The Monthly Salon: February
The Monthly Salon: February
What have you changed your mind about?
Hello readers. It is the time of the month where we all gather, albeit virtually. I hope you are all getting through this darkest of months. ‘Getting through’ is about all you can do in an Irish February, in my experience. This month has been one long rain storm. Everything is muddy when it’s not damp. You just have to put one foot in front of the other, and make sure you’re wearing wellies.
But the equinox is coming soon. In the meantime, we have space to talk. Before we get started though, I’d like to quickly bring two little things to your attention:
First: my offer to new paid subscribers of ten percent off annual and monthly subs is still running for another three weeks. You can avail of that by clicking here.
Second: the St Basil’s Writer’s Workshop, on which I’ll be teaching a course later this year, along with Jonathan Pageau and others, is open for applications for a short while longer. I sat down for an interview with fellow author, and instigator of the course, Nicholas Kotar a few weeks back. We talked about writing, my novels, my work here, and some other things. The film of that is below. More about the course can be found here.
Back to business.
As ever in our monthly salon, you can talk, argue, debate, rhapsodise or speculate about anything you want. But if you’d like a prompt, here’s one from me.
I started writing my series of Machine essays on Substack because I was feeling increasingly alienated from everything I thought I was, and I wasn’t sure where that was taking me. I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore. I had conflicting emotions and ideas about much that was happening around me, and I didn’t know how to enunciate them. Writing is how I process situations like this.
I was growing older, granted, but the culture around me was also changing so fast that the things I had once believed no longer seemed to hold. But what had changed? Me, or the culture, or both? I was finding that writing things I had once written with no problem were now getting me slapped with nasty labels. And I was finding that politics was upside down. All the foundations seemed to be slipping or shaking.
Back in my essay series, I wrote two essays about what I called the ‘culture of inversion’ we’re living in now in the West (you can read them here and here.) I wrote about how our post-modern anti-culture, hollowed out and spiritually empty, has turned all of its previous values on their heads without having any new ones of substance to replace them with. Into this spiritual void, as I mentioned also in my recent little film, monsters will rush. We can all feel them rushing in now. But we don’t want to acknowledge the monsters. The arrival of the monsters might mean that we were wrong about … well, quite a lot of things. So we turn away, again and again.
I know that since the pandemic a lot of people have had their eyes opened about a lot of things. Quite a few of us are not who we were before. My drive to reconsider much I once thought was true is older than that, but it has been turbocharged by the 2020s. Of course, minds keep changing. Come back in five years and let’s see how we’re all feeling then.
Still, I thought it might be interesting, here and now, to ask a question to any of you who feel like answering it. On any issue at all - personal, political, cultural, spiritual - what, in recent years, have you changed your mind about?
Talk about that, or anything else you like. Over to you.
I used to think that how things were arranged in terms of human space (architecture, room arrangement) didn't matter. Now I see there is a connection between mind and matter, God and design of our human world. I didn't think there was any true connection of human concepts and Reality either. I think that comes with the idea that man is an accident of blind random forces.
I thought we might chat about transcendence. Yes, I will get to Paul's conversion, but please allow me to take a leisurely route. I hope to catch it from a fresh angle.
Long ago, I took a course on the literature of the American Renaissance. We read a great deal of Emerson and Thoreau. I did not much care for Emerson - what he called "Nature" was not something I had ever hiked through or sifted between my fingers. The object he most wanted us to consider seemed an abstraction, the writing puffed out by his resolve to orchestrate a lofty confrontation with it. Thoreau felt different somehow, but I was as yet too new to this material to challenge the professor's insistence that they were close kin. Transcendentalists, he called them. Whatever. All I know is that I stopped reading Emerson after handing in my final essay. I have been reading Thoreau ever since.
It turns out there was more involved than personal preference. Laura Dassow Walls, in three works of closely argued scholarship, detaches Thoreau from Emerson and inserts him into a lineage headlined by Alexander von Humboldt. Her Thoreau is not a garden variety transcendentalist but a particular kind of scientist - one for whom empirical investigation, philosophical speculation, and poetic imagination were interwoven threads of reasoned inquiry. Where Emerson gazed at loons and trees only for as long as it took to dissolve them into unities valued for their transcendence of any matter that might sing or bloom, Thoreau sought those unities in the singing and the blooming. Nature, he believed, was not the symbol of a deeper reality but the real thing itself. He posited no world behind or beyond the one he sauntered through on his daily rounds.
So while I must confess some sympathy for the correspondent who mourned, apropos of your religious conversion, the declension of a "first-rate social critic" into a "second-rate theologian" (or somesuch ... couldn't track it down), I would put it more generously: the more Christian you have become the more you sound like Emerson and the less like Thoreau. Where once you engaged directly with the world as it is, there are now veils to be pierced, curtains to be lifted, before the most meaningful things come into view. Where once you labored to discern the texture of a "real" England, you now go quarrying about in shrines to long dead saints for the most instructive realities. You've gone transcendental on us.
The brow of Ed Abbey, whom you admire, would surely darken. In Desert Solitaire, he flogged himself whenever he caught himself resorting to metaphor, allusion, or anything that obstructed his view of rocks, lizards, and yuccas in their bare thusness. Never having met any "underlying realities," he snickered, he was happy to commune with "surfaces." Or consider David Abram, whom I imagine Thoreau might have sounded like if he could have read his way through the next century's phenomenologists. It is likely that most people reading this have read his two books. Reread, if you have it handy, the story he tells about his confrontation with a sea lion colony and a humpback whale while kayaking off the coast of Alaska (Becoming Animal, 159-166). What in the way of joy, reverence, empathy, enlightenment, or indeed moral instruction does any Christian canon have to offer that is not available - and available immediately, in the lived moment itself, no mumbo-jumbo appended - in Abram's decidedly non-transcendental account?
Paul, I have attended carefully to all your writings - fiction and essays - since I encountered you in the 2014 profile in the New York Times Magazine. I care enough to worry. I suppose if you feel you have been called, then you are duty-bound to acknowledge the existence of a Caller. But I feel like a hiker who toils all the way up the long, steep ascent to the top of Yosemite Falls, inches himself towards those steel railings you can cling to as you peek over the falls, into the mist, and out over the landscape below ... and then, full of awe and wonder, hears a voice from nowhere whisper in his ear - "Now, for the full experience, flap your arms and fly."
The question, I guess, is why aren't the falls, the sea lions, the Utah desert, and the loons enough? Why must we leap into the void to find what is readily available on sensuous surfaces? I cannot fear for your soul, but I do worry that your uncivilized spirit will be doused in the still waters of an orthodoxy.