(Dreaming Omaha pt1.)                   

                                                   Explaining The Unexplainable

 

“It seems very pretty,” she said

when she had finished it,

“but it’s rather hard to understand!”

(You see she didn’t like to confess,

even to herself, that she couldn’t

make it out at all.) “Somehow it

seems to fill my head with ideas—

only I don’t know what they are!”

 

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

The concept of trying to explain the unexplainable appears self-contradictory because western languages are logocentric. Thus, there is a tendency to assume that the concept of making visible, what is obscure, or invisible, must cancel itself out. This is because the words we ordinarily use in the service of describing an, arguably, shared reality do not, in fact, possess those very containers, or conceptual apparatus, necessary to clarify esoteric experiences and “constructs;” which, by definition—lacking context in the ordinary sense of the word—are suppressed, and regarded as inherently irrational, or simply unimportant.  Hence, the question around which such an argument can be framed is: ‘what does one do when the available forms of expression—the Tupperware through which ordinary words, sentences, paragraphs, (or figurative tropes such as hyperbole, metaphor and synecdoche), etc—are deemed inadequate or irrelevant to explain the integrity of the content of these self-contained forms’?

If one regards the idea that the interrogation of accumulated meaning, in language, or poetry, is (or can be) primarily concerned with the relationships between words—rather than necessarily being measured in accordance with the assumption that some form of globalized meaning be used as a central criterion—then, it follows logically that, it need not be essential for it to be “rooted” in the commonly understood world of tangible phenomenon. Instead, a poem can exist as a self-contained map of something experienced outside of the parameters commonly used to frame such experiences (I.E., constructs), since context, or a usable frame of reference, is not necessary to heighten that aforementioned connection—as it need only exist between the elements of the poem themselves, without having to refer to any recognizable theme outside of those relations. In this sense, a poem can be a closed system without being understandable in the Cartesian sense of cause-and-effect relationships between objects that refer to a closely-mapped reality outside of the aforementioned concerns of the poem itself.

The ways in which such ‘heuristic’ hypotheses  are used in areas extrinsic to aesthetics can help explain some of the dynamics that animate the everyday categories into which the stuff of  ordinary experiences are frequently catalogued for the sake of convenience. Hence, a culturally contingent picture of the world being described is itself a product of the mediated history of the language used to magically invoke it as a ‘reality.’ As a result, the potential to interpret all manner of impressions within these sometimes misleading methods of recording and analyzing experience hints at the underlying complexity of what often appears deceptively simple or obvious.

There is also the question of how in our everyday interactions with other people and environments we employ these heuristic framing devices as ingenious ways of compartmentalizing complex experiences, thus rendering them portable and easier to evaluate. The inverse of this process however is that one’s world can only expand to the proportions allowed by the interconnected system of names and categories that are employed for this purpose. This is commonly understood to reflect the specialized system of nomenclature and classifications, or taxa, into which aspects of one’s existence and experiences are catalogued and categorized, hence standardized, for more efficient evaluation and reference. The difficulty, of course, arises from the tendency to take these artifacts of the attempt to group various experiences—using a method similar to how animals and plants are often classified—into usable and practical containers, and then elevate them to a level of equality on par with the often subjective and quirky processes of continuing, interconnected, perception that reflect the raw stuff of unmediated existence. Whereas the former is a kind of map key, coded in the language of discrete, and well defined—therefore self-contained—experiences, organized into an hierarchy of tropes that does not reflect the more chaotic maelstrom of nature’s actual workings; the latter, is the untamed thing to which that map key refers. And, it is only through the special code offered by a conventionalized and rational system of naming that this chaos of life can be corralled and civilized, so that it can be made available for reflection. One might think of the way that a library organizes ideas into easily located books and other media, as an example of this process.

This very device however, so clever and portable, creates the environment upon which later map-makers, freely and without pause for reflection, reconstitute the entire process as a single entity. In this way, we have all become reliant upon the code itself to explain the landscape to which it refers, and only dimly resembles, as if they were indistinguishable. Such confusing of abstract ‘idea’ with the ‘world-in-itself’ creates a gap in the way in which that ‘life-in-the-world’ can be described. This gap is narrowed by the passage of time until it is no longer visible, except to the most determined observer, and creates a consciousness that loses sight of the true richness of this no longer recoverable awareness of itself as an ongoing spontaneous entity. It is here, at the junction of the standardized, usable past, and it’s almost forgotten origins, via a foot-path leading to an overgrown weed-rich garden of unexplored complexity, where it becomes necessary to speak the world subjectively and on its own terms, without compass or clear frame-of-reference, as those very things have distorted and cut it off from our sanitized simplification of its primal, unmediated, experience.

In Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave this tragic loss of the richness offered by a transcendentally experienced ‘reality’ is presented as a form of deprivation. The individual is portrayed as a passive consumer of debased representations of reality, now reduced to shadows of objects cast on the walls of a cave and distorted further by the uneven light of a fire that is also a symbolic caricature of its own inferiority compared to a more potent form of illumination. When this denizen of the cavern is suddenly released from his sensory bondage into the penetrating sunlight of Plato’s metaphorical world that exists beyond ordinary perceptions, he is overwhelmed by three dimensional objects which can now be experienced in their true depth through all five of the senses. Unfortunately, however, nothing in his limited experience has prepared him for this encounter with a world of such unfamiliar vigor and resonance, and this precipitates an existential crises: how does one describe the truth of this viscerally experienced, transcendental reality, when there exists no known language or system of concepts with which to convey its intensity and complexity? The reason for this, as it is implied in Plato’s narrative, is that the very language, ideas and concepts which might be used to express the essence of this epiphany about the nature of the world, has been impoverished by its continued application to the limited palette of events which occur in the environment of the cave. Hence, all of the familiar methods of communicating the nature and depth of one’s experiences, have become so thoroughly associated with a specific and very mundane order of sensory impressions that they could never adequately convey the heightened complexity and richness of the new environment into which Plato’s cave dweller now finds himself. Thus, he is limited by the inadequacy of a language adapted over time for an entirely different order of experience. To use such a specialized set of cliché-worn containers to capture an essentially foreign index of place, would be to invite misunderstanding, apprehension and perhaps even ostracism; since, as Plato also makes clear, nothing is more disturbing to the uninitiated than exposure to the blue-prints of an alien world for which no corresponding maps exist. One must either endeavor to reinvent language so that it fits the shape of one’s experience, no matter how strange and unfamiliar, or one must retreat into incommunicative silence.

Through this process, and inversely, via its absence, we may now see how the symbolic meanings associated with certain idioms and the worn-carpet of associations which gradually erode words, like moss-covered stones in a jetty rubbed smooth by the cumulative effects of water, create a need for new modes of expression. This is, of course, on one level, exactly what art is for. And, the metaphors—and other forms of symbolic illustration—inherent in the structure of its articulation of existence, function as touchstone’s for translating the arcane into an overdetermined but  conceptually comprehensible  map of experience. However, as language and culture unfold into elaborately branching tangles of associations—perhaps similar to the way in which an origami bird or elephant begins to reveal manifold angles and shapes as it ages and frays like an hallucinogenic floral display blossoming in time-lapse—the dense array of meanings which make it coherent also begin to stretch and mutate. And, while such mutation is also part of the expression of art, it frequently evolves into a complex bramble-knot of self-referential, and inter-textual, meanings that balance a growing reflexivity with the tendency for such cultural forms to take on unusual shapes. The latter often react to the gravitational pull of shifting cultural gestalt’s by suddenly steering into unexpected directions like elaborate parade floats that loosen from their moorings and then go sailing across those parts of the city rarely visited by festivals or airborne balloons. All of this, of course, adds new layers of import to expressions already overloaded with significance.

Perhaps, at this point in my analysis it would be more accurate to compare the meanings embedded in the sounds used to convey the intangible aspects of language to the symbolic integers in algebraic equations, such as x or y. Mind you, this is intended as an heuristic metaphor, not as a literal analogy. Nonetheless, these coded digits put in the form of letters convey the same mysterious unavailability of meaning as their linguistic counterparts, provided that one does not take the analogy to the literal extreme of assuming that idiomatic import can be quantified as if it were a mathematical calculation. One might visualize this process by imagining that each word is a separate container made of colored glass, and that their respective contents are concealed by these translucent hues, with the aforementioned algebraic symbols used to denote the mystery residing within each flask. In this way, the full significance of their meaning always remains partially obscured, denoting the extent to which each can be emptied and refilled with revised or even completely novel signifiers.  

If part of the connotation of even the most familiar expressions, are already hidden from view in this way, what does that suggest about the combined whole, when expressions are strung together like beads of oddly textured glass into sentences and paragraphs? If meaning is cumulative, with residues gradually adhering until they form calcite deposits which grow into separate tree-ring like narratives of etymological usage, then it may also be true that such discrepancies may provide a code for recuperating some aspects of lost context. This does not mean that the hidden vocabularies within each word, curled up like semantic alligators emerging into the multidimensional negative space of an MC Escher lithograph, can really be made available in any modern framework; rather, they can be only partially reconstituted, and primarily for the purpose of mapping out the process of how meanings are lost and discarded in the temporal flux that occurs imperceptibly over many years. Ultimately, what is gone cannot simply be returned, and those stories buried deeply inside the DNA helixes of every nuanced dialect, are more like intimations of a fossil record denoting the existence of an ancient ox bow lake in a Mesozoic river-bed than they are like simple equations whose meanings can be extrapolated from missing integers. All of this, of course, is rendered more difficult by the fact that contingency, itself alters the tropes inherent in signs, often beyond recognition, and in complete disregard for a word’s former history. This is because language is open ended, given to an impressionistic gloss of metaphor; and thus subject to complex distortions, over time, which transfigure it in the same way that the aforementioned geological processes would alter a prehistoric river bottom.

Of course, even this comparison is flawed, as there are accurate methods available to reimagine the environment of the latter, but no way, save for another glossing of metaphor to attempt to re-invoke the essence of the former. This, of course, is what allows languages of all sorts to bend and flex into the odd combinations and contortions of art and poetry: namely, that elusive quality of elasticity. This is also why the ostensibly inexpressible always needs to be reimagined, as such excavations reinvigorate the language as a whole, even if their quarried relics must be extrapolated in the speculative manner of divining pig-entrails, rather than in the reifying context of geometric inference.

The differences in the methods used to recuperate meaning—between say the avant-garde’s of the last century and their more accessible counterparts—might be summed up using the allegorical example of taking two different hypothetical approaches to persuading an alien-visitor, who has never seen or even imagined an ocean of liquid water, that certain biological forms exist and thrive even in its deepest regions. For example, one might explain the existence of a particular bioluminescent fish species, living far beneath the deceptively static looking surface of the ocean, to our metonymic alien—who has no frame of reference for any marine environment—by inviting this alien into the ocean. This could be achieved by utilizing a small deep-sea submersible object. Within the protective hull of this high-tech submarine, our hypothetical visitor, and human host, could travel to the very depths of the ocean; both, to point out how this particular fish interacts on its own terms within the framework of its own environment, and to give our curious, but skeptical, alien guest a glimpse of just how different this part of the world looks when one is sitting near the bottom of several miles of water, in a dense hydrosphere into which no sunlight can reach. In such an environment, one would point out to one’s visitor the oddness of other formations, such as the cracks in the ocean floor from which black-smokers emerge—large vents exuding dark clouds of sulfur and other chemicals—and the various flora and fauna ( odd undersea plant forms comprised of separate individuals forming entire colonies of sulfur drinking tubed-shaped flowers, and the numerous species of albino crabs and shrimp, that exist at their rims). This would reinforce how a  bioluminescent fish, for example, could exist at such depths; and would be, in fact, a natural consequence of the vicissitudes of such an environment; a fact less easily understood, if the fish were merely caught on a deep-sea line and pulled back up to the surface; hence; removing it, even if only temporarily, from the unique setting that justifies its singular adaptation. In much the same way, the process of explaining the obscure on its own terms, while sacrificing a certain amount of concision and clarity, comes much closer to recuperating the esoteric shades of meaning once embedded so firmly within the fabric of language.

All of this speaks of a ghostly residue, adhering to the surface of words and phrases, like an almost transparent sausage-casing or gelatin sheen; one hinting at the existence of a lost code now folded into the compactness of the words that were formerly employed as catalysts for its explosive emergence into a world of shared perceptions. The subsequent fragmentation and consolidation of memes of communication into discrete envelopes of carefully parsed out meanings has both insured the specificity and clarity necessary for communicating the stylized abstractions of a technologically sophisticated world; and, simultaneously, reduced many complex and difficult ideas into tiny compartments sufficient only for sound-bites and mass-produced clichés. The tragedy in this is that what has been pruned away into effective displays of linguistic topiary has also transformed a previously interconnected, forested, architecture of foliage into a contested memory of superfluous shrubbery. Thus, even as art forms continually adapt their recuperative properties, the newly aestheticized connection to a wider framework of meaning that they reveal will be compromised by the very artificiality of the process of elucidation, hence reducing it to a rather elaborate form of highbrow nostalgia. Ultimately, we cannot revisit the past through language, only insert it within the frame of the present, and ineluctably change it into a reflection of our own desires and sentiments. In this sense the past has indeed passed into the past.

 

JZRothstein (final edit) 8/20/2013