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I have started this occasional Substack as a way of gathering together and growing the odds and ends of my PhD thesis. I completed the thesis earlier this year, titling it: “Living Books”: Reading Intimately with Emma Goldman, John Cowper Powys, and Margaret Anderson. As is the case with many, my thesis ended up in a very different place to where it started. Ideas that originally motivated me were gradually crowded-out by others. I encountered new perspectives which led me to completely re-frame my project, on multiple occasions. And I ran into several theoretical cul-de-sacs and open planes that were simply too vast to explore. A consequence of all of this is that there are many loose ends and bits of ideas which I simply didn’t have the space for in my thesis. Here, I hope to trace those loose ends to see where they lead.

I have named the Substack “Seeds beneath the snow,” a phrase I currently use for my Instagram bio. It originally comes from the anarchist Colin Ward, who uses it to describe how a libertarian society is:

“…always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism.” (Ward, 2018: 14)

It is a great opening to a book I highly recommend, and one which upended my way of thinking about the world and our possibilities within it. That poetic image of the seed beneath the snow stuck with me, evoking a sense of hope about our collective future, but nevertheless one premised on something that already exists in the here and now. It joins together the ideal and the practical in a way I have come to realise is characteristic of the kinds of thinking I am drawn to.

The phrase is then used again by David Goodway for his study on anarchism and British literature, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward. This study was a huge inspiration for my thesis as Goodway devotes two whole chapters to exploring John Cowper Powys’s relation to anarchism. His analysis of Powys’s idiosyncratic individualist anarchism is perhaps the best exposition of his philosophy around, and something I want to build upon here.

It therefore seemed appropriate to use this phrase as a title, seeing as it captures both the origins of my thesis as well as the purpose of this Substack. I hope to grow the seeds of ideas sown during my research, but also to offer those ideas to others so that they might “grow” them in their own life. Despite the slightly arcane-sounding nature of my thesis, the argument arose from very practical considerations around reading which originated through my own, personal reading. As such, the image of the seed also captures another aspect of my work, a refusal to separate my thinking from my life.

Powys was not only an individualist anarchist, but an egoist, and what makes his philosophy so vital is that he roots it in his own, immediate experience. In The Meaning of Culture (1929), he articulates how each person possesses their own “plant-like” philosophy, or “life-illusion” (an important term for Powys and one I will unpack in a later post), whose “outer leaves, like those of a floating water-plant, expand in the sunshine and in the rain of pure chance.” Powys’s use of naturalistic imagery here underscores the value he places on immediate sensory experience, on remaining open and receptive to the elements and “the sunshine and rain of pure chance.” But he also balances this openness to experience with an emphasis on each person’s ability to imagine their way into a happier world:

“Since we are men and women, however, there soon arrives a moment when our philosophy loses its plant-like passivity. Grown now into a conscious system of thought it draws from the flowing saps and vegetative essences of its organic sub-life an active integral consciousness which feeds upon the spectacle of the world. It projects sensitised antennae, this consciousness; it thrusts forth a moth-like tongue. It selects, refuses, advances and recoils before what confronts it. And yet the further it explores… and that is the whole secret of the mysterious process… the more does its awareness of its buried life become vivid and paramount. It is perhaps the most important moment of all in the secret growth of our philosophy when we first discover the unbelievable power of the imaginative will in giving a heightened value to our days.” (Powys, 1974: 11-12)

This passage is representative of Powys’s style of philosophising. It can feel gestural (a stylistic survival from his days as a peripatetic lecturer) but also very specific in its heaping-up of expressions. Images and metaphors are taken-up for effect and then swiftly replaced or even discarded altogether. Powys was a keen walker and much of his writing, including his philosophy and his fiction, requires one to indulge his rambling and roundabout way. But the parade of vivid images and suggestive formulations has a cumulative effect, and just as he is outlining the liberatory potential of the “imaginative will,” page after page, the reader grows steadily aware of their own latent powers of creation.

Originally, I had intended my thesis to take a much more autobiographical or autoethnographic approach, which would have helped to demonstrate my argument (that is, the impossibility of disentangling one’s reading from one’s life – how we often find ourselves reflected in our reading and our reading reflected in our life). To analyse how these writers conceived of reading as a power to shape one’s life required looking to how their work had impacted my own life. The opening of my thesis retains this autobiographical approach, albeit spliced somewhat awkwardly with historical context. However, I came to find that, as I was dealing with an unorthodox set of writers from an academically-unorthodox position, the necessary work of exposition and reiteration made such an approach untenable.

Here I am looking to bring these two streams together again. I am concerned with how the quality of our imaginative life can enrich our actual lived experience, and vice versa. Powys, individuality, egoism, will supply only some of the themes I want to explore, as well as the work of Emma Goldman and Margaret Anderson. I share with Powys a love for walking, especially walking in nature, and this will provide one “life” source for future posts. Besides this, there are the following topics which all, at one point or another, featured in earlier drafts of the thesis.

I spent a long time looking into the intertwined histories of magic and critical literacy, both discourses having informed one another and feeding into literary culture. To put it very (very) generally, magic and literature both deal with the imaginative summoning of forces that either aren’t there or aren’t immediately obvious. Powys often invokes a magical terminology when discussing books, and through reading studies such as William Covino’s Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination (1994) and Ioan Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (1987), I came to understand how magic’s claim to exercise subtle forms of power (be it spiritual or psychological in essence) could be read alongside anarchism (as a frame for understanding power relations). Compare this passage from Couliano to Powys’s description of the development of imaginative willpower:

“Renaissance culture was a culture of the phantasmic. It lent tremendous weight to the phantasms evoked by inner sense and had developed to the utmost the human faculty of working actively upon and with phantasms. It had created a whole dialectic of Eros in which phantasms, which at first foisted themselves upon inner sense, ended by being manipulated at will.” (Couliano, 1987: 193)

The relation between neurodivergence and reading was also another unexplored horizon of the thesis, something I originally thought would play a more fundamental role in my argument. I found that the fact of neurodivergence (that is, neurodivergence as difference rather than deficiency) combined with the fact that reading is not a “natural” but an acquired skill (as Matthew Rubery writes, “there is no single activity known as reading”) upended how we conceive of the task of literary criticism, its purpose, its ethical stakes, and what it might reveal about us. The experience of reading, how it involves one on an imaginative, emotional, and even physical level, must differ enormously from reader to reader.

Another under-explored area, which might even prove to be the bigger idea of the Substack, is hinted at in the following passage from Emma Goldman:

“The problem that confronts us today, and which the nearest future is to solve, is how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities. This seems to me to be the basis upon which the mass and the individual, the true democrat and the true individuality, man and woman, can meet without antagonism and opposition. The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather, Understand one another. The oft-quoted sentence of Madame de Staël: “To understand everything means to forgive everything,” has never particularly appealed to me; it has the odor of the confessional; to forgive one’s fellow-being conveys the idea of pharisaical superiority. To understand one’s fellow-being suffices.” (Goldman, 1998: 158-159)

The ethical stance suggested in these lines is what ties Goldman to Powys and Anderson. All three were writing in the immediate wake of an overbearing, stultifying Victorian Christianity where, for example, charity (despite its claim to the contrary) was conditional upon one’s “moral improvement.” Powys likewise critiques Christian notions of love in his late masterpiece Porius (1951), set in the “dark ages” of Britain, where the character of Myrddin warns the protagonist of the new Christ cult spreading across the land: “I tell you wherever there is what they call “love” there is hatred too and lust for obedience! What the world wants is more common-sense, more kindness, more indulgence, more leaving people alone.” (Powys, 2007: 521)

Both Powys and Goldman critique what they perceive as the underlying power structures inherent to institutional Christian morality. Here is where I am on shaky ground. I perceived a kind of shared ethical stance which rejects specific foundational claims of Christianity, but my knowledge of this religion is not enough to make any bold pronouncements. Indeed, this might not be anything to do with Christianity, but simply the institutionalised form the religion took which influenced the dominant ways of thinking during the period I am looking at.

Put very simply, the ethical stance might be formulated thus: Letting things be as they are rather than trying to change them in the name of a higher power. I think there is much to learn in this, especially when it comes to different cognitive styles living harmoniously together. It is here that reading can become such a useful tool in our lives. I’ll end with another quotation from Powys that I think suggests why:

“But of all the activities culture pursues, in its effort to deepen our awareness of the multifarious magic of life, the one which ought most profoundly to influence us in the direction of humility is the reading of books. When one things what one owes to books, when one discovers again and again the extraordinary illuminations that have come to us from reading books, one’s pride in one’s own originality finds itself forced back to the honest, primordial ground where it has alone a right to expand and expatiate, the ground, namely, that we are what we are, different, peculiar, unique, but not superior to anyone.” (Powys, 1974: 187-188)

Works mentioned:

Couliano, I. (1987) Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Covino, W. (1994) Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination, Albany: SUNY Press.

Goldman, E. (1998) Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, Amherst: Humanity Books.

Goodway, D. (2012) Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward, Oakland: PM Press.

Powys, J. C. (1974) The Meaning of Culture, London: Village Press.

Powys, J. C. (2007) Porius, New York: Overlook Press.

Rubery, M. (2022) Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Ward, C. (2018) Anarchy in Action, Oakland: PM Press.