Introduction

If you can't join 'em, beat 'em.

Several pandemical years ago, I started something called The Reluctant Modernist, a cheap little Wix blog on which I posted maybe four or five times. Nobody cared, and it died. Thank god. So ended all woeful attempts to artificially plug myself into The Discourse. The site received about as much attention as it deserved, about as much attention as The Discourse itself deserves. No one should really be bothering themselves about discoursing, or about any social media whatsoever, or perhaps even Substack. 

At the time, however, nobody besides the techies knew what Substack was—the great ‘Stack Rush of ‘21 (or ‘22? or ‘23?) had yet to happen. I still don’t know whether this is a rush ongoing or about to top off, or stalled out, or done. In all likelihood, I’m just another poor panhandler come way too late to this once-golden land of clicks and bytes—someone who should’ve gotten off Twitter when it was cool to do so, and not before (which may sound like a claim to some proto-brilliance but isn’t: “Cool” is a window on a moving train, and if you biff the jump it’s generally fatal). I often think how much easier my writing life might’ve been if in the intervening years I’d taken to Substack with everyone else. I could’ve gotten really into Bayesian inference, or Monarchism, or become some kind of lay Buddhist, or learned how to paraphrase de Tocqueville and René Girard—instead of spending those years writing every literary journal and agent I could conceive of, begging them to publish some obscure Neo-Romantic poems, pieces of paranoid novels, arch essays on creative-industrial rot… 

Portrait of an Internet Writer at the End of a Gold Rush

But now several things have changed since the end of the blip that was The Reluctant Modernist, and not merely in terms epidemic:

The first, a mostly private sickness. Not the kind of sickness easily labeled Disease—but Dysfunction. It’s a perfectly euphemistic word, dysfunction. But it becomes a haunted one if you’ve dealt with it in its full medical meaning. In practice it means bodily suffering, often of Biblical dimensions. If I were a medieval saint or martyr (or Simone Weil, whom I fear), I would write about it here with ecstasy and relish my chance at penitence. If I were the garden-variety Millennial Narcissist I am at my worst, I would write about it here with ecstasy and relish my chance at supreme validation. But I have not yet figured out how to write about bodily sickness in any terms at all, ni ancien ni moderne, and find the bulk of the Literature of Suffering to be, ironically, insufferable. Though in a pinch I would far sooner trust the Ancients than, say, some nebulous contemporary shibboleth like Trauma.

The second? Sickness, again. Only sickness of the Mind. Technically preceding the physical but partaking even more, I think, of the Universal. At least in the terms of this mind-voiding century. Again, it’s something I have no desire to write about here. It’s all anyone writes about anymore, though few will have the temerity to suggest what many mentally ill people instinctively know: that demons are quite real, if only invisible and vaguely archetypal, while Salvation and Mental Health are entirely different things. I myself suspect neither is ultimately to be found in society.

Third: aesthesis. After completing six years of music school, followed by several years of mental instability and small-city struggling, I began to take up—with increasing seriousness—the masochistic pursuit of old-fashioned book-learning. And I discovered something: art had actually diminished. Sure, many people insisted this couldn’t be the case (since the world was only growing more and more progressive, more concerned with injustice), yet the more I read, the truer it seemed. Language had grown impoverished, the wisdom of ages fled who-knew-where, and any understanding or synthesizing of past styles or crafts seemed to have given way to endless indulgence, and then to the subsequent anxious denial of that indulgence. Though the contemporary artist is generally beaten over the head with the idea that art should aspire to the same kinds of progress as society does, the exasperated creative industries cannot, may not, admit that the opposite is much closer to the truth: in the slow march of the arts, progress and quality are barely connected. 

Mostly I began to read a lot of poetry. And I discovered that somewhere in the late twentieth century, people had started writing poems as if the English language was only fifty—perhaps a hundred—years old, instead of more than a thousand. As if the desire to attain to such bright, sterling Newness had made it impossible to acknowledge the unbroken tradition of a millennium. Tradition, which had itself inherited the poetries of older millennia before it. Some poets here or there still tried to conjure up an ancient music but for the most part, poetry had dwindled further and further down until my own time, to where people mostly wrote in dull paragraphs, or enjambed diary entries, and made a lot of muck about blazing grand new paths when all they really wanted was for people to know how deeply they felt their own pain, how exquisitely sensitive they were, how important and profound were their most basic thoughts, the trials of their lives. Like everything else, poetry had turned so far inward, it had lost its ability to see. 

I tried to be like that myself, for a while. I saw that the most successful poets (and writers of all kinds, really, most of whom partook of the same autoerotic maneuvers) were usually those who had convinced the most people that they had the most-special thoughts. And people liked to read them because they wanted to sieve some of that special sensitivity into their own lives. At best, people wanted poetry to be real and present, mundane and earthly and achingly personal. But poetry without Epic, without the Divine, without the ancient Blessing of Life outside Time, or the Song of the Earth—poetry which is merely poems and not part of The Great Poem itself—leaves us with a shallow mundane which is finally too solipsistic to last. That is: poetry was and is an art of Memory, of creating new and lasting Meaning, and unless it finds the natural grace and rhythm of the language, or if it forgets to draw from that language’s own inner memory, then it leaves no impression, catches nowhere in the mind, and sinks into oblivion, into mere ink and type.

So: I do hope to write a great deal about the abyss of contemporary creativity, and I will, alongside anything else that strikes me. But I need to end this somehow, and launch us forward into the beyond….

Once, The Reluctant Modernist—that is to say, at heart really a Romantic. Ancient Hebraic, Orphic, Hermetic, Medieval, Humanist—a spawn of the Renaissance. A Romantic in the long view, who like the first Romantics, glimpsed beauty in a glorious allegorical vision of the Middle Ages: that possibly-impossible synthesis, of the Pagan with the Judeo-Christian, the mystical with the natural, the cleric with the layman, eternal universe with brief humankind. Though at the time I thought it sounded good and fancy, I now realize I called myself Reluctant because I didn’t really want to be a Modernist at all. If we take the art critic Clement Greenberg’s definition of Modernism—a rolling, indefinite attempt to deal with the material overhaul of Industrialization—we are all, of course, Modernists. Even Postmodernism was only more Modernism. But overly-intense artistic concern for form itself, or abstract material, or other watchwords of High Modernism and Post-Modernism, are to me mostly smoke. All that lasts, lasts. Art is God is Sex is Love is Life is Truth is Fiction, and the twentieth-century Age of Theory has been a kind of nightmare (though probably a necessary one). Yet, as Bloom says somewhere:

“Literature is the very form of life, for which there is no other form.”

We have all we need, and in the end we need no theories.

So: if you have made it this far, I’m sure you are wondering: Who am I?

Nobody, living nowheres. 

And the point of it all?

To write, that’s really it. Hopefully to write in ways which Internet structures are not particularly good at containing, directing, or promoting—maybe even to frustrate some expectations that go along with writing for the Web. At the very least to have a place to do it, because nobody else is going to let me write for them (and why should they? I fit nowhere). And because life is as short as it is slow. 

But also—to abjure pure reaction. Not to merely dispense more takes. Some of what I publish here will be obscure, some pure experiment. Some will be traditional paeans to lost treasures, some merely essays. All will be essentially skeptical of contemporary art, culture, and politics. And—if I can stand it, can stay true to the feeling—not governed by the rules of any au courant style or syntax, of studied irony or agonized self-consciousness. So often it’s the very pseudo-social aspects of these Internet media which paralyze thinking and writing. The knowledge that somebody somewhere is always waiting to pull up in a comment section or a thread, to dispense some withering counter-argument, and lay out in precise detail the idiocies or failures of said piece, even to call into question the entire point of all the effort which went into its writing—this knowledge is anathema.

And yet, as with Hamlet’s Undiscovered Country, most of us would much sooner “bear those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of…” The anxious possibility that all we have to stand on is sand, and that with one word a stranger may wash our entire viewpoint away with the tide—this does not belong within the bounds of any genuine writerly quest, no matter how quixotic. And quixotic is the only word for it: any artist ought to take the immortal Don for their tutor. He is the Saint of the searching soul, for whom no Mythology is too old or too obscure. For whom the Mythology of the Self—even down to our very animating or inspiring life-force—is a matter of sublime Will, Belief, and Madness verging on the Divine. 

Doré’s Quixote, mid-flight

Because finally there is no writing without Self-Mythology. The Internet makes this huge fact very dull, and most digital strivings towards the personal reflect only dimly into impersonality. God help me if I ever start to Write For the Internet. One writes for oneself and for all time, and hopes to continue meaning something. Internet writing mostly develops ugly shorthands and plows the language into too-narrow furrows, which we somehow still believe will create instant waves. 

All I can say is I want to write as though the world is very old, because it is, and as though language is deep and wide, because it once was. The mere existence of our technological world encourages us to write as though neither of these things were true. So no: do not be afraid of Self-Mythology. After all, the true Self (something like Blake’s divine Imagination, or the Emersonian Deepest-Self, or Brahma—with a bit of the Body of Christ and the Yahwistic Sublime thrown in for good measure) is far above me, and beyond me, and I hope to embrace it as such. Self, Mythology, Fiction, Truth—all great literature abolishes the boundaries.