24 • Opening the Eye to the Storm
Our capacity for framing breaks in confrontation with the mystery of our ultimate insignificance. Fascinated and horrified we remember that we are finite, mortal, human beings.
Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, book 4, The Luminous Ground, chapter 3, The Existence of an “I”, The Numinous Experience (highlights mine):
The primitive spoke of certain spots in the forest, or on the hills, which were sacred. We have dismissed this as something fanciful. But, from the perspective I am taking, it is not fanciful at all. It is just fact, consistent with what I have described in Books 1 to 3, and empirically verifiable. Some places in the world carry the relationship with our own selves more deeply than others.
(I use the word “place” very loosely. Some of the places I mean are very, very large, hundreds of yards or miles across. Others are tiny, no bigger than a brick or two.)Human beings have, in the past, recognized such places as numinous. They are places which carry the spirit. They are places which carry the soul. That language may or may not be useful. But what I want to insist on, is only the one thing: some places, some things, are of such a nature that we feel more intensely related to them, we feel a relationship with them, a direct relationship between our own self and that thing, that place. We feel it most strongly, and when we feel it we feel that we are connected with all things, with the universe.
The Numinous
Otto, in his book, which has translated the idea of the "holy" — a very bad translation; many people argue a better translation would be something like “the experience of the numinous”. Otto's argument is precisely: This notion [of holy] has become very clouded for us.
[“Holy”] is plausibly related to notions of wholeness and completeness. There's probably connections to words like health, which people wouldn't automatically think of. But we know that people typically think about this connected now in terms of a moral term or righteousness. But this association [to health] says something else is going on here. Again, the etymologies are contested. Of course, with a word like that!
We know that [“holy”] is also weirdly associated with [“glory"]. And I mentioned this before: Glory, the “glory of God”, which is the predicate most often applied to him in the Old Testament — that's not a moral term.
What we've got to get to is: What's going on here in this experience of the holy?
Otto created this term, the “numinous” (picked up of course by Jung) to describe what the original, the primordial experience of the numinous is: Before all of these [notions], what “glory” is most pointing towards — a little bit of [“health”], not so much [“moral righteousness”]. What the numinous is, is the fundamental experience. […]
The experience of the numinous is ultimately to experience the transgressive side of the sacredness, how it opens us up in wonder and awe, and even takes us to the horizon of horror.
Confronting the mystery of our fundamental framing, we can experience the numinous — a deeply felt connection to our environment, or something in our environment, in the form of wonder, awe, and sometimes horror.
Mystery both fascinating and horrifying
Otto describes this experience of the numinous as having three central aspects to it:
It is a mystery — very much in the way I argued last time, the sense that we got from Marcel, of something that brings about sensibility transcendence, that sort of trajectory of transframing.
And then it has two opposing poles in it — which make a lot of sense, I think, given what we've built together:
One is that it is deeply fascinating, it compels — a good way, I think a very plausible way, of understanding this is super-salient to you. It is really grabbing your attention, involving you, you can't pull away. It's super-salient.
And then the other is, he said: It's terrifying. It's horrifying. There's an aspect of horror to this.
Horror
Now I’ve got to stop for a minute. I don't want to use the word “terror”. It goes back to his original term, but the problem with terror is, of course, it has become deeply enmeshed with us with notions of terrorism. And I want to put that aside. I'm going to use the word “horror” because it doesn't have that kind of association, but I have to now distance how I want to use this word from how it's become typically used by us.
Most mystery novels and mystery movies aren't mysterious at all. They don't have you confront mystery. They give you just a difficult problem to solve. And in that sense, they're instances of a kind of important modal confusion that is pervasive in our culture.
Same thing with many horror movies: Many horror movies do not actually expose you to horror. Many horror movies actually expose you to being deeply startled with fear.
Much of what passes for horror movies are movies that prey on our sort of ancestral fear of predation, where there is some monster that — although the monster points towards something, and I'll come back to that (and this is good work done by Jonathan Pageot on how we should think about monsters, we’ll come back to that) — and the monster is basically hidden in some way or unknown and it's preying upon people. And most of what's called horror is the surprising way in which the monster will suddenly appear and pray upon its victims, and then they get ripped apart. So you were startled. And most of that is not horror. […]
Horror is when your sense of contact with reality is being challenged, undermined, where you feel you have a grasp on things and then it's slipping away. Horror, therefore, is often prototypically not associated with fear, or directly with fear, it's associated with insanity or madness. And of course there is the primordial fear of becoming insane.
Monsters: inter-categorical horror
The monster points to something very interesting (and this goes back to the work of Mary Douglas): We often find creatures that are inter-categorical for us monstrous, because that's on a continuum with another important feature of things being inter-categorical.
What is meant by inter-categorical? Inter-categorical are things that don't fall into our ready-made categories and therefore we typically regard them as weird. She talks about how they're "unclean".
She does an interesting discussion about, in the Bible, the book of Leviticus, all the animals that are unclean, they're very weird. It's a very weird collection. If you tried to find some sort of essence, like why owls are unclean, and crocodiles are unclean, and whatever, and certain birds are unclean… It doesn't make any sense. And then she goes in and argues what happens is: There's ways in which people have categorized things and those categories have a certain pattern. And when that pattern is being broken, then these things challenge our grip on the world.
For example, there's an idea, Douglas argues, that you should have an interconnection between a creature’s shape, its morphology, its means of locomotion, and its location, like where it lives. If it lives in the sea, it should swim, and therefore it should have a fish shape. You have things that are in the sea that don't seem to be swimming, like the crawling shellfish. And therefore they're kind of weird, and they turn out to be unclean. And then you also have this same, she argues, this same schema is applied.
We think, “Oh, those archaic ancient people.” But remember, don't do that, because we talked about how we also have purity codes. We find things unclean that thwart our system of categorization.
If I take this [water bottle] and spit into it repeatedly and then swirl it around and drink it back, you're grossed out. That's unclean to you, because I have this whole structural-functional organization, a way of categorizing myself, and my self's relationship to my body, and how that's other than the environment. And then there's important boundaries that shouldn't be crossed. And when the spit comes out of me, it becomes inter-categorical. It's me, but it's not me, because it's not inside me, it's outside of me, but somehow it was produced — it's inter-categorical. It's yucky, and get rid of it! This is not a feature of ancient thought. This is a way in which we respond to things that violate our core categorical ways of making sense of the world.
Some of those things we just regard as yucky or gross or unclean. But if the inter-categorical thing is inter-categorical between really central categories, and it is represented as threatening to us, then it originally invokes horror for us.
If you take a look at many horror creatures, they're prototypically inter-categorical:
The wolf-man is inter-categorical between the beastial and the personal.
The ghost is inter-categorical between the living and the dead.
The vampire is also inter-categorical between the living and the dead and also between being alive, in the sense of consuming, and being alive in the sense of being able to be generative. Because of course the vampires consume and do not produce. […]
That inter-categoricalness can be on a spectrum from just “eww, yucky!” to “Ahh!”, losing a grip on reality and intelligibility, because of the deep connectedness between realness and intelligibility. This points, again, to the connection to madness, and all of this points to losing a grip, losing that contact, that comprehensive grip, losing that optimal grip on reality.
You can create pretty significant horror without having to do the startle and puncture moment.
The numinous is mysterious, fascinating, and horrifying — in the sense of losing our grip on reality and intelligibility, because some things aren’t easily put into the right categories.
Why would there be both fascinating and horrifying aspects to it? Is there some opponent processing going on?
Horrified by overwhelming mystery
The numinous is super-salient. There's almost something like a flow state in that we're being drawn into it. But it also has with it aspects of horror. It shakes at the structure of our worldview.
Now you say, “Wow, what's an example of this?”
Here's an example of where I think people brush up against the numinous. And it's fairly widespread so many of you will have encountered it. It's one that I find, I guess, annoying, because I find it dangerous.
So this happens: You're driving home, and there's been an accident on the highway. And people are slowing down. It's very dangerous to slow down. Everybody knows you shouldn't slow down like that, because it's dangerous to slow down. The chances are you're going to cause another accident, which does in fact frequently happen.
But nevertheless, people feel compelled to slow down. They are fascinated by this, because they hope to see something horrifying. Not just disgusting, they're hoping that they will see death, that they'll somehow get a confrontation with this. And that of course is horrifying because death has the capacity to… The confrontation with the threat of death, the presence of death, has the possibility to completely sever your grip on reality. Literally, in fact.
They can't look away. If they see something, they have the potential of being very unpleasantly horrified. But, of course, there's something also missing in this, because they can't actually see death. They can see the fact of death, in the sense of the result of something or someone dying. But that won't actually […] give them what they want: a grip on the phenomenological mystery of death. And that tells you something.
Wonder and awe have us open up to mystery. But if the mystery becomes overwhelming, if it causes us to lose any sense of our potential ability to get an insight or an understanding that typically comes with wonder… Awe is sort of liminal, but with horror, it's like, “Ahh!” [*gasps*] And it's expanding so fast, and “Ahh!” [*gasps again*]. I'm getting overwhelmed so fast. I'm being forced to accommodate so fast. This is like the absolute worst culture shock, and I'm experiencing horror.
Notice what you've got here: You've got all the indications of flow, or something like flow, at least the beginning of it, where you're getting drawn in this accelerating loop. Something like it at least. It's super-salient to you, but it's super salient — and this is why I'm hesitating to just call it straight out flow — it’s super salient, but not in the fact that you're deeply coupled. It's super-salient in the way that you're seeking to be deeply coupled. And your machinery is going faster and faster, but it's not actually getting a purchase. Because what's happening is you're getting horrified by mystery.
It's like, “Wow! That’s an experience of the numinous?”
If you read parts of the Bible — could be other literature too, but the Bible of course is prototypical for a lot of these researchers like Otto — there's passages in the Old Testament in which God is like this. It’s just weird and strange and horrifying aspects of God. Fascinating, super-salient, and you're drawn in. And it's like — I don't want to call it anti-flow, because anti-flow is depression — but it's like the shadow of flow, you're trying to [*gasps*], and you're getting drawn in, and all the machinery of coupling is speeding up to try and get what it can’t get, which is a stable relationship. Wonder, you don't get wonder. You might not even get awe. If it's too much, it can pass into horror.
It's plausible that this is one of the ways of interpreting certain commands in the Bible. It's often translated as you're supposed to fear God. This doesn't make any sense for a lot of reasons, because God is prototypically not the object that you can run away from or fight. Your fear would be absurd — it doesn't make any sense.
I think a better account of this is: You're supposed to have awe for God. And notice how [“awe’] is the basis of “awesome”. But it's also the basis of “awful”. Because awe borders on horror.
Our ultimate insignificance
There's a sense of the experience of sacredness that is supposed to take us to the very horizon of our intelligibility, the very precipice of our ability to make sense and make meaning of the world. It’s supposed to take us, I would say, it's supposed to draw us in. And the hope is not to just throw us into horror, but to take us towards horror until we experience that boundary between awe and horror, where we are forced into a situation of confrontation with a demand to change — a demand to change who and what we are.
And in that sense, this will overlap with the higher states of consciousness in that this carries with it a sense of being terrifically real — and I mean that, “terrifically” real — and that it is putting a demand on us to accommodate, to expand our capacity for framing, that it is pushing us to our very limits.
And the aspect of horror is the sense — a stronger word is needed here — the realization that we are indeed finally, ultimately, limited. That no matter how much we grow, we can't grow enough to encompass the mysteries that we are confronting.
The point of the horror, I think, is to get us not only to grow, but to remember that our growth will always be the growth of a mortal, limited being. A being that is always caught up in relevance realization.
Notice how I've been pushing how much this is taking you to the deepest powerful accommodation, the deepest opening up. Forcing tremendous change on you, varying who you are. This is also an aspect of the sacred.
Humility
Now think about how you can relate this on the continuum that we've been talking about. This is the ultimate frame breaking. But this isn't just breaking any frame. This is trans-frame breaking — this is breaking your capacity for framing, or at least taking it to the very limits, where you are forced into a trajectory of trans-framing that is also acknowledging that you are ultimately insufficient. It's supposed to — and I'm using this in a technical sense — humiliate you.
The problem for us is that we can only hear this negatively. But of course, humility — a deep appreciation of one's inescapable limitations — is part of, I've argued, the function of horror. It is to bring you to that state of maximal accommodation, while also deeply reminding you (sati!) that you can never become anything beyond a finite being. It is to prevent inflation. It is to prevent you ever assuming that you are more than you can ultimately be. If I could just sort of accommodate in wonder and awe, there's a temptation that I would inflate.
The numinous therefore puts you into contact, confrontation with something that is much greater than yourself, and also that has an existence, by definition, independent of you, precisely because of the way that it can threaten you.
Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, book 4, The Luminous Ground, preface, That exists in me, and before me, and after me (highlights mine):
Yet even though I am next to nothing in the presence of all this force, I am free there. In such a place, at such a moment, I am crushed to understand my own smallness, and then understand the immensity of what exists. But this immensity of what exists — and my connection to it — is not only something in my heart. It is a vastness which is outside me and beyond me and inside of me.
It is at once enormous in extent and infinitely intimate and personal.
Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, book 4, The Luminous Ground, chapter 11, The Face of God (highlights mine):
[T]he search for that ground is not merely some psychological exercise in which we look for things which remind us of our inner selves, but an experience in which we approach, as closely as a person ever can, to the underlying non-material stuff of which the world is made, and in which we come as close as possible to a direct experience of what is real, an experience in which we are enveloped, melted, evaporated, lost, and where we touch, for an instant, the inner stuff, behind the stuff, of which we and our world are made.
If we are willing to recognize this ground, whether we call it God or something else, and recognize that this light is behind all things which are at one with themselves, then we may say, simply, that a thing is beautiful to the extent that it reveals this one.
Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, book 4, The Luminous Ground, chapter 3, The Existence of an “I”, Mobilizing the Storm (highlights mine):
What it touches is beyond reason, and before reason. It may be a connection to some realm, where I no longer am, and where I shall always be.
That is our task, as makers of things: to mobilize — to open — this eye to the storm.
Mirror of the Self is a weekly newsletter series trying to explain the connection between creators and their creations, and analyze the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art. Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.
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