Lily Gladstone in Kelly Reichardt’s adaptation of Certain Women.
For a few years I kept a slip of paper in my wallet: Don’t let life harden your heart.
Sometimes this sentence held a numinous quality. Other times it felt like the most inane fortune-cookie fortune of all.
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A friend of mine told me once he didn’t feel cute after feeling acutely alive for a spell. It was a heavy feeling with him at a bar. It was an absence when he stepped out of his apartment on his way to work. Nothing physical had changed. Nothing had changed in his circumstances. When he had felt cute he had felt open, adventurous.
I think “cute” in his case was a way talk about the presence/absence of the numinous. “Cute” made the predicament easier to talk about.
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Numinous. Of or pertaining to a numen; divine, spiritual, revealing or suggesting the presence of a god; inspiring awe and reverence.
I can’t detach “numinous” from “luminous:” a flame in the world, a heightened experience of being, lost and found and necessarily lost again.
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The film Certain Women by Kelly Reichardt (an adaptation of stories by Maile Meloy) renders an exquisite portrait of someone in a brush with the numinous.
Lily Gladstone plays a woman who becomes so lonely and desperate she drives her truck out to a school parking lot. It is cold. It is night. It is Montana. She notices other humans parking in the lot, filing into a building. So she follows them in and sits at the back of a classroom.
She steps into the unknown with a gentle questing spirit.
Is the numinous a journey, an encounter, a series of encounters, an openness one opens with someone else or alone or with a horse? Yes.
I think maybe we shy away from the religious gravity of an experience because it can feel like foolishness or madness (think: Icarus).
I can hardly stomach the word “religious” here. I notice that I have a revulsion to it and want to replace it with “meaningful.” The religious gravity of intimacy — a phrase from Barthes.
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After a brush with the numinous there’s a danger of hardening one’s heart. A danger of misreading. A danger of burying, sweeping, collapsing, missing something important or difficult to see.
One can get lost.
I’m interested in how others don’t get lost and live after the opening.
How people parse and sort and do this thing that can’t be done (“close” or “complete” a numinous experience).
I would like to put aside trauma for a moment.
I have questions about the above statements to ask my future self after she has gone through therapist school.
In Certain Women, Reichardt also renders the character’s rupture with the numinous (and protects the character’s fall, I would argue). This is the most astonishing part of the film: sudden, slow, without words.
(Sidenote: Gladstone. What a thrilling presence. Even in the bloated anxious Killers of the Flower Moon — how she works.)
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I experienced something numinous this fall and want to 1) talk about it accurately and 2) never talk about it. Accuracy feels impossible at the moment.
It’s time for me to read.
There’s a bit in Sarah Schulman’s novel Empathy where a character recognizes alienation as a fluctuation between feeling exceptional and at other times feeling like a total clown.
Post-numinous, tendering an afterglow: I feel the above. Acutely.
Time to read. For paid subscribers, I’ve included a poem about snow and another about arguing.
Thank you for reading, dear reader.
Oh! You can watch Certain Women for free with irritating ads on You Tube.
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