Continuing the serialisation of my lengthy essay 'On Vision and Being Human', I present here the first three sections of the essay, which highlights some of the general nature of visionary experiences, and the problems and ambiguities they raise for the modern 21st century mind. Enjoy!
1. On Vision as Sacred Other
The question has often been asked: What is Visionary Art? On the surface, the answer would seem to be an easy one: Visionary Art is simply what it says, the art of visions, by which is meant the beholding of mythical worlds and realities beyond the mundane daylight world, of dreams, hallucinations, sacred journeys, inwardly-focussed and meditative experiences, flights of fancy and imaginal and ancestral flights. Complexity emerges, however, when we come to the realisation that each human, artist or not, will hold wholly different perceptions of what these words (or indeed, worlds) mean. We quickly come to further questions: what constitutes a dream, how does a journey become sacred, what do we mean by a world beyond this one, and how does the experience of an imaginal flight become 'visionary'?
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