End of Part 1
On what comes next
I greatly appreciate the modest but loyal audience of readers I have cultivated from among my friends, family, and broader social network(s). Your feedback has been both humbling and helpful, and your readership means a lot to me.
One of my goals in launching this Substack was to create a medium through which I could share with others in a different way, but not necessarily because I’m usually reticent to do so. As I age, I understand myself to be a more effective writer than speaker. Conversations have a logic and force of their own, separate from that of the written word; speaking is (and, I think, always will be) paradigmatically different than writing, even if that writing is part of a correspondence (those among you who have been on the receiving end of one of my long email responses are best placed to evaluate this claim in my case). As I recognize this about myself, it is important that I should make sure not to succumb to the all-too-human proclivity to valorize that which comes naturally and demonize that which does not, so I do not share this ‘discovery’ about myself to imply that writing is therefore superior to conversation. To think instrumentally, invoking the impartial eye of the wise judge, we can reflect that writing and speaking (the chief media of human communication, though by no means exhaustive of it) function as tools that are used now here, now there, to achieve - or reveal.1
But another reason I started this Substack was to learn something more about writing as such - about how I write, about how to pluck something as slippery and variegated as a thought out of its polytropism to give it something like a destiny solidified in a series of words. It is not my place to judge the success of that endeavor, not just because that would be hubristic, but perhaps even more so because the ‘success’ case entails something like a loss that we are perhaps not careful enough to notice - or to mourn. If the relationship between our aspirations and ultimate reality is fated to be asymptotic, then the proximity of word to thought is at the heart of that ever-elusive yet quintessentially human drive which impels us in our seemingly endless quest to pull the heavens down so that we can know them as they truly are. But the most beautiful things are meant to sparkle only at a distance, and thus our great task is to (re-)learn how to look on, content that some things simply cannot be beheld. And yet, we will always wonder. After all, it is only our nature…
If what has transpired so far on this site can be called a ‘Part 1’ of anything, the obvious next question is: what is Part 2 going to be, and how will it differ from what came before? Both questions can be answered simply. The next phase (probably the bon mot) will involve less regular posting. But the offerings to come will be the product of more careful consideration; the standards I aim to apply to the pieces and stories I am in the process of writing will be high, and I want to be fair to the time it may take to hone them into the sort of fighting shape they need to be in to make the impact I require. So, there will indeed be more content; I think it will be of overall higher quality, but, like many difficult undertakings, rarer.
There is much left to do, yet only so much time. Each morning is a blessed beginning - and each night an opportunity to contemplate the end.
Thanks for reading.
Perhaps the easiest example of this instrumentalization can be seen with the Bible, in the workings of the divine. For most Christians, the Bible is not the literal word of God, but instead ‘divinely inspired.’ Given that those who believe this also believe in God’s omnipotence, it stands to reason that they believe that God chose to have the religion propagated through its written word. However, more obviously, there are many passages within the text in which God speaks, and so it stands to reason that, given the aforementioned, the ability of God to engage in conversation with his creations (at least within the context of the stories being told) is likewise paramount in said proselytization. One could speculate endlessly as to how and why these different approaches are used or needed. (Just to mention them because their absence would be otherwise conspicuous, the cases of Judaism and Islam are somewhat more challenging to reconcile with the admittedly simplistic framework I have provided, but contain enough similar features that I think we can profit by considering them as well. In the case of Judaism, there is an entire tradition within the religion stipulating to an ‘oral Torah’ received by Moses on Mt. Sinai, which eventually forms the basis for the Talmudic texts, a compendium of commentaries - in writing - stretching across centuries regarding the textual interpretation of Torah. In the case of Islam, there is an explicit tradition that the Koran is the literal word of God as received by Muhammad from the Archangel Gabriel, so at first glance there seems to be less conflict between conversation and the written word - the Koran, as the final word of God, in some sense fuses speech and writing together. Yet the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, provide a companion body of writings which are well beyond my abilities to put in the context of not only the foundations of the religion but the various ways in which the Hadith are interpreted and received, yet nonetheless embody to a degree that same non-discrete dyad between speech and writing which characterizes many aspects of the texts within the tradition of the other two Abrahamic religions.)