Maybe "keeping it" is overrated

On newsletters, and ways of seeing

Hi, friends,

I’ll be honest: I’ve been struggling to know what to write. Partly, this is exhaustion. Between work and studying and moving, life is full-on on every front. In wonderful, rich, unfolding ways. Even so, I’m working as hard as I can just to keep pace.

But a larger part is a major shift I feel, which I don’t know how to articulate yet. In so many ways, I’ve been in flux for years now: moving to a new, old continent and restarting my life from scratch. But this emerging shift feels different. Like beginning to operate, to connect, from a different part of my body. Like I’ve found a new perceptive organ, and I’m trying to learn how to use it.

I’ve been reading a lot of William Blake: poster boy of the mysterious (mystic?) experience that, if articulated, might well get you pronounced loony. Blake didn’t care much about being pronounced loony, of course. I love his famous letter to the Reverend Dr. Trusler, written in 1799. Trusler had commissioned Blake to produce a series of illuminations of his own moralistic writings—then objected profoundly to the visionary, transcendent quality of the art Blake produced. Blake’s response?

You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care.

I mean, zing.

But also … I wonder if “to the Idiot” is actually superfluous here. Blake was riled and (gloriously) letting off some steam. But beneath the anger, is the more important point that the deepest truths can never be made explicit, even to the most brilliant of perceivers?

Because the deepest truths aren’t grasped cognitively.

They’re a felt sense; a hum; a deepening. And that, by its nature, can never be explicit.

True art leads you to that felt sense, attunes you to the hum. But never by explicit proclamation.

Which leads me to question a weekly newsletter: a process of explicitly unfolding your thoughts, feelings, and reflections as they happen. What’s the value in this? Would it be better to go off for several years and try to produce some blazing poems that might, in some oblique way, help me and maybe a few other people tune more strongly to the hum?

Sometimes I think it would (if I could even get close to an achievement like that).

But then I consider the times we’re living through. In which life is so hard already, and there’s more crisis on the horizon. In which the texture of daily life for so many is gritty and abrasive, or at best flat.

And I think of how much nourishment and joy I get from hearing from you. Each week, some of you write back to these letters to tell me what’s going on for you, and how it resonates with what I’ve shared. And that’s everything.

These aren’t the times, I don’t think, to retreat. To go hermit.

This is a time to straddle the worlds, or try to. To keep deepening into whatever mystery is revealing itself to us, and keep sharing what we can of it, when we can, without diminishing it.

And without worrying too much about whether people think we’ve lost it.

Maybe “keeping it” is overrated at a time like this, anyway.

In short: I hope you’ll indulge me if I get even weirder in the weeks to come. And I hope you won’t feel shy of sharing your weirdness, too. Weirdos unite.

William Blake

For now, here’s more Blake, from that same letter, on what it all comes down to: ways of perceiving:

I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision. I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way.

xx Ellie