Passing Forms

"How sensible I am to the restless change which rules the world. To appear, and to vanish—there is the biography of all individuals, whatever may be the length of the cycle of existence which they describe, and the drama of the universe is nothing more. All life is the shadow of a smoke-wreath, a gesture in the empty air, a hieroglyph traced for an instant in the sand, and effaced a moment afterward by a breath of wind, an air-bubble expanding and vanishing on the surface of the great river of being—an appearance, a vanity, a nothing. But this nothing is, however, the symbol of the universal being, and this passing bubble is the epitome of the history of the world."

- Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821 - 1881)

Spiritual Correspondences

"The whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world...
…
...all things that have existence in nature … are correspondences...
…
...nothing can subsist from itself."

- Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 - 1772)
Heaven and Hell

Passing Forms

"I died as mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as man, to soar
With angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel soul,
I shall become what no mind e’er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones,
‘To Him we shall return.’"

- Rumi (1207 - 1273)

Mycelial Alps

"We reached it at 7.15 A.M., having accomplished the ascent from the Faulberg in six hours. The snow was flattened on either side of the apex so as to enable us all to stand upon it, and here we stood for some time, with all the magnificence of the Alps unrolled before us.

We may look upon those mountains again and again from a dozen different points of view, a perennial glory surrounds them which associates with every new prospect fresh impressions. I thought I had scarcely ever seen the Alps to greater advantage. Hardly ever was their majesty more fully revealed or more overpowering. The coloring of the air contributed as much to the effect as the grandeur of the masses on which that coloring fell. A calm splendor overspread the mountains, softening the harshness of the outlines without detracting from their strength. But half the interest of such scenes is psychological; the soul takes the tint of surrounding nature, and in its turn becomes majestic."

- John Tyndall (1820 - 1893)
Hours of Exercise in the Alps

Photographer's note. This is "really" a semi-macro view (a few inches on a side) of a portion of the bundle of maitake mushrooms my wife purchased this morning at a local farmer's market. But my "black and white" photographer's eye was immediately drawn to the mystery and majesty of snow-strewn alpine passages in some faraway mountain range.

Radiant Geometry

"If we wander over the moor, where we tread on Nature's carpet, we find that all the little plants which nestle in the short mossy grass are "radiating ornaments" - that is, they are pretty objects which consist of parts spreading regularly from a center.

I cannot too strongly advise the young ornamentist to study the principles on which Nature works. Knowledge of the laws which govern the development of plant-growth is very desirable; but it is not our place to imitate even the most beautiful of plant-forms - this being the work of the pictorial artists. Yet it is ours to study Nature's laws, and to observe all her beauty, even to her most subtle effects, and then we may safely pillage from her all that we can consistently adapt to our own purposes. But in order that we produce ornament, we must infuse mind or soul into whatever we borrow from her."

- Christopher Dresser (1834 - 1904)
Principles of Decorative Design

Hallucinatory Apparitions

"The old doctrine of ‘ghosts’ regarded them as actual ‘spirits’ of the living or the dead, freed from the flesh or from the grave. This view, whatever else may be said for it, represents the simple philosophy of the savage, which may be correct or erroneous. About the time of the Reformation, writers, especially Protestant writers, preferred to look on apparitions as the work of deceitful devils, who masqueraded in the aspect of the dead or living, or made up phantasms out of ‘compressed air’. The common-sense of the eighteenth century dismissed all apparitions as ‘dreams’ or hoaxes, or illusions caused by real objects misinterpreted.

...

Modern science, when it admits the possibility of occasional hallucinations in the sane and healthy, also admits, of course, the existence of apparitions. These, for our purposes, are hallucinatory appearances occurring in the experience of people healthy and sane. The difficulty begins when we ask whether these appearances ever have any provoking mental cause outside the minds of the people who experience them—any cause arising in the minds of others, alive or dead. This is a question which orthodox psychology does not approach, standing aside from any evidence which may be produced."

- Andrew Lang (1844 - 1912)
The Book of Dreams and Ghosts

Indeterminate Organization

"The great advantage, then, of indeterminate organization is that it cultivates that spontaneity, intelligence, and imagination without which many important objects would remain unintelligible, and because unintelligible, uninteresting. The beauty of landscape, the forms of religion and science, the types of human nature itself, are due to this apperceptive gift. Without it we should have a chaos; but its patient and ever-fresh activity carves out of the fluid material a great variety of forms. An object which stimulates us to this activity, therefore, seems often to be more sublime and beautiful than one which presents to us a single unchanging form, however perfect. There seems to be a life and infinity in the incomplete, which the determinate excludes by its own completeness and petrifaction. And yet the effort in this very activity is to reach determination; we can only see beauty in so far as we introduce form. The instability of the form can be no advantage to a work of art; the determinate keeps constantly what the indeterminate reaches only in those moments in which the observer's imagination is especially propitious. If we feel a certain disappointment in the monotonous limits of a definite form and its eternal, unsympathizing message, might we not feel much more the melancholy transiency of those glimpses of beauty which elude us in the indeterminate? Might not the torment and uncertainty of this contemplation, with the self-consciousness it probably involves, more easily tire us than the quiet companionship of a constant object? May we not prefer the unchangeable to the irrecoverable?"

- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)
The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory

Hidden Depths

"All have numerous perforations, and there are passages broad and narrow in the interior of the earth, connecting them with one another; and there flows out of and into them, as into basins, a vast tide of water, and huge subterranean streams of perennial rivers, and springs hot and cold, and a great fire, and great rivers of fire, and streams of liquid mud, thin or thick. [...] And there is a swinging or see-saw in the interior of the earth which moves all this up and down… There is a chasm which is the vastest of them all, and pierces right through the whole earth; this is that chasm which Homer describes in the words, ‘Far off, where is the inmost depth beneath the earth;’ and which he in other places, and many other poets, have called Tartarus. [...] And the reason why the streams are always flowing in and out, is that the watery element has no bed or bottom, but is swinging and surging up and down, and the surrounding wind and air do the same."

- Plato (c.424 - 348 BC)
Phaedo, translated by Benjamin Jowett

Photographer's note. This was captured at Cenote Taak Bi Ha, an underground cave filled with stalactites and crystal-clear water, not far from Tulum (that I posted a few pictures from in an earlier post). While not large (quarter of a football field sized total area in all), it is a fun place to snorkel, dive, and (as in my case) just prowl around the (often slippery footpaths) to get different perspectives on a part of Homer's underworld.

Seeking Light

"There remains but mere experience, which, when it offers itself, is called chance; when it is sought after, experiment. But this kind of experience is nothing but a loose fagot; and mere groping in the dark, as men at night try all means of discovering the right road, while it would be better and more prudent either to wait for day, or procure a light, and then proceed. On the contrary, the real order of experience begins by setting up a light, and then shows the road by it, commencing with a regulated and digested, not a misplaced and vague course of experiment, and thence deducing axioms, and from those axioms new experiments: for not even the Divine Word proceeded to operate on the general mass of things without due order."

- Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626)
Novum Organum

Returning Presence

"The Father has looked around, and has seen the Morning Star, fearless between the rush of the oncoming yellow sun, and the backward reel of the night. So the Great One, whose name has never been spoken, says: Who art thou, bright watchman? And the down-star answering: It is I, the Morning Star, who in Mexico was Quetzalcoatl. It is I, who look at the yellow sun from behind, have my eye on the unseen side of the moon. It is I, the star, midway between the darkness and the rolling of the sun. I, called Quetzalcoatl, waiting in the strength of my days.

The Father answered: It is well. It is well. And again: It is time.

Thus the big word was spoken behind the back of the world. The Nameless said: It is time.

Once more the word has been spoken: It is time.

Listen, men, and the women of men: It is time. Know now it is time. Those that left us are coming back. Those that came are leaving again. Say welcome, and then farewell!"

- D. H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)
The Plumed Serpent

Photographer's Note. This image was captured in the pre-Columbian Mayan walled city called Tulum that my wife and I visited during a short trip to Mexico this past weekend. One of the last cities built and inhabited by the Maya, Tulum reached its peak between the 13th and 15th centuries. Although Mayans continued to occupy it for about 70 years after Spanish contact, the city was abandoned by the end of the 16th century. Today, it is one of the best-preserved coastal Maya sites.