True Seeing

Art that has power can be arresting, amazing, mystical, shattering. But art of our own time requires that we get inside the head of the artist and figure out what she was thinking first, so we can process it mentally and arrange our reactions into tidy platoons of ego-reinforcement. What I mean is, that even looking at art today requires that we spend at least as much energy defining ourselves in reaction to it, as we do actually experiencing it.

I want to experience art the way Annie Dillard describes running into a weasel in the forest:

Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key. Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright
blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied out our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t.

- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974

Here is what happened the first time I actually saw a piece of shamanic art.

We were arranged like an audience, waiting for a surprise. Our eyes were closed. They took a black piece of cloth off a painting. It was as large as a big window, rectangular, painted on a canvas. The image was benign, symbolic, talismanic, simple. It was quite a pleasant image of the symbol central to the spiritual tradition in which I was being trained.

I continued looking. We sat there quite a while. My eyes did not leave the painting. I kept looking, but not really thinking. I would look as long as they expected us to.

There was a tension and then the spring let loose. All of a sudden, I SAW it. I saw it with my hidden eyes, the eyes that can see beyond, that can see in the dark. I FELT it. I felt a wave of all that it contained: all the intentions, the traditions, the materials, the vision of the artist, the LOVE with which it was painted, the incredible LOVE, the gift that it was: the time and the effort and the persistence.

It blossomed in front of me, it caught my breath, and left tears in my eyes. I saw the details that seemed specific to me, personally, but for all the world otherwise simple and pleasant embellishments—a hidden message, another layer. I saw and felt the materials that went into it, how they had been spiritually-aroused to the task of its creation. I felt it’s numinous self, how it embodied an entire history and intention that had poured through the artist during its making. I was deeply stirred, but if I had not had eyes to see, it would have just been hiding in plain sight.