Like sex, the experience of being touched by a work of art is always the same and always different. It happens only very rarely and each time I am taken by surprise. I become filled with the sense of a vast mystery and feel an electric charge that brings my whole being to alertness and attention.
This experience of art happens to me very rarely. Once I watched my friend Livia Vanaver of the Vanaver Caravan perform a solo piece as part of a tribute to Ruth St. Denis and the Denishawn Dance Company. It was decades ago but the image remains clear and strong. As she came onto the stage and began to dance I felt the atmosphere of the room change. Each posture within the dance bore a definite but ineffable meaning. My skin tingled and I found I was participating in a transmission of knowledge within the act of creation.
Later I watched a one-man play by Gurdjieff teacher Frank Crocitto. He had assembled the piece from the writings of Walt Whitman. We were a small, warm audience in an improvised theater. Frank wore a Whitman-style beard and the big boots and a floppy wide-brimmed hat of the poet.
“The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world…”
Frank belted out the rough poems in a resonant voice and it was as though a spirit entered the room. The impression was one of time intersecting with eternity in a moment of creation.
Again, in the Uffizi museum standing before Da Vinci’s Annunciation I feel the quickening. The message of the painting beggars description and contains a density of knowledge that is greater than any interpretation could convey. I stand in front of this painting for a long time and gradually more of its internal geometry and significance blooms in me. I feel that the painting is telling me something about being receptive to a higher will in the manner of Mary as the Archangel informs her that she will be the mother of God.
The same with Van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom in Arles, which hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The longer I look, the more I feel I am able to behold the subtle and intense world of energies Van Gogh sees. Despite the mundane subject, the painting emanates the terrible passion of his perception as a palpable force and I understand how his sensitivity drove him mad.
This sense of living artwork is pronounced in surviving statues from ancient Egypt. For example, there is a four-thousand-year-old statue depicting the goddess Iwnit in the Luxor Museum. It is carved from diorite, one of the hardest types of stone requiring a diamond-tipped blade to cut, let alone sculpt, using modern tools. The sculpture is a masterpiece of technical perfection, symmetry, and beauty. But greater than the mystery of its manufacture and mastery was, for me, the sense that the statue is alive. In fact, I felt that the statue was more present, vital, and compassionate than I was. Standing before the piece of stone was deeply humbling.
Another experience of living art that opens a portal to the unconditional was a concert of Leonard Cohen’s a few years before he passed. One can catch a glimpse of the depth of the artist in his poetry, which is at once true at the level of ordinary life and the deeply spiritual. Cohen sang most of the concert in a posture of prayer on his knees. With his resonant, attention-filled voice he created an atmosphere of reverence by exuding gratitude and humility toward the members of his band, the audience, and something greater. The result was that a quality entered the space which I can only describe as an invisible Music beyond the music.
All these experiences left me with a certainty that when art is connected to a creative source beyond the personality of the artist, it conveys knowledge far greater than any ordinary instruction. Art that is connected in this way bypasses the mind, its preferences and analyses, and engages a dense, coherent conversance with the heart of the human being.
Art that opens a portal to the infinite and eternal is an event of the moment. When it is painted on canvas or carved in stone it has the possibility to transmit its knowledge to future moments and future humanity. Art of this kind introduces something real and vital for human beings to understand our role and purpose as microcosmoses within the great body of the totality.
This article appears in June 2024.
