Meeting Yourself in Silence

"The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes one’s work for peace. It destroys one’s inner capacity of peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one’s work because it kills the roots of inner wisdom which make work fruitful."

- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

For regular followers of my blog (I hope at least a few of you remain!), I apologize for the recent dearth - heck, a veritable void - of posts and images. While legitimate reasons may (oh, so slightly) outweigh embarrassed half-baked excuses, the real truth(s) are revealed in Merton's quote: the dearth has as much to do with surrendering to too many (non photography related) projects as it does to my - and, everyone else's - ongoing battle to maintain some semblance of "inner peace" that - without which - it is impossible to sustain the creative process. 

I have always been a photographer of the heart; meaning, that I when I sense my left brain working - thinking, processing, analyzing - I put my camera back in its bag and turn my attention to other matters. I have also long embraced my heart's need for a deep contemplative quiet before my muse awakens. Unfortunately, such states have been increasingly hard to come by; what, with an unceasing pandemic, growing unrest in my country (a day away from a profoundly important election as I type these words), and spillage of day-time anxiety over what the next few months and year will bring over into dreams (and nightmares). And so, in turn, my camera sits patiently in its bag, and my blog wallows in its dearth of new images. But, alas, a ray of hope...

Merton's quote is taken from an essay ("The Modern-Day Desert") that appears in a truly extraordinary book, Notes on Silence, written and edited by Cassidy Hall and Patrick Shen. This book - discovered by chance as I was looking for something "completely unrelated" on the web a few weeks ago - has been a blessing; it is, at once, a spiritual salve, a place of solace, and a portal to precisely what my soul needs to help stumble its way through the muck and morass of this dark time. The book is also as much a metaphoric portal to otherworldly spiritual realms as it is a direct one to the mother project from which it was spawned; namely, an equally remarkable (and multiple award-winning film) called In Pursuit of Silence. 

Both film and book are joyously mystical meditations on the ineffability of silence. Not in a pedantic "let's listen to sounds of silence" sort of way (a topic well covered by other documentaries), but as revelatory / participatory pointers-to / glimpses-of what lies beyond the silence. Words, images, film stills, quotations, transcripts (in the book) - and, yes, "sounds" (and the lack of them) in the film - are brilliantly combined, mutated, and transformed into a new transcendent meta-language that hints of truths that pure silence is itself but a waystation to. You will meet myriad musicians, artists, mystics, philosophers, monastics, and theologians, and learn about the infinite variety of silences that permeate existence. 

Of course, the inner serenity I thought I had lost - and which I most certainly, and inexcusably, took for granted - was never gone! But it took this film and its accompanying Notes on Silence to remind me what "inner serenity" looks like. Seeing silence is akin to meeting yourself for the very first time.

I encourage anyone whose artistic muse dwells in inner silence to first view the film, and then order a copy of the book to keep by your bedside reading table. It is a treasure trove of timeless wisdom.

PS/Postscript. The image at the top of this post was taken mid-Oct at the Peaks of Otter Lake (along the Blue Ridge Parkway in VA). Apart from a few forgettable "snapshots" around the house and garden, this image is among the first "real" photographs I've taken in months. My muse may not have fully awakened, but I can see vestiges of an "inner serenity" that Notes on Silence reminded me never really left.

Unexpected Meeting

"Mathematicians attach great importance to the elegance of their methods and their results. This is not pure dilettantism. What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration? It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details. But this is exactly what yields great results, in fact the more we see this aggregate clearly and at a single glance, the better we perceive its analogies with other neighboring objects, consequently the more chances we have of divining the possible generalizations. Elegance may produce the feeling of the unforeseen by the unexpected meeting of objects we are not accustomed to bring together; there again it is fruitful, since it thus unveils for us kinships before unrecognized. It is fruitful even when it results only from the contrast between the simplicity of the means and the complexity of the problem set; it makes us then think of the reason for this contrast and very often makes us see that chance is not the reason; that it is to be found in some unexpected law. In a word, the feeling of mathematical elegance is only the satisfaction due to any adaptation of the solution to the needs of our mind, and it is because of this very adaptation that this solution can be for us an instrument. Consequently this aesthetic satisfaction is bound up with the economy of thought."

- Henri Poincare (1854 - 1912)

Crystalline Physiology

"Molecular biologists usually characterize life by objective properties like self-reproduction, variability and selection, adaptation, and metabolism. These characteristics do not constitute the definition of life but are properties of what we have previously recognized as living (on the Earth) on intuitive and subjective grounds. I think there is no objective definition of life (especially of extraterrestrial life) but only a subjective definition: we will decide that a system is 'living' when we will have relations with it (essentially based on communication) which will appear to us sufficiently rich, interesting, complex. Since any type of communication needs a physical support, the system considered must itself have (or be) a complex physical structure. The living systems on Earth have a hierarchical structure of the following type: living system ... organs ... cells ... 'central memory' (DNA). The transition from one stage to another in this scheme may be contingent and have no logical necessity. One could treat the problem at any of these levels. But molecular biologists are used to building the macroscopic from the microscopic. Since there is no other well established working method, I will thus restrict myself to the aim of finding a model of 'central memory.' It will be required to have the fundamental characteristics of DNA: to be stable, to contain rich information, and to diffuse, thanks for a reading mechanism, this information into the surrounding medium (protein synthesis in the case of the cell). These will be the minimal characteristics of ... model for a crystalline physiology. The places of possible occurrence in nature of this kind of physiology, terrestrial and extraterrestrial rocks, interplanetary dust, white dwarfs and neutron stars are then discussed."

Jean Schneider, "A model for a non-chemical form of life: Crystalline physiology," Origins of Life, Volume 8, pages 33-38, 1977.

Mathematical Structure

"A famous thorny issue in philosophy is the so-called infinite regress problem. For example, if we say that the properties of a diamond can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its carbon atoms, that the properties of a carbon atom can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its protons, neutrons and electrons, that the properties of a proton can be explained by the properties and arrangements of its quarks, and so on, then it seems that we're doomed to go on forever trying to explain the properties of the constituent parts. The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis offers a radical solution to this problem: at the bottom level, reality is a mathematical structure, so its parts have no intrinsic properties at all! In other words, the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis implies that we live in a relational reality, in the sense that the properties of the world around us stem not form properties of its ultimate building blocks, but from the relations between these building blocks. The external physical reality is therefore more than the sum of its parts, in the sense that it can have many interesting properties while its parts have no intrinsic properties at all."

- Max Tegmark (1967 - )

Our Mathematical Universe

"Dust Blown Up Into Shapes"

"You're water. We're the millstone.

You're wind. We're dust blown up into shapes.

You're spirit. We're the opening and closing

of our hands. You're the clarity.

We're the language that tries to say it.

You're joy. We're all the different kinds of laughing."

- Rumi (1207 - 1273)

Eyes to See

"Nature is painting for us,

day after day,

pictures of infinite beauty

if only we have the

eyes to see them."

- John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

Postscript. Sometimes a sunset is "just" a sunset. A few years ago I suffered the indignity of having an art juror "explain" to me that - while my photo-submission to a local art show was technically well executed and showed a "beautiful sunset" - because images of sunsets are so passe ("You really ought to know better!" was my admonishment), I should strive for something a "bit more original." This was an assessment by which I was simultaneously both annoyed (since when did beauty of any kind become passe?) and amused (the juror had no idea that what she was really looking at was one of my synesthetic landscapes, not a real sunset). Adding insult to injury - and turning my amusement to even greater annoyance: after I explained to the juror that the image she was looking at was not a sunset but rather an extreme macro of a smidgen of light refracted through the bottom of a glass vase, she cocked her head, and with a bemused smile, very condescendingly reproached me with, "Now, now, I know a sunset when I see one!" Well, as the image shown here attests, sometimes a sunset really is just a sunset (as captured last year during a family trip to the Olympic Peninsula). 

Non-Doing

"Here is how I sum it up:

Heaven does nothing: its non-doing is its serenity.

Earth does nothing: its non-doing is its rest.

From the union of these two non-doings

All actions proceed,

All things are made.

How vast, how invisible

This coming-to-be!

All things come from nowhere!

How vast, how invisible -

No way to explain it!

All beings in their perfection

Are born of non-doing.

Hence it is said:

"Heaven and earth do nothing

Yet there is nothing they do not do."

Where is the man who can attain

To this non-doing?"

- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

The Way of Chuang Tzu