Elements of the Ecstatic Experience

I wrote this in November 2006 to post to an online group. What I describe reoccurs much more regularly in my life and has become very much more pronounced. I used to have dreams where it seemed the culmination of my experiences had finally been fulfilled (wish fulfillment I suppose) where my vision got very fuzzy and I felt dizzy. This was a rather accurate preview, but it is more like the heightened amount of information I am perceiving is what is causing this response. That is, due to what seems a loss of filtering, a more singular (and more familiar) focus is compromised.

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I have made a list of the four most prominent aspects of my own ecstatic experience. This is an attempt to describe what this feels like to others who may have questions. It is surely not very accurate as the experience as a whole is rather unique in character and not exactly like the those which I am making an analogy to, but close enough. All these elements can be experienced at the same time as well as independently.

1. Convulsing of the body-

These are what we call kryia. These can be gross movements or small and more global. As this is involuntary it is a bit like shivering. And in fact being in a cold environment can enhance them.

2. A searing feeling in mind and body.

This is probably what we call bliss. Some analogous experiences are the hot flash one gets on hearing some very disturbing news, hearing a very high pitch and loud sound that makes the head reel and even the rush of heat before vomiting. It has a very disorientating feel to it.  Although none of the analogies are pleasant this experience is often very pleasurable but not always exclusively so. Awe and panic are often hand in hand here.

3. An heightened experience of color, detail and movement.

This seems to be the classic description of a peak experience. The only analogy may be a chemically induced psychedelic experience, but for me the ecstatic experience is more subtle and more intense, there is no hallucination to get in the way. With this level of detail everything commands my attention. Also I am very aware of the movement of the scene as I pass through it. I cannot but see my view bouncing as I walk, trees turning as I pass and so forth.

4. An increased sense of association.

The best analogy for this is the fever dream. I think this may be what some famous thinkers call entering the mythic experience, an experience where everything appears as living. Objects in view seem somehow related, or they strong conjure mental images, or both with the connection in the association being very vivid. The associations can be very, very rapid, faster than I can actually reflect on. They are also shifting and shift away from associations that I would normally make, again leading to disorientation. This also distorts normal perception of size and separateness.

This last item deserves a bit more. I think that the mind finds meaning by analogy, the structuralist view. And I think the mind creates a matrix of analogy. As attention vacillates between the different elements in this matrix it is a motor that gives the sense of meaning. But when this facility starts working on an heightened level, indiscriminately using mental and objective elements, the sense that everything is alive and responsive starts to prevail. I do think that this way of being is very beneficial for me, especially in being an artist, as long as I am reminded that this is in the subjective inquiry. I also know that this way of being is so inconsistent with the generally accepted world view that an acceptance of it as something valid and beneficial is a bold assertion.

I also want to note that all my analogies are to things that denote a compromised individual and in so none of them are necessarily desirable. This does not make it easy to put my ecstatic experience in a positive light. However I do have faith in what comes to me as a culmination as well as not disavowing that a compromise is being made to my normative being. And I prefer the greatest accuracy in describing what my experience is, even if the description feels aversive, over a beautiful categorical statement that does not really explain anything other than itself (such as being at the vanguard of the evolution of man into a higher existence.)

"Paying Homage To Both Sides Of The Cuticle"

I would like to explain the background of one of my works, "Paying Homage To Both Sides Of The Cuticle", image posted here. The black and the white panels were actually studies for larger works.  My goal was to get a sense of depth from essentially a monochromatic painting; white built forward from a golden ground, black built forward from blue ground, with shinny lines on top of a matt surface. I haven't done the larger works, I envisioned doing two 48" square canvases of each color scheme. When playing with the studies I liked the look of the two contrasting panels placed side by side, but the overall dimension was not so pleasing to me. On contemplation I suddenly envisioned a third panel, the lower red one, which came out almost exactly as I imagined it.

The compositional process I describe here, though seemingly formal, it is actually based on thematic material. This is what I really would like to explain. The title of the work, "Paying Homage To Both Sides Of The Cuticle", reflects this thematic material. The large pieces that have yet to be done of which the black and white pieces were studies, as I describe above, I have been planning on titling "I I  I II", which looks like code but actually means "self one, self two". I was also considering the title "Poles Of Passage". The theme here is one of internal and external identity and the flux between the two.

Now this idea has a personal history. I have done a much smaller work preceding this one with a very similar color scheme. I do not believe I was trying to replicate this work, or even had it in mind, but the theme of it was still working in my thinking. Here is this earlier work. This is entitled "B&B", two drawings placed side by side. What these drawings represent are two distinct presences I felt during the time I first started to do this art I do now, one that felt mostly internal and another that felt mostly external. 

The internal presence I would feel running around my body. It was like a very quiet but poignant voice, very whispery and impersonal. I would see it on occasion, if I could get a bead on it, as a kind of golden white vapor inside my body, flowing into different parts of it. 

The other presence I felt externally. This was a much more personal presence which felt quite feminine. I had so much intense stimulation during this time of my life it was quite emotionally challenging for me to sustain it. I would sometimes become very disturbed and distraught. This presence would come to me at these times and calm me down. Or maybe the presence would just be with me. Then I would feel a very strong but gentle and loving demeanor. The color I would see with this presence was a dark blue with black, and this is the presence I named "Blue", who comes rarely now but unmistakably succinct when she does. 

It was funny for me to realize that how I saw these two presences in my mind were of opposite colors, black with blue and and white with golden orange. This color polarity correlated to the polarity of the internal and external ways in which I felt them. On a personal level I equated the golden white presence with me and the blue black with a friend of mine, who at the time seemed to have an influence on the discoveries that were happening with me. This again brings another polarity, self and other. However all that was happening, what I was experiencing, was based within my being and my perception, from inside me. There was very little sense of objectivity. At times I had more of a sense of Blue inside. And on a few dramatically intense occasions the white would be swirling outside which I felt inside as well. This very extraordinary occurrence is something I would not be able to explain more deeply. But it made me think of experiencing the inside on the outside and the outside on the inside, a flux of boundary beyond usual experience. 

This explains  the "Both Sides Of The Cuticle" part in the title (cuticle meaning epidermis). The "Paying Homage" part has to do with the red panel below the two. This is related to the use of certain materials in human culture to mark a thing or place as significant. A golden guided frame around a western religious icon is a perfect example, the use of red ochre to mark sacred sites in prehistoric times (and perhaps in the present) is another. Monks golden robes would be too. What is interesting about this is that whatever it is that is used to create a mark itself denotes a boundary, often physically, between that which it is indicating as noteworthy and that which it is not. So there is a kind of paradox in devotionally indicating what is on both sides of that boundary. The honorific object or material has to be part of and yet still separate from that which it indicates.

The red panel is moved slightly away from the other two and in an inferior position It is also painted so the panel recedes compared to the other two. It is a frame which doesn't surround the subject, is removed from the subject, and is also part of the subject. The red color to me is like the red earth I mention above, or like fire used honorifically. However I painted this panel to look like there is a layer of skin on it, with a muted view of activity behind the skin layer and glossy gestural lines on top, echoing the glossy lines on top of the black and white panels. So the perimeter between the white and black is mirrored in the representation of a skin layer in the lower panel. 

Viewed from the front all of the three panels have a certain depth to them, if only pictorially, which metaphorically represents extension into each dimension away from the boundary line. This is another polarity from the viewer's point of perspective, one from their point of perception, to, into distance and depth. Geometrically then there are two axes of polarity represented, left to right and front to back. This brings in the complexity of polarity within a matrix of three dimensional physical space, which makes the boundary more difficult to discern, even though its existence is still perceived.

Substance and Spontaneity

When I began to make art the way I discovered and since have engaged in regularly, I had many thoughts about the process as it was something completely new to me. It was not in fact based on the intention of making art as I had done up to that point. The art seemed as a by product of the process, an artifact, but also a necessary part in focusing on what transpired through me. Since then I have learned to elicit what comes away from any art surface, which has made the effort even more suspect as an artistic or creative process. But even when I first began the experience had me question and redefine the artistic process as far as I had thought of it up until then, what art had to do with what I was doing.

What I thought about most profoundly in the beginning was of the substances which I was manipulating. It was obvious to me that I was not doing what I was for an intended effect. The image was one I was discovering, not deciding upon, as spontaneously as the occurrence of marking the page was for me. If there was no intention per se of an image to be created then I saw what I was doing was interacting with substance so substance itself was the meaning of my work. Even though during that time I mostly used (and still do, but not exclusively) traditional art materials and supports, usually ink and paper, the artistic process in which I found myself had me think specifically of the interaction of substance itself, and of my facilitation of this in a very direct and unencumbered way.

As my participation felt so minimal in what I was doing I could understand what I was doing as not so different from the interaction of substance in the world around me. I could distinctly see the connection of what I did to what everything was did everywhere. I was rather incidental in the process. I thought about early forms of human expression, using red ochre to mark special or sacred places and settings, of people covering their bodies and faces with mud, of little figurines of clay, and of the story of Adam being fashioned himself of stuff from the clay bed. I began to ponder a meta-theory of the function of art in history. What I came up with was this (taken from an email dated 9/1103):  "All efforts at art making are a reenactment of the transformations of material done by the world."

The effect of this thought when worded in my mind in this way had a seriously profound effect on me. I began to cry profusely. When I to wrote it out in an email to share the idea with a friend (see above) I began to cry again. And whenever I tried to express this verbally to anyone over the span of a few months I could not hold back the tears, so much so I was reluctant to speak of it, the effect it had on me was so great. I do not get the same reaction in my life now on contemplating this idea, but the poignancy of the concept has been impressed on me from it being so emotionally framed despite and beyond it seemingly being so completely intellectual. It is a contemplation on art I will not forget and which I have been investing in further over time.

On a personal level what this means for me doing what I do, especially when I do not actually produce any physical results from the effort, is the intrapersonal interaction of the stuff of by being, what must be interacting to cause the response that has me move so spontaneously and alter my perception of my surroundings so dramatically. In this way I can define my art as the manipulation of the stuff inside me, whether seen or not, but the interaction of which must be happening for me to experience what I do. This as a re-enactment of the world around me is a pretty heady thought, one which has many implications the least of which I have contemplated. But which upon further investigation surely would include insights on the fellow beings who share this world with me.