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.

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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.