"Mysticism is an experience, not a philosophy" -- Elizabeth Petroff

Inspired by Bernini's statue The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, this piece is based loosely on St. Teresa's description of that experience, in which she was visited by an angel who pierced her with the love of God, sending her into ecstasy. A vision such as this one exemplifies the elusive moment of clarity that so many people hope to experience in their spiritual journey, a moment when the layers of individual interpretation that we place between any experience and ourselves fall away, and truth and beauty appear.

The mystic experience

Many mystics describe the process of the spiritual journey as a mundane process. Zen Buddhists, for instance, talk about sitting meditation and disciplining oneself to endure the boredom. The more one sits, the less one wants to sit, and it is working through and accepting this boredom that leads to a breakdown of the "false self" - that is, the self that is constructed, that is a layer of removal from the true being that is our core.

St. Teresa explains the process through a metaphor of watering the garden. At the first level of spirituality, we must work hard to water the garden, pulling up water from a well bucket by bucket and dumping in onto the garden, again and again until the garden is watered. It is only at the very final level of spirituality that the work becomes effortless. At this point, when we are completely desperate and humble, when the well is dry and the reservoir empty, we can only lie down and hope for the rain to water the fields. Allowing rain to soak our bodies is to make ourselves vulnerable, it is allowing God to wash away the false self. This can never happen, however, without the repetitious work of the previous levels, the individual's effort to break it down alone.

I begin to address these issues through the metaphor of layers. The participant dons a white robe, and carries an umbrella covered with sheer white fabric that reaches to the floor, creating a small room in which the participant stands in order to see a projection. Further, the film itself is obscured through the use of layers of image and color, and clips that zoom very close to the action. The film is projected indirectly, hitting a mirror, which reflects the image down onto the participant, like St. Teresa's rain - but the participant is NOT vulnerable, rather, s/he still maintains the layer of umbrella between the projection and the eye. How much can one understand while maintaining the construction of the self? The paradox here is that in order to see the projection, you must have the layer of umbrella. Yet it is a barrier between the original image and the eye - a reference to the incomprehensibility of God. One cannot see the infinite, according to mystical philosophy; one must simply understand the infinite.

The video itself addresses two additional issues. First of all, the nature of St. Teresa's description is extremely sexual, corporeal. She describes the arrow piercing her heart, pulling out her entrails, causing a sweet pain so great that it made her moan. The video depicts a pair of hands crocheting, the crochet needle piercing the fabric and pulling the yarn through the loops, as the arrow pierced St. Teresa's body. The arm and hand of the umbrella, held by the participant, are positioned near the heart as though they are imminently to enter the body, paralleling St. Teresa's arrow.

Furthermore, crocheting references domesticity, the repetitious nature of maintaining one's own existence. St. Teresa herself founded a reformed order of nuns within the Catholic Church in order to emphasize simplicity and work as basic foundations of the spiritual journey. The act of crocheting is a reference to everyday work, work that in and of itself may be beautiful, but is meant most often to be functional, to generate a useful product to protect the body as it works and sleeps.

The actor-observer phenomenon and dreamscapes

A self-contained simulation is meant to have one participant and eight observers. The participant wears the robe and carries the umbrella, while the eight observers watch the participant from the darkness. The number eight references the eight observers in Bernini's Ecstacy of St. Teresa: on each side of the space, in the balcony, four patrons lean over the edge, voyeuristically craning to see St. Teresa. Yet seeing is never the same as experiencing. The observers, trapped on the outside of the umbrella, want to be inside; ironically, the perspective that one gains by watching from the outside of the piece allows for a more holistic picture. The observers can see something that the participant cannot and vice versa. Certainly, while the observers enjoy watching, they enjoy watching only up to the point at which the curiosity takes over. There is an understanding that one gains by being inside the experience that is lost from outside.

In this way, mystical visions are dream-like. Reading about the experience is not the same as having it; you can see envy on the faces of the patrons in Bernini's piece - and on the faces of the observers of this piece as well. The experience is very personal, very internal. An outsider must rely on a description from the source, and trust that the description is true. There is no way to give someone your dream, just as there is no way to give someone your mystical vision.

A note on convergent media

In this day of virtual worlds, I wanted to create an experience that imitated a spiritual moment, an environment that was simultaneously personal and available to everyone -- even those who feign no interest in the digital world. Thus, the goal was to integrate the technology into the piece in a seamless way. The piece is not about the media; clearly, it is no technological breakthrough to reflect a digitally manipulated projection off a mirror. Yet the media was integral to the piece. The participant, standing in a completely black space, staring up through a sheer fabric, can see only the single light from the reflection: the media enabled the creation of a virtual window into a vision.