Darlings

Content Warning: Child Murder and Extreme Pretension

In 1198, Pope Innocent III proclaimed that all churches in Italy should install “Foundling Wheels”. The Wheel was a simple contraption consisting of half a barrel fitted to a window with a bell next to it. Unwanted or unaccepted babies could be placed in the wheel, and thus the care of the Church, and the bell rung without the mother exposing herself to the shame of identification.

As long as human beings have felt shame or fear, they have required technologies of anonymity.

The Wheel was a symbol of hope. Babies that might otherwise have been drowned in the river might at least have a chance of life.

The Wheel was a symbol of despair. You have carried a child for 9 months and now you must give them up. If you are lucky, you might see them on the street years hence - and you cannot reveal yourself to them.

The Wheel was a symbol of judgement. What kind of society would force women to do this?

“In the eyes of those lovers of anxiety and perfection, a work is never completed - a word that for them has no sense - but abandoned; and this abandonment, of the book to the fire or to the public (whether due to weariness or to the obligation to deliver) is a sort of accident, comparable to the breaking of a reflection, that fatigue, irritation or some feeling comes to nothing.” - Paul Valéry, Au suject de Cimetière marin, La Nouvelle Revue Française

In 1933, Paul Valéry published an article on his own poem that he had published 13 years earlier. An earlier echo of the the Substack writers who write about writing. So it is fitting that this article contained one of the finest observations about artistic endeavour ever committed to print. Sometimes written as “No work of art is ever completed, only abandoned”.

A while ago, I was talking to a friend who was praising me for my frequency of writing. He mentioned that he was trying to write and that he had a piece half finished sitting in draft for several months. I advised him to publish it immediately.

I have many flaws but I am not a lover of anxiety and perfection. If you are then please take Valéry’s words to heart. The opposite of perfection is not imperfection - it is existence.

The act of creation is an act of gnostic blasphemy. The gnostic heresies separated the Supreme Being from the Demiurge. The Supreme Being exists on a spiritual plane, pure, divine, unchanging. We Demiurges pull down the divine into the material, the mundane. An act of reverse transubstantiation - turning the Body and Blood back into Bread and Wine.

But wouldn’t you rather be eating bread and drinking wine?

I love Valéry’s lack of concern about the fate of his work - the book can go into the fire or the public. There is little difference between the two. Both consume your work until there is nothing recognizable left. Except maybe fatigue and irritation.

Substack is a Foundling Wheel for brainchildren.

But what other options apart from abandonment are there?

Medea: “My friends, my resolve is fixed on the deed, to kill my children with all speed and to flee from this land: I must not, by lingering, deliver my children for murder to a less kindly hand. They must die at all events, and since they must, I who gave them birth shall kill them. Come, put on your armor, my heart. Why do I put off doing the terrible deed that must be done? Come, wretched hand, take the sword, take it and go to your life's miserable goal. Do not weaken, do not remember that you love the children, that you gave them life. Instead, for this brief day forget them—and mourn hereafter: for even if you kill them, they were dear to you. - Euripides, Medea

Murder was not uncommon in the families of Greek Myth in a manner that makes soap operas look restrained. Cronus castrated his father and then ate his children which does not strike me as a healthy family dynamic.

Nevertheless, Medea’s crime was noteworthy. Medea was a Princess of Colchis, a Georgian kingdom at the Eastern end of the Black Sea. She was a descent of Helios the Sun God. She fell in love with Jason, the Greek adventurer who sought the Golden Fleece. She betrayed her family and killed her brother for Jason. She conspired to cause the death of Jason’s hostile uncle Pelias. She bore Jason two sons.

And then Jason left her for a Corinthian Princess and Medea was to be exiled. This was to prove a fatal mistake. And, given Medea’s track record, a predictable one. Medea did not fuck around. She killed the Princess and her father with poison and then killed her own sons with a sword before leaving with their bodies on the Chariot of Helios. Jason was spared to ensure that he experienced his grief unalloyed.

Apart from her gender, Medea would have made a great 00s Golden Age of TV Anti-Hero - as recent posts like “The female mind cannot comprehend the allure of Medea of Colchis” prove. Medea is creative. Not a mere battlefield bludgeoner, Medea is an artist. She schemes. She creates. She forms. She is proud. She betrays. But more than revenge, what she craves is control. She will not be separated from her children by someone else. She takes no notes. Her creative decisions are final.

“Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament… if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: 'Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it —whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.'

…That you must master the secret for yourselves lay implicit in our bargain, and you were never promised that a writer's training would be easy. Yet a clue was certainly put in your hands when, having insisted that Literature is a living art, I added that therefore it must be personal and of its essence personal.” - Arthur Quiller-Couch, On The Art of Writing: Lecture 12: On Style.

To finish his inaugural series of lectures as King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, Arthur Quiller-Couch - aka Q (but not that Q*) - wrote about a matter close to his heart: Literary style. In particular what style is not. Style is not heavy and ponderous and ornate - like a poisoned golden robe and coronet. Style is sharp and quick - like a dagger to your child’s heart.

Above all, Q orders us to murder our darlings. Not “kill”. We must own this act of filicide. Valéry would abandon his work to the flames in a fit of weariness. Q would hurl it kerosene-soaked into the furnace to ensure that this abomination can no longer contaminate the rest of the work. These are crimes of passion. And it is up-close and personal.

For Q, the purpose of style is find yourself. If someone else could write that sentence, that paragraph then you have failed. Abandon. Murder. Amputate what you need to.

What I want to read are words that no one else could have written but you.

*”Bond, there are no exploding pens this week but we do have a fine selection of sonnets for your appreciation.”