Somewhere in The Way Things Are, a collection of interviews, religion scholar Huston Smith describes the difference between the esoteric and exoteric dimensions of religion:
A true infinite is without limitations of any form and, by the same token, beyond any positive definition, because definition would demarcate and therefore limit. Some minds, faced with this notion of the infinite, are enticed, one might almost say entranced. Their response to it is affirmative, embracing. They are like a moth before the candle flame: they go for it. Other minds are rebuffed by such a notion. Repelled may be too strong a word, but they are certainly turned back by it. At best, they can’t get their hands on it, their minds around it, and so it’s meaningless. At worst, it’s frightening, a little scary, or at least certainly unappealing. So the esoterics are those for whom the infinite is a positive notion; the exoterics are those for whom it is a negative notion. Actually, in the Western world, it’s doubtful that one finds true philosophical esoterics before Plotinus, because even the Greeks, with all their passion for abstraction, saw the infinite as an inferior concept. They saw it merely as an indefinite, and that which is indefinite is without form, amorphous. And for the Greeks, the perfect is the formed rather than the unformed. Just as in French today, ouvrage fini, a finished work, is a good work, completed, articulated, defined. So in the West we have to wait till Plotinus for a positive infinite to emerge, and even he was probably influenced by India. For Indians, unlike the Greeks, viewed the infinite from very early times, certainly by the time of the Upanishads, in the positive or esoteric way.
Needless to say, there’s a lot here. I’ve been thinking about the above in relation to writing.
If the formed and unformed are both in some way formed, then writing is an act of what Smith called demarcating the infinite, of limiting the limitless. With lines drawn on paper, meaning is created by what the marks call attention to and what they don’t. But, paradoxically, good writing can work against demarcation. While it limits, it opens–to varied readings, to implications, to new dimensions.
Go figure. It’s at this point my brain starts to sizzle. The moth hits the flame. Zap.
On a related note, check out the esoteric blog for the Worcester, MA junk shop Happy Birthday Mike Leslie.