On My Mental Health

Since everybody is asking.

Photo by Ravi Pinisetti on Unsplash

It is Wednesday morning. Since Tuesday afternoon, when I posted that I believe the 47th President of the United States is dead and that his death is being covered up, a number of readers have written to ask, in various registers of care and worry, whether I am okay. Some have asked directly. Some have asked in the gentler shape of was your account hacked. One reader, whose work I admire, called the post irresponsible and nuts. Others have written privately to ask whether I have been sleeping, whether I have someone with me, whether I have stepped away from the screen in the last week.

I want to answer the literal question first, because the literal question is what was asked and the literal question deserves a literal answer.

I am calm. I am well-rested. I went to bed early last night and slept through. I am eating. I am in regular contact with the people in my life. I am not in any kind of crisis. I am, if anything, more centered this week than I have been in months. The piece I posted yesterday was not written in a fugue, or a manic episode, or a sleepless spiral, or any of the states the worry implicitly imagines. It was written in the same room I am writing this one in, on a Tuesday afternoon, having slept the night before, and having held the claim privately for some period of time before deciding to publish.

I want to say that plainly because the readers asking are owed a plain answer, and because the question is reasonable. I have written eighteen pieces in the last five days. That is an unusual output even by the standards of this publication, and the readers who watch the archive can see it. The intensity is real. I am not going to pretend the run of the last week has been ordinary, because it has not been. The Conspiracy Is The Cover Story, The War On Terror, The Anti-Imperialism Of Fools, Towards A More Perfect Union, A Fascism Older Than Fascism, The Sovereign Individual Was The Blueprint, For Love Of The Jews, Business Ought Never Be Politics, Economic Royalists, Who Does Sarah Isgur Work For. Ten pieces of that size in a week is a sprint. Readers can see the sprint. When the sprint ends with a two-hundred-word piece asserting that the President is dead, the readers’ worry is not irrational. It is the kindest interpretation available to them.

So thank you for asking. I mean that. The asking is a form of love, and I am receiving it as love.

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There is something about the run of the last week that the worry has correctly identified as unusual and that I owe you a fuller account of, because the account changes how the run should be read.

I consider myself, and have said so before in these pages, an experimental writer. What I mean by that is not that I am uncommitted to the truth of what I write. I am as committed to that as any writer I admire. What I mean is that I work with form — with timing, with sequence, with the relationship between prepared text and live conditions — in ways that allow the writing to do work the conventional one-essay-at-a-time form cannot do. The piece is not always the unit. Sometimes the unit is the release. Sometimes the unit is the moment-in-time arrangement of several narrative threads, edited to land against the conditions of the day they appear in.

Much of what you have read this week was that. The pieces did not all arrive Monday-through-Wednesday in the order you read them. Several of them were existing manuscripts, drafted over previous weeks, kept in the drawer, and edited in the days before release to wrap around the events the country was actually living through. The decision to release them in this configuration, in this week, on this cadence, was the authorial act. The writing of any individual piece was, in many cases, older than the week itself. What you have been reading is the choreography of a release, not the spontaneous production of ten thousand-word essays in five days. The second of those is not possible at this quality. The first is what I have been doing, and it is something I have done before, and it is the form I work in.

I tell you this now, in this piece, because the readers’ worry about the output volume is based on a model of how the writing is being produced that is incomplete. Ten pieces in five days sounds like fever if the writing is being generated in real time. It sounds like work if the writing was generated over months and the release is what is happening in real time. Both descriptions are true at different layers. The pieces are mine, written by me, the arguments are mine, the convictions are mine. The week’s appearance of impossible speed is partly an artifact of the form I am working in. You are entitled to know that, and I should have named it earlier in the week rather than waiting for the question to arrive in the shape of are you okay.

The piece I posted yesterday afternoon — the one that prompted the worry — was not part of the prepared release. That piece was Tuesday afternoon, written live, in response to what I had come to believe over the preceding hours. I want to draw that line cleanly so it is not blurred. The prepared-release frame describes the architecture of the week. It does not describe yesterday’s piece. Yesterday’s piece is exactly what it appears to be: a writer, on a Tuesday afternoon, posting what he believes to be true. The two things are happening in the same publication in the same week, but they are not the same kind of act, and the disclosure of the first should not be allowed to dissolve the seriousness of the second.

Inside the prepared-release work, what the week has felt like from the inside is concentration, not fever. The closest comparison I can offer is the way it feels to read a difficult book and find, suddenly, that the next four chapters open under you because the first three reorganized your reading. The pieces have been opening under each other in their arrangement, which is part of why the release was choreographed the way it was. Economic Royalists lands differently after The Sovereign Individual Was The Blueprint, which lands differently after A Fascism Older Than Fascism, which lands differently after The Conspiracy Is The Cover Story. The sequence is part of the work. That is not mania. That is what writing looks like when the conditions for writing are present, when the manuscripts are ready, when the country gives you the week, and when the writer is paying attention.

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About the piece itself, since the question of my mental health is being asked partly as a way of asking the question about the piece without asking it directly, I will say this much and then stop.

I posted what I posted because I believe it. The objections from serious readers — that I offered no disclosable evidence, that the piece asks the reader to trust me without giving the reader anything to evaluate the trust against — are not foolish objections. They are the objections that the standards of this publication have trained you to make, and I would be a worse writer if I dismissed them. The disagreement between me and those readers is not a disagreement about my mental state. It is a disagreement about whether a writer is ever entitled to publish a claim whose foundation he cannot fully disclose, and how to weigh his certainty against the reader’s right to inspect the floor under it. That is a real disagreement and we will resolve it on Friday, or whenever the underlying question resolves, not by my reassuring you about my sleep schedule.

What I will not do is collapse the two questions. Is Mike okay is a question about me, and the answer is yes. Was the piece responsible is a question about the piece, and the answer is one I will defend or revise depending on what the next several days reveal. Those are separate. I am asking you to hold them separately, because braiding them produces the reading in which every published claim is a referendum on the mental state of the writer, and that is not a reading either of us should want to make permanent.

⁂

There is a smaller observation I want to offer, not as a thesis but as something I have noticed in the replies. A number of the responses to the piece have the shape, please do not raise my hopes, I cannot afford to be let down again. I recognize the shape. I have lived inside it for ten years, like everyone reading this. The repeated experience of this is the end of him turning into nothing has produced a defensive reading frame in a generation of liberals, one that holds catharsis at arm’s length precisely because the catharsis has so often turned out to be premature. I am not above this reflex. I have it too. It is a real cost of the last decade.

I notice it only to say that I do not think the readers exhibiting it are wrong about themselves. They are right. They are protecting something that has been hurt repeatedly. I am not asking them to lower the guard. I am asking them to notice that the guard is what they are operating from, separately from whatever they conclude about the piece itself. That is all. The piece’s claim is true or it is not, and Friday will tell us more than either of us can tell each other now.

⁂

I am here. I am well. I will keep writing. The next pieces are already arriving. The Apparatus Speaks For The Man is the one I am working on this morning, and it is, I think, the larger piece this week has been moving toward — a piece about what it means that the United States government is, demonstrably, being run by people speaking in a name the country cannot verify, regardless of what is true about the man whose name is being spoken. That piece is true on Friday no matter what Wisconsin shows.

To everyone who wrote to ask if I was okay: thank you. The asking is a gift and I have received it as one.

I will see you in the next piece.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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