The Daemon of Pen and Page

Chapter Two of "Writing at the Wellspring"

Dear Living Dark reader,

“What are you reaching for and aiming at in your reading and writing? What are you aching to find, understand, achieve, accomplish, or realize? How are they both, in the end—your daimon of the pen and daimon of the page—one and the same?”

That’s a snippet from Chapter Two of Writing at the Wellspring. I have previously shared the book’s introduction, conclusion, and first chapter. Today we continue with the second chapter.

In connection with this serialization of the book online for TLD subscribers, which I’m offering while scouting around for an agent or publisher, remember that subscribers will also receive a discount on the course that I’m teaching this fall at Weirdosphere, the online learning platform/community from the creators of the Weird Studies podcast. The course is likewise titled “Writing at the Wellspring,” and its content represents a fusion of this new book with my earlier book, A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius. I hope you’ll join me.

Meanwhile, here is Chapter Two, which follows on from the introduction’s meditation on living and writing into the dark and Chapter One’s dive into the hidden river of your writing.

Warm regards,

The Daemon of Pen and Page

Chapter Two of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse

by Matt Cardin

The Coherence of Your Self

In the late autumn of 2023, I found myself taking stock of my writing that year. And I found that, in a development that I never would have predicted before it actually unfolded, my interaction with social media had become a source of significant authorial energy and productivity. Habitually an intermittent writer, I found that I had written a great deal that year, and that much of it had been specifically produced for sharing through a medium that I, like many people, have tended to criticize and use with more than a dash of irony.

This phenomenon was related to the fact that, beginning in the spring of that year, I adopted a new approach to social media in which I deliberately set out to ride the Thoreauvian railroad instead of letting it ride me. I sought out information, advice, and guidance on how to write for best effect in a short-form social media environment, with “best” judged by the metric of reader response and connection, that is, overall success or failure in communicating messages in such a way that people would actually see them and read them. This resulted not only in a noticeable increase in positive interactions with a growing crowd of readers, but in a new charge of energy infusing itself into my ongoing exploration of the intersection between the daemon muse model of writing and creativity and the theme of nondual self-realization.

This energizing effect was quite unexpected. Over a span of five months, I wrote and shared thousands of words through a medium that has generally favored pithy, short-form statements stripped of rhetorical subtlety and stylistic flourishes. And somehow this shift to a new register that felt so different from my usual mode of writing served to unlock a well of motivation. I found myself returning to my computer keyboard day after day as I sought to state the truth as it appeared to me in that moment. The words began to accumulate. Momentum began to build. As the weeks and months passed, I was genuinely surprised at the volume and variety of what wanted to express itself.

And then, of course, as the autumn season advanced and the shadows of its final twilight lengthened, that energy curve reached its peak and began its descent. This was predictable. For years my creative impulse has tracked the seasonal cycle. The fall and winter months usually represent a time of hibernation and incubation for my creative activity. So naturally, as that year’s seasonal shift away from advance and creation and toward retreat and reflection took place, I turned to contemplating the recent spring/summer surge to see what it added up to.

What I found was right in line with something William Stafford said in an essential essay on writing that I have returned to many times in my life: “I know that back of my activity there will be the coherence of my self, and that indulgence of my impulses will bring recurrent patterns and meanings again.”¹ The scattered, separate statements and reflections that I had shared on social media that year added up to several quasi-essays, appearing in fragments, written incrementally in what felt like random order over an extended span of time, and falling later into discernible groups with spontaneously logical orderings that displayed a progression of thought and theme. This happened concomitantly with the writing of the more conventionally produced essays that I thought of as such when I was publishing them at The Living Dark. As with those, some of that other material now appears in this book.

I tell you this, including the story behind it, on the chance that it might be as valuable to you in your own creative life as it would have been to me if someone had said it years ago, early in my career, when I was mired in the unnecessary notion of a rational and linear progression of ideas and their articulation whenever I faced a blank page. Trust the coherence of your self. Indulge your impulses. See what patterns and meanings emerge.

And importantly, do this not only when you write, but when you read, as your mind and sensibility take in someone else’s words and seek to assimilate them. Seek to understand what is being said, but don’t fail to pay attention to your own reactions to it as well, to the thoughts and feelings arising naturally within the inner space of you as you interact with the textually transmitted inner space of another person.