Alchemy and Paranoia

            Good evening to you, dear reader. It’s wonderful to see that you’ve successfully made it through another day. I hope you’re enjoying these little entries of mine as much as I’m “enjoying” getting them to you. It’s an odd thing I’ve noticed—although I must admit that I expected it, even planned on it—that the effort of sitting myself down, churning out these posts, and then sending them off nightly into the wide world is getting progressively easier with each day that goes by. I’m a very private, even very quiet person by nature; it’s very difficult for me to think these idle musings of mine would be of any great—or even slight—interest to anyone. The whole project seemed and seems to me to smack of the most crass, brazen, inexcusable sort of presumptuousness.

Which, strange to say, is one of the reasons I decided to start this blog and to keep at it tenaciously. There’s nothing else for me to do in this life but write. I look around me, and the world appears to me to flow by as some massive, beautiful, terrifying thing—a thing to be caught, as best as we can, in the frail, diaphanous net of our language. If I don’t put myself through the daily rigors of trying to put some crumb, some piece of the world into words, if I don’t weave at least a few strands of a web to catch the world as it goes by, the world quickly sinks into unreality for me. Very rapidly, instead of a well-ordered, fairly predictable world of people, places, and purposes, I find myself descending into a nightmare realm, fragmentary, haunt of shades and a thousand conspiracies. It’s not a nihilistic world, it’s not a world drained of meaning or significance—not at all! To the contrary, it’s a world that suffers precisely from an overabundance of meaning, in which every object positively seethes with a potential to harm, in which every gesture or offhand remark hints, darkly but insistently, at gargantuan sinister currents of absolute malevolence. And all the while you look on, eyes wide, watching for the knife. The whole experience is something like seeing the world in Technicolor, where the whole mass is so oversaturated that you can’t help but shrink away because it hurts your eyes.

The danse macabre from Bergman's The Seventh Seal, a black and white film that doesn't exactly fit in with the Technicolor idea... but you get the point.

You’ll call this paranoia… and you’d be right! But paranoia, after all, is nothing more than the flipside of imagination. In its raw state, an overabundance of imagination can be a very painful thing, a very alienating thing. I think all of us, as readers, have had this sort of experience to varying degrees—imagination, like any other human capacity, is perfected by being practiced, and reading is one of the most effective ways of training imagination that I know of… but more on that some other time. As I was saying, though, raw imagination is extremely painful, because it’s there, it’s active, but since it’s not being put to any actual work it’s got nothing to do but feed like a sucking parasite on the mind that’s been unfortunate enough to pick it up. And so we have the nightmares, the terrors, the headlong rush after anything that seems likely to bring relief. We have the progressive movement into a constant fever pitch of anxiety, a steady shrinking away from every contact, even the warmest interaction… after all, if everything is a trap just waiting to be sprung on you, kindness is certainly the most obvious disguise for evil intent. Such is the logic of paranoia.

But there is a way out. It’s not immediate, it’s certainly not painless, and it’s not without its own terrors. It has to do with alchemy. Now, alchemy is the ancient art of transmuting baser metals (particularly lead) into purer metals (particularly gold). Ostensibly. Granted, alchemy, taken literally, does involve making tinctures of various plants and employing them medicinally in a weekly cycle having to do with the position of the sun, the particular virtues of the plants, etc. It’s a fascinating subject, and one I’ll have to look into more deeply at some point. But—and this is the really relevant point—alchemy, while it does invoke this material imagery of the transmutation of metals, is an allegorical process. Although alchemical processes and practices take place on the material plane, the real alchemy is a spiritual progress of the soul up from its base natural state (lead) to a purified state (gold). Now, as I said, I’ve not done extensive studies on the subject, but as I’m writing this I’m becoming increasingly convinced that I ought to. Alchemical texts, once one learns how to read them, are really marvelous pieces of literature, great allegories up there with the very best our world has to offer.

But to return to writing. Writing, the writer’s life, and the discipline of writing constitute, in their own way, a form of alchemy. This horrible paranoia that I was talking about, this constant self-defeating attitude of wide-eyed impotent terror in the face of the universe—this is lead. But it can be made better by steady discipline, by allowing itself to be itself and to overcome its fears… among these, the fear of speaking openly, as itself. The fear of revealing itself to the world. The fear of seeming conceited or pretentious, or like an old windbag. And so, dear reader, dear sweet reader, that’s one reason why I keep at this thing, night after night. I’m a ridiculous creature. But I hope I have the potential to improve myself, and so I’ve dedicated myself to this discipline. I hope it brings you some enjoyment, reader, and that someday I’ll be able to write beautiful things for you to read. I send you all my best wishes and hopes, reader.

Clouds and Sunrise

            Well, here we are again, reader. Or maybe not again. Maybe we’re not even here anymore, or at least maybe you aren’t. Could be a ships passing in the night kind of thing. Although to be perfectly frank, if the ships are going to pass it won’t matter much whether they pass in the night, at high noon, or under the rosy light of a lazy dawn sun—which, mind you, is itself passing over the horizon, locked in that rhythmic ascent all unguided, then off to punch his card like the rest of us come evening. I ask you, reader, have you ever seen a perfect sunrise? It’s a rare event, for one because the clouds have to be perfect—odd, come to think of it, that the clouds are such a crucial ingredient in a sunrise. We would tend to think they’d just get in the way, simply obscure the brilliant light. Which, of course, they do. But by that very token, they set up this intricate play of reflection and interrelation, an overabundant vivacity of light far more subtle, far more harmonious than anything that we could glean from an unobstructed view. But I digress, and for that I apologize; digressions are in my nature.

            But as I was saying, the perfect sunrise. I’ve seen it only once in my life, when I was out walking the dog about a year ago. I didn’t see the whole of it at first, since there were some buildings in the way—walls, naturally, obscure the sunrise in a far more destructive way than clouds. Still, I looked up and saw this curtain of cloud, covered all in this absolutely delicious shade of pink, tending to red as my gaze descended. I hurried my pace as I walked around the library; I could tell this sunrise would be one worth the seeing. And it was. Half the sky was filled with clouds, tapering off to the center, out of which peeked a sun that was red and distant, the way the moon is distant. (Even the sun likes to imitate the moon sometimes, strange to say.) The total effect was like an amphitheater in the sky, where yellow drifts upward into red, and beyond to delicate pinks and roses at the zenith. It was a breathtaking sight. Perhaps a poet could have written on it. I looked on with awe, but also with a kind of unease. It was so perfectly constructed it reminded me of the Argument from Design.

            Should have taken a picture, come to think of it… But, to be perfectly honest, reader, I’m not exactly a technology enthusiast. In fact, you could call me a bit of a Luddite. True story!

            Let me see, how to tie all this back to writing so it doesn’t look like I’ve been waxing on about ships and sunrises for no reason…Well, for one, I think that the clouds can teach us a lot about the way narratives get constructed. What, after all, are writers looking to say when they write? For the sake of argument—as always, pending further reflection, speculation, and (most importantly) spectation—let’s say the author’s really just saying something along the lines of, “I am here. I feel such-and-such. There are other people and I like some and don’t care much for others. They feel so-and-so. We do things. It is now.” That basic fact, or some very simple fact, lies at the heart of all writing, and in a lot of writing it appears in some allegorical form; depending on the author’s temperament it can appear as an object to be obtained, a thing to be destroyed, some state of affairs to be brought about. King Arthur searches for the Holy Grail while Ahab’s out hunting the White Whale, kind of thing. But it’s always something lost, or else something we have—say Frodo and the Ring—that we’re trying to get rid of. In this analogy you see us drawing, this thing—call it the terrible ecstatic brute fact of being a human being in a human world—is the sun.

            But of course, if you just come out and say it, you take all the fun out of the game—writing, like life, is of course just a game we’re all playing. Look there, we’ve dispensed with it all in a paragraph… the totality of our existence, there laid out plain as day in a few bald sentences. It’s time to bring in some clouds.

            Clouds are obstacles, of course, but obstacles are what drives the whole narrative engine we’re building here. You’ve always got the sun in place, but the writer’s real work is (fortunately) a bit closer to earth, in the now-harrowing, now-tedious, but always rewarding task of standing there in the sky, working out new and old ways of catching the light. So we create characters, wind them up with their own quirks and motives, and watch them out there in the world in and between the lines. Sometimes they butt heads, sometimes they get confused and forget themselves utterly, sometimes they have so much to say and do that they worry they’ll explode. Some are lost, some return, and some are out there still, wandering cold and afraid without a compass. All die in the end. But that’s life, that’s literature, and it’s the writer’s job to take all these clouds, so much vapor, and make of them something of love and beauty.

Or try this one on for size: say the words are mirrors, and life is a light that shines dimly, from an unknown source. It’s your job to arrange the mirrors to catch as much of that light as possible, to let it free, to make it dance. Do you see that light, reader, do you watch it move? I hope that it lights you safely home.

Names, Lists, and Questions

                Hi there, reader. Hope today’s been a good one for you. I figure now is as good a time as any to sketch out what I’d like to do with this blog, beyond the obvious things like shouting out into the void and trying to coax it into talking back. For one, I’ve got a question that’s been bothering me for these last few weeks, months, or really for the better part of my life up to now. It’s always been there, in one form or the next, trying to formulate itself, trying to understand itself. It’s not an easy question to come to terms with, because as I try to find an answer I always have that image of myself in my head, watching myself looking for answers and wondering why I’m bothering to look in the first place. How can I ask it if I don’t know where I am, what I am, where I’m headed? But how can I know what I am if I don’t already know what I’m asking? I’m always at cross-purposes with myself here—it’s something like when you look in a mirror to try to see how others see you, even though you know in the back of your mind that you’re always posing for a mirror.

                Let’s try again. Maybe a better way to start would be to explain, to define, to try to catch in words just what I mean when I say that this blog is “A Daily Weblog on Reading, Writing, and Apocalypse.” These words mean things, of course, but those meanings are not and can never be within the words themselves, but more in the other words that we can say about them. And this process can and probably must go on infinitely… or at least indefinitely. I think this is probably one reason that it’s so much fun to explain things, to become more and more detailed in our explanations to the point that we realize we’ve really explained nothing at all, and all that remains is an empty meaningless shell of words around which we try to trace the outlines of a possible meaning. In other words, there’s something terribly indecent in somebody composing, say, an instruction manual or a scientific theory.

                Which brings me back to Reading, Writing, and Apocalypse. Now, let’s make a first, terribly superficial pass at this by dividing this into parts, like so:

1)Reading: this is what you’re doing now. No, of course it’s not necessarily all you’re doing. I’ll wager that you’re more than likely breathing, sitting (or standing), maybe scratching your ear, probably wondering why I’m blathering on so long on this point. But, God willing, among other things you’re reading right now. But just what is this “reading?” Naturally, I apologize for seeing a problem here where there obviously isn’t one, and I really hope you can clear this up for me. But let me think this through, say this out: when we read, we think of it as something fairly simple, fairly innocuous, these days even fairly old-fashioned. But I wonder if reading is really so harmless a process as all that. Say we look at reading from the viewpoint of a biologist… what an exceedingly odd behavior! Look, the subject just sits there, fidgeting, running eyes over a lot of funny black marks and in the meantime showing the whole range of human emotion, from hilarity to sorrow to amorous passion to existential dread… and this is a normal activity? What could these people possibly be up to, what are they doing, what are they really all about? What could possibly be going through their minds?

Just look at her. Sitting there, reading her book. What's going on here?

2)Writing: this is what I’m doing now. Of course, I’ve read before, and will again. You’ve probably written before, and will again. The two activities presuppose one another in a funny way… although, all things considered, it’s not at all rare or exceptional for things to presuppose one another in this way. Light presupposes dark, good presupposes evil, life presupposes death—and I could of course go on in this vein. But what really gets me about writing is that this, of all things is the oddest, most self-defeating, and yet at the same time most wide-ranging and enduring means of communication that we human beings have ever come up with. When we write, we hide ourselves away for hours at a time, trying to make everything just so. And so we hide ourselves away… for the sake of communicating something more effectively? Are we really trying to say anything here or are we just playing around with words? This is something I’d like to look deeply into, to try and work out just what it means to turn writing into life and life into writing. Just what are we doing to ourselves when we become writers, after all?

Just look at her there. Sitting there, writing. What's going on here?

3)Apocalypse: this is in some ways the simplest topic that I have to talk about, but precisely because of that it’s the most difficult. Now, strictly speaking, there’s not much to be said about apocalypse. It’s either there or it’s not… although that’s not quite right either. Now, rest assured, when I talk about apocalypse I have nothing like an end of history or an end of time in mind… although of course, strictly speaking, I don’t necessarily not have that in mind either! In the old Greek, apocalypse meant something like the disclosure of something hidden, the lifting of a veil or the revelation of a secret. Among other things, I think the concept of apocalypse offers us a way of seeing not only the way reading and writing work together and complement one another, but also—and you’ll excuse me if this sounds vague, I’ll admit I haven’t quite worked this through—a way that reading/writing as an activity fit into the structure of this our life.

Finally, something that makes sense!

               It goes without saying that all of this is, at least for now, fairly preliminary, subject to change at any moment. At this point, of course, the blog is only in the second day of its existence. It has plenty of opportunity and freedom and potentiality, it hasn’t yet become fixed in any particular form or way of being. So there may be departures… there may be wide departures. But there’s the game plan as of now. Hope it turns out well. All the best to you, dear reader.

Greetings and Apologies

            Well, hello there reader! It’s very good of you to show up. I, unfortunately, am the author of this humble blog… and, if you’ll please believe me, I’m no happier about that fact than you are. I? Author? What audacity! What silliness! What self-indulgent drivel is all of this nonsense going to turn out to be? We tried, we really did, we wanted to get somebody else to write the blog for us. After all, there’s nobody in the world less qualified for this sort of thing than our humble author. He tries his best, or at least he says he tries his best, which I guess amounts to the same thing. Six of one, baker’s dozen of the other, kind of thing. We tried, really we did. Best to let somebody well-qualified put words in our mouth, you know, so on, so on, etc, &c. There’s something terribly comforting, you know, in having someone else do all the heavy lifting, to tune into the deeper meanings and strivings of a soul trying to come to terms with—well, itself, among other things.

            But we did, we gave it the old college try, looking for somebody to speak for us. We’re really a very humble person, I assure you. And when I say that, I mean—although I know what deep waters we humans are always diving into any time we even begin to speak of meaning—that really, if we’re all very (dis?)honest with ourselves and try to be as self-sufficient as possible, we’ll quite naturally drive ourselves into the inviting delusion that the best thing for any of us to do is to keep ourselves to ourselves, a hand clamped firmly over the mouth and the other hand clapped just as firmly… eh, on a book! We tried, though. We tried, like so many others, to make the dead speak for us.

            These dead writers, you see, they’re not like us at all, they’re a special breed, they’re a type who can’t help but say their say, and damn the torpedoes! It’s very comforting, very reassuring, though, that they tend to say exactly what everyone else is already thinking. So we tried, we tried very hard and for a very long time, to let these writers do all of our talking for us, to us. BUT, and there are harmonies of infinity contained in that “but,” some of us can’t help ourselves. We grow up, lonely and distant in spite of ourselves (in order to spite ourselves?), driving others away because we can’t stand to see them go, carrying always within us that little thing, that sacred, holy thing, that hungry nostalgia, the ancient call of fall, flight, and forgetfulness. We are alone because we cannot stand to be alone, and more often than not we let ourselves believe we love it.

            But the books were there for us. Though everyone around us seemed to grow further and further away, we could always count on ink and paper to wrench us out of ourselves. In the struggle of a crafty old sea-dog striving to find home, in the anxieties of a young prince making idle mischief while staving off his destiny, in an ordinary young man’s three-week visit to a magic mountain that becomes a seven-year apprenticeship in nihilism and humanism, we discovered our truest selves. We tried very hard to hide ourselves from ourselves, but deep truths have a way of forcing themselves to the surface eventually. Words were always our first, our purest and greatest love; we always knew they would win out in the end.

Circuitous paths. Courtesy of Mr. Sterne.

            Life works itself out that way, you know? You wake up, on no particular morning, and you realize that it’s all been perfectly arranged for you, that there was an enormous yet somehow familiar hand meticulously arranging every step of the journey, and you hear a voice, quietly at first but growing louder, whispering your name. You find that you really are an instrument, a kind of woodwind, and that all your life up to now has been a process of infinite, infinitesimal construction. I feel the pressure, I sense the movement of the air, and so I can’t help but let the music out.

Again, I say, we tried. All of us. If someone else could speak for me, they would have done it by now. But there comes a time in life when you have to become what you really were all along. Who did I think I was kidding? After all, we've been around long enough to know what we’re about by now, surely.

And so, among other things, this blog is a record of a failed attempt. It is a monument to failed connections and failed communications. It is a chronicle of mistakes and miscalculations, both made in the past and in the future, all for your benefit, all for your amusement, all for love of you, dear, dear reader. For too long I tried my hand at taking myself seriously, and the results were… well, they were the kind of results that come from taking yourself seriously. So now I paint myself the clown, and I hope to be taken as one. Hopefully you will all have a great laugh at my expense; if I can give you that, maybe I’ll have justified, just a little bit, my existence, my misexistence. I hope that there’s much you can teach me, my beloved reader.