Questions

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Ryan. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

This is one of those weeks for me when really everything is on the table: What should I do with the rest of my life? What might we build inside the universe that grief has made? Does ordinary experience run both ways through time? How will I compel myself to finish my novel this year? Should I be a consultant, an editor, a therapist, a coach, the founder of a cult*, or a musician? What happens if I literally run out of money? How much longer do we have before the most pernicious manifestations of a capitalist-driven AI corrupt the essence of human nature? And so on.

(*This one would be by, limited, popular request.)

While I keep taking in a bunch of inputs and trying to make a meaningful synthesis of it, here are two pieces of reading that landed with me this week:

1. An interview with Jeffrey Kripal, who writes from an academic grounding about mystery and unexplained phenomena. This one came to me at random, but it’s so on brand for my late friend Ryan that it feels like a loaded coincidence, at least. Sample question and answer:

Is it your argument that there are elements of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, particularly challenges to ideas of strictly linear time, that support these possibilities?

I’m not a physicist, but one of the science writers I read is Philip Ball, and what Phil says is, look, we need to create a culture and a way of thinking that is quantum. We still insist on living in a Newtonian world.

2. And my fave Kathryn Schulz is back with a letter of recommendation for the writer Norman Maclean, who wrote the story on which the ’90s film “A River Runs Through It” was based. This one courtesy of my mom:

… What is “A River Runs Through It” about but the impossibility of knowing, when you are chasing after some beautiful wild creature, whether you are frightening it or lighting its way or simply bearing witness while it does what it would be doing even if you were not there to see it. That is why, despite all its technical and topographical specificity, the book had such universal appeal. Maclean knew he had caught tragedy in his high beams, because readers wrote to tell him so again and again: “I have a brother just like that, and I can’t find anything to do that will help him.” Such readers loved Paul because they loved someone like Paul—a prodigal son or daughter or sister or brother, recognizable and precious to countless generations of siblings and parents whose hearts could never be free of worry and grief.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram.