Six Months Miscellany
May 3rd is coming up - that will be six months since the beginning of this project.
Many of you have been reading since early on and many have jumped in along the way. The unexpected has emerged recurrently from the convergence of many minds, disparate urgencies. Conflict, controversy at times. But: creativity. Newness!
Case in point: if you’re reading this as an email, you’ll notice the new banner. Months ago, I put out the call for graphic design of this publication’s logo and banner:
Here are results - the artist’s interplay with the call and Poetry, Thought, Word Magick itself is terrific! (keeping the archaic flavoring of the word). I’m thankful to Substack for the cross-currents it fosters around the world; and so, Lucas Urrutia in Argentina alchemized my sails, lightships, and sigils. He even converged upon - and beyond - what I speak of in my “about” page: Dante’s “angelic butterfly.”
The artist’s own use of symbolism and identification of what he calls “fundamentals” coalesce what essences he found in Poetry, Thought, Word Magick. I recognize myself and this project in his alchemical mirror.1 Call-and-response, collaborative, feedback loops - it’s wondrous in general what transformations issue from the exchange of inputs and outputs here, how this work can evolve and transmogrify. For me, Urrutia’s image is clarifying: it lights a going forward, upon what I call (since my writerly approach is so old school it’s new) an “old-new” Creative Path.
Have you ever been daunted or discouraged by the Creative Path? - which is equivalent to your Life Path adventure arc, whatever your vocation, for it demands from you creative seeking of purpose and fulfillment. I have and everyone has. Not everyone can say, though: I’m here for you and I’m here for myself. When the world’s instability and earth’s uncertain future confronts me, I confront despair. I have my demons and I have my daimon. For you, dear reader, I’ll open my studio door and reveal you my workings in real-time; and also, with encouragement for you to hear and pursue your own inner calling, I’ll present the truth of what it takes to dare the unprecedented.
A lot of this is unsayable.
I’m aware of the value of your time and attention - subscriptions are free, for now, and so I’m requiring nothing else of you and nothing less. Nowhere else will you find such present access to an uncompromising artist’s perspective of the path. There are lots of places you can find tips on career or craft: the best’s offerings are in earnest; the rest set you up with a shell game of forumulae. Nowhere else will you find such close companionship for glorying in the source.
Through these next six months, I’ll be concentrating on bringing to timely conclusion my current front burner work, The Killing Joke - forthcoming from The Mute Canary. You can look over my shoulder. This book will have the last laugh, if I don’t keep it decisive to the times.
To that, I’ll soon share some expansive results of another call I put out a while back, asking readers for supplementary leads on several of the book’s topics:
I’ll pull up from the depths of a deep dive some of the tentacular, spectacular, queer and self-luminous, pressure-hardy creatures I might have overlooked without such a reader-driven curriculum: alternative, suppressed, avatars - archetypal iterations - of the Trickster, Jester, and Fool.
Plus, there are other points of focus coming up: past publications and back burner works-in-progress, the latter asimmer with what’s demanding our attention during these times, holding us to account - context attunement for creative unfolding.
This July is the 10-year anniversary of the release of The Re-echoes from Furniture Press Books of Baltimore and I think that can be the occasion for my first in-person reading since the pandemic shut-downs - I have a few ideas as well for some sort of performance I can offer here. One thing I maintain about The Re-echoes after this decade of its reverberation in print is that if you read this book you don’t have to read Finnegans Wake. Now, as a Joyce admirer, I urge you to read Finnegans Wake (hopefully with some guidance), but with my book, you don’t have to. Better than CliffsNotes or SparkNotes, The Re-echoes is its own thing, and yet you’ll find it riverruns its course of coursing through history and epiphanic instants in hypnagogic/hypnopompic celebration of cyclicity and recurrence in a brisk 99 pages.
Plus, I’ll soon update you on a project I’ve had going for a number of years now in partnership with Rob Zweig, memoirist and CUNY English professor, in pursuit of the right way to tell the story of Ota Benga, the Congolese man who in 1906 was put on display in the Bronx Zoo. A recent visit to Lynchburg, Virginia, where Benga spent the last years of his life in relative (post-traumatic) peace amidst key figures of what would later become the Harlem Renaissance, both relieved and revealed in starker living detail the heavy responsibility any artist would have in attempting a portrayal. A whole community in Lynchburg has intergenerational memory of Ota Benga. Much to tell, much to discuss!
Let me take this post to affirm once again I welcome public commentary and conversation on the Substack website as well as private communication in reply to these emails. Community and camaraderie are cherished. Good faith argumentation is encouraged! At the same time, I won’t allow my comments page to become a platform for trolling or disinformation. Thus, I will feel free - judiciously - to use the “ban” function accordingly.
My most recent post - “Sunflowers.” - sought a workable definition of propaganda. Roughly, I came down upon the sense that propaganda is essentially about bad faith communication - disguised as news or civil exchange. For the propagator, a state of war is implicit, covert, and one-sided: actions are taken to “turn,” disrupt, confuse, or demoralize the enemy.2
In relation to this same topic, please allow me to recommend Peter Pomerantsev’s This is NOT Propaganda (subtitle: Adventures in the War against Reality). I held off on delving into this book until after my post. Here’s an aspect of the creative path to mention, an exercise in staying with your own thought: it was necessary for me to distinguish, to-the-purpose, what I noticed going on around me - further research wouldn’t help get exactly at that recognition. Now my thought has its footing and I can absorb more thoroughly Pomerantsev’s book for its insights into the forces and techniques utilized to undermine unity, civility, and humanistic values around the globe.
Lastly, an item of “housekeeping” as Substack puts it… there’s a new Substack app you can use in addition or in preference to receiving emails (available now on iPhone + iPad and coming soon to Android). Find out more here: Substack app
The app is a great way to have all your Substack newsletters in a single handy place; and since the app makes it easy, if you want an easy way to discover more newsletters, don’t forget to sample The Sample, newsletter of newsletters.
I’m thinking of quicksilver, reflections, refraction, glow of the athanor, polish of the alembic.
Often the propagandistic message is openly hateful, yet with a contriving assumption of agreement or shared sentiment on the part of the receiver; the real - unacknowledged and immediate - target of aggression is the receiver.
This is AWESOME! Love the illustration and the thoughts that inspired it.
The new banner is gorgeous! I was so excited to see it this morning. Cheers to you and Lucas for this collaboration!