle of the flood-stage Danube where the two protagonists encounter the terrifying primal forces or entities of a transcendental reality is simply and literally the landscape of the soul. The two levels are merged.

To repeat: In narratives like these, understory is surface story. The surface story is a direct, literal instantiation of the understory. I could multiply examples indefinitely. I’ll be you could, too.

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In weird fiction, understory is surface story. The distinction is collapsed. The very surface of the narrative is the landscape of the soul.

---

I find this recognition to be neat. It feels a bit like an epiphany, not least because it accounts in large part for the attraction I have always felt to weird and supernatural fiction, both as a reader and a writer. And I think it might behoove writers of the form in general to be aware of it.

Not incidentally, this same idea plays into Pressfield’s final point, which is that conscious awareness of this principle can be beneficial to a writer:

I’m working on a new novel right now, I’m asking myself, as I wrestle with its structure and concept, “What’s the Understory? Where does it play out? Is it happening on the landscape of the soul?”

I’ve never really applied these criteria to any story as part of the process of working on it. It’s a helluva deep exercise. I highly recommend it to all of us.

I think I second his recommendation, though I’ve never actually written anything myself from such an awareness. Right now I’m just finding it fascinating to go back through my favorite works of weird fiction, and also my own stories, and apply this insight. In doing so I’m noticing for the first time how these stories all, to one degree or another, present the understory right on the surface, since their common core theme is the weirding of conventional reality, with the encounter between the protagonist and the source of the weirdness standing as the convergence point where the two narrative levels become one.

I also note, in parting, that this is why all such tales can be read in one way or another as tales of awakening or enlightenment. In fact, they can also be used or regarded as tools for enlightenment. The collapsing together of one’s egoic life narrative and sense of personal identity with the underlying spiritual/metaphysical/deep ontological reality is what awakening is all about. It is also what weird fictional narratives, read in this way, are about. There is much food for reflection here.

Publication News

Last week saw the publication of my latest book, Matt Cardin, Journals, Volume 1: 1993-2001. This is the first of two volumes collecting thirty years of my private journals entries. The publisher is Sarnath Press (S. T. Joshi’s micro-imprint). Kindle, trade paperback, and hardcover editions are available. The second and final volume,

encompassing 2002 to 2022, is currently in the works.

Here is the ’s back cover copy:

For more than two decades, Matt Cardin has been one of the most dynamic writers of contemporary weird fiction. In addition, he has been a perspicacious commentator on weird literature, horror films, and related subjects. Now he presents the first of two volumes of his journals, which he began keeping years before he contemplated a career as a writer. In these journals Cardin wrestles with profound philosophical and religious issues, absorbing the work of thinkers ranging from Plato to Nietzsche to Alan Watts; at the same time, he speaks of his fascination with such writers as H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Thomas Ligotti, whom he has made a special subject of study. Throughout these compelling journal entries, Cardin reveals his own shifting philosophical and psychological state, presents early drafts or synopses of his weird tales—including many partial drafts and plot germs for stories that he never went on to complete—and speaks with affecting candor of his personal relationships. Cumulatively, this journal reveals Matt Cardin to be one of the most intellectually challenging authors associated with horror literature.

[NOTE: When I wrote this post to launch this newsletter, I had given the project the title “Living into the Dark.” In April 2023 I changed the title to “The Living Dark.” However, the principles laid out in this post still fully apply.]

Recently, as I was leading the fall convocation at my college and delivering something resembling a keynote, I told my assembled colleagues about something I had written in the self-evaluation portion of my last annual performance review. The theme of my talk was the importance of “finding your why” (in the vein of Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why and Find Your Why), and in the process of personalizing it, I found my mostly extemporaneous words turning toward the topic of long-term future goals and how I have always been constitutionally unable to establish them. That was what brought my performance review to mind, as the HR-provided form for writing this annual document contains a question that asks employees to reflect on where they want to be, career-wise, five years from now. It also asks how we plan to get there. My response to this question provided not only good fodder for that recent convocation talk but a good point of departure for further explaining this newsletter’s outlook, not to mention its entire content plan.

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Here’s what I wrote about my five-year goals in that self-review:

This is always a question that makes me sound like a distinctly unmotivated person when I try to answer it, because I have no five-year goals. All the best things that have happened in my life, career-wise and otherwise, have been the result of serendipity as I have made a point of living in the present and following the path that presents itself right now. Life knows what it wants from me. Five years from now, I’ll find out what I’m supposed to be doing five years from now. If I have any plan for reaching that, it’s simply to concentrate wholly on this moment, the here and now, and fulfill what it asks of me, in the confidence that this will lead organically and inevitably to what is supposed to be in the future.

I trust you see the connection. The paragraph above could serve as a kind of mini-manifesto on what it means to “live into the dark.” Following on from last week’s explanation of the inspiration for this newsletter’s title in Dean Wesley Smith’s Writing into the Dark, I want to delve more deeply into the specific meaning of the theme at hand and what it involves, entails, and invokes.

On Living…

Living into the dark means living with no plan, no rigid goals, no outline. It means forgoing the impossible attempt to plot a path to a preconceived end. It means accepting, even embracing, the fact that the future is unknowable, that all your thoughts about it are pure projection and abstraction. Beyond even this, it means accepting that you will never actually live your way into the future, since the future only ever arrives as a kind of cloud formation in the eternal and evanescent present: always new, always unexpected, always categorically eluding and transcending your mental images of it.

This understanding and experience of life has unfolded and intensified for me over the span of my five decades. The wisdom that has seemed to want to force itself upon me is that human life is a process of, first, having rigid expectations and assumptions built up about literally everything — about what people, families, and communities are like; about the solidity and givenness of familial, institutional, societal, and civilizational arrangements; about what you should expect and hope for, what brings pleasure and fulfillment, how you should view the purpose, trajectory, and meaning of your life; about your very own self, who and what you really are, and the relationship between this self and the world — and then seeing these ruthlessly deconstructed and demolished.

Living into the dark means living with no plan, no rigid goals, no outline, forgoing the impossible attempt to plot a path toward a preconceived end.

Life, it seems to me, is in essence a massive head fake. From the moment you’re born, it says, “Here’s what I am, and here’s what you are.” And you, being young and naive, run with it. And then at some point life suddenly, shockingly crows “Gotcha!” and makes an impossible slam dunk at the opposite end of a playing court you didn’t know you were on, after which the walls and floor crumble and you find yourself hurtling endlessly, weightlessly through the empty space of an infinite jeweled cosmos like the doomed astronauts spilling out of the shredded spaceship in Ray Bradbury’s “Kaleidoscope.”

Living into the dark means living with full, acute awareness that this is all the case. It means letting this awareness suffuse and transmute your sense of everything.

In the case of a newsletter titled after such a theme, it means writing without a definite plan, letting the thing have its head and run where it will. Just like I’m doing right now. If you’re still with me, then I assume this approach speaks to you on some level.

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…into the Dark

I want to say something, too, about the term “dark.” In the context of this newsletter, and of my writing career over the past 24 years or so, “dark” carries a welter of interlinked connotations that are in full effect here.

The dark in this project’s title means dark as in unseeable and unknowable, not available to perception, cognition, or direct awareness — much like the darkness of the unconscious mind, ever unknowable to the conscious ego except as a shadowy presence that always accompanies, precedes, and stands behind, looking over the ego’s shoulder, as it were.

It means dark as in the darkness that, in the perennially evocative imagery of Genesis 1, “covered the face of the deep” in the primordial state of uncreated chaos before God spoke and shaped it into an ordered cosmos.

It means dark like the numinous shadows and gloom of Gothic and supernatural horror, which conceal, embody, and emanate all the heady, paradoxical potency of Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the awesome divine mystery before which we tremble with helpless fascination and dread.

It means dark as in Abram’s transformative encounter with Yahweh in Genesis 15: “As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. Then God spoke to him.” (I have actually always been partial to the rendering of this verse in the Douay-Reihms 1899 American edition, where the divine visitation is described as “a great and darksome horror.”)

It means dark as in the fertile yin soil of the creative unconscious, which can manifest as the muse, the daemon, and the genius, not only in pretty words with overtones of mythic symbolism, but in actual firsthand experience.

It means dark like the “cloud of unknowing” that, in the words of the anonymous author of the classic fourteenth-century Christian contemplative treatise bearing that title, must always “remain between you and God” in this life, “preventing you from seeing him in the clear light of rational understanding, and from experiencing his loving sweetness in your affection.” The author advises us to reconcile ourselves to waiting in this cloud, this ignorance, while continuing to long for God. “For if you are to feel him or to see him in this life, it must always be in this cloud, in this darkness.”

It means dark as in the apocalyptically unsettled tenor of the present collective cultural moment, when God, the universe, fate, the zeitgeist, name your higher power, seems hellbent on demonstrating to all of us the aforementioned emergent meta-principle of crumbling cosmos and reversed expectations.

These are some of the connotations of the word in question within the context of this newsletter and my other writings. Having caught the drift, you can surely articulate more of them yourself if you’re so led.

There Is No Grand Scheme

In all these ways and many others, my whole life has been an experience of living into the dark. As Thomas Ligotti once wrote, “There is no grand scheme of things.” Or rather, it’s a grand scheme that I, that we, can only read in reverse, never ahead or directly, as it is part and parcel of that numinous darkness. In fact it is the darkness, as I was forcibly shown one night in my mid-twenties when it appeared at the foot of my bed as a man-shaped shadow that paralyzed me with its presence. I have written1 about this before,2 and I will inevitably say more about it in future installments of this newsletter, including the fact that it was only later that I recognized my unpleasant preternatural encounter as a missed opportunity — missed because I shrank from it in horror — for liberation and enlightenment.

These things and more will serve as the substance of Living into the Dark. I have no plan here, other than to remain true to my sense of guidance by personal interest, natural affinity, and inner gravitational attraction.

Human life is a process of having rigid expectations and assumptions built up about literally everything and then seeing these ruthlessly demolished.

I should add that the darkness as such will not always or even usually be foregrounded here. Many other interests, some of them positively light-hearted, will assert themselves. Oddly, I may offer advice about productivity from time to time, as this has been an area where I have unexpectedly done a lot of personal experimentation and gained a lot of shareable knowledge. But the darkness into which, as it was for Seamus Heaney, everything I know is a doorway, into which I am and always have been writing and living, will stand behind the scenes, in and as the shadows, leading ever onward toward that final reunion and fulfillment whose inevitability has entranced me with longing and terror since before I had those words to describe it.

I might also note that this same luminous, numinous darkness is now and always has been your own constant companion. Eventually, in some unique form suited to each of us, we all encounter it. We are all forced to acknowledge it, though we tend to tamp it down, cover it up, and deny or ignore its truth. The name we usually give to this act of repression and denial is “living my life.”

My point is that we are all, in our separate ways, consciously or unconsciously, living into the dark. If you find my style of talking about it, even when I’m not talking about it, even when I’m ostensibly talking about something else, to be resonant, evocative, interesting, or otherwise congenial, then I hope you’ll click the “subscribe” button below and join me to find out where this is all going.

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[NOTE: When I wrote this post to launch this newsletter, I had given the project the title “Living into the Dark.” In April 2023 I changed the title to “The Living Dark.” However, the principles laid out in this post still fully apply.]

In connection with the previous entry’s explanation of this newsletter’s theme and intent, I really need to say something about the phrase and concept of “living into the dark” and its connection with a good or even great book, and also a video, that I think many readers here would find well worth checking out.

The book is by Dean Wesley Smith, the vastly prolific science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writer. Three years ago when I was finishing up my Ph.D. at the same time that my To Rouse Leviathan was about to be published, I found myself thinking a lot about my writing career, my future in academia, and my life’s general direction. I was also doing a lot of meditating and spiritual reading. I had long been a proponent of something like divine guidance, particularly via the experience of communing with and listening to the inner genius/daemon muse. And I was strongly intuiting the parallels and overlaps between this approach to both creative work and life at large. As I tried to express the matter to myself, I found words and phrases like “blind guidance” and “walking forward into the darkness” coalescing in my mind.

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Being a long-time initiate into life’s School of Synchronicities, I should have recognized that I was in precisely that fertile state of mind and soul in which the inner and outer worlds tend to spontaneously, meaningfully align. But this did not prevent me from feeling a jolt of real surprise one day when an Internet search whose terms I have long since forgotten yielded the phrase “writing into the dark.” And it wasn’t just a phrase. It was the title of a book. After investigating it for about 30 seconds, I knew I had to read it.

Smith’s thesis in Writing into the Dark is that writers can dispense with outlining and instead rely on their creative mind to envision a complete story and produce a book. Contrary to widespread opinion, he says an outline is not necessary. You can simply start writing, establish the initial circumstances, and from there continue to write from the edge of the present moment, trusting that what happens next will emerge naturally. Yes, there’s a bit more to it than that. Smith develops his idea with additional advice about such things as “creative cycling,” what to do if you get stuck, and how to create a “reverse outline” by looking back over the latest section of a draft and making notes about the pattern it reveals, which can then spur you forward into the next part. Still, in essence, his overall counsel really is that simple: Trust your creative mind. Abandon the attempt to plan things ahead of time. Let the vision emerge as you write. Write into the dark.

In late 2019 when I absorbed all of this, it resonated so perfectly with what I was thinking and feeling that I knew I was really onto something. I recognized I was in that familiar position of being deeply influenced by seeing/hearing someone skillfully articulate what I was already trying to state for myself.

In addition to purchasing and reading Smith’s book, I read many online articles and blog posts about it, some by Smith himself. I also watched several videos about it on YouTube, including a recording of an excellent talk Smith gave at a conference in Las Vegas where he pretty much laid out the entire approach.

Then I came across another video, and this is what made the full connection to my broader set of concerns. Like I’ve said, for me the idea of proceeding without knowledge, without a preconceived plan, is wider than just the question of writing and creative artistic work. It expands to encompass life as a whole, linking writing to my world. So, that’s why this next video, which I encountered right as I was digesting and appreciating Smith’s advice, drove home the impact of his core concept even more deeply:

The video features fantasy and horror novelist Michael La Ronn at his “Author Level Up” YouTube channel explaining how Writing into the Dark was “the foundational book that changed everything” for him. He says his adoption of Smith’s approach marked a turning point in his writing career, helping him not only to write with greater speed and volume but to write better by producing more compelling and fully realized novels.

At one point he offers an effective summary of Smith’s advice on trusting the creative mind, what Smith calls the creative voice:

Creativity comes from the back of the brain. . . . Others might call it a muse or your subconscious.

La Ronn points out that Smith contrasts the creative voice with the critical voice, which comes from the front of the brain and has the job of keeping you safe. Outlining is an activity we perform with with this voice and this region of the brain. Since the job of the critical voice is to protect you, it has a tendency to stomp all over its tender, sensitive sibling, heaping criticisms on its spontaneous attempts at storytelling, which represent vulnerability and therefore feel dangerous to the self. Hence, the wisdom of working without an outline, of writing into the dark, which sidesteps the critical voice and lets the creative voice speak freely.

La Ronn identifies the following passage in Smith’s book as his favorite:

Writing into the dark takes a belief system in story. It takes a trust that your creative voice knows what it is doing. And it takes a vast amount of mental fight [to] let the fine work your creative voice has done alone and not ruin it with your critical voice.

Like La Ronn, I appreciate this passage. And, being who I am, I was already brooding on the wider, life-level applications of embracing this attitude of trust toward one’s deep creative core — something I had spoken about myself in A Course in Demonic Creativity — when La Ronn took a turn into this very thing and dramatically broadened the scope of Smith’s advice:

Writing as a belief system. That got me thinking about my relationship with religion. I believe in a higher power. I can’t prove it, though. For example, I could tell you about an emotional experience I had that gives me faith, but you can’t see it. I can’t really convince you that a God exists. Yet I still choose to have my own belief system because of faith. Faith is believing in something even if you can’t see it, even if you can’t prove it. Without faith, you don’t have a belief system. It’s the cornerstone on which any belief on anything intangible rests.

I’m going to get philosophical for a minute, but for me, writing is sacred. It’s as sacred as prayer. When I sit down and write, and simply trust my creative voice and have full faith in it, I’m connecting with something higher than myself, for reasons beyond myself. Because I don’t outline, I never know where my story is going to go, but I trust my creative voice. And it always, always, always comes through for me. It has not failed me, not even once. But that, like belief in any major religion, takes an incredible amount of faith.

Borrowing a metaphor from Smith, La Ronn compares the experience of using this intuitive approach to write a book — or potentially anything else — to entering a deep, dark cave without knowing where the exit lies. It’s dark. It’s frightening. You can sense unseen shapes in the gloom that envelops you. A feeling of dread arises. But eventually, if you continue crawling through the darkness with absolute faith that a hidden intelligence is guiding and accompanying you, you’ll emerge into the sunlight on the other side, filled with a euphoric sense of freedom and fulfillment. And the story of your journey through the cave will be rich and rewarding.

“As I tried to express the matter to myself, I found words and phrases like ‘blind guidance’ and ‘walking forward into the darkness’ coalescing in my mind.”

As I say, when I encountered all of this, it dovetailed perfectly and powerfully with the thoughts that were already percolating within me about trusting inner intuitive guidance. So it’s surely no surprise that right then, back in October 2019 when I first read Dean Wesley Smith’s book and watched Michael La Ronn’s marvelous video, my thoughts seized upon the idea of “writing into the dark” and modified it to “living into the dark.” I have used it ever since. Though the launch of this newsletter with this title represents the first time I have talked about it publicly (or at least I don’t remember having mentioned it to anybody before), the idea has been with me for a while.

So, I didn’t want to get very far into this project without acknowledging Smith’s and La Ronn’s influence, and without thanking them for sharing their insights. It probably goes without saying that I heartily recommend both Writing into the Dark and La Ronn’s YouTube channel. Since you’re someone who is interested enough in these things to have stayed with me all the way to the end of this entry, I’m confident you would find something of value in them.

In next week’s entry, I’ll delve more deeply into the phrase “living into the dark,” both the living and the dark part, to uncover a wealth of numinous meanings and connotations. Until then, I would love to hear your thoughts on any or all of the above. Use the buttons below to leave a comment, to share this post, and to subscribe so that you’ll receive future entries.

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Disclosure: I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which helps local, independent bookstores thrive in the age of ecommerce. I’ll earn a commission if you click through one of the book links in this post and make a purchase.

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