How do you feel? Do you feel a little annoyed? Like maybe you have better things to do? Do you feel a little put out, like you have an unpleasant task ahead of you? Do you sort of sigh in your mind when you receive these emails? Or do you possibly even delete them without really thinking about it? Do you maybe feel nothing at all?
Do not let me further diffuse your attention: devour these words or destroy them. In general, I think we should all be raising the thresholds by which we govern what is allowed to impinge on our attention. It is with that in mind that I cordially invite you to unsubscribe.
If you unsubscribe, I promise you will be rewarded with a feeling of freedom and lightness. Your mouth will be filled with the taste of strawberries. You will join a community of people over eight billion strong, and you will be more interesting to your friends and family and lovers. When you wake up tomorrow and you have that first introspective moment of consciousness you will find yourself much further along the path to enlightenment.
What you are engaging in now is just a distraction. You have any number of things going on that are more important than whatever is going on here—and I mean forget this, forget me—you have any number of things happening that are more important and more immediate than whatever is happening on Substack, whatever is happening on the Internet. Your wife is mad at you, your kid is struggling to learn algebra (and you can’t remember the Substitution Method), your dog is getting old and will soon die. There is so much going on inside your head, so much turmoil, and strife, and love and loss, and stress and grief and struggle, and mundane knots as well; your desk chair is uncomfortable, your fridge needs the water filter replaced, your clothes are wearing out from washing and drying them so many times (and you no longer even know where you would buy yourself new clothes), you don’t very much like your boss, and driving to work every day makes you a little nauseous, and you haven’t found any good new music to listen to in a while, and your enjoyment of music in general seems to have slowly waned over the decades to an apathetic nadir. So why would you want anything else? Why would you want to invite anything else to think about into your head, anything meaningful and grand and challenging, let alone whatever is going on here? Who am I to impose some cute little blog post on you?
Who am I? I’m certainly not an expert on any of the subjects I discuss here, in fact I have no relevant formal training at all, and definitely none in writing. In real life, I work at a little consultancy, and I spend my days writing code, training statistical models, and looking at graphs. I spend most of the rest of my time with the lovely woman who, on Friday night, became my wife, and our dog; or working on projects like this publication or any number of frivolous software projects. I have a weird obsession with craft coffee—I own at least seven different coffee-making apparatuses (in order of most frequently used: V60, Moccamaster, Chemex, Hario Switch, Aeropress, Moka Pot, Stagg pourover).1 I type in Dvorak. I’m left handed. I live in Colorado, back in the town where I grew up, however on the opposite side; right up against the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, minutes away from cliffs and canyons and streams and trails and evergreen trees.
My interests as an adult have been significantly influenced by my exploration of mindfulness and meditation, which began in my freshman or sophomore year of college. The thing that first got me interested in mindfulness was Leonard Mlodinow’s book Elastic. The argument was, if I recall, basically: don’t you want to actually be there when you tell your partner you love them? Okay so then how do we go about this? It turns out, when you take a look, it’s not as easy as you’d like it to be.
From there, Sam Harris’s podcast took me much deeper into the practice and philosophy of mindfulness. Meanwhile I was also exposed to David Foster Wallace (via Jordan Ellenberg’s How Not to Be Wrong, which makes a passing reference to him as an author that often includes references to mathematical concepts—I thought: now here’s some fiction I could get into), most importantly the famous “This is Water” speech and Infinite Jest—I think I read that book at the ideal time in my life. I was about 21 and it was as if it was the first book I ever read. DFW resonated with me powerfully, and I received his writing as a powerful elucidation of what mindfulness is, not to mention a realization of what fiction could be.
So it was that I began to observe a transition within myself from an interest in science, technology, and engineering to an interest in literature, philosophy, and art; this is the force that drives this publication.
A lot of people, in their anniversary posts, reflect on and make goals for their numbers: how many subscribers they have gained, and how many they hope to gain. That sort of thing. I have only one goal for Orbis Tertius: to write stuff that is absolutely unhinged. To write stuff that makes you think What the fuck. Why would you write this?
When I began, I imagined I would exist in the rationalist sphere. I am embarrassed by this. The past year has basically been an effort to crawl out of this box I built for myself. I have been continuously re-applying the rules of rationalism and trying to write from within them, and only enjoying myself when I managed to break them, and, unsurprisingly, getting frustrated. I’ve realized (if I’m being honest, I have always known) that I have absolutely no interest in trying to write from within the rationalist sphere, or any sphere at all,2 and that good writing—good anything, in fact—comes from doing things that are weird, things that no one else would ever even think to do, things that might even be repellent to imagine doing if you’re anybody else. The dancer and choreographer Martha Graham said it best:
There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to decide how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
It is basically no business of mine what is good, or if anything I do is good, or what sorts of things I should do. You can’t create something good, you can only create. You can only keep the channel open, and then it’s all aesthetics; aesthetic is everything, and the only difference between what we recognize as success and what we recognize as failure is that success is what we call it when an aesthetic finds the eyes meant to behold it, and, importantly, that those eyes are many.
I’ve never been interested in anything beholden to legions of eyes, whether it’s Marvel movies, genre fiction, popular music, or Starbucks coffee. This is why I named this publication after a fictional secret society. I hope Orbis Tertius remains a relatively tiny, intimate, secretive organization—yes, I’d like it to grow, but if it becomes very large, it means I’ve deadened my vitality. This is the point of Sam Kriss’s antagonism. This is the point of the avant-garde. People think that the point of the avant-garde is to experiment, so that the boundaries of an art can be pushed out, and that the unapproachability of avant-garde stuff is a societal barrier that we must overcome to unlock new horizons of creativity. This is incorrect. The point of the avant-garde is to create something unapproachable, so that the only people who dare approach are those who look at it and say Ah, yes. Of course.
If you say that you don’t like avant-garde stuff, I contend that must only mean that you haven’t found the avant-garde writer, director, or painter who happens to take as their raw material the very mechanisms of your soul. I can’t blame you, really, because the odds are that that person has almost no audience. That person is probably an old man in rural Cambodia who whittles tiny horrific figures out of wood and immediately casts them into the bonfire upon chipping the last splinter and gazing into the visage of the deity from his dreams—the primordial will that reaches so deeply into the material of his soul as to preclude its existence, just for a moment. Figures which, if you happened to see them reflected in his eye as he momentarily bore the gestalt, lit by the flames, would fill you with spiritual torment; for you too would see the deity of your dreams, and you would never be the same.
Of course, all of this is a superficial description of the layer on top of the actual phenomenon, that is, the actual creation of things. There is a huge distance between avant-garde stuff and pop stuff, and it’s not always better to be on the left side of that spectrum. But I don’t think most artists even think of it this way. The artist doesn’t create for any audience in particular or for any particular type of person and certainly not you. They only create because they must, because they are so in touch which that vitality that they can’t not. They have that divine dissatisfaction. All art is very much a selfish thing, of that you can be absolutely certain, and yet there is something happening there, something which, from a wider perspective, is very much selfless.
This is not to say that what I’m been doing here has ever been art. This is to say that art is what I would like to do here, eventually.
In the past year I have adhered without fault to a schedule of publishing every other Sunday night at 8:00 PM Mountain Time, including Christmas Day—22 essays, 3 stories, and 1 recipe. While I would like to keep publishing at a generally biweekly pace, I may begin to relax this schedule. I may begin to experiment with brewing formulae that require months or even years long fermentations, so that a good heady funk can develop, and my emails will hit you with the same taste of vinegar and probiotic benefit that comes with a sip of Kombucha.
In return I ask nothing. You are my bonfire; I cast these horrifying figures upon you mostly so that I may be rid of them.
Interested in stepping up your coffee game yourself? The most important thing is to use recently roasted beans (buy them at a coffee shop instead of the grocery store) and grind them just before you brew. If you are feeling adventurous, try a light roast. The extra caffeine and fruity flavors really help to beat back the unerring torture of existence.
The only geometric object in or on which I would like to exist is the hyperbolic plane, where all lines have many parallels, every path traces a curve along spacetime itself, and every point is a saddle point. Giddy up.