What is the story behind the logo that you use in your intros where did it come from?
That's that logo is called the 'meaning of music' and it's actually a sculpture that I made in 1985, that's about five and a half feet by half five and a half feet and about eight inches thick and it's made out of foam core, which is this material that's often used as a backing for paintings or for when you get them framed. It's styrofoam sheet about a quarter of an inch thick with paper on both sides and you can cut it very accurately with an exacto knife, and so what I did was make a stack of those of those foam core sheets about eight inches high and I made the thing in quarters, and so that it would fit together on the wall because it would have been too big to maneuver easily and it's a very complicated image.
It's actually a three-dimensional representation of a two-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional object. And that four dimensional object you could think of as, it's a representation of time and space and I can tell you I kind of have to hint at what the the painting means or the sculpture, it means the same thing that music means. You know how music unfolds and then something else unfolds within it and then it unfolds again within it like a rose opening into the day. Or like a lotus flower that sort of comes up from the darkest depths, up through the dark water and then blooms on the surface of the water and the Sun and that's where the Buddha you know what would you say symbolically rest. So you can imagine that thing opening and then imagine that that's what that painting is an image of and that's the same thing as music, so it's a Mandela image and for Jung the Mandela was a symbol of the self and the self was something that unfolds like music, which is actually why we like music, and it's like the Rose that you see, the geometric rose that you see in stained glass it's the same thing. That's the stained glass window that Pinocchio's reprehensible compatriot lamp-wick breaks when he's in pleasure island that he throws a rock to destroy the model holman to demolish the substructure of western civilization.
So I had a very intense religious experience at one point and I was contemplating that, so when I drew the image to begin with I drew it in about 10 minutes kind of rough and then I used a straightedge to straighten it all up and a protractor - or a compass to make the curves, but I drew it very quickly and I'd been thinking about, I'd been reading Jung a lot at that point like for months months of intense reading and that image sort of popped out of me very very suddenly. But it took about three months to make the actual image and then I had only a quarter of it hanging on my wall because it was so big and I had finished it after about three months of works this was back in 1985 when I was a graduate student. And I was listening to the Jupiter symphony which is the piece of music that I use, that was used for the intro to my to my videos and it's a Mozart symphony.
This happened man, so this happened, so I was really watching that Mandela that quarter Mandela that I had made intensely, and caught listening to the music trying to understand what the music was signifying you know, because music has intrinsic meaning which is a very strange thing. Now the part of the reason for that is that language has meaning and our language has a musical quality right and that's processed mostly by the right hemisphere so that when people speak there's a there's a melody in their language and that carries a lot of the emotional import, and then what musicians have done is figured out how to use that musical faculty let's call it, that non-semantic musical faculty to sort of purely denote meaning that's part of what music means. But I was still trying to understand what the meaning was, because it's nonverbal the meaning of music and I was trying to figure out how to articulate that and that's partly why I made the sculpture was to get a grip on it and to understand it. I was really really concentrating hard on that Mandela and that sculpture and I had been working on it intensely for about three months, that's a lot of meditation on a single idea. And I was standing in my living room and then had this very strange experience and I can't explain this properly because there's no way of really describing it but I'll do my best so, you know in those Renaissance paintings sometimes you see - well first of all you see great cloud great great sunny skies with with massive stupendous impressive billows of clouds and then light shining through, the sunlight shining through and streams. Sometimes that's captured very beautifully but especially English later later artists usually that are later than the Renaissance but you see it in Renaissance paintings too, and you all you also see in in in Renaissance paintings especially in the earlier phase of the Renaissance the sky opening up and God sort of peering forth through the clouds and that's exactly what seemed to happen to me is that, I had this sense it was like a vision although I was still in my living room who knew it, but inside the theater of my imagination I could feel the the sky opening up. Now it wasn't the sky it was I would say the only way I can really think of other things that was something like another dimension, and then I can feel this force descend upon me which I think was something that you know would have been considered classically something like the Holy Ghost I suppose, and it filled me with this intense sense of paradisal, paradisal - I don't know what how to say it. Well it was like being in heaven for some brief period of time and I could feel myself transformed, transmuted as a consequence of this experience and it was as if I was in the presence of something that was a living you know, and I suppose that was an experience of God if you want to put it that way. That's certainly what it seemed like and I felt that I could live that way, I could live transfigured like that permanently if I desired it and I thought 'my god I wouldn't be able to walk down the street in this sort of elevated state' let's say. 'I don't know how I would act, I don't know how I would interact with people, I don't know how people would interact with me, I just don't think that I could do it'. And then I felt that whatever had descended, it seemed that as if it was sorrowful and it departed from me slowly with no punitive intent and I wouldn't say with any dissatisfaction. It was as if a gift had been offered that I was in no position to receive. And I went I talked to my wife soon afterwards I shook physically for about half an hour after that experience, like I was shaking you know, like you shake after a car accident if you've ever been in a car accident, and my pupils were completely dilated.
I had a couple of experiences like that, like echoes of it a couple of times after that and so anyways that was a very very powerful experience I've certainly never forgotten that and, well you know, I don't know. I don't know what to think about that. I mean god only knows what the world is really like that's for sure and I've had a variety of very strange experiences that have convinced me that we know very little about anything.
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