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.

Nature’s Cipher

"All the things in the world constitute a cipher.
All nature is merely a cipher and a secret writing.
The great name and essence of God and his wonders, the very
 deeds, projects, words, actions, and demeanor of mankind -
what are they for the most part but a cipher?"

- Blaise de Vigenère (1523 - 1596)

Innumerable Worlds

"I hold the universe to be infinite as result of the infinite divine power; for I think it unworthy of divine goodness and power to have produced merely one finite world when it was able to bring into being an infinity of worlds. Wherefore I have expounded that there is an endless number of individual worlds like our earth. I regard it, with Pythagoras, as a star, and the moon, the planets and the stars are similar to it, the latter being of endless number. All these bodies make an infinity of worlds; they constitute the infinite whole in infinite space, an infinite universe, that is to say, containing innumerable worlds. So that there is an infinite measure in the universe and an infinite multitude of worlds.

Within this universe I place a universal Providence, whereby everything lives, grows, acts and abides in its perfection. And I understand this in a two-fold way: one, after the fashion of the spirit which is completely present in the whole body and in every part thereof. This I call Nature, the shadow and record of the Divine. The other manner is the inconceivable way in which God, an essence, presence and power, is in all and above all, not as part, not as spirit, but unspeakably."

- Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600)
Testimony before the Venetian Inquisition in1592, Translated and quoted in
Giordano Bruno: His Life, Thought, and Martyrdom (William Boulting, 1914)

Mycelial Dreams

"In the best interpreted dreams we must often leave one portion in obscurity because we observe in the interpretation that it represents the beginning of a tangle of dream thoughts which cannot be unraveled but which has furnished no new contribution to the dream content. This, then, is the keystone of the dream, the place at which it mounts into the unknown. For the dream thoughts which we come upon in the interpretation must generally remain without a termination, and merge in all directions into the net-like entanglement of our world of thoughts. It is from some denser portion of this texture that the dream-wish then arises like the mushroom from its mycelium."

- Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939)
The Interpretation of Dreams

Lines of Force

"The view which I am so bold to put forth considers,
therefore, radiation as a kind of species of vibration in
the lines of force which are known to connect
particles and also masses of matter together.
It endeavors to dismiss the aether,
but not the vibration.
...

I do not perceive in any part of space, whether
(to use the common phrase) vacant or filled with matter,
anything but forces and the lines in which they are exerted.

...

The aether is assumed as pervading all bodies as
well as space: in the view now set forth, it is the
forces of the atomic centres which pervade
(and make) all bodies, and
also penetrate all space."

- Michael Faraday (1791 - 1867)
Thoughts on Ray Vibrations

A Diagram of Forces

"The form, then, of any portion of matter, whether it be living or dead, and the changes of form that are apparent in its movements and in its growth, may in all cases alike be described as due to the action of force. In short, the form of an object is a ‘diagram of forces,’ in this sense, at least, that from it we can judge of or deduce the forces that are acting or have acted upon it: in this strict and particular sense, it is a diagram,—in the case of a solid, of the forces that have been impressed upon it when its conformation was produced, together with those that enable it to retain its conformation.

...

In an organism, great or small, it is not merely the nature of the motions of the living substance that we must interpret in terms of force … but also the conformation of the organism itself, whose permanence or equilibrium is explained by the interaction or balance of forces."

- D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 - 1948)
On Growth and Form

Whirling Energy

"We are whirling through endless space, with and inconceivable speed, all around everything is spinning, everything is moving, everywhere there is energy. There must be some way of availing ourselves of this energy more directly. Then, with the light obtained from the medium, with the power derived from it, with every form of energy obtained without effort, from the store forever inexhaustible, humanity will advance with giant strides. The mere contemplation of these magnificent possibilities expand our minds, strengthens our hopes and fills our hearts with supreme delight.

...

Nature has stored up in the universe infinite energy. The eternal recipient and transmitter of this infinite energy is the ether. The recognition of the existence of ether, and of the functions it performs, is one of the most important results of modern scientific research. The mere abandoning of the idea of action at a distance, the assumption of a medium pervading all space and connecting all gross matter, has freed the minds of thinkers of an ever present doubt, and, by opening a new horizon - new and unforeseen possibilities - has given fresh interest to phenomena with which we are familiar of old."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)