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Mystery – Odilon Redon. c.1910. Wikioo.

“We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.”

Paulo Coelho

• Are you aware of the mysteries in life, in your life?

Mysteries surround us all; they are there for the looking and the finding. As the quotation tells us, it is crucial for us to accept that mystery exists in all our lives. This takes humility and a realisation that we cannot, ever, know everything. 

Mystery even resides in the ordinary, the mundane. For example, artists like to paint the ordinary aspects of life; this is in order to imbue them with some mystery and reveal to us the hidden unknowns in ordinary, everyday objects, ones that we may not usually notice. 

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”

Francis Bacon

Corner of Studio Sink – Richard Diebenkorn. Wikioo.

“Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.”

Elbert Hubbard

• What would life be like without mystery ?

Henri Matisse, The Inattentive Reader , 1919. ​WikiArt.org.

Without mystery in life, we would find everything monotonous. If there were nothing left to discover, if we knew everything, how bored would we be!

Whether the mystery is in science, nature, music, or art, it is vital that we have it in our lives.

Stories and paintings, for example, that leave no sense of mystery and wonder are not creative, interesting or engaging. They are dull. We need some uncertainty, something unpredictable to keep us interested in the narrative.

Art installations like the one below fill our minds with questions and are replete with mystery and hidden meanings.

Christian Boltanski, Chance (detail), 2014, Carriageworks, Sydney. Image: Zan Wimberley. Wikimedia Commons

Christian Boltanski’s  fascinating work, above, explores aspects of life and death, memory and memory loss, the dispossessed, and the Holocaust. He emphasises in this huge art installation the concept of the impermanence and chanciness of life for all human beings. 

He often uses exposed electric wire, photographs and light bulbs in his work; however, he never directly declares the exact subject of his creations. He skirts around them, hinting at the true meaning through fragments that nudge us into a kind of memory, still leaving us with a sense of mystery.

Because of this, his work is haunting and poignant; the uncertainty and mystery pulls us in, and we want to know more. Representing terror and trauma through art is extremely difficult and depicting this in a very real, concrete way can never be effective or successful enough.

Boltanski achieves a powerful message in his artworks through using found objects, scraps of life, replete with associations and reminding us of the stories and experiences that even the smallest object can symbolise.

His work alludes to a general, collective pain and suffering, as well as the Holocaust…not explicitly, but through implication. This is powerful, depicted through inference, never openly stated. 

I am personally reminded by his oblique symbolism of a small, silver, heart shaped box given to me as a child by my great aunt. It is engraved on top with her name, ‘Rose.’ Inside, there is nothing… expect a rusty mark, a shadow of an old hairpin. If her life story had somehow been written inside, it could not have created such a sense of wondering and imagining.

As I see this, memories return of her neat grey-white pin curls, her feistiness, her scarlet lipstick, pink rouge and pale, plump, powdered face; yet I also wonder about her life when she was younger. Even the trace of the clip inside the box itself has stimulated so many thoughts and feelings, so much mystery and so many unanswered questions.

• The human condition

René Magritte. The Human Condition. 1933. Wikimedia Commons

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

Max Planck

The human condition is a term that encompasses the common needs, experiences and essentials of existence of every one of us. It refers to a state that universally affects all human beings on the planet.

We may be diverse in many ways, and our differences are highly important. At the same time, we are all deeply connected.

“Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.”

Michel de Montaigne

For example, we are all born and we are all going to die. We will, every one of us, age, and we will all struggle with the limitations of our biology. All of us face the mysteries of life…and death.

Carl Marr, The Mystery of Life, 1879. Wikimedia Commons.

“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”

Frank Herbert

Existential issues affect us all, as we grapple with the mysteries of living and dying. The difficulties of facing the reality of our own mortality and the other enormous mysteries of life touch every one of us.

• The possession of knowledge

Does having a great amount of knowledge and education reduce our appreciation of mystery?

Neuroscientist Christopher Koch, working on the mystery of consciousness says:

“I still very much have a sentiment that I do live in a mysterious universe. It’s conducive to life. It’s conducive to consciousness. It all seems very wonderful, and literally every day I wake up with the feelings that life is mysterious and a miracle, I still haven’t lost that feeling.”

Christoph Koch. Quoted in ‘What We Cannot Know. Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge.’ p349. Marcus du Sautoy, 2016.

“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”

Anais Nin

Du Sautoy’s scientific book explores the limits of knowledge and discusses areas that he thinks can never be known, mysteries that will always remain so. We can never be certain whether there is more to know in the future.

Scientists and philosophers have for years marvelled at the unfathomable aspects of our world and the limitless boundaries of knowledge and discovery.

‘All I know is that I know nothing.’

Socrates

Can we accept this fact, that there are things we may never know?

“Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate.”

Leonhard Euler

At all stages of history, there have been assertions that some things will never be known or solved.

The problem for many amongst us in 21st century society, is having a constant desire to press a button and immediately know everything. But what is this doing to our minds?

If we can obtain such instant information, without painstaking research or extensive study, this will surely encourage us to focus on the superficial, to skim the surface, without looking deeper into mystery and unanswered questions.

This is the difference between diving in and skiing along the surface of life…

Racing scene at the German Championship 2007 in jetski-race on the Elbe, Krautsand.. Wikimedia Commons

“…media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Nicholas Carr (2010 ref no. (p6-7) The Shallows- how the internet is changing the way we think…)

With this approach, mystery is not even on the agenda, and its magic is lost from our lives.

So often in our contemporary society, there is no time to delve into the depths of knowledge, to discover new mysteries and ask new questions.

Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez 1867— Underwater oil painting( from a drawing made in a submersible)

For now, in the twenty-first century, much of our social discourse is constructed around the value of the quick-fix solution and formulaic, over-confident, upbeat, ‘positive’ thinking. There is little room, or respect, for mystery, or for doubt, uncertainty, ambiguity, or wondering.

This rapid evolution of our ways of thinking may lead us into a precariously shallow and superficial state.

• Accepting the mysterious:understanding the importance of NOT knowing

Why should anyone want not to know? Not knowing can be crucial, and learning to stay with not knowing is relevant in so many contexts. It can be highly creative and freeing.

Instead of rushing to find solutions, what if we were to allow some degree of uncertainty, wondering, curiosity? What if we were to permit ourselves to dive deeper into all that is around us, to explore, and to maintain an attitude of waiting, of observing, of contemplation?

Could we take the risk of facing the unknown and give ourselves, and others, some space and time to ponder over the mysterious and the unexplained? Then we might engage with fresh possibilities, discover new mysteries and some new truths.

It is, indeed, reassuring to know things, yet knowing can be used as a defence, a way of feeling protected and ‘safe.’ Whilst our intellect is, of course, precious and important, intellectualising can be a way of defending against emotions.

The Intellect – Jim Warren. Flickr.

“Intellectualized insight alone is not sufficient to result in positive changes.”

Alexander Lowen

Staying with the intellectual only, or otherwise skimming the surface of life and its mysteries, can mean that we miss so much…and that we do not learn to accept that there are aspects of the world that we might never fully understand. Just as we cannot control everything, so we cannot possibly get our heads round some of the mysteries of life.

“Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world; it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world.

It means remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation. Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If we keep our knowledge in our heads only, without allowing it to filter down to our emotional level, the need to know everything, to make the world totally logical and reasonable, can prevent us from accepting the unexplainable wonders of our truly amazing, enigmatic and mysterious universe.

Part 2 of this post will be published next week…see you then! 😊

©Linda Berman