Then to Saint Fillian’s blessed well,
Whose spring can frenzied dreams dispel
And the crazed brain restore.


Marmion by Sir Walter Scott

“One of the rules of a tragic time is that real enemies must never meet in open combat.”

These are the words of Samson Shillitoe, the irrepressible, deeply flawed, mad(?) poet and anti-hero of the novel A Fine Madness by Elliott Baker.

This utterance is directed at one Dr. Oliver Wren, a handsome, brilliant, and jaded psychiatrist who stands in counterposition to our scoundrel-in-chief. The story is set in a 1960s New York City.

Shillitoe is discovered camping out uninvited in Wren's office late at night, listening to his recordings regarding his clients while drinking the shrink’s 20-year-old brandy.

“Someone was sitting in his chair, with his big feet on his desk, drinking his brandy and listening to his voice.”

After confronting the intruder, Wren is incredulous when the poet rebuffs his more than reasonable offer to come under his care in lieu of involving the police.

“I don’t think we’re enemies,” said Wren quietly.

You don’t? You who protect what is while I envision what can be? You who find sickness where I find the fierce abstraction of desire? You who make a profit out of human misery while I command the moon and make melodies in a warehouse of gutturals? And you don’t think we’re enemies!

To be clear, Shillitoe is a drunk who physically abuses his live-in girlfriend, Rhoda, the one noble character in the novel. He dodges child support payments to his ex-wife. He insults or mocks just about everyone and everything he encounters. He does not take the laws of God or man seriously, at all. And yet, through Baker's dazzling and genuinely hilarious prose, you come to root for the bastard. It’s important to note that Baker goes out of his way to demonstrate that women find his particular brand of verbally vivacious toxic masculinity irresistible.

The Mad Poet archetype, for all its many flaws, has always held a certain attraction. There are many examples, Lord Byron (“mad, bad, and dangerous to know”) comes to mind, although the 20th century in particular may beat out the others centuries for the sheer scope of “case studies.”

To name only Americans: John Berryman (jumped off a bridge), Hart Crane (jumped into the Gulf of Mexico), Robert Lowell (extreme bouts of mania), Sylvia Plath (head in an oven), Ezra Pound (insane asylum), are well known, and we might extend the list considerably if, frankly, it wasn’t so damn depressing.

Perhaps in part because of this, in the decades just following WWII, one current of such attraction evolved into an unspoken assumption that psychological suffering somehow equated to artistic authenticity. Whereas the counterculture simultaneously adopted the quintessential Romantic “mad” poet Blake as a model for their myriad prophetic projects—Ginsburg did this explicitly, while Timothy Leary and the lesser prophets of the age took up Blake’s rhetorical style, that is, his combativeness and pose of righteous indignation. Leary believed that recognizing the human, and in particular the human brain, as a biological machine was the key to unlocking freedom. Outside of his more flamboyant public persona, his advocacy of LSD use was couched in terms of altering human hardware/software, and thinking of oneself as a “metaprogrammer.”

This same rough Mad Poet archetype has greatly contributed to the allure of our most widely recognized American poet, Poe, and while poets have largely fallen out of fashion, the fascination with madness has only gained potency since the publication of A Fine Madness in 1964 (and a middling 1966 film adaptation starring Sean Connery in 1966).

It is not controversial to say that “mental health”, or the lack thereof, has in many quarters not just become chic, but a sign of practical transcendence. The mentally unwell are exempt from certain judgements, rules, etc., and in fact receive a certain hard-to-define ordination.

After all, it is the Mad Poet’s cousin, the Jester, who the King keeps close at hand for counsel. In dark times, it’s only the untrustworthy wit who can be trusted by the highest authority. When the world has gone mad, who can you trust except the sincere madman?

Robert Rentoul Reed, Jr. notes just this in his book Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage, citing the titular character in John Marston’s play Antonio’s Revenge as illustrative:

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By wisdom's heart, there is no essence mortal
That I can envy but a plump-cheek'd fool:
O, he hath a patent of immunities 
Confirmed by custom, seal'd by policy,
As large as spacious thought.

And indeed today, when every man, woman and child is king, queen and crown prince of the universe, do we not also gaze upon the “mentally disordered” with a form of hushed reverence? Do not our teens, pre-teen and 20 and 30-something-year-old teens press and scramble to pick up diagnoses as children pick up so many pretty rocks on the woodland path?

And why not? They seem to act as particularly potent talismans, “patents of immunity” if you will, warding off the discomforts and responsibilities of our pillowed and dehistoricized age.

The mad are “neurodivergent,” which, if we are honest, sounds cool, almost X-Man-esque. This is not to downplay the insanity-inducing environs confronting us; again, one can understand taking on these various neurodivergent pseudo-holy identities as an imminently practical solution, particularly when acknowledging the utter paucity of attractive identities offered by the older generations.

So. Pardon me, I only need a moment…

A quick recap:

The Jacobeans gave the fool a privileged tongue.

The Romantics turned the “mad” poet into a prophet, secular (Byron, Shelley) or otherwise (Wordsworth, Blake).

The twentieth century transformed suffering into artistic authenticity, lending itself to moral grandstanding.

The twenty-first century increasingly turns diagnosis (poetic “spells,” if you will allow) into a powerful identity.

Reed notes that it is the malcontent, the madman who is most often the mouthpiece of the author’s true thoughts and feelings. And indeed Baker’s joy is almost palpable as his self-taught madman Shillitoe excoriates psychiatry, literary society, landlords, middle class “kulchur sniffers” and the poor.

Through a series of twists and turns, our poet finds himself under the care of Wren at his facility, Para Park. With the police looking for him, Shillitoe is convinced by his “enemy” that he will remain undisturbed at the facility long enough that he can finally finish his manuscript.

Naturally, Wren’s wife, Lydia, ends up visiting Para Park. Inevitably, the discontented, culturally curious wife of the good doctor stumbles upon our poet scribbling away in the “bathing room.” Soon after, Wren ends up stumbling upon them…intimately engaged in her education.

The consummate professional, Wren, of whom we were told earlier is a competent fighter, does not beat the scoundrel. He slips away before they notice his presence. He determines upon reflection that his restrain was solely due to Shillitoe being his charge. Within the course of the same afternoon, at a board meeting, Wren casts the deciding vote in favor of introducing psychosurgery at Para Park, a notion he was previously against.

Of course, it is determined that Shillitoe will be the first recipient of this new medical boon, thus confirming our poet’s initial assessment regarding the real relationship between Poet and Psychiatrist. Wren gets a piece of the poet’s brain, literally.

Wren’s “impartiality” results in involuntary psychosurgery. The mechanism—the poet’s brain—is defective, and must needs correction.

It is this impartiality in the name of care that opens up interesting and disturbing speculation.

A better known anti-hero, Tony Soprano of HBO show The Sopranos shoots another uncomfortable dart into the Mental Health Industry. The well-intentioned psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi treats mob boss Tony, but understandably struggles with the ethical questions raised in helping a violent psychopath better “function” in his day-to-day dealings. It’s only in the penultimate season that Melfi cuts off Tony’s treatment after grappling with the obvious ethical quandaries. Better late than never.

The final season of The Sopranos ended in 2007, just before the mental health industry took on an almost explicitly religious fervor in the 2010s.

To his credit, Reed speaks highly of a truly religious institution in his book, published in 1952:

…in England, the rank and file of the Christian medieval church had for centuries constituted what was perhaps the greatest single humanitarian organization that the Western world has known.

In this enterprise, “the understanding and the care of the mentally ill” was considered “an essential and necessary part of the holy man’s training.”

He singles out a 13th century English friar, Bartholomew de Glanville for his “touchingly humane” treatments: “refreshing entertainment and comfort; removal from the original environment of the patient’s insanity; and lastly, music and occupation.”

Indeed, in A Fine Madness, Para Park does not lack for any of these things. There is, however, one key difference in approach, which we will arrive at shortly. First, we must look at another medieval method of mental correction—bowssening.

Here is Reed:

In later medieval times, “bowssening”—that is, immersing the patient in a well—became one of the most popular treatments of the insane. The patient, we are told, was first doused, then bound and left overnight upon the cold floor of the chapel or, if no chapel was convenient, upon an outdoor altar. This procedure, as a rule, was repeated several times until either the devil was forcibly washed out or hope of effecting the cure was abandoned.

The poet I most associate with the waters is Hart Crane. I am no New Critic, mind you, biography must intrude.

Here the same poet speaks:

“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.”

In the Christian life, the man, woman, child, undergoes baptism, drowns, and is returned to life and life abundant. He or she participates in the death and resurrection of the God-Man. The “mechanism” cannot be quantified.

Had Crane first been dipped in some holy well and left, bound and shivering, upon a chapel floor, would he have still leapt into the sea?

The treatment may have failed.

Still, it is worth asking whether the medieval custodians of the wells understood something modern psychiatry has no interest in investigating, indeed, would consider a type of pathology? The medieval churchman could not imagine that a man was identical with his brain. Their remedies were, by today’s medical standards, crude, cruel, and obviously ineffective. But they addressed the human sufferer as a soul, not a mechanism.

In the final chapter of A Fine Madness, our poet is leaving NYC on a plane with Rhoda, mind apparently intact, trying to finish his long poem.

Shilllitoe finished reading the second part of the poem and went on to the third.

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Men marry what they do not fear
        (percentages
               and pimpled brides)
touch, fail, multiply
to fractions
        that communicate
        like fence posts
        in Montana snow-
drifts hiding contact.
        frozen.
               forgetting
what they mark
and why-

...

Then the fourth part of the poem broke free, its wild wind carrying him higher and higher. And the words, like hard-brined fists of fire, beat back at the sun.

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I never know what’s in my heart
Nor likely will. Around it stand
Angels with leopard-spotted wings,
And unicorns untamed by virgin hand.

One does hear rumors. Like a child
Hears stories rattling in the ground
Of men that slew great dragons, died
Themselves but not ungloried in the act.

Or one who moves into a new house.
He’ll never see the genius of the place.
But all the floorboards eek their elderly
Tall tales of a former, maybe brooding, grace.

Unfortunately, I cannot find the thing.
Someone a many years ago did sell it off,
Took for its price a wad of cash, and Vegas thence.
A giant probably guards it in a chest, but sloth

Is never very far from ignorance,
And no one sells a map of fairy-land.
No alchemist yet born could make a lance
From those dull twins. But Lord, if there’s a chance,

Spit one last yearn of fire through my limbs,
Gut me with all your diamond, choose my eyes
To become East, and slip past all the rims
Of this world and the next into your prize.

The angel and the unicorns will bow their necks
To your Supreme, and meekly paradise aside
Until the engines of my marrow ask your leave
To Joshua, and swear your clarity in pride.

I seemed small too once
and moved apace.
My hands opened doors and I ran
Out, out looking for treasures.

Come back and put your mess away!
My apronless mother calls from the porch.
Do I want the big or the little cup? A red or blue one?

How could I know,
the boy confused by joy
who couldn't place
his own gasping?

It seemed so easy then,
the running.

No saint had ever prayed upon that land,
Nor even faerie frollicked underneath
Its red clay filled with iron which they loathe;
Nor had the sanctifying breath
Of poets clad the sere mundane
In glyphed eternities.
Or so I thought; and so I felt.
Hot-burning manzanita and the smoke
Of large incessant fires; the drought
Which made good serious atheists
Perform rain-dances; rock
Black, porous, strewn
Through all the ranches where it fell
Out of a sky made crimson by the fire
Which came from parturition of the mount
Not so far distant from our house.
None would have guessed Sophia was divine
Whose tutor was that harsh topography;
Nor had a Keats on such unsupple worlds
Been learned to what he was; our bird
Was not the nightingale but the vulture; huge
Grim eater of the dead, a shaman – wise
But horrible and nothing like a dream.

And it was death I knew ere life;
He brought himself to me in all of this;
The hot cracked skulls of cattle, dung
Left almost fossil by the unabating heat.
I killed a rattlesnake at three years old
And learned that I would die like he had done;
So early did I learn philosophy.

Only the stars seemed things untouched;
And queen of them, the moon; thank God
I had but little pagan learning for I would
Have worshiped these if I had known the means.
What my small supplicating soul
Desired from them silently I can but guess;
But even now I can hear water in the stars,
And taste the coolness of a moonbeam in my mouth.

The country was a man with leather skin
And shale at his joints; eyes of obsidian,
And diamondback the rest; the poison oak
Unctuous, did make his sparse habiliments.
Thus did I never see the beauty which invites
One like a courtesan into a sherbet world,
Nor does more chastely like a proud young wife
Compel you in to warm up from the snow;
No, this was Hector torn upon the ground
By godlike animal; a threatening cruel chief
With feathered tomahawk, and you soft-bellied doe.

The way they do things in the west
Is simple; and the faster gun
Decides the will of God. A bowie knife
Is in the fist of all the angels set to guard
A California boy, and they’ve got rope
For catching us if we break from the herd.

God is more terrible than death;
Faster, more cunning than the snake.
He bit my ankle and he poisoned me
When I had stepped upon him unawares;
He set his coyotes on my trail,
And gave the cougars of my scent.
I’d see the boughs abending as they stalked
Through verdurous black canopies
Athwart my brambled walk; I’d hear
Of evenings as I readied for my sleep
The ghostly yelps of the blonde dogs
He’d made to persecute the quiet black.

And then He showed me what He was;
Leviathan his plaything and the world
Like a rough stallion he’d broke.
He’d dress us all in snakeskin at the end,
Our bodies cool as moonbeams or the lakes
Of sweet blue fire that we call stars.
I had to get the Bethel-wound and limp;
Use granite for my pillow and receive
His clemency just when the jagged knife
Was subsequent kid Issac’s throat to rip.
His angels are great hunters and the bores
Of all their rifles sing the Milky Way.

Later I knew that I’d been born
In that same house of mercy where the man
Named for the Seraph and the Rose
Had been so plucked as after roses’ kind
To be the nearer fragrance to his lord.
So I was wrong; a saint had prayed;
And I had never been alone.

(speaking)

You looked a little lion in my arms.
I sang the Paschal anthem to your soul.
Oh Lord, how we were warded from alarms;
You looked a little lion in my arms.
I saw your mother struggle with the horns
Of Death, be blooded by that bull.
You looked a little lion in my arms.
I sang the Paschal anthem to your soul.

(with a strong voice)

The snow is melting and my heart is light
And now you breathe the thunder, o my son.
I cannot tell it you – the joy you brought:
The snow is melting and my heart is light.
It stomached me like as a cannon’s shot
When you came mewling out into the sun;
The snow is melting and my heart is light
And now you breathe the thunder, o my son.

(whispered)

He’s waking up. The lilacs bloom.
Nonbeing is a kind of hope;
With breeze of myrrh and golden broom
He’s waking up. The lilacs bloom,
And mustangs gather round the tomb.
He won. His breath is April. Hope
Is waking up. The lilacs bloom.
Nonbeing is a kind of hope.

So many careful angels in disguises ward our lives.
Another people knew this well: and Stone
Coyote, Buffalo and Cloud were Spirits strong
To organize the world in beauty. At the point
Of every knife and arrow gleamed a dancing sprite
Called him, The Gift of Sacrifice,
And Spirits fed the wounded soul of man
With meat and fur of deer and dreams
Portentous as a storm-cloud is of rain.
What in our suburbs then? be there
Of mailbox and cargo-van assignéd deities?
As slowly round the world there closed a net
Of beaming satellites were these asphyxiate
From breathing on their native stars?

A question for, and she exists but still,
English herself: what are you now, once diademed
With peerless homages and every trueborn genius,
Nursed on the brutal mountains or the dales green
And worn in battle on the king’s own sleeve;
Today an outcast, like a river pure
Now mucked with garbage and obscure
With pigments foreign to the thing you are,
Misused as is a bow broken for firewood?
Can you capacitate for this weird age
Whose mostly usages I modestly withhold,
The current logos of the swollen lung
Whose vulcan cry is always images
And games mistook for serious,
And too mercurian for keeping ledger of;
That is to say that I at twenty years and three
Hear on the tongues of my own peers
A language no one learnéd from the crib,
Nor yet has made its print on any book:
The bird dissolving as it flies,
Its feathers nor regenerative
But cumulus with their own amnesiac despair.
And in this change I have a paradoxic certitude
That in less years than mark my present hour
Will be extinct the possibility that I am understood.

The story that I wish to tell is of a Creek
And of its Spirit, how it marked
My boyhood and my manhood. It is short
The telling, and the point thereof
Is mostly that I teach myself to recognize
That every place I love is Wingéd and Forever.
Cow Creek, the Creek is named, and it is rich
With bluegill and the smallmouth bass,
Tadpoles and what they prophesy,
Egrets and beavers, otters too; raccoons
And crawdads. Miner’s mint
Grows on its banks, and various trees.
It raised me did this Creek as much
As any human, for I spent
Huge portions of my years in solitude with him,
And lived upon his shoulders through great change.
From earliest moments thither I made pilgrimage
Because my father is an angler.
So much elapséd there throughout a decade's time:
I played as solider and Crusoe; made
Forked spears by plying with my knife the still-green branch,
Had fortresses and dendrite-lofts full stocked
With acorns, roots, and lettuce false.
There when a storm became I would lie down
In the high grass and let the lightning ride my eyes,
Would ask the dangerous winds to lift my heart
Into their philosophical stampede;
Then could I feel the angels everywhere
In every swaying oak and every shock of light.

The water of the Creek is golden green and blue,
An algae lapis or a diamond wrapped in weeds.
I did much violence there to nature as a boy
For which I do repent me. Let it be
That if my soul through God’s fierce love be formed
More to his puissance that this Creek be healed too,
For it is part of me, and if His blood is mixed with mine,
My body joinéd unto His, then does this Creek
Enter His Church because
My blood is golden green and blue,
An algae lapis, or a diamond wrapped in weeds.

I.

The child who just yesterday
Did skin his knee and break the flower pot
Today is known a proverb, handed down
From rivergod to rivergod;
For in his belly laugh the living waters, yes
Wisdom herself has builded there her house.

II.

The banker’s daughter gave me but a wave
And underneath myself I saw
Poseidon's heart, a white stone with blue veins,
And all the cobblestones that make the street
Shouting the higher name of God,
And all the world was folding like a rose
And blooming like a rose, and like a rose
My inward self, a white rose with blue veins,
And Florence shook with glory as a hero shakes
His shield and the hair of Phoebus shines thereon.

III.

This weekend in a park or by the road
I’ll meet a one whose rich commode
Is hung upon his back; his feet
Tattooed with where they’ve gone,
His speech a labyrinth and his eyes a dawn.
Old man or woman leaning on a cane,
You are a pillar, strength of all that’s strong,
And will remain when time itself is gone.

IV.

I do not know what terrible Eternity
You are, what suns deglobe upon your mind
Like drops of water emptying their light,
I do not know what am I that do speak,
Nor why I do; the flesh is shaped to praise
Things that it does not understand,
For all such things are somewhat like to God.

Eleison, Kyrie.

Long have I hated you, Machine.
Your steel casements full of things I do not understand;
I blame you for the faeries having fled
As if you drained the stars of milk
To make the blue binomials which are
Inscrutably your blood.
You by existing must corrupt
My private romance with the past;
I cannot well pretend to be
A Keats espoused to poesy
Who am by your white pixels built:
I do no writing with a quill
In a Victorian summer shirt,
Lime-trees around a privileged spot;
In fact I do not write at all.
I type my coward angels while
Neighbors debate vaccines,
And your strange waters, O Machine,
Do fructify in scentless molds;
Madmen debating unrealities
Are everywhere, and sometimes I am one of them.

Through you I think; my hands
Attach themselves to spinning worlds
Deep-grammared on a structure past my ken,
While tackling the stasis of your keys.
No music comes from these univory plaques
Of verbal mimesis; while I indite
One hears the upboot and the downboot of the night.
A carpenter, erewhile atleast,
Thinks with a knife; a painter with his paints.
What does it mean that you are how I see?

Eleison, Kyrie.

While someday you give summer-scents?
Be like a scythe connotive of the grape
And gathered sheaf? Will you
Unfunctional in winter come to pay
Due service to the orchestras of Time?
Will you, like water, touch our eyes?
Feel, like our other tools, a friend?
Long have I hated you, Machine;
But you are part of me; and part of what shall be.

Eleison, Kyrie.

Too powerful a symbol it would be.
Go where the fighting’s hottest, said the king.
And I decided not to measure holiness.
He races like a spark among the stubble, flicks
His tail and leaps and goes among
The corners, yes, of the Machine.
Always, from things that were, he makes
New nows; and now is where the Glow begins.
The shape of what that saint would be
Who could be captain of that power,
Could whisper into eucharist this age
Of false astrologers, who have blasphemed their worshipped stars;
But never mind all that. Our practice now is this:
To stare and question with a knowledge past all doubt,
What form is roaring in a loud vermillion
The tomb is empty, Deus Domine;
For God will love
Precisely that which I, self-reared on foolishness, despise.

White fire running and white fire
On all the surfaces and in the deeps,
In me, my limbs, and in the finitude
I labour to remember. In this walk
Of stupidly enchanting pink
Wind-castles, suns
Like words just on the tips of tongues,
Like armies and myself an army, yes
Whose enemy is only that I cannot see.
All things incise my body; there is light
Within me and without. I want to cry
The shapes of every animal
To give you glory. Will the world
Run out of things to say? You are
An endless deep. White fire
Running on all the surfaces;
The trees, and velvet yellow flowers, trees
Of your light. Fire.
And if we have no pain
Will there by tears remained to us,
More shapes and future elements,
Can we then give you oceans? I forget
Every of all, and can but speak
What you already spoke. Wind-castles, suns,
All things incise my body. Do I leave
Ambrosia on the holy trackless ground?
White fire from your Spirit, what am I?

I pray a backwards prayer into the kid I was.
I try to spend him spiritual swords
Because who knows how all this works.

Sometimes I weep a tear for him, though not
In sadness, but as a desert-stone does in the night
Collect the moisture from the waterblooming stars.

I see the fevering of his wounds and call the son
Of serpentine Asclepius,
Bring balsam, water, salt;
And have the general’s wife prepare
A posset out of treacle-dark and milk of goat.

Nor do I pity him, but shake the spear and rap
My shield in the pattern of one near to death.

Breath in the hot dry air o little one,
Breathe out the twinkling blue and gold.
We see the stars down-plucked like fruit.
O it is hot and dry my little brother, on
These windy plains outside your heart.
Go down back into it. We all have left
You water there; weapons that will not break.
And also I shall leave this one last prayer:
May strangers bring you water
Wherever I have left you none.

Your body will be ripped apart by light.
Ripped through the air like as a falling meteor;
And finally, understanding, quick and bright.

All that you ever dreamed, o aching heart,
Like four enjacinthed creatures, all shall roar.
Your body will be ripped apart by light

Into a sweeter wholeness, rich, complete.
Inward and outward shall surcease their war,
And finally, understanding, quick and bright.

Whenas the fleshéd God Achilles met
What did he say to him, the pearl-diver?
Death shall be ripped apart by light

Into a body of the selfsame mud; starlight
Shall bloom in you, o Hades-languisher,
And finally, understanding, quick and bright.

I saved your glorious armour up on height;
Nor you or it were made in vain; be clad, therefore.
Your body has been ripped apart by light.

Your limbs shall heave with lightning, and bedight
With holy ornaments, a house in Pythia you’ll rear.
Your body is a temple of the light
Where a lamb bleeds understanding, quick and bright.

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.

I found the altar in a bird
And in the trembling castled air,
I found the church within a word
And laid my offering there.

Worlds within worlds of light,
And animals prepared from birth
To meet the keen of sacred knife;
I found the altar of the light.

Flowers, angels, men; the cup
Of water from a thousand stars distilled.
This church of petaled stone, this scent
Of feathered fire, where nothing is alone,
And sunlight is a sermon you desire.

I saw the hearts of everything with pure
Clear golden blood, and crystal all alive.
I knew that every rood was speaking as it could,
That everything was tragic; everything alive;
And everything would die for love,
Like naked heroes cut by swords of indigo
Upon the altar of themselves, offered
Forever to the Lover they desire.

The lily of the valley speaks to him,
The sculptor who has lived here many years
Without a dwelling, now surrounded by
Roods, herms, and big white stones
With deep pearlescent crenellations, weird
But comforting, as if the purpose of the world
Were somehow in their large repose
Best understood. She says
Her language in the starlight, for a man
Whose hands can say in stone what lips
Can never say in words, imbibes
Like her, a flower, through his skin;
Starlight and moonlight make him grow,
Strengthen his forearms, broaden out
The hillocked anvil of his back;
The sunlight makes his statues start to breathe;
But still, he never talks to them, but workes on.

The lily of the valley is his soul;
But he does not reply. A heavy animal
Comes from the mountains and his horns
Spattered with gore; among the statues he lies down
To die; out of his nostrils comes a spout of myrrh.
The sculptor weeps and says a single word.
But now the lily is the silent one.
He workes on.

Birdsung Aurora having stripped herself of stars
Came walking through the valley all alone.
He looked around. A thousand lilies were in bloom.
Tomorrow is a stone.
He heard the mountains shout.
He workes on.

Come here, you nameless boys; for we have feared you far too long.
We brought you here to sacred Troy to fetch the golden apple you desire,
And then condemned you once you’d set the walls to fire.
I’ve seen you in the streets hurling those thick black spears
Into each other’s breasts, and piling up the bodies near the sea,
Where shuttling crabs enact the arguments
Of sister-love, of Mars and laughing Aphrodite.
But Nestor’s sitting underneath an apple tree nearby
Cupping in ponderous woe-wagéd hands a butterfly,
And whispering to those immortal horses that the fee
Of deathlessness is but a thousand times to die.
I’ve seen you in the basements of your hearts
Fouling the panoplies your mothers sought for you
From magma-lunged Haephestus. You should know
There goes around your house a long parade
Of powerful bright creatures, shouting down the walls
Like trumpeters of fire; and that your father Zeus
Gave you that vicious beauty for a cause.
We’ve feared you, yes; each of your names
Is like a hollow ship upon whose prow
Is carved the face and open jaw
Of a leonine red animal. He made you fierce
To break the bones of Chronos, eat
The golden marrow thereoutof, and find
Some stone to callus your strong hands upon.
I’ve seen your skin and muscles shimmer like as lightning and the dreams
Of worlds, soon ending, disturb your eyes
Like as the pool of Siloam. I’ve seen
The angels comes descending and ascending on your heads,
The problem is, you chose too small a thing to wrestle with.
Take then this spear, and throw your brother in the pool
So that he may be healed, for you may wait another year
With your infirmities, the thorn stuck in your soul,
Breathing the wind of Hesperides,
So sweet, and summerlike, and cool,
Under the porches five,
Until the master gives a golden apple to his foal.

We put on our black robes and it is good
They hang so heavy on our limbs, for otherwise
The food of intellect might differently metabolize
Than other victuals, instead of adding flesh to flesh,
And leave us gasping on the earth like fish
Heaved early from the emerald womb.
In Latin, briefly, we took all of us an oath;
Quixotic now, somehow young men
In black and rusty armour in the candlelight
Sit down to food, in sable cut for monks,
And this our century is called the twenty-first;
And this the century most suitable for knights.

We sense in the thick linen on our arms and backs
Dead scholars, winters waiting for alarm
With crooked necks, and vellums sprent with sweat;
The vital wars of intellect; the sudden Bright
Seen as by Benedict, the child-pureness of delight
In some nocturnal gathering of wine and wit.
We see Boethius imprisoned, Socrates in court,
And Maximus detongued; we hear
The shaking into crystal of their bones; we feel
Their toméd bodies round us lushly like the white
Fresh flowers of a meadow in the spring.

The world is like a pool of water filled with light.

And one of us gets up; the dove and serpent of the Greek
Has taken hold of him; and he recites
The first book of the Revelation of the Lord.
He prances through it like a fine and noble horse,
Who, forcing through a narrow upward pass
To meet oncoming charge, must step
With the precision of a dancer on the shale;
The fire does not singe his mane as through
His nostrils it outflowers. And the words
Of that sharp two-edgéd sword Himself,
Come from between this young man’s teeth
Like small specific daggers and the tips thereof
The summits of blue mountains where the angels come
To offer sacrifice.

Long tables these and set with meat;
May God them someday bless that other tongues
Of flame than those of candlelight
Fall down like crowns upon the heads here sat.

So in Savannah Georgia a new college has been made;
Let much be asked of it, and much of us of whom it’s made.

Another flower then, I guess.
Another anon post on X.
Those trad wives won’t marry themselves.
These books are made for more than shelves.

Another photogenic dawn.
Another symbolic “we won!”
Nothing is new under the sun.
I hope you had some laughs, anon.

I sang into a horn of pearl
Upon the ocean’s shore,
And round about me rose an army all of sand
But I destroyed them with a shout
Of my black Samaritan lips.
One did not fall; he had a heart of solid star;
He said he was my brother, from before.
Out of the hills came men without the gift of speech
And took the sand for as to maken bricks.
Far out in the between
Of water, sun, and moon,
That seam of fire which is the door
That leads the bride into the groom,
I saw a hawk developing in fire
Wrenching a serpent, feathered like an owl, from the sea;
He dashed the serpent on a jagged stone,
And wept out of his golden eyes a tear
Blue as falling Neptune.

Later, young maidens came in swimming to the shore.
I broke my horn of pearl into pieces to be mirrors,
Because the bruises from their manacles
Were hidden underneath the brilliant silver of their hair.
And then my call was answered from the other shore;
The sea became as diamond, faceted and clear;
And on its face came walking men of solid star
Who said they were my brothers from before.