OK, I confess, I have visions. Why does this feel like a confession and not an exaltation? I guess because I come from a family of very practical people. The patriarch had escaped Czarist mayhem for Jews and worked hard to create a walled city of capital to keep those he cared for insulated from mayhem, Czarist or otherwise. When I told him I would not be coming into the business and going to art school he backed away as though confronting an insane person, unpredictable and capable of creating his own mayhem. “You are leaving a goldmine.” So I was a little equivocal about my visions. It was bad enough to make pictures for a living… I reveled in seeing music and tasting color (which helps out in the kitchen). I sometimes like walking in the woods barefoot on a warm day so to better feel the underfoot as a mental map of texture…I was used to mind pictures, using this to form and reform stuff into the sculptures I would make. It was a a labor saving device. This sense I’ve since found out is called synesthesia. I thought everyone was like this and probably is to varying degrees. But one evening it came from a different order of mind.

First I should probably say, that along the countercultural meander, psychotropic drugs were often offered and sometimes used to mostly vivid and positive effect. But this little vignette takes place in a period after son Noah was a born and was a crawling around little tyke. Laura and I had pledged not to do drugs or alcohol while we we were trying to figure out what having a child to raise up meant to our general behavior. This is the long way of saying that this experience was on the “natch.”

Noah was eight months old and a really adventurous and generally charming child. Friends visiting, up from Chicago were curious and dubious about this new state of affairs. Baby?? What’s that got to do with making art? We were all hardcore and dedicated in our cohort and knew no one else in their mid-twenties attempting children plus a life of art making. 

At this point we were winding up our stay in Madison—we’d left our little place in the country, though we adored growing a garden, both of us. Wisconsin winters will box the —“Yippie! Country Living,” right out of you. So we had moved into married Student Housing for our final semester.

Our friends were art grad students at the U of Chicago. We loved arguing about art—art vs craft, Conceptual art vs whatever. It was a strange time in the arts. The Modern Project was over. What’s next? The baby was not having it so I went into the bedroom to see if I could get him to sleep. Sitting in the rocker, I started my breathing exercises….calm calm, saying my mantra (of course, I had a mantra, didn’t you?). The baby finally slumps into that increase of gravity every parent knows.

It began with an increase in my own gravitational pull, hands becoming heavy, feeling huge, then the whole body began to feel heavy. My hands then felt like my whole body was in my hands, then there was a lifting. Yikes! What’s happening? Calm calm breathe breathe. My heart was thumping panic as I began to lift from the rocker.  Calm calm breathe breathe…mantra mantra…I was floating near the ceiling, seeing myself seated in the rocker. Then, as though disembodied into atoms, up and through the ceiling to seeing the complex of apartments and further into the night sky looking over the planet then up further into a fizz of bubbles where I became a bubble among a zillion bubbles. Happy? It was a feeling akin to falling in love and having the feeling returned, then “oh gosh, we have company…” The feeling of dropping 20 floors all at once and I was back in the rocker. And out to join the company…how long have I been gone? Fifty years, I think, as I write this fifty years later.