The Tower
The dangers of building artificial realities, and an identity crisis of sorts.
The Black Dog is still hanging around the house here, lying on the floor, thumping its tail, heaving those great big haaawumphing dog-sighs.
I think this might be a longer-than-usual visit. I think—if I’m allowing myself some literary license—the Black Dog was sent here, this time, with a message. And the message seems to be this: you’re going the wrong way.
See, I wrote myself into a trap.
I’d been working on The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, and cross-referencing it with The Occult by Colin Wilson. Both authors describe a kind of latent capacity in human potential; they each contrast this, in different ways, with the diminished perception that modern people are blinkered by.
Wilson writes about what he calls “Faculty X”—the underlying mechanism of psychic phenomena. His theory is more antiquated: he was writing in the 1970s, and he’s got some rudimentary ideas about synthesizing “instinct” and “intellect” in order to access Faculty X. Despite the outdated terminology, there’s some useful stuff in there, pointing toward a higher level of human experience; not just for a few gifted people, but as a basic function of the mind.
McGilchrist puts forth a similar argument from a neuroscientific perspective. He’s not going as far as Wilson, claiming that people have paranormal abilities; however, he also says we’ve created a world that corresponds with only a part of our full cognitive powers. While I can’t summarize his doorstop of a book in a few sentences—the gist is that our “left” hemisphere is more narrow in its perception of the world, and tries to limit its reality to preconceived categories:
The left hemisphere’s compulsive habit is to draw on the world a map, or a schema, which always falls short of the territory it represents, a map which is not, as Korzybski put it, 'the territory,' but which in time comes to be confused with it, so that we confuse the reality we experience with the map of it that we have made… The left hemisphere thinks it knows, but in truth, it does not even begin to understand.
The persistence of this theme suggests a kind of gnosticism1. The world we perceive isn’t the real world, or at least isn’t a complete picture. We can’t fully trust our senses because we’re living in an artificial representation of reality. And not only are we not seeing clearly—we’ve created a world that reinforces our misperception, and further separates us from our full potential.
And here’s the real trouble: writing—any writing, even good writing—has a tendency to feed into that artificial reality.
Written language is an inherently left-hemispheric pursuit. The left hemisphere, again, thrives on preconceived categories; without fixed meaning, there is no alphabet, nor are there words to turn those letters into. When I’m typing these little squiggles, I’m trying to distill something dynamic and subjective—my experience of reality—into something concrete and objective, in order for it to be accessible to other people. For us to meet in this virtual space, you (the reader) and I (the writer) have made a two-sided Faustian bargain with language itself.
For me, in exchange for having access to the sorcery of writing, beaming my thoughts into your mind without directly speaking to you, I have to whittle my experience down into a form that will fit within these tiny boxes of words. In doing so, I have to accept—in a sense—that the only real things are those which I can explain to you. Everything I can’t put into words stays locked up in my head2. If I tried to let it out without being able to articulate it, I would be… something else, but not a writer. I’d have to put time and energy into learning a whole different language, music or painting or dance, in order to communicate that form of experience. And there’s a good chance I’d end up with a bunch of shitty songs/ paintings/ interpretative dance quintets, and still sound like (even more of) a lunatic.
On the other side of the coin, you as the reader are also making a bargain: in exchange for the chance to experience something novel, you’re accepting and ratifying a desaturated view of the world. To find those rare sentences or stories or images that hit you like a bolt of lightning, you’re wading through the slag of cheap words that we pile up everywhere. The narrow world that reading permits becomes the only world you see. And as life-altering as those lightning-bolt moments can be—it’s not clear that you’ve gained more than you’ve lost in terms of direct experience of reality.
And that’s only the fundamental problem of written language. You and I are further separated from each other—and from actual reality—by all the other layers of mediation that we accept.
Even after accepting written language in place of real speech, you can’t see the organic impression of my thoughts on a handwritten page, capturing something about my inner experience in the quirks of the hand holding the pen. Handwriting would limit its reach to one person at a time; I’ve made a bargain at the cost of some authenticity. Even a printed sheet would give you a more tactile experience, where the choice of paper and ink would add to the sensory aura of the whole presentation. The place where you chose to read it would wind itself up with the words on the paper. But again—that would limit its reach to a few dozen people who would want something sent through the mail. So I’ve made another bargain at an additional cost. Then we have to navigate the cultural conventions and class restrictions of writing on a digital platform; for me, it’s the pressure of posting something—anything—even half-smart with enough frequency to keep an audience engaged; for all of us, it’s the demands of building virtual relationships with people who aren’t physically present in our lives. More bargains, less authenticity.
At the end, in classic Faustian form, we’re both getting what we said we wanted, but in a left-handed fashion. I can reach you, and you can hear me. But only through the medium of a copy of a copy of a copy, a virtual shadow, with almost all of its original vitality stripped away3.
This isn’t limited to just written language, either. The particular constructions of the language we use, and the thoughts we think with, all reinforce the reality of a particular world4. After a certain point—the more we talk within the confines of the left hemisphere, the less we’re able to communicate.
Scaled up to the level of a civilization, the same bargains compound into an artificial reality that becomes difficult to escape.
McGilchrist invokes the familiar metaphor of the map and the territory. That doesn’t quite go far enough in describing our situation. A good map will, in theory, allow you to get somewhere in the real world. What we’re constructing is maps on top of maps on top of maps; not really a map anymore, but a blueprint for an artificial environment, which is, paradoxically, also the structure itself.
We’re building the Tower again.
The Tower is one of those mythic archetypes that has always still been happening.
Western readers will be most familiar with it via the Tower of Babel described in the Bible. But it’s not a uniquely religious object. There might have been a real, historical precedent for the Biblical account5. This particular formulation of the myth is meant to tell us something specific about the Abrahamic God’s covenant with humans, as well as provide an origin myth for the world’s languages.
Still—behind all that is a metaphysical formation that shapes the universal human relationship with the more-than-human world.
The sin of the tower-builders is in trying to artificially transcend material reality. In the many variations of this myth from around the world, the recurring motives for building upwards are either trying to reach Heaven, or to escape the consequences of some judgment on Earth (usually a flood), or to otherwise set humans above the rest of Creation. It never works, of course. Whether it’s the judgment of a monotheistic god or just a restoration of cosmic balance, the Tower always comes down.
The teleological purpose of the Tower is to teach us that trying to escape the material world through material means is futile. We’re famously slow learners. So the Tower continues rising and falling throughout human history.
We do this compulsively in the material world, obviously; our compulsion to reproduce the same process in the imaginal world often goes unrecognized.
We’re building the Tower with words, words, words.
That’s what all this is for. All these endless papers and essays and books and podcasts and explanatory models and TED Talks and videos and philosophies about How Stuff Works is all, presumably, meant to give us access to some kind of transcendent understanding of the world. We’re still just working on the lower levels now. But by God, if we keep at it, someday, we’ll be able to reach all the way to Heaven, escape the mess we’ve made of the world below. We’ll kick down God’s front door and demand an explanation for all this. Think of what we could see from up there.
There’s work for many hands on the Tower. I might just be a humble writer with a modest following, but every word I produce on here is one more brick mortared into the colossal edifice. It’s all more interpretation, more explaining, building, building building. While it might seem unremarkable on its own, every brick gets us a little closer to Heaven. Supposedly.
It’s all nonsense, of course.
That’s a quintessentially left-hemispheric view of the world: “If I can just physically remove myself from the rest of this, get a good look at it from a better vantage, away from the dangers of the physical environment—then I’ll be able to figure everything out.”
There is no “up there” to reach in terms of knowledge. Every level we build on the Tower takes us further away from the real world. We’re building this massive crystalline structure and trapping ourselves in it.
We might be able to get a god’s-eye view from up there—but gods aren’t gods just because they live up in the clouds. Only gods can embody the paradox of separateness and interbeing, viewing the totality of the world from afar while still being intimately connected to every entity within it. Humans are too limited for that. Living in a physical body means we have to pick one or the other at a time: transcendence, or connectedness. And artificial transcendence is unsustainable. Gravity is a hard law in the material world. It all comes crashing down, sooner or later.
Which brings me around to my little crisis. I’m not a dancer, or a painter, or a poet: I’m a prose writer. I’m feeding into this artificial reality. I’m helping to build the Tower.
By the end of this sentence, I’ll have written 1,847 words, which you have now read. That’s on top of the tens of thousands of words I’ve already written in this space over the past fifteen months. Are you better off now than you were before you started reading? I hope so. But I won’t flatter myself enough to take it as a given. Is there anything I could have written here that would tell you more than sitting quietly outside for an hour would have done? I’m not sure.
And even if you, gentle reader, managed to glean something worthwhile from all this nonsense—was it worth the left-hemispheric separation that I’m helping to inflict on you by writing it?
I’m not saying it’s impossible for writing to spark those lightning-bolt moments. But it’s goddamn hard to hold myself to the standard of producing that kind of writing, instead of just mixing up some mortar for the next course of bricks.
I really like writing on Substack. I like being part of the neighborhood; I like reading the great work that other writers put out, and it’s personally satisfying to have people interested in my own stuff.
I’m just not sure I’m doing enough with it.
Substack is a wonderful place. It’s also just one more ziggurat in a world getting crowded with them.
So what do I do now?
Defining all the ins and outs of classical Gnosticism would be a whole different post, but if you’ve seen John Carpenter’s They Live, or (hallelujah) The Matrix, you know what kind of gnosticism I’m talking about.
You’re welcome.
This is the cultural (or spiritual, if you like) equivalent of the grocery store produce that looks good enough on the shelf, but is revealed to be nutritionally empty when analyzed with a spectrometer.
One of the blind alleys that material-reductionism leads us down. Scholars tell us that the tower of Babel is “just” a creative gloss on, say, the Etemenanki in Babylon; it’s a one-directional relationship between material reality and the imaginative constructions that humans create from it. Whereas it’s equally true and much more useful to say that the Tower always exists in mythic time, and is always trying to build itself in our world—a recurring phenomenon in material reality, but emerging from another source.
"Whether it's the judgement of a monotheistic god or just a restoration of the cosmic balance..." An aside here, but reading this line, I realise that I increasingly view this either/or as akin to waves and particles. Both are functional descriptions which bring different aspects of the same mysterious process into view.
Write more tragedies, of course