A
couple of weeks ago I read about an artist whose work, in my view, parallels
the mystical experience. Wil S. Hylton writes of one of James Turrell’s
creations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:
The room was devoid of boundaries, just an eternity of inky blackness, with the outline of a huge lavender rectangle floating in the distance, and beyond it, the tall plane of green light stretching toward an invisible horizon, where it dissolved into a crimson stripe. … The shapes and contours I saw were made entirely of light.
It
reminded me of the first laser light program I saw in the days before laser
light shows became commercial and often tacky. It was truly a work of art on
the interior “canvas” of the Los Angeles Planetarium dome, accompanied by
music, ranging from classical to jazz. The colors were so intense, I cried.
The
only other time I remember crying at the intensity of colors was on a visit to
Petra, an ancient and abandoned city in Jordan carved in stone whose mineral
composition reveals intense striations of colors. (You will remember its stone
temple from the film Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade.) I felt so sorry for one of my trip mates who was too
sick to leave the bus, unable to join us being led on donkeys through a very long
and winding few-feet-wide passageway between sheer stone cliffs to Petra.
Having
that experience, I could understand why Zorba would wire the narrator of Zorba the Greek to come see a beautiful
green stone he had discovered. Zorba, based on an actual acquaintance of the author,
Nikos Kazantzakis, angers the narrator by his seeming obliviousness to
the great famine he and his world are enduring on the eve of even greater
disasters to come.
“To
hell with beauty!” he writes, “She has no heart and does not care a jot for
human suffering.” But then his anger dissipated, and he felt drawn to Zorba’s
request: “Some wild bird in me was beating its wings and asking me to go. Yet I
did not go. … I listened to the moderating, cold, human voice of logic.” In
response, Zorba wrote, “You too could have seen a beautiful green stone at
least once in your life, you poor soul, and you didn’t see it,” and the bad
choice convinces Zorba there is a hell.
Hylton
writes:
The joke among Turrell’s friends is that, to see his work, you must first become hopelessly lost. … Not everyone enjoys the Turrell experience. It requires a degree of surrender. There is a certain comfort in knowing what is real and where things are; to have that comfort stripped away can be rapturous, or distressing. It can even be dangerous.
Notably,
his work is yet wheelchair accessible.
This
could describe a mystical experience—becoming hopelessly lost, surrendering,
having comfort and certainty stripped away, rapturous, distressing, dangerous.
And yet “wheelchair accessible,” which I suggest as a metaphor for available to
all.
As
with the mystical experience, “a dense and impenetrable vocabulary to describe
his work” is needed, like “thingness of light” and “alpha state of mind.” “Without
these terms it would be nearly impossible to discuss his work,” Hylton
observes. So too with mystical
experiences, for example: “thin places,” “dark night of the soul,” “interior castle,”
“showings,” “mindfulness,” “oneness,” “nirvana,” “kingdom of God,” “in the Word was life, and the life was the
light of all.”
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