•

She’s in a convenience store in Tokyo when her father calls.

Her husband thinks he hears her crying. He puts back the bag of candy and turns—she listens, pressing the phone hard into her ear with a shaking left hand, otherwise still. He waits—she sobs once and inhales. Air-conditioned quiet. A severe breath, he thinks, a precursor to something explosive. He walks to her and shuns himself for thinking the moment cinematic.

She lies on the hotel bed that night, fully clothed and unevenly sunburned. He recommends she take a bath, saying, “There’s no harm in it.” She turns away from him, looks out the window. Tokyo looks dimensionless, it’s so dense. Like a sun as it dies.

Three days later, they get drunk in an otherwise empty ramen restaurant and walk back to the apartment. She scolds him for forgetting to lock the front door as she takes off her shirt, her jeans, her panties. He grabs her face roughly and she winces, glad to feel his thumbs on her healing cheeks, anything through the drunkenness. They have sex—he tries to fuck her hard enough to quiet her head but fails, and stops, and sleeps. She wakes in the humid square bedroom and grabs her phone unknowingly, cursed in morning light. She sees the notifications, listens to the voicemails. Her husband wakes when her phone shatters against the far wall.

They decide to return home sooner than they planned. She protests, telling him the two days make no difference, that the funerals—funeral—is planned for the 6th. He calmly makes her agree to go back earlier, “If only for my sake.” She expects them to argue about something misremembered on the long flight back, but they don’t because she mostly sleeps.

He wakes her once to stop what looks like a nightmare.

•

Two weeks after the funeral—taut posed hands, boring pain—he is fired. She watches pasta boil while he tells her. She puts down her new phone and stirs in a ruinous amount of cheese. They trade their car for something less safe and use the extra money for bills. He sells the watch his father gave him for his twenty-first birthday to pay their utilities. They let their health insurance expire because they feel buffered from death—“Statistically totally unlikely,” he says to her, laughing from another room.

Two months later, he limps. She wants to hurt herself for not making sure he took the probiotics their friend recommended, and for not forcing him to be more physically active. “It can only help,” she pleads. “Don’t ignore this.” He apologizes, feigns feeling better for ten minutes. They agree to wait a week to see if the pain subsides, if the limp disappears on its own. She wakes to soaked sheets three nights in a row—his skin harmful. They take the bus to the nice hospital’s ER but another patient in the waiting room tells them about her last bill, so they take the bus to the county hospital, grateful at least for the cooler night air. He works to keep a smile on, losing color behind it. They wait seven hours to be seen—her husband burning beside her, the room full of other wounds.

He is hospitalized and operated on twice. Before the first operation—minor, the doctor tells them—he leads her to talk about what he wants her to do if something goes wrong. She tells him to ditch that tense. She tells him she can’t take anymore death, not from loved ones, not from strangers, anyone. “I will kick your ass if you fucking die.” They cry for an hour, gulping through their honest urges.

She resists the urge to sleep all the time. While he sleeps, she tries to sleep but can’t and watches reality television. While he’s awake—constant testing, a kind-faced torture—she sleeps. While they’re both awake at once, she touches him as much as possible, trying to tell him her love through her fingers, through her unblinking eyes.

During their last day in the hospital, she wakes to his surgeon, a nurse, and the chaplain.

•

She moves in with her cousin, promising not to commit suicide every day over breakfast with a secret phrase. Her cousin’s husband quickly learns what this little phrase means, quickly sees its context. Six weeks later, the husband, after drinking seven beers, tells her they should make love, grabbing her hips, that they were meant to, after everything that’s happened. She locks herself in their master bathroom—which feels to her like a geometrical temple—and sleeps beneath the fluorescent lights.

She moves two states west with the money she received from her family, after all the deaths. She works in a gas station, working the graveyard—counting fat crickets and occasional travelers on stiff fingers. She steals a candy bar nightly, telling herself it’s a sugary token for all destruction. She saves money for no reason.

She wakes when she hears something load. She gets out of bed, feeling strange with carpet between her toes, suddenly another child. She blinks open the moonlight, hoping to see a shadow behind the cheap living room blinds. Hoping for a knock, a muzzle, a shot. She knows it from the news, this new violence. She hopes it has the heart to find her.

The doorknob feels like cold stream water. The door—

She thinks, “I’ll never know what’s worse.”

The question organizing You Can See Everything is on its surface epistemological: what does Elizabeth Holmes know? This question’s premise is that knowing a certain thing leads one to behave a certain way. But this theory of psychology is far too neat to be true. We want to think in binaries, e.g. Holmes either knew in advance that Evans would demand money from A24 for the couple’s participation in the documentary or she was kept in the dark by her duplicitous fiancée, thus we should label her either a liar and con artist or a victim of manipulation and abuse. But consider the Abbot and Costello bit with which Fielder administers to Holmes an ad hoc psychological test. In that scene it seems clear to me that Holmes was not pretending to not get the joke. Of course she had reason in that moment to pretend: pretending to miss the sketch’s lingual nuance would help her more plausibly deny having fraudulently advertised the capabilities of Theranos’ flagship device. That’s the softball Fielder serves up. But Holmes is obviously pained and disappointed by not understanding; she feels infantilized and left behind, and stuck once again between men belittling her. That said, ignorance, incapacity, and even misogyny do not magically exculpate Holmes from having conned investors and the general public. It turns out a human can raise a billion dollars without having mastered the human condition, particularly in a place as credulous as Silicon Valley.

One of the painful aspects of opining publicly in the 21st century is restating basic tenets of sound thinking. Reality is complex. People are complex. People are not types. The tendency to latch onto an acronym or DSM entry in order to feel comforted by a causal account of the entirety of a stranger’s behavior is stupid. Armchair diagnosis from afar is not that different than the frenzy for phrenology. We should remember that Fielder has shown us again and again that the surface of a person usually reflects whatever’s in front of them, even through turbulence. Regarding You Can See Everything’s main subjects, the most likely account is that Holmes is both naive and savvy, manipulative and manipulated—and that Evans is both narcissistic and caring, a decent dad and a terrible citizen. This both/and-ism might seem to abrogate the intellectual tension of You Can See Everything, a masterful personal investigation in the mold of Errol Morris (but one that is also deeply funny). Instead the movie transforms that tension. Sure, we can pleasurably speculate about the guilt or innocence of Elizabeth Holmes, shrinking our minds to fit the Procrustean bed of legal and moral categories. But fun from the parlor game of public opinion runs out pretty fast. A better film than we deserve, You Can See Everything invites us to sit with the slipperiness of being with others, and face how that slippage makes us strangers to ourselves. The film uses the extreme close-up to make us uncomfortable with the grandeur and grotesqueness of the human face. Now imagine the depth and strangeness behind those big blue eyes.

The cultural status of the tattoo can be described by three categories. Each describes a quality a tattoo may evince. The first quality is strength. The second is belonging. The third is beauty.

Minimally, a tattoo proves its host can choose to sit and suffer needlessly. The price of passage from womb to tomb does not include adornment. Scars, of course, are common, and often look cool as hell; the scar is naturally and necessarily prior to the tattoo since bare survival leaves its traces. The line between scar and tattoo is strong. The earliest tattoos of which we’re aware mark a corpse found face-down in glacial ice whose custody occasioned a spat between the Italian and Austrian governments. Sixty-one designs speckled the guy. Researchers made a meal of his bones and guts and linked his tattoos to intestinal infections and skeletal wear and tear. Tattoo as therapy became the working theory for Ötzi, though it’s easy to imagine stabbing ash into your body as a form of spite or protest. The plainest fact is that the dead man did not need to suffer more but he chose to. This is often what we mean by strength: to sacrifice comfort to gods of a higher purpose. The iceman and every single successor has sat still to earn their marks. Long, dark lines distinguish the tattooed from those so blissfully blank.

The word tattoo comes from the Samoan language. Early Polynesian tattooing marked the tulafale, or talking chief, a political advisor and orator deemed arbiter of a clan’s history. Such a tattoo, a half-year ordeal of salt scrubs and daily needling, conferred to its host a centralizing, grounding power. We see here the association of strength and belonging. Like any arbitrary mark, the tattoo distinguishes. Early tattooing bonds one to another and so provokes schismogenesis. The later interpretations of tattoos as testaments to criminality follow this early ordering. We visually bind ourselves in social circles so that our skin may mirror our loyalties. Blank skin belies the depth of our desire to belong. Before the human community became an object of our dreams—before electric networks remade the globe in constant communion—belonging’s necessary byproduct was an Other. But this stance was once wisely defensive. See the early Christian attitudes towards Polynesian tattoos: those followers of Christ refused to refuse to judge and thus forbade strangers from being marked, wanting strangers’ bodies blank for God’s final verdict. Even with contemporary tattooing’s mass appeal, there are those who think the practice inculcates a cultish attitude.

Now consider a man with a skull on the back of his hand. You see the skull and know the man sat through pain to get it there. You might think the skull the central symbol of a group the man belongs to, fine or nefarious. Or, more likely in 2026, you might think, “This guy likes skulls.” The man with a tattoo of a skull on his hand belongs to the large and diffuse group of people who enjoy depictions of skulls so much they chose to inject one into themselves so that they can look at it whenever they like. But this aesthetic preference differs from the notion of belonging. Joining the global group of skull-likers is not the skull tattoo’s primary purpose. Its simple reason for being is pleasure. Tattoos adorn, at least to those who choose to use them. Tattoos imply that flesh can be enriched by culture and thus frame skin like canvas, paper, or stone. While the earth is beautiful before a child draws lines in its dirt, the ground seems more accommodating while conspired with our designs. A natural object adorned is beautiful, but it is also consonant with the work of living. The foreboding majesty of a cavern wall shimmers more warmly once we render on it our common hunt. We mark to make beauty less alien; we want to pay the giving earth in kind. All art is ultimately surplus, an outpouring of energy like the abundant sun’s. Our species radiates art and bodies are good homes for effusions of beauty. Also, again: it is cool to like skulls.

I have been made mad with depression a few times in my life. I have since extolled tattoos as an effective anti-suicide measure because more often taking pleasure in one’s body means less often wanting to kill it; the tattoo is orthogonal to self-destruction’s dull design. My tattoos prove to me that I am strong, that I belong, and that I am beautiful. Such paeans sound pat but not to those who’ve nearly died by their own hand. At least for me, I am dumb and need reminding.

Then we come to the buzz, the scratch, the music filling a space covered in art as blood is wiped away from you and the pressure of the gloved hand returns, the artist pressing down under white light, and you are either breathing or chatting or laughing, the pain a wire through moments of silence, and the shop is either convivial or serious but ideally either way you feel supported, held up by the cushioned table and the steady professionalism of the person you’ve chosen to change you for good, and maybe you look away or maybe you watch the image take shape, its union with your skin modifying it from that dream you took to the artist who then translated it into a stencil laid gently then pressed firmly onto you, and maybe this is one of many sessions, each of many hours, or maybe this is it, some quick flash, a one-and-done, two fifty with tip then you’re out the door, but either way you are on the table and getting tattooed and are undeniably here, in your body, pinned by hurt and art to space and time, and that is what it feels like to get a tattoo.

But I should say more about the pain. I have been tattooed many times. My largest tattoo covers my entire back and took ten sessions of an average length of three and a half hours. I have an ironclad pre-tattoo ritual no matter the design’s size or placement: I eat a steak burrito, drink a big bottle of water, and walk around outside a bit. This is how I prefer to wait to hurt. Everyone’s psychological relationship to suffering is unique, its nature defined by an incalculably complex set of variables. I like to think my pain tolerance is high because I have experienced pain that was quote-unquote off the charts, i.e. that eluded language and mathematics entirely. I’m good at contextualizing present pain relative to that aberrant shattering—but maybe I’ve just got less yowly nerves than most. Regardless, I love getting tattooed and have never once asked to take a break. I enjoy the pain because it’s got, and gives, a good context. In my experience, a tattoo hurts enough to ground me while not at all breaching the threshold past which panic flashes through you. The pain of a tattoo tires me out, but in the moment I’m able to bullshit with the crew at my favorite shop as though we were laughing over lunch. I am also inveterately interested in my topologies of tolerance. What hurts where? Which part is bottomlessly capable of punishment and which stretches of skin seem to scream? I like having maps even if I decide to walk off-trail; a big tattoo sketches my stamina. With a tattoo you can trade some cash for a little pigment and a lot of self-knowledge.

Sitting for a tattoo embeds you in a long history. Like most aesthetic practices, tattooing has been celebrated and shunned as moods and mores have varied. Right now in the United States tattooing is as popular as it has ever been; nearly a third of our adults host pigment. But until this year, in South Korea tattooing was essentially illegal. There are religious communities for whom tattooing is a source of shame and others for whom the act is part and parcel of showing devotion. Whatever its status in a given family or locality, we can say and know that tattooing will not stop. And the practice has other charms. Tattooing is a rare remnant of a cash-and-carry culture; a lawless spirit prevails wherever you flip through flash. This is good and crucial because we should remember that beauty needn’t be state-sanctioned. (Some blood won’t spill on credit.) The tattoo is a small instance of rebellion against what’s given.

Yet tattoo artists often cop to feeling a familiar threat: the homogenizing pressures of social media. Instagram is the de facto marketplace where artists showcase their work. A dial-up kid might have reasonably thought the internet would engender diversity and weirdness, but monopoly-hungry corporations have obliterated the virtual network’s exploratory spirit. Now in a few quick taps you can pull up a global array of ink and feel above it a terrible chorus of quick decisions. This sea of square references can easily overwhelm the inner vision you nurse on the way to your local shop. To be clear: such pressure is not existential; the worldwide appetite for self-modification grows yearly. But the artists I talk to feel priced in to a game they’d rather not play and pressured by an otherwise invisible tide of competitors. Ancient arts in branding hell—a price of our age.

The final consideration is intimacy. After many hours of sitting beside and being touched by someone, it would make sense to befriend them. A simple sort of love naturally rises for the person who has helped you feel more beautiful, confident, and creative. I feel this love for the artists for whom I most regularly sit, Zac and Greg at Shrine Tattoo in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It helps of course that we have a shared commitment to scribbling all over ourselves and other overlapping interests. The fact is: to tattoo is a close and brutal work of care. Tattooing proves the union of love and blood, strength and pain, beauty and bruises.

For most of our lives we have known the risks of writing, but those risks have changed with age. When we were young the danger came from not pushing ourselves to the edge of our abilities, from complacency; if we didn’t try hard enough, we risked our abilities to live with ourselves. Our desperation drove us towards each other and so we made a community. Then our groups fragmented, the internet got demolished into a surveillance op / shopping mall, the consequences of public speech intensified, and domestic responsibilities spiked for most. It seems to me the big risk rises now from silence, from us letting lapse that shared passion organizing much of our lives and moralities, from treating art as a hobby, or worse, as some soft-walled safehouse for the discharge of thoughts and moods orthogonal to the dominant culture; our danger now is the daily practice of cowardice. But you and I have stoked each other’s artistic flames for decades now, or at least reminded one another of the reality of our fire, and for that I am indescribably grateful.

I wanted to write you about a fear of mine. I know you’re working on your magnum opus, a long book comprised by a series of volumes in which you express all the aesthetic and spiritual ambition available to you now so deep into your life. I know we’ve discussed the silliness, the laziness, and the fearfulness of refusing to try one’s hand at the big game—at writing a masterpiece, at adopting once more that youthful ambition to go to the edge—particularly when one can ground that ambition in decades of life and pain and knowledge whose production can only be lived once and forward and thus can only be accomplished with a good deal of time. But what I fear now is something more practical, more domestic, something we haven’t yet discussed in depth. So I figured I’d write this letter and share it with readers, many of whom are also writers, in hopes the act will help me understand my fear, help others understand their own, and help you better respond to it all.

I have recently started working on the longest and most demanding project of my life, a Big Weird Book that I wildly believe is necessary. I do not fear losing the motivation to go to the edge. I do not fear losing the discipline for regular creative work, a habit I’ve been accustomed to since I was ten and a habit upon whose altar I sacrificed much of the free experimentation of childhood. What I fear now is disappearing.

To write, you have to disappear. Practically this means you have to be absent from those who love you. It is visibly and emotionally obvious to those around writers that they are, at least when the getting’s good, somewhere definitively else. Staring ahead at a project that’ll likely require five to ten years of steady work, I am imagining the potential consequences of that absence for those who love me and for those whom I love.

The years ahead promise degradation. A truism, sure, but a forceful one for me and mine. My dad’s got Alzheimer’s and we don’t know how the disease will worsen or with what pace. My mom’s been living with an ostensibly terminal diagnosis for years now. My wife’s parents, while healthier, are getting up there. You know well the pains ahead of me because you have walked with them before. And then of course there’s the body and the money and the mortgage and the rest of the bullshit breathing down the neck of any time left alone to write, to playfully work, to open our selves to the process by which our lives feel most sensible and aligned and brilliant. What I’m saying is this: I’m afraid I’ll feel irresponsible and even cruel for investing so much of my self—my energy, attention, and dreams—into what others could see as some kind of inexplicable and bottomless pit. Why throw thousands of hours at a thing that might only elicit in our lifetimes the sustained attention of a few hundred people? Or a few dozen? The farcical ideal of connecting financial stability to the production of novels remains a joke, or at least for me, since I know now the breach in my sanity said relation tends to crack open. I have the sickness that says I must shit on money if I am to care. It is what it is. Given the declining cultural value of writing books and the declining level of attention likely to be paid to those books, particularly the challenging ones, how am I to justify throwing so much time into this book-shaped hole? Is working on such a project tantamount to a kind of quietist psychosis?

My wife is the most supportive, generous, and enthusiastic person I know. So I do not know exactly for whom I feel this fear. I have rarely operated from a stance of needing the approval of others to pursue a chosen goal; as you know I am a stubborn fuck, recalcitrant and focused though hopefully still kind, my punk parts pumped hot blood even though the gray hairs keep rolling right in. I guess I worry about the madness of a task of such scope. I have never written a very long book, capping out at around four hundred pages—and for a strict exercise in genre, at that. Will doubling the quantity (and at least tripling the quality) of my past efforts feel so different? More urgently, will the people around me keep loving me even if I take myself away from them for so many hours of our limited lives together? Can I get away with it? And if I do pull it off—if this heist goes down and the loot gets fenced and no authorities real or hallucinated catch wind—what will become of me if the book is met mostly with silence?

We’ve talked for twenty years about how writing, the process itself, is the complex act during which many of our most important moments have occurred. And how receiving your published book in the mail is kind of like staring at a coffin. And how the reception of your book is beyond the point, which is to live and experiment on the edge of your capacities and thus to advance your sense of the spirit of all that is possible. But I still fear that god damned silence. And I still fear the quiet betrayals to which people can subject themselves and each other. Maybe I will always walk with these fears. I still want love and I still want to be understood. The latter is a hard ask when the method by which I most sincerely ask others to know me is to read eight hundred pages or whatever.

Anyway. I know you are careful and wise in the blood of all this, and more importantly, I trust you. Please offer your thoughts whenever you find the time; despite the worry, I’m in no rush.

Love,
Ken

When I consider history’s freaks, the tiny class of the truly aberrant, I admire most those who exploded their lives for the sake of love. I’m talking Rābiʼa who crawled across the desert for days, Hallaj who exclaimed his identity with all of creation, Simeon who lived a stone’s throw above the earth. In such lives I read deep experimentation. Here are full souls irrupting into workaday living; here are those who make our story a question; here are extremists whose brilliance indicts the mean. They are the brave children of a singular insight, a flash of experience whose power compelled them to restructure their lives entirely. You see in many of their statements the temptation to rejoin the world and its business, and you see again and again their refusal. In the hot light of intemperate visions, these weirdos cut their cords.

I do not pretend I would become such a figure were my strongest love stripped from me, but I’d definitely go at least a little fucking crazy. I wonder now if the thinness of my tether to the world as many understand it—as a chaotic arena whose competitors fight for scraps of shelter, meaning, and affection—is a product of my misunderstanding the world, of my seeing it too uncharitably. I’ll admit to a long-held grimness. I don’t think we can view our species honestly unless we account for our bombs and blood and bullshit. Am I so willing to walk away from the world, at least in theory, because I believe the world worth abandoning? Do I want to withdraw my love from organized lovelessness? Yes. I almost typed out an excuse for my species’ failures but then I remembered my doglike devotion to the truth. I say yes to wanting to exit the arena, though I do not want to die. At least not as long as my surest love lasts.

I wonder about you out there. What tethers you? What are the conditions in which you would remake your life—or break it?

On my first night in the Oakwood Apartment complex, I found the fish. It was March of 2003. Two months later Chris Moneymaker would win the World Series of Poker and popularize the game for millions, but I was already a freak at thirteen—at least in theory. (By ten I’d read Doyle Brunson’s Super System, all six hundred pages. I could also relay the most definitive moments in the history of the city of Las Vegas. Blame movies.) I walked into the complex’s otherwise empty community room: beige wallpaper, round wooden tables, and a glossy parquet floor were dimly reflected in a long clean mirror, the space sometimes doubling as a dance studio. When I saw five older guys drinking and playing cards my stomach fluttered. I sidled up to them and acted curious. They asked if I had cash. I said yes. They asked if I wanted to play. I said yes. They asked if I knew Texas hold ‘em. I lied. Two hours later I had three hundred and sixty four dollars in my pocket and only twenty were mine.

During my next few sojourns in Los Angeles, I spent my free time playing poker at house games across the Valley. My main table was a lucrative home in Sherman Oaks frequented by actors flush with cash. We’d usually start around seven and play until dawn. My opponents were more often than not dramatic, impulsive, and dumb; I tolerated shouting matches and drywall boxing for a weekly bilk. (The couple who owned the house eventually put a heavy bag and spare gloves in their back yard.) After twenty of those games, I had turned three hundred and sixty four dollars into twelve thousand dollars. I was inordinately proud of this feat, mainly for the discipline with which I gambled. Teen boys freaking out at the poker table seemed stupid; why not expend that passion trying to get laid? When I turned eighteen I played a tournament at a nearby casino, scrubbed out, then realized on the long, foggy drive back home that easy access to green felt could ruin me. I vowed to never play for substantial stakes again and I’ve since kept that up. A few years after that long drive, I also quit acting. I no longer felt the thrill of dissimulation in my blood.

Dostoevsky’s novel The Gambler has a subtitle: From a Young Man’s Notes. Youth carries with it a belief in the boundlessness and plasticity of the world. The first time Alexei Ivanovich steps up to a roulette table, he seems to know the future: “something radical and definitive was bound to happen in my fate.” Seeing the gamblers hustling to bet, his heart pounds. Though he has read “thousands of descriptions of roulette,” Alexei is unable to escape his “plebeian desire to win.” He needs money and has none of his own, sure, but no matter: he intends to play for a bigger stake: to win is to change, to break from the world, to escape slavery to whom—or what—one loves. “It only takes being steadfast at least once, and in an hour I can change my whole destiny!” While this is true for all of us (one can ruin a relationship with a few words, leave home and never return, commit a crime, join a cult, etc.), the young person feels compelled to find their hour rather than it finding them.

The Gambler, written by Dostoevsky in a hurry to pay off his own gambling debt, shows Alexei falling into a peculiar intellectual trap. He believes there is “the semblance of some order” in the spin of the roulette wheel (and often makes statistically inane and gloriously superstitious statements), but as former gamblers know, this belief is a pretext for the actual physical drive: the “terrible thirst for risk.” Alexei, thoughtless at the table, seeks “luck, victory, power” and wants to satisfy those cravings as quickly as possible, saying early on in his tale that he sees “decidedly nothing filthy in the desire to win sooner and more.” He is too young to know that in the pursuit of deep satisfaction there are few shortcuts worth taking; he is too young to know that quick pleasures rarely satisfy. No matter their age, the gambler feels the false promise of rapid psychological change. This is a reasonable feeling, though, insofar as money so obviously determines material possibilities. But as Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov shows, a smart young man is capable of justifying all forms of self-destruction.

The initial reason one steps up to the table soon vanishes. For the gambler, risk soon becomes its own end. This is because the feelings produced by winning big and losing big are equally disorienting, destabilizing, and yes, compelling. The structure of an effective drug—be it the stock market or cocaine—is such that any emotion can swiftly be metabolized by using it again. Gambling provides an obvious polarity, pleasing enough in a world without solid standards, but bettors come to love instead gambling’s wild consistency of intensity. Gambling thus attracts those who want method and madness. Sometimes Alexei seems enamored with fast money, and sometimes he seems serious about changing his life, and sometimes he seems constitutionally at odds with giving a shit. He wonders aloud how ridiculous it is to accumulate money “through honest work”; he doesn’t consider himself “something necessary to and accessory to capital”; he regards money as a crude instrument but states the axiom that “pleasure is always useful”; he has to pretend to look with a “serious point of view”; he lives in an incomprehensible world, one “fantastic, strange, insubstantial”; he almost surrenders entirely to “the comic interest of the coming denouement” (a finale postulated in the middle of the book); and, finally, he summarizes his situation like so: “At times it seems I’m going mad. And at times it seems I’m still not far from childhood, from the schoolbench, and it’s simply crude prankishness.” We could read in Alexei’s lack of cupidity an aristocratic disinterest or childlike incoherence over whom the physical fervor of taking risks sometimes prevails, but we would be wrong. Gambling produces polarized emotions and clear outcomes, but more importantly, it creates the pleasurable interplay between the folly and lightness of fucking around and the thrill and weight of finding out. To gamble is to invest care in arbitrary outcomes and withdraw concern for one’s wellbeing. The river must bring you the full house, the pass must be caught, the spin must end on red—not because those events will bring you success or failure, but because they sanctify and ground the risk whose pursuit has become in that moment the whole story of your life.

Of course Alexei loses it all. Everyone who gambles in The Gambler loses it all. In a sly nod to the reader, Alexei says “that is the ideal thing, when the victim himself rejoices that he is being led to the slaughter.” Later he tells Polina, the woman he mistakenly believes he loves, that “there is pleasure in the ultimate degree of humiliation and insignificance.” While another person can humiliate you, a perfectly efficient way to feel you are a chit in the cosmos’s carelessness is to lose your livelihood—your means to existence, your proof of belonging to the human community—to the plunk of a metal ball, the arc of a penalty kick, or the turn of a faceless card. Some like it cold.

We don’t often read memoirs of the bankrupt. Fiction, though, is the realm in which the wisdom of failure is regularly conserved. Yet works like The Gambler are not strictly, or even primarily, moral; Dostoevsky obviously had the most fun while writing scenes of delirium, self-destruction, and headfirst hedonia regardless of its consequences (see also Dmitri’s last party in The Brothers Karamazov). As Alexei says near the end, “Nothing could be more absurd than moral lessons at such a moment!” Much like the gambler can savor the felt under their fingers while losing their rent, we can read literature while a safe and sane world collapses. And don’t worry: the characters recriminate themselves, as Alexei makes plain: “If they only knew to what degree I myself understand all the loathsomeness of my present condition, they wouldn’t have the heart to teach me.” Funny that he understands the loathsomeness but not the essence or cause of his condition. Why? Total self-awareness denies the possibility of both tragedy and comedy.

By way of a “self-intoxication by your own fantasy”—the fantasy of knowing versus pretending to know, the fantasy of determining your fate versus being thrown around by life’s storm—gambling makes love “move into the background.” To gamble with money in a game is a safe substitute to risking love in your life. The servant Potapych is The Gambler’s Candide, saying, “We’ve got everything at home in Moscow. A garden, flowers such as don’t exist here, fragrance, apples ripening, vastness[…]” But none of the earth’s simple pleasures seem to the gambler to compare with the notion of the clean break, the radical transformation, the flight from all concern. At the end of his tale, Alexei has been implicitly invited to visit Polina, the former object of his servile and violent love. But the young man soon lapses into the delusions which drive him again and again to the table. The book ends with this line: “Tomorrow, tomorrow it will all be over!” The it is a question. What exactly will end? Struggle, care, addiction, loneliness, life? In all but the last case, wherever you go, there you are. The wise gambler is the one who knows himself just well enough to walk away; one needn’t master the soul to get while the getting’s good. But with respect to the ruined gambler, the way out—the fix, the come-up, the solution—is simple. For Alexei and all the young men to come, the next life, the best life, is always in the next bet.

We respect sobriety and its pursuit because we recognize the destructive qualities of addiction, principally one’s enthrallment to a given substance. We tend to look at the disease like depression or psychosis, as an interior derangement which transforms its host into something improperly, or uncoordinatedly, animalistic. We know the pursuit of drunkenness isn’t unique to our species, but this knowledge accidentally entrenches the ennobling of our abstinence. We are the only creature capable of sustained self-denial by way of general principles, and we see in this capacity the thumbprint of a higher order. We regard the ascetic as the resolution of the tragedy of the drunk, and the drunk a story we shape out of the senselessness of animal suffering, and all the rest—those who inconstantly moderate their cravings—the swarming substrate above which true morality rises. At least that’s how the mythologies of abnegation favored by over half of humanity would have it.

Omar Khayyam, the eleventh century Persian mathematician and poet, seems free and clear of such delusions. His chief recommendation: get drunk and stay drunk. Khayyam’s four-line poems, the ruba’iyat, advance a vision of life defined by pursuing simple pleasures and avoiding the traps of intellectualism, self-aggrandizement, and despair. Beyond the beauty of its constituent lines, such a vision might seem useless to readers now, caught as we are in an era whose centralizing economic product is addiction itself. But there’s something special about Khayyam’s portrayal of intoxication. Instead of causing it, can drunkenness solve the problem of self-destruction? Is inebriation the best response to theodicy? And what does poetry have to do with any of this?

To answer these questions, we have to develop a sense of the beliefs Khayyam evinces in his poetry. Life is a confusing, constrained process whose purpose is unknown, if not unknowable. All ontological or existential accounts are speculations, tales meant to blind and soothe, and whose origins are not rigorous discernment but the peculiarities of whoever is speaking. Worse, God is an incompetent craftsman, cruel overseer, or both, having made with this world an engine of “malice” and “injustice.”1 Pleasure is possible, and yet “we are creatures of a single moment” for whom “Time’s brutal potion” is always lethal, and for whom the magnitude of even a supernaturally long existence would be vanishingly small and negligible compared to the permanent and silent eternities before and after our deaths. Set astride our razor-thin lives, we may reasonably say that it is better “not to be.” The ontological premise upon which all ethics are constructed is firmly rejected by Khayyam’s epitaphic poems. We are left to wonder and suffer among ourselves, unconsoled among “the departed and the unborn.”

Thirsty yet?

Khayyam lived in a culture defined by Islamic practices and prohibitions, including the injunction against drinking alcohol. But in poetry he is free of the crystalline rigor of religion or mathematics; he needn’t adhere to any rules or appeal to any grand principles in order to justify the pursuit of “half a loaf,” “a tulip-cheeked girl,” and some wine. Yet his poetry is enduringly strange for a few reasons. While we tend to expect poems to reveal the hidden specificities of being, Khayyam is stingy with descriptions of experiencing such pleasures. His quatrains sometimes seem to imply that drinking is a good in itself, as though the effects of intoxication were incidental to the magical naming of wine as “liquid ruby” and “heart’s blood”; Khayyam often writes as though transubstantiation occurs in us between the imperatives “drink” and “be merry.” In his defense, we could assert that the realities of drunkenness are incommunicable, but this would ignore many thousands of pages of world literature. So, stranded as we are in an otherwise worthless and hostile world, our wellbeing seems to depend on understanding what intoxication enables us to feel, know, and do.

Drunkenness, alongside other satiations of our simplest desires, creates a true form of equality. In our attainment of sustenance, we are “no man’s master and no man’s slave.” This pleasure reveals the falsity of hierarchy. Khayyam disproves the legitimacy of social strata and nations with a geometer’s concision: “One sip [is] worth the realm of China.” Further, we are all “images revolving on [the wheel of heaven’s] walls”; drunkenness reveals the dreamlike projection of reality.

Drunkenness reduces life to its immediate presences: “Here we are with wine, music and this broken-down corner, / Heart, soul, the cup, clothes stained with wine-dregs[.]” Carnality restored, the drinker may easily rejoice in the beauty of a woman, the brightness of a song, or the softness of a patch of grass. But drink’s distillation is more fundamental, as we become “Void of hope of mercy and fear of punishment, / Free from earth, air, fire and water.” This is a kind of oblivion. One that may be reached in life, too, thus outmoding suicide with respect to escaping “existence’s narrow straits.” (When Khayyam subjunctively pines, “If only I could find the door to oblivion,” little did he anticipate the ubiquity of Barefoot Cellars and Two Buck Chuck.) But this reduction is also a break from the “prison of workaday reason,” a freeing of the “captives of intellect and of the nice distinction”; rather than the permanent darkness of death, an event whose consequences we cannot detail, burnt up as we are in a fire without smoke, one can enter and exit drink’s oblivion at whim, and better yet, this collapse of categories rids one of “a thousand sicknesses.” Both men enamored of barrels, Khayyam concurs with Diogenes the Sinope: “To escape from the learned schools is best[.]” The moral exemplar of Khayyam’s poetry is “a waster sitting on a patch of ground, / Heedless of belief and unbelief, the world and the faith – / No God, no Truth, no Divine Law, no Certitude: / Who in either of the worlds has the courage of this man?” The question is rhetorical: a brave life is one lived without regard for judgment—even one’s own.

But drunkenness is not just a process by which the uncaring cosmic clockwork’s extraneous pieces are gutted and cast aside. Khayyam’s essential insight is that to drink and be drunk is to synthesize, to sense and immerse yourself in the constant connecting of seemingly disparate things. A review of Erowid or familiarity with psychedelia affirms the strong correlation between inebriation and the conviction, often transmitted wordlessly, of the interrelation of all with each and each with one and back again. But Khayyam’s strict pessimism, his assessment of the meaninglessness and badness of reality, is contrary to the hippie’s satisfaction with their lack of distinctions. Or, plainly: Khayyam knows death denies us answers because silence denies us meaning. For him, “all that is” is “loss and ruin.” So what communion is possible when thinking and speaking merely “lay bricks on the face of the seas?”

Strangely, Khayyam’s poetry is its most intimate, its most exquisite, when it describes the relations between the living and the dead. “Creative Reason” presses “in tenderness a hundred kisses” on each brim of the cups of our lives; that this same potter destroys us does not eliminate the truth of each kiss. “So many delicate legs, heads, hands” are joined together in love; hate may undo the joining but not the having-been-joined. Khayyam’s poetry establishes again and again the fact of intimacy, the fact of union. And generously, Khayyam’s lines extend that union between the living and those from whom we feel so interminably far, those we say we have “lost”: “Every particle of dust on a patch of earth / Was a sun-cheek or brow of the morning star; / Shake the dust off your sleeve carefully – / That too was a delicate, fair face.” We should be careful with the dead, even in their dissolution: “Tread roughly on no plant, / For it has sprung out of the dust of the tulip-cheeked.” Contrary to the prevailing conservatism of in-group religions, this is practically a Jainist Ahimsa, a primum non nocere based in a sensitivity and magnanimity to the everpresence of life. Though we finally are clay and dust, we may yet protest for the sake of better treatment. With an unparalleled tenderness, Khayyam invites us to see his “father’s clay in every potter’s hand.”

But this intimacy is not limited to family. Those we love and treasure above all, those subjects and objects of shared desire, are guaranteed a kind of immortality, and are guaranteed it almost because of the unceasing impartiality of the cosmos: “Before you and I did, night and day existed, / The revolving heavens were busy; / Where you set your foot on the face of the ground / Was the pupil of the eye of a sweetheart.” At least in the dimension of poetry, we remain desired, seen, by those who have passed on. Their love for us remains; we are beckoned in by the dead, upheld by them, even in our ignorance: “The dust under every fool’s foot / Is a darling’s upturned hand[.]” That same sweetheart presents to the fool her cheek. The presence of the dead in the dust of the living is an offer of love.

This is true, too, of those deemed superior during their brief empowerment, those supposedly beyond the petty ending of earthly death by way of fame, fortune, lineage. In Khayyam’s swaying sight, a “king’s head” is embraced by a “beggar’s hand,” and we can only imagine the beggar holding him “gently, gently.” Even phyla are an illusory obstacle: “See moon-bright faces in the jaws of ants[.]” This is a kingdom properly understood.

Drunk all the way awake, we can say confidently of the loneliness and solitude of hell: “there is no indication but the name.”

We so often hope for our distinction from the other; this is the premise of dominant moralities, at least as long as law has cast the world in its lithic image. We so often fear our separateness from each other; this is the engine of heartbreak. Khayyam’s drunkenness allowed him to grasp the “precious stone” within the breast of the “wheel of heaven.” In becoming drunk, one “abandon[s] selfhood / Freely, like the pure whose hearts are consumed away.” To drink is to consume, but to be drunk is to be consumed. Yet such simultaneity isn’t limited to wine. In sensing the ultimate union of the living and the dead, and in feeling the care with which all are cohered, Khayyam achieves in his poems that “flash from the stage of non-belief to faith”; the quickness of his quatrains allows for such a leap—and leap we must. Though the orders of obedience and prescription, those grim faiths of the rod and ledger, seem to separate us, a simple intimacy is “life’s only fruit.” And that is a truth worth reciting in the trenches.

A young friend recently argued that her peers have no imagination. Afraid, I urged precision: how could she tell? She explained: there are many college-age people for whom the core quality of all positive experiences—with art, sex, psychedelics—is “cool,” funny,” or both. She described people with no desire to dig into the past’s treasuries of art, who engage only with algorithm-served media. She reported asking friends what kinds of clothing they like and hearing nothing in response because those friends have only ever considered a garment in the context of full outfits diagrammed, labeled, and linked in social media posts. “To be interesting, you have to think about your life and you have to read books,” my young friend said, her eyes wide with shock at the vacuousness cultivated by lifelong addictions to screens. While I don’t believe one must read books to be interesting, I know the act of reading helps because reading remains the most accessible method of thinking about things for a sustained period of time. A book solicits the world’s secrets on your behalf. The poetic complaints of a 10th century Chinese bureaucrat can be read and metabolized by a white girl in Idaho, and such a possibility indexes the fullness of our future. The technologies that centrifugally separate our lives threaten this.

By forcing trillions of calculations upon digitized existence, we made stones speak back to us so well that some mistake mirrored silicon for a new face. A few thousand people designed and built a bomb powerful enough to indict the very prerequisites of ordered inquiry, and then did it again, and again, and again, and again, and thousands of times more until the conditions by which most species sustain on this earth became guaranteed only by the murder-suicide pact of a handful of rich freaks. The most terrible truth of history is that it has always felt insane to strictly advocate for not destroying other people. No long-lasting tradition or community has abrogated this fact. Paul’s disfigurement of Jesus’ teachings turns us toward the past: if the body is the seat of evil, why not destroy it preemptively? It stands to reason that as long as war continues, Lazarus cannot wake. Justice and compassion have not yet had their age.

I recently sat in a large room at my workplace and alma mater to witness Cornel West speak. He is a joyful and associative thinker, grand and passionate in the mode of Black American churches, and unrepentant in his love for humanity and its works. He is old but his memory is prodigious. He grounded his address in praise for his mentors—teachers and their texts, living and dead—in order to bolster the spirits of the students and educators in the room; his speech felt personal and generous. He didn’t make one clear argument, a fact which centered the criticism of some students with whom I spoke days after, but deeming solidity and centrality the principal qualities of intellectual integrity reduces one’s ability to understand a person engaged so deeply with jazz, literature, and political movements. The demands humanism places upon us are not so programmatic; they are often intuitive, rising up out of a primitive and intrinsic consideration, for oneself and another. The lives produced by such convictions should seem like music. Today a colleague recalled a college commencement whose speaker said he had met only a few genuinely educated people in his life. It seemed clear to me that Cornel West, or Brother West, is genuinely educated.

I went home that night vertiginous. Rilke’s imperative, you must change your life, felt very present to me, shining and retinal. West is a man who has taken seriously the call to remember and know, and is also man for whom the weight of all that work seems light as a feather, unburdensome, learning a kind of buoying. The next morning I felt the incredible ease of ignoring the internet to instead read a book. I read for hours and hours, freshly recommitted to the activity I loved most as a kid. From womb to tomb is the frame of our life, a phrase of West’s, and it seemed so plainly absurd to fill our brief run of light and sense with the automatic cannibalisms of power. Or, the most concise proof I can think of: if I were alone against the wall, would that death find me with a book against my chest.

Unlike stereotypically emotionally illiterate military men, I believe I understand myself and my past thoroughly. I don’t find this situation worth praising though, because I had very little to do with my self-awareness. An easy and curious relationship with one’s self and one’s past is, at least in my case, a quality cultivated in the good light and fresh soil of a childhood free from abuse. Shit rolls downhill, as the saying goes, and these fucked-up veterans were inheritors of dad-shaped holes1 dug into them by fucked-up fathers. So at first I thought the toad would likely show me nothing new. “I’d probably have some dad stuff, sure. Maybe I’d be forced to revisit my darkest depression days.” I paused and thought for a moment, lit by the TV’s shifting colors. My throat started to tighten. “I’d probably think about my first dog.” Tears rolled down my cheeks as if the ground demanded drink.

I kept thinking about my first dog. She was a Golden Retriever named Jojo. In the self-generated mythos of my family, she was our best dog: the faithful, smart, patient, and happy animal whose presence never felt a burden. She died when she was old, too tired to move from her spot behind our truck’s back tire. Her hip completely crushed, my parents put her down as soon as they could. But I wasn’t crying on the couch about Jojo’s death, even though I could cry about a pet’s death longer than the world would like. I sat with my wife that night and cried over Jojo because I was thinking about the time I beat her.

I don’t remember how old I was. Until that night on the couch I had barely tried to reconstruct the facts infusing the memory because the pain of it was so sharp. But I now think I was about five. Jojo and I were standing about fifty feet from our home’s front porch. She was an adult dog and I was a kid animal, so she was about half my height. The day was bright and hot and we were alone out there in the yard. Jojo was panting and standing beside me, waiting with dark eyes in that patient yet hopeful way of which dogs are masters. Thinking of the moment before I first hit her, I cannot remember what I thought or felt then, but I now believe I didn’t feel angry or frustrated. Regardless of the activity or inactivity of my mind, I swung my fist into Jojo’s ribs. I don’t remember her face but I do remember she stayed still. Then I lifted my right leg and kicked her in the same place. I don’t remember whether or not the kick moved her from her place beside me. Then I hit her a third time, again with my fist. She did not yelp, nor did she run away. I stopped and looked at her. She was standing beside me and panting, as if nothing had happened, though her eyes flickered away from me every other second or so. I’m sure she felt confused, afraid, both. Thinking about the beating now, my cowardly heart says maybe I was too small to hurt her at all, my fists and feet too tiny to register as anything beyond the realm of play, but I know this is not the case. I remember the beating not just for the uniqueness of that kind of cruelty in my life, but because I know that I hurt her. And because I know—this next fact the edge of a knife—that she continued to love me.

I don’t know why I hurt my dog then, but I suspect it was for one of two reasons. The first possibility is that I hurt her because I wanted to see what happened. Young animals exercise their strength against one another, biting too hard or pinning too long, and this aspect of play seems exploratory: What can I get away with? When will this feel wrong? Hitting her could have been a way to sound the depth and span of her patience, to try the solidity of her love: Will she move? Will she hate me now? The beating could have also been an experiment in finding the edge of my strength, determining whether or not I could effectively hurt someone else of my choosing. All these experiments are necessarily cruel because of their lack of communication and consent, but in my case, there is the additional disparity in power between a human and their pet. Even still, cruelty is secondary to the point of such experiments.

The second possibility is that I hit my dog in order to be cruel. Cruelty, in this instance, is both means and end. I could have hit her to feel better than her, to prove to myself that I was superior and that she was inferior—dumber even if bigger; naive even if older—so, in a basic sense, to feel good. That this goodness was at the expense of another creature wasn’t worth considering. Learning is not the point of such cruelty; its aim is mere feeling. This is selfish. Arbitrary. Evil.

During COVID’s peak, I decided to read everything I could about fascism. I wanted to know what the word meant. I considered dozens of definitions backed by hundreds of historical examples and thousands of arguments. At the end of this sixteen month-long period of research, I articulated my own definition. Fascism is the violent maintenance of a belief in one’s superiority. Thus it is an act meant to feed a belief; belief is the ground in which fascism seeds, but violence is what makes it bloom. Maybe it sounds silly or harsh to say that when I hit my dog as a kid I was being a little fascist, but I believe it. In hurting her I felt better than her, and thus believed in my own superiority. I superficially proved in that moment my mastery, at least through the limited tautologies and cowardices available to children.

For the last thirty years I have not stopped feeling haunted by my momentary cruelty towards that good and beautiful animal, my friend. Any time I think about it I hurt and cry, just as I’m doing as I write this sentence. And I know this pain is sharper for Jojo’s immediate forgiveness. If she had lashed out, biting me and drawing blood, I wouldn’t feel as badly as I do. I would view the moment a simple example of a stupid child learning that actions have consequences. But the pure love emanating from most dogs, that simple animal love atop which Christianity’s most challenging moral notion rests, renders me entirely guilty in its light. I had done a needless thing, bringing pain into this world where it had not existed before; the world was made worse by my three bad decisions. Yet the dog stayed put. Shortly afterwards, Jojo wagged her tail and we walked together to the barn. I don’t remember if I spoke to her. I don’t remember if I hugged her that day. All I remember is that she walked beside me the rest of the afternoon, and on many afternoons to follow.

I have no convictions about what follows the end of life, if anything. But I tend to think more easily of human death, even that of friends and family lost to despair and disease, than I do the ways in which we’ve lost our animals. Though I would like to believe that, were I to somehow meet Jojo again, I would drop to my knees, wrap my arms around her, and say I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry; that this would be a kind of heaven.

Writing is a lonely art. In our current conditions of mass addiction to screen-based entertainment and widespread anti-intellectualism, the habit of reading books is declining with time. The act of laboring with language can feel important and mysterious and thrilling, but there are few cultural rewards for such work.

So: what do I want from this? Facile answers—ads and propaganda—must be ignored. Once I find the question’s silence, any sincere answer is a likely a good guide to living. Right now, I want to tell you a bit about each of the ten books I have written.

Solip is my first novel. It is short, dark, and strange. I wrote it after reading contemporary, avant-garde, and experimental literature almost exclusively for six years straight. The logic of its language is more musical than plot-driven; it is often a sickly poetry. Solip is what some critics have called “a person in a room” book. With it, I tried to convey the performative weirdness of being alone. It was published in 2013 by Tyrant Books, the concern of Giancarlo DiTrapano, a late friend and one of America’s most important publishers. It’s still in print.

Say, Cut, Map is my second novel. Like Solip, it’s structurally unlike most literature on the shelves, yet it more often uses patterns inspired by the cut-up technique of the Dadaists and William Burroughs. It follows the recovery of a man who is mutilated while working in a foreign country. Published in 2013 by Ben Spivey and David Peak’s Blue Square Press, it is out-of-print (though I’ve made a PDF available online).

EarthBound came about because Gabe Durham said he was interested in publishing books about classic video games. He challenged me to write the first title, so I focused on the most formative game of my childhood. The game is an oddly structured and surprisingly mature satire of American culture, so I tried to convey its essential goodness while showing its influence on me. My book was inspired by the early essays of Tom Bissell and other works of memoir-oriented criticism. It came out in 2014 and is still in print from the prolific Boss Fight Books.

Eat the Flowers was written during the four years I studied canonical texts at St. John’s College in Santa Fe and worked as a political organizer. It collects poetry, aphorisms, and essays focused on animality, pain, fascism, and imagination. It’s essentially a collage of how I navigated the first Trump presidency. I released it through my nonprofit publishing company Sator Press, and like all of Sator’s back catalogue, it is in print from the excellent independent press Two Dollar Radio.

The Country is a short thriller I self-published in 2019. It was the product of my preoccupation with post-apocalyptic stories and Holocaust literature. Its originating question: Can I write a page-turner with a protagonist who is amoral? I wrote The Country during downtime at work and self-published it via Amazon, hoping it would be maximally accessible to various American dads (including my own).

The City is a sequel to The Country I self-published through Amazon a year later. I wanted to expand the story’s scope and spend more time in its particular desolations. Scratching the intellectual itch of a series was fun. I have a third and final entry planned. Some day.

A Task is my best book. Set in the near future, it is about four Americans affected by a suicide cult. I wrote three wildly different drafts over the course of ten years, interspersing revisions with long periods of research. Inspired by Blake Butler’s novel 300,000,000, the first draft began like this: Three billion people must die. It took me nine years to realize the book’s final sentence. The books from which I stole the most are Madame Bovary, Preparation for the Next Life, and the first novel I completed at sixteen (during NaNoWriMo). After failing to sell A Task to a literary agent and a big corporation, I crowdfunded its publication on Kickstarter in 2020 and pledged to have an hourlong conversation with each of the book’s first thousand readers. Those conversations have been moving. I sell and distribute copies of A Task directly.

What Now?: A Sick Person’s Guide to Surviving the United States of America is meant to be read in an hour by someone in the hospital or by that person’s caretaker. I wrote it to help others practically and psychologically navigate the stressful, dysfunctional, and often cruel world of being seriously or chronically ill in America. My scars are in its pages in more ways than one. It’s available on Amazon.

Blood’s Hiding is the product of my childhood dream to write a fantasy novel. After COVID’s destructiveness, I realized there was no good reason to delay fulfilling that dream, so I got to work. I crowdfunded the book and was particularly supported by friends I had made in the Magic: The Gathering community. I also allowed backers live access to my drafts in progress. Two sequels to Blood’s Hiding are outlined, but despite the genre’s joys, I doubt I’ll return to the work of maintaining a big world and all its moving parts. You can find copies on Amazon.

The Christian: A Comedy is a sad story I recently wrote in response to the following question: What would happen to an average American man if he tried to live like Jesus? Initially I intended it to be riotously funny, but I found its final shape to be fuzzier, gentler, and less cartoonish—though it’s still got jokes. The Christian: A Comedy is likely the closest thing to a satire that I’ll ever write. I solicited a cool Russian artist for its cover and had to pay them in a convoluted, sanction-dodging way online. In maximally American fashion, the book is available on Amazon.

And that’s it for now. Ten books from twenty years of taking my writing seriously. In summarizing them, I feel both proud and hollow: on the one hand, I don’t plan on having children, so they are the work I hope will outlast me; on the other hand, writing books often feels like being a temporary boarding house for subtle yet persistent spirits. It is an art whose creation can often feel like an accident, or a temporary gift. Regardless, because of all this writing and publishing, I have consistently felt the solace of being in a community of writers and readers whom I’ve come to know online and in person, with some becoming deep and permanent friends. Literature has centered my life as long as I’ve been conscious. I believe that writing and publishing are worth the effort, even when the consequences are quiet.

The DHS is a paranoid institution created in one of the most murderous and racist periods in American history, just one year before our government and soldiers began their decade-long campaign of killing, poisoning, maiming, and impoverishing three million people for the sake of preventing some imaginary weapons from being built, the same three million people who just so happened to live above two hundred billion barrels’ worth of oil. And the DHS is the origin of ICE, the most well-funded and now de facto secret police force in history. What we see in Minneapolis, what we have already seen in Portland and Los Angeles and El Paso and Chicago, is the consequence of formerly powerless people being paid and deputized en masse to terrorize communities. (The accusations of the powerful are always confessions.) ICE, whose current bosses are petty and feckless men obsessed with power, is animated by people too weak and too stupid to recognize the fact that their work each day writes yet another episode of American self-sabotage.

We can easily dispense with ICE’s pretense of “policing” when we have now thousands of videos in which their agents look and act like an invading army. Whether or not their cruelty is “legal” is beside the point (at least for anyone who can think more complexly and sustainedly than a middle schooler). The armed and masked men are breaking car windows, assaulting children, raiding schools, running people over, deploying chemical weapons in the suburbs, and kidnapping mothers and fathers and children at whim. These are the men wreaking havoc in our country, not those who have made their homes here after having committed the supposed crime of being born poor.

It is the twenty-first century so we are no longer like Albert Johnson, the man responsible for one of our nation’s most influential and childish delusions, when he said that “the character of immigration has changed and the newcomers are imbued with lawless, restless sentiments of anarchy and collectivism.” In other words, we are not stupid and miserly. Or at least we needn’t be. It is only the losers in power who believe that difference is some horrible nightmare from which we must wake at any cost.

I am proud of all those risking their lives in order to prevent, or at least document, the dumb violence perpetrated by ICE. They are the people whose actions future historians will praise; they are the people worth naming.

is a running project of Blake Butler, an American artist whose decades-long dedication to experimentation, honesty, and rigor in writing, reading, and publishing is exemplary. His style is staggeringly rhythmic, defined in turn by punches of staccato bluntness and long, flowing sentences in which philosophical, poetic, and surreal moods are carefully braided. Come for his essays on reading and stay for his hallucinatory sequence of novels. (And don’t miss his online literary journal WANTED which operates with a delicious simplicity.)

announced himself by way of an elaborate counter-grift perpetrated on social media in which he gently goaded tech bros to buy him a gaming PC and many tomes of ancient and classic literature. Once arrived, donald has published a series of increasingly beautiful and inventive reviews of American banalities—energy drinks, chain restaurants, first person shooters—in which his sincerity as a writer and thinker is repeatedly demonstrated. boat is easily one of the most interesting young American writers working today.

Mental Hellth is the project of , a journalist and essayist who focuses on the psychological pains created by global capitalism and the internet. Each entry feels like a clear-eyed corrective against various forms of self-harm, revanchism, and hysteria—yet Moskowitz avoids the lazy drift to centrism inherent in other projects oriented towards empathy and shared understanding. Mental Hellth is a treasure trove of testaments to sanity and compassion in the 21st century.

compiles the recent work of the British essayist Sam Kriss, a writer who puts an acerbic erudition to good use, subjecting contemporary idiocies to a nice long acid bath. Kriss is also fluent in a literary tradition in which one mixes fact and fiction playfully—a rare recognition that the task of the writer is not to be a faithful subject of the empire of empiricism, but rather to use language to expand our sense of what can be said.

is the home of the American writer Mark Leidner. His poetry and short stories are popular for good reason as they are consistently kind, surprising, and playful. If you read him sleepily you’d mistake his work for wisdom literature the likes of Zen itinerants—and you wouldn’t be wrong. Mark’s got one of the most inviting styles going and is a devotee of literary joy. (Plus he’s a screenwriter!)

is the work of Garri Saganenko, an expat American who currently resides in Germany. A poet and essayist, Garri focuses on how desire, sex, and family history inflect our self-regard. Since leaving the cult of the States, he’s been riding that wave of clarity granted to writers who get out.

houses the writing of Eric Raymond, a trenchant dispatcher from the belly of the American beast (i.e. San Francisco). Few writers are as incisive about the techno-feudalist inhumanities organizing contemporary society, and few writers are as concerned about the wellbeing of artists of all kinds.

is the Substack of Alexander Sorondo, a magisterial profiler of literary figures like Vollmann, Danielewski, and Moore for the solid publication . But Alex rambles more widely than the study of those already known; writing regularly from his post in a grocery store in Florida, Sorondo pushes himself to paint a clearer and clearer vision of that common, messy humanity in which writers and quieter weirdos are all similarly immersed.

Corpstext documents the artful desires and aesthetic experiments of the American artist . M has practiced photography, writing, book design, and publishing for many years, and currently focuses on fashion and self-design informed by the philosophy of Georges Bataille and other avant-gardists. M’s essays are luxurious investigations of the bounds of expression, and accordingly, feel both timely and out of time.

is the hub of ARX-Han, a pseudonymous writer whose novel INCEL has inspired a renewed commitment to writing literature as a mode of finding the core truths of daily agonies. ARX’s output is mostly in the form of reviews and essays, and he is a sensitive and systematic thinker who proceeds with fearlessness. I particularly admire his comfort with a near-scientific and effortlessly networked materialism when it comes to engaging with passages of contemporary literature; his reviews bring a refreshing empiricism to a field so often defined by petty squabbles between middling charismas.

BLOOD IN THE MACHINE is the journalist and editor ’s running study of the bullshit of AI, be it by tracking the moves of its peddlers or documenting the destructive effects the technology is having on living human beings. I’m not as staunch a critic of the products of machine learning (mostly because I believe that most technologies are used wisely only after decades of experimentation), but I appreciate any and all skepticism directed towards a boring corporate boosterism so obviously propped up by billions of dollars of capital and the wishes of various empty-eyed CEOs.

is the notebook of Phil Christman, a Christian writer and professor whose intelligence and leftism stands stark against the dominant cravenness of American evangelicals and their sycophants. His writing is witty and funny and heartfelt, and he engages volubly with pop culture and great literature, yet he is unafraid to call shots and spot bullshit and repeatedly remind us of what matters: caring for each other.

follows Kristen Iskandrian, an American writer and bookstore owner. Kristen has a wonderful way of addressing mystery; she uses clear and direct prose to initiate us into some common yet fraught experiences of interiority (such as reading a new book, or navigating holidays with family). Her work seems warm and relaxed and true, a gentle nudge from a smart friend who knows you’ve got more in you.

the late review is the project of , a writer who subjects herself to a level of rigor under which most of us would wilt. Probing her illnesses and interests and lacks, Kate seems an iron-steady hand in an age whose chaos seems hellbent on making us tilt into oblivion. If you want a view of what scholarship of the future might look like, you’d be well-served studying Wagner’s work.

is run by Naomi Kanakia. Naomi’s a fascinating figure for a few reasons. The first is that she is an incredibly perceptive and thorough reader, yet her long and prolific reviews of authors’ various oeuvres are delivered in a perfectly inviting and approachable prose—in other words, she is an adept smuggler of depth, that current contraband. The other is that she is a deeply engaged citizen of the world of letters, highlighting self-published novels and probing Substack’s literary pantheons and reviving interest in obscure writers working in under-appreciated genres. I really look forward to her book about the goodness of reading canonical work.

Isabel Pabán Freed uses Substack strictly as a newsletter, sending her readers instead to a beautifully pared-down website of her own design. We see in both this refusal to play Substack’s silly metricized games and Isabel’s self-hosted essays the discipline and focus required of any serious and scholarly thinker today. Yet Freed’s seriousness, evinced so clearly in her addressing and contextualizing subjects like sexual assault and political emancipation and suicidal depression and being trans in America, is mixed with the levity of someone who obviously enjoys thinking, enjoys writing, and sees both activities as constituting a full, beautiful, and responsible life. I’m yet to read her fiction, but I’m certain I’ll dig it.

Lastly, and are the two best literary journals on Substack. Zona Motel is a self-styled BROTHERHOOD whose members attend to books published by small and/or independent presses. Its reviews, essays, reports, monthly Zoom sessions, and even its gossip column (yes: a gossip column) all convey the bright and dirty energy of people who yet believe in the project of a free (read: fearless) artistic community; I particularly admire Zona Motel’s not-giving-a-fuckness about commercially propped-up art and the prerogatives of big publishers. The Metropolitan Review is a bit more charitable to the products of prestige, yet the journal also features close readings of offbeat texts and essays written from challenging perspectives. The principal boon of The Metropolitan Review is its momentum; its founders and editors have done a great job of gathering like minds under the banner of putting good work in front of smart people. Professions can still be built off making good on that promise, and I see a long future for The Metropolitan Review and its regular contributors.

To read with rigor is to repeatedly experience this sequence of feelings:

1. You feel awe and surprise. The text feels new, like a miracle attributable only to the ahistorical genius of its author. You want an explanation of the magic, so you decide to read texts that informed it.

2. While reading associated texts, you find pieces of precedent. You marvel at the fact that these ideas were articulated even earlier, at an even greater remove from you, but this feeling isn’t as strong as the original shock of the new.

3. The magic of novelty becomes the magic of materiality, genealogy. The original text first felt alien in an essential sense, somehow oblique to the history from which it emerged, but now it seems like an iteration on good work from quieter predecessors. You feel the facts of influence, context, tradition reestablish themselves in your mind; you feel lineage leak back in to your vision of things. Hungry again, you read until you find the next miracle.

A brief example: I’ve been studying early Jewish literature. I hadn’t yet read the Book of Isaiah, and was surprised by its stark inversions, apocalyptic language, and universal call for peace. Throughout the Talmud, rabbis make clear the importance of communal love and kindness, even when such acts seem contrary to Mosaic law. One passage of the Mishnah is maximally explicit with a categorical humanism in which every person is said to be a unique being for whom the world was created. And historical studies of the period in which early Christianity fomented show the steady practice of poor, rural Jews proclaiming apocalypse and divine primacy. All this served to contextualize the Gospels, showing that Jesus was not some embodied irruption of a new moral order, but was instead a man for whom certain aspects of Jewish culture stood paramount—including a post-Tanakh conviction in life after death—and thus demanded a strict yet simple sincerity. The Gospels are novel in some ways, of course, and are often unquestionably beautiful, but they are not fundamentally new—a fact easily missed if you were to read them after those variations on blunt expediency called Roman culture. Thus reading rigorously rematerializes much of what feels otherworldly about the New Testament.

To read rigorously is to marvel at the solidity of bridges. To read rigorously is to see magic in the wild functionality of a child. It is a process by which a curious person replaces Quixotic enchantment—one in which the demand of reason is darted numb—with a more permanent love. But this is not a complacent or comfortable process; reading with rigor creates an admiration ginned up in the chase, a commitment carried in the hunger to see around the next corner. And we will never lack new shadows whose light we must see.

Despite Eggers’ failure, Nosferatu contains beautiful elements of a timeless, challenging narrative. But these elements have little to do with Count Orlok. Our destructive channeling of sexual desire, and how that work defines history, is terrifying. The project above, a 30-minute edit of 2024’s Nosferatu, presents such a horror story.

nos was conceived by Ken Baumann and Nick Younes and edited by Ken Baumann. All copyrights remain with their original holders; this project is a work of criticism, published with no commercial purpose, and protected by the fair use doctrine. Don’t narc.

The epic is concerned with authority, friendship, society, striving, and death—all bywords for questions we will never answer for good. But a moment in one of the tale’s earliest formulations rings my head like a goddamn bell. Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu has died. In grief, the king wanders aimlessly. Newly challenged by death’s silence, and for the first time, Gilgamesh fears for his life. The sun god Shamash worries over the king, visiting him with a question and a claim: “O Gilgamesh, where are you wandering? The life that you seek you will never find.”1 Two sentences that run through history like water threads through mountains. How does Gilgamesh respond? Four thousand years later, mourning whole futures, what might we say to the same sun? I don’t know. But we can sketch a sense of an answer by asking instead of He who saw the Deep: Do you know yourself?

The epic begins by praising the sole constituent of an old problem: a king abusing his subjects. Gilgamesh is introduced as “wise in all matters,” a man who “saw the Deep, the country’s foundation,” who “knew the proper ways,” who “saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden.” The poem’s events are teased: Gilgamesh “brought back a tale of before the Deluge” and “came a far road, was weary, found peace.” And we are instructed to read the tale of Gilgamesh as it has been carved in stone. The poem’s introduction looks forward to its conclusion and ahead to its future while contextualizing its nature and purpose. In other words, it models a kind of self-knowledge which its central subject initially lacks. But before elaborating what Gilgamesh is missing, we should clarify our notion of self-consciousness. Rather than assume the Delphic premise—that knowing yourself is a prerequisite of the all-encompassing work of general wisdom—we should instead adopt a simpler definition. To be self-consciousness is to conceive of yourself empirically, acknowledging the facts of your nature and your status as one part of a more important whole. Using that definition, is Gilgamesh self-conscious at the beginning of the poem?

The king of Uruk is said to know a great deal about matters external to him. He explores, fights, builds. He projects his power outwards in order to sate simple desires. Like imperialists to come, his knowledge seems to stop at a dogmatic self-regard. Yet the unnamed poets assure us that he will travel, tire, and settle down; Gilgamesh will find peace. This implies that he will decide to reflect on, then stop, his manic activity; self-knowledge is on the way. But for now, Gilgamesh is instead a “magnificent and terrible” “bull on the rampage.” Two-thirds divine, he is nonetheless an earthly tyrant, commanding women and men to satisfy his appetites. He does not know his limits and thus is ignorant of the social restraints of authority. The gods, sympathetic to the plight of Gilgamesh’s subjects, realize they must calm the “storm of his heart,” an image implying the king’s central and total thoughtlessness.

Enkidu is an “offspring of silence,” a creature whose nature differs greatly from that of Gilgamesh. His is the silence of the tabula rasa. Unlike the externalizing king, Enkidu “knows not a people, nor even a country.” Instead, he has been made to “graze on grasses” with other herbivores, peaceful among an unnamed herd. Enkidu lives well—with and for others. Yet for the hunter, Enkidu’s peace is a problem. The hunter is a node connecting murder and desire. In setting free “all the beasts of the field,” Enkidu prevents the hunter from “doing the work of the wild.” According to the hunter, this work is killing. The hunter reads into nature an essential hostility, a storm’s faceless raging. The hunter believes he must kill in order to eat; Gilgamesh has a hunter’s level of self-consciousness. He knows enough to note practically, though not philosophically, the differences between self and other, predator and prey. Animal Enkidu reveals the hunter mind’s suppositional selfishness. Enkidu’s hunter’s father hatches a plan: use a woman to alienate Enkidu’s herd from him. Gilgamesh repeats this advice. Enkidu takes the bait and exiles himself into humanity. Enkidu considers other beings enough to liberate them, Gilgamesh considers other beings enough to trap them.

Sex, booze, bread, and oil subtract from Enkidu a primal strength and add to his nature “reason and wide understanding.” No longer a simple “child of nature,” Enkidu is a man with social appetite. He has enjoyed the drugs for which so much human labor is organized. He works as a shepherd and sleeps again with Shamhat, reaffirming his agricultural nature. Hosting a new notion of property, Enkidu is enraged over Gilgamesh’s “divine” right to sleep with bridges-to-be, and thus wants to “change the way things are ordered.” Agriculture requires a fixed, and so implies a fixable, social organization. Enkidu fights Gilgamesh to stop the king’s “happy and carefree” harvest. A frustrating and wonderful lacuna hides the origin of their friendship; we pick back up with Gilgamesh showing off Enkidu to his mother. Ninsun describes Enkidu as an orphan and this devastates him. Weeping and weak, Enkidu elicits from Gilgamesh his first act of empathy. The king holds his new friend and asks why he suffers. Enkidu says that terror has entered his heart. We are barred from explication by another gap in this “damaged masterpiece,” but can speculate on the connection between Ninsun’s description and Enkidu’s terror. Enkidu might fear returning to a state in which he has no strong human bonds, or he might fear conceiving of himself as being without origin. Enkidu does not know that he was made by the gods to pacify a wild king, though I suspect he now senses his nature as a child of silence. To know true quiet, to return to it, is fearful. This is a terror we will see again.

In the beginning of friendship, we see the slow bloom of both men’s self-consciousness. In asking a question, in wanting to understand another’s pain, Gilgamesh now imagines aspects of reality that he does not, and cannot, innately know. But his concern is still externalized, aimed. His lack of self-consciousness is demonstrated by his proposal to ameliorate Enkidu’s suffering: to go kill a god. Enkidu is appropriately confused. He explains that Humbaba is both fearsome and a friend, and asks, “Why do you desire to do this thing?” A clear invitation for Delphic solvency which Gilgamesh declines. Instead, he states how he will begin climbing a mountain.

Gilgamesh’s sense of self develops further when goaded by Enkidu’s fear. “Why, my friend, do you speak like a coward? With your feeble heart you vex my heart. As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he may do, it is but wind.” Gilgamesh is now aware of the arbitrary nature of action. Such awareness cuts both towards existentialist construction and nihilistic destruction, but given the rest of the poem, it seems Gilgamesh has begun to believe that life is worth considering. Reasonably, he announces his plan to “establish for ever a name eternal,” entering history despite time’s abrasive air. Before departing for this grand adventure, he instructs the city’s regents to “judge the lawsuit of the weak” and “call to account those who do wrong.” In leaving home, our king has come of age. He now exercises enough self-awareness to consider the welfare of others. But as he immediately shows, this self-consciousness is not fully developed, stating that such care is to take place “while we attain our desire like babes-in-arms.” Two steps forward, one step back.

What, if anything, finally eradicates Gilgamesh’s immaturity? Does he come to understand himself fully? The king goes on to relate dreams, solicit guidance, “seek life” (through bloodshed), consider mercy, mourn death, and, finally, to fear. After Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh binges on externalization. He commands all of nature to mourn. He requires his townsfolk to listen to him cry. He praises leisurely murder. He says to his friend’s corpse, “Now what is this sleep that has seized you? You’ve become unconscious, you do not hear me!” Still Gilgamesh refuses to understand the self-implicating nature of death; still Gilgamesh acts before he understands. In a marvelous gesture of avoiding reality, the king orders the construction of an extravagant statue in Enkidu’s image. The work is done and displayed to the sun god, the entity who will in the next tablet condemn Gilgamesh to failure. Yet it is not until a “maggot dropped from his nostril” that the king surrenders Enkidu’s body for burial. It is only at that moment that Gilgamesh “grew fearful of death.” Gilgamesh now reflects on his agony with precision and urgency: “How can I stay quiet? My friend Enkidu, whom I love, has turned to clay. Shall I not be like him, and also lie down, never to rise again, through all eternity?” The maggot causes self-consciousness to irrupt into literature.2 It is the lowliest of the low who crumbles the walls with which power fools itself. Finally awake, Gilgamesh seeks to conquer eternal sleep. He seeks life at the edge of the known, venturing to the bounds of the tellable. What do we make of this great turn?

For Enkidu to become fully self-aware he had to yield to a desire for companionship, a yearning the work of civilization soon follows. For Gilgamesh to become fully self-aware he had to yield to a fear of death, an aversion the work of civilization soon follows. Both men are wrapped in the world’s web amid a silk of instinct: Enkidu to move towards, Gilgamesh to move away. Thus the twinned work of life with other people. A beast made for service enters history from the realm of prey. A king permitted to rule enters history from the empire of predation. Unlike Enkidu, Gilgamesh lacks a foundation of living with and for other beings. It is only the threat of permanent nothingness, the hint of a death too small to note, that channels Gilgamesh’s energy into self-consciousness. Power makes kings, but grief motivates poetry.

A pretty ending, sure—but too glib. We are invited by the poets to have a more complex, and thus funnier, understanding of ancient selfhood. Despite his buffoonish love of violence, Gilgamesh retrieves the plant by which he may defeat death and revive his beloved. By every practical measure and after a journey to the ends of the earth, he has found “the life that he seeks.” Rather than a life defined by particular chosen qualities, Gilgamesh’s ideal is simply endlessness. Such is the aristocrat’s view of goodness: more is more, every finitude a failure. Perfectly, it is a snake—an arch symbol of rebirth; the form of the lowly trickster—who takes away our easy answer to the question of meaning. Gilgamesh sails home, lamenting his recklessness with respect to marking his way back to immortality, asking hopelessly: “What thing would I find that served as my landmark?” In the end Gilgamesh has answered the sun’s question: he is lost and has lost. One might expect a newly self-conscious person to feel broken by such a disaster, ruptured back to the faceless gaze of time. But the poets promised early on that Gilgamesh “came a far road, was weary, found peace.” In what does Gilgamesh take such final comfort? Arriving back home, he brags to his boatman: “three square miles and a half is Uruk’s expanse.” Having failed completely, our first great man points to his playpen.

I’ve been thinking about my father. He is in his seventies. He has been addicted to various drugs for sixty years. He’s been off the hard stuff for awhile, mostly due to my mother’s care. Bob is a man for whom going to therapy would be a sign of weakness. Even when I explained to him how going to therapy helped me not kill myself, his tone betrayed confusion. (Wasn’t I just sad? Wouldn't the feeling pass?) This, too, from a man on antidepressants at the time. We can safely say that self-awareness is not a common province of men, particularly men born in the mid twentieth century. I love my father, and in many respects he’s a smart and sensitive guy, but for him the notion of being completely honest with another about one’s behavior seems alien, self-sabotaging, impossible.

Another friend recently told me she broke up with her partner, a man similarly sick with addiction. He too was wary of therapy, refusing entirely to talk with a counselor even under threat of his lover saying bye for good. During our conversation, Andrei’s Discord post came to mind again: the first generation. Fuck.

I have identified in much of the world an excess of belief. More loosely, and perhaps more accurately, there exists within the heads of most people too many god damned ideas.

Take just one of our two therapy-refusing men. When he imagines talking with a therapist, he likely associates such an act with at least three of the following ideas: a) the inability of a stranger to meaningfully weigh in on his life, b) a compromised effeminacy with respect to talking about his feelings, c) the medical profession’s tendency to reduce people to examples of diagnostic categories rather than respect them as unique individuals, a group of which he is, paradoxically, an indelible and important member, d) his self-sufficiency with respect to ordering and improving his life, e) his problems existing somewhere below the threshold of professional purview, f) antipathy towards “armchair” experts, g) a suspected bunkness or bullshit-proneness of talk, h) the indulgent nature of taking time to talk about one’s feelings.1

And now let’s view “going to therapy” as neutrally and factually as possible. When a person goes to therapy, they talk with a friendly and informed person for an hour or so about their experiences, moods, and beliefs. During that conversation, the informed person might offer advice, or encourage clearer thinking. Afterwards, either the person seeking guidance or their insurance representatives pay the informed person. And that’s it! That’s the whole fucking story! All other beliefs about “going to therapy” are impediments to seeing and understanding the experience for what it actually is.

Let’s revisit Andrei’s dictum with a decluttered mind: We are the first generation for whom regularly asking an informed, kind adult for guidance is not a sign of weakness. All excess ideas have been jettisoned.

Obviously, the problem of superfluous belief does not end with men who refuse to go to therapy. Let’s address an extreme and urgent example of excess ideation at work: the Israeli government and army’s genocide of Palestinians, and the justification of that genocide.

When self-described defenders of Israel are asked to account for the explosion, shooting, starvation, and homelessness of tens of thousands of people, their responses articulate or imply the following beliefs: a) Hamas must be exterminated at all costs, b) Hamas refuses peace, thus must be beaten into submission, c) Hamas holds Israeli civilians and soldiers hostage, thus chooses their self-destruction, d) Hamas members are animals, i.e. are subhuman and thus do not participate in any community to whom laws and rights are applicable, e) most if not all Palestinians are subhuman, etc., f) most if not all Palestinians desire the destruction of the state of Israel and/or Jews all over the world, g) most if not all Palestinians are recalcitrant to the realities of power and, recognizing their relative weakness, should stop fighting, h) the territory of Gaza is ordained by YHWH to belong to the nation of Israel, i) the death and privation of Palestinians is an example of justice served given the murders and destruction of October 7th, 20232, j) most if not all attention paid to the deaths of Palestinians, and any attendant criticism of their killers, is an expression of antisemitism, k) Israel is too endangered a nation to merit critique, i.e. its means will always justify its end of surviving, given that end’s fragility, l) the nation of Israel is the most important organization on Earth and thus has moral primacy, m) war is the only route to peace, n) the published numbers of the supposed dead are actually fraudulent… The list goes on. All these beliefs in response to a question about the morality of exploding, shooting, and disordering the lives of tens of thousands of neighbors. Contemporary politics is a refuge of delusion.

All Israelis—both those who support the “war”3 and those who abhor the genocide—would of course be better off if they persuaded their government and soldiers to stop. Systematic cruelty in all its forms is necessarily self-destructive. Many of the people who understand themselves as “Israelis” and “Palestinians” have beautiful minds, souls, and hearts, and all involved deserve better. But an excess of belief prevents those in power from seeing their situation as it stands. And all those whose lives have been rendered simple by bombs, bullets, and blockades—all those for whom the daily procurement of water, food, medicine, and shelter demands all their available energy, then more—cannot afford the distraction of ideology.

Superfluous ideation is a clever animal’s principal engine of destruction. (A truth well-known among the depressed.) In order to not be trapped in the complex expediencies which constitute the status quo, one must see and think with as few assumptions, with as little prejudice, as possible. Once we clear our minds, the absurd monstrosity of power becomes obvious. Justice and its invitations stand stark in the light of good thinking.

My friend and I were talking about death. My friend said he felt well-prepared for his grandpa, a father figure, passing away because the old man said one phrase all the time: "I'm gonna die someday!" (He would say it lightly, easily.) Such tranquility made me realize, and with a horrible humor, that nearly all the deaths in my life had been fucked up: accidents, suicide, early disease, surprise trauma. Three grandparents passed in statistically average circumstances, sure, but everyone else exited an absolute fucking mess.

Growing up on a ranch meant growing up with death. Trucks hit dogs, horses got fatal stomach aches, babies of all kinds died in the womb. Accidents and illness—bad dumb luck—hold no favorites. All bodies are amenable to terminal error. I feel okay with this as a kid, lest I lose my mind to grief when another pet goes. But I've since noticed that getting older instills in one a softening. Thick skin thins as friends are shorn in time. I suppose this fragility is another kind of exhaustion. Perhaps it runs parallel to the gradual abandonment of kid you's dreams. Either way, animals keep dying and the living are left with memories and stories and should-have-saids, and ghosts often act as dust in your eyes.

What can be done about this? Little. Better ideas, so potent elsewhere, seem powerless before grief—our most stupefying common experience. We can encourage ourselves to have chiller attitudes towards the dead, particularly those who went while sad or crazy or doing something dumb, feeling more forgiving or understanding or neutral or kind, but the absence of one you love is a hard dark hole whose edges brook no negotiation. They're gone and you hurt—doesn't matter what we think about it. Death, at least in secular cultures, is as permanent an answer to the question of life as you're going to get.

What I have found most effective in righting myself when slanting towards oblivion: acknowledgment. "I miss my dead friends." It's a sentence whose syntax is childlike, yet the power of a child's attitude with respect to adulthood's intractable problems cannot be overstated. I will say it aloud whenever I'm feeling it now and accept whatever follows, be it tears, desire, anger, disappointment. "I miss my dead friends." You can say it now if you'd like. "I miss my dead [fill in the blanks]." Saying aloud the truth of your moods helps by distancing you from the pit. You have entered into the quiet history of your life an admission of powerlessness over death, but in doing so, you have gained the immeasurable strength of self-knowledge. To know that and why you're fucked up is sometimes our only meaningful philosophy.

The other trick is to tend to the living. Let the dead bury their dead is an icy imperative, but one whose wisdom is yet apparent. Better to help one you love, and in so doing to cohere reality, the fabric death so effortlessly frays. After all, a kindness among the extant is close to eternity. One can't dodge death's blank ache, but a little love amongst the living can subvert its stubborn order.

I've thought a lot about great books the last twelve years. I started to focus on canonical texts when I enrolled at a small college in which Great Books (note the capital letters) are studied and discussed in small classes. I went in a hungry writer hellbent on theft, intending to pull off a slow but thorough literary heist. Yet crime demands from its criminal peculiar tolerances. Classes at St. John's avoid a few standard intellectual habits; most jarringly, conversations omit considerations of a text's historical and cultural contexts. Instead students are encouraged to focus on the text itself, understanding it first by its own terms, then as an expansion of questions posed by earlier texts read in common. Over four years I came to see that studying at St. John's hones three skills: being empirical, or seeing what is in front of you; listening closely, particularly to those with whom you disagree; and thinking clearly through complexities with which you have no prior expertise. In blunter terms, the school helps people enact a sober and patient curiosity. After graduating, I stuck around via a relaxed day job in which I help students organize their lives. It's not the only show in town, but it's a damn good one.

As I began to closely read great books with other people, a few of my beliefs rapidly dissolved. I realized canonical texts are always much subtler, much weirder, than their precedent reputations. Iliad is about anger and glory and war, sure, but it is also about the tender joint of pride and doubt; The Wealth of Nations extols a burgeoning international capitalism, but Smith strongly emphasizes the literally dehumanizing effects of specialist-reliant production; War And Peace is a kaleidoscopic novel, but it is serves as an elaborate preface to an aristocrat's mechanistic theory of history. The fact of great work's consistent strangeness means many who cite canonical books in a neat and tactical manner are more often than not artless propagandists. Reading great books well banishes their caricatures.

Yet great books do not magically evade the grasp of sound judgement. Great books are often composed of dumb shit: self-contradiction, speculation cast as wisdom, shaky premises in lieu of firm arguments. Great books contain plenty of prejudice and incoherence. For example, Deuteronomy is a marvel of literary construction, blending first, second, and third person perspectives to clue us in to the grand, terrible, and perhaps doomed task of legislating—but it is also a book that prohibits murder while encouraging people to stone each other to death a lot. The messy nature of great books informs my pet binary theory of political dispositions, which is that each person favors one of the following identifying propositions: history is a product of mostly good decisions made by rational people; or history is a product of mostly bad decisions made by crazy people. Regardless of your inclination, I should respond to those who object to reading great books anachronistically, meaning applying contemporary knowledge and values to old texts. This method is often useful, particularly in the formation of one's principles, but it can inhibit the empiricism required of reading a book well. It is a frustrating truth that you have to leave your ideology at the door, at least temporarily, in order to understand and appreciate a text in full. Otherwise the mind—a scared little goblin hankering for weapons—will quickly, or even automatically, form the words in front of you into a cudgel with which you can beat your enemies, be they real twerps or digital phantoms.

Reading expediently is dishonest. But conversely, a quality that sabotages good reading is reverence. One needs only a minimum positive regard for a text in order to read it well. That regard has a simple name: respect. You need to respect a great book, meaning you must assume it has something to teach you. Reading great books with other people helps you practice this respect, since you should also extend it towards your fellow readers. But respect needn't be an infinite forbearance: a person who often says dumb or cruel shit should be dismissed then ignored, and a book that often evinces prejudice or incoherence should be similarly shelved. For example, the writings of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt are sometimes regarded as brilliant and prescient political theories rather than Machiavelli-recycling apologia for the most destructive and boring movement in human history; people should save themselves some trouble and stuff Schmitt in the cabinet of cranks-as-curios. Reverence is an attitude that apologizes in advance for any possible flaw; respect allows one to assess each contribution—to a tradition, culture, conversation—as it stands.

The two essential qualities of a great book are that it definitively influences the future and that it appears to boundlessly reward attention and analysis. Platonic dialogues keep dreamy moralists and our Sim City-minded busy while also appealing to earnest high schoolers who really want to know what really knowing means. And the same dialogues clearly shaped Grecian, Roman, Christian, and Arabic cultures. Since both qualities can only be discerned with time and distance, claims that a contemporary book is "great" should be interpreted as symbols of a strong admiration and/or predictions of the book's fate. This consequentialist definition of greatness also defangs petty crusaders for whom "the canon" represents a totalizing solution to the question of how to be. Hagiography can't stand on a horizon.

Carefully reading a great book requires a rare courage: the reader must first understand then moralize, reversing the common order of the day. This complex act requires patience, skepticism, praise, and blame mixed together in unpredictable proportions. Reading a great book well is more akin to studying an animal in the wild than diagramming an imagined machine. Practicing such a holistic and open-ended empiricism strengthens our "connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation)." As Foucault argues, this connection is the foundation of a free life. It stands to reason that reading great books well benefits the constituents of any living community. More simply: I recommend it.1