Writer's Diary
6/9/26
All I’ve wanted to do lately is sit in the sun, and drink socially at night with friends.
The only hope for culture is our dissidents and outsiders, the exiles and weirdos who’ve been pushed to the margins or socially liquidated. They’re labeled as deviant, or bad, or evil, or irrelevant. In-group hegemonic institutional culture is so far gone that it can only reify itself through the blind narcissistic optimism and grandiose illusions about its own value.1
I’ve been thinking a lot about 2020 lately, and how terrible the first few months of the pandemic were, but also, in the long run, at least for me, and I think for others, salutary. It’s the only time in my adult life where I’ve truly stopped everything, and not out of choice. Didn’t make art or love. Didn’t go anywhere. I read about 100 books in my childhood home. I went for runs and walks. I watched movies. I rewrote all of my plays, and I reevaluated myself and my values.
I was forced to stop because the world stopped. But there’s certainly a lesson in that. I need a period of spiritual autophagy and turning over. They say our cells turn over every seven years. It’s been six years since the beginning of the pandemic And Dimes Square, this arc of my life. And there does seem to be something natural about restorting myself and my world.
Six years ago, in hindsight, I wanted more and more and more, to prove myself, to prove myself as a writer, to win fame and respect, to become someone. I rejected limits. Really, most limits, most commitments, anything that reined in my specialness. Unconsciously, at least, this is how I lived. I’m sure that was off-putting to people. My ambition and desire, my ego. My superiority complex.
Now, at the end of that cycle, I want less: commitment, marriage, privacy, maybe even anonymity, security. And I look forward to those things very soon, actually.
I also have to resign myself to the fundamental reality that writing some great plays and lasting works is irrelevant—that literature will not move the needle (any needle) unless it appeals to people’s narcissism, unless you yourself appeal to their narcissism, and their own strange, insatiable, Instagram-generated need to be seen.
The artist always has to escape the traps and the snares that he sets for himself, the way that mystics used to have to escape the traps and snares set by the devil. And I think that homology is very telling. Today’s artist may very well be yesterday’s mystic. They may be the same person on the whole.
The artist ultimately evolves or devolves into Tarkovsky’s stalker, living at the margins of society, occasionally getting paid a little bit to take tourists into the zone to fulfill their wishes. (What does Tarkovsky’s stalker have at the end? He has his wife and his child, who is also gifted. His dog. And that’s enough.)
All I know now is that I’m on the side of people who have romantic courage, who are not spending their time defending the last bastion of the minimal self, who care more about curating a little image and a little career over everything of value.
The small people who can’t defend love, who can’t defend art, who can’t defend the spirit of their community are the de facto enemies of the few who do.
I have so much appreciation recently for conviviality, for dinner parties and cigars and slaps on the back, for summer nights spent talking and walking around, for friendship with a metaphysical orientation. This alienated and stay-at-home, this bed-rotting era is also a great filter for people who have talent for friendship but also believe in friendship.
We have no idea what the arc of the universe bends towards, and we don’t know if it’s good in a legal or ethical sense. But we can know that the arc of our lives and our communities can bend towards decency, laughter, forgiveness, towards dancing and mutual eros, towards sonata for piano and violin, towards poetry and dialogue, if we want it to. It has to be willed. It will not happen on its own.
And I think what’s clear enough now is that an attitude of assumed-progress-and-chill means the most ambitiously pathological people will take over pretty quickly, and the most humane will find themselves living under a state of nervous supervision.
One wishes for revelry, not mimetic rivalry. For Shakespeare’s comedies, not his tragedies.
Every era crucifies its prophets and ignores its geniuses, separates its lovers, and elects its sociopaths. This is the course of history. Bad taste and stupidity. Animal spirits bent towards vapid acts rather than great ones.
What I’m talking about here is the romance of continuing, of dancing and laughing despite the tragedy that’s called for in the script. Then you see the unfathomable depths. You touch on the oceanic part of the self, the larger mysterious attraction and magnetism of the cosmos, the lovely face that speaks to you in the crowd, or that you wake up to in the morning, the eyes of children and animals full of light. The birdsong and bee-dancing that structures the time of nature and the seasons.
When you graduate from high school, you see pretty quickly how quickly hope and romanticism go away for people. How quickly they become suspicious of the outsider and the strange, the esoteric. And how much they start to consolidate their lives around a few predictable behaviors and beliefs. This is the horizonless American world. The frontierless American world.
Resignation is a liquidation event, a margin call for a certain structure of soul. When you know the fund is bankrupt, you have to give the investors their money back and figure out a new investment strategy.
The point of life is to love as deeply as possible, and if you’ve done that in a Platonic sense, you are a philosopher. You are not blameless or perfect. You might not be a genius, you might not be anyone, but you have touched the essence of things. You’ve harmonized with the greater part of reality.
The reason that men don’t read books, I think, is not just because they’ve been drawn or put into podcasts, or because they’ve been pushed out of the publishing industry, although some of the push and pull genealogy is correct, but because there’s a larger sense of abjection, of having been pushed out of themselves and society as a whole, of having been humiliated, that is projected on anyone who affirms themselves as a great writer. How dare you not accept your abjection sir?2
Of course the poet has a palpable design upon the reader or the audience. “Fight a little bit harder. Encourage mutual self-building, more contemplation. Don’t accept things at face value. Don’t be afraid of evil, because there’s good, and that’s the way to the good. Have a soul because it won’t have you. Find other souls to co-regulate with and against. Work actively to find what’s beautiful, what’s pleasurable. Be a hedonist and a philosopher, but also seek out the saint and ask for his advice. Live dialectically and trust your own genius. Enough to know what it sounds like when it speaks within.”
Part of the reason that we don’t feel like we live in a particularly democratic society is that non-democratic institutions have taken over much of the business of managing civic life (corporations, NGOs, foundations, smaller nonprofits, media enterprises), and that these extra-governmental organizations have developed their own legal systems, HR departments, and their own morality. You can’t vote your way out of it. You can’t easily hide from the many eyes of Sauron.
Americans no longer either have affinity groups or much avail to legal rights to protect themselves from institutional in-groups, groupthink, and the solar flares of various cultural revolutions that seem to shoot out every three to five years.
The most powerful preference cascade would be just to shift normies a little bit so that they don’t automatically buy the messaging of institutional organs. Small movies having global success is great. I don’t even care if the movies are particularly good. The important thing is that they’re different. They’re outsider. They’re risky. It’s good when canceled or liquidated politicians claw back from the dead and win elections. It’s good when banned writers find publishing houses. It’s good when fired academics find more success outside of universities.
Men do not buy each other’s novels, do not have book clubs to read each other’s novels or non-fiction books, no longer write letters to each other, no longer write respectfully in response to each other’s essays, because they no longer believe in their own capacities. They no longer think they have roles to play. They’re just weird mixtures of biomatter and affect. Bros, dudes. Toxic byproducts. There’s no belief in the good. The reciprocal good. The mutual good.
ratified
Lately? Slow learner?