#on conversion

Left: what conversion wanted me to be. Right: what survived. On Conversion — the first essay of The Hedonist Prophet — went out last Friday. Free at jackdangercross.substack.com.

Four days until the first essay of The Hedonist Prophet goes live. On Conversion — a piece about the cultural machinery that tries to convert people into shapes someone else needs them to occupy. Free every Friday in your inbox at jackdangercross.substack.com. The publication's first six months will run a series on conversion: religious, gendered, medical, aesthetic, political.

If you have ever seen a man scratching at his hand and rubbing it until it bleeds, then you have a clear and distinct picture of a sinful soul. For craving gives way to suffering and mental itching yields to torment. And all the while he was scratching he was well aware that this would happen, but he pretended it would not. We tear our wretched souls to pieces the same way and make them sore with our own hands; only this all the more serious in that our spiritual being is more precious and more difficult to heal. We act not so much out of a obstinate enmity, as under a kind of numbness brought about by inner insensitivity. The mind sloshed out of itself does not feel the inward condemnation, for it is not at home, but probably in the belly, or still lower. Some minds dwell on stewpans, others on purses. The Lord says “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Is any wonder that the soul should feel her own wounds so little when she has forgotten who she is, and is inwardly estranged from herself, having taken her journey into a far country? Yet there will be a time when, coming to herself, she will realize how cruelly she has mutilated herself just to get a miserable piece of game. But she was not able to feel that as long as she was burning to lay hand on some vile piece of prey of flies, like a spider spinning its web out of its own viscera.