The Living Dark: My newsletter’s first birthday

Yesterday my newsletter for writers, The Living Dark, had its first birthday. In recent years the movie reel of my life has sped up to a dizzying rate of speed, so it seems inconceivable that we have really traveled a full orbit around the sun since I published the first TLD post. But it’s true. Surreal, but true.

Here’s a post to mark the occasion, reflecting on the project’s past year while looking ahead to the future and explaining some new features that are in the works:

One Year of The Living Dark

If you’re interested in uncovering your writer’s voice and vocation through articles and essays that flow out of my 25 years as a published writer and 15 years as college and high school writing instructor, this newsletter is for you

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On writing the personal to express the universal

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:3 mins read

As writers, we would do well to remember that our art conceals a hidden paradox: What is most private and personal in us is also the most universal. Our deepest truth, which seems to be the most hidden and idiosyncratic thing about us, is actually what resonates with all people. In our writing, it’s when we delve deeply into ourselves that our work makes a profound connection with others.

Haven’t you experienced this in your own life as a reader? Don’t you find that when you come across writing that is palpably personal, writing that clearly shares the writer’s most intimate views, thoughts, and feelings, that’s where you can see yourself most clearly? The sense of connection is practically hypnotic.

This is why pandering to others in an effort to appeal directly to them and/or to extract their money is counterproductive. It alienates the reader and makes the writing sterile, whereas the act and art of writing honestly instills life in what we write, which transmits its energetic charge to our readers.

The psychologist Carl Rogers put it well in his classic 1961 book On Becoming a Person:

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.

For a deeper look at this phenomenon, not only in the art and craft of writing but in the practice of spirituality, see “The Writer’s Paradox: Personal Is Universal.”

Introductory note and index to ‘Journals, Volume 2’

  • Post category:Book News
  • Reading time:4 mins read
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Volume 2 of my journals is now available from Sarnath Press. Here’s a portion of the brief introductory note that appears at the beginning of it. It describes the rising sense of exposure that I felt while creating this volume, as the entries I was transcribing grew more and more recent:

For a full introduction to this journal, including an autobiographical sketch that establishes the wider life context of each entry, see volume 1.

Regarding the many significant gaps in coverage during the years encompassed by the present volume, in some instances these gaps represent places where I have omitted content. In a few such instances, I have briefly summarized the nature of the excised entries. Other large gaps represent either periods for which I have now lost my notebooks or periods during which I went silent and did not write in my journal. In both such cases, I have entered brief explanations.

Finally, on a personal note, as I worked my way through my notebooks chronologically to create the manuscripts for both volumes, I found that whereas the older entries often felt like someone else’s writings, as if I were unearthing old bones in a textual-archaeological dig, the more recent entries progressively began to feel more like “me.” Thus, the content of the latter years in this second volume, which extends all the way to last summer—less than twelve months ago as I sit here writing this introductory note—makes me feel distinctly more exposed and vulnerable. I simply point this out for whatever it is worth. The fact that future “me” will look back on these same entries, and on the sense of vulnerability just described, with the same detachment that present “me” currently feels toward the older ones, is just one more testament to the fundamental strangeness of the ego self, and of its relationship to the wider, deeper world of timeless total identity and reality, that I grapple with throughout this journal.

MATT CARDIN
Pyatt, Arkansas
March 2023

Additionally, here is is a downloadable PDF of the book’s index, showing the multitude of topics that entered my journaling inferno during my thirties, forties, and early fifties:

Index to Journals, Volume 2: 2002–2022

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On feeling the call to absolute stillness

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Are you ever tempted to abandon all of your creative projects? Let them collapse? Maybe even let your whole outer life crumble as you sit there silently and just watch it all burn down? Is there ever an inner spiritual call to do this?

This is a question and a temptation that has suggested itself to me multiple times over the course of my adult life. The peculiar nature of my mental-emotional makeup apparently renders me highly susceptible to such thinking. Naturally, this has made itself known in my private journal. The example below a case in point that shows me grappling with the pull toward absolute inertia.

When I wrote those words, I was deep into editing my mummy encyclopedia and conceiving the proposal for my paranormal encyclopedia, while also carrying on a full-time job as a college writing center instructor and English faculty member, even as I was managing all the necessary responsibilities to my family. In the center of this swirl of competing calls and obligations, the desire just to let everything go was a constant whisper, a silently thrumming inner suggestion that hovered on the margins of my awareness and sometimes converged toward the center.

And into the midst of this came the above-quoted passage from the works of Oswald Chambers—who would later become the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation—to amplify the whole thing. That particular journal entry will appear in volume 2 of my collected journals, whose proofs I’m currently editing for publication later this year. I share it here for those who will immediately grok what I’m talking about, those who are personally familiar with the inner call to total silence and stillness.

I have no particular advice to offer about this experience, other than to state that it needs to be recognized and honored. Just a couple of days ago I encountered the following words from nondual teacher Robert Wolfe, from his booklet “Elementary Cloud-Watching: Contemplating the Meaning of Living in the Moment” (excerpted in his biographical essay at Amazon). They convey the mood of this inner stillness as well as anything possibly could:

Civilization and stillness—quiet, inactivity—do not go together. Civilization is a continual process of choices; stillness comes without choice. There is nothing which can be done to create this stillness. It is not something which is to be acquired; it has no value as currency. It is, put another way, priceless.

One must relax, to breathe this stillness. Not just the body: the mind, the psyche. One must relax ambition. Ambition and stillness are not compatible. There is no ticking of the clock here. There is no effort in stillness.

My new podcast: The Living Dark

I have just published the first episode of a podcast to accompany my Substack newsletter, The Living Dark. I invite you to listen:

Episode 1: The Remarkable Story of God’s Autobiographer, Jerry L. Martin

In it, I explore the remarkable story of Jerry Martin and his book, God: An Autobiography, as Told to a Philosopher, through an in-depth interview with him. Jerry, a former skeptic and philosophy professor, shares his personal journey of experiencing an unexpected encounter with a voice claiming to be God. We delve into the problem of spiritual discernment, the role of faith, and the varied reactions from others when they learned of his experiences and conversations with God. We also examine the significance of the relational aspect of God, the importance of understanding different world religious traditions, and the potential implications of this new understanding of God for religion today. I invite you to join us as we explore the diverse spiritual journeys individuals may undertake as they connect with the divine in their own unique ways.

There’s also another item of note when it comes to my newsletter: The title “The Living Dark” is new. These seven months after launching the project, I have decided to act on a suspicion that has whispered itself in my psyche from the start: that the title “Living into the Dark,” which I gave it when I rolled it out last September, is not entirely effective. It has always felt a bit lumpy. It never rolled off the tongue as smoothly as I would have liked. By contrast, “The Living Dark” both encompasses the original title—which in my mind always carried the implicit connotation “living into the (living) dark”—and expresses a meaning that is simultaneously more expansive and more pointed. It’s an ideal moniker for a project whose guiding theme and short description, which I have also recently retooled, is “the numinous intersection of religion, horror, creativity, and the unknown.”

In addition to the title change, there will also be a shift in focus as the matter of deep creativity, of the relationship that we each have to our own demon muse, however conceived or experienced, becomes focal, though I will continue to write about many other things, too.