To the Publisher
To the publisher:
I have much to write. I suppose the best approach is to simply write what I am thinking about.
It is the end of the year. Last year (not the year ending today, the one before that) was a pretty crazy year and I had some pretty crazy thoughts then. Thoughts about good and evil and spirituality. These were all things that I thought everyone knew, more or less... things that I thought everyone went about life not talking about it, because it wasn't the type of thing you were supposed to talk about except in moments of birth and death, or falling in love, or making a blood oath of friendship or marriage, or betraying a friend, or taking a life, or attempting to resurrect the dead. Because these were all things that everyone knew, on some baseline deep instructions on what to do, that are kind of a requirement for being alive, for the whole rest of being a human to follow afterwards. The type of thing that everyone knows, and goes through life aware of, but not really talking about, because they are reserved for those sacred moments.
I haven't really shared thoughts of those things to other people very much. Kind of because I am scared of the reaction I might get, of speaking the unspoken, and awake some kind of terror in them that I had articulated the things they knew all along, and thereby putting myself at risk from them; and on the other hand, getting a response of, "yeah, of course, everyone knows that, why are you thinking so much about it? Everyone knows that, when someone offends you you are supposed to get angry, and parents are supposed to take care of their children, and women are pretty, and music sounds good..."
I was in Louisiana at the time. It was an interesting moment in my life: first taste of adulthood, college. I had ran away from home to go to college there because it was the only option I could afford. It was a different world to me, an isolated one, where not a lot goes in and not a lot goes out. I had "broken containment". And in that time, all these new things I was experiencing, I had to differentiate the signal between what was the 'adult world', and what was specific to Louisiana.
I got the impression that the people in Louisiana thought more about "spiritual things" then the average person. They didn't exactly seem very concentrated on moving outside the world they had there. They were content to stay, and focus on strange, esoteric, otherworldly things. A lot of the Christian groups there took it to the extremes. There was voodoo there. There was even confusion between Christianity and voodoo - some voodoo practitioners I met insisted that it was a way of practicing Catholicism. I don't know if it's because of the land there, the bog swamp seemed to have some sort of spell over it, or if it was the character of the people there, the French re-settlers and the English-Scottish drifters and the intermingling of the two, and the freed African slaves, but some strange spirits were haunting the land around the mouth of the Mississippi river. They prided themselves for having a lot of ghost stories, for some reason.
It felt a little bit like Old Europe. I suppose in a place like Louisiana, where it was just the same people for a few hundred years, compared to the state I previously was in, Michigan, where there was a continuous deposition of various strains of white people over the course of a couple hundred years, the white people would keep their ways The spiritual practices, that people in Old Europe had traditionally maintained, and where people would be more open about them, and could expect to take those things out into the public sphere, to strangers, was present there. And the mechanisms where a people that had been in the same place for a very long time, not on the state level but on a more local level, how people retained the same character and practices, independent of what those practices were, was again present in Louisiana, just like Old Europe, unlike most of the rest of the United States.
It was a lazy place. The sort of forgotten corner of the world, still keeping to their ways, where one could think about things without too much changing around them, not much except in-group signals. And so I could think about these things, these things in the shadow of old Europe, these legacies, these stories, of kingdoms, and the formation of nationhood, and how humanity got the state it is in. Now led by a nation, build at first by a more or less homogeneous people, now not so homogeneous, built on ideals, which, in times of peace and prosperity, are still sufficient to unite the people, but in any time of crisis I fear could so easily dissolve. Of these things, thinking of roles and archetypes, and of what makes a nation, and what makes it stable. A place that embodied both a semblance of Old Europe and the new supernation which superseded it - was the perfect setting to think about how we got here. An archetype I thought about that I wish I had considered a little longer was the record keeper. The archivist. The publisher. The person who preserved the stories and traditions and mannerisms of a people. The person who is able to take a lump sum of a ton of information and make sense of that. Though no one really saw the notes, I had inadvertently become an archivist of Louisiana.
It was funny. I had these questions I wanted answers to. No one was forcing me to think about these things and ask these questions, it wasn't for any pure academic purpose, it was merely my own interest. But no one else around me seemed to have the same curiosity or propensities as me in Louisiana, which led to the curious happenings where I would be asking them questions about themselves and how they got there, part expecting that they would be able to meet me in the middle, because the questions were about them - but they did not share the same interests in themselves. The questions themselves were foreign, the traditions of self-reflection I had accidentally picked up from some Catholics in the Northern United States were not part of their own traditions. "We just live down here, we don't really think about it." It was kind of like explaining water to a fish. Breaking containment, indeed.
So under no social pressure, having these foreign thoughts and questions, I wrote a lot of interspersed writings. I was in doubt if I should have even wrote those things, because they seemed strange to the very people I was writing about. I was unsure who would read them. Scattered records, through voice notes and paper and files on my computer and ephemeral pictures of whiteboards erased and text threads sent to friends. Having no one to share these interests to, I was unsure as to how I should format them.
I have a lot of writings that need to be sorted through and archived. I need a publisher.
Yeah, I want to write about all the crazy thoughts I had last year.