Paper Temples

Doesn't everybody want a haunted library?

By now, regular visitors to this space will be well-acquainted with my (borderline schizophrenic) ambivalence about the publishing industry¹.

Many of my posts over the past eighteen months have come in the form of a very public argument with myself over whether and how I should be writing. Back in October, I had mostly talked myself out of writing a book, for all of the obvious financial and cultural reasons. More recently, I convinced myself that adding one more brick to the Tower would be pointless, compared to many other tactical deployments of reality-disrupting enchantment.

I happened to be doing some more soul-searching this past week, when my “nemesis”

Elle Griffin

got some well-deserved attention for her analysis of the publishing industry. The resulting discussion (with

Lincoln Michel

and

Freddie deBoer

, among many others, offering some alternative interpretations) has been very interesting—but not particularly encouraging. Even if things aren’t as bleak as Elle describes, the commercial prospects are still pretty dim for most authors, by any estimation. This quote from Freddie’s piece really hit home:

Here’s the reality: there’s always been far more entrants into creative fields than those industries can bear in terms of providing people with a living, and the digital tools that have torn down barriers to entry have simply increased the competition and made the overall Pareto distribution even more brutal.

Damn. Yep. So the question for me—and all the other die-hard writers who are similarly afflicted with the compulsive need to write no matter what—continues to be whether it’s worth the toil to produce something with limited commercial value. If we can’t not write, should we stick to scribbling our missives in our notebooks (and on bar napkins, and receipts, and walls…) rather than inflicting them on an already-saturated market, in a longshot attempt to surface briefly above the maelstrom of content?

The solution for this might be painfully obvious, but I only fully internalized it this past week: rather than obsessing about the commercial side of the equation (as long as we’re not condemning ourselves to financial ruin) writers could focus on the inherent power of books—physical books—as art, beyond their commodity value.

This is right in line with my recent essays on applied metaphysics.

From a strictly materialist perspective, a book is just a vehicle for an assemblage of words. Its value is tied to efficiency: what is the most cost-effective way to get these ideas into the reader’s head?

That utilitarian argument is what drove the publishing industry through the highs and lows we’ve seen over the past century. For a long time, print was the most economical way to mass-produce words, in the same way that glass bottles are the most efficient way to deliver wine: the aesthetics reflect the expediencies of manufacturing, shipping, selling and consuming within a particular economic system, equal to or greater than serving the customer’s enjoyment at the end of the process. Over the past fifty years, digital media has increasingly allowed the unbottling of prose. Why waste time and money on costly manufacturing when the end product can be piped directly to the consumer? Books are now competing (and losing) against virtual delivery via audiobooks, eBooks, and digital self-publishing. After all, if it’s just a bunch of words, the packaging is incidental.

The counter-argument, from the perspective of applied metaphysics, is that books are enchanted objects.

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Storytelling has its own applied metaphysics, its own form of enchantment. As I’ve written before, “enchant” literally means “to speak/sing into being,” which is indistinguishable from storytelling. Storytellers take the unreal and make it real, with the power of the images they conjure in people’s minds. Characters become literal spirits—non-corporeal entities that exist outside of linear time, and take on their own kind of personhood once they’ve been summoned².

This dimension of pure storytelling can slip past the obstacles created by digital media, and in some ways, is enhanced by it. Virtual storytellers have lost control over the physical atmosphere of the telling: listeners can’t be compelled to sit within the magic circle of a nighttime campfire. People can easily half-listen to a podcast or audiobook during the harsh jostle of their morning commute. But print forced out that old firelit magic centuries ago; in exchange, audio technology allows storytellers to reach a much wider audience, while preserving some of the spellcraft of voiced stories. Whether the new quantity of listeners makes up for the corresponding loss of quality is debatable; at least there’s a silver lining.

The consolation prize for print books, meanwhile, is that they offer another layer of enchantment in addition to the story itself: the physical form of books can act as portals in a way that virtual delivery can’t compete with.

“Well, duh,” I hear you say. And yes—duh. I’m slow on the uptake sometimes. But listen: I don’t mean a portal in the way that a screen is a portal. The electrified black mirrors we put on our home entertainment altars are just scrying-glasses for all the digital phantasms our culture conjures up for us, sure. Those are portals too. But they’re undifferentiated portals, leading to a theoretically infinite number of realities. Even if a story can technically be delivered through a screen, the object itself has no character of its own. Tablets and televisions and smartphones are all the same in their physicality, no matter what you read on them. They all come pre-packaged with their own enchantments beyond the author’s control.

But a book, printed and immutable, is a key that unlocks only one door: the one that the author constructs. It’s a little piece of the reality created by the author, which the reader physically carries around with them. Every book on your shelf at home is a door that opens both ways: it allows you to exit your reality and enter the reality of the book—and it also allows some of the reality within the book to enter into yours³.

Holy books are an obvious example. A single copy of the Bible or the Torah or the Koran is never just a book, never just a vessel for the words written on its pages. The books contain the Word of God—are a portal to God’s dimension—and as a result, they’re understood to be minor physical manifestations of God in our reality. People are killed in conflicts over the physical treatment of holy books, even though no actual violence can be done to the words themselves.

This form of metaphysical praxis is carried on in ostensibly secular rituals, even in the godless parts of the United States, with people placing their hand on a Bible and swearing an oath. The physical presence of the (closed) book in these rituals has nothing to do with the information printed in it: the object itself brings God into the ritual space to observe the proceedings, and—through physical contact—transports the claimant partway out of the mundane world and into the presence of God.

Some books are like Ouija boards. In the right hands, their symbolic weight allows them to transcend the humble construction of mass-market paper and glue. They become conduits for supernatural forces, casting a spell that enfolds the reader in a different reality.

Some books are like Ouija boards, which are, themselves, something like a temple—a physical interface, set apart from the ordinary world, for the purpose of communing with extraordinary realities. These are differences of degree and not of kind.

Books can be like temples.

This might sound grandiose when we talk about the commonplace stories that most people are reading and writing. But it’s something to aspire to. We don’t need every temple consecrated to the Prime Movers of the cosmos. There’s plenty of room down here for smaller temples, pagan temples, dedicated to the lesser demigods and genius locii that live around us.

This gets into the question of what a temple should be: does a temple need a god? Or can it just be a metaphysical gathering place for entities of all kinds? Maybe some temples are more like pubs than administrative buildings. Maybe a temple can be a beacon for working-class spirits, and not just an earthly embassy for the Big Ones.

Maybe a book can be that too.

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This approach won’t be for everybody. Not every book needs to be a temple. Mundane books aren’t necessarily inferior. We don’t need every book to be spangled with sigils, loaded with arcane maps, stuffed with sketches of the flora and fauna of the Otherworld.

But they certainly could be.

For those of us who can’t get the scribbling monkey off our backs, no matter how much it costs us, this kind of book is still worth writing, even (especially) in These Dark Times. If we can’t keep from writing, we might as well write enchanted books that serve as physical portals. The slop-trough of cheap content is overflowing and the economics don’t make sense. But people still feel the power of genuine, tangible, honest-to-God books, even if they can’t put their finger on why. There’s a real need going unfulfilled.

It’s a high bar to clear.

We’ll know we’ve succeeded when the books we write have their own weird gravity. If we do our jobs well, people decades from now might feel the intangible pull of a book before they even open it. Books have a hard time whispering to potential readers when they’re reduced to digital ephemera. They need a gateway into our world, drawing on the sensual experience of touch and texture and smell, to create the enfolding space of an object with physical and symbolic consequence. People still pull the good ones off the shelf and flip through the pages on a whim, because they want to step across the threshold into that other world, and reconnect with the spirits living there.

There’s a practical difference between an author trying to write whatever book they can sell the quickest, and writing a book worthy of being printed—of occupying a physical space in somebody’s life, of being revisited and handed down many times, becoming a familiar portal to a favorite place.

This approach would dictate that, even if the publishing industry falls apart completely, the author should still print at least one copy of their book: if necessary, written in lampblack ink on homemade paper, hand-bound, and given away for free. A book like this would still hold value even if it didn’t come with a cash advance and an author photo on the back flap—would probably blaze its own sorcerous path through the world much faster and to greater effect than if it were commercially printed. The world is already flush with slick, shiny, soulless products. We need more weird little treasures. All the better if it’s something that people can’t wait to show their friends because it feels alive. Like a little haunted paper temple.

It’s a small target to hit through a narrow window that seems to be closing rapidly.

But it’s still possible.

1. I’m sure this constant back-and-forth has gotten tiresome for some of my readers. As always, I humbly thank you for sticking with me on this. I swear I haven’t been playing coy. This has been a genuine, constant struggle, for over a year now; having the opportunity to air it out in public and get some feedback from other people has been very helpful.

2. And occasionally take up a phantom existence in our reality, beyond the printed page. One famous example is Alan Moore reportedly meeting a manifestation of his fictional creation, John Constantine, from the Hellblazer series of graphic novels. Constantine apparently found him in a pub and said, (apologies to sensitive American readers) “I’ll tell you the ultimate secret to magic: any cunt could do it.” Words to live by.

3. Of course, this also happens with digital devices, in a much more literal, explicit, and creepy way. First rule of applied metaphysics: be careful what you invite into your home.