“Genuine enigma destroys language.”
Brian O’Doherty

Writing SEREN: Art and Mysticism

Mention mysticism at a gathering among your friends and neighbors, and you’re likely to elicit a roomful of blank stares and embarrassed mutterings. It’s a subject not well suited to polite and casual company. It is however, a more comfortable concept when coupled to art, symphonic music and literature. 

Britannica defines Mystical “Having a spiritual meaning that is difficult to see or understand.” Merriam-Webster goes further: “Having a spiritual meaning or reality that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intellect.” And “Having the nature of an individual’s direct, subjective communion with the absolute.”

Heavy stuff, but not entirely alien to art speak, at least in 19th and early 20th Century critical writing. Great art is a place where reason finds its limits. Many would argue that this landscape of eternity is very much the territory of the greatest creations of Western Civilization—whether it be a painting, sculpture, symphony or sonata. Any art work that endures the centuries and continues to fascinate multitudes of generations across diverse cultures must contain something which transcends temporal, literal, and specific qualities and nudges into the realm of the universal. A work that exceeds the limits of language and intellect. Few would argue that symphonic music communicates directly to the deepest, and most inarticulate emotions. It requires no narrative to drive an audience to tears.

Visual art can offer a similar experience, especially when the viewer allows it to be uncoupled from its subject matter. We can admire the image of an isolated individual in an Edward Hopper painting without needing to know the specifics of person, time and place. We feel its human-ness. Numerous art historians would argue that universal human-ness is the very point of art and museums.

Norman Bryson writes: Francisco De Zurbaran’s “ Lemons, Oranges, Cup and a Rose (1650-1660) shows a visual field so purified and so perfectly composed, that the familiar objects seem on the brink of transfiguration, or (the inevitable word) transubstantiation. Standing at some imminent intersection with the divine, and with eternity, they exactly break with the normally human.”

In writing SEREN and trying to develop a plausible motivation for the protagonist, Fairchild Moss, I hoped to describe a twofold desire in the character. First, a need to be embraced by tradition and accepted into the acknowledged ranks of first-quality painters, as represented by the beam-signing ceremony at the fabled Scarab Club. And second, Moss’s wish to find that elusive quality of genius and originality which characterizes great art. Since Moss has inherited wealth, his ambition finds its locus in things less tangible than monetary success, and in things more difficult to attain than mere money. It is this desire that leads him to seek out the muse, Seren. In order to find genius, one must first be able to recognize and acknowledge its existence. Hence Moss’s haunting of museums, and the locales of historically great artists. A journey of communion if you will. Ambition in art is nothing new, but in an increasingly materialistic culture, seeking greatness for greatness’s sake can seem both naïve and anachronistic. To buffer that cynicism inherent to contemporary culture, I wanted to impart a Quixotesque quality to Moss’s quest, combined with an endless self-questioning. Ambition untempered by doubt ceases to be relatable to most readers.

When Robert Motherwell—a product of both Stanford and Harvard—states: “Make no mistake, abstract art is a form of mysticism.” He refers to an art that relies on a direct connection to the most profound emotions, bypassing the need for direct, literal translation. As Clive Bell suggests in his essay on significant form, “A good work of art carries the person who is capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy.” A painting capable of creating this condition of ecstasy is what Moss hopes for from his liaison with the muse. What he discovers at the end of SEREN is that seeking greatness comes at a cost—which is the moral of almost every quest fable.

The quote below from the poet Wallace Stevens reminds us that the intimations of mystery are all around us, and that engagement with the mystical is only the turn of a page or a museum entrance away.

“The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind
If one may say so. And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.”

—Wallace Stevens
Connoisseur of Chaos

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The story of Moss, Claudine, and the wicked muse Seren continues in the novel, AIX: The Apotheosis of Fairchild Moss due out in 2026.