Proving That I Exist

May 11, 2023

I don’t trust anyone who tries to tell me how my mind works. If someone tells me my mind works a certain way, I will do everything in my power to make it work the exact opposite way. If they tell me I want dopamine, I will throw my phone into a landfill. If they tell me I need a sense of community, I will lock myself in my room. If they tell me that I’m angry because of such-and-such problem, I will reply, “No, I’m just hungry,” and then I will eat a bagel.

The only people I trust are novelists, because they don’t try to tell me anything about myself. Instead, they tell me how their mind works, and I say, “Oh yeah, mine’s kind of like that too.” That’s a friendly interaction. We are coming to each other with humility; one asks the question, “Do you sympathize with this?” and the other says, “Yes, I do.” There’s no presumption of authority. We’re all on level ground.

I’m the only person who knows what’s going on with me. I don’t know what’s going on with any of you. I don’t understand you, except to the extent that you are similar to me. Thankfully, when we look carefully, we find a great deal of similarities. However, we also find a great deal of differences. I don’t expect anyone who reads this to understand why I do what I do. In fact, my general attitude is to assume that everyone hates me for how I live my life. This is because I don’t do most of the things people consider necessary for a good life.

My dad keeps joking lately that I should have been born into an aristocratic family in the 19th century. Either that, or I should have been born some sort of farmer. I’m not sure. All I can say is that I definitely am not cut out for the sort of world I’ve found myself in. Perhaps, there is no world that fits me properly. I guess that’s probably true of everyone.

The idea behind Balckwell Rising is to chronicle my attempts to reckon with the world. I am a man of constant reckoning. If I have any skill, it’s that one.

I wrote a novel, and I published it two weeks ago. It is called Only In Dreams. It is the story of a young man obsessed with love, and obsessed with dreams. As far as he is concerned, love, like dreams, exists only within his own mind. During the story, he has to deal with his dreams and his love becoming externalized. They become real. He is not alone in the world anymore. Gradually, he is thrown from his inner world into the world that we all share.

Only In Dreams is another way of expressing everything on this website, in the same way that 2+2, the square root of 16, and 48/12 all express the same number. In some sense, I believe that our lives work like this as well: that our existence here on Earth is a projection or manifestation of our soul somewhere else. I use the word “somewhere,” even though it’s not a place, because that’s what I have to do. I have to write a bunch of words.

Schopenhauer, in the preface to The World as Will and Representation, writes:

“What is to be imparted by [this book] is a single thought. Yet in spite of all my efforts, I have not been able to find a shorter way of imparting that thought than the whole of this book.”

I myself am a single thought, but the shortest means I have of expressing that thought is my entire life. Within this life, everything I do, every word I write, gestures toward that thought, and acts as a key toward understanding that thought. The quantity is unimportant. It is not about mass-manufacturing keys. It is about constructing a matrix of keys of which any one, or any two, or any three, or any four… can serve to lead one toward the thought.

For whatever reason, I exist. I exist in the exact way that I do. I have tried to be different than I am, and I have tried to be exactly as I am. I have succeeded and failed at both. During this process, I have written hundreds of essays, a tiny assortment of short stories, one complete novel, and two unfinished novels. Of all of these, Only In Dreams is the most important to me.

It is my hope that I can continue to write and publish many more novels, but at the same time, I feel that the one is enough in itself. I have turned some part of my existence into its own being with a life of its own. Only In Dreams exists in the world as a testament to the fact that someone named Mike Blackwell once wrote a novel called Only In Dreams. I find that pretty cool.

I wrote the novel four times. I had to stop after the fourth time, or else I would keep writing it forever. I had to move on to some other story.

(I’ve briefly mentioned the novel I’m working on right now, which is about a man named Pierre. I feel like the fact that his name is Pierre tells you everything you need to know about him. Ideally, when you opened the book up, there wouldn’t even be any text inside. I lack the confidence to do something like that that, so instead I’m writing a whole novel to explain what I mean by naming this character Pierre.)

This website exists because I needed somewhere to put my essays, because if I didn’t make somewhere to put them, I’d never finish them. Even if I thought they were complete, they would still remain just drafts in a folder, always open to being meddled with and tweaked. I needed somewhere for them to go that signaled that they were complete, that they could be looked at and reckoned with for what they are. On the one hand, so that other people could read and enjoy them, and on the other hand, for my own sake, so that I could accept them as a final product that can no longer be changed.

Each essay and each novel reflects a moment — a moment that can be as short as a few hours or as long as several years. If they are hidden away, they are not able to participate in their moment. I said in my recent Frankenstein episode that “A man alone is no man at all” — a book left unread is similarly no book at all. My novels and my essays are not a diary. They are meant to be shared as an aspect of my social existence. For a long time, I thought I wanted to hide Only In Dreams away, but I didn’t fully realize until I clicked that big Publish button how much I truly needed to let it free.

We now enter the era of Balckwell Rising in which I can call myself a novelist without feeling like I’m pulling one over on everyone. I wrote a novel. It’s right here. You can read it.

Alright, I can stop talking about it now.