The Mooring of Starting Out

or All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here

For this is action, this not being sure, this careless
Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,
Making ready to forget, and always coming back
To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

– John Ashbery, “Soonest Mended”

A healthy mind is one that engages with the world. For a few years of my recent life I lived in relative isolation—putting aside circumstances, my nature, which tends toward withdrawal rather than participation, inaction over action, did not help—and it is only over the past year or so that I have begun, slowly, to break out.

The first step is always the most difficult, the most fraught with worries, hesitations, doubts, fears, uncertainties—we do not know whether the ground that meets our foot is likely to be of solid earth or sinkable peat—but as the naturalist John Burroughs once said, “Leap and the net will appear.” Between what one imagines and what one is able to realize, a shadow falls; our ideals are like compasses pointing to true north, but a compass won’t help you if you never try to go anywhere. 

What I’m trying to say is that I have no definite plan for this newsletter as of yet, but sometimes we don’t know where we want to go until we take the first step. In my adolescence I started a variety of blogs, with varying degrees of success, and that desire to carve out a little cozy nook of the Internet where I could share the wanderings of my mind has never left. More than that, I want a place to think deeply, feel deeply, refine it all through the beauty and joy of language, and share it with you, dear reader. Along with longer, more reflective pieces published at least once a week, there will be shorter bits of whimsy in between. Expect more than none and up to all of the following: cultural criticism, film reviews, book recommendations, diary entries, limericks, roundups of poems, deep dives into esoteric topics, existential crises, rants about people in this neighborhood and their dogs, “humor,” meaningless ponderings with no real conclusions in sight, salacious gossip, recipes from dubious books of potions left to me by mysterious great-aunts, “advice,” and my pretentious but correct opinions on anything and everything.

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise (1872)

The title of this project comes from a letter written by the poet John Keats to his brother George in the spring of 1819. In the letter, Keats reflects on a notion certain “misguided and superstitious” persons have of the world being “a vale of tears.” No, Keats replies, it is “The vale of Soul-making.” We all start out in the world as “intelligences or sparks,” but in order to become “Souls,” we need to “acquire identities” and become personally ourselves. This happens when the intelligence, or mind, and the “human heart” act upon each other in the schoolroom of the world—its “pains and troubles” are necessary for the heart to “feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways,” and the mind develops its identity from this feeling and suffering heart, fashioning us into proper souls. My attempts at this soul-making are what you will see documented in this newsletter. 

I will leave you with the ending of Keats’s “Ode to Psyche,”—psyche, of course, is “soul” in Greek—which is as good a manifesto as any:

A rosy sanctuary will I dress
     With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
          With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
          Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
          That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
          To let the warm Love in!

If you would like to be the net into which I am leaping, etc., etc., please consider subscribing—more substantive content is on its way!