The Age of the Holy Spirit

1

At my Thursday night Men's Spirituality Book Club, we've been debating the recovery cliché that "acceptance is the answer," which sounds so limp and lazy.

But I'm learning that acceptance is not passive. Wearing the world as a loose garment requires a difficult and oftentimes exhausting stance that makes room for total inflow: the mental shred, pixellated heat, and humiliating muck that comes with being alive in this absurd century, not to mention the stupid feelings and existential jitters that are part of simply being a person. 

In the end, there's no workable choice other than to hoover it all up and learn to live in the beautiful grey because everything is connected and always changing. So accept it all. Except negation. I reject rejection.

2

But then I came across this sentence from Simon Critchley that I find difficult to accept:

And most writing, like most love, is self-love, which is what makes that writing uninteresting, and that love uninteresting, or not really love—it is one long song of myself.

Reading this, I felt exposed. After all, I write a newsletter of all things. Is this an act of self-love? Perhaps, although it usually feels more like self-loathing, especially when I cannot get my sentences to behave or an episode to sound how I think it should, which is most of the time. 

But if not for this habit, I might not write anything at all. To write requires an audience, real or imagined, which generates an interesting flicker between the self and not-self: the self as author and the self as receiver. This flicker is where the action lives. It creates mistakes and glitches, but also sometimes sparks, which makes the whole undertaking feel worthwhile.

To write anything worth reading requires writing something I do not already know. I learned this lesson well twenty-something years ago when I was a graduate student receiving bleak red letters on my essays about Plato, Rousseau, and Freire. I thought I understood the material and was writing clearly enough, so I asked my professor why I was failing. She smiled as if she’d been waiting for this question. “When you write something you don’t know the answer to,” she said, “I’ll give you an A.”

Ten years ago, I tracked her down at a dinner party to thank her for changing how I write and think and teach. When the party drifted toward the hors d'oeuvres, she took me aside and asked for a hug. I realized how important it is to say these things to people while I can, to let them know how much they've influenced me along the way.

Which is the reason for this year’s special guest series.

3

David Leo Rice is another professor who influenced me. Six years ago, I was stuck on a story that I wanted to start again, so I signed up for a creative writing class at the school where I teach. This was during the strange weeks in New York when rumors about a sick lawyer in Westchester were circulating like a virus but we took the subway anyway and went out to eat and laughed and coughed on each other. So I was already primed for the uncanny when David turned me on to writers like Aimee Bender and Steve Erickson, as well as bits of wisdom like a man who really wants a sandwich is more interesting than a man who sort of wants to cure cancer. We stayed in touch after the class, and soon I was reading High Weirdness and Mark Fischer and thinking about lost futures.

David's stories also broadened my perception. The New House is a fable about the headfuck of creation that I'd like to press into the hands of every artist, writer, and seeker I know. His stories have renovated the architecture of my nightmares, especially The Hate Room, and I can’t wait to receive my copy of his latest collection, The Squimbop Condition, which follows a pair of time-addled brothers who “leave a trail of chaos in their pursuit of an impossible mission: to bring about the Golden Age—over and over again.”

Every few months, David and I have long telephone calls in which we walk around our respective cities and sanity-check our understanding of an increasingly illegible world. Each time we sign off, I'm heartened by his cheerful rejection of nostalgia, which is crucial for acceptance of any kind, and by the way he embraces the mess of our culture to map new routes to the sacred.

And David is with us tonight to discuss the age of the holy spirit. But first, he must answer the official Midnight Radio interview question.

4

Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?

"Yes, I feel quite certain that there are dimensions and powers beyond our comprehension, at the very outer edges of our awareness. The human condition, as I've experienced it so far, is to be able to grasp the presence but not the nature of these 'things,' whatever they may be—to know that something is out there (or 'in there,' because I think the innermost part of the imagination merges with the outermost limits of perception), but never to grasp what it is. This is why dreaming, talking, drawing, and writing are so important to me, because they feel like a way of harmonizing and playing with these presences, and finding a means of enjoying rather than suffering from the fact that we can never know what they really are, nor can we ever forget that they're there, on the margin and at the center of everything. Perhaps, therefore, this form of play is the same as prayer—it's not a means of asking for something, nor of pledging loyalty in the usual sense of that term, but of enacting a playful and dynamic relationship with the forces that make us who we are, and whose nature we can never grasp."

5

Tonight's episode opens with six minutes of David reading a few bits from his latest essay, "Master of Puppets: On My Mother’s Death and the Last Chapter of the History of the World," after which we discuss acceptance versus surrender and how to act accordingly in an age of grief and algorithms. And I'm cheered by how he presents the act of reading and writing in 2026 as a holy covenant.

This was a ninety-minute conversation that I've chopped down to 29 minutes, and I’ve exorcised myself from the recording because 1) I like the odd shape that remains, the abrupt shifts that suggest an invisible logic; and 2) I cannot tolerate the sound of my voice or laughter (but Marty is helping me deal with this by making me do argumentative videos).

Because David says things like "in a dead world, mediated by a dead internet that is spawning its own undead successor," I wanted this broadcast to sound like an eerie late-nite transmission, the sort of thing that bleeds across your dashboard in the fog of a cross-country drive. It's laced with static, sighs, and mumbles, and I mangled David's voice until I forgot what it sounded like, searching for a zone between legibility and illegibility which, I think, is where the holy ghost lives.

Here are the songs that cycle in and out of tonight's broadcast:

1. Burial - Strange Neighbourhood
   Antidawn • Hyperdub, 2022 • Bandcamp
2. Blasé Saint - Lifelover (17% slower)
   Matryoshka • Sferic, 2026 • Bandcamp
3. Kali Malone - The Spectacle of Ritual
   The Sacrificial Code • Ideal Recordings, 2019 • Bandcamp
4. Flowchart - Y2AOK (68% slower)
   Pre-2000 Singles and Comp Tracks • 1997
5. Romance & Dean Hurley • White Lace and Promises
   In Every Dream Home A Heartache • Ecstatic, 2022 • Bandcamp
6. Yassin Omidi - Lineup
   Electronic Wave Function • Mosaic, 2025
7. Datacide - Sixties out of Tune (41% slower)
   Flowerhead • Rather Interesting, 1996 • Bandcamp
8. Blackwater - Woodstock (35% slower)
   Istanbul/Woodstock • 2018 • Bandcamp

Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

The feeling of the larger culture spinning its nails until it hands and grinds down. A low energy system in which the same undead narratives and public persona are continually resurrected, while the question of what purpose human beings serve grows ever murder. Flashes of insight and shocks of aliveness do still occur. We do suddenly gain ideas and the energy to act upon them. Though I'm less and less certain of how this happened, and quite certain that it cannot be forced or even predicted. If the first age was the age of the Father, the Old Testament, the age of childhood, of being fully under the yoke of definite outside powers with ironclad rules. And the second age was the age of the Sun, the Christian age, as well as the humanist age and bequeathed, the age of young adulthood, of feeling embodied and free to act on our own initiative upon a redeemed and clarified earth. This now is the age of the Holy Spirit, a time of disembodied and all-pervasive power that can enter and leave us at any time and for any reason, imparting any message at once or no message at all, squashing and empowering us with sudden and random intensities. If the first age saw everything as living, the second age saw everything as dead, humans as pure matter, devoid of souls, then in the classic pattern of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, the third age combines these worldviews in a novel and so far incomprehensible way. It has often been said that artists need a shard of glass or ice in their psych. An ability to dissociate and stand outside what's happening to them. And an artist has to see their own life as an example of what life itself is, as to the scientist right by studying subjects and characters. It's equally often concerned that we can master the art of living if we could do it twice, once to explore and reverse, and once to apply what we've learned. Given that the nature of life is precisely our inability to do that, the only recourse is to do both at once, to either fragment or double our consciousness so that we are both acting and observing in turn. To admit that this inner shard of ice is not necessarily to forsake our own humanity. It deploys conscientiously as a means of accessing a level of humanity that is otherwise obscured and wasted in the struggle to survive as individual. Trying to win a game whose rules we don't know, but whose board we can barely see. The urge to overcome or blot out consciousness is everywhere in our culture today. And most of the methods on offer are truly commercialized, anesthetics that may come but can never save creation. What I'm straining to articulate here is the possibility of a good faith nullification of consciousness, a non-suicidal merger with the world of the dead while still alive. A deliberate stuffing out of the will to live, not toward a will to die, but rather a will to enter a third state in which the mind, free of both the will to live and the fear of death, allows for full immersion in the realm of pure creativity. A kind of dreaming low awake, which the entity or force that created this world must have felt of creating it. Now, in a dead world, mediated by a dead internet, it is spawning its own undead successor. The only means of attaining a new chapter of life is to open ourselves to Holy Spirit and to go wherever it takes us. Looking ahead, I see no path of sane and honest autonomy. Only a decision between drifting deeper into the realm of the living death, or using the last of our consciousness to renounce the desire to master the puppet that knows it's a puppet, submitting to the will of whatever is straining to emerge from the dead materials of the past, and from our own dead cores, an indivisible through all that at once struggles to become conscious of. But then there is an element of intention of whether you accept it or not. Right? But that all you can do is submit it. That's different than surrender. Right, just surrender I think is force, right? If you tried to prevail and you just lost. The agency that I'm trying to point to there is that you recognize that this is the only thing you can say. There's there would be something better about accepting it in a certain way, rather than fighting against it and having it forced upon you. Or even worse, you know, just living in a total denial that it's now in this humanistic age of progress and empowering the individual and all the things that I call the second age, which I think is is definitely over. Well, if the sectors of you when you fight against them, as in any trap, whether the addiction is a trap or any of these kind of consumer traps. I guess addiction is a is a kind of consumer trap in a way, also. But the more you struggle, the more it is on you. Not just because it is stronger than you in in some ways, but because it actually is empowered by your struggle. A weak form of surrender because you just give up. And then there's this sort of illusion that strength comes from conquest, right? You know, never giving up is is where you find moral or um like strength of character, like that. That would be the second age. And then the third age that I'm sort of trying to grasp at is like principled surrender. Or maybe maybe I've just surrender is the wrong word, but like principled acceptance. Holy passivity, right? Because when you're dreaming, you have no agency. Either you could say you're nothing, right? You're you're a pure observer in a totally alien world. That's one concept of dream. Or you could say you're everything, like you are the dream. You know, you're not a person in the dream, you're the grass on the ground and the clouds and the parking garage, that's all you. And you could see it either way. But both, I think, illustrate the same point, which is that there's no distinct individual that is you. You know, a dream is not like a video game where you're moving one character through an otherwise inert or automatic world. Like that, people think of dreams that way, but I don't think that is what dreams are. And either way, that sense of acceptance is exactly right. That it's sort of like dreams is just showing you how it is. And it may seem strange to us when we wake up because we have all these illusions about the world when we're awake, which tend to do with agency, and and therefore grief, to say, you know, why did this happen to me, or it's unfair. Both of us lost parent or both parents young younger than a lot of people, right? Or a lot of people didn't have to go through that until much later, or or still haven't gone through that. And there is a sense of unfairness. Well, why did this have to happen to me, or what if, you know, it's like the book of Job's idea of what did I do to deserve this, and um, you know, you're punishing the wrong you know, you got the wrong guy kind of thing. Which is fair enough. I mean, those are those are legitimate emotions. But I do think they, yeah, like you said, you know, I haven't had a decade to process it yet, but it's like they do get sanded down over time. You know, wisdom in life is this sense of understanding, you know, truly understanding what it means to say it is what it is. It takes no effort at all to say that, but it might take a lifetime to genuinely accept it. David Lynch has that line that he's like, you know, it is not necessary to suffer as long as you understand suffering. You don't have to invite suffering as long as you're not fleeing from it. Or as long as you're open to the suffering that's gonna come to you anyway. You know, you see this in uh Flair O'Connor stories a lot, right? Like people always go down these very kind of like perverse and dark paths, and it's always ambiguous whether that was the path to grace, you know, whether they're you know darkness before the dawn kind of thing, and they're gonna like emerge into some revelation that the world is godly, or they're just being like morbid weirdos and small children. First age is that genuinely don't have that much input. And there and therefore you're open to infinite input. Right? Like you yeah, you only know, you know, a hundred people or something, you live in your village, you do your craft or your job, or you just do what your family does. Uh, you have your traditions, you don't know, you know, who's who's around beyond the hills you can see in the distance or whatever, right? And you just live in that world. You know, which is not to say that it's a utopia, but you're in a kind of harmony with you know the weather and this cycle, the seasons, and your own development, and all of that. And and therefore, yeah, you have these kind of wild what what you know, leaving aside the question of whether they're real or what that even means, but you have these kind of epic experiences of good and evil, and and uh your imagination is very alive, let's say because it's filling in a lot of gaps, that's one way to see it. Or because it's it's grasping the totality that is actually there. Alright, so that that's the first age. The second age is the age that I think we're coming out of now, or that we have recently come out of, which therefore is the age that we all grew up in, and perhaps grew up with the assumption that we would live our whole lives with it. Uh, which is the age of too much, right? It's the postmodern age, the age of like fragmented, infinite information that maybe at that time we thought was gonna add up. Right? We thought there was a kind of world picture that was emerging. Which you have to believe if you're gonna consume that information. Right, it's like you can't eat food if you don't believe it's gonna make you fall on it. Consuming all that information, you know, it seems naive in retrospect, but at the time there was this idea that you can put the pieces together. You will understand where history is going or left or right, you know, opinion to have on things that is not in a like right-think way, but in some sense that seemed objective at the time. You know, all the things that were meant by education in the late 20th century as like an unquestioned good. Obviously, it was connected to information. And now I think we're in this age that is so fragmented, there's a weird, emergent, new form of unity. In the sense that, like I find it much easier to entirely ignore the like endless stream of information coming at me, now I find that much easier, whereas five years ago I found it impossible. Because I now know, or I now believe, that there's no way I can put those pieces together. Because it's hitting this change in history is hitting me as I'm sort of entering middle age or as I'm going through these catechlismic life changes like losing my mother or having a child, but my view on it is is especially clear, but I think it is happening to everyone. Reading so many like books and articles about the Obama era, the sense of like just tinkering with the settings, right? Or like you can slowly sit you know, sand off the edges and you know the arc is gonna bend toward justice and all this stuff. And I think now it feels like that that way of thinking seems like a fetish, right? Or it seems like a kind of weird mania that has almost no relation to real. You have to do a lot more than tinker with the settings. But I think it leads to almost a greater coherence of psychic energy. Yeah, thesis is this I don't think overly romanticized, but you know, this sense that there was a good time. You know, if you're old enough to remember a time before the interrup, you know, I think rightly romanticize or appreciate tire summer days when you just sit and read a book, right? Or wait outside the movie theater for the for your friends to show up and you would just go to the movie and then talk about it after. Like that, I think we're not wrong to think that that was good. But that's that's the thesis. The antithesis is like just turning your brain into shrapnel scrolls of speeds and dispersing yourself to unto infinity. And then level three or or or stage three is uh synthesis. It's like we're emerging into some kind of new consciousness now where we know that we can't go back to level one, but we also know we can't remain on level two. Right? But it's sort of like what do you do with your consciousness now that it's obvious and communally obvious, right? It's not just obvious to any one person, but it's basically obvious to everyone that just staying in the number level two infinite internet brain, it's not sustainable. And the internet is not what it was either, right? It's like the internet itself is turning into this kind of like necrotic swamp. But the question is, what do you do? You know, and I think a lot about modernism. And I think almost all of my favorite writers are from the 1920s. Faulkner, Lovecraft, Kafka, Bruno Schultz, Pessoa, Proust, you know, on and on. But like that was clearly a high point for what I think is like some of the most interesting literature. It's not a coincidence that I'm so drawn to that because those people were sort of equivalent of our generation. They were writing in the 1920s, and we're now in the 2020s, which means that they were growing up in, let's say, the 1870s and the 1880s with a certain sense of order in the world, with a certain sense of you know, progress of the mind and of society, that then got completely splintered and fragmented by World War I in the 1918s. So by the time they emerged into the 1920s, they had this sense of heartbreak of like the world we thought we knew, and the world we thought we were going into, the world we thought we were going to inherit as adults, based on the world that we grew up in, doesn't exist. And if and if you believe in fake, you can say it was never going to exist, right? But like one way or another, there's this sense of shock and and and maybe so anger and outrage of like you guys like fucked up everything. Like we just like destroyed the world we thought we were going into. But you have to like do what you can do, right? You know, you have to figure out a way to represent that feeling that is honest to the time, that's not just like wantingly nostalgic. And and a lot of that, you know, wanting nostalgia or like insistence on going backward led to faculty. It seems to me that they were trying to articulate some path for the mind that was honest about the fact that something is lost, that something good is lost, you know, and that the human character and the human spirit is under threat, but also honest about the fact that you can't just restore it by force, which is basically the fascist idea. I think we're in that exact same position now, given that we come out of, you know, let's say the last third of the 20th century, you know, 1970s, 80s, 90s, probably, or still would be listening to this sort from somewhere in there. Yeah, and we also lived through this kind of like your decade of the 2010, which, you know, it's not quite as cataclysmic as World War I, but like there, you know, in some sense, it is it is some kind of dividing line that you can never go back to an early side of. And so now that we're sort of washed up on the shore of the 2020s, I I really think that modernism is important to think about not as something to just repeat, but also as something to understand, like what are the tendencies of the generation that is reckoning with the loss of the world that it thought it was going into. You know, where something like postmodernism is, you know, it's also interesting, but it's like I think often more cynical. I'd rather be put it well at some point where he said that you have to find a way to return to modernism in order to depart again in a new direction. You know, like not go back through postmodernism or go into some other place that that's like the frontier we're trying to reach. Not trying to be like, what is my pre-internet bring and can I just forcibly like strap that back on my head? Right. Or if you do, it's gonna be some grotesque, you know, trad culture kind of thing, which like, you know, it is what it is, but it's not, that doesn't scale, or you don't want that to scale. Like one would have good reasons to not want that to scale. But I think it's worth saying, like, what can the mainstream culture be now, given that it's not gonna be you know what someone in 2012 or even uh 2015 thought it was going to be. But I had an interesting conversation with my wife whose parents are you know pretty open-minded people, but like relatively strict Christians, or like seriously. And she said something interesting where she's like in the realm of visual art, they're much more open-minded. Like they'd be willing to go to a Francis Bacon exhibit or a Hirano Sposch exhibit and see all sorts of hellish torments and be interested by it and even appreciate it as great art, but they would not feel the same way about reading a book that went to those places. And I think that's an interesting idea of like, is it just that reading is so much more intimate in the sense that it's happening inside your head? You're admitting your own mind's ability to generate those images. Right? Like if I go to the net and I see you know Francis Bacon paintings of you know guys getting ripped in half, I can like it or dislike it, but I don't really have to take ownership of it. I'm like somebody else painted that painting and it's on the wall, and I can look at it or not look at it, but it just objectively exists. If I can read Marquis de Sade or Dennis Cooper, you know, something like truly horrific, uh, and my own mind. Can picture it, then I have to live with the fact that I have that anxiety. Reminded me earlier when you were talking about prayer. And you could say, like, a superficial idea of prayer is you're asking for something, right? It's supplication. It's like, you know, please heal my mom, or please, you know, make it easier for me to overcome my addiction or whatever. You're you're just praying for help. Which is understand, it's a natural thing to do, but it often doesn't work. Right? And then there's the so that's level one. Level two is abandonment of prayer, of just saying, like, well, this doesn't work, so why should I do it? And then level three, which you can only come back to in your own time, and and a lot of people probably never make it back to, is actually, I think, the opposite perspective, which is prayer not as asking for something, but actually as offering yourself. And saying just like here I am. It's like turning yourself on as a as a beacon on the map, but just saying, like, here I am. I'm ready to be used for whatever purpose I should be used for. And that I think is part of why reading a book that you believe someone sweated over is a really meaningful experience because it's like this person not only made the effort and the time, but they like they gave themselves over to these words and these ideas and not others. Like this is what they came up with. And they went to the underworld and this is what they came back with. And that is kind of a holy covenant between the author and the reader of like, I really want to see if you felt it was worth it to go to the underworld to bring this back. I want to take you at your word and see if I agree. And when you read a book and you love it, it's like that form of love is like love for the persons. I don't I don't mean journey and in the kind of like sappy emotional journey sense, but like literally the journey they went on to the place where those ideas came. I've always been interested in the Middle Ages, and you know, and I studied and majored in medieval studies in college. And so I've always, even before AI and all this, I think I already had this inkling of like neo-medievalism, or that we were we were heading back toward something that would be structured more like the Middle Ages and less like the Enlightenment. It's partially for this idea that like maybe my most hopeful possibility for for uh yeah, the next like the coming decades, let's say let's say, is just like a positive form of fragmentation where there will be these enclaves or these kind of like things similar to the idea of monasteries in which you'd have small numbers of people preserving knowledge, right? Or people who you know do still care about reading and writing and do trust that what they're reading is not AI, you know, have some way of guaranteeing that to each other at least enough to burn each other's trust. And there are, you know, and maybe just like a glorified version of like book clubs or like small academy, you know, but like having a world of people who are interested in you know reading and writing as its own discipline, not not only ignoring the fact that it's becoming obsolete, but that it's becoming like more important as it's becoming more broadly obsolete. I wish literature w were, you know, it's still a major force in the culture, but I guess part of the third age is like overcoming my heartbreak about the fact that that's not true, and I don't see any way that it will ever be true again. And saying, like, what does it mean to want to continue doing this anyway? Even when the writing on the wall is so clear, and like obviously pursuing video or you know, some other kind of graphics, you know, is a better idea in every like rational sense of the term. What does it mean to sort of like truly cast your lot with an irrational? I I do think that's what a sort of wholly intimate is, right? There is a kind of clue within the idea of mutual incompatibility of like neither person can convince the other. When I was working on my first novel, I wrote like an insane, like a thousand-page draft. It was just like total, you know, it had to be done, but it was like impossible to parse. Like it took longer to read than it did to write. And it was just miserable, it was just so hard to try to look at it and try to understand like what it was trying to be and what to do and how to cut, you know, 600 pages out of it. And it was horror. I mean, that took like at least two years to just get through the draft. And it was horror. It really was like a genuine suffering. Like it wasn't, you know, it was it wasn't like you know, an exciting creative acrimony, like it sucks. But by the time I finally cracked it and I got to the point where I was like, I know what the core of this thing is, and I know what to do with all this other stuff, which became other books, and then I was finally able to edit it down and sort of you know turn it into something that could then be published, I think like not only the pride that I felt at having come through that process, but also just the way that that process changed me. Like the way I would think of it is like if I was talking to I was, I don't know, 24, if I was talking to someone who's 24 today, and they're like, look, I could just feed this into, you know, any of these AIs and ask it, you know, what's the best 400-page version of it? Right? Or ask it, you know, what are the core themes here, or like how does page 200 connect to page 800? There's no way I could convince that person not to do that. But there's also no way that that person can convince me that what I went through wasn't worth it. And you may have to just agree to disagree, and that you know, like that just is generational change. Like, there is no way to genuinely uh hear each other because you're just dealing with a different reality.