Consciousness

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.

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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.² 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:

Banville’s literary style brings me to yet another creative stream concerned with what lies beyond our present consciousness-world configuration (the subject-object split, which I will refer to as S-O). Like many other streams working towards healing our terrible disjunction from any otherness whatsoever, this literary style seeks to approach the nothing linguistically — a near impossibility, since the nothing lies beyond language, beyond our linguistic world.⁴ This literary effort is not towards describing the nothing — such a move remains within the province of S-O — but, rather towards participation in the production of a meaning event! How are we to understand this literary or artistic effort? Brendan McNamee helps us here by noting:

This event occurs at the event horizon or what I call the threshold. My researches took me far and wide into cutting edge systems of knowledge — chaos theory, quantum physics and cosmological physics, calculus, geometry, topology, literature, philosophy — to name a few. I mined these systems in order to appropriate their rhetoric, and my earlier undergraduate studies in physics and maths helped me wade through the complexities of the acquired knowledge in each of the disciplines. I was looking for viable descriptions of the threshold.

I found that the one crucial missing piece in every discipline concerned with thresholds was the key role of suffering. In the epigraph above, Borges alludes to suffering and the threshold: “we must say: think, suffer, and avoid the subject”. By “subject” he means the subject of the S-O split.

My task is to explore how suffering at the threshold or, better, the suffering of the threshold is a key feature in the phenomenology of the threshold — and I mean the soul phenomenology of the threshold. All the cultural practices and disciplines that I mention here are possible only as knowledge is gained from the way the world appears to us as given — and this appearance is determined by soul or the psyche. It is our a priori — the generator of meaning!

Since the world currently appears to us as given in its impenetrable solidity (materialism), we have lost connection with meaning and the generator of meaning — the psyche. Our language has become opaque to depth of meaning because of “the fear of mystification (quite understandable from a scientific point of view), that is, the fear of being taken in unawares by certain unverifiable metaphysical meanings of the notion of soul.”⁶ This fear leads to

In response to this embargo on any direct mention of soul/psyche, many disciplines are finding their way to languaging the threshold without using metaphysical language at all.⁸ Realising that materialism has trapped us inside our language, to the point that whatever lies “beyond” language has the form of an impenetrable black box, many disciplines are nonetheless moving rhetorically “towards the unsayable, towards absence, towards nothingness,” as Brendan McNamee says of Banville’s novels. The point of this collective, century-long effort in literature, art, and philosophy is to address an “extra-linguistic yearning for something, since it must have a word, we may call the sacred.” McNamee defines such efforts as a quest, not to make the unknown known, but to find a way to live in that unknown:

The experience of living with the unknown is possible at the threshold in a soul moment that may be called a meaning event.¹⁰ Such a moment “overcomes” the S-O disjunction and could have deep healing effects on the human participant who is in effect participating in an incarnation. Yes, such moments fade or “abscond” but they also leave an imprint in one’s being, generating a life-changing longing and a quest, a way of life that Brendan McNamee describes so well above; or maybe a style of literature by authors such as Banville who tries to move us towards the nothing, or a possible meaning event via his chosen art form.

There is a necessary and difficult preparation, a new cultural practice, if you like, that can promote such a trajectory towards a meaning event and I have been writing about this practice since 1994. Let’s first hear Lyotard’s description of the practice, as quoted by McNamee:

This is an extraordinary and daunting claim on our present lives. But it needs to be well understood. Lyotard’s claim finds a kindred spirit in Jung’s notion of a necessary poverty of spirit:

Jung here is talking about our modern age of nihilism, the absence in our culture of any living symbols that could collectively bind our lives together coherently. He is not advocating a plan of action — rather a simple owning up to and facing our modern predicament, our empty-handedness. This stance means that we must come down to earth and acknowledge our simple humanness. We need to renounce our outdated metaphysical ideals! This gesture is remarkably hard to achieve. We seem to prefer our ideals and to renounce nothing at all.

John Banville’s literary style valorises the ordinary and some of his beautiful prose even achieves a brief vision of the transfigured ordinary at the threshold:

This passage is an extended description of the barest, unembellished features of an ordinary afternoon. But the lines “There was no puncture. A strange moment…” initiate a mood of “teetering on the brink of being something.” There is a sudden tension of something imminent about to happen, something pressing, like the prelude of a thunder storm that may or may not break. This is an example of approaching possible meaning events that writers such as Banville and other artists are seeking to convey to us through their art forms. He takes the reader to what I call the threshold — the locus of a possible coming-to-be.

Such moments take us to the edge of what is known (“I did not know what was expected of me”) and we begin to participate in the unknown future as it presses forward into actuality. The primary felt quality of this event horizon is tension, a portent, as I have written elsewhere.¹⁴ The degree of felt tension is a qualitative measure of imminence. Something is coming into existence that was not there before. Sometimes it makes it over the threshold, sometimes it recedes back into the nothing.

As Lyotard and Jung suggest, a certain style of living (“spiritual poverty”, the “empty hand”), can prepare us for these meaning events, when they occur, and there is every reason phenomenologically to think of such moments as sacred, as Brendan McNamee reminds us, so that this preparatory cultural practice may be thought of as a sacred path.¹⁵ This shift of cultural attention to the threshold is characterized by a corresponding experience of impoverishment, empty-handedness and even abandonment. The threshold is the site of a kind of initiatory suffering, where suffering refers to the process of opening up one’s being to that of the other “beyond” our linguistic categories, sufficiently to receive an imprint, a message that is carved into the matter of the psyche. In one such experience attained in 2010:

We can see in this dream suffering can be understood as an initiatory imprinting. The point is to drive home a message from “beyond” into the being of the initiate, not to punish or torment. Since we are being drawn to the threshold, in order to receive the message, it is incumbent on at least some individuals to stay in the suffering long enough that the message becomes clear. This can take years though, as so graphically illustrated in Kafka’s The Penal Colony:

The appearance of sacred geometry at the threshold is the appearance of an ordered (“readable script” by the initiate) movement that is breaking into our current world, with the kind of astonishing, terrifying power and beauty that Rilke knows:

And indeed, I had this “pathos” dream in 2004 when I arrived at the threshold, pictured in the dream as a door:

This movement at the threshold can be characterised as convolution, deformation, undulation, twisting, contortion — the movement of space-time itself. The human experience of this movement is one of extreme torture, torment, suffering, even agony, as this movement emerges into our present world of static things. Disciplines such as topology combined with computer power, have given us glimpses of such movement but of course it is simulated, positivised movement.¹⁹ For example the discovery of chaotic attractors:

Such simulations can’t possibly express the human experience of the threshold. My dream shows both human/divine suffering and movement together as the angel, much like Klee’s Angel series. Many artists, writers, poets are pointing to this emergence in their own manner or style. And they are also pointing to the same locus of these strange and astonishingly beautiful appearances.²⁰ Where is this locus or, as Heidegger might say, this “clearing”? John Banville and the Apophatic genre of literature suggest, along with art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto and poet Wallace Stevens among others, that the earthly “site” of the Coming Guest, the unknown future, is none other than each ordinary, commonplace thing, including each of us, as empty hands.²¹ This locus can become a site for a meaning-bearing soul movement — a threshold that is the overcoming of the subject-object split (S-O) that may occur, even if just for a moment.²²

In Holbein’s stunning artwork below there is a skull in parallax view, an experience of the Real twisting our stable linguistic world as it enters the threshold.