Mystery doesn’t do well in today’s world. There’s little we don’t know – and, if we don’t know it, cannot then find out. Spaces are delineated; knowledge is readily accessible and none is more than a phone call or message away. Shadows, and the indiscernible shapes that move in the background of our lives, cannot maintain their inexplicableness against the exacting gaze of a camera. And neither, under these conditions, can we maintain our relationship with the mysterious: with the ineffable, uncertain and surreal.
Increasingly, though perhaps not intentionally, we have buried ourselves within a world of purported certainties seeded by doubt. We live contained lives, in which our borders are negotiated and preserved on our behalf. It is during crises – such as global pandemics – that we feel the narrowness of the space around us: the imaginative limitation of the familiar and the inadequacy of the material. We stay put, disquieted, aware of a lack but ignorant of its source. Even if the walls are figurative, their constraining power is literal. We do not venture. We do not see beyond what we’re presented with: the material, the purportedly valuable and the certifiably worthwhile.
To liberate ourselves means to reassert the spaces in which stories and otherness propagate. It means to see beyond, to the valueless yet undeniably valuable unknown, at a time when traditional narratives can no longer contain the world’s movements.
Imagination
Our wealth is not contained in material possession, but in that which we allow beyond it. Humans are unique for our capacity to think other, to conceptualise beyond what we can see and touch, and abstract realities different from our present. We dwell upon the future, romanticise the past and imagine the unrealised. We’re able to see a wood not just as a wood, but as a haunted wood: a place of wonder in which unfathomable creatures lurk and airy sprites stalk the night. We’re also to see a large group of people as a nation. This makes possible global societies – but now, too, do these societies, in their demand for myopic systems of value, exhaust that ability. We are losing our capacity to imagine other – and, with it, the natural habitats of mystery.
Imagination propagates within the gaps in our reason and through our willingness to refute certainty. Yet we compulsively cherish reason and certainty, and eschew humility. If we do not know, we do not allow. The immaterial and inexact are affronts to efficiency that detract from the verified; the non-quantifiable butts up against our need to quantify, to understand the value of every act, pursuit and thing.
Just as excessive comfort may stagnate the soul, a world without mystery stifles the imagination. We’re then left with the sense that we know of everything that is – or, at least, that is valuable – and it’s not enough. In our assumption of the real, true or worthwhile, we no longer contemplate the shadowed realities that exist parallel to our own: those we imagine.
To embrace is to suspend conflict with. When we embrace the uncertain, we have a greater chance for inner peace. When we no longer need to ascertain and clarify, to know irrefutably and delineate absolutely, we create and interpret. We imprint. Outward conception becomes a gateway to inner exploration. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the interceding strangeness whispers to the imagination. Space is created between what we know to be true and what we conceptualise as possible. In difference exists not chaos, but harmony. Imagining other allows us to see beyond identification: the who and what becomes more amorphous, more playful, and better able to withstand uncertain change. We see not only what our world is, but what it can be. We’re liberated from the echo of thought, cease to be only the recipients of stories – feeding our repertoire of shoulds and coulds – and reclaim our role as creators.
This has never been more necessary. We live in times of contraction, inhabiting the same spaces, physically and mentally. The pathways of experience are solemnly narrow: to and from work, the kitchen, the bedroom, the supermarket. Now’s the time to reclaim our ignorance, and give liberty to the unquantifiable, to that which we do for us – for our health, mind and imagination – and not for monetary outcomes. The world is not bound in unassailable certainties. It’s carefully wrapped and, subsequently, may be undone.
Paths
Our minds are frayed by what we know, and the conditions we’ve accepted. When we believe we know the path, and the path is linear, plainly delineated, we have a choice: to like what we see and accept it, to not but surrender to it, or to turn our gaze towards the woods and hills, the unknown and shadowed. Henry David Thoreau understood the importance of the uncertain and unchartered. In Walden, he writes:
‘Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realise where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.’
Many of us live salaried existences told through a tale of increments. We march warily up an interminably angling hill. Years can be quantified to monetary outcomes, and often little else. The essential spontaneity and uncertainty of life are stripped away, and there are no shadowed corners remaining to spin our imagination. Capitalism pushes us towards value-based evaluation. We regard things, even people, for their inherent value, and the extent to which they can further us. Other possibilities disappear from our vision, and our fixation on final outcomes invariably measured in more – more money, prestige, recognition – obscures diverging paths. But there is no finality; enough is an evolving idea that, for most, fails to find conclusion. Desire becomes an occupation, a means to live, and then a fixation. In endeavouring for more, we contemplate less.
At birth, meanwhile, we know nothing of the world. It is a mystery. Our awareness of the unknown develops as we do; the world we know – finite, controlled, protected – beckons to the world we do not, and our imagination intercedes to give the latter definition. This is why our culture has an extreme nostalgia for the past, but critically for a time before smartphones: the dawn of ubiquitous connection and capture, and subsequent homogenisation of story, place and people.
Series such as Stranger Things are gripping exactly because the characters are faced by non-verifiable (at least to begin with) possibilities: clandestine government experiments gone rogue, aliens, the supernatural. There’s a youthfulness to it. A naivety. We’re intrigued by what we don’t know; attempts to explain and clarify are compulsions that diminish our enjoyment.
In a world in which we have all the answers, and yet the answers leave us hollow, there’s something to be said for naivety: for the fog of war – the black, uncharted space on a map – or that which exists beyond a Google search, phone call or message.
Contraction
Globalisation sought to make our world larger but ultimately made it smaller: a tsunami of Western certainty – and its franchised way of living – further suffocating our ability to think laterally. Cultures, each with their own complex history of myth and story, are now encouraged to think singularly and unimaginatively in terms of capital, in terms of input-output. You are here – but, if you do this, and do it enough times, you will be there. This trap is everywhere. The (large) market for self-improvement is less about discovery, and more about greater utilisation of your most valuable resource: time. You’re to wake up earlier, sleep less, read more and reach financial fulfilment (with the fallacious expectation of broader fulfilment as back payment for your efforts).
In maximising each moment, we minimise ourselves. We are what’s utilised and expired: the tool of the system. We wrangle life’s beauty for its expedient expiration, the movement from one point – which is never a point enough – to the next. In the name of expedience and maximisation, we sacrifice experience. We read, but do not learn. We listen, but do not hear. We accumulate, and yet are without.
Time and space
Time, like space, like wildness, is excessively capitalised upon in the name of financial growth, and growth of no other kind. Without humility, without truthfulness to the mental consequence of these obsessions, we cannot recover the light of imagination.
As a society, we have marginalised, pushed back or banished the spaces – night, stars, wind, cold – that relieve us from our constructs. We have cut down or cut through woods and circumvented mountains. This is how the erosion of mystery began: with maps. Modern maps detail the connection between points, but omit the histories and stories that exist between those points. Maps are no longer a form of storytelling; subjective interpretation has been exchanged for empirical exactness.
Maps as we know them – not leafed-through prints but their computerised, more efficient progeny – articulate the world in terms of origin and destination, and prize efficiency over experience. They’re an expression of domination, of the known and the knowable, and of land as definitive space. Wild spaces, meanwhile, in so far that they still exist, indicate a lack of cultivation and infrastructure: an inconvenience. In his book The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane writes ‘… maps – and the road-map is first among them – encourage the elimination of wonder from our relationship with the world. And once wonder has been chased from our thinking about the land, then we are lost.’ For Macfarlane, wild places refuse ‘any imputation of meaning.’ They exist as places of subjective experience, of interpretation and of difference. The journeys that natural landscapes offer can be distinct; they’re unfranchised, unscripted, and it is through their relative unpredictability that imagination blossoms. When there is no certain path, many pathways may appear. Modern life may provide a detailed canvas, but insists upon a narrow interpretation. Otherness is navigated, and mystery marginalised to the point of obliteration.
These aspects of the outside, the spaces between points on a map, remain sanctuaries to our essential humanity, and our infinite capacity for joyful creation. That which we do not know invigorates us more than what we do. Imagination is fuelled by curiosity, blank spaces, open canvases. For millennia, we’ve navigated these spaces with stories, lending form to the inexplicable. Now, however, the world is understood in relation to its economic utility more than its ability to captivate, or power to rejuvenate.
The unknown is a place of transcendence. It is a means by which we see beyond the boundaries of our known world and, through that lens, beyond ourselves. Without it, we are trapped, and become less.
Salvation
The wild is majestic for its relative chaos, its cherished primordial order. The preservation of its shadow. Not good nor bad; not light nor dark, but both – Coleridge wrote that in nature there is ‘nothing melancholy’ – and unconcerned with the quickening of process. Such is nature, both the explored and unexplored: an endless paradox of light and dark, in which we find our best light by intentionally exploring the deepest dark.
We are compelled to drown the silence of the natural world, but silence is a canvas upon which we imprint, and its layers inform us who we are. By valuing certainty over all else, and filtering perception through purportedly unquestionable rationale, we limit ourselves. Our garden shrinks, and our minds undergo a diminution. If land is only the sum of what we agree it contains and nothing more, we rob ourselves of the immaterial and non-quantifiable. We rob ourselves of the opportunity to create. Mystery is that which we interpret in the space between the known and unknown. If we do not allow this space, and if we seek only to dominate it, capture it, record it, then we do not allow mystery, and our ability to create – to imagine alternatives – is diminished.
Times of global crises are times of reflection. Now mostly immobile, our world a repetition of the familiar, we’re forced to question where we’ve been heading, and the real value of our journeys. It’s also a unique opportunity to recapture what is lost – the ‘out there’: the faraway and unknown. To live life in pursuit of self-capitalisation, to expend and ultimately expire our resources and world, is to accelerate down an unlit tunnel. For many, the realisation that this is it turns us back to what once was: community, myth and mystery.
There can be comfort in uncertainty, and light in shadow. This is not to reject the scientific or rationale – which are required for a baseline of objective truth – but only to not disregard that which exists beyond the purlieu, and allow space for what might be – the imaginable – between what certifiably is. What is valuable to us as a society does not dictate what is valuable to us as individuals, or as communities. We need stories, and the diverging paths they offer.
To survive, both as individuals and communities, in times of global crisis or not – there were already crises at hand: economic, climate, identity, etc. – we have to reclaim myth and mystery, and sit in accepting curiosity of the unknown and uncertain. To rediscover meaning beyond carefully reinforced systems of value, we have to rediscover something of ourselves. We are the interpreters of order from chaos. The story makers. The self-aware, self-making messes of variability. The imagination is our candle; with it, we see what has not yet been seen, which cannot always be exacted, specified or verified. Beyond everything we know is everything that could be – and beyond our fear, non-truths that echo deeper awakenings, and the beginnings of salvation.