That aesthetic, oh that frenetic aesthetic, how I yearn for that aesthetic! It is one of rambling, of chaos, of some hidden, immense meaning shrouded in obscurities, in riddles, in veiled mysteries, in thousands of pages of words. They scatter and are thrown, and fragment, and in fragmentation meaning arises. You look to your right and left and down and outside and on a tower and in a cave and it is everywhere but you can’t find it because it is too fast; you can almost see it but it constantly eludes. It is too large! Too large to be seen all at once, so it fractures itself, and drives you into itself to be lost and gain knowledge slowly and randomly, in bursts. Here you don’t understand and there you don’t understand but here is a connection and something is there; what does it mean? It is vague and maybe imaginary, but in its vagueness the subconscious, that holder of instinct, utters its voice and its voice thunders and smashes us as we sit there reading or listening and you know something has been said.
That radical crash! That untamable Something! That bucking bull made of power and light and a mountain and the sound of “inexorable” and “eschatology.” The ehkks, the ehkks, that ehkks noise! It lifts you up and throws off chains! Or the hard h of “Bach” and “horde!” It is guttural and thick and brings you a mile away and a mile within and a mile into the boundless sky, to fly and taste freedom; nay, to shatter the one million gallon tank of Freedom and have its waves break upon you so that it pulls you along and you howl in laughter.
It is a wild, loose connection. It is Idioteque hammering at your eardrums. Throwing around each other, and holding close, and throwing, and holding, on and on. A constant straining that feels on the verge of explosion and disaster. It will never survive! How can it succeed! But it does and it does! There can be no order seen but order there is nonetheless; the order in the process of wildness, in the taste of danger and that valuable Risk and the opposite of clarity. It twirls round, many paths circling one another, almost planned, all the while with the goal in mind and deeply striven for, directly through indirect means, and achieved all at once, in a flash, messily.
It is a wind storm that blows you right out of your seat and control is unthinkable, hilarious, insane. It knocks you to your knees and dries up your face so that you squint and speech is muddled, and lifts you and takes you wherever its whimsical whim decides, without asking permission first or second or last. You ask questions and it responds, booming so you can say no more, but your mind screams that the answers are no answers at all, yet you know that now you know, somewhere in your vast confusion.
Ah, this aesthetic of the cataclysmic, the primal, the ineffable. How like the Bible’s poetry! How raw and to our core! But after it shows me myself and I tremble at the finality of enormous Truth, and I am overwhelmed and cut down, I do continue with life-regular. It is merely one aesthetic out of many. A passion of art. Perhaps it is my favorite, but it is only a part of the world God has created. It holds wild vigor, but wildness is not all of life. Calm, sweet calm, is bliss as well, and is the favorite of many. Kindness and steady work are other blisses. I like it a lot when the lovers of calm sincerely appreciate my love for the wild though they know they do not love to dwell in it as I do. I thank them, and Him, for this. Therefore, I try to appreciate calm, or kindness, or simple and innocent merriment, so that I may laugh with my fellow saints, my brothers and sisters. I pray my soul continues to learn this until I joy in ultimate Joy.
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:14-19, ESV
Thoughts of a Novice 