A Year and Years Gone By

My first twelve months on Substack

On June 20th, 2023, I published my first essay on Substack, “What is to Be Done.” I wrote the following:

The right holds that there is a transcendent order to the universe, and valorizes excellence, tradition, hierarchy, virtue, piety, and physical and moral courage.  The right is thus the prime enemy of the current order, be it TradCath, Race Realist, Neo-Pagan, OrthoBro, Nietzschean lifter, etc.  The system means to destroy us, and its every thought is bent on that end.

So what can one do in the face of it?  Faith.  I don’t mean in this instance religious doctrine, although I have strong beliefs that I take as normative.  I propose rather that the right takes its a priori assumptions about the way the universe works seriously and that we live accordingly.

My sentiments were hopeful and remain so. Over the course of this year, I can say I’ve made friends with and found support among (and supported in turn) allies of all those persuasions I noted and more. I stand by those thoughts as both normative and aspirational.

My first essay was inspired by

John Carter

. The reader should note that I didn’t even know how to tag someone at the time I wrote it, and thus John Carter probably never realized my debt to him, though we have since had many exchanges. I also cited Charles Haywood as an example of the kind of thinking that moved me; Haywood was gracious enough to respond on X to my one and only ever solicitation for sponsorship (tongue in cheek) by actually becoming a paid subscriber. I should have held out for a Shampoo Genius Fellowship; perhaps next year.

Over the course of the year I have attracted (as of this writing) 2,845 subscribers, including 43 paid subscribers, despite my not paywalling anything. I am very grateful for all of them, all of you. When I set out to write here I had no idea what the reaction would be, and frankly, no real interest in building an audience. I made a conscious choice to write what I felt needed to be written. As can be seen from my back catalogue, this has included political commentary, art criticism, biography, history, current events, pop culture, memoir, fiction, religion, science, UFOs, mysterious disappearances, and (of anything can be called my main focus) education. Despite never knowing what they were going to get week to week my audience has stuck by me and grown beyond anything I could have guessed.

Over the course of the year I have also learned to be an audience. I can honestly say that-to my knowledge- not a single day has gone by without my at least liking and restacking several posts. If there’s a secret to getting engagement I would say it’s to be engaged, and I suspect that a good bit of what success I’ve had here stems from people thinking of me from having seen something I’ve shared or commented on. Though I haven’t always been able to avoid controversy and animosity I like to think I’ve stuck to being positive overall and passed on every offer of blackpills. And of course, I try whenever I can to be funny.

I’m by nature an introvert. I don’t like crowds and groups and cliques; I’m not a joiner and I don’t really network or promote myself. I’ve declined offers to cross-post and to appear on livestreams and such. But more than that, I like to let my message speak for itself, rather than let myself intrude. If you’re one who’s made such an offer, please also understand that I really do wish to remain as anonymous as possible, both for mundane reasons of opsec and a desire for humility.

My mom de plume is the Librarian of Celaeno for a reason. Librarian is a title as opposed to a name. I’m not a man, but an office, a duty, a station. My self is subsumed into a calling. Celaeno is the site of a haunted library in deep space in the Cthulhu Mythos as adapted by August Derleth. There are all kinds of strands of meaning there. We live in a haunted world, cf. Mark Fisher, we exist among the ghosts of latent futures stillborn in our collective failures to realize our individual and collective potential. The imagery of the library (no one reads anymore) and the dead mall (that lichform of neoliberal materialism gone by) are recurring ones in my work, as is Vaporwave and the lore of the 1980s. The past reaches out from its unquiet grave, and the only rite that can exorcise it is study- quod ceteris negatum est, cum mortuis loquemur.

As it happens, I was in a library recently, near where my dad lives in Florida. He’s not doing well, unfortunately. While visiting him some time ago I went to the local branch and wandered around. Most of the stacks are taken up with DVDs and large-print mysteries as befits an area of Bidenesque demographics, but there was still a pretty decent non-fiction section. I remembered my own youth, growing up in a rough area with little in the way of prospects. That local library was a refuge, an oasis away from all the struggle and loneliness, where meaningful things awaited those who would sacrifice their time and energy to find them. I spent so many days bent over books, walking two miles from our house and two back, through neighborhoods I knew well were full of people who despised me on account of my race and would hate me far more had they known I was taking pains to learn and improve myself. I would meander home pondering, wishing I had someone to tell about all the great things I had learned. But there never was.

It hurt then, but I understand now. I had to be humbled first, to learn to listen as well as speak, and to accept first and foremost my ignorance and inexperience. Thirteen years in the hospitality industry were my Wheel of Pain, and my career as a teacher is informed by that struggle as much as the books I read. Only now, in middle age, do I feel even a bit ready to pronounce on anything, and I still prefer to do it as anonymously as possible so as to avoid even the hint of self-promotion.

All that is a roundabout way of saying that as I wandered that library I wondered if there was a kid like I was in there somewhere, living an obscure life in a flyover town, wondering about all those big things he got to read about in his spare and solitary moments. I suspect there was. More than anyone, more even than the great people who patronize me and recommend me and share my work, I write for him, because thanks to all of my readers I get it be his unknown hope of one day being able to share knowledge with the world, and in some small way, uplifting spirits in a dark age.

I dedicate this post to that boy or girl, who will one day take my post as Librarian of Celaeno when my time is over.

Where I grew up