Thoughts
It’s Monday morning in Thailand as I write this. Something about the distant Easter and arrival of spring in the US led me to the 36-hour fast that I began last night. Something, too, about my nature, the desire I’ve long had to reject the material in service of the spiritual, is clearly responsible for this. Deprivation, like restraint, is undervalued in society today, I reckon.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. More than usual, I mean. Increasingly, I’m trying to move that reading offline. But because I live in Thailand, it can be difficult to achieve a screen-less reading experience. My Kindle is my friend. After my wife, it might even be my best friend.
Last year, another friend of mine, this one made of flesh and blood and brain and bone, sent me a photo from a shop in the mall that had a few racks of used books on sale. The photo was of a paperback copy of Mark Mordue’s Boy on Fire: The Young Nick Cave. A few hours later, it was mine, along with a hardcover copy of Richard Dawkins’ Outgrowing God. If I remember correctly, I was already what I’ve taken to calling a “lapsed atheist” at the time: spiritual but not religious, but with a growing and deepening interest in the religious, driven in part by the certainty and reverse dogma I kept encountering in atheism, not to mention the depths of the spiritual poverty that I kept encountering in me. The thought of reading about the early days that preceded Cave’s current “religiousness” alongside Dawkins’ staunch atheism, therefore, attracted and thrilled me.
Alas, both books sat unread for months. Dawkins’ on the desk in the office from which I’m now writing, and Mordue’s on a shelf in the bedroom. This weekend, though, while in the sweet embrace of some much-needed solitude, I finally cracked open Boy on Fire. I did not, however, begin reading it alongside Outgrowing God. I instead began reading it alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.1 As I wrote to Cave, annoyingly and with a number of grammatical and mental typos that I can’t now undo but will of course correct to my benefit here:
Do you have any words of wisdom in the realms of Good Friday, Easter, spring, and their ilk? I'm not a Christian (yet), but nor am I an atheist anymore. Where I live, Buddhism reigns supreme, and I've taken a deep liking to it, at least as a philosophy, but perhaps also as something more. In any case, I find myself full and occasionally overflowing with sorrow these past few years. And I feel modernity to be the source of much of it. Modernity plus the membrane of "me" that it passes through, that is, for what is the world but—quite literally—what I make of it?
On Saturday, I began reading Boy on Fire. I also started reading Frankenstein for the first time (somehow). I almost always read several books at once these days. It's the best way, I think. It is for me at least. Have you ever noticed how any books you read simultaneously seem to speak subtly to each other, to explore common themes and predicaments, and in doing so, to reach some exalted state?
Right. So, as I was saying, Good Friday, Easter, sorrow: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/03/93040/
There are a number of ways that one can discern the connections that I drew between young Cave, young Victor Frankenstein, and Frankenstein’s monster. And I have no interest in providing clarity on any of them. I would, however, like to share this one brief excerpt from Boy on Fire, which I was happy to read under daylight and take a cheap pen rather than a tired finger to:
At last, at last, his world was changing, step by step. It can take a while to see that happening when it’s your own life, like starlight reaching you long after the fact. People would ask him if his music had changed because his life had changed, but they did not understand how the songs could be things made to will yourself into another state of being. It’s why art is so dangerous as well as inspirational. It can make things happen, terrible things. It can be your liberator. But it can be your gaoler, too, if you’re not careful. It reminded Nick of that old Tarkovsky film Stalker. You needed to develop an understanding of the difference between your deepest wish and your most powerful desire, and how much your work could fuel one or the other, if you were ever going to survive the journey you set out on as an artist.
One of the reasons I started the Liminal Spaces section of this site (which you’re reading now) was so I’d have an appropriate outlet for my “fast thoughts.” My slow thoughts go in Essays, and my fictional (more or less) thoughts go in Noirs. This division of labor, if you will, works for me. As much as I’d love to spend each of my days free and writing whatever I wish, Symbols & Rituals is not a business I’m trying to grow. It’s not a business at all. Everything that ends up here gets here the same way: it could not be stopped, not even with the value I place in restraint. What you’re reading now, like everything else I’ve put here as of late, is the result of a failure on my part to prevent it, a failure with roots in self-preservation, but a failure just the same. I mention all of this only to add that one sign among many that I’ve begun to turn to inappropriate outlets for my fast thoughts is as follows: I begin to write to Nick Cave again. So please, accept this failure of mine for Cave’s sake. God only knows the amount of pain that people pass on to him each day already through their letters. God, or, you know, nothingness.
Here’s a full list of the books I’m currently reading (i.e., rotating between and binding inextricably together with phantasmic connective tissue):
Reading now:
The Graphic Works of Odilon Redon by Odilon Redon
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce
Boy on Fire: The Young Nick Cave by Mark Mordue
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Reading next:
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu
Recommendations
Pouring Milk on My Father's Scalding Bones: Sudden death and the sadhana that remains by Oshan Jarow
The Joys and Pitfalls of Writing a Novel in Your 20s: A correspondence from the writer's forge sent up in the canary's beak by Why Is the World
In Preparation for the Third Quarter Board Meeting: A story from behind the scenes by Dawson Eliasen
The Dust of God: A prehistory of outer space by Sam Kriss
The End of (Online) History: Hegelian dialectics for the 21st Century by Erik Hoel
Eve Theory of Consciousness v3.0: How humans evolved a soul by Andrew Cutler
The Most Dangerous Idea by Roger’s Bacon
Tao of Philosophy by Alan Watts
Sewn Mouth Secrets, A Deleted Symphony for the Beaten Down, and Inevitable Collapse in the Presence of Conviction by Soilent Green
Diaspora Problems by Soul Glo
Singing Bowls and Medieval Library by Dr. Ir. S. Pigeon
Thanks to the concise nudge from J.E. Petersen in his By the Books series.