Unbounded: Artists’ Books and Imaginary Scripts

                                                                                Introduction

Transcending illusory boundaries is a central goal of the world’s great spiritual traditions. Created by Nepali-American artist and Bellingham resident Jyoti Duwadi, the works in this exhibition invite us to meditate on how everything in nature is like a word or phrase in a much larger narrative—an endless story that binds us all together.

The Upanishads, among the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, hold that our task in life is to see through the illusion of separateness. To do that, we must remove the boundaries around our individual consciousness. Only then will we be set free from the suffering those boundaries cause and awaken to the one universal consciousness that is present in all beings—Atman, “the unbounded Self,” our common factor and true identity.

Ideas about union with the divine are at the heart of most other religions as well. Despite different approaches, they share the goal of leading people toward the understanding that we as individuals are distinct but not separate and therefore depend on each other, like the strokes of a pen in a work of calligraphy. From East to West, meditation is a spiritual exercise that aids in this “awakening.” One interpretation of Jyoti’s artists’ books, especially his imaginary scripts, is that they are a visualization of various meditation practices. Stilling the mind. Contemplating an image. Listening to intuition. Pondering the meaning of sacred texts. Letting go of what we think we know and allowing a natural wisdom to rise.

We might also see imaginary scripts—or asemic writing—as a recognition of the limits of language in describing the aim of meditation: opening one’s awareness to what it did not realize before. Perhaps, in the end, we can only gaze into the mystery and remember the words of the Upanishads: “It is not understood by those who understand. It is understood by those who do not understand.”

Asemic Writing: Words without Language

The twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” It was hardly a new observation. From ancient India to medieval Europe and beyond, followers of mystical traditions had always known this. Words, of course, can be invaluable in leading people toward spiritual truths, as the endurance of books like the Bible, the Qur’an, and the many classics of Hinduism and Buddhism attest. Yet, for all their usefulness, words often confuse rather than clarify. As the Upanishads put it: “words turn back.”

Coined in 1997 by visual poets Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich, the term asemic writing applies to a form of abstract art that explores this dilemma. Asemic scripts are completely fictional and, in the conventional sense of writing, are impossible to read because they do not record real words. Instead, they use the semblance of writing to ask questions about the nature of language. Are words as concrete as we think they are? In naming something, are we inadvertently limiting it or categorizing it as something it is not? Do we sometimes get so hung up on words’ literal meaning that we fail to see what they are really trying to tell us?

By removing all possibility of understanding the narrow semantic meaning of words, asemic scripts shift our attention to the big picture. One way to think of them is as a visualization of what happens when we clear our mind of thoughts, an essential part of Eastern meditation. Christian mystics embrace a similar idea through the practice of the via negativa, a way of meditating on God only in terms of how he may not be defined. This leaves few words other than infinite and love. As Meister Eckhart, a medieval mystic, pictured it, “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”

Asemic writing, with its sense of erasure of everything familiar, also calls to mind ancient teachings about nondualism, the idea that the seer is not separate from what he or she sees. According to this school of thought, what our senses perceive as separate, including ourselves, is the same thing expressing itself in different forms. Do words make it harder to realize this? Can asemic writing, like striving to surpass the senses while meditating, open the inner eye to a higher truth?

What Can Be Known but Not Told

Joseph Campbell, the noted scholar of comparative religion, observed: “It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words… Mythology pitches the mind… to what can be known but not told.”

In that sense, can we see asemic writing as an abstract portrait of myth? The word myth is typically used today to refer to something that is not true, but this definition, as so often happens to words related to spirituality, is too simple. A myth, it would be better to say, is a story that may or may not have happened but happens all the time; it is true of no one and everyone.

In general, modern Western society prefers the kind of knowledge that the ancient Greeks called logos—literally “word,” but connoting a “just the facts” argument based on what we would now call the scientific method. We value mythos, the kind of knowledge conveyed through art and storytelling, less, and many are even suspicious of it. Is this fair? Are myths really less concerned with truth than science is? Karen Armstrong, in her book A History of God, explains that myths are “attempts to describe a reality that [is] too complex and elusive to express in any other way.” Though, on the surface, the lines and squiggles of asemic writing are, like myth, a fiction, they also remind the viewer that reality can be known in more ways than one.

The Deep Life of the World

What is the difference between fantasy and imagination? To British neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, there is an important distinction between the terms: “Fantasy covers up reality and takes one away from it,” whereas imagination expands the mind, makes new connections, and provides insight into “the deep life of the world.”

Which term best describes asemic writing? If imagination is your answer, is it enough to get us all the way to the truth? Or, as some forms of meditation teach, is it better to go beyond imagination and, in the beyond, simply make ourselves available to what’s there?
Being All, Loving All

“Most of us know that one of the great problems of modern life is the loss of a sufficiently deep understanding of our oneness with the environment,” John Main, a Benedictine monk and meditation teacher, wrote more than forty years ago. “The danger or consequence of this is that we are living on the edge of an ecological disaster, just because somewhere and somehow we lost that realistic sense of unity and oneness.”

Some of Jyoti’s imaginary scripts are written on found objects that otherwise would have gone into a landfill and polluted the earth, including sanding belts, shoe forms, and plastic window blinds. These artworks can be seen as opening us up to what every master of meditation teaches: oneness does not stop with the human family. It encompasses everything in nature. Too often, we become so deaf from listening to the squawking of the narrowly defined self that we can no longer hear the faint, whispering words of other creatures, who bear the consequences of our self-centeredness. Are those the words we see written on these objects? Is Jyoti’s work, on some level, a critique of consumerism, disposability culture, and humans’ prioritizing of their own needs and desires over the good of the whole?

Peter Schwenger, in his recent book Asemic: The Art of Writing, asserts that imaginary scripts “may be without meaning, but [they are] not without significance.” This is especially true if we interpret them through the lens of meditation and mysticism. In their insistence that everything is connected, mystical traditions are not running away from reality; they are running into it. “Thou art that.” To realize the meaning of these three words from the Upanishads is to realize that if the billions of words that have been written over the centuries to guide people toward the highest truth were to become unreadable, we would need only one word to sum them all up: love.

“Mystics everywhere speak the same language.”

—Meister Eckhart

Michael Taylor,
Special Collections Librarian and Associate Professor,
Wilson Library, Western Washington University,