And I’m going to stay that way.
I’m writing a book for Dutch high school students. It’s called Advanced Psychic Combat Training. That’s a phrase I use in class quite a lot to describe the skills one learns in a humanities class. I say, “The real title of this class is, How to Understand, Resist and Create Propaganda.” But the secret title is, “Advanced Psychic Combat Training.”
I’m getting up every day and putting pen to paper, or rather, fingers to keyboard. It’s a very good feeling. I enjoy the writing process a lot. I’ve developed a number of tricks to make it as un-intense as possible. I pass these on to my beloved Ph.D. students.
There’s a lot of time to write. There’s a lot of head space. That’s because I’m not on social media. You may have noticed. I’ve gone. I’m dead. I’m completely gone. It took a few weeks to be completely gone. I was waiting with bated breath. A friend who follows my work closely wrote to say he had noticed that I was totally gone. That was yesterday. So I figured wow, I must be gone. Dead.
“Why not stay dead?” asks Ralph Fiennes’s character when James Bond comes back from being presumed dead, in Skyfall. It’s a question I’ve been asking.
I was thinking of coming back you see. But now I’m thinking, the advantages of being totally dead are … high.
For a start one isn’t giving extra data scraping material for free to someone.
I do get the urge. I saw a line in a newspaper article that I liked the look of just now. I imagined copying it and pasting onto a Threads post and saying something witty. I’ve forgotten the line now, five minutes later. Others may have latched on to it and approved and reposted it. Or not.
Social media was very important for me. Because of having been married to someone with NPD, I lost all my friends and family. I didn’t get get on social media as I knew it would be the end to be seen to be regarded by others, by anyone else. In any way. So when I did, I knew it would be the end. A few weeks later, it was the end.
So I have to thank social media for that—the good old “connect with lost friends” thing. I have a long list of them. I’ll be emailing you and otherwise getting back in touch in other ways.
An inner quietness is descending. I think a lot about the phrase from Philippians, “The peace of God that passes all understanding.” I think I’ll write a Live Theology! post about it. But this is a deep and wondrous peace, and it’s freely available to anyone, as you may know if you meditate a lot.
“I will not cease from mental fight” is my favorite line from the poem that gives this publication its title, the one often called “Jerusalem” although it should be called “And did those feet” or something like that. It’s appended to the end of the Preface to Blake’s brilliant Milton, an amazing sort-of reboot of that poet for a time of terror, the Napoleonic Wars.
As the urge to create little phraselets that hit like barbs comes and goes, I start to think that one way to sharpen the sword of mental fight is to leave it alone. Mindfulness is like that. Mind (or soul, I prefer that really) has its own intrinsic sharpness. Working really hard all the time to spit out darts might not be the same thing as mental fight unceasing.
The main work is to fight for one’s life outside the Mirror World.
And what is Mirror World? Well, you’ll have to read Advanced Psychic Combat Training. But I’ve been noticing something very interesting. What Marx says about ideology, that how you live your world is upside-down, as in a camera obscura, is remarkably consistently true of many, many many ideas.
Image Credit: Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura: View of St. Louis Looking East in Building under Construction (2000)