– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
Moreover, and more bizarrely still, they [UFOs. – P.] are mischievously omnipotent in their ability to show themselves to us in quite outrageous ways, as in a picture window, while at the very same time completely eluding any lasting or conclusive contact. We have more than enough evidence, up to eighty thousand cases reported around the world, Méheust notes. And yet we have nothing, not a single piece of incontrovertible evidence. Working much like a mystical text, they reveal themselves only to conceal themselves. Apparently, they can never be known as they are. The UFO, then, is “the unnameable thing” (la chose innommable) that clearly manifests intentional properties but frustrates all psychological and sociological explanations. Whatever it is, it exists “before all determination”. Accordingly, the UFO phenomenon creates epistemological conditions that are inherently solipsistic, circular, and maddeningly paradoxical for those who attempt to engage it. In a word, my word anyway, they are hermeneutical realities.
These unnameable things, these damned things, as Fort would say, express themselves in the cultural fantasies of the time and place. They can also be scarily mimetic, as, for example, when they literally hunt hunters or fish for fishermen, as we saw with Vallee’s study of the Latin American cases. They are thus hardly objective things “out there.” They are objective things “out there” and subjective things “in here.” They are interactive, participatory realities that cannot be understood outside the forms of consciousness that perceive and experience them, that is, us.
[…] Méheust avoids both of these rationalist and religious extremes, consistently arguing instead for a richer and more nuanced position.
That position comes down to this. The world is not simply composed of physical causes strung together in strictly materialistic and mechanical fashion requiring, say, a physics for their complete explanation. The world is also a series of meaningful signs requiring a hermeneutics for their decipherment. Whatever they are, UFOs “vibrate in phase” with our forms of consciousness and culture. We thus cannot even conceive of them outside or independent from their observation. This most basic of facts puts into serious doubt the adequacy of any traditional scientific method. Such methods, after all, work from an ideal of complete objectivity, which in turn demands an effort to eliminate all interference with the observer. But what if the observer is the very mode of the apparition? What if the observer is an integral part of the experiment?
For his part, Méheust argues that the naive idea that consciousness is a clean “mirror” separate from the objects that it reflects needs to be abandoned immediately and put into the museum of bad ideas. He cites the physicist Von Neumann here, who wrote that “the conception of an objective reality has thus evaporated”. Méheust had arrived at the same conclusion twenty pages up: “We therefore find, but now transposed into the domain of the symbolic representation, the paradoxes of microphysics: as with the electron, the notion of a UFO independent from its human observer is nonsensical”. The implications of all of this for the study of the UFO phenomenon as a “mythical-physical reality” are immense: “one is not able to envisage [the UFO phenomenon] independently from our consciousness; what is more: there can be no question of eliminating that part which the human spirit adds to it; it is, on the contrary, an essential component of the phenomenon”.
[…]
Méheust also employs mythical language to say the same thing. Hence he can describe the entire UFO phenomenon as a “technologized Hermes,” after the Greek trickster god of lucky finds, language and communication, doorways, and dreams (and the etymological base of our own “hermeneutics”). Here he points out that in reading the abduction narratives one often has the impression that the victim has “penetrated” into the UFO as if it represented “the other side of the mirror.” Like Alice in Wonderland, the victim has somehow entered another universe, this one of an atemporal and nonspatial order. The UFO has in effect acted like a “windowsill,” even like a “reality changer.” Méheust is particularly struck by all those stories in which a gardener, hunter, fisherman, or driver is engaged in some utterly banal activity when—pop!—another reality opens up in the very midst of the mundane activity. He thus sees these narratives as a return of the repressed Hermes archetype, as a lived embodiment of that most basic of Hermetic principles, “where the high and the low cease to be perceived as contradictory”.
Very much related to these Hermetic notions of the UFO functioning as a windowsill, reality changer, or portal and of paradoxically joining the spiritually profound and the mundane (or the culturally lowbrow) are the key issues of the absurd and the symbolic function. We might recall that Vallee had highlighted the utter absurdity of many of the UFO narratives. He felt that this absurdity was not accidental or meaningless, that it was somehow part of the message. Aimé Michel highlights the same in his preface to Méheust’s book, “Requiem pour des chiméres trés anciennes” (“Requiem for Some Very Old Chimeras”), a potent little gnostic essay in which the author expresses his disgust with “the ideologues and the theologians,” that is, with the representatives of reason and faith, neither of whom, he suggests, have really confronted the facts of the case at hand. Such facts, Michel admits, appear both fantastic and absurd. But does not this nonsense itself make sense? Is not this genre of absurdity entirely appropriate, even expected, before the possible presence of another thought? Hence Michel’s fantastic realist mantra, which is also Méheust’s mantra, “to envisage everything and to believe nothing”. Méheust follows the master here, pointing out, for example, that the UFO phenomenon acts like a “super-dream” (sur-reve) that works through a process of radical “absurdization”.
Pp. 210-3
Ср. съ поршневской концепціей языка въ его связи съ абсурдомъ.