There is the sequence of names which bothers me. Saint-Exupéry, Richard Bach, Hermann Hesse, Paulo Coelho…the writers that managed to smuggle ‘eternal questions’ as a bookstore blockbusters. People who more less still fascinate the average reader and provide the sense of awe, miracle, inner calling, fatality, divine coincidences two-three hours a day and until you finish the book. It takes at most a week or two afterwards for all that higher state of mind to wear off and you’re back to good old self.
I was startled by a curious fact. For a few of them I thought they wrote some great works back in the day when I was young and able, but I changed my mind – in retrospective and without even rereading them. Not because someone convinced me otherwise, or because I had a brainstorming session on how all this literary spirituality doesn’t really work. It was a spontaneous by-product of growing-up. As if the effect such writers were aiming for was strictly biologically conditioned. It works between 16 to 20 years of age and not a day more.
In my case. But, now as I’m trying to figure out what’s exactly wrong with that genre, several things spring up in my mind. I’m not talking about the authors that flood the market with their 10-steps-to-god-or-how-to-discover-your-divine-nature self-help crap, tailored to sell millions and ensure that their grandchildren will drive SUVs and splash around in their private swimming pools as much as them. That’s not literature. It belongs to a shelf with washing-machine and microwave manuals. On the other hand, Coelho and aforementioned gang are considered writers, artists, people who are or were eligible for a Nobel prize in literature. The aspect which exactly makes their work a failure. In my view.
You cannot do a spiritual art. It’s a pleonasm. Either you write spiritually, then you don’t do art, you write a new new testament or something. Or you do art, to which you can’t attach a set of spiritual premises or intentions, because the art explodes from its own inspiration, its own independent origin, its own way of creating world. It’s inherently spiritual. Why vast majority of ritual, sacred, or in the case of the West, a christian art hasn’t much of an artistic value? Because it cheats in the first step. It uses the tools, it takes the form, but it lacks the primary movement, the first ring of chain which distinguishes it from artisanship. A ring which binds it to a fuzzy vision, a dark core of something born ex nihilo, a premonition of certain glory, a structure, a sensation, which doesn’t have a name and can’t be quoted from the pool of wisdom.
What do you get in Little Prince, Alchemist, Siddharta? An event, experience, happening, a spiritual excess turned into imagination. Into a story. Maybe that’s why Bible never really worked. There were too many parables, too many images, too many characters. So we all ended up reading it and storing in into a cultural memory, in a tradition, in a set of sayings, maxims, in a way to build our collective identities, as we missed on partaking in the reality that happened in the first place.
It sounds pretentious, but I dare to say that an imagination is the greatest killer of any kind of enlightening, of shattering encounter with realities that surpass us, if there are any. Apart from transposing what should’ve been the event to the level of fiction, it always surrounds spiritual with a sense of exception. It’s supposed to happen to someone far, someone exquisite, someone chosen. Such distance auguments our reading impression, it helps us to sink into the fable, and practically destroys any transformative potential of the text.
I don’t know how people actually change. Or do they change at all. But if there is a higher state of mind it comes as a shock and it works as a total experience. It’s not a poetical superstructure, a neverland of great people and great ideas, a pleasant and instructive world that we engage in from time to time, a thing which we are able to like and learn from. I guess that’s why all Coelhos, Bachs and Hesses fall from people’s hearts and memories as dead automn leaves. Or it just happened to me.
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