Thank You to Readers
A venting thank you that moves from appreciation → truth-seeking mission → cancel culture frustrations → provocateur tendencies → creative compulsions → collaborative aspirations.
Thank You to Readers
Now that I have finished posting the 2016 stanzas from my mosaic poem Made For You and Me, it seems like high time to express my thanks. Thank you for engaging with my work. I appreciate you taking this ride with me, getting intimate with my creative exploits. Thank you especially if you read me each day.
My writing runs the gamut, from mountain peaks to ocean depths. I enjoy exploring the highs and lows of inner and outer reality. But even the feel-good and uplifting material—take, for example, my poem “AA Meeting” or my poem “Voyager” or my love letter “That Fun Auntie”—never dips (so at least I hope) into Hallmark hollowness. Because I make it a point to stick close to what is real, the ride can be tough, upsetting, even in the happiest times of coasting on sunshine. As a life affirmer in the vein of Spinoza and Nietzsche, I want to be able to confront the darkest facts of reality—facts, say, that Schopenhauer and Cioran at their rhetorical heights could draw our attention to—and still say “Yes” (still find insight and beauty and so on).
Investigating brutal truths, plumbing the darkest depths, in my creative and academic writing is my thing. It has always been my thing. Some of you might be under the impression that it is my main thing. I am more diverse than that. But if you do sense that I have been leaning even more toward the dark side (see, for example, “Khe Sanh”), you would not be completely wrong. After my efforts out of poverty and into academia were wrecked by the anti-art anti-diversity swell of cancel culture (a story I describe in my “Letter of Grievance”), I have become even more outspoken—even more radical in my efforts to shine a light on suppressed horrors and to dismantle comforting illusions.
We need provocateurs and iconoclasts, I say to myself. We need writers of the “obscene and offensive and hateful and problematic,” given our era of “safe-space” excess: a time where cries of “triggered” and “activated” have constricted the circumference of what we can say (especially if we happen to have certain optics). If we stay silent about unsettling realities (like that children are being trafficked or that we all have a Nazi inside us), we aid and abet a dark climate where they are able to grow best. If we avoid telling the truth so as not to upset people, we aid and abet a climate where artistic exploration and intellectual curiosity is considered inappropriate.
But beneath this justification (which is a genuine justification reflecting my calling to learn and expose the truth), there is a certain pleasure—a cruel delight—I get in using brutal truths as a cudgel. I do have a heart, do not get me wrong. Indeed, I empathize even with those motivated to silence “malinformation” and the artists and thinkers who spread it (as I make clear in my essay “An Olive Branch to the Cancelers”). Hope-preserving fantasies and consolation-preserving delusions, after all, can be psychologically and physically protective. They can be, to use Nietzschean language, “hygienic to life.” It makes sense, then, for people to fight to safeguard their atmospheres of delusion, their buffers against the void. When an artist comes along pointing out our hypocrisies and our ignorance and our shadow elements, that can feel like a personal assault (even when it is done in the pursuit of truth). But from my mood right now and from where I stand right now, I do not like these silencers—these cancelation gremlins. I harbor enmity for all who would suppress literary expression. On my best days, I simply would have their access to artists and thinkers blocked (until they can prove that they are big enough boys and girls—speaking by analogy now—to sit through the movie without being up all night with nightmares and without then siccing the institutional powers against the upsetting movie and its maker). If there is going to be any blocking, such a gatekeeping tactic is better than blocking the artists and thinkers from expressing themselves—that, at least, is the main thesis of the essay in question. On my worst days, however, I would love to inflict pain upon these gremlins, these cancelers of open inquiry.
It is not the best thing to admit. The vengeful fantasies are concerning. It implies a disturbing unraveling of my character. But there you go. I do admit it. Like the embittered old Thomas Paine (too long penalized ultimately for caring so much for truth), I have gone “funny.” I am “off.” “Something’s not quite right about Mike.” I know this. I can take the perspective of the outside observer. However much my compass points to truth, part of me wants to spread pain on my trek. But even here there is a “higher” justification. I imagine myself speaking to “society” a cautionary message: Take care of your hardworking people, your artistic pioneers. Call in your loving culture workers like Socrates (who take seriously the call to teach the next generation). Or else, you will pay. I will be a lesson. Respect artists and thinkers! (One might envision an alternative reality where Socrates, in the face of his caring outreach work being spit upon, uses his philosophical gifts to nefarious ends after he flees his prison cell: destabilizing Athens and worming into the heads of his cancelers to torment them at night.)
One might think the joke is on me here. Those who claim to be triggered, I myself know, are almost always merely faking. In a victim culture one is pressured, in some cases even to secure basic needs, to play the victim. Victimhood carries social cachet, even material benefits—hence the incentives to feign fragility. It is straightup fashionable to be triggered. The mobs crying “triggered” to get professors fired are, moreover, often just out to bully, to demonstrate their power (ultimately, I think, as a way to avoid direct confrontation with the fact that they were thrown into this life—each generation clueless as to why—only to be obliterated). So how am I really going to cause pain in this case? Would it not be a matter of buying into their performative lie if I were to say, in effect: “You think that was triggering? Well, wait until you see what I have in store”?
Three things might be said in response.
First, I do know that my uncovering of brutal truths are unlikely to discomfit these fakers. My platform is negligible and their defense mechanisms—their rhetorical fortresses (their mental immune systems)—are too robust to let me do much damage (at least directly). What hurt could my words do when they—although the type to crumble into tears because of the words in Huckleberry Finn—grew up watching rape porn as tweens? But I do hold out hope that me and my ilk might burrow into their heads on a delayed fuse. I resign myself to the long game. I am okay with my strike being felt by them in the private times of night, years later (perhaps even after I am gone).
Second, there are those rare few cancelers who really do get triggered and traumatized. For them, I bluntly state: “Well, prepare to be really fucking triggered!”
Third, and perhaps most regrettably (but I am being honest, at least about some dark part in me): I might hurt innocent people—whomever I can (even non-cancelers). Sometimes the hurting of innocent people—think of the slave slaughtering the white infant in my poem “Powerplay of Pity”—will dramatize the seriousness of the issue: in the case of the poem, the unfair brutalities of chattel slavery; in the case of me, the unfair brutalities of cancel culture. Of course, the maneuver might be self-defeating in both cases. My literary provocations might just result in clamping down harder on free speech “so that no Mikes can unsettle us anymore.” The slave’s physical violence might just result in clamping down harder on slavery “to stop the baby-killing monsters from ever becoming free.” One might have said the same thing, however, about the Boston Tea Party: “The dumping of the tea is only going to have the British crack down even harder!” Shocks to the system, especially if it impacts innocents, perhaps can be potent catalysts for change—as we see when protesters close down highways.
I do not know how much of what I just said is true about me. I can get carried away in venting. All I know is that I cannot help but write. Even if I am not read by anyone, an inexorable creative compulsion propels me forward. I plow ahead each day with a twisted joy (as I imagine Camus’s Sisyphus might do in his daily eternal grind). And having weathered the cancelation brunt of the Nancy-Reagan generation of the fashionably triggered—well, that has only sharpened my commitment, an artistic commitment for which I am willing to die. Because of the efforts to restrict my voice in the name of protecting “vulnerable populations” and creating “safe spaces,” I find myself more eager to unsettle and provoke—although never at the expense of truth: showcasing infant rape (as in “The Tip”) or questioning our free will and moral responsibility (as in “A Case for Hard Determinism” and “A Case Against Moral Responsibility”) or pointing out the hypocrisies surrounding our commitment to unfounded taboos (as in “Pound Town: A Defense of the Moral Permissibility of Bestiality”). Perhaps this militancy is a phase I will get over once I purge all my pain.
I appreciate you keeping an open mind as you roll with me! Your words of support buoy my spirit. Your criticisms of my work, which I hope to see more of, are crucial to refining my craft. I intend for this Substack, after all, to serve as a collaborative forum for workshopping my drafts. My ambition is not merely to agitate but also to enlighten and inspire, revealing profound truths of our common humanity. Amidst the tug-of-war of light and dark, I seek to uncover truths resonant with our shared human experience. Each line I write inches me towards understanding, and each response I receive anchors me in community—something a loner like me likely needs now more than ever (if only to prevent a cell from turning malignant). Let us embrace life’s complexities with radical empathy and imaginative zeal, finding beauty even in the midst of struggle. Here is to more exploration, more questioning, and above all, more discovery—together!
I was thinking about linking you all to some highlights. I sort of did already. But I didn’t get a chance to comb through my posts. I do really like “Diani,” though. And “An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k)” is something that I cannot stop tinkering with.
