Unreal Things

 "Unreal things have a reality of
their own, in poetry as elsewhere.
We do not hesitate, in poetry,
to yield ourselves to the unreal,
when it is possible to
yield ourselves."

- Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)

Photographer's note. There is an amusing story behind this image, which I took with my iPhone yesterday after my wife, our eldest son, and I finished dinner at a local Nepalese restaurant. As we were waiting for the bill to arrive, I was transfixed by what looked like - to my eye, anyway - a mountainous dune-like vista (such as we had recently seen during our visit to Death Valley, CA). In "reality" this is nothing but a three foot section of wall near the ceiling, with the play of light owing itself to some light fixtures on the ceiling itself (which I cropped out of the image you see above). The "amusing" part is that while I was transfixed by the real-but-unreal dunes (and took a few loooong moments, as I usually do, to get the composition just right), our waiter was politely waiting by our table, equally transfixed by my fascination with what - to him - was nothing but peeling paint on a wall that needed repair! Indeed, when I was finished and approached our table to sit back down, I heard the tail end of a conversation that ensued behind my back between our waiter and my wife. My wife was explaining (as she has done countless times before in similar scenarios) that I "see the world a bit differently," even as our waiter kept apologizing for not having yet "fixed" the wall. Light, shadow, texture, reflection, paint, wall in need of repair, or dunes in the desert, ... which of these are "real" and which imagined? And what of the infinite other Borgesian worlds left unperceived and unexplored? Seeing the world differently, indeed 😊

Thoughtful Imbibing

"Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light -- with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood -- the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it -- but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance. -- Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.

...

Aside I turn to the holy,
unspeakable, mysterious Night.

...

In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents."

- Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772 - 1801)
Hymns to the Night 

Luminous Eddy

"The birth and death of the leaves are the
rapid whirls of the eddy whose
wider circles move slowly
among stars."

- Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)

Another Vision

"We must close our eyes and
invoke a new manner of seeing, a
wakefulness that is the birthright of us all,
though few put it to use.

...

What then is our course, what the manner of our flight? This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land; nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birthright of all, which few turn to use.

...

Never did eye see the sun unless
it had first become sun-like,
and never can the soul have vision of
the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful."

- Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270 CE)

Scenery of Spring

 "In the scenery of spring,
nothing is better, nothing worse;
The flowering branches are

of themselves, some short,
some long."

- Ryōkan (1758 - 1831)

Cosmic Soul

"I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.

...

It did not seem impossible that man himself was the germ of the world-soul, which, we still hope, is destined to awake for a while before the universal decline, and to crown the eternal cosmos with its due of knowledge and admiration, fleeting yet eternal. [...] It is even conceivable that every creative advance that any mind has ever made involves unwitting co-operation with the cosmic mind which, perhaps, will awake at some date before the End.

...

The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time."

- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)
Last and First Men and Star Maker

Shitao's Yihua

"On a windy, rainy, spring day, I am happy I have no visitors; my hand is free, my mind relaxed and cleansed. The ancients called it yihua, the 'single stroke': a thousand hills, ten thousand valleys, people, bamboo, trees, a single brushstroke and all is completed. On one level, yihua constitutes a very practical concept: a complete design begins and finishes with the single brushstroke. On a metaphysical level, it suggests that 'myriad strokes are reunited in oneness' through the mind and hand of the artist and through the artist's spiritual communion with nature."

- Shitao (642–1707)

Movements of Mind

"The life of forms is not the result of chance. Nor is it a great cyclorama neatly fitted into the theater of history and called into being by historical necessities. No. Forms obey their own rules - rules that are inherent in the forms themselves, or better, in the regions of the mind where they are located and centered - and there is no reason why we should not undertake an investigation of how these great ensembles, united by close reasoning and by coherent experiment, behave throughout the phases that we call their life. The successive states through which they pass are more or less lengthy, more or less intense, according to the style itself. [...] We must never think of forms, in their different states, as simply suspended in some remote, abstract zone, above the earth and above man. They mingle with life, whence they come; they translate into space certain movements of the mind. [...] We must, in the truest sense of the word, follow closely at its heels; we must take careful note of how it lives its life."

- Henri Focillon (1881 - 1943)
The Life of Forms in Art

Unknown Worlds

"Without a living subject,
there can be neither space nor time.

...

[This is] "...what one might call the description of a walk into unknown worlds. These worlds are not only unknown; they are also invisible. Furthermore, the justification for their existence is denied by many zoologists and physiologists. [...] While this assertion will sound odd to anyone familiar with those worlds, it can be explained by the fact that not everyone has access to those worlds. Certain convictions are able to bar the entrance to those worlds so securely that not even one ray of all the splendor that spreads over them can penetrate it. Whoever wants to hold on to the conviction that all living things are only machines should abandon all hope of glimpsing their environments. [...] Every subject spins out, like the spider's threads, its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a solid web, which carries its existence.

...

Each subject lives in a world where there is
only of subjective realities and where the
same environments represent
only subjective realities."

- Jakob von Uexküll (1864 - 1944)
 A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans:
With a Theory of Meaning

Infinite Garden

"The Author of nature has been able to employ this divine and infinitely wonderful power of art, because each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, as the ancients observed, but is also actually subdivided without end, each part into further parts, of which each has some motion of its own; otherwise it would be impossible for each portion of matter to express the whole universe. [...] Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond. [...] And although the earth and the air interspersed between the plants in the garden, or the water interspersed between the fish in the pond, are not themselves plant or fish, yet they still contain them, though more often than not of a subtlety imperceptible to us. [...] Therefore there is nothing uncultivated, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion, except in appearance."

- G.W. Leibniz (1646 - 1716)
Monadology