Why Being Human Is Almost Impossible: Leigh McCloskey on Art as the Language of Creation

Since I was a child, I have been convinced that the essence of our life is science. Numbers, logic, structure. Later in life, I began to see that this is only part of the picture. Life is also about movement and how we move through the world. And, also, it’s about art.

I have come to see mathematics as the blueprint of the universe. Something fixed and reliable, the plan everything is built on. But nobody has ever fallen in love with a blueprint. What makes life worth living is what grows on top of it: what we feel, what we choose, what we create. So what happens to a society that keeps the blueprint and forgets about the rest?

These are the questions I discussed with Leigh McCloskey in the seventh episode of the second season of Talks 21. Leigh is an artist, actor, and explorer of the Western hermetic tradition. He is best known for his monumental work Tarot ReVisioned, created over seventeen years, in which he explores archetypes and the symbolic structures of human experience.

Alongside a successful acting career, Leigh spent decades creating a unique body of work at his Malibu home in California, Olandar – a place that has become a gathering point for artists, thinkers, and seekers from around the world. That home holds his living artwork, The Hieroglyph of the Human Soul, a hand-painted room he describes as a kind of painted cave.

We recorded this episode inside this space. Being surrounded by his unique work naturally influenced the conversation itself. It became less a discussion about art as an object and more a reflection on art as a process of discovery.

Leigh and I shared thoughts on why art and science were once two tools for the same question, and when they drifted apart. We spoke about mathematics as something living rather than abstract. We spoke about Leigh’s view that human beings are not here simply to arrive somewhere, but to unfold and develop their potential. And why the moment of contraction may be the trigger for that.

You can listen to the full seventh episode of the second season of the Talks 21 podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or here on my website.

Takeaways from This Episode

• According to Leigh, art is not only a profession but a way of asking questions that only art can address.

• Leigh explores the possibility that mathematics represents more than an abstract system for describing reality. As he says, numbers, forms, and patterns may also carry symbolic meaning. 

• He describes his own role in his work as closer to a midwife than an author, allowing something to be born rather than imposing an idea.

• Leigh suggests that difficulty and suffering can become transformative when we engage with them creatively instead of only trying to escape them. 

• The contraction we may be feeling collectively is, in his reading, not the end of growth but the stage that precedes blossoming.

• According to Leigh, a song does not transform us because it taught us something, but because it allowed us to feel something.

• He suggests that instead of asking people what they think of our work, we might ask what our work makes them think.

https://youtu.be/-ptHFfL70uc

Why Art and Science Were Never Meant to Be Separate

Leigh put it simply near the start of our conversation: science builds the piano, and art lets us play it.

His point is historical as much as philosophical. During the Renaissance, according to Leigh, art and science were often different tools used to explore the same fundamental questions. He offered Leonardo da Vinci as an example. Leonardo was not trying to be a painter; he used painting as a way of asking questions that no other method could reach. Over time, Leigh suggests, art became increasingly defined as a category or profession. In his view, this narrowed our understanding of what art fundamentally represents: a form of creation and a language through which we explore existence.

I recognise this separation from my own journey, because I lived on one side of it for a long time. Mathematics works with a simple assumption: the one who observes stands outside the thing being observed. The mathematician looks at the numbers, and the numbers do not look back. I call this narrow rationality, and for years it was the only kind I trusted.

But physics has known for a century that the observer is part of what happens. It is a remarkably useful simplification, and I would not give it up for anything. What changed for me is that I stopped treating it as the whole territory. Putting the observer back into the picture, which is what I mean by an expanded rationality, takes nothing away from mathematics. It only admits that we are inside the thing we are describing. This is the shift I explored in my lecture The Art in Mathematics – Divine Signature in Numbers.

Leigh goes further than I would, and I found his version worth considering. He points out that everything alive is mathematical, while the reverse does not hold: a pattern can be perfectly mathematical and completely dead. So numbers, for him, are not abstractions we invented to describe things from a distance. They are something we are made of. He uses the image of a tuning fork. Strike it, and the note sounds in anything built from the same material. In his view, a shape or a pattern can work on a person in exactly that way, which is why art can move us before we understand why.

Whether or not one shares that view, it opens an interesting question: Are we only describing structures around us, or are we also discovering relationships that we are already part of? 

Why Contraction Might Be the Beginning of Blossoming

Later in the conversation, we moved to growth, and to what happens when it stops. Leigh uses the image of a plant that has grown as tall as it can. When growth stops, it is natural to read it as a sign that something went wrong. But this is the moment the bud forms. According to Leigh, the plant has not stopped growing. It has changed direction, from getting taller to opening up.

He relates this idea to the challenges we face today. The fierceness we see around us, the sense of pushing harder and faster in every direction, reads to him less like an ending and more like a stage. According to Leigh, we are not here to get somewhere. We are here to open up, in the same way the plant does when it can grow no taller.

This echoes something I explored with Daniel Pinchbeck, who spoke about pressure and crisis as engines of change and quoted Dion Fortune's line that God is pressure. My own experience points the same way. The biggest shifts in my life did not happen when things were easy. They arrived when I had no option left but to change how I was looking at things. What Leigh adds is a gentler frame for the same dynamic. The pressure is not a punishment and not a catastrophe to be survived. It may be the condition under which something opens.

I would keep both possibilities on the table. Pressure can lead to a genuine opening, but it can also lead nowhere at all. It depends on what we do with it. If we only react to it, by looking for someone to blame or by waiting for it to pass, nothing opens. Whether pressure becomes an opening or a decline seems to me to depend on us far more than on the pressure itself.

Art as a Different Way of Listening 

Toward the end of our conversation, Leigh said something that reframes what art is for. Music does not transform us by informing us. It enters us, and it transforms us because it allows us to feel something. In his view, this is why art heals: it is not outside of us, describing us from a distance. It moves in.

This is close to what I explored with Uria Tsur, who works with the human voice as a bridge between what we feel inside and what we can share. Uria does not teach performance; he creates conditions in which people feel safe enough to be truthful. Leigh, working in a completely different medium, arrives at a similar principle. He is clear that he was not illustrating anything on the walls of his home, and that he did not know where the work was going. He describes himself as the vehicle through which something was able to express itself.

Both of them point toward participation rather than observation. Leigh frames it in theatrical terms: the difference between being an audience and being an actor. An audience reacts. An actor is inside the scene, present, responsible for how it goes. I recognise this state from climbing, where nothing exists except the present moment. I suspect most of us know this from somewhere.

Listen to Episode 7 of Season 2 of Talks 21

This was a conversation of a different kind. Leigh thinks in symbols and images, and he speaks the way he paints, in layers rather than in lines. Meeting him inside the room he has been painting for decades gave the whole episode a unique atmosphere.

If what you have read here resonates with you, I recommend the full episode. Among other things, Leigh describes what he experienced at the moment his father died, and why it changed how he understands a human life. He also explains why he believes that being ordinary, rather than extraordinary, may be what finally allows us to be ourselves.

You can find Leigh's work at leighmccloskey.com and on his YouTube channel, and you can listen to our full conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or here on my website.