Thanks to all who responded to the last epistle. This new email address is warming up quite nicely.
In this popup museletter, we shall review the results of the survey. Then I’ll share a hint about the book’s working title.
🗡️ 9% chose the enchanted-looking short sword
You find yourself the hero of your own story. This feels glorious, at first. Oh how your sword sparkles!
But little do you realise that this sword has trapped you within a mono-myth centred around individualism, linear progression, and conquest. It seems the enchantment is also a curse, preventing you from experiencing the wisdom-inducing thrill of emergent complexity and generative co-existence. Oh well!Add 1 x “enchanted-looking short sword” to your inventory. The sword gives you a +2 Attack bonus, but you are also now cursed with MCS. Alas! Turn to page 42.
💰 11% chose the gleaming back of coins and seeds
This one is a mixed bag. The coins (symbolic meta-optionality tokens representing a universally fungible ‘claim on energy’) are themselves cursed. But the seeds are handy! They are symbolic of regeneration—the opposite of extraction.
The canny among you subvert the system, using coins not simply to accumulate yet more coins, but rather to regenerate life—thus generating true value.
Add 5 x d6 Coins and 5 x d6 Seeds to your inventory. Turn to page 56.
🏺 18% chose the carafe filled with spring water
How nice is water! I have friends who hunt for natural spring water. You drink the water, which tastes of wholesome minerals, and feel refreshed!
Restore 1 x d4 of Vitality. Turn to page 17.
🦋 23% chose the flowering wand and butterfly
The butterfly—ever the symbol of transformation and change—and the flowering wand, a device well-suited to (re-)awakening latent vitality. Good choice!
It might also be that we have some fans of Sophie Strand’s book The Flowering Wand, here. A book that takes a re-wilding approach to myth, asking: “Does your metaphor have an ecosystem?”
Add 1 x “flowering wand” to your inventory. It grants you +3 Luck to any druid and life spells. Turn to page 37.
🟩 39% chose the broken plinth in the shadows (the one covered in moss)
It was very heartening that the largest portion of subscribers were attuned to the one in the penumbra. Whereas every other plinth held an object, this one didn’t—instead, it provided a platform for moss.
Moss thrives at thresholds—softening stone, holding moisture, nurturing life in overlooked places. Whereas the “flowering wand and butterfly” might represent transformation and change, here moss heralds an invitation. A beckoning towards composting, dissolution and release. An invitation to transformation.
Gain +10xp. Your quest continues. Turn to page 113.
ᕁ᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮ᕁᕁ᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮ᕁᕁ᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮ᕁᕁ᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮ᕁᕁ᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮ᕁᕁ᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮ᕁᕁ᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮᙮ᕁᕽᕽᕁ᙮᙮🐌
You would be forgiven for thinking my next book is a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ novel. Actually, it kind of is—but perhaps not as overtly as what I have just shared here.
There’s something to be said about the threshold moments that life sometimes presents us.
As we know: momentum inhibits reinvention.
At a macro-scale, we have a paradigm of infinite growth that is leading our species, and much of life on Earth, towards self-termination. There are forces that want to keep us productive, busy, unquestioning and unawares.
But some of us notice the beckoning.
I’ve been listening to the podcast “We Are The Great Turning” in which Jessica Serrante has an extended conversation with Joanna Macy—a 95-year-old Buddhist scholar, translator of Rainer Maria Rilke, and creator of “The Work That Reconnects”. She’s a true elder, and it’s been heartbreaking to hear her genuine grief at the trajectory of our world.
There’s hope there, too. But it’s the grounded kind of hope we can arrive at without spiritual bypassing.
I’m writing of a way to embody that hope, in a manner that doesn’t diminish your efficacy in this current epoch we share.
The trouble with books, though, is that they are ultimately still a ‘product’. And people generally want to invest in things that make them “Feel Good”. Thus, these deeper and perhaps more ‘sombre’ sensibilities need to be smuggled in.
Yet! Whilst writing this to you, I saw this pop up from Nassim Taleb; a scholar whose writing and thinking I still (generally) admire.
Rick Rubin also speaks similarly. “Make art for yourself—not the audience,” he says. “The audience comes last… And it turns out that when you make something truly for yourself, you’re doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience.”
(I’m wary of quoting popular men—on account of it being trite—but there’s something in this. )
As much as I say I am writing this book for you, I am also writing this book for the younger version of myself who—despite doing “all the right things”, needed to heed the gifts that disenchantment brings.
Okay, this email turned out way too sombre—ha! Rest assured, this isn’t quite the tone I’m going for. ~(˘▾˘~)
And I also want you to know: this book is far from “done”. I’m merely helping myself manifest it by speaking of it to you.
The book I’m writing will be exactly the kind of book you offer a friend who’s “just not feeling it any more”. It’s the book you’ll gift to a friend who is burnt out from maintaining their own momentum. It’s a book you’ll turn to whenever you think: there’s got to be a better way…
As I mentioned last time, this whole book writing process feels like a courtship and evocation. I’ve needed to develop within myself so as to be able to write this. There are countless drafts I have binned because they were all “too clever”, and too swept up in pretensions and postulations.
The mythologist Martin Shaw, someone from whom I’ve learned much, emphasises that storytellers embark on a journey from persona to presence. He suggests that while a persona is a constructed identity we develop to navigate social interactions, presence emerges when we shed these layers, embracing authenticity and depth.
I’ve danced with the utility of personas before. But this next book will offer something a step further; speaking to the authentic relational acuity behind the personas we deploy. The presence.
And now, to the hint as to the working title for the book.
Six years ago—about three years after How to Lead a Quest was launched—I was going to write a book called “The Character Handbook”.
I’d begun to realise: How to Lead a Quest was too narrow in its purported market.
The number of folks with the influence, authority and willingness to lead quests within organisations was relatively few. And whilst “of course” we want to “venture beyond the default”—the reality is that most leaders and managers within Enterprise Land would rather their people ‘just do the work’; maintaining productivity and operational efficiency (even at the expense of relevance realisation). This is the classic ‘hidden commitment’ to predictability and stability. “We want you to innovate—but don’t you dare innovate!”
I’d realised that it is far better to write to all of the fellow infinite players who just happen to be playing a role within Enterprise Land. Some of them, of course, are the Sleeper Agents, working their way to positions of influence and authority, so as to change things ‘for the better’. Trouble is: most become corrupted by MØŁØĊĦ along the way. I have another book in mind aimed at re-activating the Sleeper Agents we may have lost—but that’s separate from the book I’m currently focused on.
The Character Handbook ultimately didn’t work because of the same curse the enchanted-looking short sword had: “Main Character Syndrome” (MCS). The implication is that those of us afflicted with MCS start to see others not as fellow infinite players, but instead as ‘non-player characters’ (NPCs). This kind of disposition might fuel the ongoing rise of Dark Triad personalities, which… is not cool.
It’s as Granny Weatherwax wisely asserts (paraphrased):
People who think they are Special and Chosen are dangerous and bad for the world.
(I was reminded of this by Venkatesh Rao’s recent post—a wonderful homage to Discworld).
Suffice to say, I have abandoned the working title of The Character Handbook so as to side-step the threat of writing something that might further perpetuate individualism as distinct from individuation. Yet still, there’s an underlying need that beckons to be spoken to.
Shumon Basar wrote of this a few years ago. This snippet from Zora’s Zine on “The Laws of Lorecore” is thoroughly metamodern in form, and something that aptly gestures towards the same emergent phenomena that has been influencing my writing.
“Lore refers to our ubiquitous, obsessive reliance on narrative, meta-narrative, and myth. Do you Story? Do you BeReal? Do you manifest on TikTok? You suffer from—or enjoy—“Main Character Syndrome” (MCS). Everything is about you. Revolves around you. Your innermost thoughts, your outermost actions, all of which must be documented, time-stamped, and uploaded for archival reasons. In the olde days, we would call this solipsism: that strange sense that you are the only thing that truly exists. Everything else, a deceptive holographic irritation. MCS is as if a solipsist could conjure a real-feeling world simply by manifesting it through their media channels. During MCS, it’s your stage, your film set, and everyone else is the crew. The literary genre that best reflects MCS is “autofiction.” It mainstreamed in the 2010s. Autofiction is metafiction of the self. Living life as though you’re acting life and describing it to yourself while acting—but, narrating it out loud, to make sure everyone can hear. Autofiction casts the “I” in an unending performance. Why? For the lore of it. You see, it’s not just dragon-infused fantasy TV that peddles myths these days. Your social media feeds are a factory of myth-making. Lore is the new myth you make about yourself. You live inside these myths mythically. I’d like to suggest that lore is to the self what Sigmund Freud’s death drive was to life: it’s the horizon that makes the here a thing that feels like it’s actually happening to you.”
But the book I am writing feels a little more timeless than the “demented present” we share. Something much more mythic in its mode. Yet timely nonetheless.
Something we can turn to, so that we can better play our roles in response to whatever contexts emerge in the pursuit of meaningful progress and relevance realisation, in this time betwixt worlds.
Okay, that’s enough hinting about the working title. At this point in time I don’t quite know what the next epistle will cover—stay tuned and let’s see what emerges.
In the meantime, if you have any questions, I’d love to hear them. Simply reply to this email. I can’t promise swift or lengthy responses, but your replies genuinely help to warm up this new email address—so they’re deeply appreciated.
Fondness,
—fw
PS: If you want to go the extra mile, please forward this email to a friend. It’s a bit of a mishmash—but they might be intrigued. They can join in for the rest of the pop-up while it lasts » foxwizard.com/popup-museletter