Today the library at my college hosted an “author luncheon” featuring employees who have been published. Here’s my table, featuring me + Divinations of the Deep, Dark Awakenings, To Rouse Leviathan, What the Daemon Said, and my horror, paranormal, and mummy encyclopedias. Four colleagues also had tables set up featuring their publications. A fun time was had by all, as enhanced by the presence of sub sandwiches.
A week ago, Substack launched its new “Notes” feature, which you may have heard about. As the company’s first foray into social media-style interactions, Notes is a kind of Substackified rival to Twitter. I have been using it for several days now and rather enjoying it, since, as a writer with a newsletter on Substack, it enables me to share short ideas, quotes, links, etc., that wouldn’t add up to a full newsletter post but that can still serve to connect with readers and foster enjoyable communication.
And yet, as I have used it, I have also noticed myself gravitating toward a realization and a principle that is necessary to bear in mind: Writers in this age of online hustle need to make a deliberate practice of focusing on the writing itself as an end in its own right. The other alternative is to give free rein to our egoic-addictive craving for attention and validation, and thus become its slave. If you’re actually meant to write, anything of value that might come from doing it will arise out of an inner attitude and outer practice of silence, not from a frenetic grasping for validation via likes, clicks, or shares.
Yesterday I published a reflection about this matter at my Substack newsletter. And yes, I’m aware of the inbuilt irony of using an online newsletter to publish a cautionary reflection on the creative and spiritual dangers of online writing. Still, maybe it will speak to you: “The Wisdom of Silence in the Age of Online Writing.”
I’m currently tending an idea for a new book. It has arisen in connection with the following two thoughts, which in turn follow on from my reflections a couple of weeks ago on Ray Bradbury’s “book people” and Morris Berman’s “monastic option.”
First, for the past decade-plus I have felt/suspected that America’s collective adoration of apocalyptic fictions and fantasies is not unconnected to the now patent emergence of some truly catastrophic trends and scenarios in real life. This predates, by the way, Demon Lindelof and Brad Bird’s savvy exploration of the same idea in Disney’s Tomorrowland movie (which I heartily recommend even though it’s flawed).
Second, in The Twilight of American Culture—a book that I can hardly believe is now 23 years old—Berman mounted a devastating analysis, both academic and polemical, of America as a country and culture that is definitively past its peak and on the downhill slope of collapse.
In Twilight’s intro he said he had deliberately not included a “happy chapter.” Too many books, he said, mount a compelling, even an unanswerable, argument that some current situation is grave, dire, a clanging emergency—and then conclude with a single glib, fatuous chapter that lays out a five-point plan to “fix it.” Berman said his view was that 1) history clearly shows a cycle of maturation and decline playing out in every culture and civilization, 2) this never, ever varies or reverses itself, and 3) the U.S. is clearly living out its own decline stage right now. As Agent Smith said to Neo, “You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.”
I find this view quite persuasive. So I guess I’m saying that I think we currently have both things happening at the same time. On the one hand, our collective addiction to apocalyptic fantasies is both spawning and reflecting a proliferation of real catastrophes. On the other hand, this trend or tendency is wrapped within a real and irreversible trajectory of decline and collapse.
As I mentioned two posts ago, Berman’s suggested action during such a time is to adopt what he termed “the monastic option”: Follow the lead of the famous Irish monks who “saved civilization” by finding some worthwhile area of endeavor—a field of knowledge, a set of skills, a blueprint for a humane way of living, whatever calls deeply to you—and deliberately seek a way to preserve and transmit this to a new culture that will arise in the future, after the present one has burned itself to the ground. To illustrate and flesh out the point, Berman explicitly makes reference not just to the witness of history, and not just to what he takes to be “new monastic” efforts that are currently underway (such as the Clemente Course in the Humanities), but to various manifestations of this theme of cultural preservation through a post-collapse dark age in apocalyptic and dystopian fictions, including, as mentioned, Ray Bradbury’s “book people” in Fahrenheit 451, who memorize and effectively become books during an age when reading is banned, so that one day, when things have changed, their knowledge can be written down once again.
You might infer from my recent focus on these things that such ideas have been occupying my attention. You would be right. As I said at the top of this post, I’m currently, and speculatively, incubating an idea for a new book that will fuse these ideas with my A Course in Demonic Creativity. In other words, a book about the discipline of the demon muse, the discipline of divining and aligning with your inner creative genius, as a way of identifying and cultivating your own monastic option, your own unique “great work,” in the face of the apocalypse.
What the Daemon Said, my collection of essays, introductions, and interviews on horror fiction, film, and philosophy, has received a Golden Ghoul Award from the Serbian horror blog Cult of Ghoul, as seen in the trophy image added to he book’s cover above.
The blog is run by Dejan Ognjanović, who writes about horror for, among other venues, Rue Morgue magazine. He wrote a feature on What the Daemon Said for the magazine’s November/December 2022 issue. Previously, he interviewed me for the magazine in connection with the publication of my horror literature encyclopedia.
Dejan is extremely knowledgeable about current goings-on in the horror world, so it’s an honor for my book to be recognized at his blog.
An update on recent activity at my newsletter that may be of interest to all my readers:
First, a few days ago I published a reflection on Eisenhower’s dire warning about the military-industrial complex and the way his words actually proved to be a prophecy about where America was headed. In this post, I suggest that in our present-day, real-world dystopian scenario, the “monastic option” that Morris Berman famously laid out in his book The Twilight of American Culture—that is, the choice to deliberately preserve and pass down to a future generation some form of knowledge or way of living that can serve as the seed of a future renaissance—seems a valid and even necessary life path to adopt. By way of illustrating the point, I refer in my post to one famous fictional example of this monastic option in action: the “book people” in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Second, just today I published a recording of my own personal piano setting of the famous opening theme from director Paul Morrisey’s Blood for Dracula, sometimes known as Andy Warhol’s Dracula, along with the story of why I love this music and how I came to create a piano version of it nearly 30 years after I first started trying:
Click on either image above to open the corresponding post.
Subscribe to my newsletter to receive all such posts and essays directly in your inbox.