To my nearly unlimited chagrin, I’ve decided to think about becoming a ‘Substack Bro,’ not out of any desire to achieve any awareness for my mostly nonexistent, semi-pseudonymous online persona, but only out of a desire to confront some of the problems and hesitancies that have bedeviled my writing more and more in the past year or so (and as a means, I hope, to better stay in touch with some distant friends). I have found that the perfectionism attendant of academic writing has made it harder and harder for me to express anything readily, that the process is not enjoyable, and that I need an outlet to express ideas that are at best only half-formed without feeling like I need to sit on them until they fully cohere. So I might do some of that on this blog, and perhaps some fraction of it will even be of interest to those few who may indulge me in this.
So here this is, with a name I think roughly fitting to the present state of my intellectual and spiritual capacities, and I’ll be so bold as to assert that you can expect at least a few posts to follow, irregularly, sooner rather than later. So to those of my friends to whom I send this, subscribe if you’d like, comment, in the future, if you feel so moved, and at all times be assured of my gratitude.
Count me in!
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.