Artwork by Christopher Wolf
Notes From a Moorwolf
You cannot exile or cancel a Moorwolf; he's already watching from just outside. He's never set foot on the inside - until now. But he knows your online ways very well indeed. As he eyes a sensitivity reader passing seemingly fair, his glib upper lip curls back to the bone line, the fresh, unsullied light of his moorland bounces off the mature canine teeth at the delicious prospect of dragging 'them/they' behind the woodshed and tearing 'them/they' asunder, smilingly. Now, as disjointed as the wokester, the Moorwolf goes on...
He'd like you to know that he has no politically fixed abode, and the positions he takes up in these here pages will not affix him thusly - try as you might. He's of the staunch belief that books don't come with comment sections and that that is to their benefit. Further, he adds: Your comments are most welcome - and equally welcome to be ignored. Although they perhaps won't be, if you happen to be Oscar Wilde or Christopher Hitchens back from the dead - or possibly a reasonable analogue.
You must excuse his occasional brusqueness. It's just he chooses, curates even, to whom he gives his time with a great deal of rigour and care. And in truth, he suggests you do the same. Now aside from this defensive posturing, he is positively sure that you're most welcome to read him but adds that the forfeiture of self comes by broadening one's appeal.
Now, at this juncture, the Moorwolf's pupils will begin to dilate and sharpen: it's an involuntary, salivating response, you understand, triggered by the possibility of accurately predicting how some might receive his hard-wrought and necessary arrogance shaped up here in his cold and bitter landscape:
‘Who does he think he is?!’
‘Who would like to know?’ Says he.
That's the nature of a Moorwolf, it will never allow him to sacrifice the pursuit of truth for the sake of partisanship, allyship, religion, politics, or otherwise. And he will not be filing down his fangs to fit your idolatrous market - evidently. He says, amongst other things, that he believes he kens your predicament: you've friends, associates, and mutual benefactors – the pack – things of which he's minus; they influence your voice and inhibit verbal freedom. And now to restate, like Big Charles before him: ‘Isolation IS the gift.’ The gift to the solitary animal, living ‘at a slight acute angle to society’.
This particular wolf is intellectually immunised against the rectal digits that would conspire to slacken his bite. The sinning animal climbs down from his rock: I'll write what I want, about what I want, when I want. Raa... In one of his more cordial moods, he'd likely tell you calmly that he's starkly aware of many of the most prominent biases and leanings regarding information sought and that he actually very much values discourse from various disparate quarters of thought - if only to root out the worthy points of disputation. His oversized paw scratches around, sniffing out tasty fallacious nuggets on which to sharpen and gnaw.
‘For its own sake!’ He adds with a snarl.
A reluctant endeavour, writing within this domain. One with relish and great joy the Moorwolf does not undertake. He's more than aware, even from his misty wilderness, of the online mobs, the pious, the doxxers, the trolls and all the other midwit groupthinkers that would seek to destroy his material gains - or worse. But he'd just like you to know:
‘I HAIL FROM NOTHING.’
Gosh… A tad overly dramatic, no? Still, you get the general vibe…
‘Nothing to lose.’
‘Nothing to cancel.’
Quite... Anyway, he's not here to ‘influence’, or more cringingly, to become some sort of 'influencer' – a term with which he actually takes great umbrage given that people usually tend to only seek out information which supports their existing theories. He prefers...
‘Reinforcer!’
Yes, thank you, Mr Wolf... but you get his point. And you can bet he'll have no truck with that sort of thing.
He now dons his manlike apparel and straightens his tie beneath faintly silvering whiskers before acknowledging that the notion of an 'about' section is to him almost as alien as the concept of neckwear.
‘Let the little way to death be as it might, the kernel of this life of mine was noble. It had purpose and character and turned not on trifles, but on the stars.’
Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
