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.