Midway Through the Labyrinth

I have spent much of my life imagining that achievement would simply arrive. A manuscript completed. A degree earned. A publication secured. A debt paid. Some invisible bell would ring, and I would finally inhabit the person I had been attempting to become.

The years have taught a different lesson. Life accumulates rather than concludes. One project gives birth to another. Each summit reveals additional ridges beyond the clouds. The destination recedes. The work remains.

When I look back, I see more evidence of movement than I once allowed myself to acknowledge. I earned a master's degree in philosophy. I published academic work. I placed fiction and poetry in journals. I developed as a painter. I built friendships and communities that would have seemed improbable to earlier versions of myself. There were years when survival itself demanded most of my attention. Yet the work continued. The manuscripts continued. The paintings continued.

Several novels now occupy various stages of existence.

Revolver remains among the most personal and unsettling. Its subject is madness, illness, and disintegration, following a protagonist whose syphilitic decline fractures the boundaries between perception and reality. Disease functions there as more than a medical condition. It becomes a force that reshapes memory, identity, and the architecture of consciousness itself. The novel has haunted me for years because it inhabits territory where philosophy, horror, and tragedy converge.

Hours on Fire pursues a very different ambition. It resists conventional narrative in favor of a fragmented, recursive structure inspired by works such as The I Ching and Naked Lunch. The project seeks a form capable of accommodating contradiction, dream logic, prophecy, and metafiction. Rather than presenting a world, it attempts to generate one through juxtaposition and recurrence.

Then there is project "Mudball," a post-apocalyptic science fiction project shaped by my long admiration for Philip K. Dick. I remain fascinated by questions of reality, memory, and identity. Post-apocalyptic fiction often concerns survival. I find myself equally interested in epistemology. What happens when entire civilizations collapse and certainty collapses with them? What forms of meaning emerge from cultural debris?

A fourth project turns toward the historical imagination through a fictionalized retelling of the Donner Party. The story continues to exert a peculiar gravitational pull. The ordeal occupies an ambiguous territory between history, mythology, and nightmare. It contains suffering, endurance, community, betrayal, landscape, and the extremities of human adaptation. Every return to the material reveals another layer.

Poetry has followed its own trajectory.

Posthumology and Spectral Ethics emerged from periods marked by melancholy, grief, and sustained philosophical reflection. They concern mortality, memory, loss, and the strange afterlives that persist within consciousness. Those collections often feel like conversations conducted in candlelit rooms with ghosts who never entirely departed.

More recently, my attention has drifted toward a different register. Necrosophia and Psychagogia move closer to visionary and prophetic traditions. Their atmosphere owes something to apocalyptic literature, Renaissance occultism, medieval prophecy, and the enigmatic utterances of figures such as Nostradamus. I find myself increasingly drawn toward symbolic systems, archetypal imagery, and forms of writing that function simultaneously as poetry, philosophy, and revelation.

Yet the future I imagine extends beyond books.

I want to continue painting.

A sentence unfolds through sequence. A painting arrives all at once. Color, texture, gesture, and composition generate forms of understanding that remain stubbornly resistant to paraphrase. Each canvas teaches patience. Each canvas reveals another limitation worth overcoming.

I want to continue exploring the natural world. Museums, forests, shorelines, fossils, insects, cryptids, folklore, forgotten histories, strange books acquired from stranger places. Curiosity has always been one of the most reliable sources of meaning in my life. I hope it remains so for decades to come.

I want to deepen friendships and cultivate new ones. Creative work flourishes through solitude, yet life itself flourishes through connection. Some of the happiest surprises of recent years arrived through people rather than projects.

I want to improve my health.

This goal appears almost embarrassingly mundane beside novels and philosophy, yet it may be among the most important. The mind inhabits a body. For years I treated that fact as an inconvenience. Increasingly I regard it as a responsibility. Better fitness, greater strength, improved endurance, healthier habits: these ambitions lack the glamour of publication announcements, yet they shape every other aspiration. The future I desire requires a body capable of carrying me toward it.

Perhaps that is the central realization. Achievement no longer appears as a collection of trophies arranged upon a shelf. It resembles cultivation. Books, paintings, friendships, knowledge, health, and experience belong to the same ecology. Each nourishes the others.

There was a time when I imagined success as arrival.

Now I imagine it as continuity.

I want to finish these novels. I want to complete these poetry collections. I want to fill sketchbooks and canvases. I want to publish more stories. I want to read difficult books and walk unfamiliar trails. I want to remain curious. I want to remain capable of wonder. I want to become healthier, stronger, and more resilient than I am today.

The list remains unfinished because life remains unfinished.

That fact once troubled me. It now strikes me as a gift.

The future stands before me as a field of unwritten pages, blank canvases, and untaken roads. Some projects will fail. Others will transform into something entirely different from what I currently imagine. A few may succeed beyond expectation. The uncertainty no longer feels threatening. It feels alive.

For now, the work continues.

Somewhere beyond the horizon of the present moment, versions of myself I have yet to become are already setting their tools upon the table and beginning.