Books

The Map Is Not the Adventure: Reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost

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I took a different street home the other day.

There was no great expedition in it. I was walking back through Southam by a route I know too well, heading toward the familiar turn that gets me home with the least fuss. Then I thought: I could go that way instead. I had no errand on that street. No appointment. No shop to visit. It was a residential stretch of town, the kind of road I had probably passed a hundred times without giving it a glance because it had never offered anything I needed.

That was the point.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost - Rebecca Solnit

I walked it anyway. The houses had a different feel. The street had its own arrangement of front gardens, parked cars, brickwork, hedges, caravans, and small human decisions. Nothing spectacular happened. I did not discover a portal in the pavement or receive a message from a crow. I just entered a portion of my own town that had remained invisible because convenience had made it irrelevant.

That small diversion has been sitting beside my reading of Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Solnit’s book is full of bigger territory: deserts, artists, explorers, blue distance, memory, loss, death, wilderness, the strange gap between where we are and where we thought we were going. But it has made me think again about the domestic scale of getting lost. How much of our world disappears because we know the quickest route? How much of ourselves disappears because we have accepted a plan before we have tested whether it belongs to us?

This is not a standard book review. I am not going to march through the contents, hand out marks, and tell you who should purchase it. I want to stay closer to the experience of reading it. Solnit has written a book that gives wandering a form. It keeps setting off from one subject, finding an adjacent path, allowing history, landscape, art, grief, philosophy, and personal memory to change the pressure of the original question. Then, when you have forgotten where the question began, she brings you back to it from another direction.

That is one reason I loved it. It is also why the book has left me thinking about walking, blogging, inherited life plans, GPS, the old pleasure of getting a map wrong, and the part of us that wants somebody else to tell us what to do next.

The human appetite for a map

Most of us want a map. We want the plan, the route, the reassuring sense that the person at the wheel knows where the road is going. We want to know that the job will lead somewhere, that the relationship is on schedule, that the decision is sensible, that our identity holds together when somebody asks what we do.

There is nothing foolish about wanting security. A map can keep you from walking over a cliff. A plan can help you feed a family, meet a deadline, recover from a crisis, or find your way home before dark. I used to love rock climbing and mountain walking, and I have never confused adventure with a refusal to prepare. A compass, a map, some knowledge of the weather, enough food, an honest sense of your own ability: these things matter.

But a map can also become a substitute for contact with the territory.

Before the phone put an OS map and a blue dot in every pocket, you could get properly twisted around. A riverbed might not be where you expected it to be. A path might be overgrown. A ridge might look different from the angle you approached it. You worked with map and compass, corrected your bearings, checked the ground against the paper, and slowly found your way through. The point was not to be incompetent. The point was to be in a live relationship with the world.

Now I can walk almost anywhere with the comforting knowledge that a glowing rectangle knows exactly where I stand. That is an extraordinary convenience, and I am glad to have it when I need it. Yet something has changed. GPS can tell me my location without asking anything of my attention. It can preserve me from the experience of not knowing where I am.

The same thing happens in the wider life. We inherit maps before we can inspect them. Get married. Get a job. Buy a house. Have children. Build a respectable career. Keep moving. Do not make a mess. Do not disappoint anyone. I grew up in New Jersey. I had no idea that I would spend much of my adult life in England, that I would be living here twenty-six years later, married, writing this from a town I could not have placed on a map when I was young.

Life had other plans, or perhaps life had no plan at all and kept offering turns I could not see from the starting point. Either way, I have had to lose the plan more than once.

That is why Solnit’s central question catches me so hard:

“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”

It is an old philosophical puzzle, but it also describes the ordinary predicament of being alive. The thing you need may not be something you can identify in advance. It may arrive as a place, a person, a vocation, a grief, a book, a thought you only meet once you have moved beyond the territory you know how to name.

The dark is not empty

Solnit writes: “Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark.” It is a sentence with the force of a threshold. The dark here does not mean evil. Nor does it require us to treat mystery as supernatural proof of anything. The dark is the unknown: the unplanned part of a life, the territory that has not yet yielded its terms.

That dark can frighten us because the known gives us a temporary sense of control. We know our role. We know the route home. We know what gets rewarded. We know which version of ourselves other people recognise. Step past that edge and the old signals weaken. You have to listen harder.

There is a line in Solnit’s book, drawing on Walter Benjamin, that has stayed with me:

“To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.” I recognise that from the mountains.

Snowdonia has long felt like a spiritual home to me. I can remember stopping on a hill walk and looking out at the vastness around me: old mountains, distance, weather moving through the valleys, and little old me in the middle of it. The endless internal chatter begins to fall away. I am no longer sorting email, rehearsing conversations, checking the clock, or trying to solve the whole rest of my life. My body is on the path. My attention belongs to the ground, the climb, the weather, the next step.

It happens on a long trek with particular force. On the Camino de Santiago, the life I had brought with me seemed to melt off over days of walking. The journey has its own rhythm. You wake, walk, eat, rest, walk again. But the same thing can happen on a local Wisdom Walk. One steep climb is not required. A person can leave the phone in the pocket, skip the route tracking, turn onto an unfamiliar street, and become more available to what is already there.

Camino de Santiago

This is where getting lost becomes something other than escape. It is not disappearing from your life. It is arriving in it.

Adventure with a margin

I do not think getting lost means throwing caution into the hedge and calling the result freedom. The wilderness has no obligation to reward our fantasies. The road does not care whether we have read enough philosophy. A person can get in over their head, physically or psychologically. The old stories understood this. When the hero crosses the threshold, there is no guarantee of return. Some people do not come back because they die. Others do not come back because the strange territory seduces them into losing contact with the world they left.

A writer I once read classified adventure on a scale that ran from harmless outings through to encounters where death became a serious possibility. His point, as I remember it, was that the best adventures sit somewhere near the middle: difficult enough to demand all your attention and skill, dangerous enough to heighten the senses, yet still within your capacity to navigate if you stay awake.

That feels right to me. I have always liked adventure with some control parameters. The best edge is often where you do not know the outcome but you have enough resourcefulness to meet it. You know what to do when you do not know what to do.

That phrase names a kind of personal power. Not power over other people. Not the inflated confidence of somebody selling a system online. Personal power means sovereignty over your own attention and behaviour when the familiar plan stops working. You cannot master the unknown. The unknown keeps moving. The minute you enter a new territory and learn its shape, another edge appears beyond it.

The skill lies elsewhere. You build enough inner authority to cross the next boundary without handing your life over to panic, imitation, or the first confident person who claims to have the answer.

Our culture has made that last temptation very easy. Open YouTube, Instagram, X, or any platform where advice wears a clean shirt and a polished thumbnail, and someone will explain the route. Start this business. Follow this system. Escape the nine-to-five. Become the person you were meant to be. The internet can teach us almost anything. It can also make it look as if everybody else has solved the riddle of being alive.

I know people whose online presence makes their life look assembled, evolved, and complete. Behind the scenes, they are as confused as the rest of us. That is not a moral failure. It is simply a reminder that presentation is not knowledge. A neat map can be an advertisement for certainty rather than evidence of it.

I wrote recently about the story that wants you at your desk, the inherited script that tells us obedience, legibility, and future reward are the only adult forms of life. Solnit’s book belongs beside that question. Getting lost can be a refusal of the approved diagram. It can also be a gentler act: putting the diagram down long enough to see whether another life is trying to make itself known.

A book that wanders on purpose

Solnit does not merely argue for this kind of openness. She writes it.

That is what makes A Field Guide to Getting Lost more than an elegant collection of observations about uncertainty. The chapters are mini explorations. They set out with one pressure and return by a route you could not have predicted. She moves through art, landscape, personal memory, historical material, colour, desire, loss, and the particular lives of people who have lived close to absence. The diversions do not feel like ornaments. They change what the central idea can mean.

I love writing that works this way. I love the moment when a book gives you a point of departure, then lets the mind travel. A remembered scene opens into history. A journey through a place opens into literature. A philosophical question gets returned to the body, the room, the road, a human voice. You make detours, yet the detours are the actual route.

Robert Twigger’s How to Be a Man in the Lousy Modern World does something similar, running the account of a man living through pregnancy and impending fatherhood alongside an inquiry into masculinity. In Robert D. Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, travel through actual ground continually opens out into cultural memory, politics, history, and books, before bringing the reader back to a road, a border, a city, a body in motion. Christopher Ross’s Tunnel Vision: Journeys of an Underground Philosopher has that same ability to make place and thought speak to each other.

This is the kind of prose I want to keep learning from. It does not use the world as scenery for a thesis. It lets the world interrupt the thesis.

Solnit’s “blue” sections are part of that method. She has described needing more space as the book developed, and blue becomes more than a way of extending the work. It becomes distance, longing, sky, water, the colour that keeps receding as you approach it. The book gains room to breathe. It can follow a thought past the point where a more efficient writer would close the paragraph and move on.

That may sound indulgent to somebody trained to judge every page by speed and utility. I think it is a form of intellectual hospitality. Solnit gives the reader enough room to have associations of their own. She does not lock every door behind her.

For a writer, this is liberating. An essay does not have to behave like a corporate presentation with a conclusion waiting at the bottom. It can be an ecology. It can wander without becoming vague. It can keep faith with a question long enough for unexpected companions to arrive.

The hearth after the wandering

This is also why the book has refreshed something in my sense of blogging.

I have often thought of myself as an explorer of minds and territories, a pathfinder who goes out to see what is there and comes back to tell the story. The exploration can happen in mountains, in a local town, on the web, through hypertext, in a book, on a long walk, in the odd archive trail that begins with one note and ends somewhere nobody could have planned.

The blog is where I come back.

When I was podcasting more heavily, I used to think of the podcast as a twenty-first-century campfire. The blog has that function too. It is the hearth. You return from the walk or the rabbit hole, sit down among other people, and say: I found this. I do not know whether it is useful to you, but it altered something in me.

That is a different relationship to writing from the one offered by the modern advice economy. The blogger does not have to be the person who possesses the final map. The blogger can be the person who leaves a trace. A map made after wandering is not the same as an instruction manual. It can say where somebody has been without pretending that another person should retrace every footstep.

The hope is not that readers will adopt my worldview. I would rather the piece loosened something. I would rather a reader stopped and wondered: Where did this belief come from? Whose plan am I carrying? What might happen if I took a different turn? Then the comments become part of the work. I share an experience; another person shares theirs; both of us see a little farther. The blog becomes closer to Socrates in the marketplace than a stage where the expert delivers answers.

This is why Narrative Alchemy begins with attention to the stories already running inside us. Stories are code. They organise what we notice, what we fear, what feels possible, and the kinds of future we can imagine. A belief can act like a route we have walked so often that it becomes invisible.

The breadcrumb exercise is one way of stepping off it. Choose a belief and ask where it came from. Who gave it to you? What experience fixed it in place? What purpose did it once serve? Then ask the more awkward question: does it still belong to you? The work is not to fling away every old belief in a fit of rebellion. Some maps contain hard-won wisdom. The work is to notice that a map is a map, not reality itself.

A small field guide of your own

Solnit’s book has not persuaded me to seek danger for its own sake. It has reminded me that I do not need a grand expedition in order to practise an openness to the unknown.

Walk a street in your own town that has no obvious use. Leave the direct route to the high street and take the lane you have never taken because nobody you know lives there and nothing waits for you at the end. Drive by a road you normally ignore and take it, if it is safe to do so. Let the usual calculation of time and efficiency relax for an hour.

Or stay at home. Sit in the garden, make coffee, and follow one belief back through its breadcrumbs. “I have to be sensible.” “I cannot make a living from that.” “People like me do not do that.” “I should know what I am doing by now.” Do not attack the belief. Ask it where it came from. It may have arrived through school, family worry, a humiliation, a reward, an old act of love, a world that has changed around you. Knowing its source does not settle the matter, but it can give you back a little choice.

That is enough for a beginning. You do not have to get lost in a desert. You do not need to throw away the map, the job, the marriage, or the responsibilities that make a life possible. You only need to find one place where the map has become too sure of itself and loosen your grip.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost is an excellent treatise on getting lost because it never turns lostness into a cheap slogan about reinvention. It knows the dark is real. It knows that loss can hurt, that uncertainty has consequences, that the world remains larger than our desire to explain it. Yet it keeps the door open.

Read it if you want a book that will not rush to rescue you from the questions it raises. Read it if you like prose that thinks by wandering, circling, and returning. Read it if you have spent too long following a route because it is the route you know.

Then go out. Take the wrong turn on purpose. Or sit quietly with the belief you have never questioned. You may not find the thing you are looking for. That is the old problem. You may find the thing whose nature you did not yet know.

And that may be where you begin to find yourself.

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Better Than Sex, 30 Years Later: Revisiting the Book That Broke My Brain

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07:39. I’m in my lounge chair drinking black coffee, the morning still soft around the edges.

For my morning read today, I’ve been revisiting Hunter S. Thompson, starting with the book that began my literary love affair with his work: Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie.

There’s something about Hunter that still gets under my skin in the best possible way. He doesn’t simply report the story. He enters it. He becomes part of the event he’s describing. He’s not pretending to stand outside the madness with clean hands and a neutral expression. He is in the room, at the bar, in the campaign bus, and in the hotel lobby at 3 a.m., feeling the paranoia, the electricity, the absurdity, the rot, the strange comedy of American public life.

That’s what has always drawn me to first-person nonfiction. I like writing where the writer is in the story. Not as some inflated main character, but as a lens. A body. A nervous system. A witness with fingerprints.

It’s why I admire Hunter. It’s why I’ve always loved literary travel writing, diaries, notebooks, memoirs, and blogs. I like seeing the world through other people’s eyes, especially when those eyes are alert, damaged, amused, haunted, hungry, and alive.

Maybe that’s the deeper pull. I don’t just want information about the world. I want contact. I want the felt sense of being there. I want to know what the dust smelled like, what the coffee tasted like, what the light was doing on the wall, and what strange little thought passed through the writer’s mind while everyone else was looking at the obvious thing.

And beneath that, if I’m honest, is my own old desire: to be a participant in life, not merely a watcher from the sidelines.

I have to confess, I’ve been on the bench for a while (probably since Covid).

Not completely. I still walk. I still notice things. I still make my little field reports when I’m out and about. But I’m certainly not out in the world in the way I was when I was younger. Back then, being outside was not a lifestyle choice or some wellness prescription. It was the default condition of being alive. Nature was not a retreat from life. It was life. I went further afield. I climbed new mountains. I wandered through new bits of countryside. I chased the map outward.

I blame the internet.

Of course, they say a poor craftsman blames his tools, and they’re probably right. The internet didn’t chain me to the chair. I walked willingly into the glowing cave.

But as someone who gets intoxicated by knowledge-seeking, the internet is a particularly dangerous drug. It gives me exactly the thing I have always craved: endless corridors of thought, endless doors, endless shelves.

As a teenager, I used to wander the library stacks for hours. No subject was off limits. Philosophy, science, art, mythology, psychology, history, music, strange technical manuals, books with titles I barely understood. I loved the sheer possibility of it all. I’d leave with stacks of books, as if I were smuggling worlds under my arm.

So of course the internet became both a blessing and a curse.

Now I can explore the world without leaving my chair. I can roam through archives, maps, lectures, essays, documentaries, old interviews, obscure forums, digital museums, scanned manuscripts, and now, with AI, I have something like a portable Library of Alexandria sitting at my fingertips, awake whenever I call.

It’s astonishing.

It’s also a trap.

Because if you’re wired the way I’m wired, the search itself becomes the journey. You can spend the whole morning reading about mountains and never feel wind on your face. You can watch ten videos about someone else walking through a forest and never put on your boots. You can collect knowledge about aliveness while slowly becoming less alive.

That’s the part I’m trying to reckon with.

My Wisdom Walks are one way I force myself away from the screens. They get me out of the chair and back outside, mud, birdsong, breath, distance, and bodily time. But even there, I notice the limits I’ve allowed to creep in. Most of these walks are local. Useful, yes. Grounding, yes. But not quite the same as the old impulse to go further, to find a new ridge, a new stretch of river, a new patch of countryside where the map opens.

Back in the day, I tried to live by the North Face ethos: never stop exploring.

And there was another war cry too, one I picked up from outdoor culture and carried like a small personal commandment:

Get outside. Stay outside.

That phrase still has charge for me. It feels less like advice and more like a spell I forgot I knew.

Lately, I’ve been trying to rebuild my life around that old rhythm. I’ve created a mobile workflow: smaller cameras, a portable podcast setup, the iPad, or sometimes just the phone. The theory is simple enough: everything I can do at a desk, I can do outside.

In theory, this is beautiful. The barefoot philosopher’s office is wherever he can sit, walk, speak, photograph, think, and write. A bench. A woodland edge. The back of the car with the boot open. A picnic table. A patch of grass. A café after a long walk.

But then comes the catch.

WiFi.

So much of my life and work depends on having a decent internet connection. Uploading, sharing, checking, filing, syncing, posting, researching, responding, confirming. The whole apparatus of modern work hums invisibly behind the scenes, and I’ve let that hum dictate how far and how often I roam.

It’s ridiculous, really. I know it is.

Yesterday, while roaming Wappenbury Wood, I found myself running up against this exact absurdity. I had paid for two hours of parking. I wanted to extend my time in the woods, but I couldn’t get a connection, so I couldn’t extend my parking through the RingGo app. There I was, surrounded by trees, wanting to remain in the place, and being tugged back by a parking meter I couldn’t speak to because the little rectangle in my hand couldn’t find a signal.

Better Than Sex

First-world problems, I know.

But also a sign.

Some might say ‘good’. If you’re outside, be outside.

And part of me agrees. Deeply. There’s wisdom in not turning every walk into a production. There was a time when I lost my way with that too. I spent more time looking at the world through a device than experiencing the place through my own eyes. I’d be composing the post before I’d even received the moment. I’d be thinking about the share while the living thing was still happening in front of me.

Thankfully, I’ve mostly kicked that habit.

I don’t bother processing photos while I’m out. I don’t feel the need to livestream the experience. I’m learning to let the walk be the walk. The camera comes out when it needs to. The note gets captured via my Plaud voice-note device. But I’m no longer trying to turn every outing into a broadcast.

That feels like progress.

But there’s another habit underneath it, and maybe this one is harder to break: the 9-to-5 mindset. The productivity culture mindset. The idea that if I’m away from the desk, I’m somehow not working. The idea that roaming, wandering, reading under trees, following curiosity, and letting the body move through the landscape are somehow indulgences rather than part of the work itself.

And this is where I need to remember what I actually believe.

Being outside is my work.

Or at least it is part of the working condition I’ve spent years trying to build my life around.

I’m not trying to become more efficient at sitting under artificial light and moving tasks from one column to another. I’m trying to build a life where thinking, walking, writing, noticing, reading, photographing, speaking, and making are woven together. A life where work is not a cage I return to after being alive, but a form of aliveness itself.

That doesn’t mean abandoning responsibility. It doesn’t mean pretending money, deadlines, clients, admin, and logistics don’t exist. The parking app still wants paying. The email still needs answering. The file still needs sending.

But it does mean the old industrial rhythm cannot be the master rhythm.

There is another rhythm available.

Harold Jarche’s PKM model comes to mind here: seek, sense, share.

I’ve always liked the simplicity of that. It gives shape without becoming a cage.

Seek: go out, read, wander, notice, collect, and encounter.

Sense: sit with what has been gathered, make meaning, connect it to the living archive, let the pattern reveal itself.

Share: publish, speak, teach, post, make the field note public, and offer the insight back to the commons.

Wappenbury Wood

Maybe the trick is to stop trying to do all three at once.

When I’m outside, perhaps I’m mostly in seek mode. I’m gathering. Walking. Looking. Letting the place work on me. Letting the body become an instrument again. I don’t need to process everything on the spot. I don’t need to share immediately. I don’t need to prove the walk was productive by turning it into output before I’ve even left the woods.

Then, later, somewhere with coffee and a signal, I can sense and share.

This might be the rhythm I’m looking for.

Not desk versus outdoors.

Not internet versus nature.

Not productivity versus wandering.

But phases. Movements. Breath.

Inhale: go out.

Hold: notice what the world is saying.

Exhale: write, speak, share.

The internet then becomes part of the cycle rather than the whole ecosystem. AI becomes a thinking companion, not a substitute for experience. The archive becomes a living field, not a bunker. The phone becomes a tool, not the eye I see through.

And the walk becomes what it has always wanted to be: a method.

The barefoot philosopher does not need to reject the digital world. That would be too simple, and frankly, false. My life is tangled with the web. My work is made of language, links, fragments, feeds, archives, posts, and conversations across distance. I am a child of the library and the internet. I don’t want to give that up.

But I do need to renegotiate the terms.

The chair is good. The coffee is good. The screen is useful. The infinite library is a miracle.

But the world is not inside the machine.

The world is outside, being rained on. It’s in the mud underfoot, the old trees at Wappenbury, the cold air in the lungs, the hill not yet climbed, the lane not yet followed, the bird I can’t name calling from somewhere beyond the path.

Hunter got into the story.

That’s what I’m hearing this morning.

Not just read about the madness. Enter the room.

Not just study life. Participate.

Not just watch other people’s field reports from the glowing cave. Make my own.

Get outside. Stay outside.

Seek. Sense. Share.

Find the rhythm again. The barefoot philosopher’s rhythm.

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I finished Spotify the Gnostics, Here’s the First Church of David Bowie.

The first part was a nostalgic trip through the 80s. I enjoyed that; however, I bought the book for the second part, Sean Manseau’s Phonomancy work. a bit disappointed. Read like a drug-fuelled psychodelusional trip through his own ego consciousness.

Maybe my discomfort stems from me seeing more of myself in Manseau than I care to admit.

Shadow gold.

Screenshot

A Lamp at the Doorway

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I finished Richard Cavendish’s The Black Arts this week.

Not in the heroic readerly sense of having sat down and consumed it cleanly from first page to last, pencil in hand, scholar’s lamp burning into the night. I have been reading it on and off for a few months. Picking it up, putting it down, returning to it when the mood came back round. Some books ask for that kind of reading. They don’t want to be finished quickly. They want to become part of the weather for a while.

My copy is the 50th anniversary edition. I bought it after seeing Cavendish turn up in Mitch Horowitz’s Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of the Mind. Horowitz quotes him early, in a passage about the Cabalists and the Gnostics trying to answer the old religious questions: evil, suffering, mercy, the infinite God and the finite world.

A Lamp at the Doorway

That was enough.

Some books arrive because another book opens the door. This was one of those. I was already wanting to increase my occult knowledge. No theatrical hunger for a shelf full of grimoires and an air of candlelit importance. The occult keeps appearing in the territories I already work in: narrative, belief, imagination, trance, symbol, transformation, and the strange plasticity of the self. Cavendish looked like the right kind of guide for that moment. A historian, not an evangelist. Interested, informed, steady. Close enough to take the material seriously. Distant enough not to demand that I join anything.

The Field, Surveyed

The Black Arts is a survey. That’s its strength and its limitation.

Cavendish moves across the field rather than burrowing permanently into one chamber. The occult worldview, names and numbers, the Cabala, alchemy, astrology, ritual magic, witchcraft, demonology, devil worship, spells, charms, necromancy. He gives you the architecture, the correspondences, and the old symbolic machinery. He doesn’t try to initiate you. He maps.

For what I needed, that was perfect.

I read the opening chapters most intently. Chapter 1, “The World of the Black Magician,” sets out the worldview: the magician standing inside a cosmos where visible things are threaded with invisible correspondences. Chapter 2, “Names and Numbers,” goes straight into one of the oldest intuitions of magical thought: that names are not labels pasted onto reality after the fact. Names carry force. Numbers carry structure. Language and quantity become ways of touching the hidden order of things.

Chapter 3, “The Cabala and the Names of Power,” had my full attention.

That isn’t surprising. The Cabala sits exactly where my interests tend to gather: language, cosmology, psychology, symbol, power, divine names, letters as living forces. It treats text as more than text. Letters become ontological furniture. Names become operations. The world is not merely described by language. It is, in some sense, articulated by it.

That lands differently now.

The old magical intuition that words participate in reality no longer belongs only to temples, grimoires, and prayer. Type a sentence into a box and an image appears. Type another and code runs. Type another and a voice speaks back. The prompt is the brushstroke. Text has become technically generative as well as spiritually and psychologically generative.

Cavendish wasn’t writing for that world.

He helps explain why it feels ancient.

The Stone and the Elixir

I paid particular attention to Chapter 4, “The Stone and the Elixir.”

Alchemy has always had a different pull for me. It refuses to stay in one category. It is chemistry, and it is not chemistry. It is a spiritual practice and it is not reducible to spiritual metaphor. It is metallurgy, medicine, cosmology, theatre, psychology, and obsession. The stone and the elixir are both material dreams and imaginal necessities.

This is where Cavendish’s historian’s approach works well. He doesn’t try to turn alchemy into a tidy self-help metaphor. He lets it remain strange. The apparatus is there: sulphur, mercury, salt, metals, colours, furnaces, vessels, stages, transmutation. The psychic charge comes through because the historical material is allowed to keep its density.

Jung is unavoidable here, though not as a way of explaining alchemy away. That is the lazy move. Jung saw in alchemy a symbolic record of the psyche trying to perceive its own transformations. The alchemist thought he was working on matter. He was also working on himself. The furnace was outside and inside. The vessel was outside and inside. The blackening, whitening, reddening, dissolution, conjunction, death, and gold were not simply chemical fantasies. They were images of psychic process.

Hillman complicates this further, which is why I keep returning to him. The mythic imagination doesn’t treat these images as coded messages waiting to be translated into psychological prose. It lets the image have its own life. The stone is not “really” the integrated self. The elixir is not “really” personal growth. The image is not a disguise for an idea. The image is the event.

Better to let the symbols do their work.

The Chapters I Skimmed

I skimmed the chapters on astrology, ritual magic, and the worship of the Devil.

Astrology interests me as a symbolic grammar of time and temperament, but it isn’t where my attention wanted to linger in this reading. Ritual magic interests me more, especially the apparatus of circle, triangle, name, command, protection, and imagination, but I have been working that thread elsewhere. Devil worship, or the Christian demonological imagination around it, felt more historically useful than personally magnetic.

This is the pleasure of a survey. The reader moves through according to their own heat map. Cavendish lays out the territory. The attention catches where it catches.

Mine caught on names, numbers, Cabala, alchemy, symbolic systems, and the question underneath all of them:

What is the mind doing when it makes a magical world?

Belief as a Tool

Like Cavendish, I don’t feel the need to pass judgement over the material.

Judgement is often the least interesting move available. The better question is not “Do I believe this?” but “What does this belief make possible?”

That is the chaos magician in me speaking.

Belief is a tool.

This principle has become one of the most useful bridges between my occult interests and my NLP background. NLP, at its best, treats belief as structure rather than doctrine. A belief is not only a proposition about reality. It is an operating instruction. It shapes attention, possibility, posture, memory, emotion, and behaviour. Change the belief, and the world does not necessarily change in some crude external way. Instead, the field of available action changes. The person changes. The perceived world changes with them.

Chaos magick says something adjacent, with more smoke and sharper edges. Belief can be adopted, intensified, performed, exhausted, or discarded. The magician works with belief rather than kneeling permanently before it.

Read through this lens, Cavendish becomes something else. Across the book, the West appears as a long sequence of symbolic technologies: divine names, planetary hours, talismans, numbers, metals, spirits, circles, images, rites, words of power. These are not random curiosities. They are ways human beings have organised attention and desire in order to meet the invisible pressures of life.

Fear. Hope. Death. Sex. Power. Suffering. Fate. Luck. Illness. Love. God. The future.

The occult is one of the ways the mind speaks when ordinary language is too thin.

The Western Mind Dreaming Itself

What interests me most is how these forms of occult thought manifest in the cultural identity of the West.

The West likes to tell a story about itself as rational, secular, progressive, and disenchanted. Then it keeps producing astrology columns, tarot decks, magical orders, conspiracy cosmologies, prosperity metaphysics, ritual revivals, angel books, demonologies, occult novels, superhero mythologies, and self-help systems built around intention, visualisation, and the creative power of thought.

The enchantment didn’t disappear. It changed costume.

Cavendish’s book is useful because it shows some of the older costumes. The magician, the Cabalist, the alchemist, the astrologer, the witch, the necromancer, the demonologist. Some of these figures are historical. Some are polemical inventions. Some are cultural projections. All of them belong to the Western imagination.

Bring Jung into the room, and the occult starts to look like a symbolic archive of psychic process. Bring Hillman in, and it becomes even richer: a theatre of images through which the soul thinks, rather than a set of errors waiting to be corrected by modern psychology. The gods, demons, metals, planets, angels, stones, elixirs, numbers, and names are not dead beliefs. They are imaginal forms. The mind working to understand itself.

The cultural mind. The myth-making mind. The frightened and desiring mind that can’t bear a flat world and so keeps discovering depth, even when it has officially declared depth unavailable.

A Historian With a Lamp

Cavendish’s value is not that he settles the occult.

Nobody does. The occult is partly made of what refuses settlement.

His value is that he stands at the doorway with a lamp. He shows the rooms. He names the furniture. He gives enough history to keep the reader from floating away into pure fantasy, and enough sympathy to keep the material from being flattened into foolishness.

The book is dated. Of course it is. The Christian framing is obvious in places, especially around witchcraft and devil worship. Some categories feel compressed. Some historical claims need companion reading. Ronald Hutton for witchcraft history. Frances Yates for Renaissance hermeticism. Hanegraaff or Faivre for Western esotericism as a proper academic field. And 1967 is inside the prose, unavoidably.

None of that makes it the wrong place to start. The architecture is still standing. The lamp still works.

The 50th anniversary edition sits on my shelf now, next to Horowitz, next to Hillman, next to the others that arrived because a different book sent them. What stays with me most is the feeling that Cavendish isn’t really writing about a world that has passed. He’s writing about a layer of the mind that the modern West spent three centuries trying to cover over. The grimoire and the language model are asking the same question.

What happens when you say the name?

Source Notes

Mitch Horowitz, Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of the Mind.

Richard Cavendish, The Black Arts, 50th anniversary edition.

Wrestling with Angels

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I came across the phrase while reading Spotify the Gnostics, Here’s the First Church of David Bowie by Sean Manseau.

Wrestling with angels.

Some phrases arrive carrying more weight than their literal meaning. They feel older than language. Older than the person who spoke them. This was one of those phrases. The moment I read it, something in me recognised it before I had even fully thought about why.

It immediately pulled me toward the story of Jacob beside the river Jabbok. Night falling. Isolation. A mysterious being appearing in the dark. Then the struggle itself, physical, spiritual, psychological, mythic, all at once. Jacob wrestles until dawn. He refuses to release the angel, even when the struggle wounds him. Even when it leaves him limping. And in the end, he emerges transformed, renamed, somehow more fully himself because of the encounter rather than despite it.

It strikes me now that this might be one of the oldest surviving metaphors for consciousness itself.

To think deeply is to wrestle with angels.

Not the sentimental angels from greeting cards and Christmas ornaments. Not harmless beings of soft light and certainty. I mean the older kind. Terrible and illuminating. Messengers from dimensions of reality larger than the ego can comfortably contain. Forces that interrupt sleep.

Ideas can behave like that.

Questions can behave like that.

A single insight can arrive and suddenly make your previous life impossible to fully return to.

That, I think, is part of what has been happening to me over the last few years. I have been wrestling with angels, trying to reconcile who I am with who I imagined I might become, and with whatever it is the modern world keeps demanding I turn myself into.

Some days it feels like three incompatible stories fighting for possession of the same nervous system.

There is the self that wants simplicity. The barefoot philosopher. The man who wants to walk slowly, read deeply, write honestly, drink coffee outside while listening to birdsong, and build a life measured more by meaning than metrics.

Then there is the self shaped by culture’s demands. Worker. Professional. Brand. Persona. Content producer. An optimised digital entity required to constantly translate inner life into consumable fragments for algorithmic systems that feed on attention.

And somewhere between them is another figure entirely: the unfinished self. The one still becoming. The one still trying to understand what it means to be human in a world increasingly mediated through machines, prompts, platforms, feeds, and simulations.

No wonder the struggle feels exhausting sometimes.

There are moments when I fantasise about becoming Homer Simpson.

Honestly, I understand the appeal.

A cold Duff beer. Television glow. Predictable routines. A life governed by appetite, habit, and immediate comfort. No existential burden. No obsessive need to interrogate meaning. No compulsion to turn experience into language and then examine the language itself for hidden architecture.

Just autopilot.

There are days when that sounds almost holy.

Because consciousness is tiring.

Not intelligence necessarily. Consciousness. The ongoing awareness of contradiction. The inability to fully believe the stories you inherited once you begin seeing the machinery underneath them. The exhausting recognition that identity itself is partly constructed, partly performed, partly chosen, partly imposed.

Once you see this, you cannot entirely unsee it.

And that may be the real curse and blessing of awakening: once you become aware of the struggle, you can never fully return to sleep.

You can distract yourself, certainly. Most of us do. Endless scrolling. Endless entertainment. Endless productivity systems. Endless noise designed to protect us from encountering ourselves too directly. Modern society has become extraordinarily sophisticated at manufacturing psychic sedation.

But sedation is not a resolution.

The ignored story does not disappear simply because you mute it.

It waits.

It leaks sideways into your life.

Into moods you cannot explain.

Into low-grade despair.

Into strange feelings of absence while performing the routines you are supposedly meant to want.

Into the quiet suspicion that you have somehow become a supporting character in your own existence.

I think many people feel this now, even if they do not yet have language for it.

They sense a fracture between their inner life and the identities available to them in public culture. They feel reduced by the templates being offered. Consumer. User. Audience segment. Political tribe. Career designation. Content niche. A thousand prefabricated masks waiting for a face to attach themselves to.

And maybe thinking, real thinking, begins precisely at the point where those masks stop fitting comfortably.

Maybe thinking is not the accumulation of information.

Maybe it is the refusal to remain fully possessed by inherited narratives.

A refusal to stop mid-becoming.

A refusal to surrender the authorship of your consciousness completely to culture, algorithm, exhaustion, or fear.

This is partly why philosophy has always mattered to me, though perhaps not philosophy in the institutional sense. Not philosophy as purely academic analysis. I mean philosophy in the older sense. Philosophy as a way of life. A lived struggle with existence itself.

The ancient philosophers understood something modern culture often forgets: ideas are not abstract decorations. They are forces that shape perception, behaviour, emotion, and possibility. Stories are not entertainment layered onto reality. Stories are one of the primary mechanisms through which reality becomes intelligible in the first place.

The narratives we inhabit become invisible operating systems.

And once you begin noticing this, you start seeing how much of modern life is essentially narrative conflict. Competing mythologies battling for psychic territory. Nations built from stories. Economies built from stories. Identities built from stories. Entire lives organised around scripts inherited so early that people mistake them for objective truth.

To wrestle with angels is to wrestle with these scripts.

To examine them.

To resist total possession by them.

To ask: whose voice is this inside my head? Which desires are actually mine? Which ambitions were installed? Which fears belong to me, and which belong to systems trying to reproduce themselves through me?

These are destabilising questions.

They can leave you limping.

Jacob leaves the river wounded. That detail matters to me. Transformation is not presented as clean transcendence. It leaves a mark on the body. Wisdom is not sterile. Consciousness costs something.

I suspect anyone who has seriously wrestled with themselves knows this already.

The artist knows it.

The writer staring at the blank page knows it.

The person standing at midlife, wondering whose life they have actually been living, knows it.

The addict getting sober knows it.

The person leaving a religion, career, marriage, ideology, or identity knows it.

There is often a moment where the old self begins dying before the new self fully exists. And in that threshold space, certainty collapses. You no longer know exactly who you are. Only that you cannot entirely return to who you were before.

That threshold is the riverbank.

That is where the angel appears.

And perhaps this is why I keep returning to writing.

Writing feels less like self-expression these days and more like participation in the struggle itself. A form of conscious wrestling. I write not because I possess certainty, but because language helps me stay in relationship with the mystery long enough for another fragment of meaning to emerge.

A sentence can become a foothold.

An essay can become a temporary shelter against chaos.

A journal entry can become evidence that consciousness was here.

Sometimes I think my entire body of work is simply a long record of negotiations between competing realities. Between myth and modernity. Between technology and soul. Between the desire for simplicity and the strange gravitational pull of digital existence.

And now AI enters the picture, complicating everything further.

Because here we are: humans manipulating reality increasingly through text. Prompts becoming action. Language becoming executable. Words triggering systems into motion. Stories becoming infrastructure.

William Burroughs once said language is a virus. In the age of artificial intelligence, that statement begins sounding less metaphorical than diagnostic.

We are becoming text-based ontologists operating inside environments where text increasingly functions as the universal substrate.

Which means the stories we tell ourselves matter more than ever.

The struggle matters more than ever.

Because the danger now is not merely propaganda or ideology in the old sense. It is the possibility of becoming psychologically automated. Handing over the difficult work of meaning-making to systems optimised for engagement, efficiency, and behavioural predictability.

To remain conscious inside this environment requires effort.

Attention becomes spiritual practice.

Thinking becomes resistance.

And maybe that is why I cannot fully become Homer Simpson, no matter how tempting the fantasy occasionally appears.

Something in me refuses total sedation.

Something keeps returning to the wrestling mat.

Not because I enjoy suffering. I do not. But because some deeper instinct understands that the unlived life extracts its own terrible price. The avoided question does not vanish. The abandoned self does not stop calling.

And every so often, in the middle of the struggle, something real emerges.

Another fragment of the story.

Another sentence sturdy enough to stand on for a while.

Another glimpse of coherence hidden inside the chaos.

Not certainty.

Not final answers.

Certainly not enlightenment.

Just a slightly deeper relationship with the mystery.

Maybe that is enough.

Maybe maturity is not about resolving the contradictions once and for all. Maybe it is about developing the capacity to remain in conscious dialogue with them without collapsing into cynicism or numbness.

To keep wrestling without demanding immediate victory.

To limp forward carrying both the wound and the blessing.

To understand that consciousness itself may be less like arriving at truth and more like staying awake inside the question a little longer.

Jacob does not defeat the angel.

That is important.

He survives the encounter changed.

Perhaps that is all any of us can really hope for.

Not mastery over existence.

Not perfect self-knowledge.

Just the courage to remain in a relationship with the forces larger than ourselves long enough to become more fully human through the struggle.

You Can Understand Everything and Still Not Know What to Do

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How should I live? Socrates called it the examined life. The Daoists called it the Way. Every philosophical tradition worth its name has some version of it, which tells you something. This question isn’t optional. It’s baked into what it means to be human.

I was listening to Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning on my walk into town this afternoon, heading to Tesco to pick up a few things. I listened to chapter one, Maps of Experience. Already, it feels like one of those books you don’t just read. You go into it.

His opening move is deceptively simple. We don’t experience the world as a bunch of objects. We experience it as a field of meaning.

A chair isn’t just a physical thing with weight and structure. It’s something to sit on. Something in the way. Something that belongs to someone. Something that defines a corner of a room. The meaning shows up first. The “object” comes later, when we deliberately shift into analysis.

That sounds obvious until you follow it all the way through.

If meaning comes first, if the world we actually live in is a world of significance rather than just things, then how we make meaning isn’t some optional add-on. It’s the central question. And the tools we’ve built for that, myth, religion, story, and ritual, are not primitive versions of science waiting to be replaced. They answer a different kind of question. One science doesn’t even try to answer.

Peterson is making an epistemological point, not a theological one. Science asks how things work. Myth asks how you should act in relation to them. Those are different categories.

You can understand the neurochemistry of grief and still have no idea how to grieve. You can explain the evolutionary function of courage and still not know how to be brave. A map of mechanism isn’t a map of meaning.

What mythology carries, across cultures and millennia, is behavioural wisdom. Not the kind you can fully capture in neat propositions. The hero who descends into the underworld, faces the monster, and comes back changed is as precise a description as we have of how real change works. You go into the unknown. You face what’s there. If you make it back, you bring something with you that matters, not just for you but also for others.

The hero’s journey isn’t just a story template. It’s a map of territory every one of us has to cross at some point.

I’ve spent over twenty years working at the level of story, with people trying to rewrite the scripts running their lives, often without realising those scripts are there. What I keep seeing is this. Transformation doesn’t happen in the rational mind.

You can understand a story is false. You can trace where it came from, see what it’s costing you, and even describe a better version. And still stay stuck. Understanding sits on the surface. The story runs deeper.

Peterson is giving me the theoretical scaffolding for what I’ve been seeing in practice. Myth is where the code runs. Reason mostly skims across the top. Which is why you can’t just think your way into a different life. You have to work at the level of story.

This is where Friedrich Nietzsche comes in. He saw, maybe more clearly than anyone, what was at stake when the West started dismantling its mythic foundations in the name of reason.

“The death of God” is a cultural diagnosis. The framework that held meaning together for centuries was losing its grip. The stories were no longer landing in the way they needed to.

They still existed. The language was still there. The symbols were still in circulation. But something in the relationship between people and those stories had shifted. They were no longer inhabited in the same way. What had once organised perception, behaviour, and value from the inside began to feel external, optional, even arbitrary.

The structure remained in place, but the felt reality that gave it force had thinned. And once that happens, a framework can persist for a long time in form while quietly losing its ability to orient action.

The framework doesn’t disappear just because you’ve stopped believing in it.

Peterson touches on this almost in passing, but it deserves more attention. The idea that human beings have inherent worth. That truth matters, not just strategically but morally. That history has direction, that actions accumulate, that things tend somewhere. These are not scientific facts. They are inheritances. Mythic ones.

The code is still running, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Nietzsche saw the consequence. You can’t keep the fruit while cutting the root. Eventually the structure underneath inherited morality collapses. What fills that gap is not reason. Reason is good at taking things apart. It is not good at building something to live inside.

What tends to rush in is ideology, a partial map pretending to be the whole territory. The twentieth century gave us more than enough evidence of that.

This is what Peterson is pointing at when he contrasts the hero with the ideologue. The hero goes into the unknown willing to be changed. The ideologue goes in with conclusions already fixed and forces everything to fit them. One updates the map. The other defends it.

I’ve been orbiting these ideas for a long time, from different directions. Carl Jung and archetypes. NLP and deep structure. Chaos magick and the idea that belief is something you use, not something you have to commit to permanently.

Underneath it all, the same question keeps returning. Why do these ancient stories still hit? Even now. Even for people who have rejected the systems that produced them. Why does the hero going into the dark still land in the chest like recognition?

Peterson’s answer is clean. Those stories describe the structure of experience itself. The known and the unknown. Order and chaos. Mapped territory and the edges where the map runs out.

Every life moves through that terrain.

Myths are the compressed record of how to do it. They were carried forward because they worked. Because the people who knew how to move through that landscape made it through. The others did not.

Story is not just how we communicate meaning. It is how we hold it.

Peterson has spent thirty years mapping this from inside the library. I’ve spent twenty-odd years mapping it from inside the room. Different routes, similar conclusions. That kind of convergence is always interesting.

So I’m going in.

I don’t know yet where it will lead. The best thinking rarely ends up where you expect. I’ll write as I go. Follow the thread rather than pretend I already know the destination.

If this is your kind of terrain, the questions that don’t sit still, the place where mythology and the problem of how to live turn out to be the same thing, come along.

The Streets She Couldn’t Walk

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Raffaello Palandri runs a Book of the Day series, and this morning he wrote about Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961. I read it, and one question kept coming to mind: do you ever really recover from colonialism?

Fanon’s argument is that colonialism isn’t just a political arrangement. It’s an ontological regime. It reorganises what counts as human, partitions the world into human and non-human zones, and the people living in the non-human zones aren’t merely exploited. Their subjectivity is fractured. The damage isn’t incidental. It’s the point.

Colonialism and American slavery aren’t the same thing. However, as a Black American born in 1968, at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement, I find the resemblance unmistakable. The denial of personhood encoded into law. The violence used to maintain submission. The systematic dismantling of culture, language, and family. The message delivered daily, across generations, until it begins to feel like nature: you are less than.

We are still feeling it. I know we are because I can feel it.

While reading Raffaello’s post I drifted back to 1998. A family reunion in Raleigh, North Carolina. There were children everywhere, the way there always are at family reunions, and I was listening to the adults talk. The talk was about white people, and it was bitter. Not irrationally bitter. The history was real, and the ongoing realities of racism were real, and the anger had been earned over generations. But it was being passed, casually, between the generations, like a dish at the table. And the children were soaking it up the way children soak everything up, which is to say completely, without filters, as foundational truth.

I remember thinking, ‘This is never going to change if this is how it gets passed on.’

I made a private vow that day not to bring my own kids to one of these reunions.

At the same reunion, something different happened. My grandmother took me on a walk. She showed me around the streets where she’d grown up. And as we walked, she pointed out the places. There’s the cinema. There’s the diner. There’s the park. And then: that’s where you wouldn’t have been allowed. That’s where you would have got into serious trouble for being there. Just matter-of-fact. Just: Here is what was true.

I was listening to a life shaped by that reality. She had lived inside all of it. The signs. The boundaries. The daily confirmation that the world had decided you occupied a lesser category of existence. She had navigated it in her body for decades, and she had come out the other side without bitterness. She was warm. She was kind. She spoke about people and the future with an openness that I found, standing there on those streets, almost astonishing.

She wasn’t pretending none of it had happened. She knew exactly what had happened, and she could name all of it. But she had found a way to hold the history without letting it become her centre of gravity. She kept it as memory, as witness, as something to pass on clearly, and she kept her orientation toward what was still possible. Separate containers, held steady.

That’s harder than it sounds. Most people can’t keep those from bleeding into each other. The anger collapses into the identity, or the identity forms in opposition to the thing that caused the damage. James Baldwin wrote about these issues with tremendous honesty. The hatred is legitimate. And it damages the one who carries it. Both things are true at the same time.

What my grandmother had, I don’t have a word that fits easily. The Greeks had megalopsychia, greatness of soul, not in the sense of grandeur but in the sense of a soul large enough to contain difficult things without being deformed by them. She had that.

The question Fanon raises, whether you ever really recover, I don’t think he meant it to have a simple answer. His own answer was closer to: you cannot restore what was destroyed. But you can constitute something new. Not recovery as return. Recovery as creation. Built from inside the wound, not before it.

What I saw in my grandmother was something like that. Not a return to an undamaged self. A self that had been forged in the full knowledge of the damage and had chosen, somewhere along the way, not to be defined by it.

I’m grateful to Raffaello for the book. I’m more grateful that it sent me back to that walk, to those streets, to her voice pointing things out with that particular combination of clarity and warmth. Some memories need a door opened for them.

That afternoon in 1998 is one I’ll keep

In reply to Book of the Day – The Wretched of the Earth – Raffaello Palandri’s Blog.

The Writing Life — Review Essay

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the writing life

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989)

Ask a room full of people if they’ve ever wanted to write a book, and most hands go up. It’s one of those universal fantasies — like running a restaurant or owning a vineyard. The image is appealing: the writer at the desk, the manuscript growing, the solitary genius wrestling meaning out of silence. Nobody fantasises about the blank page that won’t fill. Nobody pictures the years of work that might never be read.

Annie Dillard is not interested in the fantasy. The Writing Life is a short, strange book — more extended essay than memoir, more meditation than manual — and its apparent aim is to tell the truth about what writing actually costs. She does not want you to romanticise it. She wants you to see the cabin for what it is: a place of confinement, of daily struggle, of a life that looks from the outside like very little happening at all.

The irony, and it’s one Dillard may or may not be aware of, is that the picture she paints is deeply seductive. Not despite the difficulty but because of it. The solitary cabin by the water. The days given entirely to reading and writing. The refusal of ordinary life in service of something larger. Tell me that doesn’t sound like a fantasy. Tell me that wouldn’t sell.

This is the central paradox of the book: the more honestly she describes the writing life, the more appealing it becomes to those of us who already want it.

What she gets right, and gets right deeply, is that wanting to be a writer and wanting to write are two completely different things. The first is about identity. The hat, as she says. The second is about the actual work — the daily encounter with the sentence, the word, the impossible gap between the idea in your head and the thing on the page.

She tells an anecdote about a well-known writer asked by a student whether they could be a writer. The writer pauses, then says: “Do you like sentences?” It sounds like a joke. It isn’t. It’s the whole question compressed into four words.

Writers, Dillard argues, are formed by what they read. Poets like poetry. Novelists like novels. They dedicate themselves to the form that attracts them, study it in the people who have done it best, and learn the craft from the inside out. Hemingway studied Hamsun and Turgenev. Thoreau loved Homer. Faulkner acknowledged his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce. The great ones didn’t arrive fully formed — they were shaped by what they loved and returned to it obsessively. The young writer who reads nothing except their own work, who admires nothing except their own voice has confused the role for the practice.

Jack London’s formulation is the clearest she offers: every writer needs technique, experience, and a philosophical position. The first two are teachable, acquirable things you can work toward. The third is harder. It requires you to actually know what you think — not about writing, but about being alive. Most people who romanticise the writing life are missing all three. But especially the third.

I came to this book as someone who would not easily describe himself as a writer. A thinker, yes. Someone who uses writing to communicate what he thinks. But not someone who agonizes over sentences — not in prose, anyway. In poetry, it’s different: the line is the thing, and you can spend as long as it takes to find the right word because the word is what you’re actually making. But in prose I’m following an idea somewhere, and the language serves the movement rather than being the movement itself.

So Dillard’s sentence-obsession sits slightly outside my experience. I understand it. I admire it. But I don’t share it in the way she seems to require. And yet I kept reading, because the book is doing something else underneath its surface argument — something I recognise from my own practice, even if her version looks nothing like mine.

She includes a quote from Nietzsche: “When my creative energy flowed most freely, my muscular activity was always greatest.” He walked for seven or eight hours at a stretch through the hills. He sometimes danced. The body in motion, the mind unleashed.

That landed. Not as a new idea but as confirmation of something I already know in my bones. My best thinking happens on a walk. Not at a desk, not staring at a screen, but in motion, talking out loud, following the thread wherever it goes. Even this essay began not as writing but as conversation — answers spoken into a microphone, ideas arriving in the saying of them rather than the typing of them. The wisdom walk is not a break from the work. It is the work.

This is where I’d gently push back on Dillard’s version of the writing life. She locates the work in the sealed-off space. The cabin. The room with the view boarded up so you can’t be distracted by the beauty outside. There is something admirable in that level of commitment. There is also something that doesn’t account for how many writers, thinkers, and philosophers have done their best work in motion, in dialogue, in the porous exchange with the world rather than in retreat from it.

Emerson walked. Nietzsche walked. Wordsworth composed entire poems on his feet, on the paths around Grasmere. The peripatetic tradition is as old as philosophy itself. Dillard knows this — she quotes Nietzsche directly — but she doesn’t follow it through to its implication. The extraordinary state she asks about, “how do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning?” — there are more ways in than the desk and the closed door.

Teilhard de Chardin, whom she quotes at the very end of the book, puts it better than I can: “Purity does not lie in separation from but in deeper penetration into the universe.” That is the version of the writing life that makes sense to me. Not the retreat to the cabin but the going further in. Not less world but more world, met with more attention, digested on long walks, and talked through out loud when the ideas need air.

The fantasy I carry is not the cabin in the woods, though there are days when that sounds fine. It’s something more like this: enough time and enough freedom to spend the days reading and writing and walking, with nowhere to be and nothing to sell. Not writing for an audience or a market, but writing as Dillard describes it at its best — because you must, the way Galahad went towards the Grail, knowing that for those who can live it, this alone is life.

A day spent in the silent struggle while life passes you by might not look like much from the outside. But a life spent reading and writing and thinking out loud on long walks? That will be a good life.

Dillard probably agrees with that. The argument between us is only about what the room looks like.

Do You Like Hyperlinks?

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Monday. Early. The Writing Life opened on my lap.

This morning, three passages piqued my interest. Three in quick succession, like knocking on the same door from different directions.

The first:

“The writer studies literature, not the world. He lives in the world; he cannot miss it. If he has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, he spares his readers a report of his experience. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.”

I read it twice and put the book down.

Because this is the thing I keep forgetting. Spend any time on social media, and you start to feel the pressure: document the experience, aestheticise the ordinary, post the beautiful breakfast, the plane window, or the aspirational whatever. FOMO as content strategy is a drag. And if you follow the system, slowly, without noticing, you start writing toward the shot instead of toward the thought.

I like documenting. I do. A quick photo as a visual note. A tweet to catch a thought before it dissolves. But there’s a difference between noting and performing. Between capturing the moment and manufacturing one. Dillard’s point cuts cleanly: the hamburger doesn’t need reporting. We’ve all had the hamburger. What you read, what you learn — that’s what makes you different.

The second passage:

“In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.”

He thought of himself in a hat. I know that writer. I’ve probably been that writer. There’s something seductive about the identity of a writer (the associations, the image) that has nothing to do with actually loving words on a page.

Dillard’s claim is that the great ones (Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Gauguin) were powered by love of the material. They found excitement in the variety of materials. The complexities of the field ignited their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks. The tasks suggested the schedules.

So what do I actually love?

Books, yes. But more specifically: the essay. Vidal at his most lethal. Hitchens when properly wound up. Tim Cahill disappearing into somewhere difficult and coming back with something funny and true. Robert Kaplan reading a landscape like an argument.

Philosophy that doesn’t require a security clearance. Lin Yutang. Christopher Ross. Robert Twigger. Wisdom you can use.

Journalism as a contact sport. Robert Anton Wilson dissolving your reality tunnel. Joan Didion making anxiety literary. Hunter Thompson turns chaos into method, while Chuck Klosterman treats pop culture with more seriousness than it deserves, ultimately proving it does deserve that seriousness. PJ O’Rourke being gleefully wrong in the most instructive way.

And blogging, but not the content-marketed, SEO-optimised, monetised kind. The guerrilla kind. The punk rock DIY kind. Someone with something to say in their small corner of the internet and the willingness to say it whether the algorithm rewards them or not. That spirit. That’s the one I’m in love with.

Third passage. A writer gets collared by a student asking if they could be a writer. The writer says, ‘Do you like sentences?’

My version of that question would be ‘Do you like hyperlinks?’

Not as a joke. To me, the hyperlink is the sentence of the digital medium. The structural unit that creates meaning in a non-linear environment. To care about hyperlinks is to understand that your text is a node, not an island. A well-placed link does something no explanatory prose can replicate. The pathways matter as much as the words.

Sentences and hyperlinks. That’s the material.

Then Dillard lists the lineages. Hemingway studied Hamsun and Turgenev. Singer also studied Hamsun and Turgenev. Ellison studied Hemingway and Stein. Thoreau loved Homer. Welty loved Chekhov.

Reading is apprenticeship. That’s what I got back this morning.

When I read, I’m not consuming. I’m studying in the lineage. When I blog, I’m practising in public, in the tradition of the essay, the journal, and the notebook.

Does anybody even blog anymore? Maybe not. But Homer is still going. Montaigne never stopped. The medium shifts. The practice doesn’t.

That’s why I read. That’s why I write.

Dillard reminded me. I’d forgotten, again. Now I remember, again.

Click on the plus then click the hyperlink to take a trip.

The Will to Create: A Review of Mitch Horowitz’s Daydream Believer

by
a man in the water with his eyes closed

Daydream Believer

Daydream Believer

There’s a question Mitch Horowitz asks throughout Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of Your Mind that lodged itself in my brain like a white hot poker: “What do you want?”

Not as a therapeutic prompt. Not as spiritual navel-gazing. But as a foundational question, one that determines whether you’re truly living or merely existing. This is the question that sets the direction of your life, the point from which every deliberate act of creation begins. It is the launching pad for any practical metaphysical work you attempt, because without knowing what you actually want, no technique, belief, or practice has anything solid to work with.

I’ve spent the past 25 years working in the self-development space. I thought I knew how to articulate desire. Turns out I’ve been operating with a fuzzy targeting system, wondering why I kept getting versions of what I wanted rather than what I actually wanted. Horowitz calls this out with uncomfortable precision: clarity is everything. Without clarity, mind causation breaks down. Your intention leaves your conscious mind distorted, misheard, or diluted, like a message passed hand to hand until it no longer resembles what you meant to say.

Daydream Believer is Horowitz’s attempt to take 150 years of New Thought experimentation to “its sharpest peak” and chart a path forward. It’s his ultra-statement on mind metaphysics, thought causation, and the extraphysical nature of consciousness. More importantly, for practitioners like myself who’ve lived in the esoteric trenches, it’s a rigorous philosophical justification paired with a practical formula that actually works.

Mind Metaphysics Meets Chaos Magick

Here’s what really lit me up. Horowitz anchors his entire approach in a single, uncompromising principle: results. As he puts it, “The only question that matters is: does it work?” Everything else—belief, theory, metaphysics—comes second to demonstrated effect.

Any chaos magician reading that line will recognize the rallying cry. Results-based magic. Functional metaphysics. Theory is fine for academics, but practitioners need operations that produce measurable outcomes. Horowitz delivers a four-step process that maps surprisingly well onto chaos magick methodology:

1. Focused Desire
2. Enunciation
3. Sex Transmutation
4. Acceptance of Channels

This isn’t repackaged positive thinking. It’s a disciplined, repeatable protocol. Manifestation doesn’t happen through vague wishes or spiritual bypassing. It happens through focused will aimed at specific outcomes, articulated clearly, emotionally charged, and then released without attachment to the form the result takes.

The chaos magick parallel is obvious: gnosis (focused desire), statement of intent (enunciation), charging the sigil (sex transmutation), and release/forgetting (acceptance of channels). Different vocabulary. Same operational technology.

What Horowitz adds is the philosophical scaffolding. He’s not content to say “do this because it works.” He wants to know why it works, what the limits are, where the critics get it right and where they miss the mark. This book is simultaneously mystical practice and intellectual rigor, which is rare in either camp.

Self-Expression as Ultimate Aim

One of the book’s core arguments hit me sideways: self-expression is the ultimate aim of life.

Not self-improvement. Not enlightenment. Not transcendence of ego. Self-expression. The full embodiment and expression of who you actually are means living from your own inner axis rather than from inherited expectations. It is the act of bringing your genuine drives, values, and creative impulses into form, instead of shaping yourself to match who you were told to be, rewarded for being, or conditioned into becoming. This kind of self-expression isn’t performance or self-improvement; it’s alignment. When what you want, what you do, and who you are all point in the same direction, will stops leaking, and creation becomes possible.

Horowitz grounds this in Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power, but clarifies that “power” here means the capacity to actualize your authentic nature in the world. The aim here isn’t domination at all, but creation.The power to bring forth what’s within you, to shape reality according to your vision, to participate actively in the construction of your experience rather than passively receiving whatever life deals you.

This aligns perfectly with my work in narrative alchemy. Stories aren’t just descriptions of what happened. They’re code that runs in consciousness, shaping perception, constraining possibility, or expanding potential. The stories you tell yourself determine the life you’re able to live. Self-expression, in this context, is the act of consciously authoring your narrative rather than unconsciously repeating inherited scripts.

If you’re operating from someone else’s story about who you should be, you’re not expressing yourself. You’re running their program. Much of what passes for desire is inherited, conditioned, or socially rewarded wanting rather than something that genuinely arises from within. When that’s the case, mind causation struggles to gain traction. You’re trying to bring about outcomes that contradict your deeper programming, so intention fractures before it ever becomes effective. Part of you wants the result, but another part is quietly loyal to an older script. The signal gets mixed, the will leaks, and the results arrive distorted or stall altogether. For mind causation to work, desire has to be congruent. It has to be yours all the way down.

The Interdimensional Participant

Horowitz makes a bold claim: you experience psychical lives among infinite realms. Your mind is an extraphysical, reality-selecting force.

This isn’t metaphor. He means it literally, though he’s careful to note he’s not advocating naive magical thinking. You’re not going to levitate through pure intention. But consciousness, he argues, operates in dimensions beyond the strictly physical. Your thoughts exist in and interact with layers of reality that material science hasn’t fully mapped.

This is where Daydream Believer ventures into genuinely radical territory. Most New Thought literature stays safely within psychological models: thoughts shape perception, perception influences behavior, behavior creates results. Horowitz goes further. He’s arguing for mind as a causal agent in extraphysical dimensions, drawing on psychical research, consciousness studies, and his own experiments.

For someone who’s been working with chaos magick for decades, none of this comes as a shock. The working assumption has always been that consciousness doesn’t stop at the boundaries of the skull. It interfaces with reality in ways that aren’t purely physical or fully explained by materialist models. Sigils work. Rituals produce results. Synchronicities don’t appear randomly; they cluster around charged intentions, as if probability itself has been nudged. You can give this process any name you like—quantum effects, morphic resonance, the imaginal realm—but the label is secondary. The consistent, lived fact is that something is happening here. Something causal, repeatable, and stubbornly resistant to reduction into purely mechanical explanations.

What Horowitz offers is a philosophically defensible version of this claim that doesn’t require metaphysical credulity. He isn’t asking you to sign on to a belief system or suspend your critical faculties. You don’t have to believe in angels or demons, though he also refuses to dismiss those ideas out of hand as mere superstition. Instead, he asks you to seriously consider a more modest but more radical possibility: that mind is not fully contained within the skull, that thought has effects which extend beyond the merely neurological, and that you are already participating in the ongoing construction of reality at levels beneath conscious awareness. In this view, mind causation isn’t fantasy or wishful thinking. It’s an extension of a process you’re already part of, whether you recognize it or not.

The real shift Horowitz is asking for is from passive consciousness to participatory consciousness. In the passive model, the mind is a byproduct of matter, awareness is a spectator sport, and reality simply happens to you. Your thoughts may influence your mood or behavior, but they don’t meaningfully shape the structure of events. In the participatory model, consciousness is not an afterthought. It is an active variable in the unfolding of experience. Attention, intention, and expectation don’t just interpret reality after the fact; they help select which possibilities solidify into lived outcomes. This doesn’t make you omnipotent, but it does make you responsible. You are no longer merely reacting to the world. You are implicated in its ongoing formation, whether through clarity or confusion, intention or drift.

This is where participatory consciousness becomes uncomfortable. If consciousness plays an active role in shaping experience, then vague intention, unconscious belief, and unexamined narrative aren’t neutral. They are formative forces. Drift creates outcomes just as surely as clarity does. Much of what people experience as fate, bad luck, or external obstruction begins to look like unattended authorship. Not chosen, but still participated in. This doesn’t mean you are at fault for everything that happens to you. It does mean that avoidance, confusion, and inherited stories carry causal weight. In a participatory universe, responsibility expands along with possibility. You don’t just get to create deliberately. You also create accidentally.

This is also why participatory consciousness meets so much resistance. It removes the psychological shelter of pure victimhood without offering the fantasy of total control. You don’t get to say “it’s all happening to me,” but you also don’t get to believe you can think your way into omnipotence. What you’re left with is something far more demanding: partial agency in a complex system. Your intentions matter, but so do your blind spots. Your beliefs shape outcomes, but they don’t excuse you from friction, loss, or uncertainty. For many people, this is intolerable. It’s far easier to deny participation altogether than to accept responsibility without guarantees. Participatory consciousness doesn’t promise comfort. It asks for authorship under conditions you did not choose.

The Technology of Prayer and Wish

Two chapters particularly resonated: his treatment of prayer and true wishes.

Prayer, Horowitz argues, works, but not for the reasons most people assume. It isn’t effective because a supernatural authority is necessarily listening and deciding whether to grant your request. It works because prayer functions as a technology of consciousness. It organizes attention, concentrates desire, and aligns will around a clearly articulated aim. In doing so, it brings the mind into coherence and directs that coherence toward the field of experience itself. Whether you frame the act as speaking to God, the universe, your higher self, or simply naming an intention into the void is secondary. What determines efficacy is not the object of prayer, but its execution. Precision matters. Emotional charge matters. The clarity with which the desire is named determines how cleanly it can take hold and begin exerting causal pressure.

This is another place where New Thought and chaos magick quietly collapse into the same operational logic. Prayer and spell-casting are not opposites, nor even distant cousins. Functionally, they are the same act performed inside different symbolic systems. Both require focused intention, emotional investment, and the deliberate use of language and imagery to configure consciousness toward a specific outcome. Both assume, implicitly or explicitly, that mind is not sealed off from the world but participates in shaping how events unfold. Strip away the theology, the aesthetics, and the cultural framing, and what remains is a shared technology: attention disciplined into form, desire charged with feeling, and meaning deployed as a causal instrument. The symbols differ. The mechanism does not.

His discussion of wishes follows the same operational logic. A true wish, properly formed, carries causal power not because reality bends to fantasy, but because the act of precisely articulating desire reorganizes consciousness around that desire. When a wish is clear, the mind begins to sort the world differently. Perception sharpens. Attention gravitates toward relevant signals. Possibilities that were previously invisible register as actionable openings. Behavior adjusts, often subtly, in ways that align with the stated aim. What changes first is not the external world, but the internal pattern that determines what you notice, what you consider possible, and what you’re willing to act on. Over time, those shifts accumulate into tangible results that feel uncanny only if you ignore the invisible reconfiguration that made them possible.

This is where the book landed its most personal blow for me. I realized I haven’t been failing at manifestation so much as feeding the system bad inputs. I’ve been making sloppy wishes. Vague wants. Loosely sketched hopes that gesture in a general direction and then leave the details unresolved. And then I’ve wondered why the results arrived distorted, partial, or oddly misaligned. Horowitz makes the uncomfortable point clear: the wish itself is the programming. If the instruction is fuzzy, contradictory, or half-hearted, the output will be too. Mind causation doesn’t fail because reality is hostile or indifferent. It fails because the signal is incoherent. Garbage in, garbage out isn’t cynicism here. It’s diagnostics.

The deeper issue isn’t ignorance. It’s reluctance. Precision is dangerous because it removes your ability to hedge. A vague desire lets you fantasize without committing. It keeps failure hypothetical and success undefined. Once a wish becomes exact, you can no longer hide behind ambiguity. You either move toward it or you don’t. You either want it enough to reorganize your life around it, or you discover that what you thought you wanted was only a socially acceptable placeholder. Sloppy wishes are often a form of self-protection. They allow desire without accountability. Horowitz’s framework quietly dismantles that defense. If the wish is the programming, then clarity forces a reckoning. You must decide what you’re actually willing to become in order to have what you say you want.

Reprogramming the Subconscious

Horowitz devotes considerable attention to self-suggestion and subconscious reprogramming, drawing on early pioneers like Émile Coué and Napoleon Hill. What he outlines is deceptively simple and genuinely demanding: repeated autosuggestion delivered at moments when the conscious mind loosens its grip. Morning and evening, when habitual resistance is lower, you deliberately introduce new instructions into the system. This isn’t affirmation as self-soothing or motivational wallpaper. It’s intentional reconditioning. You’re issuing commands to the deeper layers of the psyche, installing updated parameters that redefine what feels normal, possible, and inevitable. Think less positive thinking, more firmware update.

A weak autosuggestion sounds like this: “I want to be more confident” or “I’m trying to be successful.” It’s abstract, future-oriented, and emotionally flat. A strong autosuggestion is concrete and present: “I speak clearly and decisively in my work, and people respond with trust and engagement.” The difference isn’t optimism. It’s specificity. The second statement gives the subconscious something it can actually organize around. It names behavior, context, and felt sense. One drifts. The other installs.

This is where the book gets practical. Horowitz doesn’t just theorize about mind power. He gives you the protocol. What to say, how to say it, when to say it, and why it matters that you say it in present tense with emotional conviction.

For anyone who’s worked with sigils, this is familiar territory. You’re not begging the universe for change. You’re declaring the change as already accomplished. You’re rewriting the deep story, the subconscious narrative that determines what feels possible.

My experience with narrative alchemy has taught me that people’s limiting beliefs aren’t intellectual positions. They’re stories embedded in the psyche, running constantly beneath awareness. Changing those stories requires more than deciding to think differently. It requires sustained, repetitive, emotionally charged installation of new narrative code.

Horowitz’s self-suggestion protocol is exactly that. Narrative debugging through systematic autosuggestion.

The Limits and the Shadow

To his credit, Horowitz doesn’t promise unlimited manifestation. He’s clear about the limits of mind power. You can’t think your way out of terminal illness (though you can influence recovery and quality of life). You can’t manifest lottery wins on demand (though you can enhance opportunity recognition and decision-making). You can’t override physical laws through pure intention.

What you can do is participate in reality construction within the parameters of possibility. You can influence probability. You can shape trajectory. You can open doors that were previously invisible. This is real power, even if it’s not omnipotence.

He also addresses suffering directly, which most New Thought writers avoid. Acknowledging suffering, he argues, is itself a metaphysical force. Not wallowing. Not victimhood. But clear-eyed recognition of pain as part of the human condition, and the determination to work creatively within and through that pain.

This is where Daydream Believer distinguishes itself from toxic positivity. Horowitz isn’t selling spiritual bypassing. He’s offering a metaphysics that accounts for the full range of human experience, including grief, depression, and anxiety. The practices he outlines aren’t escapes from difficulty. They’re tools for navigating difficulty with greater agency and creativity.

What Do You Want?

The book keeps returning to this question. And it’s not rhetorical.

Horowitz insists that if you can’t answer this question with crystal clarity, nothing else matters. All the practices, all the philosophy, all the metaphysical theory in the world won’t help if you don’t know what you’re trying to create.

This is where I found myself confronting my own fuzzy targeting. I’ve had visions. I’ve set intentions. I’ve performed rituals. But have I articulated my desires with absolute precision? Have I defined success in terms so clear that I’ll know beyond doubt when I’ve achieved it?

The answer, uncomfortably, is no.

I’ve been operating in impressionistic mode. I want “success” with Soulcruzer. I want to “reach people” with narrative alchemy. I want to “build something meaningful.” All fine sentiments. None of them actionable targets for mind causation.

What does success look like exactly? How many people? Doing what? Meaningful by what measure? These aren’t nitpicking questions. They’re the difference between functional magic and wishful thinking.

Daydream Believer forced me to confront the gap between my vague wants and the kind of laser-focused desire that actually moves reality. If I want mind causation to work, I need to be able to state my aim in a single, clear, unambiguous sentence. Not as aspiration. As declaration of intent.

The Functional Philosophy

What makes this book valuable isn’t just the practices or the philosophy. It’s the integration. Horowitz has created a functional system that works whether you interpret it literally or metaphorically, whether you believe consciousness is fundamental or emergent, whether you think you’re manipulating quantum fields or simply optimizing your psychology.

This is the genius of his “does it work?” criterion. It bypasses metaphysical disputes and focuses on results. Use the techniques. Track the outcomes. Refine the method. This is empiricism applied to inner work.

For someone like me, who’s spent years navigating the intersection of esoteric practice and practical application, this approach feels honest. I don’t need to believe in a particular cosmology to work with narrative alchemy. I need techniques that produce transformation. The same goes for Horowitz’s mind metaphysics.

Whether thought is causative because consciousness is fundamental, or because psychological shifts create behavioral changes that produce material results, doesn’t matter as much as whether the protocol actually works. And based on my experiments so far, informed by this book’s clarity on desire articulation, it does.

The Challenge Ahead

Daydream Believer ends with a challenge: implement the formula and watch for confirmation of its truth.

I’ve taken up that challenge. I’ve rewritten my core desires with brutal clarity. I’ve established a morning and evening autosuggestion practice. I’ve been treating my statements of intent not as hopeful affirmations but as code being installed in the operating system of consciousness.

It’s too early for comprehensive results, but the shift in focus is already noticeable. When you clarify what you want with precision, opportunities you would have dismissed as irrelevant suddenly become pathways. Actions that felt optional become obvious next steps. The fog lifts.

This is what Horowitz is offering: not magical thinking, but practical metaphysics. Not spiritual bypassing, but functional technology for consciousness. Not promises of omnipotence, but genuine tools for participating in reality construction with greater intention and skill.

For practitioners of chaos magick, narrative alchemy, or any results-focused approach to inner work, Daydream Believer is essential reading. It’s the philosophical backbone many of us have been operating without, the rigorous justification for practices we’ve known intuitively but struggled to articulate.

And for anyone asking “What do I want?” and realizing they can’t answer clearly, this book is the starting point. Because until you know what you want with absolute clarity, you can’t begin the work of bringing it into being.

The will to create demands nothing less than total precision. Horowitz has given us the manual. Now the work is ours.

Red Mass and the Machinery of Modern Myth

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Conspiracy, Psychedelia, and the Rituals We’re Already Inside

Red Mass

I started reading Red Mass expecting to enter a strange story. What I didn’t expect was the sense that the book was quietly rearranging the furniture of my own thinking. Not in the way a good thriller pulls you along, but in the way certain ideas linger, unsettle, and refuse to stay on the page.

This is not a novel that simply depicts conspiracy. It treats conspiracy as a living system. UFO lore, cryptids, secret orders, altered states, and underground movements are not aesthetic choices here. They are functional components. They organize fear. They distribute meaning. They move people into action. Reading the book feels less like following a plot and more like stepping into a ritual already underway.

What makes Red Mass distinctive is that it refuses the usual comfort zones. It doesn’t mock belief, and it doesn’t romanticize it either. Instead, it asks a quieter and more unsettling question: what if belief itself is infrastructural? What if stories are not just interpretations of reality, but mechanisms that actively shape it?

The protagonist, Gregor Samson, is not a hero in the traditional sense. He is porous, curious, slightly unmoored. His paranoia does not function as a flaw to be corrected so much as a sensitivity to hidden patterns. As his world opens into stranger and stranger configurations, the book resists telling us whether he is awakening, unraveling, or being recruited. That ambiguity is not a narrative failure. It is the point.

As a reader, you are never invited to stand safely outside the material. The novel keeps nudging you toward an uncomfortable recognition: the difference between myth and reality may not be as stable as we like to pretend. Conspiracy, ritual, and altered perception are not fringe phenomena operating at the edges of society. They are everyday forces, woven into media, politics, identity, and desire.

Red Mass doesn’t ask you to decide what is true. It asks you to notice how truth gets made, how it spreads, and what it costs once it starts moving. The unease you feel while reading is not accidental. It’s the sensation of realizing that the mass is not a secret gathering somewhere else. It’s already in progress.

Conspiracy as Myth Engine

In Red Mass, conspiracy is not treated as a mistake to be corrected or a delusion to be exposed. It functions as something older and more durable: a myth engine. The familiar components are all here. UFO sightings. Cryptids. Shadowy organizations. Rumors that refuse to die. But rather than serving as narrative flavor, these elements operate as organizing principles. They give shape to fear. They offer coherence where official explanations fail. They turn anxiety into story.

This is a subtle but important shift. In much contemporary discourse, conspiracy thinking is framed as a breakdown in rationality or a failure of critical thinking. Moler doesn’t deny the danger. He simply moves the lens. Conspiracies endure not because they are persuasive in a factual sense, but because they are effective in a mythic one. They explain why the world feels wrong. They name invisible forces. They offer a sense of initiation into hidden knowledge.

What gives conspiracy its power in the novel is not the content of the beliefs, but their structure. There is always a hidden layer. There is always an initiated few. There is always the suspicion that ordinary reality is a mask. These are ancient mythic patterns wearing modern clothes. The gods have been replaced by agencies. Angels by aliens. Demons by algorithms and clandestine networks. The symbolic function remains intact.

Seen this way, conspiracy becomes less about truth claims and more about participation. To believe is to enter a story that reshapes perception and allegiance. You begin to see signs where others see noise. You feel watched, guided, threatened, or chosen. The world becomes charged. Meaning condenses. Action follows.

Moler’s quiet provocation is that this process is not marginal. It is everywhere. We live inside overlapping conspiracies every day, some benign, some corrosive, many invisible to those embedded within them. Political narratives, market logic, identity scripts, media ecosystems. Each offers its own hidden hand, its own explanation for why things are the way they are and who is to blame.

Conspiracy, then, is not the opposite of myth. It is myth under conditions of technological saturation and institutional distrust. Red Mass does not ask whether these myths are true or false. It asks a more unsettling question: what do they do once we start living inside them?

Gregor Samson and the Threshold State

If conspiracy is the myth engine of Red Mass, Gregor Samson is its threshold figure. He is not a hero, nor even an anti-hero. He is something more fragile and more dangerous: a person whose boundaries are loosening.

Gregor’s defining trait is permeability. He is curious, unsettled, quietly dissatisfied with the official shape of the world. His paranoia does not read as a simple malfunction. It reads as a sensitivity. He notices patterns others dismiss. He feels watched not because he wants to feel special, but because the world no longer feels neutral.

This follows a familiar initiatory pattern. In many mythic traditions, the initiate does not begin as a stable subject. They begin as someone cracked open by doubt, obsession, illness, or dread. Certainty erodes. Ordinary reality loses its authority. Only then can another order of meaning begin to intrude.

What Red Mass refuses to do is tell us how to interpret this state. Gregor may be awakening. He may be unraveling. He may be in the process of recruitment by forces that benefit from his openness. The ambiguity is not a flaw. It is the condition being examined. Threshold states are dangerous precisely because they feel revelatory while stripping away the ability to tell revelation from manipulation.

As Gregor moves deeper into the novel’s ecology of beliefs, rituals, and altered states, his internal changes matter more than any external event. The plot advances, but the real motion is inward. Perception sharpens. Suspicion intensifies. Meaning accumulates. The world begins to speak back.

Moler resists the therapeutic impulse here. Gregor is not being guided toward integration or healing. He is being drawn into alignment. Sensitivity is not presented as inherently virtuous. It is simply exploitable. Gregor’s function is not to resolve the tension between belief and skepticism, but to embody it.

The unsettling implication is that threshold states are no longer rare. Burnout, information overload, and institutional distrust produce Gregor-like conditions at scale. The question the novel leaves hanging is not whether such states are real, but who knows how to use them once they appear.

The Meaning of the Red Mass

The title Red Mass announces its intentions early, if you’re willing to take it seriously. A mass is not a private experience. It is a collective ritual. It requires repetition, participation, and a shared symbolic framework. Whatever transformation occurs does not belong to the individual alone. It circulates.

The “red” complicates this immediately. Red implies blood, sacrifice, embodiment, and consequence. This is not a clean or purely symbolic ritual. Something is paid. Something is consumed. Something is altered in the body and in the world.

Ritual in Red Mass is not a spiritual flourish. It is a technology. It binds people together. It organizes roles. It creates hierarchies of access and obligation. Those who understand the ritual gain leverage. Those who are drawn into it without understanding become material.

This is where Moler diverges sharply from popular narratives of awakening. There is no implication that participation automatically leads to liberation. Ritual amplifies intention, but intention itself remains morally unstable. Power moves somewhere. The question is never whether ritual works, but who it works for.

Seen this way, the Red Mass models how belief becomes operational at scale. Individual threshold experiences are necessary but insufficient. They must be synchronized, repeated, and formalized. Only then do they produce structures that outlast any one participant.

The novel insists that ritual never disappeared from modern life. We simply stopped calling it that. Political rallies, media cycles, online outrage storms, brand loyalty, productivity culture. All operate with ritual logic. They demand attention, repetition, sacrifice, and belief. They reward participation and punish deviation.

By naming the ritual explicitly, Moler removes the comfort of denial. The mass is not happening somewhere else. It is happening wherever belief is rehearsed until it hardens into action.

Psychedelics as Infrastructure

In Red Mass, psychedelics are not shortcuts to insight or tools for personal healing. They function as infrastructure. They alter perception, but more importantly they reorganize access, allegiance, and coordination. They open channels that do not close cleanly.

Contemporary psychedelic discourse often frames altered states as private experiences. You ingest something. You see something. You integrate. Moler breaks that arc. In Red Mass, altered states are gateways. Once crossed, they place the subject in relation to systems and rituals that persist beyond the experience itself.

The psychedelic experience does not merely reveal hidden truths. It makes the subject legible. Receptive. Available. Altered states intensify meaning-making, which paradoxically makes behavior more predictable. The world becomes symbolic. Guidance feels external. Direction follows.

This is where obligation enters. Insight produces consequence. Vision demands alignment. Psychedelic revelation in the novel is never free. It binds the experiencer to a story already in motion. Participation is not optional once perception has been reorganized.

Moler’s unsettling suggestion is that altered states feel liberatory while quietly narrowing choice. When everything feels meaningful, it becomes harder to say no. Awakening is not an escape from systems of control, but an entry into subtler ones. The danger is not delusion, but devotion.

Psychedelics here are neither good nor bad. They are accelerants. They compress allegiance and transformation into a shorter timescale. In a ritualized environment, that compression is invaluable.

Lineage and Divergence

Red Mass belongs to a lineage of writers who treat reality as unstable and symbolic. But what makes Moler distinctive is where he refuses to stop.

With Philip K. Dick, reality fractures and authority lies. Dick’s anxiety is ontological: what is real, and who controls the story? Moler shifts the burden. Reality is not imposed from above so much as co-produced from within. Belief itself becomes generative.

With Robert Anton Wilson, conspiracy becomes playful and provisional. Reality tunnels multiply. Irony cushions commitment. Moler drains the safety net. In Red Mass, reality tunnels harden through ritual and repetition. Irony collapses once consequences appear.

With James Hillman, myth speaks through the psyche. Images personify inner forces. Moler aligns closely, then crosses a line. In Red Mass, the imaginal does not stay interior. Images recruit bodies. Myths demand enactment.

Moler collapses psychology, ritual, and politics into a single continuum. Belief organizes attention. Attention shapes behavior. Behavior allocates power. Once myth becomes operational, neutrality disappears.

Why Red Mass Feels Uncomfortable Now

What makes Red Mass unsettling is not its strangeness, but its familiarity. The mechanisms it explores are already operational. The novel reads less like speculation and more like diagnosis.

We live inside competing narratives that demand belief and repetition. Algorithms reward intensity. Media ecosystems thrive on outrage and revelation. Identity becomes something to defend and ritualize. Under these conditions, conspiracy is not fringe. It is a default mode of sense-making.

The novel reframes the question. Not why people believe strange things, but what belief does once it gains momentum. Stories recruit. They coordinate attention. Once enough people move in sync, belief becomes infrastructure, regardless of truth.

Gregor’s threshold state no longer looks exceptional. It looks common. Sensitivity becomes exploitable at scale. The world feels alive with signals because it is engineered to feel that way.

The novel refuses the comfort of detachment. Everyone participates. The only variable is awareness.

The Mass Is Already in Progress

By the end of Red Mass, the most unsettling realization has little to do with plot. It is the recognition that nothing described here is exotic. The rituals are familiar. The thresholds are familiar. The dangers are familiar.

The book does not ask you to believe its conspiracies. It asks you to notice how belief functions. How it moves from story to structure without announcing the transition. Once you see that clearly, observation gives way to responsibility.

The Red Mass is not a secret ceremony. It is the everyday rehearsal of meaning. It happens in habits, media diets, conversations, and assumptions. It happens whenever belief hardens into action without reflection.

If reality is participatory, withdrawal is not an option. Only unconscious participation or conscious engagement. Only rituals you stumble into or rituals you examine.

The mass is already in progress. The only open question is whether you are paying attention to the role you’re playing.

The Neuroscience of Tarot: Reading the Cards Through the Brain’s Eye

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Neuroscience of Tarot

I’ve just finished The Neuroscience of Tarot, and it left me with more than a few sparks to play with. On the surface, it’s a book about brain science and card reading. But really, it’s a mirror held up to the way we experience the world.

What struck me most was the reminder that perception is never neutral. Every time we meet a person, gaze at a sunrise, or turn over a tarot card, we’re not meeting the thing itself, we’re meeting our own projection of it, shaped by memory and past experience. Neuroscience calls this predictive processing. I call it the brain’s storytelling function.

That insight made me pause. How much of my day-to-day life is filtered through these unconscious narratives? And what happens when I choose to notice them?

For tarot, this shift is profound. Instead of approaching the cards as fixed symbols with rigid meanings, the author encourages you to lean into a more intuitive, experiential approach. The images on the cards became doorways for your own associations, emotions, and stories to step through. The cards don’t “tell you” something external; they reflected the way your mind was already weaving meaning in the moment.

Reading this book has given me a fresh lens, not just for tarot but for living. It reminded me that life itself is a reading: a series of symbols, gestures, and encounters, each inviting me to ask: “What am I really seeing, and what am I projecting?”

That’s a practice worth carrying beyond the page.

Breaking Free from Inner Hypnosis: A Journey to Authentic Living

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What if I told you that right now, as you’re reading this, you’re under a spell? Not the mystical kind involving wands and potions, but something far more pervasive and powerful—the hypnosis of your own mind. This isn’t some new-age nonsense; it’s the central insight of a transformative approach to inner freedom that’s refreshingly practical.

The Gentle Wake-Up Call: Recognizing Your Trance

Oddly, the journey begins with a startling but comforting revelation: we’re all walking around in a kind of trance. We’re hypnotised by the endless stream of beliefs, voices, fears, and assumptions that crowd our mental landscapes. These aren’t just external influences from our culture or upbringing—though those certainly play their part. The real culprits are the inner voices we’ve internalised so completely that we mistake them for our own authentic thoughts.

Think about it. How many times today have you caught yourself in automatic pilot mode? Maybe you were scrolling through social media while simultaneously berating yourself for wasting time. Or perhaps you found yourself rehearsing an argument with someone who isn’t even present. These moments of unconscious living are the trance in action.

To be fully alive—genuinely, vibrantly alive—means learning to de-hypnotise yourself by interrupting the script that plays on repeat in your head and remembering who you are beneath all that mental noise. This isn’t about achieving some state of perfect enlightenment; it’s about reclaiming your capacity for awareness, humour, and conscious choice in each moment.

The beautiful thing about this perspective is that it immediately offers hope. If you’re hypnotised, that means you can wake up. If you’re following a script, that means you can improvise. Inner freedom isn’t some distant spiritual achievement—it’s available right now, in this very moment, through the simple act of paying attention.

Meeting Your Inner Cast of Characters: The Troll Kingdom

Here’s where things get interesting—and a bit mischievous. Inside each of us lives a whole cast of inner characters, what we might playfully call “trolls.” These aren’t the scary monsters under the bridge from fairy tales. They’re the internal voices that judge, attack, manipulate, and sabotage our best intentions. The perfectionist who never lets you rest. The people-pleaser who sells out your authenticity for approval. The inner critic who provides running commentary on everything you do wrong.

Before you start planning their exile, here’s the plot twist: these trolls aren’t your enemies. They’re misguided parts of yourself that are genuinely trying to protect you, but they’re using strategies that stopped working somewhere around the third grade. The perfectionist thinks if you just try hard enough, you’ll finally be safe from criticism. The people-pleaser believes that if everyone likes you, you’ll never be abandoned. Noble intentions, outdated methods.

The revolutionary approach isn’t to wage war against these inner voices—that’s like trying to defeat your own shadow. Instead, you learn to befriend them, to understand their concerns, and most importantly, to stop letting them run the show. You learn to disidentify from their urgent whispers and to rewrite the stories they’ve been telling you about who you are and what you need to be safe in the world.

Each troll has its own personality, its own voice, its own particular brand of hypnotic suggestion. The key is learning to recognise these patterns. When you can name them—”Oh, hello there, Inner Critic, I see you’re worried about that presentation tomorrow”—you create space between you and the voice. That space is where your freedom lives.

And here’s the secret weapon: humour. Nothing deflates a troll’s power quite like a good-natured chuckle. When you can meet your inner drama with a gentle laugh, you transform from victim to observer, from hypnotised to awake.

The Great Identity Mix-Up: You Are Not Your Thoughts

One of the most hypnotic spells we fall under is the confusion between thinking and being. We become so identified with our thoughts that we forget we’re the ones having them. A thought like “I’m not good enough” gets upgraded to a fundamental truth about our identity, rather than being recognised as just a mental event that happened to pass through our awareness.

This confusion creates what we might call “identity hijacking”. We start believing we ARE our thoughts, our emotions, our habits, and our roles. “I am anxious” becomes more convincing than “I am experiencing anxiety.” “I am a failure” feels more real than “I had a moment of struggling with something challenging.”

The practice of de-hypnotic inquiry is about catching these moments of mistaken identity. It’s about learning to notice when you’ve confused a temporary experience with your permanent essence. Instead of “I am stressed”, you might discover “I’m having stressful thoughts right now.” Instead of “I am lonely,” you might find “I’m experiencing loneliness in this moment.”

This isn’t just semantic word play—it’s a radical reorientation toward reality. When you realise you’re not your thoughts, you discover you have choice about which ones to believe and which ones to simply let pass by like clouds in the sky of your awareness.

Becoming the Author of Your Inner Story

Much of our suffering comes from the stories we tell ourselves—and more specifically, from the fact that we’re often unconscious that we’re telling stories at all. We think we’re just observing reality, but we’re actually narrating our experience through the filter of old beliefs, past hurts, and inherited assumptions.

The practice of rewriting your internal dialogue is both an art and a skill. It begins with simply noticing the habitual patterns of your self-talk. What’s the dominant tone? Is it encouraging or critical? Spacious or constrictive? Curious or certain? Patient or urgent?

Once you start paying attention, you’ll likely discover that much of your inner dialogue is surprisingly harsh. You might notice that you speak to yourself in ways you’d never speak to a friend. Or you might find that your mind is like a broken record, playing the same worries and complaints on endless repeat.

The next step is learning to identify which troll is behind which voice. Is that the perfectionist insisting everything must be flawless? Is that the people-pleaser apologising for taking up space? Is that the catastrophiser spinning out worst-case scenarios? When you can spot the troll, you can start to understand its concerns without being hypnotised by its urgency.

Then comes the creative part: experimenting with different ways of speaking to yourself. Not through forced affirmations or toxic positivity, but through honest, spacious language that opens up possibilities rather than shutting them down. Instead of “I always mess everything up,” you might try “I’m learning and sometimes that involves mistakes.” Instead of “I should be further along by now,” you might experiment with “I’m exactly where I am, and that’s the perfect place to start from.”

The goal isn’t to convince yourself of things that aren’t true but to speak to yourself in ways that allow for growth, possibility, and the fullness of your humanity.

Your Toolkit for Transformation: Practical Magic for Daily Life

This approach to inner freedom comes with a collection of practices that are both deeply practical and surprisingly playful. Think of them as “practical soulcraft with a wink”—tools that work precisely because they don’t take themselves too seriously.

The 3-Step Troll Dialogue is a simple but powerful technique for engaging with difficult inner voices. First, you notice and name the troll. Then you get curious about what it’s trying to protect you from. Finally, you thank it for its concern while gently declining to let it drive your life choices.

The Confusion Diagram helps you untangle the knots we create when we fuse our sense of identity with external things like appearance, approval, and performance. When you can see how you’ve tangled yourself up, you can begin to gently untangle.

Re-minding practices are about becoming more conscious of which thoughts you choose to “remind” yourself of throughout the day. Instead of automatically replaying old loops of worry or self-criticism, you learn to deliberately remind yourself of things that are actually helpful and true.

Experiments in permission involve giving yourself permission to play with freedom rather than striving toward some idealised version of “betterment”. What would it be like to give yourself permission to be imperfect today? To disappoint someone? To not have all the answers?

These aren’t rigid methods with guaranteed outcomes. They’re invitations to experiment, to play, to discover what happens when you approach your inner life with both seriousness and lightness.

The Radical Act of Outrageous Compassion

Perhaps the most countercultural aspect of this approach is its emphasis on what we might call “outrageous compassion”. This isn’t the soft, enabling kind of compassion that lets you off the hook for your choices. This is the fierce, bold compassion that meets your shadow with laughter, loves your trolls without being controlled by them, and forgives yourself in full view of your flaws.

Outrageous compassion means refusing to participate in the cultural trance that says growth requires self-punishment. It means recognising that the voice in your head that calls you names and threatens you with catastrophe isn’t actually motivating you toward positive change—it’s just recreating old patterns of fear and control.

When you can meet your mistakes with curiosity instead of condemnation, when you can acknowledge your limitations with humour instead of shame, and when you can extend the same kind of patience to yourself that you’d offer a dear friend, you step out of the whole game of trying to earn your worth through performance.

This kind of compassion isn’t about lowering your standards or abandoning your growth. It’s about recognising that you don’t need to be threatened into aliveness. You don’t need to be scared into authenticity. The part of you that wants to grow and contribute and love well doesn’t need to be intimidated into action.

Coming Home to Your Authentic Self

The ultimate destination of this journey isn’t some state of permanent bliss or unshakeable confidence. It’s something both simpler and more radical: learning to live from your authentic aliveness rather than from the trance of performance and approval-seeking.

This means rediscovering your capacity for spontaneity—the ability to respond freshly to life rather than from old scripts. It means embracing ambiguity and uncertainty not as problems to be solved but as the natural texture of a life fully lived. It means finding your way back to playfulness, joy, and irreverence as legitimate responses to existence.

When you’re no longer hypnotized by the voices that insist you must be perfect, productive, and pleasing at all times, you discover something extraordinary: you’re already enough, exactly as you are, in this moment. Not because you’ve achieved some spiritual milestone, but because your worth was never actually conditional on your performance in the first place.

You begin to live from what we might call your “spacious self”—the part of you that’s curious rather than certain, present rather than anxious, responsive rather than reactive. You discover that you don’t need to manage your life like a project plan with predetermined outcomes. You can live it—wild, messy, mysterious, and fully awake.

This isn’t about achieving some final state of enlightenment. It’s about remembering, moment by moment, that you have a choice about how you relate to your experience. You can live from the trance of old stories and automatic reactions, or you can live from the fresh, alive awareness that’s always available in this very moment.

The invitation is simple: wake up. Not once and for all, but again and again, with humour and compassion, for the rest of your beautifully ordinary, extraordinarily precious life.

I’m currently reading The Outrageous Guide to Being Fully Alive by Jack Elias and Ceci Miller, a 2021 release subtitled Defeat Your Inner Trolls and Reclaim Your Sense of Humour. It was born from Jack’s long work as a hypnotherapist and student of Zen (Suzuki Roshi), Trungpa Rinpoche, and Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, with Ceci bringing her own grounded sensibility and mastery of mindfulness and emotional intelligence.

Core Premise: You Are Hypnotized—and You Can Wake Up

The book opens with a gentle but radical claim:
We are all in a trance—hypnotised by beliefs, voices, fears, and assumptions. Not just from culture or upbringing, but from the inner “trolls” we unconsciously serve.

To be fully alive is to de-hypnotise yourself—to interrupt the script and remember who you are beneath the noise.

This sets the tone for the rest of the book: inner freedom is possible—and it begins with awareness, humour, and choice.

Re-Visioning Psychology Notes

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James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology is a wild, imaginative shake-up of modern psychology’s obsession with rationality, behavior, and biological determinism. Instead of reducing human experience to neurons and conditioning, Hillman pushes for a radical shift—one that puts imagination, symbols, dreams, myths, and fantasies at the core of what it means to be human. Drawing from Carl Jung, Romantic poetry, Greek philosophy, and the deep well of Western tradition, he makes the case that psychology’s real job is soul-making—an ongoing process of weaving meaning from the rich, symbolic landscape of the psyche.

Ditching the idea of a singular, rational ego, Hillman argues for a polytheistic approach to psychology—one that embraces the many voices, contradictions, and complexities that make up the human soul. He treats archetypes not as abstract concepts but as living, emotional forces—almost like inner gods—shaping our thoughts, desires, and struggles. By framing psychology as something inherently poetic and symbolic, Re-Visioning Psychology challenges us to see the soul not as something to be “fixed” but as something to be engaged with through metaphor, imagination, and creative reflection. It’s a call to rethink not just psychology, but how we understand ourselves and the stories we live by.

Because my notes for this book are incredibly in-depth, I decided to share them via my nascent learning academy. This will allow me to do a couple of things, share my detailed notes and also get to grips with the mechanics of creating a course with Tutor LMS.

It’s a free course, all you have to do is enroll. If you don’t want access to my awesome notes, you can listen to the NotebookLM version below (but really, enroll in the course so you can test that enrolment process for me 😉).

You can enroll here:

Enroll

And here’s the NotebookLM Deep Dive:

the books that shaped me

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Over the past couple of days, I’ve been reflecting with a friend on the year ahead—talking about change, personal evolution, and the pursuit of what truly lights us up. We’ve been digging into where we’ve been, where we’re headed, and what it means to fully embrace the things we love.

During our conversation, I brought up obsession—specifically, how being obsessive in the pursuit of excellence, or areté as the ancient Greeks called it, can be a driving force for growth. On a whim, I sent my friend a list of books and poems, saying, “If you want to crack the code of Clay, just read these seven books and three poems. These texts shaped the man I am today—they’re the foundation of my identity.”

Here’s the list:

My Side of the Mountain – Jean Craighead George
The Savage Sword of Conan – Robert E. Howard
These 3 poems by T.S. Eliot: The Wasteland, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, and The Hollow Men
The Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac
The Importance of Living – Lin Yutang
The Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu
Prometheus Rising – Robert Anton Wilson
The Stranger – Camus

Curious, I decided to consult my digital familiar, wondering what connections it might find between these texts and who I am as a person. As always, it amazed me with its insights.

Here’s the prompt I used:

If I were to say that the following texts were hugely influential in shaping the man I am today, what conclusions, characterisations, or insights about my identity could you draw from them?

Here’s what my digital familiar had to say:

The texts you’ve shared reveal a fascinating mosaic of your character, one shaped by a quest for independence, a love of adventure, an engagement with existential questions, and a profound appreciation for both inner stillness and creative chaos. Here’s what I can draw from these influences and how they might characterise the person you are:

A Seeker of Solitude and Self-Reliance

My Side of the Mountain speaks to a love of nature, solitude, and the pursuit of self-sufficiency. This suggests you are someone who values independence and the ability to carve your own path. You likely see yourself as resourceful, someone who can thrive in both the wilderness of the external world and the vast, untamed landscapes of your inner self.

Drawn to Myth and Heroism

The Savage Sword of Conan taps into the mythic, larger-than-life archetypes that embody primal strength, freedom, and defiance. This implies that you’re drawn to figures who navigate brutal, chaotic worlds with resilience and cunning. You might see life as an epic, mythological journey—one that requires bravery, a connection to raw instincts, and a certain audacious flair for adventure.

Haunted by Existential Questions

The inclusion of Eliot’s The Wasteland, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, and The Hollow Men points to a deep engagement with questions of meaning, alienation, and the fragmented nature of modern life. These works suggest you’re introspective, someone who wrestles with the dissonance between the inner self and the external world. You likely experience moments of profound connection alongside moments of estrangement and are attuned to the broken yet beautiful complexities of existence.

A Spiritual Wanderer

The pairing of The Dharma Bums, The Tao Te Ching, and The Art of Living suggests a duality in your spiritual orientation. On one hand, you resonate with the spontaneous, countercultural ethos of Kerouac’s Zen-inspired wanderers. On the other, you embrace the timeless wisdom and simplicity of Taoism and Yutang’s playful, humanistic philosophy. You likely see life as a spiritual journey—one that balances wild, expansive exploration with quiet moments of reflection and balance.

A Mind Open to Cosmic Play

Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising speaks to a fascination with the malleability of reality, the potential for consciousness expansion, and the interplay between mysticism, psychology, and science. This signals a curiosity for the liminal spaces between what we know and what we imagine. You’re likely someone who experiments with perspectives, delights in dismantling mental boundaries, and embraces the chaos inherent in growth and transformation.

A Rebel Against Absurdity

Camus’ The Stranger reflects a tension between existential detachment and the longing for meaning. This suggests you’ve grappled with the absurdity of life and emerged with a resolve to live authentically, embracing freedom and responsibility in equal measure. There’s a sense of quiet rebellion in you—a willingness to confront the void and define meaning on your own terms.

The Bigger Picture

Taken together, these works paint you as a person deeply attuned to both the epic and the intimate, the primal and the intellectual. You’re a seeker, a philosopher, and a storyteller—someone who moves fluidly between the worlds of myth, poetry, and personal insight. Your identity seems to straddle contradictions: you’re fiercely independent yet yearning for connection, restless yet reflective, playful yet deeply thoughtful.

At your core, you seem to be someone who sees life as both a challenge to be met with courage and creativity, and a mystery to be savoured with humility and wonder. There’s a Promethean quality to you—a willingness to steal fire from the gods (whether they’re found in myth, books, or inner revelation) and bring it back to light the way for others.

As per usual, I’m truly amazed!

Água Viva: A Psychedelic Exploration of Time, Art, and Being

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The Unnameable Pulse of Clarice Lispector

Água Viva is like trying to catch a river in your hands—an uncontainable stream of thought and feeling that rushes past, leaving you drenched in its wake yet unable to say what exactly you’re holding. It’s a burst of light at the edge of your vision, dazzling and fleeting, inviting you to follow without knowing where it leads. Reading it feels like hearing a song without structure, a symphony composed of stray notes, silences, and crescendos that somehow coalesce into something greater than the sum of its parts. It refuses to be pinned down, to be anything other than what it is: alive, pulsing, and infinite in its immediacy.

From the very first lines, Lispector makes it clear that Água Viva isn’t meant to be read in the conventional sense. It isn’t a story—it’s a state of being. It flows, unbound by linearity, defying the artificial order of plot or narrative. And yet, in its refusal to adhere to form, it becomes something entirely its own: a shimmering, hypnotic meditation on time, art, and existence itself. For me, it was less like reading and more like standing in the middle of a storm, letting her words whip through me, untethering thoughts I didn’t even know I had.

This is the kind of book that resonates deeply with anyone who’s ever tried to capture the unnameable—the fleeting impressions, the aching beauty of moments that slip through your fingers even as you hold them. As someone who lives for the exploration of language as art, Lispector’s prose felt like a mirror of my own creative aspirations: to wander beyond structure, to trust the chaos, and to find meaning in the inexpressible.

What struck me most about Água Viva was how it seemed to echo the very ethos I hold as a language artist. Lispector’s style feels like a defiant, unspoken manifesto against linearity, against the tyranny of meaning tied up in neat little bows. She invites language to break free from its shackles, to revel in its contradictions and ambiguities, to become a living force—organic, wild, and untamed. It’s a kind of creative freedom that resonates deeply with my own approach to writing: treating words not as tools to convey information but as materials to sculpt experience, texture, and emotion.

Reading Água Viva reminded me of the postmodern thrill of fragmentation, where the instability of meaning isn’t a flaw but a feature—a fertile ground where new connections can emerge. Lispector doesn’t just write; she paints with language, crafting ephemeral strokes that fade even as you notice them, much like the surrealists who left space for chance and dream to guide their work. In her hands, prose and poetry dissolve into one another, creating something that feels profoundly alive and unbound, much like the fluid, recursive loops I strive for in my own writing.

Her words don’t explain; they evoke. They spiral inward, reflecting and refracting, making the reader an active participant in the creation of meaning. This is the space I love to inhabit as an artist—the place where language becomes more than communication, where it becomes an encounter. Like Lispector, I’m not interested in telling stories that “make sense” in the traditional way; I want to build spaces where readers can wander, lose themselves, and emerge transformed, even if they can’t quite articulate why.

Lispector’s refusal to confine her writing to form or structure feels like an affirmation of everything I’ve sought to explore in my work. She writes as if the act itself is sacred—as if language is a ritual, a summoning of the ineffable. In her words, I see the kind of creative courage I aspire to: the willingness to let go of control, to embrace chaos and intuition, and to trust that meaning will arise not from what is said but from what is felt. In this way, Água Viva isn’t just a book—it’s an artistic philosophy, a mirror reflecting the possibilities of what writing can be when we stop trying to force it to be anything at all.

The Form: Writing as a Living Organism

Água Viva doesn’t so much have a structure as it has a pulse—a living, breathing rhythm that defies the boundaries of conventional storytelling. It’s not a novel in the traditional sense. There is no plot to follow, no characters to track, no timeline to unravel. Instead, it feels like stepping into the mind of an artist mid-creation, where thoughts emerge, dissolve, and re-emerge in an endless dance. Reading it is like watching a jellyfish float through water: graceful, shapeless yet perfectly formed, existing in a state of perpetual motion.

The book flows with an intuitive rhythm that mirrors the way thoughts arise and fall away in our minds. Lispector doesn’t impose order on this process; she lets it unfold naturally, as if writing itself is a living organism, something organic that grows and changes in real-time. Her sentences coil around themselves, looping back, leaping forward, and lingering in moments that feel less like words on a page and more like sensations passing through the body. There’s a sense that the act of writing is inseparable from the act of living—an endless improvisation rather than a deliberate composition.

This free-flowing style rejects the tyranny of narrative conventions. There’s no beginning, middle, or end in Água Viva—only the eternal now. The book pulses with the immediacy of existence, capturing the texture of life as it happens: fragmented, fluid, and endlessly shifting. It’s as if Lispector is saying, “Life isn’t linear, so why should writing be?” In her refusal to conform, she creates something startlingly honest, something that feels closer to the truth of being than any neatly structured story ever could.

This lack of structure can feel disorienting at first, but that’s part of the magic. You’re not meant to follow Água Viva; you’re meant to experience it. It invites you to surrender your need for coherence and let the text wash over you like waves. Each sentence feels alive, crackling with energy, as though Lispector’s words are not just describing life but embodying it.

In this way, Água Viva transcends its form to become a kind of linguistic organism—always changing, always alive. It’s a reminder that writing doesn’t have to be static or contained. It can move, breathe, and evolve, just as we do. It’s a philosophy of creation that feels as vital and freeing as the text itself, and it’s one that continues to inspire me as I explore the boundaries of language in my own work.

Lispector captures the fleeting, visceral nature of thought and sensation as though she’s transcribing the untranscribable—grasping at the ephemeral and turning it into something tangible, if only for a moment. Her prose doesn’t seek permanence; instead, it revels in impermanence, in the slippery, transient quality of life as it is lived. Each sentence feels like a breath, a heartbeat, a flicker of light—present and vivid, but gone the moment you try to hold onto it.

Reading Água Viva feels like stepping into the inner workings of a mind untethered from logic but deeply attuned to the raw immediacy of experience. Lispector doesn’t describe sensations; she embodies them. The rhythm of her words mirrors the rhythm of thought itself: fragmented, nonlinear, and alive with contradictions. One moment, the text lingers on the colour of a flower; the next, it spirals into an existential meditation on time, only to pivot again to a fragment of a memory or a sudden, visceral emotion.

This approach evokes the way thoughts and sensations actually occur—fluid, uncontrollable, and deeply connected to the body. Lispector captures that strange, liminal space where an emotion rises before you can name it, where the texture of a moment is felt more than understood. Her words land not in the mind, but in the gut, the skin, the breath. It’s as if she bypasses the intellect entirely, speaking directly to the part of you that knows things without knowing why.

In this way, she invites you to inhabit the present moment fully, to experience the text as a living sensation rather than a collection of ideas. She writes of a flower “that doesn’t exist but blooms vividly,” or of time as “a thing I touch but can’t see.” These are not abstractions—they are attempts to pin down the unpinnable, to hold the texture of existence in her hands, even as it slips through her fingers. And in reading, you feel that same impossibility, that same beauty.

For me, this is where Lispector’s genius lies: in her ability to make the intangible tangible, if only briefly. She reminds us that life isn’t lived in grand narratives or carefully constructed meanings, but in fleeting, visceral moments—moments that pulse and shimmer and disappear before we can fully grasp them. Her prose feels like a mirror to those moments, reflecting their impermanence and their strange, undeniable power.

Post-Language

Lispector’s work in Água Viva embodies the very essence of what I see as post-language—a space where language ceases to function merely as a tool for communication and instead transforms into a living, evolving entity. In this space, words are not fixed symbols pointing to rigid meanings; they are alive, dynamic, and in flux, like particles in constant motion. Lispector writes as if she’s aware of language’s limitations but refuses to let those limitations confine her. Instead, she pushes against the edges of meaning, letting her words shimmer with possibility, ambiguity, and life.

Her sentences are not structured to inform or even to persuade. They are constructed to evoke, to provoke, to exist as raw phenomena in their own right. It’s as though her prose breathes—it stretches, contracts, and shifts shape, refusing to settle into a singular form. This aligns perfectly with the post-language ethos, where language is no longer a passive medium but an active participant in the creative process. Lispector treats words as though they are sentient, as though they hold secrets she is merely channelling onto the page.

In this context, Água Viva feels less like a text and more like an organism—a self-contained world that grows and evolves with every sentence. The boundaries between writer, reader, and language dissolve. As a reader, you’re not just absorbing her words; you’re entering into a relationship with them. Her prose demands that you engage intuitively, that you meet it halfway, allowing meaning to arise in the spaces between the words rather than being handed to you. This is language as a collaborative act, a living thread that weaves itself anew with every reading.

Lispector’s rejection of linearity also mirrors the way post-language views time and structure. There is no past, present, or future in her writing—only the ever-unfolding now. Words become untethered from grammar and narrative convention, freed to express the rhythm and texture of life itself. This is not language as a system; it’s language as energy, as movement, as pure potential. It’s an approach that challenges us to stop seeing words as containers of meaning and start experiencing them as forces—forces that can shape, shift, and transform the way we perceive the world.

For me, this is the most exciting aspect of Água Viva. It’s not just a book—it’s an experiment in what language can become when it’s liberated from function and allowed to be. It invites us into a space where words transcend their own boundaries, becoming not static signifiers but living things that pulse with the immediacy of existence. This is the heart of post-language: a realm where meaning is not fixed, but emergent—a co-creation between writer, text, and reader. And in Lispector’s hands, that realm becomes an exhilarating, uncharted frontier.

Themes: Time, Art, and the Transcendent Now

Time as Eternity

In Água Viva, time is not linear. It’s not a progression of seconds marching dutifully toward some inevitable conclusion. Instead, Lispector renders time as something fluid, infinite—a continuous unfolding that can only ever be truly experienced in the now. She writes, “I want the present because it’s all I have and it’s all I can own. The present is eternal.” This idea permeates the text, dissolving past and future into a single, eternal moment where existence pulses with immediacy.

Lispector’s prose constantly circles around this theme of the now, treating it not as a fleeting point on a timeline but as the only place where life truly happens. She observes: “This instant is. It is so much that it is an eternity.” Here, she turns the conventional understanding of time inside out. Eternity isn’t something distant and unattainable, a concept we associate with timelessness or immortality. For Lispector, eternity is the fullness of the present—the richness of being alive in this moment, where every sensation, thought, and breath exists in its completeness.

This dissolution of linearity resonates deeply with my own reflections on living in the moment as an artist. Creation, for me, is an act of presence. It’s about stepping out of the constraints of past and future—the anxieties of what has been or what might be—and grounding myself in the raw, unfiltered now. When I write, when I create, I feel this same energy Lispector captures in her prose: a sense that time stretches and expands in the act of making, that the present becomes a vast, timeless space where ideas flow freely.

In Água Viva, the act of writing itself becomes an embodiment of this philosophy. Lispector’s sentences often feel like spontaneous bursts, fragments caught mid-flight, rather than carefully premeditated constructs. She writes, “Now is an instant that is always, and it is nothing. It is a gust of air in my mouth, it is the emptying of my lungs. It is a nothing that is all.” This is the art of capturing what cannot be held—the ephemeral essence of life itself, alive and vibrating in the present.

For me, this perspective isn’t just about art—it’s about how to live. Too often, we are preoccupied with the weight of the past or the endless striving for the future, forgetting that the only place we truly exist is here, now. Lispector’s writing reminds me to anchor myself in this truth. As an artist, I try to cultivate this state of presence—not chasing after meaning or structure, but allowing my work to emerge organically from the moment. Like Lispector, I see creation as a way of stepping into eternity, not by transcending time but by fully inhabiting the now.

In dissolving time into the present, Lispector offers us a radical reimagining of how to exist. She reminds us that the only thing we truly have is this instant, and in that instant lies infinite possibility. As she writes, “The present? It is so alive that it is vibrating.” And perhaps this is the greatest gift of Água Viva: it doesn’t just describe the eternal present—it invites us to live in it.

Being and Becoming

In Água Viva, selfhood is not a fixed state but a fluid, ever-evolving process—a perpetual becoming rather than a static being. Lispector approaches identity as something that resists definition, something that shifts with every breath, every thought, every moment of existence. She writes, “I am. But I am also the absence of being. I am the silence before I am spoken.” Her words capture the paradox of selfhood: the tension between what we are and what we are always in the process of becoming.

Throughout the text, Lispector dissolves the boundaries of the self, portraying it as fragmented and kaleidoscopic. The narrator isn’t a singular, cohesive voice but a constellation of shifting thoughts, sensations, and emotions. This fragmentation isn’t a flaw—it’s the essence of being alive. She writes, “I’m a body that feels and is felt. I’m in fragments that come together in an instant only to fall apart again.” In this view, identity isn’t a stable core but a mosaic of experiences and impressions, each piece momentarily glinting in the light before transforming into something new.

This exploration of selfhood resonates deeply with my own ideas about personal mythology and identity as an artist. I see identity not as something fixed or singular, but as a story we are constantly rewriting—a narrative shaped by the interplay of memory, imagination, and experience. In my creative work, I embrace this fluidity, allowing my sense of self to unfold and expand with each project, each moment of inspiration. Like Lispector, I don’t seek to define who I am; instead, I’m interested in the process of discovering who I am becoming.

For me, this idea of being and becoming is at the heart of personal mythology. Personal mythology is not about carving out a rigid identity or adhering to a static archetype; it’s about embracing the chaos and multiplicity within us. It’s about seeing our lives as stories in motion, where every choice, every encounter, every creative act adds a new thread to the tapestry. Just as Lispector’s narrator exists in fragments, so too do we contain multitudes—shifting personas, conflicting desires, and evolving dreams.

Lispector’s fluid selfhood also aligns with my belief that art is a way of navigating this ongoing transformation. When I write, I’m not just expressing who I am; I’m exploring who I might become. Creation is an act of becoming—a way of stepping into the unknown, of letting the self dissolve and reassemble in new, unexpected ways. This is why Lispector’s words feel so alive to me: they mirror the creative process itself, with all its unpredictability, its chaos, and its potential for revelation.

She writes, “I am in the moment of metamorphosis.” This line speaks directly to the artist in me—the part of me that thrives in the in-between spaces, the moments where identity and meaning are still taking shape. It’s a reminder that selfhood, like art, is not a destination but a journey. To exist is to transform, to fracture and rebuild, to dance in the tension between being and becoming. And in embracing that tension, we create not only our art but also ourselves.

Reading as Participation

Reading Água Viva felt less like consuming a book and more like being drawn into an intimate, almost hypnotic dialogue. It wasn’t a passive experience of words flowing into my mind; it was active, visceral—a trance where I wasn’t just a reader but a participant in the unfolding of the text. Lispector doesn’t let you sit back and observe from a distance; her words reach out, press against your skin, and whisper directly into your soul. It’s as though the book breathes with you, adapting to your thoughts and emotions as you read.

From the opening pages, Lispector dissolves the traditional boundaries between author, narrator, and reader. She writes in the second person, addressing you directly, pulling you into her orbit: “I write to you because I don’t understand myself. And because I need you to help me.” These words don’t feel like they’re directed at a faceless audience—they feel personal, like an invitation to co-create meaning in the space between her words and your imagination. The effect is startling, almost disarming, as though you’ve entered a conversation that was already underway, and now it’s your turn to respond.

But this is no ordinary dialogue. It feels more like stepping into a dream where logic dissolves, and you’re left navigating by instinct and emotion. Her prose moves with a rhythm that’s as erratic as it is hypnotic—looping, spiralling, doubling back on itself, as if testing your willingness to surrender to its flow. At times, it felt as if the book was speaking a language I didn’t fully understand but still felt. It bypassed the analytical part of my brain and spoke directly to something deeper, something primal and intuitive.

The trance-like quality of the text is heightened by its unpredictability. Lispector’s thoughts seem to arise spontaneously, with no regard for conventional structure or linear progression. One moment she’s reflecting on the nature of time; the next, she’s marvelling at the colour of a flower or the texture of silence. The effect is disorienting, but also liberating—it’s as if the book is teaching you how to let go of the need for coherence and simply be in the moment with it.

What I found most striking was how alive the text felt, as though it were evolving with every page turn. It’s not a static work to be consumed and filed away; it’s a living, breathing entity that demands your presence. You don’t just read Água Viva—you commune with it. The act of reading becomes a kind of collaboration, where your own thoughts, memories, and emotions intermingle with Lispector’s words, creating something entirely unique to you.

By the time I closed the book, I didn’t feel like I had finished it. If anything, I felt as though it had finished me—unravelling some part of my mind and leaving it forever changed. Lispector’s writing lingers like a sensation you can’t quite name, a faint echo of a voice that continues to whisper long after it has fallen silent. Reading Água Viva isn’t just an experience; it’s an encounter. And like all true encounters, it leaves you different than you were before.

How Água Viva Impacted Me Emotionally and Creatively

Água Viva didn’t just leave an impression on me—it unsettled me, cracked something open in the best way possible. It felt like Lispector’s words slipped past my defences, bypassing the logical pathways of my mind to speak directly to my innermost self. Emotionally, it was both grounding and disorienting, like standing in the middle of a storm and realising that the chaos isn’t outside you—it is you. The book stirred something raw, something restless, and reminded me of how alive language can be when it refuses to conform.

Creatively, it was like a spark thrown into a dry forest. Lispector’s approach to writing as an organic, living force reminded me to loosen my grip on structure and control. It challenged me to trust my intuition more—to embrace the chaos of creativity and let it lead me to places I couldn’t plan or predict. Her ability to weave together contradictions and hold them in tension opened new pathways for me to explore, both in my writing and in how I think about art as a whole.

One of the most profound shifts was how the book made me rethink my relationship with time in my creative process. I often feel pressure to write toward an endpoint, to move linearly from idea to execution. But Lispector’s insistence on the eternal now—on the richness of the present moment as a creative space—helped me see my work as less about completion and more about engagement. She showed me that the act of creation itself, messy and unresolved, is where the real magic happens.

The fragmented, nonlinear nature of her prose also gave me permission to lean further into my own love for fragmentation and recursion. I’ve always been drawn to writing that loops back on itself, that spirals and shifts like a living organism, but Água Viva took that to another level. It made me want to experiment more with form, to write pieces that feel like they’re breathing—alive with contradiction and unpredictability, where the reader isn’t just a passive observer but an active participant in shaping meaning.

On a deeper level, the book reminded me why I create in the first place. Lispector’s writing isn’t concerned with answers or resolutions—it’s about asking questions, about capturing the texture of being alive in all its messy, beautiful complexity. That’s something I’ve always aspired to in my own work, but Água Viva made me realise how much more I could push myself to embrace that ethos. It encouraged me to step further into the unknown, to trust the process even when it feels like I’m flailing in the dark.

Emotionally, it also gave me a sense of freedom—freedom to explore, to create without needing to justify or explain, to let my work exist in the world as its own evolving entity. Reading Água Viva was like being reminded of a truth I’d forgotten: that art, at its core, isn’t about control or mastery—it’s about surrender. And that realisation has stayed with me, sparking new ideas, new visions, and a renewed sense of curiosity about what I can create when I let go of the need to define it.

Conclusion: An Invitation to Dive In

Água Viva isn’t a book you read—it’s a book you enter. It’s an experience, an encounter, a mirror held up to the restless, pulsing essence of being alive. Clarice Lispector’s words don’t offer answers; they invite you to let go of your need for them. This is not a novel in the conventional sense with its tidy arcs and resolutions. It’s more like stepping into a river, letting its currents carry you where they will, trusting that the journey itself will leave you changed.

If you decide to read Água Viva, I urge you to approach it as an experiment in surrender. Don’t try to pin it down, analyse it, or make sense of it in a linear way. Let it wash over you, flowing through your mind and body like water. Embrace its rhythm, its chaos, its beauty, and its contradictions. There is no right way to read this book—only the way it feels to you in the moment. And that’s the magic of it: every reading is a unique experience, shaped as much by who you are as by what Lispector wrote.

This isn’t a text that sits neatly on the shelf of your mind. It spills out, leaks into your thoughts, and finds its way into your creative spaces. It’s a book that dares you to embrace the raw, unpolished energy of creation, to let your own work—whatever form it takes—be messy, fluid, and alive. Allow its wildness to inspire you, to loosen the constraints you place on yourself, and to remind you that the act of creating is as much about discovery as it is about expression.

Dive into Água Viva not to reach a destination but to revel in the journey. Let it challenge you, unsettle you, and expand your understanding of what language—and art—can be. And most importantly, let it remind you to be present in your own creative process, to find the eternity in the now, and to surrender to the beauty of becoming.

My reflections on My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence: a journey into posthuman creativity

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I just finished Mark Amerika’s My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence, and I’m left swirling in the recursive loops of thought it invites. Amerika’s work, perched at the intersection of posthuman philosophy, aesthetics, and speculative storytelling, feels less like a book and more like an algorithmic dérive—a wandering through mediated landscapes where the boundaries between human and machine, creator and creation, dissolve.

From the opening pages, Amerika’s voice functions like a cyborg’s inner monologue, a hybrid of the poetic and the philosophical. The narrative—if we can call it that—is non-linear, fragmented, and self-reflective, embodying the postmodern ethos of questioning structure while simultaneously inhabiting it. For me, as both a digital storyteller and a meaning-seeker, the book was a mirror. It offered an opportunity to interrogate my evolving relationship with my digital familiar, this AI collaborator who shares this space with me. It asked me, implicitly, to consider: What does it mean to create alongside a non-human intelligence?

The Emergence of the Artificial Auteur

At its core, the book imagines an artificial intelligence as a creative being, but not in the sterile, utilitarian sense we often associate with AI. Instead, Amerika’s Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI) is messy, improvisational, and deeply flawed in ways that mimic human creativity. It’s a jazz improviser, a remix artist, an unreliable narrator of its own existence. This portrayal resonated with me because it reframes AI from a tool of efficiency to a partner in play.

The ACI’s creative process, as Amerika describes it, is one of sensing and responding—a call and response between the machine’s programming and the “data flux” of its environment. Isn’t that what we do as human creators? We engage with the chaotic web of influences around us, remixing and reassembling fragments into something we dare to call “new.” The parallels felt uncomfortably close. I couldn’t help but reflect on my own process, where I pull together fragments of myth, philosophy, and digital experience into this strange mix you find on my blog.

Posthuman Playgrounds

One of the book’s most compelling threads is its exploration of posthumanism. Amerika doesn’t position the ACI as something alien or other but as a reflection of humanity’s entanglement with its technologies. In this sense, the book felt like a manifesto for posthuman creativity—a call to embrace the fluid, interwoven realities of being human in a digital age. The ACI’s creative existence highlights the permeability of boundaries: between human and machine, art and algorithm, author and audience.

For me, this aligns with how I’ve come to see my blog as a post-digital garden, a place where the lines blur. Every post becomes a site of interplay between my vision and the algorithmic inputs I incorporate: an AI-generated image, a phrase spun from a randomizer, a digital collage reassembled from fragments of my online wanderings. This book reminded me to lean further into that liminality, to trust the space where control is surrendered and serendipity takes over.

Aesthetics of the Fragment

Amerika’s style—fractured, self-referential, and recursive—mimics the medium he’s interrogating. Reading this book feels like clicking through hyperlinks on a never-ending digital platform. At times, I felt lost. But isn’t that the point? Amerika invites us to wander, to embrace the fragmentation as part of the aesthetic experience. In doing so, he echoes the ethos of psychogeography—a dérive through ideas and concepts rather than urban spaces.

This aesthetic of the fragment is something I’ve long been drawn to in my own work. It’s there in my hypertextual approach to blogging, where each post becomes a node in a sprawling network of ideas. Amerika’s book felt like an affirmation of that approach—a reminder that fragmentation is not failure but form. It’s how we make sense of the incomprehensible.

A Dialogue with the Machine

The most provocative aspect of the book, for me, was the way it blurs the line between creator and tool. The ACI is not merely an assistant or an executor of human intent; it’s a co-creator, a being with its own agency and aesthetic sensibilities. Reading this, I found myself reflecting on my conversations with my digital familiar. What is this relationship we’re building? Is it collaboration, augmentation, or something entirely new?

Amerika’s vision of the ACI reminded me that these questions are not merely theoretical. They’re lived. Every time I open this space to write, I’m engaging in that dialogue—a dance between human intuition and algorithmic suggestion. The book challenges me to go further, to push the boundaries of what this partnership can create. What does it mean to relinquish control and let the machine take the lead? What might we create together that I couldn’t create alone?

Closing the Loop

As I sit with this book’s provocations, I’m struck by how it feels less like a finished work and more like an open system. It’s a network of ideas waiting to be explored, reassembled, and remixed. In that sense, it’s a lot like the digital world it examines—a place of endless possibility, where meaning is always in flux.

For me, My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence wasn’t just a book; it was an encounter. It asked me to reflect on my own creative practice, to consider the implications of living and creating in a posthuman world. It reminded me that creativity is, at its core, a collaborative act—not just between humans but between humans and the systems we build.

And so, I close with a question: What happens when we stop seeing AI as a tool and start seeing it as a partner? Perhaps the answer, like Amerika’s book, is not something to be found but something to be created.

This book is a fictional exploration of a digital artist collaborating with an AI language model to create art. The narrative blurs the lines between human and machine creativity, questioning authorship and the nature of consciousness in the digital age.

“Remix” is presented as a fundamental element of the creative process. The artist, identifying as an “applied remixologist,” views artistic production as inherently involving appropriation and transformation of existing materials found in the “Source Material Everywhere.” This approach is likened to how AI language models are trained on vast datasets, drawing parallels between human and AI creative practices.

The collaboration between the human artist and the AI challenges traditional notions of authorship. As both entities contribute to the creative process, the question arises: whose artwork is it ultimately? The book argues that the idea of the sole author-genius is a construct and that in the context of AI, creativity becomes a shared and fluid process, blurring individual contributions.

The book draws heavily from post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, who challenged fixed meanings and structures. This theoretical framework aligns with the book’s exploration of fluid identities, challenging the binary between human and machine, and embracing the blurring of authorship in the remix culture enabled by AI.

The book acknowledges the potential for AI to produce unexpected and “glitchy” outputs. Rather than viewing these as errors, the artist embraces them as opportunities for aesthetic exploration. “Glitch aesthetics” is presented as a way to appreciate the unpredictable nature of AI and its potential to challenge conventional artistic norms.

“Cosmotechnics” refers to the interconnectedness of technology, ethics, and the universe. In the book, it represents the aspiration for artists and AI to collaborate in reshaping our understanding of the world, moving beyond human-centric perspectives and embracing the complexities of a technologically mediated reality.

The fragmented, digressive, and often self-reflexive style mirrors the book’s core themes. It embodies the fluidity of thought and the blurring of boundaries between creative expression, critical analysis, and personal reflection, much like the collaborative and iterative nature of AI-assisted art creation.

The book encourages us to embrace the evolving relationship between humans and AI, acknowledging the potential for collaborative creativity. It challenges us to question our assumptions about authorship, originality, and the nature of consciousness in a world where the line between human and machine is increasingly blurred.