Going Silent: A Hiatus for The Living Dark

A necessary withdrawal

Dear friends,

Beginning today, the Living Dark is going on indefinite hiatus. I will not be publishing any new posts for the foreseeable future. I have paused paid subscriptions, meaning those of you with that status will not be charged any more payments, nor will new paid subscriptions be available. However, you will retain ongoing access to the full TLD post archive. Free subscribers will see no change, other than a new silence.

Don’t worry; nothing is wrong. There has simply been an unexpected inner realignment on this end. The impulse to write, or at least to write in the way that I have been doing here for the past two and a half years, appears to have shifted and gone dormant. And as you know if you’ve been reading TLD for any length of time, one of my primary focuses is creativity, including the discipline of remaining true to the motions—or, as it may happen, to the stillness—of one’s core creative reality.

I previously told you about how my creative energy and motivation were explosively ignited by a period of ill health last summer, which spooled on for several weeks, starting with an unspecified two-week illness in June that transitioned into my first-ever bout with COVID-19 in July. Somehow, that all led to the strongest outpouring of writing that I’ve experienced in years, resulting in the completion of Writing at the Wellspring and leading to my teaching an online course based on this new book (plus my Course in Demonic Creativity) from October through December.

Interestingly enough, the current upsurge of exterior stillness—manifesting as a drying-up of the impulse or ability to keep producing weekly posts and essays here—likewise arrived alongside an illness. Two weeks ago, for the entire first week of February, I was sick with the flu. I missed a week of work (my day job as a college vice president), which is unusual for me; in the past, I haven’t been someone who regularly catches infectious illnesses. During this most recent period of consciously unchosen retreat, the opposite of last summer’s rush of creative energy crept in. You may or may not have noticed that it has been two weeks since I last published a post here. Similarly, those of you who pay attention to Substack Notes may or may not have noticed that, after many months of posting notes almost daily, I slowed down with the onset of this month, and then flat-out stopped a week ago.

I didn’t plan on this. I just watched it happen. I have a new post written and waiting, plus the remaining chapters in Writing at the Wellspring that I have been serializing for paid subscribers. But each time I contemplate the prospect of actually formatting these posts and clicking the “publish” button, a distinct feeling of “no” arises. It’s the closest thing I have ever experienced to the way Plato described Socrates’s daimon. According to Plato, his teacher’s famous attending spirit never prodded him to take positive action. Instead, its effect was purely negative, taking the form of an inner voice or sense of restraint that arose whenever Socrates was about to say or do something wrong, with “wrong” being judged by the very prohibition of the daimon, which came without warning or further explanation.

So, it’s kind of like that. And even though it’s still a recent development in terms of calendar time, I can already tell it will not be just a blip or a momentary discontinuity. It feels like something with staying power.

I could also point to some of my earlier words that convey, though imperfectly, some of the flavor of what’s going on here.

In one of my earliest stories, “An Abhorrence to All Flesh,” which appears in both Divinations of the Deep (2002) and To Rouse Leviathan (2019), the protagonist finds, at the end of the narrative, that he has lost the power to write. “I continued to try to write,” he says. “I tried to go on with my life as it had once been. But I soon began to notice a disturbing trend in my work: I could no longer lie. Especially on mornings after the worst of the nightmares that now disrupted my sleep, I simply could not generate the false persona that was necessary to any form of writing other than private journaling.” (I’m not presently experiencing nightmares, by the way, but the other parts of this description are resonant.)

At the end of my 2015 interview for the weird fiction journal Xnoybis, conducted by my friend Jon Padgett, and appearing as the final item in my 2022 essay collection What the Daemon Said, I told Jon that “I have a pretty poor attitude toward the value of writing in general these days. I’m increasingly gripped by the sense that most of what I would write if I put forth the effort would be useless. I mean, really, what’s the point? What would it ultimately mean or accomplish? The world is littered with too many books as it is. This same sense also infects my regard for most of what’s being published by everybody else these days. I still enjoy visiting bookstores, but sometimes the pleasure feels distinctly vestigial.”

And then, of course, there is the strain of quietism, and of questioning the value of writing and speaking and active creative production, that has expressed itself more recently in my posts to this newsletter and in the pages of Writing at the Wellspring. As I type these words, my most recent Living Dark post is “Surrender to Stillness: What If You Just Stopped?” which represents Chapter Nine of Wellspring. It begins with the following speculative string of distinctly non-rhetorical questions: “Are you ever tempted to abandon all your creative projects? Let them collapse? Maybe even let your whole outer life crumble as you sit there silently and watch it all burn down? Is there ever an inner spiritual call to do this? If so, is it valid? Should we assent to it?” And then: “The call to sink into inertia and give everything up is a question and a temptation that has suggested itself to me many times over the course of my life. The peculiar nature of my mental-emotional makeup apparently renders me highly susceptible to such thinking. I have repeatedly experienced moments when it becomes apparent that what I am seeking through my creative efforts and actions is in fact a sense of final fulfillment in which I will not feel the need to do such things anymore, but will instead feel free simply to exist, to be, to sit in silence.”

I’m not saying here that I have currently reached the state described in that last sentence. Nor am I saying that my present circumstance, and the decision to press pause on TLD, is due to conditions exactly like the ones described in my short story and interview quoted above. But it you want to imagine a kind of Venn diagram that incorporates shades of each, and whose multiply overlapped center is something distinct and sui generis, maybe this will not be too far off the mark.

Finally, there is also the fact of a quiet, brooding sense of other things that want to be written, and that this requires the clearing out of my self-incurred external obligations. Maybe my daemon muse is requesting a monkish turn, a time of retreat, a removal from regular public writing for the purpose of nurturing some seed that requires the focused environment of solitude and detachment—away from the externally interactive rhythm of a newsletter and accompanying social media presence. I can’t quite tell if this is the case, but it feels as likely as not.

Regarding Writing at the Wellspring, though I have been making inquiries for agents and publishers, I honestly haven’t figured out yet what wants to happen with this book. It may end up being something that wants to emerge in self-published form. I will keep you all informed of what develops. Such updates may be the only things I post here for quite some time to come.

Thank you all for your interest and support. I’ll see you on the other side—whenever and whatever that turns out to be.

Warm regards,