Mark Recommends Things (#5)

Lydwine

It’s been a shade more than twenty-five months since I started The Cat Was Never Found. Thanks to other Substack writers, it found an audience right away. Two men in particular ,

Harrison Koehli

and

John Carter

— who had already organically built audiences of their own — saw fit to recommend my very first essay, The Devil Incarnate. I am in their debt.

Over the course of those two-and-change years, I’ve had a lot of strange ideas about what to do with this writing project. Some of those seem gimmicky, now, while others were merely experimental formats that I abandoned.

But Mark Recommends Things was something I always intended to be a regular feature of TCWNF. In the same way others helped my work to get exposure, I wanted to pass that favor along to writers I found compelling, and who I thought deserved a much wider audience. Reviewing my archive, I was surprised to see I hadn’t written one of these since November of 2022. So much for “regular feature”, eh?

Substack’s Notes feature has long since rewired the mechanics of promotion. Shares and Cross-Posts were out (if they were ever truly “in”). It’s all about the Restack, now, or the comment that pulled double-duty as a Note.

I am mostly placid about these changes. Or, at least, I’m resigned to the tradeoffs. One positive change is that commenting readers can now develop their own public catalogs of their thoughts, which are often as valuable as the articles themselves. And my biggest fear — that Notes would swallow Substack whole, and the platform would degenerate into #TwitterToo — thankfully hasn’t come to pass. The dog still wags the tail.

And, me being the Veteran Surfer Boy, I macked the new set rolling in without much hassle. But I still limit my Notes engagement to avoid addiction and capture. In fact, I mainly use it to do the job of Mark Recommends, promoting the excellent work of other writers. It’s so much easier to do it that way — which is not to say it’s better. We know the road to You Know Where slopes gently down.

Others have strived to preserve and expand the older promotion model, often to a heroic degree. For a period of time in 2023, I suspected John Carter might turn out to be some deep cover Nexus-6 android, given the superhuman output of his weekly “Write Wing” roundups. In homage to the old Social Matter formula, Carter shepherded us through virtual forests of the latest, greatest samizdat with wry jokes and creative pizzazz. It was always a blast to read, and those omnibus parking lots played a major role in expanding my Substack reading list to its current phonebook length. John has since abandoned it so he could focus on his own writing, but I’m amazed he kept it up as long as he did. It takes the kind of time, energy, and, frankly, generosity of spirit that would burn out most folks in record time.

But other heroes persist in these (often sadly thankless) labors.

Dudley Newright

of the

New Right Poast

is one, juggling Tweets and memes and vids and stacks like some thousand-armed dissident Hecatoncheires. An excellent writer himself, he remains a promotional beast for Team Thought Crime’s best scribes, ballywicks, bards and jesters, all for the love of the game. Please give this man a paid subscription if you can afford it; he is fulfilling an important role.

I’ll ask the same for the author I’m recommending today. He is relatively new to the scene and, in my opinion, criminally underexposed. If I can help to change that, maybe I’ll cancel that writer’s debt sooner than predicted. Pay off some unpaid dues.

So, please subscribe to his publication, and pay if you can. While our team boasts an embarrassment of riches when it comes to creativity, knowledge and passion, it could surely use a few more patrons.

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LYDWINE / Brian Kennedy

Dreams are the children of tumult, and so often unsettle — dreams of six white moths outside my kitchen window; of a dog with a cluster of spider’s eyes; of someone spooning brains from the skull of a baby, and the baby is smiling.

Before we left New England for good — long after our honeymoon, but long before we moved to Oklahoma — I had another dream, of troubling significance:

I dreamt I was back at my old high school, wandering outside the theatre before a show. Dreams of performance are often tied to this space, where I first learned the strange work of the stage, gathering its possibilities, its curses and graces. I was running late, but stopped to search the crowd for a cigarette, and when I finally bummed one from a stranger, before I could light up the cigarette broke apart in my hand, the tobacco scattering onto the ground — a first frustration.

I’ve come to expect this kind of failure in dreams even if in slumber I’m seldom lucid enough to anticipate the pattern. Performance, in its most practical sense, is about being prepared, being present, hitting the mark, poised in that certain expectant readiness necessary for play, whatever the specificity entails.

The anxiety, then, is in unpreparedness: the broken prop, the dropped line, the missed cue, and even a recurring scenario in which the very performance itself comes as a surprise — how could I not have known there was a show tonight? — like stopping by a church on a whim only to find myself just in time for my own wedding, and to a stranger.

But in this dream, mercifully, those customary humiliations were postponed. Instead, another possibility intruded.

Toward me and the crowd, from the east, low in the sky and silent, glided a massive flying machine, Jonah’s great fish or the early Christian ichthys sculpted in the web and flange and rivet of skyscraper steel, its caudal fin sweeping back and forth, driving the beast along its way. It was immense, stunning, overwhelming. Seeing it, my heart leapt, and all expectations of performance were instantly forgotten.

— excerpt from The Ghost Outside

At the time the man who wrote these lines reached out to me, I had just published The Chain Gangsters. I don’t mind saying that the work I put into that article left me exhausted and depressed. I never intended TCWNF as a journalistic project. Trying to keep up with the pace of the news cycle as an unpaid side-gig is a fool’s errand, especially if you’re trying to analyze current events in any depth.

To give you a sense of it, the article was tracking to be ~50% longer than the published version. I found myself having to constantly whip out the chainsaws and scalpels every time the information mutated (which was often). Unlike the regime’s favorite newscritters, my editor takes “misinformation” and “disinformation” seriously. And since that editor is also me, the whole process left me hating myself for ever starting it in the first place.¹

Anyway, that was the mood I was in when I got the brief, unsolicited DM from some stranger. I admit I’m jaded when it comes to those, since the typical format goes something like this:

Hi [insert bestseller name here]!

I love your newsletter. Let's swap recommendations on the Substack recommendations engine if you like mine. It's a great way of growing our subscriber base organically, leveraging on the growth of the other. This is my newsletter (suspiciously large number of subscribers in suspiciously short time frame)

[Link hidden]

This wasn’t one of those, thankfully, and there was something about the way it was written that made me curious. Or maybe it was just an instinct. I’ve been learning to trust those lately, so I went for a quick looksee.

As I later joked with the writer,

Brian Kennedy

, I did my homework out-of-order. He had asked me to read The Ghost Outside, and so I of course tucked into a different one instead. I can hear the raspy chuckle of my old high school English teacher, a guy who used to write me a bathroom pass at the start of each class, so I didn’t have to pretend to slowly read and contemplate Bless the Beasts and Children.²

The Plaza itself — named for Dallas newspaperman George Bannerman Dealey — is unbearably small, much smaller in person than cameras suggest, as intimate as a boudoir or a grave. The photographs and the films of the killing fail to capture this closeness. Even the shock of Abraham Zapruder’s frame 313 — the President’s blood poured out like dust, his brains like dung, as Zapruder saw through his rangefinder Kennedy’s head “explode like a firecracker” — is deadened by the pseudo-silence of the celluloid veil. To paraphrase Charles Williams, the film like a pocket crucifix preserves pain but somehow lacks obscenity. Recall that as he finished filming that day, Zapruder admits he was screaming.

For Kennedy, it was “the most public private moment of his life,” Jonathan Miller late wrote in The New Yorker. “The publicity was total, and what it did was to conceal, in the very instant that it exposed, the inexorable solitude of dying.”

Miller’s observation is borne out, strangely enough, by the Zapruder film itself. For even in the wake of that final shot to the head — its moist, red blaze — with Kennedy collapsing, falling like cold, driving rain toward an undiscovered country, into the crowded keep of death, even then the eye attends elsewhere. The drama unfolds instead among the living, caught in the spectacle offered by Mrs. Kennedy — Queen Persephone in a bloodied dress — fleeing her seat and crawling aboard the back of the Lincoln, met there by Secret Service agent Clint Hill (code name ‘Dazzle’) come running, too late, from the follow-up car after the second shot. Such is the active conspiracy of the living toward the dead we barely notice, much less regret. Like Hill’s hapless colleagues, who upon seeing their President slain immediately turned their attention toward the motorcade’s fourth car, toward Lyndon Johnson, their new charge — better luck next time, fellas — we the living have journeyed onward, beyond what was for another a final, failed moment.

— excerpt from Vandals at the Golden Gate, Part One

Part Two of Vandals is published now. I haven’t read it yet. I’m waiting for the perfect window of spacetime to glide open. I’ve found that some writings can’t just be read any old time and place — on the subway, on a lunch break, on the toilet, etc. That’s not to say those other kinds of writing aren’t valuable; I’ve done some of my best reading on the john! But when the words are also music, you can’t just read them. You need to cultivate a quiet chamber, in an empty church, so they can be properly sung.

Mr. Kennedy is that kind of writer. I find I need to empty my ears and brains of all noise, which sometimes feels like pulling off a magic trick where I live. Just when you think you’ve managed it, in barges the horns, the sirens, the copters, the blowout that might be a gunshot or vice versa. I’ll think I’ll save Part Two for a ferry ride to Brooklyn on the weekend. I’m familiar with some of the lonelier spots there. No guarantees, but better odds.

Children of decline, unwitting survivors of what we’d later learn is the most aborted generation in American history, we inherited only fragments, and the promise of desire. What part are we to play? we asked ourselves, And what are our lines? Surely they must be written down somewhere.

“People your age have too many choices,” my uncle told me before the wedding, “You have nothing forcing you in any one direction, nothing forcing you to choose. When I was your age, the choice was clear — I went to college because I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. You have to pick a direction on your own, find your way somehow. Good luck.”

So we searched for signs to guide us. For our honeymoon, at least, it was my uncle again who gave us a way forward. He sent a postcard postmarked Grand Canyon, Arizona. On the front, ribboned walls of rock in a haze of rust-red sunset. On the back, he wrote: “You’ve got to see this! Landed in Las Vegas — wow — 5 hrs. later standing at the edge of Time!”

Before decamping from Memphis we stopped at Graceland, Elvis Presley’s mansion, on the front lawn of which his mother before she died kept chickens. The tour was guided by headphones, startlingly loud, which only underscored the peculiar obscenity of the place, the house itself seeming not so much a time capsule as a crashed alien artifact from an adjacent galaxy of nouveau riche peckerwoods.

— excerpt from The Ghost Outside

I don’t know how to describe Brian’s writing, except to say that I don’t feel like a writer while I’m reading it. That’s not me being humble; I know I can write well, because I know my audience can read and think well. Many of them are writers themselves. I judge my own writing ability by the quality of the people who read it.

Just as I wrote that line, I realized how totally unprecedented and bizarre the current era is, where the artist’s feedback is constant and instantaneous. For the ones who gain traction, it’s an unrelenting blizzard of reactions, wanted and unwanted — and mostly unread, is my guess, since a popular writer might spend all day responding to a single post and still never catch up. For the rest of us mutts, the cheers are craved like A-grade heroin, and the barbs dodged like blindfire in the jungle.

What a strange predicament we’re in: a sea of pen pals, mostly faceless and nameless. And yet somehow more intimate than handwritten letters, all these parasocial conversations of ours, beamed across distances that might as well be galactic, and now complete with invisible spies and robots chiming in. Our lives have become a pulp serial. Notes today, Vids tomorrow, Feels and Neurals next week. A year from now we might all be wondering how to monetize our cyberorgies, if we manage to survive what’s coming.

But all that surreal jazz fades to a mosquito hum when I read something like this:

I knew a man in Christ who once upon a time, after he ate from a bag of magic mushrooms, saw in the summer moon the face of Christ the King staring down at him, wearing a golden crown and a full brown beard, with silver saucer eyes and white, white teeth, gleaming, a Christ of the blazing Parousia, as though intent on devouring the earth, piece by piece.

At the time this puzzled my friend, bothered him even. No longer a believer, he felt cheated somehow — to take psychedelics and see God was one thing, however clichéd. But to wind up at the mercy of a vision so conventional, so orthodox, was frankly dispiriting. The vision passed quickly, but its memory remained for years, nagging at him, worrying him — until he returned to the Church, at last, to his delight.

There are human footprints on the moon — from twelve American men, sent in pairs — each passage made, of course, in the name of pagan divinity: Apollo, the twin, the archer, the god of music, the god of prophecy and plague. From Delphi, for twelve centuries or more, his priestess in her frenzy counseled the Greeks — Croesus, Lycurgus, even Socrates. From Didyma, in the fourth century, she urged Diocletian to resume the persecution of Christians throughout the Empire — bodies torn limb from limb by clever machines or fed for sport to animals.

I don’t know how to describe what Brian is doing.

It’s not essay, not memoir, not journal or poetry, yet also all of those, singular and plural. It might even count as some kind of newfangled fiction, but only in the way our waking lives have now become partly fictional, how our personal stories are getting tangled up with old myths and legends and half remembered TV shows and dreams. When tasked with separating fact from fiction, or history from art, no previous generation of minds have ever been challenged the way ours have. It’s a wonder any of us have retained a shred of sanity.

So in that sense, Brian is writing history, too. He can see what it looks like from a distance, hovering just beneath the cloud deck, as a field of illusions projected onto crystal tombstones. But he still needs to make the pilgrimage before the flicker stops and the reel changes. So he projects himself bodily into Dealey Plaza, for example, a flicker atop a flicker. And into the haunted west, more generally, to other graves and acropoles.

Until finally, at the end of 4800 miles, standing stopped at the edge of Time, Grand Canyon, USA. Temple and pyramid, tower and sun — the shame of the earth laid bare.

That place is… silence, unmeasurable duration. Unspeakable. Some things just can’t — just shouldn’t — be said.

But we, the people? Forgive us, Father, we don’t know what to do. Faces crowded at the edge, grunts and groans and cackles and camera sounds, like the devils let loose from the Gerasene and chased into the greaseflesh filth of swine, run on and pushed out past the safety of the trees toward our ruin, but still no one able to follow through, the blue thread of the Colorado just too far down and gone, the leap now foolish, the chance passed.

We shouldn’t have been there. It didn’t seem right somehow.

We crept back to the edge after dark, when the crowds were gone, a mighty wind overflowing the canyon wall, spirit risen from the bedrock floor of time. They should hide that place from the likes of us, from all mankind. Cover up its nakedness, like Noah’s. Cover up its nakedness with angels’ wings. Or 4800 miles of perimeter wire, with orders to shoot on sight. Until the shame of it is lost to memory, let alone. Until the guardians themselves forget and fall. Then some starman come and crawl across the red rock to watch the Colorado make its final cut and flood the far side of the world.

Let someone else see that place. We stayed one night and drove away at dawn.

— excerpt from The Ghost Outside

So I ask again: What is this?

A travelogue of the American soul, scribbled on and dogeared by a poet?

Or something else, maybe. Something that Brian Kennedy could describe much better than I ever could, because he’s the poet here, and I’m just that punk with the permanent hall pass, fucking up my homework on purpose.

It happens here, I thought, It happens out here.

Do you understand? Some people won’t, some people in this land have emptied themselves of all expectation, of anything but appetite: “Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”

But for you others with ears to hear — do you understand what I mean? I think I mean the end of that awful sense of waiting hanging over us, that’s hung over us now for decades… a nation of distraction and idleness… of sexual bulimia, endless war… celebrating monsters… and all of us haunted bodies wandering a haunted land, wondering if there really is any more ‘we’, or if it’s only you and me alone, us and them, a sense that things have spun out of control and are headed toward some inevitable confrontation, some necessary reckoning… as though America in our time has to offer not wealth or progress or sweet dreams of a better life but rather apocalypse, the veil grown thin, the gaze transfigured, the truth itself beheld with awful clarity, awful intensity, “like shining from shook foil.”

But if my opinion is of any value to you, I recommend you read these works and subscribe to

Lydwine

. He is the publication’s founder, but not the only author writing there. I hope to sample the other fruits of that tree, particularly when the roots and branches are worded this way:

Our patroness, Saint Lydwine of Schiedam, is emblematic of the approach we favor - a holy victim of the Middle Ages whose sufferings and visions are almost too bizarre to be believed, and so passed over by most in favor of more anodyne sanctity. It's been in embracing such outliers of the Christian imagination that we've uncovered the work that, vocationally speaking, we feel most called to pursue.

Or, simply: Imagination for the Remnant.

Artists on a mission.

So may we all be, God willing.

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1. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, but apparently I’m a slow learner (and perhaps a masochistic one.

2. He was also the guy who oversaw our after-school detentions, stuck with that permanent latrine duty after he got caught smoking pot in the boys’ room. At least, that’s how the story went. He’s been dead for nearly a decade now, possibly serving a detention of his own in Abe’s bosom. But he’d still laugh that lifetime smoker’s laugh, because he knew I never read what I was told to.