Close Encounters

...connecting with cosmic creation

Watercolor and photo Cliff Scholz

Last week Mary and I re-watched the 1977 hit movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It remains a curious cultural artifact. Well worth another look. If you decide to watch it, there’s a good chance you’ll see things in it you may not have noticed before… and I guess I’ll just leave it at that.

The part of Close Encounters I best remembered, lo these many years later, was when — and this might be construed as a mild spoiler — the lead character Roy Neary (played by a cute, young Richard Dreyfuss) starts sculpting his mashed potatoes with his fork during a family dinner. Sculpting them into what? He doesn’t know. Why? He can’t explain. He just feels he must. There’s just something extremely compelling about the mound of mashed potatoes he’s shaping on his plate. Running parallel to Roy’s experience is a plot line in the movie involving Jillian Guiler, played by Melinda Dillon, who suddenly finds herself doing drawings that look a lot like Roy’s sculptures.

They both later learn why they are creating these things. And yes, it does relate to their encounters with alien spacecraft. But here’s the thing: They have to go through the creative process to arrive at that understanding. Roy, for example, is not going to know ahead of time what his mashed potato sculpture means. He must do the crazy thing of creating it first. That step cannot be skipped.

Speaking as a person who is frequently creating things that serve no immediate use or profit, I can relate to Roy’s situation. That’s the main reason I wanted to re-watch the movie. The deeper message I get from it is, broadly speaking, whether we’re “creatively engaged” or simply engaged in Creation, i.e., living, we seldom fully understand what we’re doing or why. Sometimes, we don’t understand much at all. And sometimes we think we know, but soon enough we discover: Nope. We really didn’t.

Thus it is that, for example, we write because we must, we sculpt or paint or build, or we creatively position ourselves in the world, both within its geography and among its people, because that’s what we need to do. We seek the tools we need to do the work we need to do; we seek the groups of people we need to be around. We might even seek out an old movie or a new book — or a friend, old or new — and not know why until we read the book, re-watch the movie, or reach out to make those friendly connections. I mean, how could we know? We haven’t read the book or seen the movie or connected with the friend yet! No telling where these things will lead.

So honestly, I didn’t fully understand why I wanted to see that movie again after all these years until I watched it, and yes, then it got a lot clearer, fast. It wasn’t just Roy Neary’s sculpting of his potatoes, it was the way his doing so seemed to sculpt his family members’ faces into expressions ranging from bewilderment to horror as they sat around the table and realized they couldn’t relate to his experience. He wasn’t one of them anymore. All I could do as I watched that scene unfold was to shake my old green head and adjust my antennas. Those who see things others do not see might suddenly seem a little alien. And you really don’t even have to see an alien spacecraft from another world for that to be true. In my line of work, it’s an occupational hazard.

But even now that I have watched it, my understanding of why I felt compelled to seek it out again will probably continue to get clearer with time, just like the significance of Roy Neary’s iconic mashed-potato sculpture got clearer to him. And yes, the meaning of those mashed potatoes did get clearer. Crystal clear, in terms of where they ultimately led him, which is a lot to say for a humble pile of mashed potatoes. But at the same time, by the end of the movie it was also clear that really, it was just the beginning. See what I mean? How might that character remember the potatoes-and-dinner scene ten years later? Or twenty?

Taken together, such reflections seem to suggest that we live in creation as a verb, as process, as ongoing proliferation of inward and outward growth and possibility. Personally, this way of looking at life feels a bit more realistic than imagining myself to be living in creation as a noun, as a collection of things, as the collapsing of possibility into definable objects and occurrences and systems of organization and ideas. Some people seem to prefer to inhabit what I call “Creation the Noun,” saying, in effect, “This is so-and-so. I live only in the world of the seen, the touchable, the nameable, the known.” But even if we do make that choice, who knows what seeing the world that way might eventually mean or where it might eventually lead?

Far as I can tell, it’s not entirely predictable where such deep assumptions about the world will take us, just as there is no way to know exactly why we marry a particular person, why we prefer this color shirt today, choose this career or leave it. So yes, we tell ourselves stories about these things, and it’s probably important that we do. You might call that “inner sculpting”. Because in the long run, those stories themselves are really just so much mashed-potato sculpture. Compelling? Sure, in the moment. But however compelling the stories we tell ourselves may seem today, they very well might seem different tomorrow or somewhere down the road. They may need to be re-sculpted. Here’s a fork.

So, speaking of close encounters, it could just be the food-as-art theme working on me now, but I recall one very late night in the dorms back in 1981, right around the hour when today and tomorrow shake hands and reveal themselves to be one very, very big day. My roommate Tim and I had made our way down to the candy machines located in the ground floor lobby. Thing was, once we got there, standing in front of the machines together, we realized something completely unexpected: There is no rational way to choose a candy bar. The implications of this were astonishing to us. The implications astonish me still. If reason isn’t up to this task, where else in life might reason prove inadequate? This led to a conversation that went on for some time between Tim and me, so long in fact that after a while we sat down on the floor gazing up at those machines with their inscrutable inner illumination from places of inscrutable illumination all our own.

Funny thing was, if I recall correctly, in the end we didn’t buy anything. I think maybe we decided that we’d already got what we’d come down there for. But we couldn’t have known that until the machines had yielded to us something that hadn’t been loaded into them by the company that kept them stocked with marginally palatable candy. And as you can see, the event continues to reverberate today. Plus if you’ll notice, it took two people to make it happen. Some things do. Some things take billions of us. Hello, world!

And come to think, this wasn’t the only time Tim and I experienced a memorable collision between our desire to eat something and the less-than-enticing options immediately available. Here’s a question you’re probably not expecting: How many powerful, institutional toilet flushes does it takes to dispose of a large bag of Doritos? I don’t think Tim and I counted, but what I can tell you is that this exercise, which started out motivated primarily by self-preservation, very soon took on distinctly artistic connotations as the flushing continued. It takes time and a measure of dedication to flush an entire bag of Doritos down the toilet, but once we committed to the process, we just couldn’t stop. It felt like community service. It felt like ceremony. Brr-SHOOSH! Brr-SHOOSH! Brr-SHOOSH!

If only there had been more witnesses and participants to that event, maybe even a film crew, this country might have been saved considerable grief in the years since then. As performance art, it deserved a wider audience. And there was no way I would have known then that about two months ago, in November of 2024, I’d have a chance to hear a presentation given by Dr. Walter Goldstein on his work breeding more nutritious corn. You never know where things will lead, and yes, I think this connects. Because a little over a year after The Great Flushing of 1981, sometime after I returned to school in 1982, I became a member of my local food co-op and soon started volunteering there, cleaning the floors and bathroom weekly to get an additional discount on organic food. Did that for years. One way or another I’ve been advocating for food quality ever since. And may God bless that dormitory toilet for swallowing what Tim and I had the good sense not to.

Point is, all of these were “close encounters” too. Spielberg, schmielberg! Honestly, I don’t think we need no freakin’ space aliens floating in with impressively bright lights, looking like a cosmic casino and making weird noises. Being human is plenty weird enough. The beautiful thing is, if we choose to notice, every day is a series of close encounters capable of landing us in, and landing in us, as compelling, new elements of mysterious creation. And if it doesn’t seem that way right now, well, maybe it’s time to kick it up a notch and make those encounters just a little closer. And, if you happen to see something that seems, like, maybe a little alien to you, well, you may want to just go with it. You never know where it might take you.