Emergent Order

"The infinite variety of forms which we observe in the realm of organic life not only delight our senses with their beauty and diversity, but also excite our curiosity, in suggesting the problem of their origin and connection. [...] The unity of the organic structure, which expresses itself everywhere in the fundamental features of living things and in the chemical composition and constructive power of their plasm, is also seen in the laws of symmetry in their typical forms. [...] In the protists … the constructive force of the elementary organism, the individual cell, determines the symmetry of the typical form and the special form of its supplementation; but in the histons … it is the plasticity of the tissue, made up of a number of socially combined cells, that determines this. [...] All the various fundamental forms that can be distinguished and defined mathematically are found realized in the graceful flinty skeletons of these unicellular sea-dwelling protozoa. [...] The great majority of organic bodies show a certain regularity both in their outer configuration and the construction of their various parts, which we may call ‘symmetry’ in the wider sense of the word. [...] These two branches of investigation have the common aim of detecting an ideal law of symmetry in the bodies they deal with and expressing this in a definite mathematical formula."

- Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919)
The Wonders of Life

Borrowed Ascent

"The growth of climbers, even more than all other plants, is upward towards the light. In the shade of the forest they rarely or never flower, and seldom even produce foliage; but when they have reached the summit of the tree that supports them, they expand under the genial influence of light and air, and often cover their foster-parent with blossoms not its own.

Here, as a rule, the climber’s growth would cease; but the time comes when the supporting tree rots and falls, and the creeper comes with it in torn and tangled masses to the ground. But though its foster-parent is dead it has itself received no permanent injury, but shoots out again till it finds a fresh support, mounts another tree, and again puts forth its leaves and flowers.
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Mr. Darwin has now shown us the marvelous interdependence of every part of nature. Not only is each organism necessarily related to and affected by all things, living and dead, that surround it ... [The the natural world is a system of] complex relations and mutual interdependence, which link together every animal and vegetable form … into one grand organic whole."

- Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 - 1913)

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...
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...all things that have existence in nature … are correspondences...
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...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.

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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.