When color fails and sepia ascends, it is not a lesser kingdom taking the throne— it is the throne admitting it was always borrowed light.
Blue steps down first, humblest of the courtiers, having pretended sky long enough. Then green, then every noon-loud hue, filing out like a court dismissed from a kingdom never theirs.
What ascends is not a color at all but the confession beneath color— the brown of old earth, old paper, old bone, the ground from which all colors briefly rose, waiting the way silence waits under every word that thought itself necessary.
This is not dusk. Dusk still bargains with the sun. This is the sky relinquishing every borrowed name, becoming itself by what it is no longer—
not red, not gold, not the day you expected, but the day before adjectives.
Swirling waves, dervish-like in their intent, divining direction beneath the moon, the water neither wandering nor sent but turning, as all turning things must turn toward some still point the motion can’t explain — the eye of every gyre a kind of prayer, where salt forgets itself, freed of its name, becomes the simple fact of moving: here, and here, and here. The moon gives no reply. She keeps her cold and distant office, draws the deep in rhythms older than the sky and older still than any naming laws. So let the dervish and the wave agree: to spin is not to search — it is to be.
Westbound on Detroit Road, Thursday afternoon— the sun at last undoing what the week of hard cold had locked, wind finding purchase in limbs long held numb.
At the light, I was made still beneath the oaks that rise above the church, their upper branches clearing the roofline, where dozens—perhaps hundreds— of narrow arms were lifted, bending back, then forward again,
not in time, not together, yet not alone— each answering the wind along its own brief arc.
I searched for the word: rhythmic—too orderly; swaying—too mild; dancing—too deliberate.
No. This was something else.
An ecstatic murmuring— as of congregants when a current passes through them, not taught, not rehearsed, each moved according to its measure, yet taken up into one trembling praise of what simply is.
The light returns in fractions— a minute portioned back today, another tomorrow. I keep the count, though clouds obscure the evidence: three minutes banked by New Year’s, another half-minute folded in, five more by Epiphany.
The cold arrives in earnest now: lake effect, the wind that finds every weakness in the house’s skin. But the light grows. The sun keeps its promise without display, deposits made, retained, compounded.
I watch for five fifteen, for when darkness once took the day entire. Now it hesitates. Now it waits.
February measures what accumulates: an hour restored, perhaps more. Afternoon lengthens itself, light touching the sun room wall at angles I had forgotten. Still the snow, still the grey insistence of overcast—but something fundamental has shifted.
The sun climbs higher, stays longer, asks nothing in return. This is not spring—spring lies, breaks its word too often to be trusted. This is mathematics, planetary tilt, the faithful working of the world’s ancient machinery.
I am owed nothing. I receive these minutes anyway.
March brings the balance: day and night held even, aequinoctium. The light has kept its promise minute by minute, fraction by fraction, until the ledger clears.
Not triumph—the cold can still return, and will—but equipoise: that moment of level standing before the light tips into majority.
I have done nothing to earn this except continue, except persist through diminishment, watching the slow reversal, the patient return.
The light grows still. The light keeps growing. The promise is not finished.
Recently, I read with great interest Hari Kunzru’s article “Doing Their Own Research” in the New York Review of Books (May 29, 2025). It is a piercing, sometimes surreal examination of the strange coalition now shaping American political and spiritual culture: a “New Weird Fusionism” of right-wing conspiracy, countercultural wellness, and mystical absolutism. The portrait he offers—of a society increasingly shaped by magical thinking, selective paranoia, and a weaponized imagination—was as disturbing as it was insightful.
But what struck me most was the realization that the cultural atmosphere Kunzru describes makes it increasingly likely that contemplative works like my recent Liber Agglutivi will be not merely misread—but conscripted into the very worldview they seek to resist.
In that work, framed as a fictional medieval treatise on sacred language, I explore how language, when approached with reverence and silence, becomes not a tool of communication but a site of presence—how it may not only speak about reality, but participate in it. Yet as I read Kunzru’s analysis of conspirituality—the synthesis of conspiracy and New Age belief—I saw an eerie proximity between certain rhetorical structures in Liber Agglutivi and the thought patterns of this cultural formation: secrecy, marginalia, hidden knowledge, the recovery of “true” language lost to corruption.
The danger is real: in an age where every form of mystery gets weaponized, how do we distinguish between authentic contemplative practice and its paranoid simulacra?
It is precisely here that the contrast must be made explicit.
The Liber is not a manual for decoding reality through esoteric symbols or a codebook for revealing global plots. It is not a mystical justification for control, nor an invitation to gnostic certainty. Its words are not “keys” to hidden truths in the paranoid sense Kunzru describes. Rather, it is a contemplative experiment—a poetic, philosophical invitation to see language as something we enter with humility, not something we wield with certainty.
What conspirituality offers is often a form of linguistic inflation: a conviction that to name something is to master it, that to imagine is to manifest, that hidden truths are personal weapons in a war against “them.” This is not reverence for mystery but inflation through proximity to it. The practitioner of conspirituality approaches mystery as a puzzle to be solved, a code to be cracked that will grant power over reality itself.
By contrast, the Liber offers a theology of kenosis—a self-emptying approach to speech in which the word is not a sword, but a veil; not a control mechanism, but a site of transfigured listening. Where conspirituality seeks to decode, contemplation seeks to be changed by what it encounters.
Consider the difference in practice. A conspirituality adherent might read the Liber’s phrase about “memory that knows not what it remembers” as a hint toward recovering suppressed historical truths or accessing forbidden knowledge that “they” do not want you to have.
A contemplative reader approaches the same phrase as an invitation to sit with unknowing itself—to let the mystery remain mysterious while allowing it to transform one’s relationship to knowledge. The first approach inflates the ego; the second empties it.
Kunzru’s analysis is especially compelling in its treatment of magical thinking across the domains of politics, religion, and economics. It is alarming to witness the persistence of the nineteenth-century “mind-cure” tradition—the belief that reality is downstream of personal attitude—now manifesting as national governance logic.
That Donald Trump, among others, internalized Norman Vincent Peale’s message of mental affirmation to the point that factuality became irrelevant is not merely a character trait—it is a symptom of an epistemological crisis. Similarly, the self-help gospel of The Secret, evangelical prosperity teachings, and the memetic evangelism of internet conspiracists all illustrate a culture in which to believe is to make it so.
The boundary between wish and world is not merely blurred—it is denied.
The Liber Agglutivi, by contrast, insists that language’s creative power arises not from assertive will but from contemplative reception. The phrase “word that becomes the thing” does not mean that the self wills reality into being. It means that, in sacred silence, the word discloses what is already most true.
This is a fundamentally different ontology. It is not manifestation; it is reverent participation.
Kunzru rightly notes how easily mystical language can be conscripted by paranoid styles. The idea that “everything is connected,” which in contemplative practice leads to compassion and humility, in conspiracy often leads to reductionism and scapegoating.
The Liber speaks of memory that “knows not what it remembers”—a phrase meant to evoke mystery and presence, not cognitive shortcuts to hidden truths.
So while Kunzru’s essay is not a critique of my work, it felt like a necessary caution about the times in which such a work might be read. In an age of epistemic confusion and symbolic inflation, sacred language must be handled with even greater care.
We must distinguish between language as control and language as communion; between the voice that silences others and the voice that emerges from deep silence. We must recognize that in our current moment, the very practices that might lead us toward wisdom—attention to mystery, reverence for hidden dimensions of experience, suspicion of surface explanations—can be corrupted into tools of manipulation and division.
The Liber Agglutivi may look like a book of secrets, but it is really a book about unknowing—about hearing the spaces where speech begins. And in a world where every utterance is increasingly co-opted for political or psychological leverage, the commitment to silence, reverence, and the mystery of meaning may itself be the most radical stance available to us.
Words that reign do so only when they have ceased to serve the self. In our age of weaponized mysticism, that may be the difference between wisdom and delusion, between contemplation and conspiracy.
