A Note on Form
Or: Why You're About to Receive Five Emails Instead of One
I want to tell you something before the next essay arrives.
For the past several months, this series has generally arrived in your inbox every two weeks — one essay, one argument, one sitting. That’s been the covenant. You gave me your attention; I tried not to abuse it.
I’m about to break the pattern, and I want to tell you why.
Essay 11 is the foundational essay in Jazz, Shame, and Being With. Everything I’ve written so far has been building toward it, and everything that follows will lean on it. It traces the profane sacraments — the practices of common life that inscribed dominative identity into American bodies across four centuries — and then turns the diagnostic on me.
It’s long enough that your email will cut it off before the argument lands.
I could publish it as a single post. You’d receive it in your email, read the first third before Gmail cut you off, and maybe — maybe — click through to finish it on the web. That’s not how this argument should be encountered.
I’ve been studying Bach lately. Specifically, I’ve been listening to The Art of Fugue — his last great work, in which a single musical subject is explored through fourteen contrapuncti. A contrapunctus is a self-contained fugue: complete in itself, but participating in a larger exploration. Punctus contra punctum— point against point. Each one sets a new voice against what came before.
That’s what Essay 11 wants to be.
The argument has five voices. A theological voice — Jennings and Carter tracing the mutations that made dominative identity possible. A historical voice — Beckert, Cone, and the profane sacraments of each economic age. An economic voice — Levy, Slobodian, Brown, and the nihilism that reopened the vacuum. A confessional voice — my own formation in Baton Rouge, Annapolis, Duke, and Durham. And a diagnostic voice — the body questions I’m only now learning to ask.
These voices need to enter one at a time. Publishing them all at once would be like hearing all five voices of a fugue simultaneously. That’s not counterpoint. That’s noise.
So here’s what’s coming.
Over the next two weeks, I’ll publish Essay 11 as five contrapuncti — one every three days. Each is a single sitting — varying in length from medium to long essays, not a short book. Each stands on its own. But the argument is cumulative: each voice depends on the ones before it, and the full texture only emerges when all five are sounding.
My hope is to give each voice room to breathe. Here’s the schedule:
Contrapunctus I: The Vacuum — How the faith that crossed the Atlantic arrived already missing its immune system.
Contrapunctus II: The Instruments of Flesh and Exclusion — The profane sacraments of the Age of Commerce and the Age of Capital.
Contrapunctus III: The Instruments of Order and Chaos — How the grammar went underground — and how neoliberalism reopened the vacuum.
Contrapunctus IV: The Grammar and the Trophy Case — Where I find the grammar in my own formation.
Contrapunctus V: Diagnostics — What does your body do?
If you’d rather read the whole thing at once, I understand. I’ll link the complete set when all five are published. But I’d invite you to try it the other way — to sit with each voice before the next one enters. That’s how counterpoint works. The meaning isn’t in any single line. It’s in the space between them.
The argument demanded the form.
Craig