I was first introduced to the world of Cormac McCarthy when my friend Ben Carlson suggested we read Stella Maris as the inaugural book of our IRL book club.

I went into completely in the dark about McCarthy which, if you’ve read his books or know anything about him, is a weird entry point.

For starters, Stella Maris is the last book he wrote before he died in June 2023. It’s is also a prequel to the book he released just before this one titled The Passenger, which I haven’t read yet. And the entire book is written in the form of a dialogue between a doctor at a psychiatric facility and a patient named Alicia Western. There is no exposition, no interiority, just pure dialogue. And as I’ve come to learn about McCarthy, he doesn’t like using quotation marks or letting you know who is saying what.

You just have to sort of, figure it out.

I thought the book was odd at first but it’s not a long book either and as I got deeper into it, my heart felt for Alicia. She was clearly in a rough place, had a terribly messed up childhood, and was gifted with the curse of being perhaps too smart for her own good.

To give you a sense of what I mean, take this flow of dialogue from page 27:

It’s not something people ask. It’s just what they wonder: is the world in fact aware of us. But it has good company. As a question. How about: do we deserve to exist? Who said that it was a privilege? The alternative to being here is not being here. But again, that really means not being here anymore. You can’t never have been here. There would be no you to not have been. What do you think, doctor?

You can call me Michael if you prefer.

I don’t. Prefer.

She’s basically suffering a mental breakdown causing her to hallucinate a weird character she calls the Thalidomide Kid who she believes is tormenting her but also lets us, the readers, begin to understand the intricacies of her mind and even her unconscious or subconscious.

She gives a fascinating answer to how she believes her mind does math which touches on some of the things I’ve been noodling on with regards to where our creativity comes from:

The core question is not how you do math, but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesn’t go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonder why the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it? We don’t know. I’ve posed this question of some pretty good mathematicians. How does the unconscious do math? Some who thought about it and Sam hadn’t. For the most part, they seem to think it unlikely that the unconscious went about it in the same way we did. What was surprising to me was the insouciance with which they greeted the news. As if the very nature of mathematics had not just been hauled into the dock. A few thought that if it had a better way of doing mathematics at all to tell us about it. Well, maybe. Or maybe it thinks we’re not smart enough to understand it.

When this topic came up in our book club discussion, the others pointed me to McCarthy’s essay in Nautilus on The Kekulé Problem:

I call it the Kekulé Problem because among the myriad instances of scientific problems solved in the sleep of the inquirer Kekulé’s is probably the best known. He was trying to arrive at the configuration of the benzene molecule and not making much progress when he fell asleep in front of the fire and had his famous dream of a snake coiled in a hoop with its tail in its mouth—the ouroboros of mythology—and woke exclaiming to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring.” Well. The problem of course—not Kekulé’s but ours—is that since the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not understand the problem in the first place, why doesnt it simply answer Kekulé’s question with something like: “Kekulé, it’s a bloody ring.” To which our scientist might respond: “Okay. Got it. Thanks.”

Why the snake? That is, why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter.

A logical place to begin would be to define what the unconscious is in the first place. To do this we have to set aside the jargon of modern psychology and get back to biology. The unconscious is a biological system before it is anything else. To put it as pithily as possibly—and as accurately—the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal.

The subconscious, as he says in an interview with Oprah, is older than language.

I’ve wrestled with this annoying question for more than I care to admit, so I figured it might be a good idea to think out loud.

Substack is extremely popular right now. But there was a time when Medium was the it blogging platform and now, well, Medium is kind of dead. Maybe not dead-dead, but it’s nowhere near the popularity it once was.

Substack makes writing articles and sending them out to an email list very easy. They’ve added some more customization features over time, but it’s still a relatively simple platform that just works out-of-the-box with minimal fuss.

Substack also solves the distribution problem by recommending your articles (newsletters?) to others on the platform, and the Notes community is sort of a less chaotic version of X. So you can build a readership based solely off your Notes.

The whole “protect your data” doesn’t seem like a big issue either because Substack, like most platforms, makes it relatively easy to export your data.

So why not just write on Substack and leave this personal site as a business card of sorts with links to everywhere I put out content?

Two reasons.

Substack has always to my mind been a place for high quality essays. Some of my favorite writers on Substack are brilliant essayists. That, to me, has always felt like the most elevated version of what a writer could do on the platform.

Substack Notes, on the other hand, are basically tweets. They work well when they’re short and when they hit on a specific feeling or zeitgeist that many people feel an affinity to, and you get the feedback in real-time.

But there should be something between a Note and an Essay.

That something is a blog post.

I’ve often pulled back from hitting publish on Substack because I didn’t feel it was worthy of being published or worthy of bothering my subscribers. It was half-baked ideas I wanted to write but didn’t take anywhere more elevated than that.

That’s where blog posts can, and should, live.

We shouldn’t have to worry about burning our email list because we have a few lines to share. Something more than a Note but less than an Essay.

The second reason, which is maybe even more important, is that I personally miss reading people’s blogs.

As social media sites have consolidated so much of the content we consume, finding little dark corners on the Internet where people share their quirks and ideas feels like something that has been lost or taken from us.

And so even if it’s a bit more work, I’ve decided that I will be writing in both locations.

To carve out my own little dark corner of the web.

Because I want to.

A year ago today, one of my favorite artists, the legendary filmmaker and philanthropist David Lynch, passed away.

His name has morphed into an adjective in its own right—Lynchian—describing, depending on who you ask, something that comes close to a depiction of everyday American life but in a way that feels dreamlike, uncanny, and maybe even a bit nightmarish. The writer David Foster Wallace, who tagged along on a movie set of Lynch’s once for an article, wrote that he was unsure if the director was a genius, or insane.

Even if you don’t love his movies, or find them strange, or difficult to understand, consider the advice of Marcel Duchamp who said “I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.”

And as artists of any kind, whether you draw, paint, make films, or, like me, write, we owe a great deal of gratitude to David Lynch for pushing the boundaries of his craft, and taking us along on his process for creativity.

He was a tireless advocate for meditation, specifically Transcendental Meditation, and wrote a book on his creative process titled Catching The Big Fish, which I’m currently reading.

Over the holidays, I read Dennis Lim’s David Lynch: The Man From Another Place, which was a short but wonderful biography about the evolution of Lynch’s career and how his upbringing and unique approach to art impacted his creative decisions.

The Genesis of The Art Life

When Lynch was 15 years old, his girlfriend introduced him to her friend Toby, whose father, Bushnell Keeler, was an artist. Visiting the elder Keeler’s studio, he was “shocked to learn its possible to make a living that way.” Before he left, Keeler gave him a copy of The Art Spirit by Robert Henri.

Lynch was captivated at that point by the symbol of possibility, and in that moment committed to himself that he would live what he called The Art Life.

The Lynchian Doughnut Hole

Lynch was often asked to define the term, Lynchian, as if he was the one who had coined it. And each time, he would decline, or give an evasive answer. Often, he would bring up his favorite phrase:

“Keep your eye on the doughnut, not the hole. A concept like Lynchian is more like the hole. If I start thinking about that, it’s dangerous.”

David Foster Wallace wrote that Lynchian is:

“…a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”

Leave Room To Dream

In many interviews, Lynch was asked if he could expound on the meaning of his film’s and he would always respond with a precise “No.” Lim writes in his biography:

“Words for him are not just reductive, they are dangerous, anathema to his view of art as fundamentally enigmatic.”

Instead, he believed his films should “leave room to dream.”

Where Ideas Come From

For David Lynch, ideas have an almost mystical notion to them.

“They have a life of their own, independent of the artist, waiting to be plucked from the ether.”

He likened himself to a radio, “tuning in inspiration on odd frequencies.”

Uncertainty Is The Allure

Both Stephen King and Haruki Murakami have talked about not outlining or plotting before writing their books, believing that if the author is surprised by where the story goes, the audience definitely will be.

The same was true for Lynch for whom the uncertainty was the allure.

“Part of what makes David’s films unique is that they’re mysteries he’s trying to solve.”

We, the audience, get to watch him discover what happens as the story unfolds.

Work To Support Your Art

Aspiring artists love to romanticize the “struggling artist” who devotes all their time to their craft, even if that means living below the poverty line, when in reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth for many of the greatest writers and artists in history.

This was certainly not the case for David Lynch. When his grant money for Eraserhead ran out, filming came to a halt and he scrambled to find work in order to pay his rent. He landed a gig delivering the Wall Street Journal at night, and it would take a total of four years for him to have enough money to complete the movie the way he wanted. He would study maps and routes to find ways to finish his deliveries quicker so that he could go back to his art.

Make Art That Engulfs

While in art school, Lynch called his paintings “symphonies”, a sign of the synthesia that characterized his approach to art. His goal was not only to bring his paintings to life, but “to become an environment that engulfs the spectator.”

Think of Philadelphia

The places we live in have an enormous impact on our creativity. Both Edgar Allen Poe and David Lynch, artists of the macabre and dread, spent significant time living in Philadelphia.

For Lynch, just thinking about the city he called home during his art school days was transportive.

“I just have to think of Philadelphia and I get ideas.”

Create Fully Furnished Worlds

“Lynch sees his movies as worlds to inhabit; for devoted fans they are often environments that encourage lingering.”

The author Umberto Eco once wrote that the pre-condition for a film to attain cult status is for it to create “a completely furnished world.”

Great Work Needs Nursing

Sometimes your art needs to be nursed along until people finally “get it.” Barenholtz TK opened Eraserhead in the fall of 1977, at the Cinema Village in downtown Manhattan. Only 25 people showed up on opening night.

But enough people kept coming for it to hold onto its midnight spot. To those early viewers, the film must have seemed to possess the potential to “derange the senses and confuse dream and reality.”

Open The Lid

Lynch, as I mentioned above, was always coy about what his movies were about. In an early interview in 1977, he caved and offered a subtle hint:

“Everybody has a subconscious and they put a lid on it. There’s things in there.”

On it’s face, this says very little. But read it again, and it says a lot, about his movies’ themes, and his recommendation to creating art

Do Something With Your Hands

After Eraserhead, Lynch spent his time building sheds.

“He built obsessively, constructing a garage, a painting studio, sheds for storage. It was tactile, satisfying work—a more intimate and utilitarian form of world building.”

When asked about his love of sheds in one interview, he said:

“They can be used for storage, and they can be used for little places to be.”

Show Things Normally Hidden

Blue Velvet had such a profound impact on David Foster Wallace, he wrote that the film brought home to he and his grad school friends

“…that the very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn’t intellectual, but wasn’t even fully conscious.”

Dive Deeper and Catch Bigger Fish

“His movies are the weird tales that give form to the submerged traumas and desires of our age, perhaps even to questions that have haunted artists and thinkers for centuries: how to explain evil, how to live with fear, how to hold the self together, how to keep reality as we know it from falling apart.”

In the end, what he became known for, and what we all can take as a lesson for our lives, for our art, is to dive deeper to catch the bigger fish.