Reading Notes 1

Writing, reality, and the cosmic magic show

Dear Living Dark reader,

This is the first post in what will be an occasional series. I’ll use it to track what I’m presently reading, researching, studying, and textually imbibing and enjoying—books, articles, essays, stories— by paraphrasing and labeling core points, quoting especially striking passages, and noting down my brief thoughts, reactions, and reflections. Consider it a slimmed down version of the “Notes and Gleanings” series that I published intermittently during the first year of this blog’s existence. I will create and publish these posts—all of which will be free to all readers (i..e, not located behind the subscriber paywall)—as a public record of my readerly excursions.

The “public” part is because of a deliberate choice that I’m making. As a writer and sometime independent scholar, I have, of course, kept reading notes in private for many years, both for personal enjoyment and for more formal purposes related to book projects, academic scholarship, and so on. One of the most productively useful aspects of such an activity is the recording of fleeting notions and impressions that might otherwise be lost to the daily flux of mental activity. Another is the self-imposed challenge of processing texts by rearticulating them or, in the case of ones that are especially abstruse or murkily written, articulating for the first time their key ideas and points in a personally meaningful way.

Recently, a little imp of intuition has been whispering to me that something about the irreducibly performative nature of writing publicly for other people—such as by, say, posting things at a blog/newsletter like the one you’re reading right now—could serve as a helpful motivator in this regard, especially since in a public post I will feel the need to give an effective label or title to each note in order to indicate its content or import. Hence, the launch of Reading Notes.

To say the whole thing more succinctly: This is more for me than it is for you.

However, having said that, I will add that the same little intuitional imp has also been reminding me that some of the most bracing and enjoyable ideas I have received over the years, along with a not inconsiderable injection of renewed authorial motivation, have come from online interactions with my readers in relation to books, authors, articles, and ideas we both find fascinating. So, I do hope you find something enjoyable or otherwise worthwhile in these posts, and if you feel like commenting on any of them, whether publicly or by emailing me at matt-at-livingdark-dot-net, please don’t hesitate. I will always be interested to hear your thoughts and impressions.

Warm regards,

NOTE 1: Wisdom about work, especially for writers

I recently discovered the psychologist and psycholinguist Virginia Valian’s 1977 essay “Learning to Work” when I saw Louise DeSalvo reference it in her book The Art of Slow Writing. The essay, which appears the book Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work, edited by Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels, details Valian’s attempts in her twenties to overcome what felt like a genuine disorder when it came to her ability—or rather, her inability—to do focused work of any kind, which not only threatened her graduate studies and professional career but made her miserable. The whole essay is simply wonderful, and it lays out an actual program of self-healing by which anyone, I think, could find real improvement, or at least added illumination, in their approach to channeling desire, insight, and creative inspiration toward concrete productive achievement.

Though Valian’s principles are universally applicable, I think they might be especially useful for writers, as in the following passages:

The important thing is how much you can come to understand, which of your abilities you can develop, how far you can grow. The culture decrees that you should do what you are good at rather than what you most like to do; that what you produce rather than what you get out of what you produce is what counts; that your ability, reflected in achievements, is what matters. Given cultural expectations, it is all too easy to equate personal and professional worth. Once the two are disentangled, work becomes less symbolic and therefore less problematic. . . .

In a way, work is like a love affair. It demands commitment, absorption, and care. The difference is that it is a love affair with oneself, or at least with one’s creative abilities, and with an abstract world of ideas. For me there are two main rewards from working. One is the continual discovery within myself of new ideas; the other is a deeper understanding of a problem [i.e., an intellectual or creative challenge to be grappled with and resolved through writing about it]. . . .

Only by writing for myself alone was I able to discover the intellectual qualities I liked about myself and those I didn’t, independently of what the rest of the world valued.

NOTE 2: When reality becomes a Philip K. Dick novel

I have never read PKD’s Valis in its entirety, but sometimes entire passages in it come for me in some form or another. This happened recently as I was skimming a 2001 essay from Lingua Franca titled “Marxist Literary Critics Are Following Me!”, which bears the endearing sub-headline, “How Philip K. Dick betrayed his academic admirers to the FBI.” From there, I springboarded to skimming the pages of Valis in search of the full context of a particularly striking statement by PKD about the potentially hyperstitional power of writing, that is, its power to create the very conditions or realities it describes.

When I located the passage in question, and when I read the full text of it and spent some time mulling on it, I began to notice that, if one were perhaps looking for practical applications to the matter of writing and creativity—as I always, in fact, am—the passage could be resolved into three propositions for writers, as stated below. The propositions, which are either mutually contradictory or complementary in some meta-logical manner, are articulated by me. The accompanying text is by PKD.

1. Be careful what you write.

It seems to me that by subtle but real degrees the world has come to resemble a PKD novel; or, put another way, subjectively I sense my actual world as resembling the kind of typical universe which I used to merely create as fiction, and which I left, often happily, when I was done with writing.

2. Then again, you may not have a choice in the matter.

Thus I would express the purpose of the novel [Ubik]—my purpose, anyhow—to be a fictional statement containing a presentation of this directing presence which I arbitrarily chose the name “Ubik” for. That Ubik (or more accurately the future total Gestalt of purpose and Meaning) may well have written the book through me is possible, but only in the sense that all creatures from grasshoppers on up, in particular small creatures such as grasshoppers, are “written through,” by what we call instinct, rather than “writing their lives.” However, I do think one could say this; rather than having it read: Ubik, by Philip K. Dick, one could put it this way:

PHILIP K. DICK
by Ubik

In a sense I am joking, of course, but in a sense I am not.

3. Then again (again), you just might have a choice—not about what to write, but about whether to open yourself up to what wants to be written.

I don’t feel I was “picked” by a Future Force, as its instrument, etc., bidden to make manifest its word, etc., any more than when you are watching a TV program the transmitter has picked you. It is broadcast; it just radiates out in all directions and some people tune in, some do not; some like what they see and hear, some reject it. All I did was to transduce, as all creatures do. I just gave what I received a local habitation and a name, as Shakespeare put it.

I suppose there is also a fourth principle, implied by the other three and standing above them as an overarching or supervening message:

4. Caveat scriptor.

NOTE 3: The ultimate truth is so simple

A few days ago, I opened my laptop and hopped on the Internet to type up something to the effect that most people get religion and spirituality totally wrong because they mistake it for a set of beliefs, propositions, feelings, experiences, and rituals, ignoring or missing (or repressing) the simple fact that it’s really just about seeing who and what you truly are and aren’t.

My intent was to say something about the red herring and dead end of getting all bound up in the unrecognized Matrix-like hyperrealm of mind content and ideas about oneself, and the world, and God, and ultimate reality, and salvation or awakening, and so on, when in fact the point is just the simple recognition or remembrance that reality is real, and that that’s exactly what you are in the immediacy of your awakeness right now, instead of being the projected ego image and accompanying objective world that you have entranced yourself to be.

I was going to say that religion and spirituality as commonly conceived and practiced are just that: conceptions, imaginations. And that instead of accomplishing what we ostensibly want them to accomplish when we turn to them, they actually just serve to confirm and embed us further in a false dream of who we are and what reality is.

I was going to type up something like that. Then I remembered that, oh yeah, Ramana Maharshi famously said the whole thing in much more powerful fashion several decades ago, as found in editor David Godman’s classic Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi (though my first encounter with them was in Stephen Mitchell’s The Gospel According to Jesus, or maybe it was his prose anthology The Enlightened Mind). In any case, what I thought were my own spontaneous thoughts and words are actually like footnotes to Ramana:

The ultimate Truth is so simple. It is nothing more than being in the pristine state. This is all that need be said. Still, it is a wonder that to teach this simple Truth there should come into being so many religions, creeds, methods and disputes among them and so on! . . .

Because they want something elaborate and attractive and puzzling, so many religions have come into existence and each of them is so complex and each creed in each religion has its own adherents and antagonists. For example, an ordinary Christian will not be satisfied unless he is told that God is somewhere in the far-off Heavens not to be reached by us unaided. Christ alone knew Him and Christ alone can guide us. Worship Christ and be saved. If told the simple truth—“The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”—he is not satisfied and will read complex and far-fetched meanings in such statements. Mature minds alone can grasp the simple Truth in all its nakedness.

NOTE 4: Ineffability as the antidote to dogmatism

In a recent edition (April 2024) of the TAT Forum, the online newsletter put out by the Truth and Transmission (TAT) Foundation established by spiritual teacher Richard Rose, I found that a passage transcribed by Shawn Nevins from a recorded 1971 talk by Franklin Merrell-Wolff titled “Meaning of the Paradox” (follow the link and scroll down) leaped out at me because I realized it offers the perfect antidote to dogmatism, in the form of the nominally/conventionally depressing realization that everything you can think or say is ultimately false:

All of our formulations are dependent upon the characteristics of dualistic consciousness, upon that character in our cognition whereby we are unable to know anything save in contrast to its other. The implication is that any statement, any self-contained, logically coherent statement, is of necessity partial only. If in part it reveals a truth, yet in part, by its one-sidedness, is of necessity a falsity; and that then in order to arrive at a higher order of completeness we must consider a contradictory religio-philosophic position, and thereby we have a self-correcting complex. This in a few and rather simple words is, I submit, the resolution of the paradox. Truth, as it is in itself, can only be known by him who abides in a state of absolute dumbness. If by truth we mean a statement that is wholly true, then every statement ever uttered by any of us, or by any of all mankind—spoken, written, or thought—is a lie. We are all liars when we speak or think, and know and are the truth only when in the state of absoluteness dumbness.

Now, having brought you to this most unsatisfactory and depressing conclusion, I shall leave you to your painful ruminations and wish you good luck.

NOTE 5: Waking up from the cosmic magic show

Also from that same edition of the TAT Forum, here is Shawn Pethel, a frequent TAT speaker and writer, offering a metaphor for spiritual awakening that reads like a variation on Plato’s cave, only better, in my opinion:

Imagine watching an exciting magic show that never ends. Eventually one would begin to see through the illusions and be less and less enthralled by the next magic trick. One’s attention would broaden beyond the sleight of hand to include the magician and the stage and then the audience and their faces. Imagine that, instead of being disappointed, the discovery of this much larger world seems far more a miracle than anything that happened on stage.

NOTE 6: Writing as an act of conjuring, inner listening, and revising the world

The following passage from Myriam J. A. Chancy, in “Myriam J.A. Chancy on Writing as an Act of Conjuring” (Literary Hub, April 5, 2024), reminds me a bit of Ray Bradbury’s description of his “theater of the morning,” the burst of imaginative activity that he said he experienced each morning upon awakening. He described how he would lie in bed watching this inner theater and listening to the voices of characters who spontaneously appeared in his imagination, until his excitement grew so great that he would leap from bed and rush to the typewriter, where he would channel it all onto the page. Chancy’s version of roughly the same thing is vivid and textured, with an additional and insightful emphasis on how her ability to listen to inner voices intensifies to the point of feeling herself inside someone else’s skin and viewpoint:

So much of writing is about listening.

It begins when my mind quiets and I can hear clearly the voices of the characters whose story I’ve been tasked to shape. Who is tasking me beyond myself, I cannot say, but I know it is time to return to the desk when they come, usually in the middle of the night, as I drift off to sleep, or from within the contours of a dream, or as I wake. They appear in that liminal space in which one sheds knowledge of self to move into another realm no one, not even ourselves, truly knows.

In that space, the voices—like the birds in my backyard—come to visit, and some become clearer than others, ready to be captured, as one does a photograph of a person, object, event. One attempts to inhabit that moment with all the senses, not only to feel the voice but to feel as it feels, hear as it hears, sees.

What do you see when you close your eyes? What do you imagine is there, hidden from sight, for another, looking in? What do you hear as you turn inwards? There is the thumping of your own heart, the swish of blood coursing through your circuitry of veins, the slow movement of eyes in their sockets as eyelids flutter close. Looking inward, listening inward, as close as you are to yourself, you can then make the leap to imagining yourself in another’s skin, another circuit board, inner workings.

Everything shifts: the quality of light, the room one is standing in, the texture of the surfaces, the tactility of objects and which of them matters for that voice, in their time, their caring.

And this, from later in the same piece, emphasizing a different but ultimately related point, is pure gold:

When history is a nightmare, all one can do is circumvent it, write another version, a fiction. This is what literature is for: rewriting, revising.