There's this long-running bit I do with my wife whenever I have a glass of wine. I'll swirl it, sniff it, suck the air in, take little sips, swirl it again, sip it again, close my eyes, think, and declare: red. or white. whichever it happens to be.

Point is, I don't have a refined palette. This is true for wine, and it's also true for art, music, movies, even literature, to be honest, which is weird because I'm a writer, but it's true.

I had a friend in high school who was really into film and we'd go see movies together, and practically no matter what we chose, as long as it was in color and had words and other people liked it, he fucking hated it. Terrible. Did you see the lighting (or whatever)? That dialogue? NOT believable. The plot holes! Ugh, miserable. A travesty. A disgrace.

See, that's a refined palette. To spend time watching things you hate in order to fully experience the contours of your hatred.

I, on the other hand, enjoyed it like a golden retriever might if the golden retriever could speak english and see color.

If that's how I drink wine and watch movies, you can imagine how I approach art.

Some of it is beautiful, and it's nice to look at, but I've never had my world shook by a piece of art. People who can stand and look at a painting for hours and really feel something seem alien to me. Same goes for the appreciation of classical music. Love listening to it in the background; don't fully get it.

All to say... not really an art guy.

A few weeks ago, as I wrote about in The Return of Magic, I listened to The Telepathy Tapes and just started believing in God, or a Universal Consciousness, the same one, it turns out, practically every old religion and mystic tradition points to.

One of the most beautiful ideas in The Perennial Philosophy -- "The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds," wrote Aldous Huxley -- is that we are all consciousness becoming aware of itself through countless unique expressions of being.

It will take a lifetime and longer to grok exactly what that means, but my working model is that this universal consciousness, or God, is tapped into our live feed of experience, can see what we see and feel what we feel, at all times, and by doing so, better understands itself from billions of perspectives (trillions? more? are insects conscious? are rocks?). The consciousness streams our pleasure, pain, love, hatred, triumph, defeat, pride, shame, boredom, ecstasy in vivid, lossless detail.

Viewed this way, I think I understand art a little bit better.

Humans don't have the direct link with each other (yet?). Words are lossy. It's difficult to transmit experience in high-fidelity.

Art might be our best effort to stream our little piece of experience to each other in the highest fidelity we can, so that we can all understand ourselves better as part of the bigger thing.

I don't know. I need to go to an art museum and see if the art moves me more now. But it seems like a richer way to experience pretty much everything, no matter what you believe.