The Secular Never Was

A tribute to a departed friend, writer, artist, and collaborator Matthew D'Abate - a staunch defender of a faith that needs more defending than I'd like.

Death is always here, always coming. Death always gets its due, maybe tears and maybe absolutely everything. I’ll try not to linger on it. But death has been in my face this February - my mother and now this friend of mine who I’ll tell you about.

It’s difficult to say anything about death, and by extension, it can feel impossible to say anything about anything, as if death is the bedrock truth beneath all the deluded chatter. I’ll try to defy this conclusion, with help from a friend.

Matthew D’Abate

These essays have become, to my small surprise, a place of faith. So let me talk about a man of faith. I first met Matthew D’Abate in the autumn of 2010.

I was at the Blackbird Cafe on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, editing some poems on the page over a cup of coffee. Matt spied the sheets of printer paper and came over to ask what I was working on. We got to talking. He was also a writer, and he was getting together a group of writers and artists. We exchanged information, and a few weeks later, manuscripts. The same age as me, Matt was from Rhode Island, an hour or so from where I grew up in Massachusetts. We’d drunk from similar waters.

He’d gather people to his bartending shifts - some serious artists, some dabblers, some avid readers, some semi-dangerous, some rubberneckers, some doomed, some fine and earnest souls. Matt collected them, introduced them around, gave them free drinks, had them over to his apartment, which he called the Villa Borghese, when the bars closed. He introduced people who became collaborators and lovers, husbands and wives, adversaries and lifelong friends.

We were friends, on and off for almost fifteen years, exchanging ideas and schemes, passing along writing contests and open submission info, telling each other of our near misses with literary success. Last year, we had a disagreement about a book-launch and mutually backed away to cool off. Then Matt died around Valentines Day, a few blocks from where the cafe had been. He was forty-seven years old.

Two or more gather in my name

Going back to how Matt and I met, when’s the last time you introduced yourself to someone you don’t know? Who goes up to a stranger to ask what they’re working on?

Matt did. He had a wholehearted belief that made him fearless. He believed in art and in artists.

He directed short films, fronted rock bands, compiled and edited literary anthologies, hosted podcasts, held parties. His most ambitious project - Literate Sunday - brought together fiction writers around the world in an anonymous online forum. The idea was to celebrate writing without the burden of name and individual ego, and the New York Times even did a piece about it. For as long as I knew him, Matt was constantly seeking out creative people, bringing them together, celebrating their work, and getting them to promote each other.

That was his faith, and he was a true believer. It’s not what killed him, but he paid a price for his faith. There were betrayals, real and imagined. There was a carelessness towards his own physical and mental wellbeing.

What makes you live

Every faith feeds you in some ways and starves you in others. The stronger the faith, the more it nourishes and the more it starves.

Truly faithful people can be frightening. They’re uncompromising. They don’t care if you’re uncomfortable. They cajole, coerce and condemn. They make more demands than you may have signed up for. But faith may be the only answer to the darkness that surrounds us.

“Something which did not exist”

Literature is a religion dressed up as something else, as an entertainment or a hobby, a pretension or a business. But make no mistake. It’s a religion - a religion of heretics.

The religious aspect is plain in William Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Here’s a man, canonized while still living, addressing himself in equal measure to the would-be sanctified, the struggling aspirants, and the rest of misguided humanity. Faulkner is cajoling, coercing and condemning, promising eternity and expressing profound disappointment, from the mountaintop.

Matt loved that speech. He’d play it at parties, loud, late at night. He would shut off the music and crank the speech at the bars where he worked - “vibe be damned,” as one friend said.

Literature can camouflage itself as something other than a religion because the creed is borderline unintelligible for all the people talking over one another. But Faulkner’s speech attempts to define the creed in three minutes. It offers the kernel of it right up front: “to create something out of the materials of the human spirit which did not exist before” - as near to a universal faith as ever expressed on behalf of artists.

Our finest hours

I saw the most of Matt between 2010 and 2014, when he bartended at the now-defunct Abbey, and the now-defunct South 4th Bar. Matt introduced everybody to everybody “this is Hannah, a brilliant illustrator, meet Kevin who’s starting an opera company.” Even if people were full of it, Matt always repeated and exaggerated the best things they’d said about themselves.

Being broke and thirsty at the time, I appreciated the cheap drinks. But drinks you can find anywhere. The introductions, and the freely dispensed faith, mattered more.

New York is a what-do-you-do? kind of town, meaning what do you do for money. For most of us, money is frequently in short supply. Perhaps New York is still a cultural capital, but the tightening conflation of money and identity in this town can kill an artist. On more than one occasion, Matt told people he was a writer, and they’d respond with, “but what do you do for money?” One inquiring mind at a party even demanded to know how much money Matt had made writing that he’d dare call himself a writer instead of a bartender. In 2025 New York, you’re more likely to run into someone like the inquisitor at the party than someone remotely like Matt D’Abate.

Historical context

In North Brooklyn, the tide had already turned hard against artists and our scruffy habitats by 2010. Rents were rising. Luxury-on-the-moon towers were popping up all over the place. At parties, conversations turned to music venues, cool bars and affordable apartments in Portland, then Austin, then the towns and cities where people had grown up. Some guy had already scored a book deal about how Williamsburg was so over that it marked the end of free-and-easy Bohemianism as we knew it.

Faith is a flower among thistles, and the thistles have thickened quickly over the last fifteen years.

Just look in your phone - vast swaths of human expression and connection have been monetized, gamified, financialized, optimized and manipulated into unheard-of dishonesty. At the same time, the basics of daily living have become too expensive to allow for the kind of Bohemian impulses, excesses and aspirations enjoyed in 2010.

This strip-mining has benefited very few, very substantially. This is the tide Matt was swimming against, and against which many of us swim still.

A folding table in the sun

One of the best times we ever had together was at the New York Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island. We rented a table, brought our books, along with a few Snapple bottles filled half with tea and half vodka.

It was a gorgeous summer day. Matt brought a portable radio and some fake flowers in a vase. We were writers advertised as such, with our books, at a table, exhibitionistic, exulting in our little victory lap. We were the least network-able table there, and sold very few books, but had a great time goofing off and talking to whoever slowed their roll past our table.

That night, back in Manhattan, we had our worst argument as friends. It was a drunken, sprawling spat in which Matt insisted I should fire my agent, who’d failed to sell one novel and was coming up short while shopping another. Having gone through the months-long labor of finding and convincing an agent, I demurred. More cajoling and coercing, more rage on my behalf. And I lost my patience. We didn’t talk for months after that.

It wasn’t active bitterness. Life went on. By that time, I lived on the other end of the borough, and I had a baby daughter.

A note on faith

I heard about Matt’s death midweek, at night, still green around the gills from a bout of norovirus. The next morning, on the train hurtling to the office, looking for recourse and solace, I sought out Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.” This is the religion that I know to have some effect. That morning, staring down at her words on a crowded train, it did.

Every religion is true, but idiosyncratic. Only when you try to make it universal do you incite the worst people, encourage the least honest doctrines and condone the cruelest practices. Every faith is power, but not as a bludgeon.

The power of faith was visible in Matt. It was his joy. It animated his cajoling, coercing and condemning, at which he wasn’t always so graceful or forgiving. Every friend of his spent some time as a former friend or an enemy. A common epithet for people of faith is flawed, usually because they won’t bother to conceal their flaws. They trust in something other than appearances. And now he’s dead, unable to cajole, coerce or condemn us. And we’re on our own, like he wouldn’t have wanted.

Matt’s faith may not be true, nor may mine. But heaven isn’t grading us on accuracy. I’ve been wrong a lot, and I’ll be wrong plenty more before I’m swept from the board. Faith isn’t about assembling or ignoring facts. It’s about acknowledging the vast unknown and unknowable territories, accepting that we will be mistaken no matter what we believe, think or do, then choosing the mistake that means something.

Collaborator

Matt and I worked together here and there over the years. I contributed short stories to his anthologies, and helped him get up and running on a few print-on-demand platforms.

Near the end of 2021, he invited me over to his place to record a podcast. I was trying to promote a science-fiction novel based very loosely on a pal who’d died on the same corner as the Blackbird Cafe.

It was the first time I’d seen Matt since the pandemic. He’d been through cancer and chemo and the isolation of the lockdowns. But things were looking up. He was bartending in Greenpoint at a place where he’d managed to revive their trade when all they had were covid street sheds to operate from.

We sat down that afternoon in front of microphones in his apartment. He opened a bottle of Evan Williams. By then, I was a dad of two and hadn’t done any day drinking in a while. The whiskey was like a subway door had opened onto my youth. Matt was a skilled interviewer, knowing where to prod and when to let the other person run long. After a few hours, we shut off the microphones. I followed Matt had to go to work, where he put shots in front of me until someone had to ask if I’d be okay finding the subway by myself.

A sober interlude

There was always a lot of liquor around Matt. He was a bartender and a writer, which both came with inebriation. Matt touched the lives of a lot of people who may never remember him.

By your forties, liquor starts to catch up with you physically, emotionally and in your relationships. But then again, so does everything. Where liquor becomes a problem can be hard to define, and harder to make an issue out of, especially with a drink in my own hand.

Most of the time, Matt was fun. Who wouldn’t want to hang out with someone who’s trying to have way too much fun? At least they know what fun is. At least they have some idea how to get it. And those instincts for fun have more to do with being an artist than a half a million dollars of courses to learn a so-called craft.

In 2023 Matt did take a stab at sobriety, after a warning from his doctor. I remember Matt, myself and a few friends going out to see Oppenheimer, about which we disagreed. Matt and I always disagreed about films. By then, Matt had told us about the doctor’s orders, and we skipped drinks with dinner.

It was a summer night and a long film, and when we got out of the theater by Lincoln Center close to midnight, Matt opted not to join us on the train. He had to walk a bit, maybe all the way back to Williamsburg.

That was one of the few times I saw him without drinking. We had drinks together a few times afterwards, but each occasion had a slightly sour feeling of fatalism and complicity to them.

Stronger than death

The Book of Common prayer says, In life we are in death. Whitman says, Life is what death leaves behind. The exact borders are up for debate.

But one clear thing: Death opposes art. Death is pencils down. Death insists says that nothing can be said, and that nothingness shines through all pretensions otherwise. It insists that all is vanity.

Art says, Fuck it. Let’s see.

Art can be a fruition of dead experiences. It can be a timeless flowering of born-to-die so-called animals. It can be a full-blossomed harvest of a light beyond this world, doubted yet unscathed by doubt. Death is not the comeuppance nor the rebuttal of faith. Death is the final whetstone of faith.

The fulcrum

When I think of Matt, I think of how faith is hard on a practitioner. The world actively derides and disputes your faith. The mountains don’t move much. The slush pile swallows your manuscript. The wicked prosper. The agents don’t call back. The righteous perish. The rent would bankrupt you. The algorithm pushes books and book reviews to the second page of search results. The cafes are full company laptops pinging slack messages, and devoid of notebooks and pens.

Faith is hard on a practitioner. Friends disappoint. Allies flake. A faith strongly felt brings with it a constant risk of violent schism among collaborators.

Faith is a fulcrum on which balances something that is not of this earth. Strong faith works against an artist or writer, simply because no earthly creation can entirely live up to it. Matt was always starting new projects. He had been working and reworking a novel for I don’t know how long when we last spoke. It was finished, but not ready, he was saying.

Most practitioners of a faith will tell you they never chose their faith. It chose them they say, never with bitterness. Even if their faith has given them nothing, faith has lifted them above all they do not have.

Selected bibliography

Rivals of Morning, a book of poetry by Matthew D’Abate

The Happiness Machines, a book of short stories by Matthew D’Abate

Faulkner’s Nobel Speech

When Matthew interviewed me

An earlier essay on faith

When The New York Times wrote about Matthew