Good writing is not mere social or political commentary, not more word noise in the newsfeed. It is a spiritual, soulful, ritual practice of magic—the conscious unveiling of the mystery of being.
How do we make magic? First we clear the ground, sweep away all the bullshit.
The task of the future writer—the truly creative person—will be apophatic—“the way of negation, clearing away what is false”—destructive of the mechanism and memes enslaving us.
Only then can a new cataphatic—“the way of affirmation, giving positive form to what is true”—embodied form of writing emerge. I use these mystical terms because mysticism, not literalism, has always been the ground of excellent, imaginative, audacious writing.
Humans are always already mystical—puppets of magical signals, signs, and metaphors—even while worshiping the God of rationality. Mysticism is the deconstruction of the known—with intention. The future writer will need a new kind of intention, a religiosity or faith.
His first task: destroy mechanical protocols. His second: find the divinely inspired protocols of unique expression.
In a way, for the first time since the Middle Ages, perhaps, we’re unsure of the meaning of authorship. Is what we read written by a collective intelligent word-spewing machine or an autonomous human? Is this written by God or the internet—or me? Where does authorship begin and end? How to become an author?
One could argue that writing has always been a form of collective intelligence, a proto-AI. There are always multiple voices speaking through us. What we consider to be an individual voice is actually a dividual, or shared voice. From an ultimate perspective, the atomized individual is an illusion. Buddhistically speaking—everything exists in the symphony of interbeing.
And yet, while the isolated, separate self alone in his brain box does not exist—we only need to listen to Miles Davis’s trumpet, Nina Simone’s voice, or Emily Dickinson’s poetics—to prove the uniqueness of the singular voice and its life-world-changing power.
G. I. Gurdjieff radically criticized the "wiseacreing" of the literati—the writers who had borrowed style but no substance—the AI of the early 20th century, since the problem of “artificial intelligence” is as old as writing itself in a way. G. also mocked those who endlessly reference, quote, or signal pseudo-knowledge without intrinsic being—the word-drunk intellectuals. (It is striking how salient his critiques are today; he even predicted we would all be hypnotized by electrical devices.)
“He would certainly recognize the fashionable writer's name and speak of him as an extraordinary being. But if you went on to ask what he had written, it would turn out that most of them, if, of course, they confessed the truth, had never read a single one of his books. All the same they would talk about him and discuss him, and splutteringly insist that he was a being with an unparalleled mind and a phenomenal knowledge of the psyche of the beings dwelling on the planet Earth.”
— G. I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
The question is: how to write with spirit (will) and soul (embodied knowledge)?
If you don’t learn to write with soul and spirit, your thoughts will remain mercurial, vague, and elusive or you will be just another meme bot. Writing is a dangerous crystallization. At best, it deconstructs the known while revealing something eternally new, yet ancient.
Good writing redeems bad culture. It is distinguished by brilliant audacity, not meme repetition. What matters—what saves—is poetics, not propaganda. Writing is magic.
The Invitation:
If you are audacious, a poetic soul; if you have hidden dynamite waiting to be discovered; if you seek a muse—then come write with us.
Parallax Writing Group + Monthly Literary Salon
With Andrew Sweeny & Cordula Frei
Starting September 8th, 2025
👉 Become a member and join us here