Gallery Magic
About forty eight years ago, I stumbled into something important. Without any knowledge of what was about to happen, I was sitting on the beach in a cold wind.
I’d taken the bus down to Hastings near the village where I grew up. Hastings is a quaint, even slightly quirky, town on the Sussex coast in England. It occupies a fond place in my heart.
Memories of drunken night-time walks home with mates along Hastings beach are etched deep. The best pubs were in the historic “Old Town”. By some miracle, pledges of eternal friendship were always abundant on those walks. And by an allied miracle, getting home took just a fraction of the time we had taken to get there earlier in the evening.
For most people, though, the beach may not be Hastings’ main claim to fame. Especially in mid-winter, the grey skies mute every attempt by earthbound colours to sing. Dark timber groins are planted at intervals along the beach. The sea piles the grey-brown pebbles of the beach against the western side of each groin. So sitting atop any groin provides a great vantage point for sea-watching at close quarters.
It was a cold December day. I was seventeen. It was the early seventies. So, of course, I was wearing my Grandmother’s dark brown calf-length fur coat. The one that my friend’s Mum said I would look back on with shame in years to come. At least it softened my unforgiving timber perch. And it slowed the infiltrating fingers of the icy wind coming off the sea. That was good because I ended up sitting there a long time. I sat there so long that my hands became numb in the cold. I sat there so long because the sea had entranced me. I mean – it had totally totally entranced me! The longer I sat with the sea, the more I slipped into a way of being that felt completely different. Different from anything I had ever experienced before. Except that it also felt more like coming home than anything I had experienced before.
It was as though the separateness of my being had dissolved. I had become part of the sea / beach that I was sitting with. The stream of words that I usually used to characterise the events of my day-to-day world had evaporated. It felt like that cold wind that dries the spray into crystals in your lashes as it blows beachwards had dried my words to nothingness too. Sure, my absorption by the never-ending waves was still associated with thinking. Or at, least, with being. But somehow it was thinking / being without words. It was being with something like bliss. Somehow, the icy wind had chilled my body to the bone and I was in Heaven.
When the cold finally broke my concentration, I set off for home, a little dazed. I’d set myself the goal of hitching or walking home. And I was wearing my Grandmother’s fur coat. So, as it worked out, I had an entire 10 km walk home to reflect on what had happened.
At the time, I credited the sea with this miraculous transformation. I put it down to some kind of mental stroking by the waves. But I was a long way from having any kind of handle on what this event was or how I might be able to make it happen again.
As the years passed by, this same feeling has arisen inside me many times. Often, it is being with the sea that brings it on. Sometimes, it’s been music. Some of the most powerful have been with driving or with extended exercise like swimming or running. But there was one class of experience that gave me the first inklings of a recipe for making it happen. It was the one that gave me a new name for it: my “art gallery experience”.
Art gallery visits have often delivered such an experience for me. The one that prompted the renaming was a visit to the City Gallery in Wellington in early 2005. It was an exhibition of Melvin (Pat) Day’s amazing pictures. They took up two or three whole rooms of the gallery. There was one picture that completely captivated me. Curse that taking photographs was not OK at such exhibitions in 2005! I would love to be still able to explore the magic of that painting, even if only in paltry dimensions on my computer.
As best I can, I have mocked up the picture from hazy memories of Pat Day’s 2004-2005 exhibition at City Gallery, Wellington (see top of post).
It was abstract. It comprised, like many of Day’s pictures, rectangles of approximately Golden Ratio proportions. Nothing you’ll find online does justice to the quality of his work that was on show that day – and particularly in that picture. There was rich, mysterious, glazed, blue. There was an area that looked like monolithic organic sandstone / ochre / yellow / gold. An earthy and robust complementary combination. The picture was just to the left of the entrance, one or two pictures in. And it completely, completely hooked me. I returned to it again and again to drink it in. To figure it out. To journey among its elements. To luxuriate in the interplay of its colours and textures. Each time, when I couldn’t absorb any more, I went off to explore the other pictures again. Kandel (2016, https://amzn.to/2GL4Csr; https://adbl.co/2TfmqNB) describes mechanisms by which abstract pictures can deliver spiritual experiences to the beholder. In this case, this one exhibition, perhaps even this one picture, took me to more profound spiritual experience than any previous encounter. Of anything. Ever. Wow!
Of course, if you’re a meditator, you’ll have spotted my “Aha!” coming a while ago. You’ll even have a name for it. One or another form of “samadhi” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samadhi). And you’ll already have your own recipe for achieving it for yourself. So it’s only ignorance has made my own journey so long. But because it’s developed completely organically – accidentally even – I’m going to piece together some of the components that have made it work for me. It might create some new learnings for me. Maybe it will spark some recognition of similar elements for you. I’ll pick this up in a following post.
Meanwhile, my journey to discover Gallery Magic began on a cold, windswept beach in my home town. My sense is that concentration on its repetitive content was important. And it was critical that the concentration went on so long. So it looks likely that I owe the revelation of this whole pathway to my Grandmother’s fur coat. Life is neat.