Geometric Visions

Written by Michael David Crawford

Before taking Risperdal, I would see visions in the sky and photograph my hallucinations. Take a look.

One evening as I was walking across a parking lot at the California Institute of Technology, I looked up to see a Yin-Yang symbol in the sky stretching from horizon to horizon. Shimmers of energy radiated from Mt. Wilson to the North. I felt a deep chord resonating through my body, the vibration of the Universe penetrating deep into my bones. I was as tall as giant striding across that parking lot that evening.

At that instant I Knew. I knew my Purpose.

I had been walking to my weekly appointment with my therapist in downtown Pasadena. I hurried on to our meeting, and when I arrived I excitedly explained my revelation to her.

"Mike," she replied, "you're not making any sense".

For a while after I cracked up at Caltech, and every now and then after that, I would see things like Yin-Yang symbols in the clouds. I would see other things too, like the energy waves from Mt. Wilson, which at the time was a powerful symbol for me. Sometimes the Yin-Yang symbols were animated, and would spin. The might be recursive, with smaller Yin-Yangs in each of the spots, and so on ad infinitum. I found that I could see them if I stared into the snow on a television set that wasn't tuned to a station.

After I dropped out of Caltech, I started pursuing various artistic endeavours. I learned to draw from Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and would construct crystalline latticeworks from painted wooden dowels.

I started to teach myself to play piano. I had a friend show me a few basic chords, and then I would just bang on the keyboard randomly until something that sounded like music came out. All the pieces I can play now I composed myself through improvisation - I still can't read music. Much later, in Santa Cruz, I took lessons from a wonderful teacher named Velzoe Brown, and learned to play quite a bit better, but still find interpreting musical notation difficult and tedious.

And I first got into photography in a serious way that Fall at Caltech. A housemate lent me a nice SLR camera, a Canon A-1, and I would walk around campus and Pasadena taking pictures. My sense of sight was vivid in those days and I found that photography came naturally. The expensive Canon could accurately meter a 30-second night exposure, so a great deal of my photos were ghostly shots in the dark. I still enjoy night photography.