Writer's Diary
12/12/25
Various Sunday-Weds, mostly in airport:
A hostility towards the sun was my only rebellion against the spirit of the age. I hankered after Novalis’s night and Yeatsian Irish twilights.
Mishima
Poets pile up metaphors, images, tropes like dragons in a cave; the poet crystallizes teh mind’s defensive reaction to death and loss; the Romantic poet does this for the individual; the epic poet does this for the tribe or civilization; but the defensive reaction process is the same: linguistic forms accrete and eventually enclose the mind (collective or individual) to protect it. We might just say the poetry linguistic resistance to entropy; poetry falls out of natural language use naturally; and withers, consequently, when natural language use withers (as it does in the Age of the Screen n Scroll)
All this comes to mind about 15 minutes above the city of Montreal, where I’m headed on a romantic (lower case, personal case,) and erotic adventure, at the end of a long year of winnowing, relentless loss and losing, and bitter Romantic loss (capital R, severing of the soul from the mate); I’m reading a copy of Charles Williams’ 1943 study of Dante The Figure of Beatrice (Beatrice is a figure of “every relationship”). The young woman next to me on the plane has been watching Korean soaps on her phone the entire, short, flight, her face pressed close to the screen.
Language has its own logic, and I find it helpful to commence on a piece of writing without a conscious, logical reason to; even as I have become a kind of deadline cultural reporter, slightly better at making pitches and writing to fit a momentary gap in the discourse, and even while I accept pitches, as a commissioning editor for this publication, I remain skeptical of the pitch as a mechanism for producing literature and literary culture; letters, in the technical sense, or romantic letters, in the historical sense, seem woolier to me, wilder and freer: mushrooms not orderly orchard apples.
Something happened to literature when it became a function of the publishing industry: it started happening less and less; letters gave way to standard forms, to prefabricated scripts; intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and religious passion had to be tamed to please not only editors, but marketers; danger was lost, spirit was lost.
And so here we are: technocrats of the soul, dreaming of being souls of the soul (again).
This is just what language is telling me, and by extension, telling you Reader.
Language is not inert; and if the point of an essay is to be smarter than you, then language has been misused, even desecrated. The appearance of intelligence is an accident, a function of function, or usefulness. Life and language, turning together, should always change each other, and us, in the process. What gives literature in that golden stretch from the newspaper to TV, roughly between 1800-1940 its preternatural glow? I would say that it’s the desperation of the language to arrest the transformation of a world gone mad with technology, money, and power; the collision of the mores and minds of the older slower pre-industrial world with the velocity of the emerging, industrial one; poets still felt the technical means of fighting back, of finding linguistic form, that is to say, transmittable codes, that could alter the progress of the new turbo-civilization.