Beyond the Matrix of Language

Writing as a portal to a wider reality

Dear Living Dark reader,

Those of us who write about writing and spirituality, language and waking up, have such an energetic paradox on our hands. It comes to the fore in things like Kenneth S. Leong’s insightful observations in The Zen Teachings of Jesus about the intrinsic relationship between Zen, art, and creativity, and about Zen’s concomitant “right-brain orientation.” Art, says Leong, is ultimately nonverbal and right-brained because it is ultimately not about the abstractness of thoughts (and therefore words) but about the immediacy of the concrete:

Art is not about thoughts. Rather, it is about seeing, listening, feeling, and touching. It prefers the concrete over the abstract. Philosopher George Santayana once remarked: “Art critics talk about art. Artists talk about where you can buy good turpentine.” As we recall from Buddha’s Wordless Sermon (the Sermon of the Flower), those who missed the point were those who were too busy thinking. Seeing and thinking do not go well together. True artists do not spend much time on talks or thoughts. They prefer to be absorbed in the concrete and direct experience of beauty instead of working with its abstractions.

This nonverbal and nonintellectual orientation of art (and Zen) can be more simply referred to as right-brained....

Since most of the activities of people today are left-brained, Zen seeks to restore the balance by being right-brain-oriented, emphasizing nonverbal and integrative activities.¹

The point about the obfuscating power of verbal language is helpfully sharpened by Mark Pesce in an essay on language and magic. Starting from William Burroughs’s famous characterization of language as a virus, Pesce observes that whereas other animals experience their world directly, our human experience is “utterly infused with the fog of language.” He elaborates:

We need to be clear about this: from the time, some tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, that language invaded and colonized our cerebrums, we have increasingly lost touch with the reality of things. Reality has been replaced with relation, a mapping of things-as-they-are to things-as-we-believe-them-to-be. Language allows us to construct complex systems of symbols, the linear narratives which frame our experience. Yet a frame invariably occults more of the world than it encompasses, and this exclusion leaves us separated from the world-as-it-is.²

Thus, in our “normal” human state and level of consciousness, it is impossible for us to see or otherwise experience the real world apart from language, since language always “steps in to mediate, explain, and define.” Notably and concomitantly, this also means that any moments of the ineffable reality of the world-as-it-is that we ever do encounter “are outside the bounds of human culture (if not entirely outside human experience) because at these points where language fails nothing can be known or said.” As Pesce characterizes it, from the viewpoint of Zen and other outworkings of the primal human activity to wake up, philosophize, or otherwise see beyond our own horizon, “language stands out as the great interloper, separating man from the apprehension of things-as-they-are.”

These points, both Pesce’s and Leong’s elaborations of them, are immediately and intuitively true. But what do they mean for those of us whose art and calling is writing? The very tool of our trade, the concreteness of it, like Santayana’s turpentine for painters, is words! If language is “the great interloper” that separates us from the natural, given reality of things outside the linguistic cage, and if “true artists do not spend much time on talk or thoughts” because they prefer direct experience, then what of the art form that is in fact nothing but the textual deployment of language, of talk and thoughts?

This dilemma highlights a fascinating point: Of all the different kinds of art, ours is the most purely strange and tricky when it comes to this matter of art and its relationship to primary reality. The left-brained arena of words and logic that forms the hyperspace of mental unreality—the false dominance of the left brain pretending to be the master when it is more rightly the right brain’s emissary; the facsimile of life in and as an imagined world of verbal logic; the mental Matrix in which most of us are unwittingly trapped—is the arena where we work. The use of our primary medium automatically invokes the enemy. Even Leong and Pesce, in communicating their points to us, were using the very medium whose obfuscating and misdirecting nature they were calling out for comment. So am I, right here.

So what’s to do?

I mentioned the solution a couple of weeks ago in “The Zen of Words”: Reality’s transcendence of language doesn’t mean we are rendered mute. Rather, it means the real world and life in general are infinitely expressible in words, especially when we use them artfully as the Taoist finger pointing toward the moon, remembering all the while—and thus passing this awareness on to our readers, whether implicitly or explicitly—that words are in fact pointers and not things in themselves.

Leong offers a lovely insight about this in connection with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which he calls “the Nature Sermon” because of its famous use of birds and flowers to illustrate the point:

The Nature Sermon actually has two parts—one with words, one without. The part without words was taught by nature herself. Note that the sermon actually took place on a mountain. In the midst of natural beauty, Jesus asked his disciples to see and to contemplate what was present and real. Actually, no word is necessary. For nature soothes, heals, and teaches with her silence. All Jesus did was to let the right brains of his audience do their work—to listen, to see, to appreciate, and to be.

But for the benefit of those who were weak in their right-brain abilities, Jesus supplemented nature’s silent lesson with his words....We should consider the verbal part and the nonverbal part of the sermon as being complementary, each lending strength to the other.³

There is significant wisdom here for all of us for whom words and verbal language are our stock-in-trade.

To put the matter provocatively: In our words we can cast a counter spell, a spell of unmaking, to counteract the binding and entrancing power of language that otherwise dominates us and our readers. We can write with the view that we are planting bombs of awakening in other people’s psyches, explosive linguistic devices with an uncertain length of fuse, which will blow up in their own good time and knock out a wall in the reader’s world, revealing the scintillating starscape of an unimaginably wider reality, like Rufus Sewell and William Hurt punching through the outer wall of the titular city-as-trap in Dark City and finding themselves confronted by the roaring gulf of outer space lying unsuspected on the other side of their simulated world.⁴

“When we are really situated rightly in the seat of our art, everything we write serves on some level as a Zen koan.”

Maybe we can write with the understanding that when we are situated rightly in the seat of our art, everything we write serves on some level as a Zen koan. That is, our best writing, the kind we do when we’re really plugged in and resonating in sync with our daemon muse, is a paradoxical deployment of verbal language to wake up the reader—not to mention ourselves—to what categorically transcends such language and can never be understood in terms of it. As writers we can call attention to what lies beyond our words, and beyond all words, using language to undermine its own entrapment and thereby fulfill the real purpose for which it, and everything else, has come into being.

What a strange business this is. And all the more fascinating for it.

Warm regards,

1. Kenneth S. Leong, The Zen Teachings of Jesus (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2001), 65, 66 (Leong’s emphasis).

2. Mark Pesce, “The Executable Dreamtime: Language, Magic, and the Universe as Code,” The Daily Grail, January 5, 2018 (Pesce’s emphases).

3. Leong, The Zen Teachings of Jesus, 67 (my emphasis).

4. There is also another possibility, which Pesce explores in the latter part of his essay: Instead of taking the Zen approach of seeking to “extinguish the internal monologue” in search of a reunification with nonverbal reality, we can take the magickal tack of recognizing the power of language to shape the actual world, and we can choose to align with this, making it our aim to unify language and being. Pesce links this notion to the “growing sense in the scientific and technical communities that when all of the specifics are stripped away, when the very essence of the universe is revealed, it is naught but code,” meaning code in the computer programming sense. “And what is code, precisely? Language.” Thus, “there is, at an essential level, an isomorphism between the world of the code between our ears and the reality of the code of the universe. The codes we create change our personal perceptions of the world, but they also change the world around us; the more we learn about how to modify the world, the more that language becomes convergent with reality, and the more our will extends over the real. In a real sense, beyond the narrow vision of the world underneath our skin, words are colonizing the world.” I heartily recommend the full essay, which is fascinating. I also note its direct resonance with one of my favorite lines from Terence McKenna, regarding what he referred to as “the syntactical nature of reality.” McKenna said, “The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”