Beginnings
Wayward musings; bringing a chaosmos of thoughts into focus.
It’s 2:13 AM on February the 13th of 2025 as I begin typing this errant missive to who-knows-who, wondering aloud (to myself, silently) what this substack account should focus on. I have the problem of having too much to choose from, too many stray ideas and projects flitting about in the aether, too much uncertainty about how to corral any of these and form them into something coherent that readers (who?) would be willing or interested in taking time to slow down to read.
What does anyone want to hear from me? Is this thing on? Is there anyone out there? The Fermi’s paradox of the Pandora’s box that is the internet likely means there’s just too much “noise.” No one is out there because everyone is out there, scrolling, scrolling… unfurling the never-ending scroll foretelling every shape and variety of horror, an endless feast of gore and suffering, a palimpsest recording an evidently infinite amount of fear, anxiety and suffering. Designed in a lab to be addictive. Designed to steal your attention, deaden your emotional capacity, bolstering falsity and rapacity. Building an unreal world, where freedom is not even desired, no shared experience can be agreed upon, and everything continues to fragment and shatter, and any thought returned to is unrecognizable, mutilated. Building an unreal world by erasing the real. And on an on, further into the web the wicked fates weave, ensnared in our own bottomless vanity.
So, yes, but what to do with this forum? An empty stage. The lights are down, the curtain closed, the puppets lie limp and face-down, their heads full of sawdust, awaiting the pulling of the strands that animate them. The fates measure a thread and snip.
(25.5 x 19.5 in. ink drawing, “Coven of the Blue Moonrise.” The basis of the drawing is an archival photo from a 1916 stage production of “The Kairn of Koridwen,” which I discovered in an old trunk at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in 2015.)
(Production photo of “The Kairn of Koridwen,” 1916. Set design by Herbert E. Crowley.)
I wonder if I should use this format to publish excerpts of the biography/art book chronicling the life of Mary Mowbray-Clarke….. mostly during the era of covid quarantine I wrote an 889 page “volume I” - and the daunting task of editing this down to a publishable length, trying to find some sort of home for it, has bedeviled me for years. I don’t know how substack would format the sort of writing it is, being rich with footnotes and such, but if it worked I could add similar things. I could easily add a chapter per week or some such, if there was interest. Is there interest? Does it matter if there is?
I have so much squirreled away. Perhaps 60 pounds worth of historically important papers - documents, letters, unpublished autobiographies, glass plate negatives, artworks, plaster medallions… much of it salvaged from Mary’s abandoned house in the woods. And I have my own artworks and writing about these things, as well. And more than that. And things sideways from that and diagonally related and all of it tied together in some sort of web.
Let’s see where this goes. This is just a placeholder message, an announcement that, yes, I’ve begun a substack account.
Thank you so much for joining me on whatever journey this becomes.
—- Justin Duerr, Philadelphia, 2:38 AM, 2025.02.13