Alice in Deep

Threshold

A phenomenology of suffering at the edge of language, where the split between subject and object gives way, for a moment, to what John Woodcock calls a meaning event.

As I have written in some of my essays over recent years, there are many streams, or disciplines, that are now joined in the urgent effort of “overcoming” the subject-object divide in our world that has now led us to the precipice. There is a general recognition that we are now near or at the point of no return for our species and we may very well take other species with us. And many of these efforts understand that a different way of being is necessary and this way of being may only be found through a transformation in the linguistic foundation of our entire culture in the West. This transformation yields a new style of consciousness, as our artists and visionaries intuit. At the same time our present style of consciousness, our present way of being, our present linguistic world, will be destroyed.

Within this general recognition that we are near a singularity, a point of no return, many are working towards a “linguistic” way (e.g. the “language” of art) to present (not re-present) some hint or gesture of an unknown future lying “beyond” our present linguistic world, and pressing forward or unfolding into actuality. This “beyond” may just as well be called the nothing and I will do so here, along with others, including author John Banville who writes in his novel Newton, as Newton faces the near destruction of his life’s work: