Dead Souls

Forgive me Substack for I have sinned, it has been many months since my last confession. Somewhere around April of this year I got stuck on a piece and the thin veneer of my weekly publishing discipline cracked and I let it remain broken. There have been Substacks since, you may have read them, but not pieces of writing. They’ve been promoting things: print releases, events and my new workshop series. Those Substacks are not really writing, they’re not what this medium is for. I’m not digging into myself and baring anything of my soul to an audience for a promo email. There’s no catharsis after its complete, just a box ticked, a necessary commercial duty fulfilled for my financial survival.

At first I didn’t miss the writing too much so I didn’t try to make it start again. It felt good to be liberated from this self imposed responsibility that I took on the start of the 2024 when I began this Substack. I aimed, and mostly succeeded, to publish weekly for a whole year. I got up to 21 paying subscribers which triggered an automated email from Substack congratulating me on making my first $1000 on the platform. Pretty wild. As those paid subscribers have trickled away over the last few months I’ve felt no need to rush to get them back. Its been nice to let it sit and say less.

I might not have been writing much but I have been reading. For over two months now I’ve been making my way through a Russian classic: Nikolay Gogol’s Dead Souls. I’ve read and enjoyed Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Bulgakov but I’ve always regarded Dead Souls to somehow be the final boss of bleak, intense Russian literature. Just look at that Penguin cover, the couple trudging through the dark cold waste, the title sends shiver down the spine and even the author’s name, Gogol sounds like Gulag or Golem. But the theme in my work this year is death so it felt like a good time to finally take on this big beast of bleak.

In fact, Dead Souls turns out to be a light hearted romp through the Russian provinces, playfully written and genuinely funny. Don’t judge a book by its cover, or its authors name, or its title. The novel’s protagonist, Chichikov, travels from estate to estate attempting to buy the eponymous dead souls, which refers to the deceased peasants of various landowners whose names remain on the census and are still liable to be taxed. Chichikov is effectively buying nothing, just the names of these dead servants, hundreds at a time. After two months of reading and making it over three quarters of the way through the novel I still don’t know why he’s doing it. When questioned he gives a variety of excuses, stories about an uncle and some inheritance for example. But these stories are only ever to leverage a particularly cantankerous lord of the manor into giving up their dead souls at a good price. At this point I’m not sure the mystery will ever be revealed. I don’t care, I will keep on reading, ten to fifteen pages a night before slipping into sleep.

One downside of writing less and reading more though is that a lot of that reading is done while scrolling Twitter or The Guardian online. Rather than spend my morning coffee trying to search my own soul and write something for this Substack I’m filling it with shit instead: xenophobic shit, genocide denying shit, hot take shit, borderline pornographic shit. I’m sure you’re familiar with all this shit and the experience of consuming it. That shit is addictive.

Whats really started come to fore now though is AI shit. The tech companies are pushing hard to convince everyone that AI will solve all of our problems and make our lives easy and stress free. There is no Apple, Samsung or Google advert now that doesn’t focus on their new AI ‘assistant’ features in the devices that we are all now reliant on and addicted to. There is no real option to opt out of AI if it unnerves you, the tech overlords have decided this is where we’re going so thats that.

One thing these companies really try and sell AI on is that it will make you seem clever. There is now no need to ponder the meaning of a painting, or a film or long and complex Russian novel for that matter. The AI assistant can do that for you by scouring the text itself as well all of its associated reviews and commentary to spew out a few sentences so that you can have a conversational understanding of the work. Useful but lifeless. Why spend three hours watching a film trying to not look at your phone when you could just get your phone to summarise it in seconds? Read that instead and get back to scrolling through more of the shit. A friction free soulless life is what they offer and we’re lapping it up.

But that word soulless doesn’t go far enough. It’s already overused, it’s not landing anymore. Soulless suggests a lightness, like the soul was somehow a burden. Gogol has helped me see it like this instead: we are becoming dead souls. Every scroll turns you into a dead soul. Every time you ask ChatGPT a question rather than another person you become a dead soul. Every time you walk down the street staring at your phone instead of looking up at the world you are a dead soul walking. And just like in Dead Souls our dead souls are bought and sold by these tech overlords as pieces of data. We’re just the names of peasant servants on a census to them, quietly doing their bidding by feeding their data mountains until we die. Sorry, the novel didn’t bring the bleak so I had to conjure it up myself.

The good news is that our souls don’t stay dead. You can bring yourself back to life whenever you like by just not looking at the shit. I did it this morning when I decided enough was enough and I needed to sit and search my soul for something to write rather than filling it with more deadening nonsense. I’m doing it every night by reading a two hundred year old book that was written in another language. I do it not to one day sound clever in a conversation with some literary types but just for the experience of seeing how my brain tries to imagine the scenes and stitch together some understanding of the words on my Kindle screen. Its an incomplete and imperfect process just like the writing of this Substack.