Door

The first person to create a door made a choice, distinguishing between “in here” and “out there,” representing a passage or portal through which people traverse a threshold: coming and going between one space and another, a tacit assumption that there are, need, or ought to be separate spaces, an assumption made explicit and realized physically by fashioning a frame, and framing forevermore one’s perceptions of what it means to move and be in the world. Once erected, a door stands waiting there as an experience, transporting all who pass through from one milieu, a complex host of connotations, in one area of spacetime, into a perceived new setting with a different set of associations. This transportation is taken for granted by most of us quite naturally as we quickly become accustomed to the ubiquitous experience. And yet the human impulse to forge this teleportation device is a distinct reminder of a felt sense we share as a species, about what it is to be a creature that intentionally creates, shapes, divides, and moves within an environment that is, in reality, undivided. We believe in gateways. We have a hunch, there are veils of various sorts, seen and unseen, and with the latter sometimes requiring our assistance making them manifest. Having a “felt sense” about something like this is a term coined by Eugene Gendlin, an intuition beyond the rational, which is therefore difficult to put into words, a physical experience and not a mental one, “a bodily awareness of a situation or person or event, an internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time—encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail.” Humans seem to share such a felt sense about separating and connecting space, i.e., the door, likely most rudimentarily for safety, as we look back to our most distant evolutionary relatives, but also more recently as transports viewed increasingly as symbols of status, ownership, distinction and definition. Doors are indicative of how we feel about and choose to see our world. And this tendency extends beyond the hinged, sliding, and revolving barriers we craft. The painter Mark Rothko viewed his palette as a door, into another reality fraught with emotion, and laden with the possibility of religious experience. “The people who weep before my pictures,” he explained, “are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” Music, too, is often experienced as something more than a pleasant melody, a door into an elsewhere, a passage through liminality. As Jim Morrison said, “there are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors.” If our felt sense and choice to construe the world this way is right, all things may be a door: a sound, a scent, a ladybug landing on your finger, or a lover’s soft caress, every tiny part of creation, waiting to be opened.