Visionaries
One cold, clear night, Jack and I dragged a mattress up to the roof of Irene’s adobe near Joshua Tree and lay down under a dark night sky scattered with stars. Airplanes cruised overhead at regular intervals, their red lights pulsing. We spotted a satellite drifting slowly across the sky from right to left. Scorpio glittered, the Big Dipper sparkled, and even the usually veiled Pleiades pounced on our eyes from their celestial perch. The evening sky was anything but dark. It glowed and throbbed and twinkled with stars, planets, planes, and other technological lights.
When I turn off the lights at night in a heavily curtained bedroom I am plunged into a black envelope of space that is thick and tangible. But I’ve learned that it too contains much more than simple darkness. Inside this dark space I can hear a low hum (the sound of the earth turning?). Sounds from outside the room soon come into focus, each one leading somewhere, to some other person’s life, or a car moving at a certain speed. I can detect aromas that seem connected to the darkness, and to memories—vividly shaped memories—that fill the darkness, as if my consciousness craves stimulation and in this darkened room, has decided to create its own.
The room is dark, but it isn’t empty of sensation. It is full, fuller than it might have been with the lights on, because I just let go and listen, watch, smell, touch—I seek the sensory streams that are there, but which are usually obscured by the activities of the day.
In his 2004 documentary The Eye of the Heart, Bill Viola talks about being in his room at night as a kid and listening as the sounds of his parents getting into bed faded and the house grew still. Listening and watching the darkness itself, he hoped to catch a glimpse of things beneath the level of everyday perception. That quest led to the probing, even archetypal images he has created in his career, each of which refused the limits of ordinary sensory expectation. He pushes what he can see to images that are as far as he can see. Slowing down the film, he stays firmly fixed on a single human feature for longer than usual—he sees further.
Creative artists of all sorts share with me that expansion of everyday experience. Probing deeper into the concrete sensory world, composers, writers, and painters make work that amplifies the way we see, feel, and touch the everyday. I love the novels of Charles Dickens, particularly my favorite, Great Expectations. The characters Dickens created and the discoveries his imagination unearthed by way of their struggles and dramas have enlarged my experience of the world. Like the sensory richness of Viola’s darkened space, Dickens’s imagination invites me to expect more detail and nuance from human actions and longings.
There’s a woman I sing with whom I used to watch and puzzle over as she engaged with the younger students in our rehearsals. I see her now through the Miss Havisham lens Dickens has given me. The woman’s behavior has taken on a richer set of motives and probabilities. Ah, she’s attempting to transform the young people into her surrogates, I think, watching her movements and gestures. Dickens’s imagination has thrown light, color, and emotion on insights that might have remained hidden from me.
Virginia Woolf’s genius uncovered a universe of robust experiences for me. Her masterpiece To the Lighthouse flooded me with sensory nuances. I was plunged deep into my own native language, now renewed and illuminated by comets and starbursts of fictional conversation. So this is how language might work, I realized, delighted to have new textures emerge from the most ordinary words and sentences. Woolf’s imagined dinner table talk with its seeming non sequiturs of gossip, fearful interpretations, and dawning love heightened my own spoken word experience. From her imagination came my newly expanded awareness of ways that disarmingly applied words can force open my encounters with the world.
Every artist with a genuine vision does this. Bob Dylan’s lyrics infuse my responses to a disappointment, or lost love. These everyday experiences become more than I thought them to be. Dylan’s creativity has mined the unknown and produced illumination for even the slightest moments of my life. Like the art of Woolf and Dickens, Bob Dylan’s music has inflected my everyday awareness with deeper sounds, sharper aromas, and more tender hues. I chose to live in a world richer in texture, sound, and images, something like Viola’s expanded sensory expectations. Expecting more leads me into other corners of feeling alive.
