The Self-Discipline of Dissidence
A Conversation with Alexander Ford and Jack Parnell
Jafe Arnold: Gentlemen, it’s been just over a year since PRAV Publishing released your first book, A Slow Death or, The Silence of the Old World. I hope you’ll allow me to repeat myself by saying that it was truly a pleasure and an honor to work with you to bring this uniquely slim, fine-tuned, hard-hitting treatise to the world. I can’t help but recall that when you approached us with the manuscript, you mentioned that you had proceeded with drafting the book, or, so to speak, finally pressing the pen to paper, with none other than PRAV in mind – there is truly nothing more gratifying and inspiring for us lone wayfarers in the realm of independent publishing, and we firmly believe that there is something, or many things, “awakening” across your book’s pages. Now, one year on, I think that the souls who have already received your book might be wondering: Where did this book come from? What led you to write and publish this austere and auspicious text in 2024?
Alexander Ford: Well, it has been our pleasure to work with you on this volume, and to be welcomed into the company of such formidable authors.
Jack Parnell: We’re both very grateful for the work you’ve done on our behalf, and on behalf of the book. It should be good to take this opportunity to reflect on it, now, removed a bit from its publication.
Ford: The book took five years to write, and for the first two or so, we worked with no hope of publication at all. That was well enough. It wasn’t until I discovered PRAV by chance, that I called Jack to say there might be a candle in the darkness. That’s true. Sending the book to you became the top of the mountain in a way, as we worked. But before we set out to write anything, there were several years of conversations, and walks, that lasted late into the night. For most of our time through graduate school studying architecture, we were consumed with the things that became this first book, in one way or another.
Parnell: The issue of the book at that time had not yet formed for us. Initially, we assumed that our sense of the circumstances couldn’t possibly be novel, and so it seemed likely that a satisfying treatment of this thing was out there waiting to be found, in a single neat volume, written by someone else. But the more we delved into that, we began to realize that our perspective on the subject was perhaps unique enough to warrant doing it ourselves.
Ford: If you’re an author, and you’re writing something that’s completely unlike anything else on the shelf, that’s probably not a good thing. You can write a hundred thousand words of gibberish, and the novelty doesn’t make it interesting. Alright, so much for the Zaum poets. But by the same token, if what you’re writing is identical to every other thing on the shelf, that’s also probably not a good thing. You know you’re onto something when you keep finding little bits and pieces of what you think ought to be said scattered all around the room, but nobody has put them all together. Nobody has marshaled them to say what seems obvious to you. Everywhere a glimpse of it, but nowhere the full picture. That was up to us.
Parnell: A lot of people can only go so far as to say: “The problem is this—it’s called Modernism. I can see that this is the point where the old world became the new world, and so, I guess whatever we did before that must have been better.” That’s it. It goes nowhere.
Ford: Yes—as we say in the book: there are those who will go so far as to be discontent, but no further.
Parnell: Right. So much is only pointing out the mountain. The mountain still has to be climbed.
Ford: That’s a persistent problem with so many figures who position themselves against Modernism. The result is that it’s an aesthetic position. And dialectical scrutiny excels at attacking aesthetics. That is its purpose. In other words, the sphere of antimodernist philosophy is riddled with arguments advanced from poor footing. With the book we set out to supply proper footwork. That has to be done in the realm of the philosophy of language. And so, it’s just as much a polemic against poorly conceived anti-modernist aesthetics as it is a skewering of the Modernists themselves.
Parnell: It’s been one long conversation in many ways, between the two of us. The foundation of our friendship—the substance of that conversation--has always been a certain intellectual exchange, and the result of that over time was always going to be something that looks like this book. The conversation continues.
Ford: It does.
Arnold: Your last point reminds me of one of Gadamer’s insights: we tend to think that we are the ones conducting and holding conversations, but in fact it is conversations that conduct and seize us, bringing something out of us, something that becomes the “event of understanding,” an “increase in Being.” Like a book — not just any book, but a book that is an enactment of, as Gadamer said, “Being understood, which is language.” And understanding — standing under something in full view of it, or being able to undergo one’s standing in relation to it – calls for standing up, speaking forth, and charting out the way ahead. I wonder, as many readers surely do too, how your architectural “background”, or “understanding”, figures into your book, or into your writing and trains of thought at large? Both of you are professional architects with an impressive curriculum vitae of awards, publications, designs, and various other projects. What does architecture mean for you as thinkers and writers? Is there an architectural dimension to A Slow Death?
Parnell: I think there are definitely other avenues by which we could have arrived here. You know, I made a study of philosophy; but a bachelor’s in philosophy is taken about as seriously as a bachelor’s in psychology: It doesn’t make you a psychologist. It doesn't really make you anything. There's a foundation to be placed there, but you have to choose to lay it down. Thinking has never been our day job.
Ford: No.
Parnell: We've never been woken up and paid to think.
Ford: Romantic as that may be.
Parnell: I could have seen these problems arise had I been a metallurgist, sure. But there is, I think, an inevitability at play that doesn’t require me to be an architect, but which does require me to arrive at these conclusions. I don’t know if you feel the same way.
Ford: It might be nice to say–that it is all interlocked like that. But in reality, I agree with you, the substance of the book approached with inevitability. At a more technical level—with respect to how architectural practice influences our approach to writing, the most challenging thing is to simplify. This is something you learn with great difficulty in the world of traditional architecture. Mastery over anything is really a function of your ability to simplify that thing. To get at its essence clearly, poetically, and without any loss of resolution. And that is one of those sacred things that Modernist aesthetes deliberately mock, and subvert.
Parnell: We joke that if we'd had more time, the book would have been even slimmer.
Ford: Right. A poor architect dimensions everything, and leaves it for his mason to sort out. It would be like an orchestra, with all the notes they're to play, torn from the page and thrown into a big pile. The result is just cacophony. But a great architect supplies only certain dimensions, despite the fact that he has figured them all. He supplies only the ones that will conduct his mason along the desired path to build. He does this because he has learned what the mason already knows: That the building is imperfect. The temple models the cosmos, it is not the cosmos itself. By dimensioning only what must be, the architect is able to direct those imperfections, and to place them where their presence will not mar the monument. Much like a teacher. If you tell your student what the answer is, and he never has to ask the question, he has learned nothing. And, if you do such a poor job that he has a hundred questions, he will be overwhelmed, and again he learns nothing.
Parnell: Yeah, I’m reminded here of Vitruvius, on beauty.
Ford: But if you can direct him to ask the right question, at the right time, he will learn everything. He may even teach you something as well. This is Plato’s lesson for us in the Meno. Which I take less as a point about epistemology, and more as a point about good teaching, but there it is.
Parnell: Wittgenstein’s remark here is the lever: “Anything your reader can do for himself, leave for him.”
Ford: Yes.
Parnell: There's this idea that if you can exert a great deal of control, the result will be most elegant. That will be the best approach, because you have the most precision. I think that goes to what you've said about writing as a forceful act.
Ford: It’s something that I encountered from Joan Didion—that writing is inherently hostile; to put your own thoughts in someone else’s head, "wrenching their mind around” that way.
Parnell: But to put it as a question of craft: the more I exert over the writing—or the work, whatever it is—the more likely it is to crack. Or to be knocked out of alignment. Or what have you. So. Perhaps it's more about knowing what’s too much, than it is about knowing what’s enough.
Ford: That's very well put.
Arnold: It’s clear that an essential dimension of your work is self-discipline. On that note, readers of A Slow Death are bound to notice on the back cover that you, Jack, are a student and teacher of the martial arts. Besides your book, you’ve wielded the pen to write a number of essays on warfare, weaponry, and the martial ethos. Could you please divulge a bit more about your experience with martial arts?
Parnell: Of course. I’ve found that studying the martial arts encourages you to have a very realistic idea of what an echo chamber is. It’s an easy thing to have a room full of people who agree with you, and in that way, to build up where you’re strong and ignore where you’re weak. It's easy to create a situation where you feel you have a consensus—it all feels correct. And then you go into a new gym, and you get rocked. That's something that you can’t hide from, right? If you get punched in the face, you can’t say you didn’t get punched in the face. It’s one of the most irrefutable things in the world: being punched in the face. It’s entirely devoid of rhetoric. It can’t be argued, and you've got to deal with the fact that there is an error in your technique. There is a primitive and individual sort of violence, which in civilized environments is much less common, sure. But when you’re talking about war, it’s because the rhetoric has reached a ceiling—and there needs to be some form of discussion beyond that. It needs to have immediate, irrefutable consequences.
Ford: To your point there is Cioran’s remark that there is hardly “any greater sign of civility than Laconism. … To stress, to explain, to prove: So many forms of vulgarity."
Parnell: Exactly, exactly. Those consequences can’t be subject to argument. It’s also important to say that in the martial arts, while I take them seriously, I am also very much a hobbyist. I am not a soldier, and I am not a professional fighter. My nearest approach to a life that is violent is maybe monastic. It's a form of meditation in a very strict sense. You can’t afford to be elsewhere when you’re fighting. In a way martial engagement discourages ‘high mindedness,' for lack of a better word. The more you are in your head planning out possible futures, the more removed you are from the flow of being. That is meditation.
Ford: I think if I can return to the comment you made about echo chambers--when you get so involved in a canon, and everyone is very comfortable with what is, and what isn’t; with what's acceptable to disagree with, and what’s not—there’s an obvious staleness.
Parnell: That's what made us feel comfortable with the idea that we didn’t need to get a doctorate to write this book.
Ford: Right—that it didn't have to be a dissertation at an institution. It didn’t need to be co-signed by that academy. We wouldn't have to sanitize it. It's alright for us, instead, to go into the professional world and to pursue this train of thought at the highest level, but independently.
Parnell: So we pulled away from the scholastic… stockade, as it were, and went out to test these things ourselves.
Ford: Often the institutional credential is only a sign of an incestuous birth, rather than an indicator of rigor. And of course there is a companion danger on the other hand, that extra-institutional work is usually the ramblings of a lunatic and not the measured writing of some saint in exile. But you can see that the onus, then, falls squarely on the authors to produce something worth the paper it's written on. If you're willing to take on that responsibility, then you're free. Walter Gropius, in the introduction to Scope of Total Architecture, wrote that he would have been "dashed on the rocks a hundred times before, had I not been able to trust my own compass." The stronger the academic orthodoxy becomes, the greater the aesthetic appeal of unorthodoxy, as a counterpoint. Out in the market square there are alchemists and charlatans, and they have nothing to do with one another. And there are far more of the one than there are of the other…
Parnell: The nature of academic orthodoxy now is that they won’t say you’re equipped to write until you’re indoctrinated. Only then. And then, you tend toward making certain kinds of arguments. But in the sparring ring, someone can walk in the first day and lay one on your chin, and that’s not because he was wrong. It’s because you were wrong. You can talk about it however you like. He was a rookie, it was unexpected, and so on. But it doesn’t matter. There is a hole in your guard, or there isn’t. It’s so easy to tell a nonsense art, because they don’t spar at all, or they only spar among themselves. There is a lot of this same attitude in academia.
Ford: Right. Many ideas only have to stand up to the scrutiny of those who have already proven their willingness to agree with them, to the administration. While there is danger and drivel beyond that ecosystem, there is life beyond it too.
Arnold: Indeed, we would be remiss if we failed to recall Heraclitus’ proclamation, “War is the father of all”, and the very important distinctions made thereafter: some turn out to be gods, others men, some kings, others slaves – of course, Modernity doesn’t accept the existence of any of the latter. Many philosophers over the ages have recognized and engaged the authentically martial dimension of thinking, of existence, of the prevailing of something instead of something else or nothing at all. More recently, my late friend Daria “Platonova” Dugina became a kind of symbol of the stakes of philosophical war and wartime philosophy. You quote Dugina as well as Alexander Dugin in A Slow Death, and you also give the floor to Nietzsche, Evola, Cioran, and other fiery spirits who are a far cry away from the “peaceful” puzzle-play and mimicry of the “establishment line” presented in academic philosophy today, which you evidently know well. You also go deep into Wittgenstein and draw out the existential tension bursting at the seams of his treatment as a “case,” which you describe as “a setup for another smug sophist to wag his finger, and hold out his own collection tin.” Out of all the philosophers you engage in your book, who in particular would you recommend that philosophically-minded readers turn to, and dare to dispel the wagging fingers and smash the collection tins? What philosophers, or philosophies, or lines of wisdom, do you find especially worth re-reading alongside, or perhaps upon, A Slow Death?
Ford: There is a great little essay written by Manly P. Hall, called “Books and their Place in Occultism,” in which he describes a certain peril that many readers may find… well, counterintuitive at first. About reading too many books. Today there seems to be both a profusion of writing flung out into the world and, frankly, a paucity of quality. He writes:
“Today, alas, books with great ideals and noble thoughts are few but in those days they were the labors of a lifetime and their every word was illuminated by the blood of the author. ... The average individual does not know how to read a book, if he did he would not read so many. Reading is an art and there are few indeed who know how to glean the treasures from the printed page. Books have to be read as they were written, thought for thought, spirit for spirit, and to know the works of philosophers we must ourselves be philosophers.”
More to your question, it was a fantastic thing to find Daria Dugina’s work in English from PRAV. In reading Eschatological Optimism we encountered many threads that resonated with us and with our own train of thought. That book hit our desks while we were in the final stages of preparing our own. I think, looking back, her work was certainly the final push that emboldened us to burden PRAV with our own manuscript. We did our best to direct readers as far and wide as we could; to take pains to point out other writers along the way that were useful to us, and so may be useful to readers in their own quest. Wittgenstein. Cioran. Evola. Eliade. Dumézil. Flusser. Nietzsche. Leon and Rob Krier…
Parnell: If someone was willing to come away from our book and immediately read something next—and get anything out of it—it would probably have to be Wittgenstein.
Ford: I think that’s true. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a notoriously difficult thing, but with the proper altitude, and a robust enough foundation, readers will perhaps see in Wittgenstein the same struggle we describe. At times with Modernism, at times against it. In America it tends to be the case that most are approaching these issues from a secular viewpoint—that’s a bit of a foregone conclusion. Wittgenstein also arrived at a definition of mysticism which was entirely secular. And yet, that attitude at once obliterates the very notion of secularism. It falls away, meaningless: this modernist dichotomy between secular and mystical. This is what Wittgenstein’s ladder is meant to describe. His picture of mysticism is true mysticism. It’s not a dogma, or an ideology. It’s self-evident. Self-evidence in that way is the specific soul of the traditional Weltanschauung.
Parnell: Philosophy can be a bit of a trap. In that you want to take as much as you need to live well. So for me, philosophy isn’t an end in itself. I don’t know if you feel that way too. I don’t think the work of life can be divorced from philosophy, and that’s important. But I don’t think the work of life is philosophy.
Ford: In his seventh epistle, Plato wrote that wherever you see a man’s written compositions, these are not his most serious works. Much to your point.
Parnell: Just so. It’s only an examination of living, either in planning or hindsight, but the living must be done elsewhere.
Arnold: And yet, I suspect there’s something philosophical to be said about the fact that both of you are Americans and are raising your voices and arms with philosophers from the Old World, and yet your title suggests that the latter has fallen silent. Are there any American philosophers or authors, past or present, you find worthy?
Ford: Cormac McCarthy.
Parnell: I was going to say, Cormac McCarthy rushes to mind. Straightaway.
Ford: The Stonemason, I think, impacted us both. Blood Meridian taught us that writing is an art form. We knew it, but we didn’t understand. But The Stonemason reassured us that our misgivings about architecture were moving in the right direction. There’s a phenomenal scene in that book, which in the only printed edition I think was actually excerpted on the back cover—hang on, I’ll just go pull it…
“The reason the stonemason’s trade remains esoteric above all others is that the foundation and the hearth are the soul of human society and it is that soul that the false mason threatens. So. It’s not the mortar that holds the work together. What holds the stone trues the wall as well and I’ve seen him check his fourfoot wooden level with a plumb bob and then break the level over the wall and call for a new one. Not in anger, but only to safeguard the true. To safeguard it everywhere. He says that to a man who’s never laid a stone that there’s nothing you can tell him. Even the truth would be wrong.”
Parnell: I think Cormac could be said to have directly influenced the work.
Ford: Without a doubt.
Arnold: And there we have it: another revelation to be followed by more reading! Allow me to recall the last time this happened: only after A Slow Death was sent off to print did you reveal that you’re the editors of The Fulmen Quarterly, which I’ve found to be a real treasure trove of original as well as historic, forgotten articles waiting to be discovered, as it were, like the “treasure texts,” terma, in Tibetan tradition. What can you tell us about this publication and project?
Ford: That’s very kind.
Parnell: It would be hard to take much credit for it, I think you’re captain of that ship and I am happy to man the sails. It’s about being sharp, and being able to take those flights of fancy and hone our skills as writers, but also as editors, and continually improve our craft.
Ford: As we neared the end of writing the book, it became… what's the word – ‘obvious’ isn’t quite dire enough — that we were on the verge of many years’ concerted study of Indo-European esotericism. But what an unbelievably daunting task: some kind of rigorous study of the esoteric arts; the symbolic arts, European occultism. Manly P. Hall wrote that the biggest challenge facing any serious student of esotericism is the difficulty he will face in discovering any useful information at all, in the first place. Our approach to Fulmen was framed in that way. Because the study of these subjects requires a very broad frame of view, it could hardly be planned. Or structured. It had to simply proceed one foot in front of the other. One isolated item at a time. So, establishing a journal seemed the best way to approach the work. Manly P. Hall’s All Seeing Eye, and its rebirth later as the PRS journal, was of course a guiding light. The early journals of Arturo Reghini, as well: Atanor (1924) and Ignis (1925) set an example for Fulmen. As it happens, some structure emerges looking back, not looking forward. For example, our study of the symbolism of the tower and the medieval athanor led to the next essay, on the symbolism of measurement, and the architectural character of the scepter. In that study it occurred to us that the hand is a critical symbol for architects of antiquity, and so a prolonged study of chiromancy would be in order. From there, broader questions were revealed about the relationship between body and temple, and on to human sacrifice in architectural practice. So on and so forth. With Fulmen we are attempting to apprentice ourselves to something, and to offer that apprenticeship to readers as well.
Arnold: As Fulmen continues to unfold and you proceed to explore so many esoteric avenues, readers would certainly be interested in knowing what else you might be working through right now. Can we expect another book in the not too distant future?
Parnell: We definitely have projects in the works. Some will arrive sooner than others.
Ford: How coy.
Parnell: (laughs) In all seriousness, we are currently working on a draft of a book that concerns Tolkien and Western Esotericism.
Ford: Yes. We have recently expanded the scope of Fulmen to include Tolkien studies. All four editions this year are focused on new contributions to the field of Tolkien Scholarship. Our hope is to see that in print as a full volume some time in 2026. Beyond, I think Jack may have already alluded to the next treatise, which we consider to be a followup to A Slow Death. That is a book we are tentatively calling “Deletion Mechanism.”
Parnell: Yes.
Ford: We shouldn’t say too much there. Not out of secrecy so much as trepidation. The book will build on the ideas of A Slow Death, and focus more directly on the antagonism between technology and mysticism. In many ways, our work with Fulmen is a kind of research project that is aimed at laying this next course of stones.
Parnell: You should mention chiromancy in more detail.
Ford: Well, the history of divination with the hands is a very rife subject. It’s one that took my interest from an architectural standpoint, as I mentioned. It will take the form of a stand-alone volume as well. Its purpose is to lift aside the veil on the Indo-European heritage of the hand, both as a symbol, and as a tool for divination. It would follow the Tolkien book, I expect. But more than that I can’t say.
Parnell: First, the esoteric Tolkien. Next, the Indo-European hand, and the second treatise.
Ford: There is work to do.
Arnold: With three works in the works, you are definitely keeping us on the edge of our seats. Hopefully, some will stand up and get to hammering their own. For now, gentlemen, on behalf of PRAV, readers, and myself, thank you very much for your time, your words, and your hitherto and forthcoming works. But before you’re on your way, last but not least, a daring request: the second part of A Slow Death makes it abundantly clear that you are purveyors and channelers of the art of the aphorism. Without further ado, could you leave us with one here?
Ford: We have a good friend, Mr. Ivan Dadić, who is a blacksmith near Donji Muć. A few years ago Ivan asked if he could have a small sketch, which I made of the Salisbury Cathedral, while I was in England giving a talk at the Birkbeck Institute. I said of course, and sent it to him. When the drawing arrived in his shop, he sent a short reply—and in it, Ivan said something that struck me very squarely. I wrote it down. He said:
“There is a path to the heart, through the hand, which does not pass through the mind.”
Order A Slow Death or, The Silence of the Old World by Alexander Ford and Jack Parnell from PRAV Publishing — available for 50% off until July 15th.