Here follows the transcript of a religious experience recently shared with me. (Perhaps that phrase causes your eyes to glaze over. What experience do you anticipate being disclosed? Something along the vertical axis – a face in the clouds, a distortion of light? Or something received aurally – a cry like thunder, a still small voice, the tone in which God spoke to the Prophet Elijah in the Hebrew Bible?)
That evening I headed out alone to a late showing of Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. Afterwards I felt weird: feverish, euphoric, but also like I might burst into tears. The protagonist has visions, or, at least, access to a mode of consciousness beyond ordinary human perception. He is a dowser, using his divining rod to detect where Etruscan graves lurk beneath the earth for his associate grave robbers to plunder. When he reaches a grave, the camera performs a 360° loop, to show sky and leaf and eventually the protagonist again, now inverted. On meeting a bright disc of moon right outside the cinema, I thought, “Of course the moon is full: everything is being laid out for me.” I tried to take a photograph and my phone died. I doubt what came next would have happened if I could still plug into my phone and disappear from the material fact of the night, like everybody else.
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