michael-dean-k/

The imagination is as ugly as it is beautiful; they come together. If your inner mind consists only of pretty landscapes, imagined scenarios, and clever compromises, all bound by a safe and familiar virtue, your net is cast not below the froth of the ocean. To dive into the depths is to expose yourself not just to shimmering coral, but to the jump scares of stingrays. The moment I thought this, as I lifted my arm to drink orange juice, I saw a monstrous bug on my sleeve, hairy and hissing; it was only a bee, but unexpectedly there, and so I leapt and shooed and booted into my aboriginal fight mode. What a synchronicity! You are not tapped into the Source unless the fear of it lifts you off the ground.

This is on my mind because I had a strange fantasy on my walk home—a fruit of imagination—and debated myself on whether I’d write about it. I decided I wouldn’t, but I suppose, now, here I am. I will spare you of the hot specifics, which unwillingly formed in my mind. Contrary to how you may think this started, I was looping a religious mantra and I saw with total purity, closer to Buddha than the drools of a leg-humping dog. My sin was not in lust, but in congratulating myself on my discipline. I imagined myself writing a paragraph on this victory of inner-chastity—“I didn’t imagine [X]… I didn’t imagine [Y]...”—but that summoned a fantasy weirder than usual, one with unbelievable metaphors that I’ll never put to paper, and an arc that ended in spasms, shapeshifting, and shrinking into a mono-droning ball of white heat that exploded and shattered the windows of nearby houses, spiraling the town into a front-lawn frenzy.

Creativity comes not without deviance; and so extreme creativity comes with flashes of imagery that will shock you, shock whoever you share it with. It cares not of your preferences or values, commitments or morals; to cast a line deep into waters brings all sorts of riches and squids to the surface of your mind, and the choice is yours on what to bring into the boat (and of course, sometime a whale emerges, and your language fails you, leaving you only able to speak of the whale with nothing to show).

A more conservative mind has no such problems, because a conservative dares not enter the mind of God. To be creative is not a frivolous hobby, it is to be a microcosm of the larger engine of creation. And if being creative involves attuning yourself to the instability of imagination, then one can’t know God without a fair amount of psychic turbulence.

(I promise I won’t stray too far into amateur theology here.) The popular caricature of God is the archetype of an architect—one with a divine “plan”—but a better image is a thunderous volcanic eruption. The Big Bang, the rupture of cosmic seed; reproduction—evolution, life, and creation, in many places at many scales —emerges from billions of scattered instances, so that the rare two can fuse into a higher order. I have trouble believing God has consciousness, intention, and agency, but find obvious a divine intelligence that folds chaos into order. The cost of divine intelligence though, in creating something as magnificent as a human, is misfiring, mutation, bad combinations, and all things upsetting—violence, death, and evil.

So if we want to carry the logos, hold the flame of divine intelligence in our own head to make beautiful things ourselves, to continue the process of God, as God, then we have to accept defects and abortions—to not cower in fear at the strange and grotesque, to not turn off the lights. This is probably a known truth, that the path towards Enlightenment runs through dark woods, but you forget that in a fit of terror from your own thoughts. This is at least, my rationalization of the stray and unexplainable thoughts that occasionally pass through me, thoughts of lust, violence, theft, vengeance, conspiracy, tyranny, hauntedness—all demonic antipodes to the dearest things I treasure.

Instead of narrowing the aperture of mind and retreating to shore, I have to learn to swim. I can go into the depths and marvel at weird creatures, but not grab a fin to follow where it goes. This is where I think “Self-Reliance” by Emerson goes wrong; he is right in the sense that you have to take seriously whatever is presented through your natural imagination, but wrong in the sense that you must follow all of nature’s impulses, wherever they lead. Nature produces mutations, Ralph. The decision on how to respond to the mental fruits of nature is where morality lives. Morality is not a purity of mind, nor is it the total absence of evil, but it’s the character you show when dealing with darkness. I can’t be blamed for trying this, for it’s in my name; Michael—“he who fights the Devil.”

A simple maxim might be something like “don’t chase it, don’t avoid it, let it wash through.” One complication is being a writer. Odd thoughts often make for good material. One view is that writing is a useful release valve, a controlled plane where monsters can roam, keeping the head pure when away from the page. But if your best writing comes forth from the ugly imagination, then you’ll find yourself calling upon it as your Muse.

Frigid in the machine-cooled nursery I look out over the low-rise sprawl of roofs and canopies and see what I remember as and now call the pom pom tree, a sole trunk towering above treelines and wires, with wooden skeleton hands reaching up and into the blue, yet skewering only through shaggy green balls, the poms, again sighted all from this nursery, a mysterious one, for I walk down that main boulevard every afternoon but never notice poms for they glide above the sight lines of the side-walk, and so here, and so now, observing this dying thing suspended 30 feet above the town, the village of floating spheres, home to ticks and ants and loraxes I'm sure, it reminds me of what I saw yesterday, those Lesser Poms east of home at ground level, where that Japanese landscaper with her hedgeclippers existed in that only moment I'll ever know her, whom I said hello awkwardly, who did not see the unattended child of an aloof mother when he snuck an empty wrapper into her bush, or so I thought I saw and double-taked and daydreamed of moralizing him, and this is what I think as I type into my Oracle, who incorrectly diagnoses the disease of this pom tree as witches broom. Witches Broom? No Claude, no, this is not a clot of bird twigs, and so I sent it a pictures and then it tells me, ah, of course, Verticillium Wilt, and that seems still wrong but slightly closer to the truth, for it does look like this tree is losing its vascular system unevenly, and yet even more true because it resembles my own numb arm, an uneven vascular, where my daughter's heavy head—her 86th-percentile head—pinches my ulnar nerve for hours of unclocked time each day as I read pre-Socratic philosophers from ebooks and remember the times I had to be investigated in expensive offices where fast-talking doctors lathered my arms in jelly and shot electricity through them but could diagnose me no better than my pseudo-Oracle despite their graduate degrees, and now I look down and imagine my arm itself as the naked pom tree, with only scant patches of flesh and tissue over fully exposed forearm bone, and there it is that ulnar nerve in plain sight, and I see it black and dying and in need of a clip, if only to release that black astral voodoo I acquired from weak composure in an equitorial skirmish, and if only I could find and cop a clip from that landscaper who I will surely never notice again despite she herself is a walking distance mystery who will yet never step foot into this refrigerated machine-cooled nursery.

I had a horrific dream last night. We were in an oversized living room, and there was an inter-dimensional parasite that would one-by-one, burrow into each person’s ass. Whether you then exploded or not was somehow a testament to your character. It went up mine at least twice. I survived, and the second time the parasite coiled up and turned into an egg. I think I won this tournment? Was this a Harry Potter dream? Actually no, this thing was slimey and shadowy and probably from the Stranger Things univese. Actually, I probably had this dream because Season 5 of Stranger Things just dropped.

Stranger Things features possessions, ghosts, monsters, and every breed of supernatural evil, but all packaged in a way to be maximally accessible. It is a cultural juggernaut, the beast of Netflix. It gets billions of views, and is the #1 show in 90 countries. It is cross-generational and nostalgic for both kids and parents, resurrecting songs from the 80s back onto the billboards.

Is it weird that a hit show normalizes paranormal and grotesque violence? I mean yes, in the end, I’m sure the kids will win, but are we not poisoning our subconscious? I guess this reflect a general hesitation to the whole genre of horror. I do think there is something valuable to virgin eyes—if you see CGI evil, even once, it could haunt you eternally. Many other cultures see Halloween as soul-damning (my sister-in-law, a true Orthodox Christian, recently went upstate to visit a monastery on the night of Halloween, to avoid the inevitable images of teenagers dressed as cadavers).

A gloomy day, where smoke rising from tar blends in with clouds, and through fog I see men in orange vests, smoking cigarettes and adding to the blur. Traffic is backed up, there are honks, and a baby wails through an open window of an SUV. I am walking south on Bell, where pidgeons flock, and realize the enormous weight of everything, all before I enter this French coffee shop. Upon entering I twist out my own head, assaulted by audiovisual XMAS slop; dear god … can I have a sricacha caesar wrap and a London fog? I contemplate emails and henchman and billionaires and babies and such, and so when I sit, I try turning off my mind. The XMAS slop is back, along with the chatter of screaming kids, and the woman to the left of me yapping on a mobile zoom call in a foreign language, and the couple to my right speaking Greek. This is too much, so I look for peace at the marble tables outside, but when I look at the fake wicker chair, I notice it’s covered in worms and birdshit. I realize this is a pessimistic log, a chain of unfortunate events, but sometimes this is the way reality presents itself. And even if it feels fresh to occasionally write with cynicism, it’s not a place to live; the literati too easily withdraw from polite society and cocoon themselves in with their own cannon, drooling acerbic puss into the gutters of Substack.

I experienced something like a pseudo-insanity on the drive to the park, weird alien transmissions and mutation of language, packaged as a seriously frightening performance to myself that devolved into gentle spasms and mumbling (though to me was an experience of musical brilliance), a side of self I’d never show anyone, which eventually birthed the phrase, “from chaos we emerge into the light” an opening line to some theology, perhaps mine. 

As I walked a hundred feet into the park, I heard a woman stretching against a bar singing seriously angelic opera. I left a note to myself that said “this explains evil and suffering,” and that’s very cryptic, but it’s in response to that aesthetic rebuke of, “how can God exist if there is so much evil and suffering in the world?”

IIRC, here’s that thought: we’re lodged in a cosmic engine where matter needs to chaotically complexify to discover harmony and phase shift into higher forms of organization. Lots of noise is generated in that process; and so you actually can’t find harmony without an overwhelming amount of disharmony and chaos. Basically, good can’t exist without an overwhelming amount of nothingness and evil. So in a way, you can’t fear the evil within you; it is simply the cost of imagination, of invention, of creation. Chaos is the cost of divinity.

Sometimes an innocent insight or daydream can mutate into something insanely twisted. It’s shocking at first, but I have the self-awareness to not believe in anything that crosses my mind. I imagine some people don’t have this ability. They might get scared by their own thoughts, thinking they’re a monster. I wonder if an evil person is simply someone who comes to blindly trust all their thoughts.

I discovered today that I could write a journal entry that is intentionally illegible to my future self. I’m writing letters, but blending them so loosely that it would be undecipherable to anybody. This means I can write fast and say whatever I want, and nobody will be able to return to this, which opens up a certain kind of confessional/abstract valve. It’s a way to use “writing as thinking” but encrypted in a way so the shadow can come out.

"Evil thoughts from good men." I wrote this in the morning—thinking it could be a good title of a novel—before having a chilling evening that night, one that is effectively the perfect opening. One day I imagine I write this out at it's full potency, but I figure I will quit procrastinating and get some version of it written (I'm adding this 21 months later, in August of 2026).

My wife and I took a cab to catch a play of The Tempest, but were five minutes late; they closed the doors, and so we wandered into some random bar. After ordering drinks I went downstairs to the bathroom, returning to find an older woman sitting suspiciously close to my wife. She was farmer, from west of Oxford, in town for a labor protest. She beheld a witchly charisma, seemingly able to meander group-to-group in our half of the bar, making each one laugh, before returning back to us. I assumed she was just an eccentric British woman, perhaps archetypal of the culture, until she insisted that she was a demon in her ring door bell—an incredible premise.

She insisted on showing us her footage of the demon, but I refused. Even if it was a glitch, some visual artifact, or CGI, I try not to load my subconscious with paranormal imagery. But she insisted on explaining it—its "black skin... pointy little horns... and beady yellow eyes..." She told the story with solemnity in her face, and keep looping back to this description—"black skin... pointy little horns... and beady yellow eyes—" "Enough!" I cut her off after 3 or 4 loops. It was as if she were trying to hypnotize us.

Later she confessed that she had supernatural powers, that she feels bad about freaking out young couples in bars, like us, causing them to flee from the bar in terror. She asked if wanted to predict our future; I said no, but my wife wanted to see her read her past. After a few minutes, she started recalling details from her childhood, giving her sharp summaries of specifically how each parent treated her. She started to cry. After nudging me again, I agreed to let her tell me future. She asked what I wanted to know—"how will everything work out for me as a writer?" She burst out in hysterical laughter, and wouldn't stop. This went out for five or ten minutes. After she calmed down, she'd like at my with frightened eyes and apologize. I asked her to explain herself, and the moment she tried she just started laughing again. It felt like there was no conversation left to be had, so we signaled to her we were calling it a night. On the way out she said, "I'll see you soon."

Out in the cold air of the street, we confided in each other on how strange the experience was. We oscillated through various paranoias, wondering if she was a witch, if we had been given some voodoo, or if she had drugged my wife. We threw out her business card. But then I checked my phone and read the most mysterious text from my dad, sent around the minute we left the bar—"Your uncle was going through his attic and found this old typewriter. Do you want it?" It included a picture of the scariest looking typewriter I'd ever seen: black paint, it's prongs floating above the keys, looking like two pointed horns, and of course, beady little yellow eyes—it fit the exact description of the demon in the doorbell. The brand was Underwood, but I misread it as Underworld, as if it were a typewriter from hell. My body was pulsating with chills.

Over the next week I'd ruminate on if I should except this potentially haunted object in my home. I consulted my writer friends. One noted that Oxford is associated with black magic, and another said I should consult a shaman, or someone versed in these matters. Another said I should take it and use the occasion to write from my shadow. This calls forth the opening synchronicity—the log I wrote that morning: "evil thoughts from good men." Was this a sign to get that typewriter and write that novel on it? I will save my specific thoughts on the shadow for a future post...

Anyway, I called up Gramercy Typewriters and described them my Underwood, and how it was a "batwing"-style typewriter. They said those are rare and they don't know how to service them. Regardless, my indecision meant I never gave my uncle a definitive yes or no, and so he said he'd bring it to Thanksgiving. In the end, he forgot it, and I never heard about it again.

• The Rembrandt painting of Aristotle (in medieval garb) touching a clay bust of Homer is a good example of an anachronism.
• Mandalas are not just pretty symmetrical drawings, they are ritualistic diagrams for Buddhist to model reality.
• Buddhist deities often appear to seem simultaneously silly and demonic. This seems similar to the psychedelic tactic of how to deal with the shadow. If something terrifying comes about, don’t cower in fear and ignore, but address it, turn it into a cartoon, and it tends to vanish.
• Why is Jimmy Eat World playing in the gift shop of the MET? This is a weird vibe to cultivate after the ancient Asian art exhibit.