That world is either making it possible for one to remain narcissistically homeostatic, hamster-wheeling after some effervescent succubus1, or allowing one to participate briefly in reality as it really is- or, at least, more closely. Probably, these are not mutually exclusive, and certainly, the latter is more durable and more important than the first.

Perception is learned. Attentional rigour, and the education of the faculty of taste (the ability to intuit balance and excellence by means of esoteric tells) are some of the main tributaries of the great river of the Humanities.

It seems to me an indisputable syllogism, that everything must be as awesome as possible, because God is as awesome as possible, and thus wouldn’t create things that are less than superlative.

The World itself is prior to, and implies all imaginal worlds. Minecraft worlds or the god-riddled worlds of Percy Jackson, which are both species of an imaginal structure that many adolescents seem to prefer to ‘mundane’ reality, are implicit to the World. More clearly, the World is partly the World, insofar as it is the World-As-Represented. Thus, Minecraft worlds were present already when the World’s terse hair was still being licked, and its knees still thin and prone to buckling.

Thus, any of us who may be yet more partial to the world as rendered in The Wind in the Willows or the Norse myths or Harry Potter can be consoled, in that they must, necessarily, be communicating to us not only something real, but something specular. That is, they are reflections, meagre participations in something that will be four-thousand fold more grand. St. Dionysius the Areopagite tells us that, though God is uncircumscribed and completely unknown in essence, through His energies-in-the-world, He is communicated completely, unchanged. A rock participates in the whole Godhead, though the Godhead is beyond infinite, a blue impenetrable glory forever unspeakable. It is important to note that this does not imply an eventual rejection of the stories we love, like a rocket discarding its fuselage once it has passed through the atmosphere. Rather, it implies that these stories will become eternal moments of joyful communion, their imperfections (which did nothing to aid their charm, but in fact detracted from their radiant selfness) burnt away. They will stand like oaken sentinels, they will wrap our shoulders round like cloaks of porphyry, they will shimmer in the light of a thousand new-born suns, forever more than themselves, forever themselves.

Once it seems to have been taken for granted that we, as it were, want a writer’s soul. It is only in recent years that the character and personality, even the spirituality, of a writer came to be seen as accidental to their writing. I have been reading the autobiography of that rubeus, elephantine personality called G.K Chesterton. The obvious degree to which his own very impressive weight of spirit lingers heavy in his words notwithstanding, he was himself a great appreciator of men and discerning of their quality. By course of Chesterton’s personal indebtedness to Robert Louis Stevenson, I began reading the letters of that swashbuckling though infirm man of the quill. In these two most recent peregrinations of mine, a sense crystalized in me which I had been slowly perceiving for a long time. And it was really the same as that which D.F.W adduces. It is that men are the most demanding and rewarding kind of literature.

Find the book here!

To get to the point, I am blessed to know very well a person whose presence and speech I consider better than any book, and yet whose presence makes every book feel splendidly more alive. And, though by now this may seem a paradox or non sequitur to the remarks I made above, this magnanimous man has published a book!

It is called A Year in the Company of Angels: A Pilgrim on Spruce Island. It is published by Ancient Faith Publish, and features a forward by the esteemed . It is a wonderful book. It contains a world which, I pledge to you, has not been hitherto encountered by — perhaps — anyone. There is a jovial sensitivity, a masculine mercuriality, and a venturesome hearthwarmth in it. There is blood and reticence, theology and pop, and a Bombadil voice throughout.

Read this book. Go to Alaska. Venerate St. Herman. Become a pilgrim through a brother pilgrim, and touch your feet upon the deep green emerald turf of Spruce Island.

May this book be unto you blood and fat, as the Albanians say.

To Anthony Linderman, Victory!

Find the book here!

I had the honor of working with Mr. Linderman on an essay published early this year at the Symbolic World; find that here as well.

Readers of mine may also be pleased to know that some poems by my hand have been, by the generosity of the author, placed at various throughout the work.

God help me, I have seen things. God help me, I have heard things. Dark patterns rustling where sight fails. To generalize, said the great artist, is to be an idiot.

That young man was a better man than me. God help us, and his children. God help us, and his wife.

Lord, I am angry in your sight.

Forget not the sunset flowers. Forget not the grief we feel. Forget not our valiant art.

They used to throw poets in prison. They used to care what we would write. God help us; I'm putting my shoulder to the wheel.

The world of the imagination, while swiftly joyous with the good scents of the Western Baths that lie beyond the stars, must also have its anchor in “a local habitation and a name.”

The truest and sharpest poetical attitude is that of the Christian, who sees in all men, however debased by choice or circumstance, the image of the super-essential God.

Here the stars wheel about two firm-planted feet; the ladder of fancy is populous with angels, not only ascending, but descending.

That world is either making it possible for one to remain narcissistically homeostatic, hamster-wheeling after some effervescent succubus1, or allowing one to participate briefly in reality as it really is- or, at least, more closely. Probably, these are not mutually exclusive, and certainly, the latter is more durable and more important than the first.

Perception is learned. Attentional rigour, and the education of the faculty of taste (the ability to intuit balance and excellence by means of esoteric tells) are some of the main tributaries of the great river of the Humanities.

It seems to me an indisputable syllogism, that everything must be as awesome as possible, because God is as awesome as possible, and thus wouldn’t create things that are less than superlative.

The World itself is prior to, and implies all imaginal worlds. Minecraft worlds or the god-riddled worlds of Percy Jackson, which are both species of an imaginal structure that many adolescents seem to prefer to ‘mundane’ reality, are implicit to the World. More clearly, the World is partly the World, insofar as it is the World-As-Represented. Thus, Minecraft worlds were present already when the World’s terse hair was still being licked, and its knees still thin and prone to buckling.

Thus, any of us who may be yet more partial to the world as rendered in The Wind in the Willows or the Norse myths or Harry Potter can be consoled, in that they must, necessarily, be communicating to us not only something real, but something specular. That is, they are reflections, meagre participations in something that will be four-thousand fold more grand. St. Dionysius the Areopagite tells us that, though God is uncircumscribed and completely unknown in essence, through His energies-in-the-world, He is communicated completely, unchanged. A rock participates in the whole Godhead, though the Godhead is beyond infinite, a blue impenetrable glory forever unspeakable. It is important to note that this does not imply an eventual rejection of the stories we love, like a rocket discarding its fuselage once it has passed through the atmosphere. Rather, it implies that these stories will become eternal moments of joyful communion, their imperfections (which did nothing to aid their charm, but in fact detracted from their radiant selfness) burnt away. They will stand like oaken sentinels, they will wrap our shoulders round like cloaks of porphyry, they will shimmer in the light of a thousand new-born suns, forever more than themselves, forever themselves.

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,

Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!

Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,

Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

-Phillip Larkin

Dr. Patitsas: “Beauty recedes as it is pursued until it resided in Christ alone.”

He elaborates two synonyms for Beauty: gift and surprise.

I would add, as Beauty recedes in our subjectivity as a motion of pedagogy, it nevertheless remains distributed throughout the ten thousand things; the sun, though we may be some day morose, shines elsewhere on resplendent brows. And it is this awareness that will finally be given to those that have offered the manifold gifts back to the giver: that which they have given away, is and has always been theirs.

All beings are good, all created things scintillate in the impossible articulations of deifying light which urge, endogenously, the world into the justice of its own sublimity.

When the attention is trapped, and begins like a fly to fly-paper to stick to the surfaces of things, then the world of multiplicity becomes, not crooked in its own substance, but corruptive because of the stance of our relationality towards it.

The poet is nostalgic for something he has never seen. For a land whose meadows he has never walked, for wells whose water he has never drunk.

He comes forward home.

Νόστος, the root of nostalgia, means homecoming.

He has never been there, and yet feels at once that it surrounds him, that it hums itself in all things, that stones and trees may suddenly be surrendered unto a transfiguration which he senses but cannot entirely perceive.

Hope proves its own object. It can be misplaced, but the energy thereof is deep and more ineluctable than whatever structures are these days said to undergird all motion and all time.

There is an aesthetic dimension of hope; indeed, hope is integrally aesthetic, for hope implies the beautiful insofar as it is implicated in what is desirable as such. It is not necessary to defer or refer, to the overthrowing of the hoped-for (here and now), the experience of beauty to the eidetic. The intentionality of any aesthetic is rooted in hope, because its ground is the tautological security of God’s unique theophany for-you. The gift of beauty is a surprise which is God’s marvelous self-guarantee. As it says in the psalms, God swears by Himself, for He is the only One who is pure simplicity.

Poetry doesn’t need to be metaphysical (at least, it need not retreat to the metaphysical), for the sayer or singer of a poem is a juvenile god, whose telos, to whatever degree attained or unattained, is to unite the created and the uncreated. Words that proceed from a hypostasis are capable of unexpected depths, dolphin movements and swiftnesses proper to immaterial wings, capable of bestowing life and death. Things can be said which create patterns of new liveliness, new dynamics may be set in motion, and loveliness unknowable may spring into power and found new cities in the heart. We create the world, as Kingsnorth has said, every time we speak. It is thus, also, that AI for the most part is a thing of mummery.

Call fire down upon the altar, or turn the key which locked the rain in heaven.

This no LLM can do.

A man can be the warhorse of his God.

“It is hard to iconize the mind and the senses. Through the Ritual of the Icon this ‘miracle’ can also be accomplished. The mind and the senses are the Magi inside of us – kneeling down in front of the Icon of the Holy Mother with the Christic Child in her arms. The mind brings as Gift the mind itself – the gold. The heart brings as Gift the Imagination – the myrrh. And the senses bring as gift the scented burning of self – the frankincense. The mind is the first one to “kneel” before the Heavenly Child. The mind must humbly receive the Mystery of the Christic Revelation. The mind should have the Revelation as thought and the kneeling as reason.”

-Fr. Ghelasie of Frasinei

White ships are always coming into harbour. Angels and Kings beg help of you, they knock upon your door. White horses take us home.

We are nostalgic towards a gift that we have already received. Being itself, which by God’s grace and help shall unfold into well-being and ever-being, is the priceless myrrh in the huge belly of the Galleon whose Captain made untameable Leviathan his plaything.

Steiner tells us (George not Rudolph) that hope is the predicate for all sayable things, sayable in the charactery of deed, thought, or image.

Hope is meta-secure, and nostalgia, rightly understood, is not a betrothal to disappointment.

Something is approaching; Someone is already here.

By expecting nothing, we are made free to receive everything. We feel, somehow, that every promise has already been fulfilled, and that the Present is more brimful of Surprise than aught imagined could ever be.

White horses take us home.

In an essay shortly to come, we shall begin to hint towards the adumbrations of a Poetics of Surprise.

“He… worked through natural laws, and the laws of men, through prophets and kings, through artists and sages- inasfar as they could, and were willing to, give themselves over to His actions. Wherever there fell tears of yearning for God’s righteousness into the dust of the earth, this was from the warmth with which He warmed men’s hearts. Whenever a wise man had a flash of insight about the one, immortal God, this was His spark in a man’s soul. Whenever an artist sang, or carved, or painted, some allegory of life that, in some way, opened the eyes of blinded mankind to see divine truth, there He touched that man’s spirit with His life-giving breath.” 

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The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.
-W.B Yeats

Alongside The Song of Wandering Aengus, this poem of Yeats’ is my favorite, and I think the most indicative of his perennial concerns. St. Sophrony Sakharov, and the Orthodox tradition more generally, conceives of the artistic act, as rendered in paint or stone or ink, as an extroverted subset of the superordinate creative process of synergistic participation in the Logos that is the manifested in the abandonment of non-being in favour of communion with God. More succinctly, the greatest artistic act is that of actualizing the potentiality of our likeness to Christ. Fr. Silouan Justiniano calls this the ‘aesthetics of deification.’ This is the art of arts, the science of sciences.

Where then does that leave the conventional artist, other than “raging in the dark?”

Is it possible for the creative act, exemplified in music, poetry, and painting, to be deified alongside the person? I, of course, don’t know. However, if we refuse the call to deepen into this ‘aesthetics of deification,’ whatever art we produce will remain superficial. As David Foster Wallace said in an interview, what we admire most in a great writer is their soul.

There is a noetic swiftness that cannot be reproduced by rote; no matter how pedantically technical one was, they couldn’t write the Psalms.

I asked Martin Shaw how one’s language becomes deeper. He said, “Time, and suffering.”

Now, we have to answer the question I posed in an earlier essay. Why do (should) we write?

Out of compassion, out of gratitude, out of joy, or out of suffering. So I think. And, as I've said before, joy and gratitude are an eternal hymn.

His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost, ‘what then?’

St. Sophrony distinguishes three kinds of men: those who are noetically illumined, but illiterate, those who are educated, but noetically lapidified, and those who are noetically illumined, as well as educated. It is the last of these that he calls a Father of the Church.

These categories can apply to the artist as well. Plenty of souls are of thorough subtlety and profound perception, yet unable to create art objects; plenty are able to work with a medium sophistication and dexterity, but their souls are hard and insensitive; and some few are people of profundity and skill at once. 

The artist is a conductor, a lightning-rod, a midwife. In one medium or another, he has become a master of articulation. While this confers on him no especial value in and of itself, if it should be emissary of a deep heart, then God can bless the world thereby.

Morality reveals to us we are a conflicted being, yearning for and called to great heartedness and depth of heart, but also inclined toward smallness…this spark wants release, and thus constantly urges us, against all the odds in this world that dictate the converse, be great, go deep.
-J. Moran

Our goal is to become Beauty. The contemplation of the beautiful is a means towards this end. For Yeats (who, for all his desire to escape what he thought to be a flesh-despising Christianity, ended up a captive to Platonic dualism) there is an insurmountable barrier between the world of toil, of life, and the world of pure eidetic intellect. His poetry at its best escapes this, but his intellect failed to do so. 

Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost, ‘what then?’ 

All his happier dreams came true -
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost, what then?’

‘The work is done’, grown old he thought,
‘According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in nought,
Something to perfection brought;’
But louder sang that ghost ‘What then?’

All that I will offer in response to these harrowing lines, is that, if we introduce a bifurcation between an attempt to pursue ‘great heartedness’ and ‘perfection of the work,’ then we will certainly be left with the ‘night’s remorse.’ In consolation I offer this: 

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
-Matthew 6:33

While I sympathize with Yeats profoundly, something in my heart says that it is possible to overcome this duality. The work of our hands can be an offering to God alongside our hearts. The repeated exhortation of St. Porphyrios seems to straddle the world’s vanity and the creativity of man as the priest of creation:

“Work like an immortal, and live every day as if it is your last.” 

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says   
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes   
In such kind ways,   
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose   
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
-R. Wilbur

Let us force our intellects to choose Christ, who is the archetype of Beauty, and whose delight it is to make us beautiful. ‘Perfection of the life’ or ‘of the work’ are likewise fruitless unless we love God, our neighbor, and the creation. 

At the culmination of all things, I think the artist may find a surprise.

If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.
-1st Corinthians 3:14-15

“Christianity is poetry.”
-St. Ignatius Branchianov

Amazingly, for me at least,  Silver Door has been plodding along for over a year now.

I published my first and by far longest piece, Human Conversion in The Digital Age, on March 2, 2023. Since then the great has joined as co-editor, and altogether we’ve published 62 poems and 62 prose pieces, spanning topics from poetry, digital technology, to Orthodox spirituality, and then some. In a fit of sweet irrationality, I even penned a manifesto:

A savvier version of myself would have spent the weeks leading up to SD's one year anniversary sprinkling bread crumbs of anticipation throughout my posts and across my social media accounts, perhaps leading up to some cool giveaway, or at least an exciting announcement. But honestly, I completely forgot.

It was only after Substack’s recent announcement introducing Substack Creator Studio, a way to lure in video stars from other platforms such as TikTok , that I began thinking back to my manifesto and the origin of this publication.

Needless to say, many Substackers were not happy with this turn of events:

As I argue in Human Conversion in The Digital Age, the ubiquity of digital technology is quickly erasing what remains of the old print-based order that had already been significantly weakened by pre-digital electric technology:

“During his life, it was said that John Milton’s Paradise Lost was on the bedside table of every landlady and shopkeeper in England. This is likely an exaggeration, but it makes a point…Now imagine trying to convince some Joe off the street from the 1960s to read Paradise Lost for two hours instead of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s preposterous.)”

Substack is an ambitious platform, and as such it cannot remain solely a place for writers and readers, as cozy as that may sound.

Addressing my fellow poets, I write in the The Substack Poetry Manifesto that:

Poets need to embrace a little I AM BATMAN-energy if this is going to work. You’re not just a writer. Challenge yourself to do more across different domains and you’ll be surprised how you can rise to the occasion.

…

First, to talk about poetry is to talk about poems. Today we often associate poems with books, which is entirely reasonable, but poems throughout history have been transmitted primarily through the spoken word.

The unit of measurement for poetry is the poem, not the book.

Substack gives you all the tools you need to provide an audience with poems in written and oral form. If enough people are delighted by your poems, you can simply put them all into a book and sell it to them. Right? Right.

In the coming months I’ll be updating the suggested protocols at the end of the Manifesto, after I’ve had time to play around with some of Substack’s new features.

This will sound Bond-villain-level pretentious, but if I’m being completely honest, I've never really considered myself a writer; I've always thought of myself as a poet, first and foremost. Poetry and the written word have deep ties but it is primarily an oral language.

The poet speaks.

Let us not forget.

My poem, Your Mother was a Flower:

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The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.
-W.B Yeats

Alongside The Song of Wandering Aengus, this poem of Yeats’ is my favorite, and I think the most indicative of his perennial concerns. St. Sophrony Sakharov, and the Orthodox tradition more generally, conceive of the artistic act, as rendered in paint or stone or ink, as an extroverted subset of the superordinate creative process of synergistic participation in the Logos that is the manifested in the abandonment of non-being in favour of communion with God. More succinctly, the greatest artistic act is that of actualizing the potentiality of our likeness to Christ. Fr. Silouan Justiniano calls this the ‘aesthetics of deification.’ This is the art of arts, the science of sciences.

Where then does that leave the conventional artist, other than “raging in the dark?”

Is it possible for the creative act, exemplified in music, poetry, and painting, to be deified alongside the person? I, of course, don’t know. However, if we refuse the call to deepen into this ‘aesthetics of deification,’ whatever art we produce will remain superficial. As David Foster Wallace said in an interview, what we admire most in a great writer is their soul.

There is a noetic swiftness that cannot be reproduced by rote; no matter how pedantically technical one was, they couldn’t write the Psalms.

I asked Martin Shaw how one’s language becomes deeper. “Time," he said "and suffering.”

Now, we have to answer the question I posed in an earlier essay. Why do (should) we write?

Out of compassion, out of gratitude, out of joy, or out of suffering. So I think. And, as I said before, joy and gratitude are an eternal hymn.

His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost, ‘what then?’

St. Sophrony distinguishes three kinds of men: those who are noetically illumined, but illiterate, those who are educated, but noetically lapidified, and those who are noetically illumined, as well as educated. It is the last of these that he calls a Father of the Church.

These categories can apply to the artist as well. Plenty of souls are of thorough subtlety and profound perception, yet unable to create art objects; plenty are able to engage a medium with sophistication and dexterity, but their souls are hard and insensitive; and some few are people of profundity and skill at once. 

The artist is a conductor, a lightning-rod, a midwife. In one medium or another, he has become a master of articulation. While this confers on him no especial value in and of itself, if it (his power of articulation) should be emissary of a deep heart, then God can bless the world thereby.

Morality reveals to us we are a conflicted being, yearning for and called to great heartedness and depth of heart, but also inclined toward smallness…this spark wants release, and thus constantly urges us, against all the odds in this world that dictate the converse, be great, go deep.
-J. Moran

Our goal is to become Beauty. The contemplation of the beautiful is a means towards this end. For Yeats (who, for all his desire to escape what he thought to be a flesh-despising Christianity, ended up a captive to Platonic dualism) there is an insurmountable barrier between the world of toil, of life, and the world of pure eidetic intellect. His poetry at its best escapes this, but his intellect failed to do so. 

Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost, ‘what then?’ 

All his happier dreams came true -
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost, what then?’

‘The work is done’, grown old he thought,
‘According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in nought,
Something to perfection brought;’
But louder sang that ghost ‘What then?’

All that I will offer in response to these harrowing lines, is that, if we introduce a bifurcation between an attempt to pursue ‘great heartedness’ and ‘perfection of the work,’ then we will certainly be left with the ‘night’s remorse.’ In consolation I offer this: 

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
-Matthew 6:33

We want to smell the flowers with our ears.
-M. Silouana Vlad

While I sympathize with Yeats profoundly, something in my heart says that it is possible to overcome this duality. The work of our hands can be an offering to God alongside our hearts. The repeated exhortation of St. Porphyrios seems to straddle the world’s vanity and the creativity of man as the priest of creation:

“Work like an immortal, and live every day as if it is your last.” 

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says   
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes   
In such kind ways,   
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose   
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
-R. Wilbur

Let us force our intellects to choose Christ, who is the archetype of Beauty, and whose delight it is to make us beautiful. ‘Perfection of the life’ or ‘of the work’ are likewise fruitless unless we love God, our neighbor, and the creation. 

At the culmination of all things, I think the artist may find a surprise.

If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.
-1st Corinthians 3:14-15

“Christianity is poetry.”
-St. Ignatius Branchianov

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Gregory Corso, from “Power”

Don’t just stand there, do something!

Reformers, uncultured warriors, and terribly reasonable people of all stripes are out in full force these days, and boy do they have something to tell you about.

Of course, to the untrained eye, we at Silver Door could be accused of such meddling. But ours is a much happier enterprise; if a crusade at all, this is one friendly to flaneurs and loafers, comprised not so much of the upwardly or downwardly mobile but by those sensitive souls who despite pretensions to the contrary are more likely to be found ambling about a flea market than conquering institutions.

Slowing down and a cup of tea. An hour by the fountain in spring. A lil’ nap. Would you like to hear a poem? Oh, no? That’s OK. Maybe next week.

Now, this isn’t some wholesale endorsement of sloth and “taking it easy” (I, like most men, am prone to scheming); it’s merely an acceptance of human limitation and weakness. Perhaps as nefarious as the serial reformer is the incessant optimizer. Both of these mad evangelists for anxiety will stop at nothing before they take away your extra cheesy pizza and right to vote.

In our present digitally mediated age of affluence, where frenetic activity is paradoxically wedded to the sedentary, we should strive to follow the royal path.

As the great poet wrote: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

To rise from one’s bed, from one’s chair, can be a little triumph. One stands at prayer in part because to sit, to recline, to lie on one’s bed is a small first step towards sleep, that little daily death where one can’t pray.

In China, there has emerged the “lying flat” online movement/meme, a kind of Diogenes inspired rejection of 72-hour work weeks and the relentless state sanctioned calls to “struggle” for the party’s economic flourishing.

It’s hard to fault rebellion against the machinification of the human person, though as impressed as Alexander may have been with Diogenes, the supine position doesn’t tend to inspire admiration for a reason.

And while the existential situation may seem marginally worse for our contemporaries to the East, we have a roughly equivalent “checking out” among our people, young and otherwise. Whether on Youtube or Tik Tok, we are most often presented with an image of someone from the waist up, talking into the camera. These images are typically taken in while we ourselves are seated, as well.

It is for good reason that during the Divine Liturgy the people are called to “Stand aright and hear the holy Gospel.” There is something quintessentially human about standing. And I don’t just mean “standing around” although there is something to be said for that. But to stand, to arise, particularly after one has fallen or been laid low, is a glorious thing.

And as we hurtle headlong into what appears an increasingly inhuman future, whether that is a cyborg or transhumanist flavored one (or both), the most basic human activities take on more profound and spiritual implications.

Again, I think of Milton’s renowned sonnet:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

When I consider how my light is spent,
   Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
   And that one Talent which is death to hide
   Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
   My true account, lest he returning chide;
   “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
   I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
   Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
   Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
   And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
   They also serve who only stand and wait.”

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Silver Door will begin accepting poetry submissions on Feb. 1, 2024. We’ll publish the first poem on the first Thursday of March.

Poets will be paid $25.00 for accepted work and will retain all rights to their work. We only ask that if you wish to publish the same work elsewhere to wait three months from the time of publication.

Paid subscriptions will also be turned on for Silver Door on Feb. 1.

Thanks to a few generous pledges we already have the funding to publish two submitted poems per month, so long as we receive enough quality work. Our hope is to raise the amount we pay poets for their poems to $50.00 by 2025, and to continue to increase from there.

Paid subscribers are the only way we can accomplish this. If you enjoy Silver Door and would like to see this happen please consider a $5.00 monthly subscription, which will be locked in at that price in perpetuity, and which will come with some form of yet to be determined extra goodies, as well.

And rest assured, The Editors are not adverse to the risks associated with becoming independently wealthy men of letters should Providence place us on this perilous path.

Instructions for submitting will be sent out on Feb. 1, as well as being integrated into the About page.

Until then, we remain, your humble servants.

Thank you.

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Everything that happens goes into the black box.

Only God knows what's inside. The black box isn't really anyone's business, though some try to peek. Madmen and artists sometimes imagine they’ve seen inside, but they have only glimpsed the shadow of the box. Sometimes one becomes viscerally aware of the black box: before a great war, when a child goes missing or drowns, as the gun is being raised. Though it’s better to turn towards the dawn. One day the black box will be opened.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

I’m delighted to announced that J.Z Schafer has joined Silver Door as co-editor.

For those who don’t already know, J.Z is the immensely talented and prolific poet behind the publication .

He is one of a handful of poets I’ve been scheming with behind the scenes recently. If you’ve missed it, one byproduct of that scheming can be found here:

J.Z has also joined me recently as the poetry co-editor for the The Symbolic World magazine/journal, whose first issue will be released in the coming months by Symbolic World Press.

Aside from providing his own unique perspective, J.Z’s involvement will allow me to dedicate more time to, among other things:

• Review books

• Expand audio offerings

• Write more long-form essays

• Bring contemporary writers and artists onto Silver Door

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On top of that, we are on track to start accepting poetry submissions in early 2024. And as I’ve said before, I’m adamant that poets are paid for their poems. The starting rate will be $25 per poem, and will increase as paid subscribers do.

There is much more that could be said, but for now it’s enough to say I’m excited to see how far we can take this project. It’s wild to think it’s not even been eight months since this publication began. This is post #65.

Thank you for coming along for the ride, I truly do appreciate your time and attention. Let any friends know who should know.

I’ll end with one of my favorite poems by J.Z, published Sept. 28 of this year:

(a trifle)

God lay a blessing on their heads,
On those before and if thou wilt
Those after me; the very stones
Of what our home shall be
To angel powers consecrate;
Let from the womb or in the tomb
Those of my blood be given peace,
For there is no diadem so heavy
With aggregated limbs of state
Nor coffer glut so full with bullion
That lightness in the soul it can command,
But thou so canst, for thou art peace itself;
May excellence and learning be the friend
Of those that susserate the wind,
May kindness and humility
Grace them into the voteless grave;
Let those made subtle for a time
With spiritual benevolence
Enrich our livelihood, and speak council
Quietly in the ear; because the times
Wane all the bones must rattle for a charm
Of Christian specimen. Make us able
To rear aright a soul new-formed,
For that a soul exceeds the universe
It is a heavy work and much condemns
Those neglectful in it. Let our patrons
Have in thine ear a word on our behalf,
Zoe and Silouan, let their unnetted prayer
Catch all the school of our predecessors,
Five thousand mouths therefore to feed;
Teach joy into our hearts, and gratitude
For that’s the seal of bliss.

May we as good inheritors
Leave heirs as good; zealous in speech
And in the mind’s acquiring,
Zealous in charity and love;
Artists and kings and prayerful men
Spring from the loins to bear
The burdens which their fathers bore in turn.
The leafy carrot and the apple-tree,
The bookshelf laid with approbated books
Let these be theirs; pious fraternity,
Strong habits of the intellect
Stairwell and hall deprived of vengeful ghosts
By incense with the dawn, a wickless lamp
Before a wall of iconography,
And bricks so filigreed with moss
The whole is verdant north.
So is my prayer in brief;
Most majesty inheres
Where littlest appears.
God, lay a blessing on our heads.

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Shall we have a healthy obsession today?

Most of us have a tendency towards mistaking our compulsions, our obsessions, with virtues.

“OMG, I’m so obsessed with that show!”

“Ugh, I’m just obsessed with Asian fusion cuisine lately.”

At its worst, obsession leads one from fixation to mindless frenzied consumption to desolation of soul. Still, it’s hard not to do this because obsessions are sometimes fun and productive.

I became a competent writer by obsessively writing and reading for a number of years. I mean, without obsessives, we wouldn’t have model trains! The downside is that over a long enough timeline, all the attention poured into your obsession(s) didn't go into other areas of your life, like personal finance or dental hygiene. No one wants a mouth full of cavities they can't afford to fix.

It’s hardly original to point out that digital technology lends itself to compulsive behavior: updating profiles, checking emails, sending your mayor anonymous, highly personalized condemnations over Facebook. The temptations are quite literally always at one’s fingertips.

I’ve certainly noticed within myself these past several months a tendency to obsess over this publication, something I'd like to think I wouldn’t continue if I didn’t believe it wasn't benefiting myself and others to some degree.

Thinking about how to combat this within myself, my mind has turned to the word zeal.

Zeal, zealotry, zealots, a lovely little family of those elusive Z-words, have gotten a bad rap. From a Christian perspective, there is, of course, false and true zeal.

I hardly need to give examples. Saint Isaac the Syrian said “He who is moved by false zeal is suffering from a severe illness. O man, you who think to use your zeal against the infirmities of others, you have renounced the health of your own soul!”

Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov said that:

If you want to be a true, zealous son of the Orthodox Church, you can do so by the fulfillment of the commandments of the Gospel in regard to your neighbor. Do not dare to convict him. Do not dare to teach him. Do not dare to condemn or reproach him. To correct your neighbor in this way is not an act of faith but of foolish zeal, self-opinion, and pride.

Forgive me; I’m admittedly talking to myself here as someone prone to obsessive behaviors. But I think what these blessed saints point to is correct and helpful in tempering these tendencies towards obsession.

Coming into a relationship with other people, whether online or off, and with all the mess that entails, in a spirit of self-emptying love, is the kind of zealotry that protects oneself from all manner of nastiness. Whether our project involves Substacks, model trains, or Asian fusion cuisine, it has to be in service to something higher—The Most High.

It’s not, and has never been, about you or your obsessions.

Shall we have a healthy zeal today?

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A good sickness really can clear the mind.

I’d been sick for the better part of last week and this past week: nothing crazy just achy, exhausted, snotty, sore-throated, two hour naps in the afternoon for days kind of sick. Until this past Thursday I barely thought about this publication, poetry, theology, technology, or anything really. It was great. A forced return to the body and the simple prayer “Lord help me” on my lips. Also, my wife and I watched a lot of light British murder mystery shows too, which helped.

Anway, in the past few days I’ve had time to reflect on Silver Door which is creeping up on six months of bi-weekly posts as well as 100 subscribers. Overall I’m delighted with how the publication has played out so far and have come in contact with some great readers and writers.

Moving Forward: short and longterm/form/haul

Leaving aside my own poems, I most enjoy writing the long-form essays. But having a day job and a 1-year-old makes writing more than one quality long-form essay a month difficult. I mean, I can do it but it’s not sustainable and I’m in this for the long haul. You don’t know until you try I suppose.

So, moving forward in the short-term I’m going to publish one long-form essay at the end of every month starting in August.

I’ll still publish bi-weekly. For now that will simply mean shorter posts. I’m slowly putting processes in place that will make Silver Door more dynamic. For instance I’m still determined to make regular interviews and book reviews a part of this publication. For now I’ll just say I’ve recently been in touch with a number of talented, cool people and I’m excited about the future.

If you can forgive yet another long, in the longterm I do plan on eventually offering a paid option for Silver Door. When that happens, the majority of posts will still be available for free, including the monthly long form essay and any and all poetry. I plan on publishing two poems per month from other poets and I will start by paying them $25 per poem.

The money from subscribers will go towards paying the poets so you’d be contributing not only to Silver Door but to first-rate poets. God willing, I’d eventually like to be able to pay poets $100 per poem. It’s very doable and why that’s important I’ll go into another time.

These are just a few broad strokes. Leave a comment if you have any suggestions for artists, poets, thinkers to interview or anything you’d like to see at Silver Door.

The Symbolic World Magazine is Happening

About a year ago a small team on a secret little Discord server started working on a magazine and just recently we got word from on high that it will in fact be going to print, likely around Christmas.

If you’re not familiar with the work of Jonathan Pageau and The Symbolic World I encourage you to give yourself half an hour and take a peek.

This is just a teaser but at the moment the plan is for a yearly magazine, although there is chatter about bi-annually. I am, inexplicably, the poetry editor.

Approaching The Cup in your hands?

Approaching The Cup, my first collection of poetry, will be made into a book at some time.

If you’ve been with Silver Door for a while you’ll have noticed that the last few poems released under Approaching The Cup have had audio recordings of the poem read by me but without the guitar backing. That’s because it was only recently I decided to expand ATC and my dear friend Lance Leeson has agreed to work on the incoming poems.

Once all the poems are published on Silver Door, approximately 50, and the recordings are finished I’ll begin the process of making the full audio version of ATC and a physical copy available. We are talking quality over quantity, possibly handmade books depending on the amount of interest.

Thank you.

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Learning cursive stressed me out. I barely figured out how to read and you want me to write in fancy? But I persevered, as if I had a choice, and completed 3rd-grade with the assurance that I now possessed a skill required for admittance to civilized society (Middle School).

Of course, it wasn’t true. To my recollection, cursive writing was never brought up again except by the younger teachers who actively discouraged it. Mostly, I continued to write in cursive outside of testing. I found I could write more quickly in cursive. This realization was cemented in Mr. Cousins’ class (7th grade) due to an ongoing, and at times furious, note-taking competition/race between myself and my social studies comrade Fritz. There is also the sudden child-like joy in the sweep of the pen as one is in the throes of slashing off a good sentence.

I started thinking about cursive again after I finished my debut Substack article: Human Conversion in The Digital Age. In it, I spent a good deal of digital ink focused on digital technologies and how they impact almost everything, particularly our communication.

I had considered writing the whole thing by hand but, after taking notes, decided it would take too long, and obviously, this piece was so important I had to get it out there ASAP.

SPEED. EFFICIENCY. COMPRESSION OF TIME.

Undoubtedly, it would have been a different article if I had written the first draft by hand. As it stands, the first world is communicating with its fingertips and thumbs. Most writers today should really be called tappers. We tap and click. Contact is reduced to minimal, fleeting strikes.

The human hand is marvelous and multi-faceted; this reduction to clacking on keyboards, or worse, spastically thumb-wrestling one’s phone at all hours of the day, also reduces human dignity. The next time you go to a restaurant, just look at the people texting. 

Recently, a Twitter mutual of mine, Adam Van Buskirk, remarked that great novels haven’t been produced since the introduction of the word processor. I haven’t read many living novelists, but this struck me as true (Cormac McCarthy uses a typewriter, by the way). Stepping into my wheelhouse, can you imagine John Keats plopping himself down at his computer desk, firing up Microsoft Word, and composing Bright Star? Or sending his famous letters to Fanny Brawne via text?

Get a grip!

The pen is mightier than the sword, but the word processor might not be. You can still stab someone with a pen.

There are, of course, fine utilitarian arguments for the word processor. But utilitarians are, to the man, buffoons, and I’m not about to give them a fair shake.

In contrast to the processor or its slower, albeit still uniform forefather, handwritten print, cursive allows a capable hand to keep up with one’s flow of thought without descending into crackhead levels of digital dexterity, while maintaining the natural human flourish and idiosyncrasy of the individual (I once had my handwriting analyzed by a Colombian sorceress—I only recall it was vaguely flattering, which was entirely the point). 

Aside from the act of writing, contending with the page instead of the screen is another obvious benefit of a return to handwriting. There is a particular satisfaction in crossing out whole sentences or even sections and either moving on or cramming a word or phrase above, below, or to the side of one’s rejection. After a good writing session, one can look back over the battlefield of the page and survey the carnage, as opposed to the nuclear devastation of the keyboard’s delete key.

As the inevitable and justified reaction against The Machine continues to unfold, it is of course necessary to build intentional communities and parallel institutions centered on the human family, not the borg. But we must be faithful in the little things, as well. As the poet Jack Gilbert said, “We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight.” And the false sense of urgency that undergirds the current mania for efficiency and optimization is antithetical to delight.

I’ve never written a poem I liked on a computer. I’ve never received a letter that delighted me that was not handwritten.

Pick up your pens.

P.S. Colin, if you're reading this, I will write you soon.