Lofty Luminosity

"How is a cloud outlined? Granted whatever you choose to ask, concerning its material, or its aspect, its loftiness and luminousness—how of its limitation? What hews it into a heap, or spins it into a web? Cold is usually shapeless, I suppose, extending over large spaces equally, or with gradual diminution. You cannot have, in the open air, angles, and wedges, and coils, and cliffs of cold. Yet the vapor stops suddenly, sharp and steep as a rock, or thrusts itself across the gates of heaven in likeness of a brazen bar; or braids itself in and out, and across and across, like a tissue of tapestry; or falls into ripples, like sand; or into waving shreds and tongues, as fire. On what anvils and wheels is the vapor pointed, twisted, hammered, whirled, as the potter’s clay? By what hands is the incense of the sea built up into domes of marble?"

- John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

Note. The photos in this post are all "quick grabs" using my iPhone while I was in Colorado on a recent day-job-related trip. While I did not have any other cameras with me (knowing I would have next to zero time for "real" photography), my iPhone sagely reminds me that images - and the gentle solace of photography - are truly everywhere, even amidst otherwise decidedly non-photography-related day-job activities. One does not stop being a photographer just because one is without a camera! The three images below were all captured within a few moments of each other while I was lounging at an Admirals club waiting for a connecting flight back home. 

Sentient Soul

"Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence. Do you understand? The character of music arises out of its form like steam from water,’ Yury Andreevich said. ‘With solid understanding of the general laws of form, which encompass all that is amenable to formulation, one can, by groping further, perceive the individual, the particular. Then, subtracting the general, one can sense a residue where wonder lurks in its purest, most undiluted form. Herein lies the goal of theory: the more fully one grasps what is available for comprehension, the more intensely the ineffable shines."

- Ludmila Uliţkaia (1943 - )

""Forms acquire meaning for us
only because we recognize in them
the expression of a sentient (fühlend) soul.
Spontaneously, we animate
(beseelen) every object.

- Heinrich Wölfflin (1864 - 1945)

Shores of Vast Expanse

"I read the skies and am rendered silent. This would be a day for walking long on shores of vast expanse. I have been the sort of man I fear would rise again in moments of resolve. When I see him on the street or in the pew or in the mirror, his translucence quivers close to the frequency of fleshliness until I blink him down into the backwash, into the riptide of graces, for he was full of judgment. So I must walk. The tall grass of the dunes is tossing like the ocean’s anemone. Waves are faithful of the sands shaped unseen under the great breathing of the tides. Wind upon grasses. Waves upon sand. Some steady drawing of my surfaces out into the depths and gone, out into the piercing light. Return for more, o mighty patience, o mighty love of the wild and unspeakable, til I am wind and wave."

- James Scott Smith
Water, Rocks and Trees

Holistic Morphology

"Since nothing can exist that does not fulfil the conditions which render its existence possible, the different parts each being must be co-ordinated in such a way as to render possible the existence of the being as a whole, not only in itself, but also in its relations with other beings, and the analysis of these conditions often leads to general laws which are as certain as those which are derived from calculation or from experiment."

- Georges Cuvier (1769 - 1832)

Feel the Tide

"It was ours, the water at the farm, but it was no different from any other water, every drop of moisture that fell since there were only protozoa, trilobites, orthocones. It was inside every single human being. When I missed the sea, I could lean my face into another person—with worry or dangerous joy or grieving—and feel their tide. The World As It Is is only a furious tide of people, linked by blood and tears and sweat, a push toward each other we can’t stem. Water was over Mother’s grave, beside Father’s, under the boats, in my blood and the blood of everyone I loved. I felt it all. I felt the weight of all the water in the world."

- Eiren Caffall
All the Water in the World

Waves of Consciousness

"Waves of consciousness roll in, roll out,
leave some writing, and just as quickly
new waves roll in and erase it.
I try to quickly read what's
written there, but it's hard,"

- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )
Kafka on the Shore

"When left alone, quantum particles behave as multiple images of themselves (as waves, really), simultaneously moving through all possible paths in space and time. Now, again, why do we not experience this multitude around ourselves? Is it because we are probing things around us all the time? Why do all experiments that involve, say, the position of a particle make the particle suddenly be somewhere rather than everywhere? No one knows. Before you probe it, a particle is a wave of possibilities. After you've probed it, it is somewhere, and subsequently it is somewhere for ever, rather than everywhere again. Strange, that. Nothing, within the laws of quantum physics, allows for such a collapse to happen. It is an experimental mystery and a theoretical one. Quantum physics stipulates that whenever something is there, it can transform into something else, of course, but it cannot disappear. And since quantum physics allows for multiple possibilities simultaneously, these possibilities should then keep existing, even after a measurement is made. But they don't. Every possibility but one vanishes. We do not see any of the others around us. We live in a classical world, where everything is based on quantum laws but nothing resembles the quantum world."

- Christophe Galfard (1976 - )
 The Universe in Your Hand

Perfect Balance

"Nature may reach the same result in many ways ... A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)