The Unspeakable

There is a relationship between a lack of understanding and a need to repeat. Whether you are trying to describe the color red or the Tao that cannot be named, or that you are who you say you are, you will scrape against what is possible to express in language. Catch something, anything in your world for which metaphor fails, which can’t even be cobbled together out of every word you know, you will after failing over and over again to say what is so, resort to endless enumeration of what is not so.

Apophasis is the act of resorting to a refusal to describe something in order to say what it is. The transcendent, the nature of God, the Atman, these are all things that are primarily understood for our lack of understanding them. Indeed, in a future lesson, we will see how uncertainty can play into the deepest form of certitude. Searching for reality in abstractions like words and ideas, one encounters  more questions than answers. How does a swirl of atoms become vision? We have labeled one and the other, but lack all but a few of the endless and necessary delineations that can be described in the ontological landscape that bridges them. Sensation? What is that, something beyond either word or idea but encompassing them, to this real and useful notion of the quantum, which as an idea can describe but never encompass the reality of the things described.

How many atoms assembled in a human body must act in conjunction before their motions are seen as the stuff of experience? Where do the separate parts end and the whole experience begin? The whole puzzle, no missing pieces, is right here solved in front of us. We can take it apart and admire the infinite pieces and the infinite ways they infinitely fit together but it isn’t so much explaining the mystery of the whole as complicating it. We puzzle over puzzles as the puzzles we are and can’t find the fundamental stuff of the universe, all we find are more patterns within the patterns. At its most fundamental level it’s just a somethingness, a thereness, presence is present where it’s present and absence is absent where it’s absent.

The regress that you see above is a modified piece of something I wrote in 2016, an apophatic regress. In trying to say why something cannot be described, therefore describing it, one is in a sense thinking about thinking. Messing around with tautology and paradoxes of this kind with respect to apophatic description is called an ‘aporia.’ This dilemma is the source of consternation and wonder in both physicists, mathematicians, and psychonauts. To read a story involving both the abstract and the manic and rambling, rollicking, adventurous side of apophatic aporia, check out my novel Quotidian Drag.