The Manic Approach to Mystery

In communion with ourselves, we are not solving a mystery. We only come into its presence.

The Manic Approach to Mystery asks what art and religion still have to say to each other, and departs from the mind’s symbol making life. The text is rooted in personal experience. A day of feverish writing on a train to Arnhem ends in a dream of being drawn upwards by an infinite, terrifying power, and then relief comes in the shape of a monumental mask of gold hexagons that arrives as appropriate concealment. Weeks later a station clock at Amsterdam Sloterdijk raises the hairs on the neck and returns in a dream, levitating and ablaze in blue flame.

Around these two images the thesis gathers its readings: Jung on the animation of the unconscious, Lévi-Strauss on the shaman’s song, the sublime from Burke and Kant to Lyotard, Hegel on the symbol, Kierkegaard’s leap to the absurd. Bill Viola and Paul Laffoley appear as artists who stay faithful to an experience they cannot explain. The symbol is a genie’s lamp, an inadequate container that holds but spills, and the conclusion reverses Kant: what the sublime reveals is the superiority of image over mind.

Written in 2017 as a bachelor thesis at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, the text already circles the question: how far can a mystery be made intelligible before it becomes a dead intellectualization?