Mysteries

Philosophical investigations

"All genuine art approaches something which is eloquent but which we cannot altogether understand. Eloquent because it touches something fundamental. How do we know? We do not know. We simply recognize. Art cannot be used to explain the mysteries. What art does is to make it easier to notice. Art uncovers the mysterious. And when noticed and uncovered, it becomes more mysterious. I suspect writing about art is a vanity, leading to sentences like the above. When words are applied to visual art, both lose precision. Impasse."
John Berger, Berger on Drawing

 Ah, yes, incommensurability: dancing about architecture, the algebra of pancake batter... But, more fundamentally, mysteries. Some like mystery, some don't. Most of us take some level of childish delight in a conjuring trick, but some cannot rest until they have worked out how the trick was done, and a few take it as their mission in life to rid the world of conjurers. A matching minority have closed their ears to any explanations: they don't just want to enjoy the trick, they want the world to be re-enchanted by magic. They can't get enough mystery, and resent those who would blow it away as much as the mystery-dispersers despise them in return.

It's curious how much current popular entertainment seems to be aimed at affirming and enlarging the mystery constituency: magic, superpowers, and alien life-forms are more or less standard issue on Netflix, along with deep-reaching conspiracies, and textbook narrative arcs, all set in a glamorous world free of tedious workaday concerns like washing up, or even facing trial for a series of murderous assaults on life's extras: negligible, nameless folk like guards and henchmen. There is clearly a widespread hunger for life to be more than it is, and an accompanying manipulative industry determined to nudge the dial of that hunger ever higher. I suppose, if nothing else, it means more people suffer from an insatiable but non-specific craving and just end up buying more stuff, which makes sense, if you're selling stuff. At worst, however, it means that more and more people's grasp of truth becomes increasingly subjective, and shaped by formulaic aesthetic criteria: tweet by tweet, film by film, series by series, the ground is prepared for truthiness to win out over truth.

There are real mysteries, of course. You surely cannot stand beneath a starry sky and not feel that the more we know about what goes on "out there" the more mysterious it becomes. According to taste, this may result in an urge to discover yet more or, alternatively, to retreat indoors for a stiff drink. Similarly, you cannot experience one of those dizzying flashes of self-awareness (you know the sort of thing: when the absurdity of your personal existence in a cosmos considerably larger than your head poses an ineffable question to which you yourself are the self-evident answer) without either a humbling sense of existential vertigo, or the overwhelming desire to seek out yet another stiff drink. The connection between such mysteries and humanity's urge to explore and exploit various forms of intoxication – whether as stimulant, analgesic, or distraction – is time-honoured and probably too obvious to be worth dwelling on.

So there are plenty of genuine mysteries, but then there is mystification. That is, the deliberate deployment of hocus-pocus and woo-woo to confuse and rule. The Enlightenment was all about de-mystifying the world, like shaking off some oppressive anaesthetic in the clear light of day, and exposing those who would like to keep topping up the dose, in order to exercise power over the rest of us. As exemplified by my favourite (mis)quote from Diderot [1] : mankind will never be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest. A bit extreme, but you can see his point. The priests and kings are less obvious, these days, but they're still out there.

I'm not sure where the likes of Diderot stood on the question of art versus science, if indeed this is really a question. Art is not the same thing as hocus-pocus, although it's true Plato wanted to turf all artists out of his ideal community, because art (according to Plato) is made, at best, out of poor simulacra of reality, and at worst of downright lies. John Berger is clearly of the opinion that the best art – "genuine art" – is a form of knowledge, but of a different order to science or philosophy: endowed with the power to reveal mysteries, but not to explain them. To show but not tell, perhaps. Which is an important prelude to enlightenment, in both the rational and the mystical senses. As Francis Bacon put it in The Advancement of Learning, "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties". Or, even more succinctly, the 13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Rumi: "Sell your cleverness, and buy bewilderment". Although to what extent, say, Cubism is a bold step down the road towards the discovery of antibiotics is anybody's guess. In the end, I suppose, one has to believe that everything humanly "true" is somehow connected; if not, well, where does that leave us?

Which may be why so much contemporary art fails to satisfy: it attempts neither to show nor to tell nor even to connect, having swallowed whole but failed to digest some fashionable relativistic philosophising that appears, superficially, to cast doubt on the very possibility of establishing any lasting or universal truths. As a result, such art ends up merely illustrating the unhelpful idea that the artist's task is to flounder about, cluelessly, in search of something new to grab our attention, however briefly. For example, turning the lights on and off in an empty room, or encrusting a platinum cast of a skull with real diamonds. Which is surely art for art's sake, in the most reductive sense possible, and mysterious indeed, although probably not the sort of mystery John Berger had in mind.

Mystery investigators

1. Probably derived from Diderot's poem "Les Éleuthéromanes":

La nature n'a fait ni serviteur ni maître;
Je ne veux ni donner ni recevoir de lois.
Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre,
Au défaut d'un cordon pour étrangler les rois.

Nature made neither servant nor master;
I don't want to be a law maker or law taker.
And her hands would braid the entrails of the priest
In the absence of a rope with which to strangle kings.

(An "éleuthéromane" is someone who loves liberty to the point of madness).