Discover more from A Stylist Submits
The Way of the Eremitic Vessel
As Christians and writers, reject political imperatives for meaning and fullness.
My first political protest was a 2016 anti-gun violence rally roiling the West Mall at the University of Texas, whose attendees waved outsized dildos in the air like the standard-bearers of old. Appropriately, the rally’s organizers dubbed it “Cocks Not Glocks.”
I’m feinting—I didn’t protest, though I was present. I was dodging the dildos to enter the Flawn Academic Center so I could study. The protesters thundered that it was ridiculous for Texas to allow open-carry handguns in public without permitting sex toys in the same spaces. Ridiculous laws demanded ridiculous protests, the protesters reasoned.
As I recall this only-in-Austin anecdote, the murder of nineteen children and two adults in Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School finds me. It isn’t fair to critique that 2016 day by this 2022 terror, perhaps. The students hoisting their sex toys into the sun didn’t know of the gunman cutting like a shark through defenseless classrooms, nor of the police officers who so terribly failed their community.
And yet. My peers did seek the public eye where the gunman found infamy. There, they staged only a theatre of the impotent. Some weeks later, conservative students staged an anti-affirmative action bake sale on the West Mall and could only ridicule ridiculousness—charging $4 from white customers, $3 from Asians, $2 from Latinos, and so on down the races. When these activists lowered the curtain over their shows, nothing material had changed for the groups they claimed to represent.
Bear with my cynicism, y’all. I came of age spiritually, artistically, and politically during the Trump presidency. Useless, immaterial theatre played all the time, from all sides.
As a student actor, I attended a November 8 rehearsal whose directors left the election coverage playing on open laptops. As one state after another reported its electoral points for Trump—UT’s ur-villain—everyone lost interest in our play. The national Carnaval-turned-bête-noir had overwhelmed the student-written Madrigal Dinner show we were rehearsing, and our directors sent us home in confusion.
Moral or Immoral: The Pageant and My Skepticism
Thus was I cast in the American political pageant. In the 2016 election and its aftermath, all seemed transformed, (allegedly) made new but hardly made better.
All things were staged for our two-party system. Left and right assured us every two years that our homeland was on the brink of political and moral disintegration, that this election was the most important election of our lifetimes. I hadn’t known that we could expect the next apocalypse to arrive every two years on the dot.
The literary world rehearsed against Trump with jingoistic fervor. His production also caught the American church, so that our denominations were cast as victims, allies, accomplices, or villains. Overnight there were directives—sent by tweet, for haste—for our leaders and laymen to speak the right lines.
We Americans chanted the words the former president and his enemies wrote for us, though they were mangled language which birthed deformed meaning—deplorables, Lock Her Up, Build the Wall, Russiagate, Not My President, Covfefe, #Resist, Kids in Cages, Mueller, travel ban, and countless others. Inescapable though they were then, I now struggle to remember the words as anything but one long, idiotic idiom. I first heard them many ends-of-days ago, after all.
Today, under another inept and unjust administration prone to jazz hands, distrust of political currents seems the most faithful way I can live as both a Christian and a writer.
Why, exactly?
Shedding political imperatives is both wise and freeing.
True Believers or Infidels: Our Politics Master Us
A throat-clearing: here, I clarify that I won’t clarify my political stances. They’re the least-interesting, most-disposable part of my personality, and no great addition to my writing. With your patience, I’ll forego the crutch of being “on the right team,” write with well-reasoned fairness, and wet-willy your ear no matter your party.
Two more disclaimers: (1) Christian teachings and artistic literature have moral implications addressable by political action, and (2) political action can do good for moral concerns. I’d be a fool to argue against either point. Every significant text has political implications embedded in its layered meanings. And despite their bread-and-circus pageantry, our political systems do have material effects and purpose for countless people.
Instead, I reject the act of foregrounding political imperatives in my faith and art, instead of growing them both from their subterranean questions of meaning, purpose, and morality. Gentle people of the stockade, a definition under duress: “political imperatives” refers to the aims of our political parties to govern every atom of law, culture, relationships, and existence. For the left, it’s the conversion of all people to its socio-cultural agenda; for the right, it’s the combative enforcement of “non-elite” values; for libertarians, it’s the supremacy of all private initiatives; for socialists, it’s the glorious revolution and birth of classlessness. For every political congregation, it’s totalizing and imperative.
When Christians and writers draw their vocations from these political imperatives, we bind ourselves to the most intemperate of masters.
Because political aims are mastering forces. They certainly speak of doing good (and sometimes achieve it), but mostly they master: they master their message, their language, their opponents, and their own supporters. Beliefs, language, and people are at best tools for the chief end of taking political power in state and national governments.
Unless you’re a political strategist paid to define reality as our base, their base, and on-target messaging, this utilitarian treatment of everything is a dishonest constraint. And if, like me, you draw your purpose from the words you inherit and write, this ensnarement is a tragedy. Political imperatives treat few things worse than language and the meaning that its words flower.
Because, in pursuit of winning seats, political imperatives make meaning. But only the hollow meanings they need to pursue seats.
Political mastery is a grinding, unending process that proclaims the value of ideas, experiences, and morals according to its own political priorities, exalting or demeaning them accordingly.
Literature professor Timothy Aubry mentions this value-trap while discussing aesthetic and political theories in literary criticism with The Point. “[I]t’s not possible at present for people to say that such and such a book is valuable because of the immediate experience it creates for readers,” Aubry says. “If that experience doesn’t have political repercussions, if it doesn’t inspire any ideological insights, then the experience doesn’t matter and the book has no value. It must have a political kind of value.”
How, then, do we respond to that political expectation of our reading? We fit our taste to serve that pressure, Aubry says: “People are still very much trying to align their taste with their politics. And so everybody wants the books that they respond to viscerally, emotionally, to also be the books that have the right politics, right?” This desire to align taste with politics is why we feed history, irony, imagination, tradition, and other transcendents to our political currents. Is Scripture’s characterization of God as a male father problematic? Is Catcher in the Rye iconic or supportive of incel school-shooters? Any immovable text that serves only its own meaning will become an obstacle, to be possessed or disdained politically.
And in “Sources of Life” for the same magazine, Greg Jackson deepens this image of political imperatives as arbiters of value and meaning, arguing that they’ve assumed the position reserved only for religion: “Politics, as it completes its colonization of culture, shades into religion. It is religion in the specific sense that it sits above everything else as the locus of supreme meaning, organizing every aspect of life according to its moral framework.”
Jackson names the blooming fear I’ve had these past six years—that political imperatives are usurping the moral meaning I receive only from Christ. It’s why I distrust the moral siren-calls of each election season as idols that lure Christians and non-Christians alike.
In some spaces, the overthrow has already happened, so that our utilitarian policy debates have become the way we determine moral living. Shutting our borders to even the least of these was to love our (American) neighbors for a time, just as to hide our faces and isolate ourselves was (also) to love our neighbors but even more so. Policies devised for the next election, meet rock-hard moral dilemmas that have bedeviled man immemorial. Though they dispose of rooted Christian teachings, political imperatives make inadequate replacements.
Artist or Christian? Both Are Neutralized
Like faith, art independent of political imperatives makes meaning and value where it hadn’t existed before. It is ambiguous value, often idiosyncratic and troubling, that persists through time and will not be moved.
But in literature too, political imperatives lead us astray, as Jackson continues: “Our art has become exhaustively political, but it is no longer discernibly subversive. To previous generations the idea of nonsubversive political art would have made little sense—a contradiction in terms—but to us it has become natural. It is what major cultural institutions, foundations, and media organizations find congenial. Far from feeling challenged or discomfited, the centers of cultural power assimilate this art effortlessly.”
Literature is being engulfed, sometimes with the devoted consent of its writers, editors, and publishers. Its political imperatives seep from the regressive Left, so that writers must write their every word behind the aegis of resisting racism, sexism, colonialism, authoritarianism, classism, and other -isms without number. However moral this resistance might be as a social project, it’s a constraint when novelists, poets, journalists, and critics must bear it. It places value in the political only, where literature can (and should) also mine value from aesthetics, imagination, linguistics, and other veins.
As with Christian belief, literature is being co-opted and then neutralized by these political imperatives. Their mastery includes mastery of allies, sometimes to a more stringent degree than their enemies. The artist Adam Lehrer writes in “Art’s Moral Fetish” that since “the art world and broader culture industries have internalized the logic of neoliberalism in the 21st century, the critical role of art has collapsed. There’s no more dissent or provocation that dares us to challenge power.”
Here’s the cost of art-for-political-value, then: “dissent or provocation” gone extinct. (The “logic of neoliberalism” refers also to corporate machinations, but those market-masters deserve a separate essay.) Political imperatives make artists into propagandists, because propagandists are both safe and strategic.
But neither the Christian disciple nor the writer can truly serve political imperatives. They serve other masters who already demand the fullest measure of their effort, lives, and souls.
Left or Right? (The Reductive Question Hiding the Alternative)
The apostle Paul, writing to Christian Colossians tempted by false teachers (would-be masters), wrote a great warning in Colossians 2:8: “See to it that no one takes you through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.”
Takes you is the key verb-object phrase here. Political imperatives (“hollow and deceptive philosophy”) will take all things, if given the chance. Paul names “human tradition” and “the elemental spiritual forces of this world” as the deceivers’ basis, and their common denominator is our sin. So too, our sin is what makes our political culture vitriolic, power-hungry, and intolerant. Not the existence of a “D” or “R” beside a name, nor a skin color, nor a certain set of genitals—the existence of our fallen, evil souls.
But the evil souls which lead us to master our neighbors also open us to the alternative Paul names at the end of verse 8: “Christ.” He expands on this alternative in verse 9, writing, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority.”
Christ as the alternative commands the two elements we seek from politics— “power” and “fullness.” For “power,” I’ll repeat myself ad nauseam: political imperatives inherently seek power. Christ, as “head over every power and authority,” as the true locus of supreme meaning, confronts them directly. He alone holds power over all things, and so it’s idolatry when we give man that same authority over meaning.
But “fullness” is the deeper, rarely-spoken motivation for seeking that power. We need to feel full, to feel completed within ourselves. We wish to feel completed in our identities, our relationships, our circumstances, and our futures. Fullness is the need we’re born with, the one we die still craving.
Christ has already completed us in the eternal fullness of salvation, the bone-deep satisfaction of both justification and hope. Sure, Jesus feels less tangible to the world our political imperatives depict. But they offer no true fullness. Political imperatives are self-interested and shortsighted, and they would make us the same. In their image, we consume only the media and talking points of purest ideology forever, and we never, ever want the parade of Tucker Carlsons, AOCs, Trumps, capital-C crises, Bidens, half-truths, and juvenile snark to end. How could these things satisfy us?
Christ does satisfy. He completes. But with our self-effacement, not our self-interest. With confession of our sin, not its magnification against our “enemies.”
Seeking Him transcends the false binaries that political imperatives give us.
Tim Keller, in The Prodigal God, peels back our impulse to classify one another as moral or immoral through Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son. Considering that spendthrift wastrel of a younger son, we can either judge his foolishness or weep for his redemption. Considering that hard-hearted judge of an older son, we can either detest his entitled need to earn his father’s love or agree with his resentment. Keller, however, doesn’t set the two brothers in opposition, as I just did. He argues instead that they’re both sinners and thus equal in God’s sight.
“In [the gospel’s] view,” Keller writes, “everyone is wrong, everyone is loved, and everyone is called to recognize this and change.” He elaborates through Christ’s example: “Jesus does not divide the world into the moral ‘good guys’ and the immoral ‘bad guys.’ He shows us that everyone is dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves.”
Here is the basis for Christian love: all people are equals, first as God’s image-bearers and then as sinners. Our shared moral failure is our great equalizer. It’s egalitarianism through our redeemable evil only.
Because it exists beyond our own merit, wealth, race, and political affiliation, this Christian egalitarianism chafes against political imperatives. Keller describes this “completely different spirituality” by defining what it’s not: “The gospel of Jesus is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism or relativism, conservatism or liberalism. Nor is it something halfway along a spectrum between the two poles—it is something else altogether.”
It is an autonomous position which answers first and ever to Christ, a position I’ll call the “way of the eremitic vessel.”
Eremitic meaning apart, as were the Desert Fathers of Egypt. Apart but nearby, as eremitic Irish saints were nearby monasteries while living before God in the caves He created.
Vessel meaning a cup to be filled, but also a handmade raft floating free from hostile banks.
The way of the eremitic vessel has the fullness of Christ, the transformation of sinful hearts, and the autonomy from illegitimate political masters. Of course, our Christian need to care for the lowly, heal the sick, reject greed, and name injustice will overlap with political goals. But no imperative can subjugate our faith in Christ.
Drifting apart but nearby, ready to be filled but also to float free, we can serve our true master. We can cleave to eremitic affirmations and skepticism:
Let our meaning be found in God’s Word, never in slogans which mean only what is strategic and only for a time. Let our purpose be found in the life, love, death, resurrection, intercession, and return of Christ, not in the apocalyptic sermons of Democrats, Republicans, and other would-be masters. Let no political imperative separate us from Him nor the Word, even if they’re our allies for a time in seeking justice. Let us submit only to the God who loves us, never to the men, women, parties, nor nations who would supplant Him.
Illegitimate Masters: The Tragedy of Russian Orthodoxy in Moscow
Christians do often align with political imperatives to accomplish noble goals, the way that the American Civil Rights movement in the 1960s shared its origin, means, and vision with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (first convened in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church). But sagely keeping apart from political leaders has its time also. There are horrible consequences when Christians become subjects of political imperatives at the expense of their witness.
This is an allegation we Christians suffered often during Trump’s rise and presidency, not only from his secular opponents but also from within our own congregations. But criticizing him, among the laypeople I know and also among evangelical leaders like Keller, John Piper, Russell Moore, David French, and countless others, was common (to say nothing of more liberal congregations that opposed his administration from the pulpit). Dissent occurred from all corners, often full-throated and well-principled. It was rarely a disowning difference the way that disputing Christ’s divinity and humanity is. If some Christians made Trump into their idol, he hardly co-opted the whole of Christian America. Subjugation of our witness, it wasn’t.
As in many of our American debates, global perspective releases us from our funhouse mirrors. So let’s say Zdravstvujtye to a theocratic tragedy in the East.
In 2014, when Russian-backed forces seized the Donbas region of Ukraine (the attack on February 24 is the newest phase of that invasion), they called themselves the “Russian Orthodox Army.” Patriarch Kirill, the Orthodox leader of Moscow, never formally condemned the aggression committed in the name of his faith.
When Russian forces attacked Ukraine this past February, Kirill advanced his involvement in the state’s violence: he openly defended Russia’s actions in a March 6 sermon, calling them strikes in a religious war between a holy civilization (Orthodox Russia) and a sinful state (Westernized Ukraine). He and Vladimir Putin share this message—Putin partly justified the war by claiming that the Orthodox Christianity of Ukraine was in danger.
Putin and the Patriarch also share the Ruskii Mir (“the Russian World”), a troubling spiritual, geopolitical, and cultural doctrine. The Russian World idea proposes that Russia is the political and cultural center for the Holy Rus (countries like Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus). Paternalistically, Russia must imperalistically righteously defend the Holy Rus and its Slavic brothers from the sinful West that threatens it—righteous even in invasion, occupation, and mass murder. Subjugation of Christian teaching by political imperatives is rarely so evident.
That Pillar article I referenced tells how Orthodox priests have come to distrust the Patriarch, specifically for his alignment with Putin and belief in the Ruskii Mir. The priest Fr. Maksym Dynets commented sharply that “he thinks the Church in Russia has become a mouthpiece of state propaganda.” He adds that it’s a matter of Christian witness: “‘This structure is not only less and less Orthodox but also [less] Christian. What we've heard is not the voice of the Church; this is the voice of Goebbels' state propaganda.’”
Orthodox scholars joined to write one definitive declaration that rejects the Ruskii Mir doctrine with Scriptural evidence, and their statement illustrates how the eremitic vessel can keep our faith autonomous and loyal only to Christ.
Their blunt denunciation concerns the soul, not only the earthly Ukrainian and Russian dead: “we reject the ‘Russian world’ heresy and the shameful actions of the Government of Russia in unleashing war against Ukraine which flows from this vile and indefensible teaching with the connivance of the Russian Orthodox Church, as profoundly un-Orthodox, un-Christian and against humanity.” Then, as an eremitic vessel should, the declaration lists six counter-affirmations of the Scripture that gives it strength.
Their first affirmation—of Christ’s total authority—best rejects the Russian political imperatives that master (and mislead) Christians.
“We affirm,” write the Orthodox dissidents, “that in the anticipation of the final triumph of the Kingdom of God we acknowledge the sole and ultimate authority of our Lord Jesus Christ….there is no nation, state or order of human life that can make a higher claim on us than Jesus Christ, at whose name ‘every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth’ (Philippians 2:10).” There’s little I can add to this most sterling declaration of Christian exiles, y’all.
There’s even less to add to its companion rejection of the Ruskii Mir: “We therefore condemn as non-Orthodox and reject any teaching which would subordinate the Kingdom of God, manifested in the One Holy Church of God, to any kingdom of this world seeking other churchly or secular lords who can justify and redeem us. We firmly reject all forms of government that deify the state (theocracy) and absorb the Church, depriving the Church of its freedom to stand prophetically against all injustice” (emphasis in the original).
This metaphor—the Orthodox Patriarchate absorbed into the Russian state like food into a digestive tract—is clarifying. What is absorbed loses its essence. When the essence of the Church is to testify to the Risen Christ and “stand prophetically against all injustice,” its absorption into any ruling political order is a loss for Christians and the world. When the absorbing order is the KBG-informed Russian regime under Putin, and when the shepherd of the Orthodox faithful willingly enlists in that regime, it is a tragedy of indescribable grief.
From this anti-Ruskii Mir declaration, we can draw aspiration for what the way of the eremitic vessel offers Christians: essence rooted in the Scriptures, boldness born of Christ’s authority, and rejection of absorbing political imperatives. It cleaves only to Christ and refuses to submit to the (Russian) world which would supplant Him.
Useful or Hateful Art—No. Art Enthralled First to Beauty
Writers share Christians’ need for the way of the eremitic vessel, to become independent from political imperatives and preserve the value of their work.
I mentioned before that much of Western publishing answers to regressive-Left imperatives which determine meaning and value only in the political. Every piece of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction should be a morality tale of the correct demographics doing the politically-useful things, never minding the aesthetic nor the imaginative. After-school specials are the inescapable present, beamed in from the past to redeem us.
“Art” whose artists accept—or even demand—this constraint can’t deserve the name (I think of this gaping essay from the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen). It has given away its meaning, its very worth, to its political masters, and the abdication makes it only permitted propaganda.
Thankfully, as people uniquely gifted in complaining, writers are protesting this short leash. And their critiques are drafting alternate routes to greater artistic autonomy and fullness, lashing together eremitic vessels of their own.
Writing “Anxiety and Responsibility: What is to Be Done About Literary Moralism?” in LitHub, A. Natasha Joukovsky rejects novels’ alleged obligation to political impact, writing that “novels can only influence the real world if they captivate, and beauty is the necessary and sufficient condition to captivation. Historico-political constraints are optional.”
Notice that word constraints? Joukovsky understands that serving political imperatives sets a trap for art, explaining how writing useful novels saps their worth: “the misplaced anxiety [over politico-historic responsibility] imposes undue artistic limits on authors that displace and undermine the actual responsibilities novelists do have: aesthetically to beauty, and ethically to truth.”
Beauty, truth—these are the ageless muses of the Greeks and the Romantics, who allow ecstasy, ambivalence, and even wrestling from their servants. Above all else, they guide and treasure the artwork. Throughout the ages that political imperatives have courted (and gaslit) writers, these utilitarian suitors have never wooed with such an offer. They seek only to relieve literature of its own integrity of meaning, aesthetic daring, and creative freedom.
And when they couldn’t persuade, political actors have dispensed ostracism, censorship, imprisonment, and death instead. It’s a fair deal for writers, if you’ve always wanted to be a propagandist.
Free to Be All Things, and Idiosyncratic, and Questioning
Joukovsky’s essay, thankfully, was one shot in a growing volley. An earlier broadside for the aesethete was “The Empathy Racket,” by the poet Alice Gribbin, where she acidly and acutely rejects the artistic institutions which value art for increasing empathy in viewers, rather than valuing art for its inherent beauty. To start, Gribbin writes, it’s uncertain whether art make audiences more empathetic (see the enormous library of renowned empath Josef Stalin).
“The empathy emphasis subjugates art by placing the burden of virtue on artworks, and, by association, on artists themselves,” Gribbin writes. Empathy, welcome though it is interpersonally, restrains the subjects, tones, and styles that an artist might choose, since “virtue” is often just shorthand for political adherence rather than actual morality.
But Gribbin wisely moves beyond rejection and into generation: “artists who believe art should serve a function in society, the utilitarians, make works that are typically conformist, generic, and didactic. By fiat, they deny the imagination its mystery and irreverence. But the imagination, like the impact of any artwork, cannot be managed.” Imagination, then, is the source of Gribbin’s alternative route.
Gribbin rejects politically-enthralled artworks (as un-aesthetically “conformist, generic, and didactic”) in favor of their betters: the “mystery and irreverence” of the freed imagination. When free, the imagination is curious, rippling, limitless like flowing water. Imagination makes artists unsuitable for political masters, which is why political imperatives require artists to “imagine” only the art which is predictable and thus unthreatening (delivering only what Gribbin calls the “circumscribed expectation of an art encounter”). “The imperative that one corral one’s [artistic] feelings in a single direction is spirit-smothering, tyrannous,” she writes.
Gribbin expands her preferred aesthetic in her follow-up essay, “Art for Art’s Sake in the 21st Century”: “the ‘art for art’s sake’ concept will always be best understood not as reactive—in rejecting this or that, political, social, or moral dictate—but as active: generative, innate, spirit-affirming. It is the original value system of art.”
Rejecting the political imperatives for the spirit of the art itself, then, can free the artist’s work to be expansive, idiosyncratic, ambiguous, anything it needs to be. Political imperatives distrust these values—for being irresponsible, or unhelpful, or immoral. Not every writer needs to write to these aesthetic aspirations (my own aspirations), but every piece of art should be free from political usefulness.
We need to un-master our literature. Its unbound imagination generates the strange, the unorthodox, the beautiful, the unflinching, and the true.
Un-mastered includes “a questioning art,” especially within a political culture that allows no questions.
The “questioning art” comes from John Palatelli’s elegiac discussion of John Ashbery and Kenneth Burke, “Forms of Action: Poetry after 9/11.” Palatelli, reflecting on the fall of the towers and the quiet resurgence of poetry beneath their ash sky, notes that Ashbery had long praised poetry foremost for being, well, poetry: “For [Ashbery], a poem is its own justification; it is not the emissary of a poet’s sense of his or her political importance.”
Lately, we see the politically-infected counterargument more than we see Ashbery’s point—poetry “gives voice” to an underrepresented group, or “speaks truth to power,” or other leeched clichés that value poetry foremost as socially responsible. But Ashbery, Palatelli writes, “declined to take for granted the political significance of his or anyone else’s poetry; nor did he confuse poetry with political action. To do otherwise would have been to risk diminishing poetry’s creative power, what he thought to be its capacity for perfectly useless concentration.”
Perfectly useless concentration is deceptively correct—it describes a poem’s alchemical transport-by-sound (present and cryptic in the Ashbery I’ve read) but also its uselessness outside of its own lines. It’s not that poetry does nothing at all. At its best, it makes no more than its own beauty, its elusive chime beyond the ear. This greatest quality is ill-suited for rallying grassroots support or informing sound policy.
For Ashbery, this mismatch between poetry and political imperatives wasn’t a sheepish flaw to be justified to politically-minded critics. It was a crucial element that defined his art. And in this stance he found a comrade in the critic Kenneth Burke, who “praised a ‘questioning art’ that instead of doubling down on certainty ‘is often turning against itself and its own best discoveries’—an art that’s not content with what it has accomplished, that’s always trying to become something else.”
Y’all might guess how a “questioning art” prone to “turning against itself” and its certainty makes its artist unwelcome in political circles who live and die by their certainties. To question capitalist systems mustn’t mean questioning socialist alternatives also, and to question liberal COVID-19 protocols mustn’t mean questioning conservative grandstanding against those protocols. To be a questioner is a political liability.
But to not question, to kneel in unquestioning fealty, is the artistic constraint Ashbery and Burke rejected. Palatelli paraphrases the constraint succinctly: “Ashbery understood what is so often evident in discussions about poetry and politics, especially since 9/11: once the work of political justification is taken up, it becomes endless. What is lost in the meantime is the freedom to write as you choose.”
For freedom to choose, writers, too, need the way of the eremitic vessel.
Our work breathes deepest when we choose to seek only the writing, its spine-tingling aesthetic experience, as its own end. Political ends, regressive-Left today but possibly right-wing tomorrow, are illegitimate and anti-artistic constraints. Eremitic writers, nearby but afloat, can enjoy creating more than the propaganda these imperatives demand.
What if we found meaning in un-mastered imagination, not in the didactic shadow-plays of our politics? What if we mined purpose in our questioning art of moral implications, not in the moralizing corrals of policy debates? What if we never fled the written word that first inspired us, even if we allied with political groups to seek truth? What if we wrote only for idiosyncratic beauty and ambiguous wonder, and never for the men, women, parties, or nations who would supplant our value with the marred world of their making?
Thanks for being here, y’all. I wish this subject weren’t controversial, but its heated surface is no good reason to never touch it.
I’ll be in touch again on December 15 with a meditation on folktales, Christmas, and the making of icons. Also, I hope your Advent season is reflective and hope-drowned by Christ. I’ll be sharing poetry readings that weigh our waiting.
You write like my son. Heavily intellectual and intense in thought. We have 8 kids and he is my only son. I celebrate your zeal for the Lord and your prowess to separate the political realm from our daily lives and our passions. We know all too clearly that the enemy comes to divide and spoil. I have too many friends and family that don’t see everything the way I see, but I refuse to give up on them. We will continue to show them love as we should. But that said , it is hard at times. And we must nevertheless lead the way... That is why I started writing on Substack. To have a place to encourage others along their way. I wrote prose from scripture. Good reading your writing. Thank you. Keep it up. 👍
Beautifully written and you gave me a lot to chew on. And I think your hopefulness is justified. I just saw the movie Tar and I think it achieves the kind of "artiness" you describe, at least in terms of ambiguity. Was expecting a political "Me Too" movie but found an exploration of genius, madness, and ambition that didn't take clear sides. Of course, one conservative critic cherry-picked a scene to dismiss it as a progressive movie while a progressive critic cherry-picked another scene to dismiss it as a conservative one. Would help a whole lot if we took in art with our blinders off (and that would include me).