The Lure of the Ineffable

 

The Lure of the Ineffable: passionate epiphanies of the spiritual and the aesthetic

Andrew Czink, 2007

 

 

         Throughout the diverse range of texts read in the course of LS800 there has been an ongoing tension between reason and emotion. Generally the emotions cannot remain unchecked, and it is the role of reason to control and guide them. Unsavoury characters of dubious moral quality are represented as slaves to emotions that lead them into increasingly abject lives, ending in despair or even death. On reflection and close reading, many of the texts reveal overt spiritual and/or aesthetic agendas that run contrary to the supremacy of reason suggested above and afford a primacy to the passions. Both the mystic’s spiritual and the artist’s aesthetic pursuits indicate an awareness or ‘understanding’ of a form of knowledge beyond the rational. This knowledge is triggered and reinforced by what I will refer to as passionate epiphanies: brief, intense encounters with beauty, wonder and love that cannot be reduced to the rational. This knowledge forms the basis of a passionate, embodied engagement with the world that may provide pathways to liberating, ecstatic experiences for the individual and perhaps even contributes to the dynamic process of defining the self and constituting meaning.

         Passionate emotions and the experiences that arouse them seem to grip the body motivating one to action. The physical power when experiencing beauty, love, or wonder can ‘move’ the subject powerfully. One of Sappho’s poems states:

         Love now shakes my limbs and,

         pathetically,

         I tremble out of control.

Why such powerful physicality? Perhaps it is because we experience love, wonder and beauty rather than just contemplate them rationally. We don’t experience logic and reason: they are tools that we use to judge and evaluate things. The brief passionate epiphanies that we experience are enveloping and require us to engage with the world rather than dispassionately analyze it. Rumi identifies this moment as “a freshness in the center of the chest.” This is an acknowledgment of the bodily nature of aesthetic knowledge. Nabokov’s Humbert refers to such a passionate epiphany as “…that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition.” Re-cognition as a form of understanding, although a form that is somehow pre-linguistic: the body knows it, but the rational mind is incapable of uttering the ineffable nature of such an aesthetic event. The mystery of the aesthetic is not lost, but rather understood in an elemental way. Rumi notes that “mysteries are not to be solved. The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why.“ There is more to engaging with the world than analytical reasoning. Regarding love, Rumi criticizes rationality. Reason is ineffective in understanding the ineffable. “If you want to expound on love, take your intellect out and let it lie down in the mud. It’s no help.” For Nabokov, the aesthetic is everything. He says that

…a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

 

The aesthetic defines Nabokov’s sense of self and provides a crucial form of engagement with the world around him.

Rodolphe in Madame Bovary valorizes the aesthetic when he says that

To feel what is great, to cherish what is beautiful, that’s what duty is!…Why castigate the passions? Are they not the only beautiful thing there is on earth, the source of heroism, enthusiasm, poetry, music, art, of everything?

 

He is reacting against the suffocating, socially constructed codes of duty that the rational mind of businessmen and governments have given primacy over the passions. Flaubert is suggesting that by relegating the passions to a role secondary to commerce and civilization the essence of what it is to be human, of what it is to lead a meaningful and full life is being destroyed.

         Mary Wollstonecraft puts forward an interesting connection between the passionate epiphany and the aesthetic impulse. She affords the imagination (the ultimate aesthetic tool!) great power in providing meaning when she says that “…the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent,…” The brief flash of recognition that Nabokov refers to is made eternal with Wollstonecraft’s work of the imagination. She takes this even further, tying passion to reason when she says “…we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.” Here passion again motivates an engagement with the world that provides defining aspects of our selves as well as meaning to our actions.

         The pursuit of the spiritual (of God, enlightenment etc.) has much in common with the pursuit of the aesthetic. Where the artist experiences beauty, love, and wonder in the corporal world, the mystic experiences these in God and the divine. In both cases the passionate epiphany is a sudden insight, a flash, a moment of ecstasy and loss of the self. A form of union occurs between the individual and the object of the experience. Oliver Davies in reference to Meister Eckhart’s notion of ‘oneness’ suggests that this oneness is “…grasped through an ecstasy of the mind.” Eckhart sees the apprehension of God as being a form of knowledge, and specifically a knowledge that is different or changed from common human rationality. The road to God and the Divine, like the road to aesthetic understanding, is one of discipline and introspection. This road is a very personal one, for each artist or seeker of God must find his or her own path to aesthetic or spiritual understanding. This process is dynamic and ongoing: “one gives birth to oneself slowly.” To experience aesthetic or spiritual understanding is a process of the self perpetually becoming what it is, or has always been.

         Interestingly, where the language of reason makes extensive use of visual metaphors, the language of the spiritual and aesthetic often uses metaphors of sound, hearing and listening. Rumi makes extensive use of such metaphors. In The Sunrise Ruby, he advises one to “completely become hearing and ear,…” Listening to everything, being enveloped in the sound of both the internal and external worlds is crucial to Rumi’s path to God. “Try to be an ear, and if you do speak, ask for explanations.” Rumi is encouraging everyone to listen and to ask questions to gain understanding of how to find their own personal path.

         Rumi embraces the ineffable and enigmatic and balances the aesthetic and spiritual. While reason has a place in Rumi’s thought, the enigmatic is primary and with it the passions. The lure of the ineffable in Rumi’s writing is the lure of the primary, of the pre-linguistic, of the experience of experience. Reason and logic cannot explain what it feels like to experience beauty, wonder or love. By an ecstatic abandonment to the abundance of our world we define our selves and provide meaning for our own lives.

         God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.

         Each note is a need coming through one of us,

         A passion, a longing-pain.

                                                      Remember the lips

         where the wind-breath originated,

         and let your note be clear.

         Don’t try to end it.

         Be your note.

         I’ll show you how it’s enough.

 

         Go up on the roof at night

         in this city of the soul.

 

         Let everyone climb on their roofs

         and sing their notes!

 

         Sing loud!

 

         The ineffable cannot be understood with only the mind and the tools of reason. Each individual must find a personal path of engagement with the world and remain open to the mysteries within it. “You can’t understand this with your mind. You must burst open!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Davies, Oliver. “Meister Eckhart: An Introduction to His Life and Thought.” Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings. London: Penguin Books, 1994. xi-xxxviii.

Eckhart, Johannes. Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings. Trans. Oliver Davies. London: Penguin Books, 1994.

Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Penguin Books, 1992.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Vintage Books, 1955.

Rumi. The Essential Rumi. Trans. Coleman Barks. New Expanded Edition ed. San Francisco: Harper, 2004.

Sappho. The Poems. Trans. Sasha Briar Newborn. Santa Barbara: Bandanna Books, 2002.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Short Residence in Sweden. London: Penguin Books, 1987.

 

 

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Sappho, 31

 

 

 

 

Rumi, 178

Nabokov, 39

Rumi, 107

Rumi, 229

Nabokov, 315

Flaubert, 133-134

Wollstonecraft, 99-100

Wollstonecraft, 171

Davies, xxi

Davies, xxviii

Rumi, 151

Rumi, 101

Rumi, 143

Rumi, 103

Rumi, 179