The Great Witness

 In recently reviewing my old journals I have come across several references to “The Great Witness.” I honesty do not recall coining this phrase but on further reflection and review it refers to something that comes up very frequently in the formulation of my ideas and approach. It points to both an internal poise and to a sensory ecstatic outcome.

In the early days of doing ecstatic drawing, at my art table on a spring day I suddenly felt a huge presence behind me that put the hairs on neck on end. It seemed to be about ten feet tall, leaning over me and looking with extreme intensity to what I was drawing. There was no sense of a focus on me, only on the act of drawing. It was like a personage from a very high echelon was investigating an event done by one far below in significance.

I just kept on drawing for the benefit of this intense witness. After a minute or so the presence was just as suddenly gone. Now I don’t necessarily purport the true existence of spirits, but I do understand that a contained experience of one’s self and surrounding is actually more flexible than what may be commonly thought. I took the experience to be a lesson by example in how to increase my concentration in the task at hand while discounting any personal involvement and attachment to it.

I try to keep a continual visual attention to my artwork as I am doing it. This may seem like an obvious thing to say for a visual artist, but remember I am an automatic artist, so don’t use my eyes to plan placement of marks on the surface. So basically my visual focus is so I can see it open up while I am doing it, which then feeds back into the ecstatic response. I think the specific reference to the “Great Witness” in the journals is to moments when this visual focus leads to an expanded sense of awareness of the work, although I do not recall the exact moments of the references. It is odd to consider an ecstatic experience of witnessing, which implies the sense of witnessing as external to the individual, but this is what it can feel like.

In reflecting more on my internal landscape since my ecstatic emergence, I began to notice times when many images come into my mind, usually at moments of rest. It was sometimes a book of dream images whose pages were being flipped.  The detail was stunning of images that would suddenly appear before my mind’s eye. But I found I would have to relax as I focused on the images, as an effort to look further into them out of amazement would immediately end the flow.

The name of this blog,” tiny eyes look”, is also a reference to a practice of intense concentration with extreme detachment. I got it when eliciting my ecstatic response at a movement event. I found a rather pronounced ecstatic response, but also noticed that when the sense of those around me became more objectified, I would get distracted from the ecstatic experience. My view of the people had to be included into the ecstatic experience, and I had to detach from thoughts of them which would distract. There was a moment when the words “tiny eyes” came to me and the ecstatic experience expanded, so I took it on as a name.

At one of my pilgrimage performances, where I elicit ecstatic experience in the public concourse, I was at the corner of Market and Montgomery and came to a very pronounced ecstatic response. It was a “heaven on earth” experience, everything being amazingly beautiful and vast and the tears began to flow. My ecstatic overview was indeed awe producing. But I noticed that if I went into the awe response the ecstatic experience would lessen. I had never heard this ever being expressed, “don’t go into the awe,” but here was a case for it.

I haven’t before put these moments together, but it is very clear that the original “Great Witness” experience was a fundamental lesson that has been instrumental many times over the years. What I was being taught on that afternoon came to play in my efforts in the downtown SF pilgrimage. And I have probably over years honed this practice of intense focus coupled with extreme detachment to be able to find myself in that expanded space.