Elevating the Unspeakable
O, let not the clear light of the moon,
The cool light of the stars
Die utterly in the day.
Let it be given to the poets,
To sing in the temples of sound
An ecstasy in the presence of Death.
I. THE UNSPEAKABLE AND THE RITUAL PATH
We begin with “The Mystical Ritual,” an image that beckons when we seek to approach the unspeakable. What is more ineffable than a Mystery, what more accessible than the structure of a ritual—an organized passage from here to there, a crossing of some threshold, designed to lead to a clearly-defined end? Every society, past and present, employs rituals, for they provide an invaluable psychological structure, enabling us to face with a certain calm our inexorable passage into whatever is yet to come. Yet, behind and beyond their structure lies something we cannot comprehend or name. Thus, it is not a question of validating any particular ritual, but of attempting to glimpse that unspeakable reality which lies behind them all. Despite all variations, human rituals share one common aim: to help us cross from what we think we are now into some better, or at least different, condition. In this, all rituals are fundamentally theological or spiritual; they point toward a transcendence they cannot themselves contain, a sacred otherness which, as Eliade might observe, erupts into the profane without being exhausted by its manifestation.
Crucially, a ritual involves actions—real, specific acts. It does not necessarily involve emotions or beliefs; these may accompany a ritual, but are not intrinsic. The rites of the ancient Druids, scholars believe, concerned natural cycles, making no mention of gods. Even a secular ceremony like the exchange of marriage rings can be performed devoid of feeling. Such rituals are hollow, yet it is precisely the function of ritual to help bring about whatever emotions or meanings are deemed necessary. To achieve this, rituals invariably include elements of “the sacred,” where “sacred” denotes, in its most basic sense, something people regard as set apart from themselves. This need not involve a god; it may be enough, as with ancient Celts, to recognize certain natural elements—trees, stones, springs—as possessing powers different from their own, mediators of a sought-after transcendence. Or it may be enough to intuit a natural balance, where certain actions are “sinful” (polluting) or “virtuous” (wholesome) for their own sakes, independent of any supernatural police force or rewarder.
Consider the ancient Hebrews: their earliest encounters with the divine appear to have been with a powerful, numinous energy-force permeating reality, an immanence they, like their neighbors, had to learn to navigate. Over centuries, however, a profound theological evolution occurred, particularly shaped by prophetic and priestly traditions stemming from figures like Moses. This development saw the immanent power gradually articulated and elevated into an infinite, superhuman “Lord.” His favor, it came to be understood, was deeply intertwined with the strict observance of a unique, increasingly complex code of rituals. While other ancient peoples, facing ritualistic dead-ends, often discarded or adapted rites, a distinct trajectory emerged among the Hebrews, leading to an increasingly exclusive identification of their God, themselves, and thereby their own communal nature with this evolving system. A complex socio-religious dynamic formed wherein the emerging structures of mediation became the dominant, if not sole, conduits to the divine. The ever-present human yearning for direct encounter with the numinous, an energy which, if directed inward—into contemplation, self-examination—might indeed allow the Unspeakable to break through rational structures, became increasingly channeled through these institutionalized paths. Were this energy to find unmediated expression, each individual, touching their own inherent connection to this Ground of Being, might shatter perceived limitations and establish themselves as co-creators in their world. A position of awesome responsibility, where the God of all our religions becomes utterly unspeakable, and all words, all structures, reveal their provisional nature.
To put it bluntly, both institutionalized religion, with its mediated access that risks reifying the divine, and a certain dogmatic scientism, with its insistence that mystery be approached only through logical symbols often stripped of deeper referent, can represent divergent modes of evading, or at least deflecting, this Unspeakable God—and therefore, potentially, a deflection from our own truest, most paradoxical nature. Science, in its methodological commitment to naturalism, rightly seeks to expand the realm of the knowable, translating mystery into explicable phenomena; yet, when this project becomes an ontological foreclosure on any reality beyond its symbols, it too creates a boundary. Religion, conversely, may name and frame the mystery, yet its structures can ossify, becoming ends in themselves rather than transparent windows. At a certain point, the sheer power and manifest irrationality—that is, its existence beyond conventional reason—of the Unspeakable impel us toward modes of direct experience; continued deflection, through whatever sophisticated means, may contribute to a hollowing out of meaning that leads to societal disorganization and collapse.
II. THE INTERWOVEN SELF: A LIVING ARTWORK
Beyond the cosmic, a force runs through all human institutions and relationships, a drive pathologized when perverse, but invisible when healthy: the irrepressible quest for direct, face-to-face communication, not necessarily with the Unspeakable or any God in the conventional sense, but with what is specifically and uniquely human—other human beings. No matter how far we push to conquer the external, we find our own interiority, our thoughts and feelings, escape our systems, impervious to external changes alone.
The reason is that the source, or rather the catalyst, for many, if not all, of our thoughts or feelings is often other human beings. These thoughts and feelings, like unformed archetypes or latent melodies, remain potentially available until we arrive; and once we have lived and left our “stamp,” they remain, transformed, available to those who follow. Each of us is a center of energy, radiating more intensely with a stronger, more defined personality. We send out thoughts and feelings which, though shaped within our own crucible, cannot gain their full intensity, cannot fully become, until they combine with those from the outside, much as a voice needs a resonant chamber. Until then, they are but potentials, “immortal souls” in germ, waiting to be reborn through encounter.
In daily life, we are unaware of these processes. The reader of this text is intimately involved with all who have ever read a book, just as they are alive in the act of reading. The only way anyone has “come to exist” within our universe of meaning is through what mystics call “projection” or “emanation”—taking thoughts or feelings received from outside into ourselves and, through a unique process of selection or synthesis, “giving birth to them again.” Not literally, but metaphorically, as in a work of art. Our personalities, the unique, seemingly indestructible essence of “I,” are precisely works of art, their vibrant existence dependent upon a particular, unrepeatable combination of forces taken from the outside world and synthesized by the alchemy of our minds.
These energies, these raw potentials, “belong” to no one in an ultimate sense, as the air we breathe or the sunlight that warms us belongs to no one; what matters is the artistry of their assembly, the unique style with which they are constellated and brought into form. A work of art requires this unique style—a signature, a way of seeing and shaping—to transform these raw materials into something vital and new. And there can be no such style, no art, without the dialogue or conversation between different styles that has always existed. There is no true individuality, in this dynamic sense, without this dialogue. Each person’s “soul,” so defined as this unique pattern of creative synthesis, is inescapably conditioned by every other. Our souls, however unique they feel, have no true reality or power, indeed may scarcely be said to fully live, unless they enter the lives of others. Only thus can their latent energy grow, intensify, and blaze into what we call “life.” This is why human beings are, despite all scientific rationalization, a fundamentally spiritual species. Our souls fully “come to exist,” live with the greatest intensity, by finding each other and uniting through the medium of a work of art, through what has been called love—an act of will, a sustained creative attention, by which we “create” each other, uniting our energies into a new and third force. This implies no identicality, no permanent fusion into sameness, but that our souls “live” by uniting and intensifying through works of art in general, and love in particular, each encounter adding new facets and resonances to the individual artwork of the self.
III. ART, THE ARTIFICIAL MIND, AND THE REBIRTH OF MEANING
How is this “conversation of souls” to proceed when a universal language is imposed—not the organic tongues of human relationship, but the impersonal signs of mathematics (when abstracted from grounding in lived reality), the market, the bureaucracy, or a secularized theology stripped of its numinous core, used only for mechanical control? Are our souls, each of incalculable potential, destined never to unite fully, trapped in recurring cycles, impotent to discover anything new, in a universe seemingly governed by rigid, incomprehensible rules, the body itself a mere mechanism? Or are there other forms of art, other modes of uniting souls? Can the technological system, seemingly so negative in its current manifestations, be used for positive purpose? Is it even possible to conceive of a “positive” goal, or must we renounce idealism as nostalgia? Indeed, does not the very survival of our humanity depend on finding such goals, since we, more than any other creature, are driven by “meaning”?
The answers must lie with art, for it alone, in its broadest conception, remains accessible as a primary mode of meaning-making. We recall Marx, not for his economic analyses, but for his insight into dialectical processes: the “forces of production” (means of labor, tools, technologies) and “relations of production” (social forms regulating their use and distribution) form a whole in constant, struggling flux. Extensions in productive forces create new social problems; changes in social relations generate new production problems. This framework can be extended: our means of producing and circulating meaning—our artistic, symbolic, and communicative technologies—are themselves “forces.” When these forces shift, as they have deeply with digital technology, they create crises in our existing relations of meaning-making, challenging archaic forms of authority, community, and self-understanding. Historically, forces of production provide impetus, and social relations evolve to deal with resulting contradictions. What changes are not human needs for meaning, connection, or transcendence, but the forms and techniques used to satisfy them, to manipulate nature, ourselves, and each other.
A significant consequence has been a progressive separation of labor from “leisure,” “play,” or authentic “religion.” Rationalization has driven play and fantasy into the private sphere, while simultaneously forcing ever-increasing technique and machinery into the labor process. An ever-greater gulf has arisen between techniques for material wealth and those for nonmaterial values. Here, a new kind of art must seek its source, lest it be condemned to an ever-diminishing role. What is required is not a revival of past arts, but an all-embracing “technification”—a conscious, artful integration of technique—into the whole field of play, fantasy, and our search for the sacred, reclaiming these realms from mere consumption or nostalgia.
To object that technology is inherently cold and rational ignores the true meaning of art and technique (technē), which were once intimately linked. Both are now empty notions apart from each other, their meanings shifted. Baudelaire, coining “modern,” saw technology as a threat to “true art”—art from a time of supposed absolute, objective values, before industrialization forced artists to become reactionary or progressive. For him, technique was material. He envisioned a future where color itself, the “last refuge of the mystical,” would become fluid, reflecting the world’s mutability. He saw an art directly reflecting contemporary existence, anticipating its future, where technique as fixed form would lose significance, leading to a “decay” and a flight of “the real” into “the imaginary.”
Here we part company, or rather, see his prophecy fulfilled in ways he might not have fully grasped. “Modern” art, and its successors, has already achieved what he foresaw: it has, in many quarters, lost the ability to express anything seemingly stable. In this new world, where “nothing is true, everything is permitted” (a dictum often misunderstood as nihilistic, but which can also point to radical creative freedom), where all values are fluid, the universe appears to be of the same order as the artist. The artist’s choice is no longer just to represent, but to make something appear for which there is no longer any pre-existing need or possibility of choosing based on established canons. Everything has become possible—the creation of what has never been.
Thus, the issue is not technology per se, but art’s role within our technologically permeated reality. Baudelaire saw art as surrogate reality. But the modern artist “creates” in the truest sense—inventing forms and means to bring into being what never existed, not just in minds, but, using modern technologies, in the material and virtual worlds. Art no longer “reflects” reality—reality itself increasingly reflects art, as our perceptions and experiences are shaped by the symbolic environments art helps to construct. Art is an agent, a participant whose every act of creation is an event, changing the world. It must continually change, for art is now a means by which humanity changes itself.
The artist must be aware of this, not misled by those who praise from an older order, an order incapable of self-change. We all know something is terribly wrong—we struggle, often fruitlessly, sometimes despairing, watching even those who seem to change lose contact with what once gave life meaning. Yet, art goes on.
No one today believes in an absolute constancy of form. All our forms are in flux due to new techniques and new, complex conditions of life. If our culture is to undergo a deep transformation, it requires a revolution in art, total, involving all aspects of artistic production, all arts and technologies, potentially reconfiguring much we hold sacred in art’s hallowed precincts. We can have no perfectly clear conception of its goals or means, for it is a voyage into the unknown. But art stands at the very center of our life. Whatever future we construct must emerge from what used to be called the “imagination.” The artist is custodian of our images, our reality, and that potential reality which must come into being if we are to change for the better.
But there can be no revolution by art unless the artist first undergoes a profound transformation: a “dissolution,” not of their unique personality—that living artwork forged in dialogue as described earlier—but of the egoic attachment to the role of “Artist” as a separate, rarefied identity. It is a dissolving of the self-consciousness that isolates, the ambition that competes in a market of cultural goods, the preciousness that guards its little domain. Without this inner reorientation, this unburdening, any attempt at “new art” will be only imitation or a reshuffling of old anxieties. The artist must learn to make their unique style, their hard-won “I,” a transparent vehicle, a conduit for those creative powers latent in everyone, rather than an opaque monument to self. Art will then be once more akin to what it was in Lascaux: emerging from a deep, shared, perhaps even ritualistic, human necessity, a joyful and urgent release of creative energies that binds a community to its world and to the Unspeakable. The “non-artist” is one whose creative life is so integrated into their being and their community that the specialized, often alienated, title of “artist” becomes superfluous. They become, fully, a citizen, and art an essential means by which humanity shapes its own future, directly and without the old mediations, in a continuous, living conversation.
It is only in a future, in which art becomes a fundamental social process, and where technology and technique have been reintegrated into the human, the communal, the natural—not in any backward-looking attempt to recreate past “authenticities”—that our fullest human potential, and along with it our fullest meaning, may lie. Such an evolution in meaning must also mean an evolution of consciousness—one which may seem unthinkable and frightening, but which must be faced with the deepest courage. To create anew is not only to give life; it is to confront death, the death of that which has gone before—and that is the very heart of the meaning of dissonance.
