4. Words Beyond Words
I was beginning to believe that stories were much more than just pleasant distractions. The best stories, the ones that stay with us, pointed to some reality outside of our own individual lives and experiences. They seemed to follow a logic of their own that was – like a Platonic Form – some kind of pattern that exists outside of ourselves.
I started to entertain the idea that perhaps the archetypes of story were even older than language itself.
What if language evolved as a way to communicate story? What if story was the more ancient, and more urgent, part of our experience than language itself?
That’s when I encountered Terence McKenna. I’d seen his name before. Back in the 90s I knew him as a babbling hippy, a ‘shroom-addled Woodstock survivor who had somehow got a job at a university. He seemed to be an “expert” in psychedelics, which was not something I had any experience, or interest, in.
I had never taken him at all seriously, but then I heard his distinctive nasal voice — sampled, of course, by Akira the Don — discussing the nature of language:
Unfinished Language – Akira the Don & Terence McKenna
After I’d got past his delivery, I noticed his content. It was something I’d been wondering myself but – ironically – didn’t know how to put into words:
“We have now left the grunts and the digs of the elbow somewhat in the dust… but the most articulate brilliantly pronounced or projected English or French or German or Chinese is still a poor carrier of our intent, a very limited bandwidth for the intense compression of data that we’re trying to put across to each other….Language is some kind of enterprise of human beings that is not finished…”
What if that’s true? It certainly seems true, at least sometimes: words are tools, but incomplete ones. They help us share ideas, but they are not the ideas themselves. Meaning leaks. Intent slips through cracks.
We know that we haven’t yet quite expressed the fullness of what it is we want to say. If you’ve never experienced that, then I know you’ve never tried to describe a vivid dream. Or write a novel.
Maybe it’s not that words fail — but that we expect too much from them.
McKenna spoke of psychedelic experiences — not as hallucinations, but as doorways. Under the influence of DMT or psilocybin, he claimed to encounter “self-transforming elf machines” — entities that communicated not with human language, but with something else. A “visible language,” built from shape, motion, music, metaphor — a language beyond words.
It sounds insane. I certainly thought so. I almost dismissed McKenna entirely, but the more I listened the more I realized that he was circling ideas that I’d slowly been reaching on my own, in a completely different way.
And then I noticed: these ideas don’t just live on the fringes of California hippiedom. They echo, in different voices, across mystical traditions around the world.
In Taoism, the Tao (the Way, the True Nature of the Universe) that can be spoken of is not the true and eternal Tao. The moment you try to define the ultimate truth, it slips away. The truest things are beyond speech.
In Zen to achieve enlightenment you must escape from trying to understand the world in terms of your own categories and language.
In Hinduism and Buddhism, the world of appearances — of names and forms — is Maya. Illusion. The real world lies behind it, vibrating with a kind of music. A dance. A play. A cosmic spectacle. A big act.
I’d also just finished reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” – part philosophy, part road-trip diary. In it, Robert Pirsig wrestles with his idea of “Quality” – a pre-intellectual encounter with excellence that language cannot entirely capture. Our names and concepts distort rather than help to communicate our experience of Quality.
If you tell someone how to write a good essay, the essay they produce will be pedestrian and mundane because it was written according to the rules, not according to the self-generating principles of Quality, he found.
So how can you teach anyone how to do anything? In the end, if they are going to be a master at it, if they are going to generate Quality, they just have to feel it.
Wordlessly.
These were, I began to see, all the same idea in different clothes. Plato would probably find common ground with all of them: the world of Forms is not this world, and our liberation comes from realizing that, and turning our heads to see the shapes that are casting the shadows of the world around us.
When we do so, we find that the universe is alive with a moving, visible “language” and trying to communicate with us through our participation in it.
And then I heard Alan Watts, through Akira again, put it all into a new focus (helped in no small part by Studio Ghibli’s beautiful “Castle in the Sky”):
Life is not a Journey – Akira the Don & Alan Watts
“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, which had a serious purpose at the end.
But we missed the point the whole way along:
It was a musical thing.
You were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”
I remember being floored by that line the first time I heard it.
Maybe the problem is not that we can’t describe reality. Maybe it’s that we’re trying to describe it, when we are meant to interact with it.
Music doesn’t “go somewhere.” It unfolds, or expresses, or resonates. And maybe that’s what the universe is doing. Maybe that’s what we are (supposed to be) doing.
Delevin, in my novel, was a translator — a man of language. But he was stuck in the paradigm I was leaving behind: that words describe a world made of things.
Nass, the woman by the fire, saw something else. She believed the world was made of meaning. And that meaning had a shape and a sound and a grammar and a purpose of its own.
She believed that Delevin — with his gift for language — could learn to speak the “words beyond words”. The kind of words that resonate with the gods. Magic words. But to do that, he had to unlearn everything he thought he knew about language.
Here is the second draft I wrote of that scene.
Delevin heard Nass singing to herself in her own language, as she arranged the firewood, and he asked her about it, so she told him a story, a myth from before the “flood”:
“A long time ago…” she began, “In the… Before Times…”
Delevin nodded. Every culture had its own tradition of a flood or deluge or some other calamity that pre-dated recorded or oral history. Scholarly opinion held that this was an echo of a real disaster, perhaps a giant volcano or comet that struck the Earth, from which all modern cultures were descendants of the survivors.
“… then, people were in chains. Not metal chains, ” She simulated pulling her wrists apart, “But chains in their head or heart. They forgot who they are. They forgot the high songs. The gods did not speak to them, and they did not speak to the gods. So they lived in chains, and there was an Evil One who controlled them. Who wanted them to stay like this.
“But there was one man. A quiet man. He remembered… something. Not in words, but in his sleep, in his dreams, he knew something was wrong… that it should not be like this. His name was Norinos.”
Delevin remembered hearing of a culture hero from some sagas from the Far North, with a man named Nornyos as a central figure. But he did not recall the events of the stories, even if this was the same one.
“One of the daughters of the gods saw Norinos, when he walked alone in the forest. She came down to him. He saw her, and he was amazed.
“Her name was Akallaya. It means.. white light.. she means, True things. There can be no lies with Akallaya, because she sees only the truth.
“Akallaya was not like other gods. She cared. She thought that men should sing the same music as the gods. She wanted to help. But her father – Shesun – the High One – the Good One – he said no. He said men made their choice. The gods cannot change the choices of men.
“But Akallaya did not listen. She gave Norinos a light – a star that he could wear, to protect his heart. And a sword of fire to show him the way.
“Shesun was angry and locked Akallaya in a tower, in the sky.
“Norinos went down into the dark. He tried to fight the Evil One, who ruled the world. The.. king of lies. Norinos could not be killed, because of the star. But he could not kill the Evil One. He was not strong enough. In the end, the Evil One buried Norinos, under a mountain.
“Akallaya heard the silence. She sang a song. A song no one had heard since the first days. It broke the sky, it broke the tower, it broke the world and the mountain where Norinos was. And he came back. She came flying to him, like a sun in the sky at night.
“Together they spoke the words, the true words. The words that shape the world. The Evil One fell. The sea came. The old world ended. This world began.
“But now people could hear again, the old music. They could sing the music again. Speak the words beyond words.
“Shesun was still angry and made Akallaya live like a woman. She married Norinos. They had children, and their children’s children live today.
“But later Shesun took them back – and now if you look up on a clear night you can see them: the sword and the star, two lights watching.
“So, that is the song of Akallaya and Norinos. I sing it when I need to remember why I am here.”
She fell silent again. Delevin sat listening to the fire as it crackled and hissed.
Why I am here.
He thought about the fire in his library, the book he had found. About the woman and Advar — both of them gone, both of them dying to bring him to this place.
He felt as he so often had that he was in another story, not his own, one he did not understand. How he longed for some Akallaya of
his own to come and tell him what it was he needed to do.
In this version, Nass is no longer telling the story in order to motivate Delevin. He asks her to tell him the meaning of the song she was singing. That felt more “true” to me, to her character and to the larger theme.
Delevin comes to realize that his world is not very different from the one that Norinos lived in: there were powers-that-be who did not want certain things to be known or said, and that it need not be this way.
We’ll leave him here for now at the campfire, on the precipice of a new way of seeing the world, as a place that cannot be explained, but can be sung.