The Writers
The Word That Burns the Hand
On William Blake, Walt Whitman, and W.B. Yeats as initiatory writers — poets who received a visionary payload and spent their lives finding a language adequate to transmit it
The Writers
The Writers
The Poet in the Underworld
On Arthur Rimbaud, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Federico García Lorca as katabatic poets — writers who descended into darkness and returned, or did not return, with what they found
The Writers
The Novel as Mystery Play
On Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges as writers who used fiction as an initiatory form — building novels and stories that enact the reader's transformation rather than simply describing it
The Writers
The Transmission That Looked Like Madness
On Philip K. Dick's VALIS, William Burroughs's cut-up method, and Antonin Artaud as writers who received something they could not explain and built their later work around the attempt
The Writers
Writing Into the Dark
On the act of serious writing as a theurgic practice — a technology for descending below the known self and returning with what was found — and why the blank page is an initiatory threshold