“In the dream of El the Kind, the Compassionate, in the vision of the Creator of Creatures, the heavens rained down oil, the wadis ran with honey. El the Kind, the Compassionate, was glad: he put his feet on a stool, his brow relaxed and he laughed. He raised his voice and declared: “Now I can sit back and relax; my heart inside me can relax; for Baal the Conqueror lives, the Prince, the Lord of the Earth, is alive.”— Stories from Ancient Canaan, trans. and ed. Michael D. Coogan and Mark S. Smith (Lexington, KY: WJK Press, 2012), 148.
Moses did not want to go back to Egypt: he tells God as much in his continual self-deprecation on Mt. Sinai, before finally just begging Yhwh to please send someone else (Exod 4:13). In the Persian period novella named for him, Jonah the Prophet receives a divine command and a word from God and immediately tries to run away. It is the sensible thing to do. In his imagined preexilic setting, he reasonably assumes that Yhwh is the god just of Israel and Judah, and therefore incapable of pursuing him over land and sea beyond the bounds of his own territory; like a fugitive from state law, Jonah is just hopping the border. It is only the storm pounding his boat and the gullet of the fish that changes his mind (and his theology). His heart, of course, never catches up. It is similarly said of the Prophet Muhammad that he waited three years after the first revelation in the Cave of Hira before beginning his prophetic career, though different lineages interpret this gap in his sirrah differently.
Poets of literary, zoographic, and other arts have described a similar kind of urgency and coyness to what they do. It is not incidental that Ancient Greek thinkers often took poetry to be a kind of mania, an ecstasy elicited by the imposition of the Muse, the Goddess, the god within (making the poet enthousiasmos), Apollo, someone or something. And it can in turn be a kind of torment—something within that one must get out and cannot quite manage to expel—should one refuse the mania or even resist it. Some creative tension there must be between inspiring god and communing scribe, of course: that is what prevents the very concept of inspiration from collapse into the banal absurdity of sheer divine dictation. All poiesis is theandric, whoever the theos in question is. But total rejection of the call to adventure simply leaves the poet, as Joseph Campbell would have said, in a permanent state of frustrated becoming, an insoluble case of arrested development unless or until some other redemptive opportunity comes along.
I’m no prophet, and I’m no great poet either. I’ve not the sanctity or the patience. I have a bit of a penchant for unintentional redundancy, too, so I cannot really claim to be any great master of prose. And I stand by the sense that the work which I set out to do when I began A Perennial Digression two years ago is being done by more than just me and often better than I myself could do it. This dispatch’s affection for David Bentley Hart’s Leaves in the Wind is well known; but Addison Hodges Hart’s The Pragmatic Mystic, his wife Solrunn Nes’s Reflections on Christian Iconography, Andrew M. Henry’s Religion for Breakfast, Filip Holm’s Let’s Talk Religion, and Daniel McClellan’s channel and new podcast, Data Over Dogma, are all similarly worthy of patronage, and certainly fill the gap of what I am trying to do plenty well whether I am doing it or not.
And yet, I cannot ignore the fundamental impulse within to commit so much of what flows through me to writing. Scribendo florui, et floreo ad scribendum: writing saved my life, gave me life, is part of what it is for me to live. If I am not writing here, I will simply fill some other, less productive, less meaningful space with all the same words. Silence would be better, probably, for me and for others in my vicinity, on a spiritual level. And that on which I am called to write is that which stands ever in need of more and clearer writing, those things both most important to us and for the same reason always all the more ambiguous; religion, philosophy, myth, culture, writing itself. That I will not master or definitively pronounce on any such thing I have realized does not purify me from the Furies looking to avenge a graveyard of dead writing projects. Or, in the words of Pirkei Avot: “It is not incumbent on you to finish the task, but neither are you free to ignore it” (Avot 2:16).
So, APD is alive again. But every resurrection brings change as much as continuity, and so here’s what that means:
Articles will now, in general, live behind a paywall. Two closely connected reasons here: the first is that I owe it to my family to ensure that if I’m taking time to do the work, it’s something that can benefit them; the second is that the paywall provides a layer of protection that free, easily shared articles do not. In a nutshell, doing this work requires that it does not threaten, and ideally even intersect with, my day job.
Prices are cheap. That said, a monthly subscription is now $5 and an annual subscription $30. I have tried to make the price as reasonable as I can. I’m under no illusion that most people are enjoying a surplus of cash at the moment, and it is by no means my goal to pigeonhole anyone, as I’m always grateful (even if often confused) for any interest in the content I produce.
The reader will notice a change in the name under which I now publish this particular dispatch. It’s still me—but a pen name (even a rather ridiculous one) affords yet another layer of protection from easy identification by those who might otherwise be less than favorable to the sort of open, critical, pluralistic, and even prodigal spirit of this effort, and might be in some kind of position to express that disfavor in a way that impacts my real life. (Incidentally, if I can ever get McSweeney’s Internet Tendency to take a pitch from me, it will also be under this name.)
I will write when I have time. A consequence of my current configuration of life is that I rarely have time to sit and do large pieces on sustained themes these days. The time to do so is not never, and those will still be a thing when I can manage them. Shorter, more straightforward entries may become a regular feature. But honest advertising is the only kind I’m interested in, so before someone signs up, I want them to know what they’re paying for.
Nova et vetera. The older posts will continue to exist on the site and be accessible as before; new content alone will be intransmissible. For now, no new colloquia. But one may find that several months of reading, thinking, and rethinking will result in revised takes on things I previously wrote on. In general, my hope is that this will just mean “cleaner” material, in the sense of more focused, better cited research. In the early days of APD, I was very good about citing and linking anything I had to say; in the later days of its original run, I got a little lazy about this, in part because of the hasty schedule on which I had to produce content for the dispatch. This time around, if I don’t have the time to cite it correctly, I won’t write it.
Grazie mille. A concluding note of thanks to everyone who, in the six months since I originally closed up shop, wrote to express their gratitude for the work and who has pinged me in the months since to express their desire that APD undergo a formal resurrection (and not just the periodic updates that elapsed from the netherworld in that time). I have always thought of myself as writing principally for my own benefit, to sort things out on the screen that in my mind appear too intertwined to separate conceptually without the aid of writing. It genuinely did not occur to me that something of a small community had formed around the dispatch (despite my repeated addresses to “Perennialists and Digressers All”) until after it had closed. I do not presume to be able to recreate that community automatically, nor do I assume the ongoing interest of readers who have surely moved on in the last six months. But I do thank any and all ready to tread this itinerarium novum.
Edit: I attempted to set prices to $3 and $27 for monthly and annual subscriptions, but Substack will not allow that, so they are set to the minimum $5 and $30.
Very glad to see you back
Wonderful news!