New Moon in Pisces
"Hopeless" rituals to become who you are. Obscurity and joy. Scottish author David Keenan. Tarot guidance in the comments, as usual.
David Keenan wanted to write novels, but he didn’t know anything much about writing novels.
He grew up working class in Glasgow and Airdrie, Scotland, loving and writing about music, coming of age in the 1980s alongside the post-industrial experimental, punk, and genre-defying rock scenes that spawned bands like Coil, Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV. More than alongside—Keenan found himself on-the-inside with these bands, reporting on their music as a journalist and taking part in their occult rituals as a practicing magician.
Though he professed to not know anything about writing, he learned as he went, because he felt it was vital that someone be recording the history of this esoteric underground music scene. And though he really wanted to be writing fiction, he didn’t mind getting swept up in the music and the culture of what he ended up calling England’s Hidden Reverse, his first nonfiction book about the ways in which these bands, and the communities they created, revolved, in large part, around being a storehouse for esoteric texts, magic, practices, and rituals.
This was before the days of the internet and Amazon. It was here, amidst the punks and the drugs and the direct experiences of God and Angels and every spiritual being below that and in-between, amidst the belief that music could tap into and reveal the nature of any given moment, holy1 or otherwise, that Keenan found the faith in himself as a novelist and a writer.
Though, not being as sentimental as I am, he’d probably not say it like that.
This is how he does say it, when he describes how he became a critically acclaimed writer of five novels, including his debut This Is Memorial Device, which won the Collyer Bristow Award for Debut Fiction and which he wrote with the hopes of “re-enchanting reality:”
“I wrote for over a decade one novel after another, without ever submitting them, because I didn’t know how to do that, and I didn’t have any agent. But I became possessed … I always knew I wanted to write fiction, and I thought: I’m going to have to start now if I really want to do it. The first novel I ever tried to write—it was so awful. I thought, ‘This is the worst shit that’s ever been written.’
But then I said to myself, ‘You know, this is the moment when most people would give up, when they’d say, ‘OK, you know, I’m not meant to be a writer.’’ So I made a magical vow with myself and I said, ‘I’m going to finish this worthless novel, I’m going to take it right to the end, and when I finish it, I’m going to destroy it. And when I destroy it, I’m going to start again.’
I genuinely did that. It took me a year to finish the worst novel ever written. And at the end of it, I did it. I didn’t just delete it off my laptop; I ritually smashed my laptop into pieces with a hammer so it could never be retrieved. And I started again, and the next novel I wrote became This Is Memorial Device, my first published novel. In a way that whole ritual allowed me to write hopelessly. And I was able to unprecious about it, to get all my clichéd ideas about writing a novel out …
That’s when I believe I became a writer … whether it was the culmination of all of my magical and spiritual tasks, I don’t know. But it was the creative act; it was the act when I became a writer that everything came together for me.”