C I P R I A N I

I walked across the street the other night to take in LACMA‘s exhibit of James Turrell‘s Perceptual Cell (http://www.lacma.org/james-turrells-perceptual-cell-and-dark-matters).

I have never dropped acid, mushrooms, PCP, etc., though I did ingest some cough medicine before a performance of Les Miz about ten years ago and I think that caused me to see a giant spider in the midst of the “Master of the House” number. I think it was the cough medicine. Or the heat of the theatre. Or perhaps it was just the fatigue of my addled brain. Nevertheless, I have not had a lot of hallucinations.

But I’ve had a few.

Just one example, many years ago after I had a little something from The Coffee Bean, just a regular daily brew, I saw something rather strange and to this day, I don’t really know the connection…

I was at The “Bean” with a couple friends. Ben Stiller was also there. We weren’t together. Ben just came in, ordered a coffee and went on his way. I actually met Ben briefly a few years later, but didn’t bring this chance encounter up during our conversation. At the time it totally escaped me. And coffee didn’t come up. We were talking about boxing. Actually, he was. At the time, he was in training at the same gym Bob Dylan worked out at. Honestly, I really didn’t say much as I really wasn’t part of the conversation, just near by, eavesdropping. When he mentioned that this gymnasium was in the basement of an old temple, I chimed in with:

“Kinda like Rocky”

Ben gave me a quick smile and continued with his story, but he seemed to enjoy the reference. Very nice guy, Mr. Stiller. Maybe it was church. Maybe Bob Dylan just owned the place. Nevertheless, Dylan, boxing, and a place of worship were involved. But no matter how many weird components make up that anecdote, it’s completely beside the point.

Later that evening, I went home (from the Coffee Bean/Ben Stiller sighting, not from the job many years later with the Ben Stiller Boxing conversation) and I couldn’t sleep. It was probably the coffee, so I decided to sit down and read. But as the wee small hours of the morning were upon me, I was still awake, engrossed in Nick Hornby‘s High Fidelity which I found myself very emotionally connected to. And at that particular moment, sometime last century, as I looked up from the page to rest for a few moments, I rubbed my eyes, gazed up at a shadowed corner of the ceiling, and honest to God, I could have sworn I saw a very small pig growing out of the ceiling. I can’t remember if the pig had a top hat, but I remember it looking more like a real life pig and not some kind of cartoon swine – more Babe than “Porky”. Come to think of it, more like the pigs in the TNT version of Animal Farm that would air just a few short years later…

I’m not making any of this up. The pig, the spider…or Ben Stiller for that matter. To this day, I ask my wife “where is the giant spider?” at any mention of Les Miserables. She wasn’t with me yet when I saw the pig, but apparently I’ve seen my share of spiders occasionally when I’m not quite awake, seeing things in my half-sleep…

Most of the time it’s shadows, light, dream residue, the mind and eye playing tricks. Hallucinations, as defined by Webster’s, are simply “experiences involving the apparent perception of something not present”.

Let’s look at that for a moment.

“Experiences”, which could be defined as “an event or occurrence that leaves an impression on someone” or “practical contact with and observation of facts or events.”; “perception”, which we could say is “something processed by one or more of the senses”, and the most important part: “something not present”.

How are we to say what is actually present and what is not? If we have only our senses to go on, which according to everyone from Plato to Maimonides to Obi Wan Kenobi, that’s at best a checkered endeavor.

This is the process for just what we see (http://www.aoa.org/patients-and-public/resources-for-teachers/how-your-eyes-work) and it is slightly more complex than simply looking out a window. There are a lot of factors and mechanisms at work and who is to say that what image is generated isn’t a copy of a copy of a copy, not unlike Plato’s Allegory of the Cave?

My experience with the Perceptual Cell was not too psychedelic. I don’t think. But the kaleidoscope of images that I saw while peacefully lying on my back, I was later told, was simply an illusion, a hallucination. The only thing that was actually happening was that the LED colors were simply changing very rapidly, all the shapes that were generated were all in my head. No two people see the same thing. No two people experience the same thing, though the mechanisms involved in the exhibit are identical: A white Perceptual cell (pictured above), a flat bed to view the show from, and the flashing LED lights that operate the same way for everyone. And yet no two people, as far as we know, see the same thing.

I am very curious – even without the flashing lights within the safety of the cell – how radically different our own perceptions of the everyday world actually are. The frustrations we have with those who have an alternative point of view is largely based on them perceiving the world differently. And I suspect that because each one of us are unique, we each experience the world not only slightly differently, but radically differently.

And yet, that there is at least some consensus on beauty, some semblance of civility, some unity, is really just as miraculous as all of the wonder around us that we perceive each day, even though it’s sometimes difficult to accept the smell of garbage, the sound of traffic, the sight of soot as miraculous.

Are we simply machines filled with mechanisms that process the world around us, or is that variance in each of us – the unique way in which we each process the same elements differently – just another possibility that there is more to each of us than meets the eye?