What do you mean by Romance and Apocalypse?

I’m searching for something. It’s hard to say what it is, but I know it when I find it—or catch a glimpse of it. The search is romance; the glimpse is apocalypse. In the literary tradition, romance means the hero and heroine coming together, but it also means digression, wandering, questing. Apocalypse is basic Greek for revelation or unveiling—if only partially. I search in life and I search in literature, from the most ancient to the most contemporary, and sometimes in the other arts. I might call the object of my search fantasy. To search, to go a-questing, means to desire, and desire has no end. The search never ends, yet it always succeeds just enough to keep going.

When my quest succeeds, if only for a moment, it is usually where the sense of the sacred coincides with the sense of place—particularly place as constituted in the natural world. Here is a painting by the German Romantic landscape artist Caspar David Friedrich that captures that perfect combination of the sacred, or the numinous or transcendent, and earthly place.

Apart from the crucifixion, there is almost something of Chinese landscape painting in this image. I am certainly not looking only in Western traditions; I am a Westerner and most at home with the images and styles of my own culture. But what I’m looking for are primordial human stories playing out in a living, exuberantly and sometimes tragically ecological cosmos. The image in the Welcome page of this Substack is another example of what I mean. Again it is Western, but this time an image that works as well in the light of Jewish tradition as in Christian: James Tissot’s depiction of Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise. For me, that is where all stories start, or it is the heart of all story: the man, the woman, and the garden: the fatal error and the ensuing errancy, the wandering quest, together.

As I write this, we are still amidst the global pandemic that has revealed so much about our lives in this new epoch of the Anthropocene, when the old orders of symbolic meaning and the social order that depends on them seem to be breaking down as fast as the biosphere (no coincidence there, I think). At the time of this writing I’m thirty-nine years old, a husband, and father to two young boys. In the academy and in literary circles I’ve drunk my fill of critique, outrage, and despair. I’m looking for what endures, what will guide us through this wild century. I’m looking for joy. True art, like true religion, must overflow with vital, coursing life in all its pain and beauty. That’s what I’m after in these essays and meditations.

This project began as a book, what I thought would be a study of British fantasy and visionary nature writing. I thought this would redeem a dissertation that I abandoned at the University of Chicago in 2010. But the project kept shifting shape, and these times are so dramatic and apocalyptic that a book of that kind didn’t seem to be what was called for—at least not from my hand. I wanted to work in a more open-ended way. The Tao never rests.

I also wanted to write to somebody… somebody other than an editor reading a book proposal or synopsis. Somebody really interested. We seem to be living through a time that is desperate for connection, or reconnection: with each other and the places we inhabit in this ravaged but still beautiful Earth. We need to know somebody else is questing along with us. We need a whole questing party, a veritable throng—as the dwarves describe themselves in Bilbo Baggins’ house at the beginning of The Hobbit.

Why subscribe?

So you can be part of the Quest, join the throng! Because you too wish to re-enchant the world while there is yet a world to re-enchant. You too feel the veils pulling back from reality, and it is terrifying, but you also sense there is a never-ending romance at the heart of reality, some true and ever-green symbol on the far side of identity and ideology and all the other wrathful and contradictory illusions forced upon us in our busy modern lives. Or maybe you just want to find interesting stuff to read.

Anyway, it’s free. In my wife’s hometown they say that if you want to get rid of something, you can’t just set it out on the side of the road with a sign that says “Free.” Nobody will value it if you don’t put a value on it—in fact, they’ll be suspicious—so you have to charge a dollar. There’s something to that, but I can say, quoting Bob Dylan, that “Hell’s my wife’s hometown.” This work is pro bono, for a while anyway. I hope it will be a resource for you. I also hope to learn from you.

I intend to write every two weeks and sometimes every week. A huge range of literature appeals to me, from the West and the East, as promising country for questing. I have no system to promote, no agenda, this really is going to be like one of those old adventures in the medieval romances. Just because you know you’re after the Holy Grail doesn’t mean you have any idea how to get it. That’s a good thing.

But I can say that I’m usually reading more than one kind of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry all at once. I’m also usually reading past and contemporary literature at the same time. So I’ll be alternating among all these kinds. I may write on music—Bob Dylan and Enya, for example, or Jean Sibelius or Olivier Messiaen, or Roger Scruton’s trilogy of books on Wagner’s music dramas. And finally, some of my experience is likely to be woven in here—cycling or tai chi, for example, or studying languages (Hawaiian and Classical Chinese are my two most recent infatuations), and more anecdotal memories. These are essays in the classic sense: hazards, attempts, flights of fancy and reverie.

So then, you really never know what you’re going to get, but if all this sounds like something you’d enjoy, then by subscribing you’ll have it delivered to your inbox and you’ll never miss a letter. You can also find all the writing here on the website.

Subscribe to Romance and Apocalypse

Searching literature and life for the enchantment, love, and sense of place that will help us live again in a cosmos--and survive in the Anthropocene.

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Husband, father, writer in Michigan, USA