#essential principles for Substack writers

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Section 13: Essential Principles for Freelance Writers Beyond Substack

Summary of my Udemy Course “From Zero to Substack Hero.” Image source from the video location Purpose of this Series for New Readers This is a new series upon request from my readers. I recently developed a course titled “From Zero to Substack Hero” and published it on Udemy and shared it on Content Marketing Strategy Insights owned by Dr Mehmet Yildiz who kindly allowed me to use his Substack…

[grandhotelabyss]

Speaking of, well, everything I’ve been speaking of lately—I am in a clanging and clamoring echo chamber of synchronicity, trying to hang on to this bit of dark wisdom from Coetzee’s novel about Dostoevsky: “he knows too that as long as he tries by cunning to distinguish things that are things from things that are signs he will not be saved”—I was less than halfway through the aforementioned Art of Darkness pod’s five-plus-hour episode on Aleister Crowley when one of the hosts declaimed a text I had no idea existed. The mage, it turns out, wrote a sonnet commemorating Rodin’s Monument to Balzac, as screenshotted above, or else read it here. 

It’s a bad poem overall—as my source for the text reports, Crowley thought himself a better poet than Yeats; compare this to “Lapis Lazuli” and get back to me—though I am not so small-minded as to disrespect the attempt at a Shakespearean coinage with “ennighted,” the otherwise apparently inexistent synonym-antonym of “benighted”  (it seems to mean “endowed with obscurity”) and therefore (perhaps) a hapax legomenon. And “the stunned air shudders on the skin” is, I concede, gorgeous.

I illustrated last week’s Substack newsletter with Rodin’s nude study of Balzac, which I saw at LACMA in 2012; the newsletter jumped off from Justin Murphy’s salute to ambitious young Balzac to consider later writers—Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury—who used vaguely magical techniques of manifestation, affirmation, and visualization, the kind now viral on YouTube and TikTok, and descended, of course, from some of Crowley’s occult practices. 

Balzac knew all about it, as he writes in his mystical novel about an androgynous angel, Séraphîta, to which synchronicity also brought me, as I report in the newsletter’s footnote. It’s the most boring novel ever written, alas, scaling Nordic fjords of sententiousness I would not have thought possible, though La Paglia pays it a lovely and lyrical tribute in Sexual Personae, assimilating it to her category of “androgyne as Apollonian angel,” calling it “the French Epipsychidion,” and noting that it was the favorite Balzac novel of—him again!—Yeats. And Balzac, as Rodin’s hand-eye rightly intuited, was not, like seraphic Shelley, himself an androgyne, but rather one possessed of “essential manhood.”

From Séraphîta, where Balzac writes, where Balzac’s eponymous and sexless seraph prophesies:

“Fruit of the laborious, progressive, continued development of natural properties and faculties vitalized anew by the divine breath of the Word, Prayer has occult activity; it is the final worship—not the material worship of images, nor the spiritual worship of formulas, but the worship of the Divine World. We say no prayers,—prayer forms within us; it is a faculty which acts of itself; it has attained a way of action which lifts it outside of forms; it links the soul to God, with whom we unite as the root of the tree unites with the soil; our veins draw life from the principle of life, and we live by the life of the universe. Prayer bestows external conviction by making us penetrate the Material World through the cohesion of all our faculties with the elementary substances; it bestows internal conviction by developing our essence and mingling it with that of the Spiritual Worlds.”

Which is to say: affirm, visualize, manifest. Or should we heed Coetzee: should we let the everyday rest in and as the everyday, a human comedy, untransfigured because all-transfigured, every inch God’s work?