Why not be utterly changed into fire?

No one can offer the definitive interpretation of a work of art—including the artist herself. Interpretation is also not an end but a means to better understanding ourselves and our world. Experiencing and interpreting art is an act of self-conscious world building. We distill from our experience of art meaningful values with which we build our worlds.

It’s in this way that people have often compared the experience of art to the experience of the divine. Mystics have historically sought such experiences looking for new insights into their practice and expression of faith. There is always something not-quite-graspable, something that eludes interpretation, remains ineffable when reflecting on these experiences. Trying to put words to an experience of art or the divine always takes something away from the immediacy of the experience. Yet putting words to these kinds of experiences is the only way we can build our world. We have to bring the transcendent to earth.

Of course, when we lose the immediacy of experience through words, we are in the position of explaining what our experience seems like rather than what it is. Like King Beetle, we are confounded by our inability to access the immediacy of experience with language. We want to know the fire, which is to say to cognize it, hold its totality in our mind without any excess. But as many medieval mystics learned, as King Beetle learns, the only way to do this is to lose ourselves to the fire. The paradox is that when we come back—if we come back—we may be changed, but the immediacy of our experience will always be gone.

In many ways this podcast is the attempt of three friends to make sense of the fire: the experiences we’ve had as fans of mewithoutYou.

As much as we’d like sometimes to simply become the fire, we know that we can’t. And, actually, on this podcast we don’t want to! Becoming changed into fire is an individual experience, which is valuable, but what we’re after here is a collective recollection of our individual experiences: to mine them for meaning, and stitch them together. There is immense value in that too, because this is the foundation on which a culture, a society, a world is built. In acknowledging this, we acknowledge that our own collective recollection is not complete without the pieces offered by as many mwY fans as possible.

So we invite you, dear listener, to recollect with us. Remember when you were utterly changed into fire.