At a recent poetry gig, I raved to an ageing poet about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, an example of prose that’s more poetic than much current poetry. ‘Reading it is a spiritual experience,’ I said without irony – probably naïve of me in an academic environment. Yet I had no conscious desire to provoke her.

‘I have a problem with the word “spiritual”,’ she said.

My eyebrows rose in polite enquiry. She objected to the word’s ‘new-age’ connotations. Imagination means the same thing, she said. Not necessarily, I said, then clarified that I’d meant transcendent rather than religious.

‘Trans just means across,’ she said with obvious impatience.

‘Trans also means above,’ said the poet sitting between us.

Indeed. For me, McCarthy lends an exalted perspective to post-apocalyptic darkness – his biblical diction, stark imagery and mesmerising rhythms inducing a meditative state in which I can read undistracted in noisy, crowded places.

In a hearteningly radical work, What is Madness? (2011), psychoanalyst Darian Leader compares psychosis with neurosis: ‘The absence of doubt is the single clearest indicator of the presence of psychosis (p. 116).’ So someone with total – psychotic – conviction regarding some truly bizarre beliefs might still have the sense to keep them secret for fear of sounding crazy. As Leader explains:

This kind of certainty is synonymous with faith. And Leader’s not the first theorist to note that questions of meaning feature in schizophrenia. As science or, more precisely, modern medicine has taken over the role religion once played in moderating society’s anxiety re mortality, the signs of a spiritual calling (visions, voices, speaking in tongues) have been pathologised – demonised, in a way. What once passed for angelic or demonic visitation has been localised, narrowed down to wonky brain chemistry. Divine inspiration, for the would-be ‘creative’ (creator), can be replicated through modelling of geniuses’ behaviours. No longer created or programmed by ‘God’, we’ve become our own makers, agents and sellers. Not content to depend, either, on artificial (external) intelligence, we can’t wait to incorporate its technology into our bodies – to negate the inner space that once enabled mystical states.

Reporting on biohacking, Gillian Terzis, who works in ‘an industry characterised by diminishing horizons – journalism’, reports that

Meow-Ludo Meow-Meow, rising star of the biohacking firmament and co-founder of Oz’s first grassroots DIY science lab, tells Terzis he’s considering offering Sydney’s BioFoundry members lab access via a chip embedded in their hand ‘because it’s fucking cool’:

The mind boggles at such logic. Let’s hope Terzis has taken his quote out of context. Still, isn’t the merging of machine with flesh just a clumsily literal bid for transcendence?

A reporter on cutting-edge technology for decades, journalist and author John Markoff says the next global computing platform to come after the smartphone will be some form of ‘augmented reality’, with companies racing to develop

That should leave less room for doubt – and independent thought. We’re headed for a virtual womb. How fucking cool is that? According to Hegel (1770–1831), we can think and understand only in language: ‘It is in names that we think’. (Not unlike computers?) And now, more and more, we think in brand names: e.g., ‘google’ is a verb, a ‘doing word’ that’s used with increasing frequency (and sounds disturbingly like the nonsense words adults burble at babies). But what’s a verb for ‘spirituality’?

To paint might fit – in the case of what’s looking like an endangered breed of artist. In the ravishing monograph Roy Jackson: Hands On (2015), art critic Terence Maloon writes of the late great painter, ‘For Jackson, as for Tuckson, commitment to art was an all-consuming spiritual discipline (p. 23).’ It’s good to know that not all artists and critics have lost sight of where mark-making came from; haven’t thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Re discipline, Maloon quotes Simon Leys (The Hall of Uselessness, p. 298):

How much scope remains for such an approach to art (or poetry) today? If I might take the liberty of messing with Leys’s equation: In the virtual world, as in reality itself, when self-obsession is complete, self-expression reaches its nadir.