This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Tricks. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
I’m trying out a feature of Substack that lets you add a voiceover version of a post, above. (I even stood in my closet to record it, a living-in-Brooklyn merit badge.) Let me know if it’s useful.
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I’m going to break your heart, maybe: I don’t believe in astrology. I’m conversant in it, because of where and when I live. I’m a (mostly textbook) Gemini. Leo moon, Scorpio rising. I have great conversations with my (astrologically gifted and seeric!) friends about astrology, and I appreciate it for the vocabulary it supplies about personality traits and relationships; for its metaphor about the absolute reign of indifferent natural forces over our lives. In my novel research, I’ve learned about the even firmer sway it held over lives of many early Americans. But if you tell me that I shouldn’t kiss an Aries at the spring equinox because my Venus is in transit—or whatever—you may as well ask if I’ve been born again. Good on you babe; that’s not my belief system.
A clarification on the subject line, though: I’m not using the term “woo woo” (beliefs in “supernatural, paranormal, occult, or pseudoscientific phenomena“) derisively. Everyone I know buys into some kind of woo woo, provided we define it in part as belief held independent of empirical evidence. While not all such unverifiable belief is equivalent—some of it could, in theory, be proven or disproven using the scientific method while some never will be, for example; and some does far more to fuel social or personal harms or goods—I do think it’s important to acknowledge that woo woo is part of how we humans see the world. It’s important because, for purposes of the creative body, it has such power.
For good and ill, we’re creatures of narrative before we’re creatures of anything else, and it’s this very truth that enables the exercise of social influence on a history-making scale, whether it’s the Apollo program or the riot at the Capitol, the Quran or Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Chinua Achebe said it better than me:
“In the end, I began to understand,” he wrote. “There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.”
Both my own experience and my research about charismatic religious founders suggest that the line between devout spiritual belief on the one hand and deep knowledge of and love for a set of stories on the other is generally thinner than we acknowledge. Most people would draw a category distinction between the New Testament and the Marvel Cinematic Universe; but I am not persuaded that this distinction will hold up over time, in terms of cultural reverberation but also in terms of the degree to which adherents of each text receive it—in that in-between space where we hold beliefs we cannot firmly test—as reality.
Here’s my woo woo: I spend a lot of time talking, and listening, to my past and future selves. To the former I supply a strength which he hadn’t discovered. From the latter I seek reassurance that the leaps I’m daring myself to will not swing into the abyss. And my future self obliges, with a depth and wisdom that does not yet feel my own. Are these figurative exercises? A poetic instrument for reflection and the harvesting of courage? Sure. But here’s the thing: I already know for a fact that I’m speaking toward my past self; similarly, future me is committed (by, uh, me) to sending some thoughts back my way. So this is a practice I take seriously.
More solemn still, though, is the mantle that falls on those of us who aspire to create stories that can live beyond us. First, to do so we must participate in narratives about ourselves that end in our succeeding; and second, I think we are invited to imagine that the effects of creative work need not be limited to entertainment or even provocation—that worlds arise from writing, and some of these are real.
Coming Friday: Discipline.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.