The numinous is, very simply, the experience of the impossible in our lives. And that raw impossibility somehow never fits too well into human systems. At the same time, there is no limit to human resourcefulness in escaping the impossible.
Cited in a review of Peter Kingsley’s “Catafalque”
Haruki Murakami is a world-renown author. I have just finished his latest book, Killing Commendatore. Murakami’s style is variously called, under the banner of Fiction: surrealism, magical realism, science fiction, Bildungsroman, picaresque, and realism. But all these genres are fictional, they say. His plots are often referred to as a journey between reality and a parallel world. And this parallel world is “governed by connectivity, according to a logic that is all of Murakami’s making… A constant collision of mundane actions and extraordinary occurrences, yet all is described in a matter-of-fact tone.” (The Jordan Times)
I’ll give just one example of this “collision of realities”. The protagonist, a commercial portrait artist, is at the rest-home of a Japanese Master as he lies dying. A small figure (an entity that calls itself an Idea) materialises and asks the artist to slay him with a long knife in order to influence the safe return of a young girl who has disappeared from her home. A hole then opens up in the floor and the artist must go down into another world and navigate its dangers while the young girl, who remains in ordinary reality, ends up in a nearby house where she must wait for three days while the owner comes and goes—i.e. wait, under the Idea’s instructions, until the artist returns from the underworld. What she goes through in this reality is invisibly connected to what the artist goes through in the Underworld, although she does not know this and he does not understand it—he just follows the Idea’s instructions, too. Their connectivity is acausal but strongly felt by the artist, strong enough for him to make concrete decisions to act in the real world, based on this felt connectivity alone, and without knowing the outcome in advance. The same connectivity binds a painting by the Master, a bell mysteriously ringing in a long-forgotten and buried well, the artist’s estranged wife getting impregnated by the artist in a dream, a dark-looking man driving a white Suburu, the release of the entity known as an Idea from an underground chamber, a neighbour who asks for his portrait to be done by the artist, and so on.
The “random” appearance and disappearance of a number of discrete events, on the surface, have nothing to do with one another yet as the story unfolds, their deep, and very real hidden connection starts to emerge through the masterful telling of the story—a very dream-like quality. The reader starts to feel the presence of a meaningful, though mysterious world, unfolding from within the most prosaic activities of modern humans—an artist who is never named, who loves to have sex, a young school girl with normal pre-puberty concerns, a neighbour who hides his motives and business dealings, a friend who makes delicious meals and hides family secrets—the normal goings-on of our modern materialistic world, none of which alone holds any more-than-personal significance whatsoever.
The story is concerned with “finding the magic that’s nested in life’s quotidian details.” (back cover) Murakami is showing us, in fictional form, the beginnings of a new cultural practice that articulates and maintains a nascent new world. When the artist’s humdrum, prosaic life is interrupted by a weird detail, an unexpected event, or intrusion, he pays attention to it, on the basis of a feeling he has (apprehension, curiosity…) of its significance, and then he acts in response to what he experiences. In the dead of night he hears a tinkling sound that he cannot ignore. He digs up an ancient hole in the ground and finds a bell. Like Aladdin’s lamp, he had inadvertently releases a genie who is grateful and helps him on a quest to find the missing girl. This spirit (the self-named Idea) can appear to him and the girl but to no one else. This spirit who appears and disappears, has a body that bleeds real blood, that can also disappear! The bell also appears and disappears, as does a sharp kitchen knife. Murakami is describing real-world appearances that are intruding into our materialistic world of surfaces only. Another reality is emerging, as strangely connected anomalies, from within materialism and Murakami is showing us in detail how to deal with these anomalies in terms of a new cultural practice.
They appear to the artist as real, significant, and as obeying different laws (e.g. the law of connectivity). His practice, in relation to these anomalies, is to trust his feeling and to act, without knowing, learning to live in a great deal of uncertainty. In so living he begins to experience the same world that we all inhabit in a new light—a light that secretly connects otherwise disparate events, and a light that keeps the distinction between this present world and a “parallel world” but breaks down their separateness. The artist learns to live with that break down of opposites and a world of great significance begins to show up for him. This new world is not one of psychotic hallucinations as Murakami shows how these anomalies can be shared experience among a variety of sober materialists.
It is in fact an emergent new world with its correlative appearances and consciousness, along with its attendant cultural practice, beautifully described in its nascence by a master story teller.
Earlier I said that his books have been categorised as one variety or another of fiction. But Murakami’s vision is very much in accord with that of early 20th century artists who were heavily influenced by Theosophy and the study in Science/Mathematics of a 4th dimension that could spontaneously intrude into our ordinary three-dimensional world along with its weird effects on space and time. Furthermore, a new definition of fiction is required when the “story” is a description of real anomalous experiences, the kind that Murakami describes, i.e. is autobiographical! . It’s one thing to think of connectivity as an entertaining read. It’s quite another to actually live in terms of this emerging world and its corresponding cultural practice–i.e., to actually have these kinds of experiences. If actually lived this way, an ordinary life becomes a work of art!
Murakami imaginatively spells out for us how living this way could be, in his book.
