Early Beginnings

I set out at 17 to become a novelist, and before I reached 19, felt confronted by an inner demand on my creativity. That intensified creative work I still do by hand in journals, although my 20’s saw the most of it, which tended to separate me from everyone, though not entirely so. I didn’t know from experience, not yet, that I could sometimes function on a grand level in private while keeping all my social connections, friendships, and family intact. Not knowing amounted to years I spent at the Jersey Shore— working in the brine, reading and writing, living the life—when I did look forward to later establishing myself.

That same year of my inner confrontation, during the fall semester of my Freshman year at Lynchburg College—where, as things turned out, I finished only that one semester—I committed myself to philosophy when I explored the books on my best friend’s shelf. He was a senior living off campus who took philosophy seriously. I was already philosophically inclined, and although from the perspective of many decades later I often feel I’ve not studied enough, I patiently continue to read works. Some by Walter A. Kaufmann recently. Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Schiller, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Max Stirner is fascinating to have read in 2023 or 2024, and though my familiarity with Henry David Thoreau stretches back into my early teens or childhood—Walden was the favorite book of my girlfriend when I lived on the Jersey Shore during my 20’s. I read Walden and The Maine Woods only recently, though. I look forward to reading Kaufmann’s Critique of Philosophy and Religion.

Late in my 17th year, I didn’t feel I had to be unusually creative to write novels of literary value. The notion of genius never occurred to me until the confrontation at Lynchburg happened. Before that, I felt I had plenty of creativity—nothing special, nothing to set me apart from ordinary people. It was just my ability. Everything was more straight forward.

And all these years later, I haven’t finished writing a single novel. The most I’ve done is 500 pages of rough draft, though I have other draft material, too, plus piles of notes for other stories. Nevertheless, what stared me down around the time of my 19th birthday—that deepened my creative and intellectual life greatly. It does seem obvious to me that one result is that I’ve made more of a mess than I would have, but taken by twists and turns, I’ve explored much more than I would have, and there’s no doubt that understanding the value of the spiritual exaltations I rose to was presupposed by coming to terms at Lynchburg.

An Overarching Spirituality of One’s Own

I spent 13 years—more and less—on Long Beach Island in New Jersey, self-employed at treading clams. Since the work usually amounted to four or five hours a day, I had lots of time to read and write. You might think writing a novel would have been a cinch, but I wrote nothing for publication those years, besides some articles for the local paper. It was about achieving the highest spiritual realizations I could rise to from the standpoint of nature and not going mad in the process, which didn’t always succeed.

Mind you, I don’t have what I regard as unusually high IQ, though I’ll tell you something to the contrary of any lack of intelligence in a moment. I know my IQ isn’t particularly high, only because, due to having job difficulty that baffled me, I had it professionally tested. I went to a psychologist with the problem. Some of the jobs I had tried to acquire were professional level, and the engagement with them especially made me feel I could not understand my problem.

It turned out my Performance IQ is only average, while my Verbal score just makes it into the gifted range. I can write, but my ability is nothing like that of people with extraordinarily gifted IQ’s that might make writing a novel relatively less of the task it is for me. My guess is that my blog may be in a better position to fill out the interests of most of you, because readers with an IQ of, let’s say, 165, will be less common than people interested in philosophy and literature having IQ’s about 30 points fewer, though it’s possible someone with such an extraordinarily high IQ would take interest.

But here’s the point I hinted at. Having a profoundly gifted IQ doesn’t necessarily mean that one’s inspiration can rise to such enormous spiritual exaltations as I have lived out. Without getting busted by the therapeutic state. Doctors exist who want to ascribe only psychiatric value to the like, but visionary genius exists regardless of the denial, even though, in recent times, “visionary” is thought to apply only to entrepreneurs.

Not only is it no minor ability to manage the inspiration as it lasts for weeks and months. You can’t be seen by others as enthralled by what they call mania (even though you identify it as inspiration). It’s also been identified as inspiration by at least one psychiatrist. Julian Lieb, M.D., is coauthor of The Key to Genius, in recent editions named Manic-Depression and Creativity. He has a private psychiatric practice. But you can’t get paranoid—as you can if you’re not careful—and make an enemy of people who have the best for you at heart. It amounts to keeping your behavior consistent, a trick that exercises the precision of Zen. I flew over the cuckoo’s nest, for sure, though I’ve retired from the like at my age.

But looking back on those episodes, not only is exercising grand exaltations something I value regardless of any refusal of the likes of that value by others, I honestly don’t believe a man is crazy if he continues to effectively care for himself and the others he’s responsible for. The belief may be that so-called mania is unmanageable, but it’s called “the divine madness” for a reason—even if that embarrasses people of sensible temperaments. If a man incorporates his episodes into an overarching spirituality of his own in relation to the mystery of existence—good for him. He’s not dependent on the helping professions. He’s his own man, as not only Max Stirner would say. And if he thinks he stands in relation to God, that’s a religious belief rightfully his own.

The Quest Continues in Ordinary Reality

Ordinary life continues the quest that I began at Lynchburg and before then as a young boy. The notion that inspiration at white heat is necessary for creative work can be true for some individuals at some times of their lives, but it’s not what’s needed in my life now.

Whether I write a novel or not is yet to be seen. I didn’t know it when I felt confronted from within myself at Lynchburg, but the straight forward quality of my ambition to get published was done in. I would write in notebooks much more than I would ever get with the program. I felt resolved in relation to a deeper underlying quest, but I’ve always looked to the future as if I might write novels, too. I have been working on some poems since I left my job at the end of March 2025. Not long before then, I got poems published in a couple of high-end fly fishing magazines: The Flyfish Journal during this past winter, and about a year ago Swing the Fly took a poem. I began writing poetry at 17, and there have been periods of my life when I worked on poems daily after getting home from work. I have four bookshelves of poems by authors spanning centuries, most of which I’ve read at least partially. But although I’ve managed to get some poems published, I have many dozens that need work.

You’ll find my Literature and Philosophy blog category sits comfortably ensconced not in culture, but as culture in nature. Literary writers like Gary Snyder and Edward Abbey take the side of the natural world , too, and virtually all who write take at least some inspiration from the wild. I would say inspiration itself is wild. My best friend from St. John’s College, where I attended a semester, was another senior, but one who lived in the dorms and who was deeply informed about the student body. He told me that most St. John’s students got there from having a personal interest in the classics. My education in the classics is predisposed by a knowledge, not only of Aristotle from age nine, but of a classical overview deeply grounded in my family upbringing. You can expect to read at least a few essays. The first post will be one. But largely I will post offbeat ideas that have to do with literature and/or philosophy, likely psychology as well. Ideas I can explore and work out in a post. How often is yet to be seen, but it may be fairly often.

My sincere hope is that I will write pieces you enjoy and find valuable.