Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘signs’

Signs and Portents

I’ve been driving for over 40 years.  In all that time, I’ve never had an accident and have received only two tickets, both for speeding; one at 16, the other at 18.

I’ve been driving when cars crashed in front of me and behind me, when big trucks jackknifed and small trucks lost their loads, when pieces of wood bounced on the pavement and smashed against my windshield, when drivers inexplicably stopped in front of me on highways and nearly caused catastrophes.  I’ve had several near-miss collisions (never my fault) and have driven through speed traps going well in excess of the limit, all with no consequences.  As a result, I’ve developed an unrealistic sense of my own security.

Sometimes I park my car downtown in one of those tall garages with tight, circular ramps.  I like to gun the engine all the way up to the roof and then go even faster on the way down.  On more than one occasion I’ve repeated this several times in a row.  I wonder what the garage staff thinks of this; I’m sure they’ve seen me.

I’ve been to Los Angeles at least 50 times over the last 25 years; so often, in fact, that a friend calls me “Mr. LA.”  It’s a city I know well.  On each trip after I deplane at LAX, I head to the car rental counter and, because I’m cheap, get the economy model.  Usually they assign me a Kia Optima, a Korean car that’s small and fast with great maneuverability.  KIA, by the way, is an acronym used by the American military.  It means Killed In Action.

On almost every trip, I make it a goal to drive the Pacific Coast Highway up to Point Dume, especially at night.  That experience helps restore my equalibrium and equanimity.  After 10pm, the PCH is deserted. The moon casts a silver line on the ocean; the stars glow brightly in the sky.  I roll down the windows and drive 60, 70, 80 miles per hour; there’s no sound except for the humming motor and the wind that whips through the car.  It’s like therapy for me; it helps me relax and evaluate my life.

Sometimes I head up into the mountains.  Malibu Canyon Road has tight curves and steep cliffs that drop to rocks below.  In the daytime, I can open up the engine and navigate the turns pretty well; at night the road is dark so it takes a little more finesse and a lot less speed.  I’m never reckless when I drive but I admit to sometimes driving faster than maybe what a prudent person should do.

A few years ago I was going through a difficult, unhappy period so I escaped for four days to LA to unwind and get some distance from the situation.  As I was driving my Korean death machine, I headed south on Coldwater Canyon, down-shifting along the winding mountain road.  Around a bend there was a thick plume of white smoke billowing high into the sky.  Driving closer, I saw a car on fire — the intensity of which had burned and melted the car almost down to its wheels.  The fire department was on the scene putting out the blaze, yet it was a shocking image, terrifying and mesmerizing.

I have an acquaintance who sees every unusual image as a sign from God.  She thinks God regularly speaks to her through signs.  When I saw the burning car, I wondered if this was a metaphor for my situation at the time.  Was it a sign?  Was my life about to explode in flames?  But if it was a sign, then from whom and what did it mean?  Or perhaps it wasn’t a sign at all, just a random event – and yet, why did it appear to me at this particular time and place?

I’m reminded of the work of John Chamberlain.  Chamberlain was a sculptor who assembled crashed and crushed automobile parts into interesting shapes.  I’m sure he pilfered car parts from the scenes of many a wreck.  I find his sculptures to be lyrical, beautiful, colorful and poetic, but I can’t look at his art and not think of death.  In his sculptures, I imagine some poor soul with a mangled body being cut from his car with the Jaws of Life.

A few days after the burning car incident, I was sitting in LAX waiting for my plane to depart.  I looked high up into the atrium and saw a bird perched on a ledge next to a window, trapped inside, tapping its beak on the glass in a futile effort to escape.

Some people see images and think they are signs from heaven or portents of things to come.  I’m not sure what I think of signs.  But I am sure I like the art of John Chamberlain.  I do know I was able to work myself out of my poor mental state.  My life didn’t explode in flames.  I continue to travel frequently to LA.  And whenever I can, I still drive fast on the PCH.

Leave a comment
6 Feb 2012

Sliding Doors

I subscribe to Joseph Campbell’s belief that religious institutions often stand in the way of religious experience.  I no longer belong to an organized religion but I am keenly interested in spiritual matters.

When I was about 14, I was lying in my father’s hammock in our backyard on a warm day one June, thinking intently on the origins of God.  I must have fallen into a trance-like state because for a nanosecond, God became clear to me in a way He had never been before and in that spiritual epiphany, I suddenly understood how She came to be. It was a transcendent moment; it thrilled me beyond any experience I had ever had before (or have had since) but when I became conscious of what I was witnessing, the door closed, the vision disappeared as quickly as one can blink an eye, and I no longer had any recollection of what had been revealed. To this day, I can tell you nothing about that moment other than I had an ‘experience.’

There have been a few times when works of art have elicited a near-supernatural reaction in me. I remember one vividly sometime around 1971 when I was visiting Berkeley, California.  I had wandered into the University art museum to see a show of paintings and drawings based on various passages in the Bible. Most of the works were traditional and predictable, until I turned a corner and saw, for the first time, the paintings of Henry Osawa Tanner and, among several works, his depiction of The Annunciation. In this small miracle of an artwork, the Angel Gabriel is represented as a shaft of brilliant light.  To me, this painting is a tour de force, certainly because of Tanner’s painterly skills but, more importantly, for his unique, radical and well-ahead-of-anyone’s-time interpretation of a divine being as a beam of concentrated energy. What makes Tanner’s work all the more remarkable was his time period (1859-1937) and his race. Tanner was black and living in post-Civil War America. Perhaps he wanted to shake up the white art establishment.  I like to think, however, that Tanner, himself, was divinely inspired to create this particular Gabriel.  I looked at that painting for 30 minutes.  When I finally walked away I thought, ‘Tanner got it perfectly right.’

I had another metaphysical moment just a few years ago, although it didn’t involve a divinity.  It was more like an out-of-body-experience.  I was at the Getty Center standing in front of Van Gogh’s, Bedroom in Arles, when I felt teleported inside the painting through some kind of time-shifting, altered-state experience. For a second or two, I found myself standing at the foot of that bed in that very room Van Gogh had painted.  When I told a few people later about my experience, I laughed it off by blaming the funny mushrooms I must have had the night before in my Veal Piccatta, but it was a real and disorienting feeling. I can’t explain it.

I’ve had a few other metaphysical experiences and I’m sure there are many others who have had similar extra-dimensional moments. Perhaps they are attempts by the spiritual to reconnect with the physical or they’re worm holes in time and matter that allow us to peek into an alternative universe.  Or perhaps they are merely delusions.  I don’t pretend to know what they mean.  But every chance I get, I have the Veal Piccatta and hope for another glimpse into what I don’t understand.

 

 

 

 

1 Comment
14 Jan 2012