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“Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.” ~Frederick Sommer

I stood in a grove of aspens with my camera, trying to compose an image that wasn’t quite coming together. When a subject matter has been rendered millions of times, does the world really need another rendering? Is there anything to be said about aspens that hasn’t been said before?

I took a few frames, which were decent enough, but the trees didn’t speak. Aspens have souls, which is not so much a theological statement as it is the sense impressed upon you when you stand in the middle of their lean bodies. It’s a vibe much akin to standing among a herd of horses. Horses and aspens see you, the kid version of you. In the case of aspens, even their knots are shaped as eyes.

I figured there is no way good way to capture the soul of an inanimate object, so I recalibrated. Sitting on a large boulder, I looked to the canopy and asked, How do these trees make me feel? It was a clarifying moment, and I stood from that rocky seat and got to work.

How did I feel? I will not put words to that feeling for two reasons. One: There are feelings, impressions, and vibes I’d rather not unpack here—at least not yet. Two: The interaction between artist and the viewer is sacred, and your subjective experience of these images is farm more important than mine. I’d rather not disrupt that interpretation.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the way things make me feel these days. It’s not so much about the objective reality—the shape, sound, or smell of a thing—but what happens in me when I experience it, what meaning I give to it. For instance:

How do I feel when my office line rings at 8:00 on a Monday?

How do I feel when I hear the eucharistic bells in mass?

How do I feel every time I log into Substack?

On the latter—Substack—I can say this. I’m growing more conflicted with this platform.

In the early days of , there was a great promise: Writers who plied their craft could bypass the traditional ways of making money as a writer and receive payment directly from subscribers who found value in the work. No more article pitches. Fewer book proposals. Through Substack, we found a way to make a livable wage doing the thing we love. I bought into that premise, and I was one of the earliest adopters of the platform. In fact, I think I participated in an early investment round sent out to Substack writers, a round meant to help fund and expand the platform. That said, I’ve heard nothing about any return on that investment. Maybe I will one day. Or maybe, like everything else in the modern world, it was an empty opportunity.

There are times when this space has felt like life, especially in those early days when it served as a sort of anti-social-media platform. Back then, there were no social features. There were no “tools” meant to wrest my attention away from doing what I loved: writing. There were no private-equity backed content creators aggregating power, either. There were no pieces written by artificial intelligence, no slop trough of words. Instead, it was community, a small band of writers hoping to pay a few bills by doing what we loved.

Those days are gone. Pandora’s lid has been lifted. The bell that’s been rung cannot be unring. Now, according to reporting by the Hollywood Reporter and as indicated by , Substack has a company valuation of $1.1 billion. (If you love the business of art, make sure to read Simon’s piece, “Is Substack’s subscription growth slowing.”) How do I feel about this? I suppose I’m happy for the founders, because there’s nothing like seeing a risky vision pay off. In some ways, though, it’s disconcerting because Substack has become yet another attention aggregator, and many of the early adopters joined this platform in protest of attention aggregators like Twitter (now X) and Facebook.

Put another way, I’m conflicted. I nurse the nostalgia for the good old days of Substack, and nostalgia is one helluva drug. But also, I lament the expansion into the attention segments of the economy, the race for the bigger valuations, and the proliferation of artificial words.

And so it goes.

Substack is where writers and readers gather, so I will not leave the gathering place anytime soon. But still, I' am asking myself: How does this make me feel? I hope you’re asking that question, too.

Some Typewriting News…

I’m not writing here as much these days because I’m working on a long form piece. So far, the piece has been written exclusively on a typewriter (2 typewriters to be precise). I’m 13,000 words in, and Lord willing, half those words are good enough to use.

Here’s a little proof for the skeptics in the room.

Carry on this week. Do great work. Use a camera, a typewriter, a sketchpad. Do something analogue because you are more than this digital life.

Welcome back. I’m back to a quasi-regular rhythm. If you missed my piece from two weeks ago, make sure to check out, “America’s 250th Birthday: The Vibes of the People, Yes.” And if you’d like to join the community,

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Reflection on the Modern Body of Art

Everything in a lawyer’s office is designed to give the body a mechanical sense of efficiency. I have three desks—one for my laptop and two monitors, one with a stack of legal documents requiring a response, and one with pens and notepads and two empty coffee mugs I’ve collected during my morning grind. Overhead, the fluorescent lights create a shadowless envelope, the kind of lighting my family calls evil.

On the bookshelf over my shoulder are the icons. A typewriter. A camera. A collection of leather-bound Easton Press books. These are meant to remind me that I am not a machine. Instead, I am a stifled creative who spends the majority of his time employing machines to make practical things, things that pay the electric bill.

It’s the ten o’clock hour, and as I pore over a piece of writing I hope will be persuasive to a judge, sends a text:

Martin Shaw has a plea: “No more jabbing our pen in the wound and calling it art.” Damn.

Jabbing the pen in the wound. I consider the language, the metaphor. A wound is a bodily thing. Art is a sort of work. No more contemplates a terminal variation to a constant. When crammed together, these three phrases beg a question: What is the current body of art? More to the point, What does it mean to have a wholly human body of art?

Last Christmas, my wife handed me a brick of a present, all wrapped in red paper with silver snowflakes. I peeled back the paper to find Sebastião Salgado’s book, Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. Through his work, Salgado explores the nature of human occupation—farmers, fishermen, factory workers, miners. Over the 350 photographs, Salgado shows men struggling at the nets, women carrying children in the fields, a mine filled with slaves shouldering heavy loads while climbing thirty-foot ladders. The frames carry a weight, show the entire range of human emotion. There is sorrow, elation, exertion, joy, fear, revolution, and the quotidian mindlessness of the menial task. It’s a body of fully formed work, something more than a singular examination of the human wound.

I sat in my office, considering Salgado’s work, and I wondered: What does it mean to create a body of work, one that’s about more than the wounds?

We live in an odd age, one that seems to be threadbare at the seams. No, that’s not quite right. Maybe a better way to say it is this: We live in an age of wounds, and the stitches binding those wounds are coming loose. So much has been written, painted, and produced about those wounds. The political wound. The church wound. The marriage wound. This is not a de facto negative thing. After all, dressing any wound requires examination. But what happens when an entire culture builds an entire body of work that is all about the wounds? What happens when the art is so wound-referential that it forgets to look beyond the pain, the damage, whatever? There is a word for that: myopic.

So, why does so much of today’s content focus on the wounds? I don’t know, but maybe it’s because our innate nature makes it impossible to turn away from any car wreck, rubber-necked as we are. And if wrecks and wounds pull eyeballs and modern algorithms optimize for eyeballs, algorithms will always incentivize artists to jab pens into the wounds. Wounds are big business, come to find out.

And here’s where I disagree with Shaw’s quote, which I’ll admit I read with no additional context. Some of the best art comes from examining the wounds. Consider East of Eden or anything written by Cormac McCarthy, for that matter. But here’s where I agree with Shaw: That cannot be the whole of a body of work. Like Salgado’s body of work, the wounds are only a sliver of the story. There’s a much bigger body to explore, one that seems to be trending toward neglect.

I click on Substack to post this short piece, and my feed is full of wound essays. Three scrolls down, I find this piece by at Flak Photography. Adams shares a photograph from Robert Darch—a photographer whose work I’ve never seen. A boy floats face up in the water on a summer day. Two other men find their places in the opposing corners of the frame, waist-deep in the water. The lighting is warm, almost golden, and the boy is wearing blue swim trunks. There is the transcendent peace of a summer swimming hole.

I look and am reminded of the swimming hole at Steel Creek or my teenage years at Bluff Hole or my college years jumping off the cliffs at Heber Springs. I smell hot dogs, taste the summer sweat, hear my buddies cackling at some joke not fit for mixed company. Pearl Jam or Madonna plays on the radio. This is what rest feels like after a long week of too much work.

I consider the quote Blase sent, the work of Salgado, the Adams post with the Darch photograph, and I reach for my journal from one of the three desks. I write: A body of work comprises the whole—the wounds, sure, but also the head, the heart, the hands, and the soft light of warmer days.

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1. The People, Yes.

Carl Sandburg—one of our country’s great Chicago poets—wrote a book-length poem during the Great Depression. Titled The People, Yes—and published it 1938—the sprawling poem examined the state of the union in an era where the dim light of democracy flickering. Reflecting on the life of one of our most hallowed leaders, Sandburg penned these lines about Lincoln.

Lincoln?
He was a mystery in smoke and flags
Saying yes to the smoke, yes to the flags,
...

Yes to man as a struggler amid illusions,
Each man fated to answer for himself:
Which of the faiths and illusions of mankind
Must I choose for my own sustaining light
To bring me beyond the present wilderness?

 Lincoln? Was he a poet?
       And did he write verses?
“I have not willingly planted a thorn
       in any man’s bosom.”
I shall do nothing through malice: what
       I deal with is too vast for malice.”

Death was in the air.
So was birth.

-Carl Sandburg, from The People Yes

Sandburg was a man of his times, and he read the vibes. He translated those vibes to the page as only poets and prophets can. But when he published that poem, did he know the vibes would be so similar nearly 100 years later?

The vibes.

Yes, it’s a dead horse of a term, and still the political pundits, coders, and writers keep on riding. Welcome to the era of linguistic dilution. But here we are, on the cusp of America’s Great Big Birthday, and though I’m no Sandburg, I can’t help but carry on his tradition. I can’t help but memorialize the vibes.

2. The Kitchen Vibes.

Pull American heritage straight from the fridge—that pinkish-brown mystery meat crammed into cellulose tubes. Grab packages of buns from Costco or the Dollar General. Ignore the glyphosate baked into the bread, because this is America and we’ll trade flavor today for kidney function tomorrow. At the grill, set a match to the charcoal in the middle of a Midwest heat wave. What is Patriotism if it’s not white hot?

Fill the tank with seventy bucks of gas and make your way to the red big-top where all the Made In stickers say China and all the price tags say A Left Kidney—we’ll trade kidneys for damn-near everything these days. Lever up the credit cards. Mortgage the house. Drop your week’s wages on the table, and buy so many pretty fires. It’s the Countries’ 250th—The Big One, Martha—so let’s set our net worths’ on fire. See the rockets’ red glare, the impotent fizzle of strontium, barium, and magnesium splash across your backyard. Smell the smoke and watch your animals come to near-seizure under the table because animals have more sense than humans. This, they say, is a birthday the likes of which we’ve never seen. Celebrate the distraction. Forget the many fires smoldering, the fires of our own making.

Yeah, man. The vibes.

3. The Vibes on the Front Lawn

Here are some other vibes. As an appetizer for our 250th birthday, some pugilists meet on the hallowed front lawn of the People’s White House. The People’s White House—you own it as much as any Executive, at least this is what your tax bill says. There, on your front lawn, some mixed martial artists fight until one cries uncle and the other flexes for the cameras. One of the pugilists does a backflip off the top rail of the Octagon.

These gladiators wear tiny shorts and thin gloves—the wardrobe of Alphas—and the winner shakes hands with the organizer, who wears a long red tie and refers to himself in the third-person, except only by his last name. Some say the organizer spent $60 million of taxpayer money on the event, which represents no more than a rounding error when compared to the size of our countries’ budget. How many people could you feed with a rounding error? or How many fireworks could you purchase from China?

A camera catches America’s comedian on the front lawn, and half of America rolls their eyes. The internet splashes his face across every social media feed the following day, and the people roast him like a hot dog, like he’s fit for consumption. For a moment, we forget the other enemies—Iran, the pedophiles, the immigrants or immigration enforcement officers. The Art of The Distraction, but Are you not entertained?

Vibes, vibes, everywhere vibes.

4. The Vibes in the Valley

In this, the year of our Semiquincentennial, the outlets report that Big Tech is spending billions (trillions?) to create humming data centers. They gobble up pieces of land as if they are Pac-Man being chased by hungry ghosts and sop up water like an industrial-sized sponge. If they outrun the ghost, the infrastructure they build will fuel the country’s race to Artificial General Intelligence.

AGI—the holy grail or at least a money printer. There is so much meaning in subtext.

Here’s the problem: the god of the Valley needs more power, more data, more infrastructure. The infrastructure of god is expensive, come to find out, which is what Big Tech says to their stakeholders—stakeholders who’ve long forgotten what it means to labor.

The tech titans pile up investor cash in great big buckets and light it as a sacrifice. By day, they follow the pillars of smoke pluming from those buckets. By night, the licking flames light the way. They suck so much power that grid operators warn of power failures in the middle of a historic heat wave. Do the People really need air conditioning? Suffer the People to come to me, the tech god says.

If America has taught us anything over 250 years, it’s this: god is ever and always created in our own image, a rapacious image paper-mached with the U.S. Dollar.

5. The Musical Vibes

I’m no linguist, but I know the term “vibes” is the diminutive form of the word vibrations. I am a musician, so I know that music is produced by a series of vibrations—the strings, the vocal cords, the pounding of a drum. If the vibrations of the Country were transcribed as a series of notes, if it was written as sheet music, what kind of music would America produce?

Imagine a wind section full of flitting piccolos darting about in the higher registry, each running a series of dissonant three-note scales. Hear the kettle drums pounding in alternate time signatures, the random clash of a symbol on the 6. Enter the organ, playing “Schism”—yes, the Tool version—over the top of all of it all. The choir sings:

There was a time that the pieces fit
But I watched them fall away
Mildewed and smoldering
Strangled by our coveting
I’ve done the math enough to know
The dangers of our second guessing
Doomed to crumble, unless we grow
And strengthen our communication

How could a country dance to this kind of chaos?

6. Rewriting the Vibes

And still, here we are.

I love this country, this region, and my people. And on this, our 250th birthday, I wish I could say the vibes in the Union were cohesive and melodic. But so long as we’re led by conductors of thunder and bluster, our flitting piccolos are drowned by so many drums and organs. We search for a place to leave our mark on the music. Is it still possible?

Maybe you think this is a nihilistic essay, but I am a Gen-Xer, and my people paint in nihilism as Rothko painted in orange and purple squares. But behind every nihilist is an innocent, and in my innocence—some might say naivety—I refuse to believe the music can’t be rewritten. The vibes can shift if the people get back to Sandburg’s question.

Each man fated to answer for himself:
Which of the faiths and illusions of mankind
Must I choose for my own sustaining light
To bring me beyond the present wilderness?

We are The People, Yes with ever-waning power. We don’t own the means of producing the music, and we do not have the war chest needed to make our tiny songs heard in Washington or the Valley. But we have pens and instruments and voices. We have chosen faiths and illusions. We can translate our sustaining light to the page, write a choral arrangement to sing for the next 250 years of music. We write because we remember:

Death is in the air.
So is birth.

For my photography, find me on Instagram

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This essay is dedicated to .

1

I am writing (the original piece, not the version you are reading) on a chocolate-brown Olympia SM3 from the 1950s. It’s a solid machine, one that takes a more heavy-handed approach to typing. This is because the Olympia was made by Germans in the years following a very second Great War. Germans have never been accused of being a delicate people.

Both history and Olympia tell us that the Germans continued to build tanks after disarmament. They called those tanks typewriters, and though they didn’t shoot fire from their snouts, they were heavy enough to be used as murder weapons. Every word takes effort on the machine, particularly any word containing the letter “a” or “p” because my pinkies have grown weak in my late middle years. I am a man of useless terminal appendages.

In the 1990’s, I attended Southside High School, and on the second floor of the south wing, a small middle finger branched off. The middle finger had several rooms filled with equipment used by the school newspaper. One of those rooms housed lines of yellow machines, each with sticky keys coated by years of teenage angst and Mountain Dew residue. There, we learned the basic mechanics of typing: left hand on ASDF, right hand on JKL;. Our instructor was a middle aged redhead with a bob cut whose name I don’t remember because, in the words of a classmate, She’s pretty for her age but she’s no Ms. Catsavis.

Ms. Catsavis was the Spanish teacher—muy caliente, the boys said.

Mad Men didn’t exist in those days—at least not as a television show—but if it had, Ms. Typingham could have been an extra. Cherry-red nails, polyester skirts, cream sweater sets. I imagine she’d burn down a Virginia Slim in the classroom if it wouldn’t have set off the fire alarms. She was not so much cold as she was a stickler. Arch the wrists and fingers; strike the keys like you mean it; strong pinkies, class. Ms. Typingham would be dissapointed to know that my pinkies are soft.

The room in the middle finger of the south wing was a raucous, rhythmic room. It rat-a-tatted, dinged, and slide-chunked, and it was the only class I can recall the teacher giving us a free pass to curse. There was lots of cursing because Ms. Typingham also required perfection.

There were free typing days where we were allowed to type whatever we wanted. Those days produced many lewd sentences at the fingers of hormonal idiot boys. A few of the girls wrote terrible poetry because that’s what hormonal girls did in the ‘90s. Our instructor cared little, so long as our fingers were moving and we kept our pinky strokes strong. Type what you love and you’ll always be typing. I still mine gold from that advice.

Thirty years ago, we learned to type on mechanical machines. Thirty years ago, there was no autocorrect, no soft keyboards, no easy words. Thirty years ago, writers—real by-God writers like McCarthy and Vonnegut and Bradbury—typed long manuscripts over grueling, hand-cramping hours. These authors were not only masters of craft; their pinkies were sturdy hammers.

2

In college, I took two semesters of photography because electives were required—and odd irony of the college experience—and Bowling 101 seemed like a waste of time. For my photography classes, I rented a Pentax K1000—a camera made in Japan also after the Second War. I learned the mechanics behind the art of photography : aperture; shutter speed; the substance of composition. There were long evenings in the darkroom bathing my filmstrips in chemicals. I watched as light and shadow emerged on photo paper in a large red tub. That semester I came to believe in magic because I saw it.

There were limitations to photography in those days. You could not shoot what was not there. You shot what you shot, and if you understood the language of light, the final image made the viewer feel something because the image was—in the most literal sense—real. An entire catalogue of photojournalist and documentarians carved out careers capturing the real on their little strips of magical film and selling those images to Time or Life or even the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

In those years, I collected photographs as if they were baseball cards. I had a journal with Xerox copies of photos from Bresson, Adams, Frank, and Lange. These were the masters, and they’d spent years honing their craft to show the world as it was, not as it should be.

Thirty years ago there were no presets, no easy ways to airbrush or clone or enhance the size of any body part. Thirty years ago, there were no easy images—even photos from a Kodak instant camera had to run through the Walmart photo lab. Thirty years ago, photographers—real by-God photographers—spent hours walking, searching for a photo-worth scene. Their eyes were trained, and their timing was tuned to the millisecond.

3

Welcome—you great hulking masses of drifting humans—into a garbage age.

In the turn lane on my morning drive, I see a middle-aged man resting his weak wrist on the steering wheel. I examine my own weak wrist, my useless pinkies. How did we earn such lazy bones and who even needs arched wrists or strong pinkies anymore? Who needs to learn the pressure it takes to pound keys? Who even needs to type? Speak a word into your magic black box and watch an LLM—the great Literary Lying Machine—make the sentence. Call the sentence your own.

A woman stands in front of the coffee shop, smiling for her black box. A professional selfie-ist cataloguing another eight-dollar latte. Who needs to learn the exposure triangle, the limitations of film speed, the way of negatives in a chemical bath? Take a photo with your phone. Upload it to the cloud. Ask the app to make the edit. Call it real.

This is where we’ve come: offload so much time, so much effort, so much humanity onto the shoulders of the artificial god; watch the artificial god work its magic; take credit for the magic; move on to the next easy act of fast and fungible creativity.

So many lament the advent of Fast Fashion, the throw-away clothing that piles up in our closets and landfills. But what about Fast Creation? Has it robbed us of our ability to create the real?

God bless the garbage age.

4

When I was kid, there were no trigger warnings. Trigger warnings came along sometime in my thirties, about the time we started taking selfies and our pinkies grew weak. And though I’m not here to give a formal trigger warning, let me say this: What follows might get a little dark.

Last week, the world minted its first trillionaire. The move from B—as in Billionaire—to T—as in Trillionaire—is a consequential one. Having a net worth between $1.2 and $1.3 trillion, the world’s richest man now has a net worth larger than the annual Gross Domestic Product of Switzerland. God bless the Swiss.

Here’s the path to becoming a Trillionaire: create electric cars; make them self-driving; build a rocket ship and aim for Mars; develop your own Al. Do these things well enough, and you’ll become a global power, an entity of one.

This week, a friend’s sixteen-year old daughter noted that the Tesla founder and Burning Man enthusiast could write the check to end global hunger for a year, and he’d still be a nrillionaire. I said, The poor you will always have with you; c'est la vie.

Once, Elon Musk tried to warn of us about AI.

AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization, and I don't think people fully appreciate that, he said.

AI is far more dangerous than nukes. Far. So why do we have no regulatory oversight? This is insane, he said.

You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like... yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn’t work out. He said this too.

Speaking of demons, in the same week Musk became a trillionaire, a local photographer was arrested for allegedly using AI to create pornographic images of school-aged children. I do not know the details of the case, but here’s what’s been reported by the news sites: the Arkansas photographer summoned a demon through the platform the world’s first trillionaire created. Maybe the world’s richest man can wash that news down with a glass of Dom Pérignon. Maybe a spoonful of caviar will settle his stomach.

The age of the digital gods may usher in a golden future, at least this is what the AI optimists hope. It may decrease mortality rates, cure cancer, grow wealth—whatever. But maybe these same platforms have made everything a little too easy. Easy words. Easy ideas. Easy images. Maybe this ease has robbed of something—strong pinkies, the techniques of the masters, a moral compass that’s governed by human limitations. Maybe AIs like Grok are in the process of turning us into slaves—first to ease, then to our own desires, and ultimately to the AI itself.

There are men banking on this last set of probabilities. They have a vested interest in the new slavery. See them on sleek ships, cackling like hyenas.

Initial drafts of this piece were handwritten, then worked on a word processor using a classic typewriter typeface. For reasons that will become important, this is an important preface to the following piece.

1.

Memories are like mines. Chip, dig, light the dynamite, haul out the detritus. Repeat until you find a mineral vein worth running. When you find that vein, stay in the vein. Let it bleed. Collect the good stuff. Show it to the people.

Here is the truth about those memory mines: one day we will breathe our last magical breath and all those good-stuff veins will evaporate. In that moment, our ghosts become veins running through the detritus of some other person’s mind. Once, we had memory; once, we became a memory. This is what it means to have lived.

Great writers are obsessive miners. If there is a memory worth mining, they will pick until their fingers bleed. They smell the kerosine of the lamp, the sulfur of the spent matches. They know the surface tension of the sweat bead tracing a line from cheek to chin. They move into the suffocating blackness, come back up for air, then to go back in until they find the good stuff, the stuff that funds their prose and poetry. I could name the celebrated miners, the ones who’ve done this well—Karr, Vonnegut, Bradbury, Bukowski, Walker. But there’s at least one miner who lives closer to home.

2.

If the Ozark Mountains are the head of Arkansas, the Ouachitas are the heart. The lifeblood of Arkansas—the Arkansas River—cuts a line between the two. To the north of the river, the autumnal colors of the Ozarks give way to the barren arms in the winter, reminding us of the cyclical nature of living. To the south, in the Ouachitas, the evergreens remind the good people that life is an ongoing thing, an eternal circle of living.

I live in the head. lives in the heart.

In his recent Substack piece, John Blase mined his Lower Arkansas experience. He referenced me by name, a thing I’m grateful for, and he drew the parallels from our Arkansas upbringing. Our backbones were straightened by the same evangelical fervor. We played under the same “moon and magnonlia,” as he wrote. Though I came weeping into this slow country a few years later, I’m sure we ate the same cream-cheese-and-cucumber finger sandwiches at the summer feeding frenzy hosted by the local church. (My church called it a Love Feast, but my mother had another name for it: The Pirana Fest.)

We were born into a common tribe, which went by the name Southern Baptist. Baptist boys are the best kind of boys in Arkansas, especially if you ask the Baptists, whose numbers match the trees in these hills. I knew the rise and fall of every verse “Just as I Am,” felt the tug of the holy tide during every altar call. (Altar Call (noun) | al·​ter call: A prolonged guilt trip set to music.) I knew the Baptist world as a husband knows a nagging wife.

When I mine those veins of memory, I am a child again. Six years old, sitting in a pew, I am terrified of a devil who might drag me behind the axles of his Chevy. I am a teenager who burns Pearl Jam’s masterwork 10 because the righteous adults say it’s the music of fallen angels. (Nothing signals fundamental devotion like dousing a bunch of plastic in kerosene and setting it on fire.) I am a college-aged lover of photography, scared to death of the nude. I am 21, writing an essay about JFK and Dr. King that is So liberal I’m certain the church where I’m working will issue walking papers.

Fundamentalism: this is how art dies one thousand tiny deaths. Woe to the arts.

Here’s the sum of the minerals mined. I never felt at home inside my skin because what sat just below my skin loved the world a little too much. I didn’t have balls enough to say what I was feeling, though, because You can’t trust your feelings. At least that’s what the preachers said. If I were the crying sort, I might shed a tear for that sentence. I don’t cry much, unless an animal is involved.

As for writing, here’s what John did: he dragged me into the mine of his memory, and in it, he dragged me into my own. This isn’t John’s fault, unless of course you fault him for wrapping phrases around the bones of a shared history. This is what writers do. They drag you back to the bodies and ask you to describe them.

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3.

Writers. What a loaded term. A crock of shit. A tag you wear at an industry convention. Hello, My Name Is Writer McWordsmith. And yes, I am a writer which means I’m a loaded crock of shit who wears the nametag. Take that for what it is. But take this also: Anyone can be a writer these days, especially with the advent of LLMs, which the industry says stands for Large Language Models, but which I say stands for Literary Lying Machines. If you can think it—or even if you can’t—the Literary Lying Machine can make people think you wrote it. Worse yet, the Literary Lying Machine can make people think you did the hard work of mining memory and turning it into art.

Woe to the arts.

It’s been months since I’ve published anything. I could blame a whole host of things for the stall, but as I look over my journals, one theme emerges: the vacuous nature of digital drivel. This is not to say there aren’t some amazing artists making amazing art with their keyboards. There are a few who cut veins and bleed their psychedelic lifeforce onto the page. But my feeds—Substack, Instagram, and news alike—are filled with grammatical constructions and literary devices that point to a singularity. Man has mated with machine, and the result is not creativity; it is word pollution. (For those of you who understand AI linguistic tics, you’ll see what I did there.)

Yes, the great big world of Content Heroes have consummated their affairs with artificial intelligence and have given birth to so many blank-eyed babies. And speaking of babies, here’s what’s true about DNA. If one man sleeps with one hundred women and each of those women gives birth, the hundred children will share some of the same genes. Sure, some may inherit their mother’s red hair or their maternal grandfather’s nose, but there will be common characteristics of all the children. Maybe they’ll have similar bone structures. Perhaps they’ll have the same shaped lips. If you lined them up and said, These are all the offspring of Jack McWordsmith, the vast lot of us would probably say, Yeah, I could see that. In this way, the diversity of that population of children would be, to some degree, flattened.

Now take the one hundred men (from different families) and allow them to exchange affections with one hundred different women (also from different families). Take those 100 children. Line them up. They’ll likely have arms and legs and noses and eyes and lungs. But what percentage of their DNA will they share? Not enough to locate them on a shared Ancestry.com family tree.

This is how art works, too. When Claude pays my art a conjugal visit, and your art a conjugal visit, and everyone’s art a conjugal visit, there’s something of Claude in all of it. The genes of Claude run through the art, claim part of the art as its own. It infects the veins.

So what? you might say. But here’s a thing I know: Claude has never had a real experience. It hasn’t touched the magnolia blossom or played under the Arkansas moon. It hasn’t eaten a cream-cheese-and-cucumber finger sandwich. It doesn’t know the guilt buried in the seventh verse of “Just as I am.” It does not know what it’s like to hide what it believes for fear of being castigated from a religious tribe. It is not capable of

touching hearing seeing

breathing

and so, it is not

any--lifted from the no of all nothing--

human merely being.

Because it is not human, it is incapable of creating from the soul. It is only capable of mimicking any... human merely being.

(All italicized words in the previous stanza are from E.E. Cummings, “I Thank You God for Most This Amazing”.)

4.

I don’t know much, but here’s what I do know. The best writing smells of graphite and eraser dust, of wet ink from a fountain pen. It moves like an orchestra or a tide, something that draws us deeper into ourselves. It makes us feel. And I suppose this is the point: so much of what I’m reading these days leaves me feeling like I’ve taken a heavy dose of Novacaine. Try to cut me; I won’t feel a damned thing.

I’m Catholic enough to believe in a Christ who lived a human experience among us, a Christ who incarnated the touching hearing seeing breathing of every human merely being. I’m human enough to believe I need that kind of Christ. I’m small enough to believe that Christ doesn’t need more content, and he certainly doesn’t need artificial content. And with all that, I’m communal enough to believe I need writers who are willing to drag me into the mines, hand me a pick, and say Hey man, go cut a vein. I need writers like John—writers who make me feel, writers who make me say

Whoa... To the Arts!

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