Frozen Homage

"There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Note. A long while back (on Feb 7, 2009 to be exact), I posted a lengthy set of musings on the Unconscious Influence and the Creative Process, wherein I speculated on the impact that seeing one of Fay Godwin's photographs led to one of my own decades later. The image above may be viewed from the opposite perspective, in that it was my conscious memory of one of Ansel Adams' well known Frozen Lakes and Cliffs photograph that drew my eye to the little scene here. While it lacks Ansel's abstract ethereality, I may not have captured the image at all were it not for my knowing (and being able to recall, at an instant's notice) Adams' oeuvre. Far from an "unconscious" influence, my humble image is an intentional homage. It is also a keepsake of a wonderful day my family and I spent on a completely frozen over part of the Potomac river in Maryland side of Great Falls Park that we had never before seen frozen (during our 26+ years of living in the area)! 

Celestial Beauty

"Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

Greatest of Mysteries

"The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us - there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."

- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
Cosmos

A Self-correcting System

"The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!

...

We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac.

...

The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, 'Why are we here?'"

- George Carlin (1937 - 2008)

Shamanic Ecstasy

"This is why the shaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist. Our need to feel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of this creativity are hidden in the mystery of language. Shamanic ecstasy is an act of surrender that authenticates both the individual self and that which is surrendered to, the mystery of being. Because our maps of reality are determined by our present circumstances, we tend to lose awareness of the larger patterns of time and space. Only by gaining access to the Transcendent Other can those patterns of time and space and our role in them be glimpsed."

-  Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)
Food of the Gods

The Sensation of the Mystical

"The most beautiful and most profound emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illuminable superior who reveals himself in the slightest details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction for the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."

- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Habitual Gestures

Making art … means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and contradiction doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward. Making the work you want to make means setting aside these doubts so that you may see clearly what you have done, and thereby see where to go next. Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself.

...
Your desire to make art,

beautiful or meaningful or emotive art,
is integral to your sense of who you are.

...

Viewed closely, however, style is not a virtue, it is an inevitability, the inescapable result of doing anything more than a few times. The habitual gestures of the artist appear throughout any body of work developed enough to be called a body of work. Style is not an aspect of good work, it is an aspect of all work. Style is the natural consequence of habit."

- David Bayles (1952 - ) and Ted Orland (1941 - )
Art & Fear

Spiritual Nature

"Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history. The use of the outer creation is to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right originally means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eye-brow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are, in their turn, words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature.

...

But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import – so conspicuous a fact in the history of language – is our least debt to nature. It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.

...

As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or, all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original elements of all languages. It has moreover been observed, that the idioms of all languages approach each other in passages of the greatest eloquence and power. And as this is the first language, so is it the last. This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never loses its power to affect us."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
Nature

Denying Temporal Succession

"And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

"A New Refutation of Time," Labyrinths

Crystalline Multiverse

"Again we were too parochial, and were led to the false conclusion that knowledge-bearing entities can be physically identical to non-knowledge-bearing ones; and this in turn cast doubt on the fundamental status of knowledge. But now we have come almost full circle. We can see that the ancient idea that living matter has special physical properties was almost true: it is not living matter but knowledge-bearing matter that is physically special. Within one universe it looks irregular; across universes it has a regular structure, like a crystal in the multiverse."

- David Deutsch (1953 - )
The Fabric of Reality

Cliffs of Mystery

"The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple-universe."

- Annie Dillard (1945 - )

Cosmological Cycling

"'Tlingit language reflects subtle differences between ordinary and extraordinary, commonplace and mysterious, safe and dangerous ... the language is rich in verbs and emphasizes activity and motion, making no sharp distinction between animate and inanimate [as defined in Western thought]. Hence, mountains, glaciers, bodies of water, rocks and manufactured objects all have qualities of sentience.' 

...

A system of cosmological understandings about the nature of existence, its entities, forces, processes, and the nature of time and space is found in virtually all human cultures. Tlingit cosmology was grounded in the principle that all living entities had 'spirits' and those entities cycle between domains of life in the world of direct experience followed after death by residence in another domain waiting for rebirth or reincarnation into this world. This process has been referred to as cosmological cycling.

...

'...people understood that all entities of nature – plants, animals, stones, trees, mountains, rivers, lakes, and a host of other living entities – embodies relationships that must be honored. Through the seeking, making, sharing, and celebrating of those natural relationships, they came to perceive themselves in a sea of interdependent relationships.'"

- Steve J. Langdon (1948 - )
"Spiritual Relations, Moral Obligations and Existential Continuity,"
in Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom

Mystery of Mysteries

"Should one wish to learn the methods of a conjurer, he might vainly watch the latter's customary repertoire, and, so long as everything went smoothly, might never obtain a clue to the mysterious performance, baffled by the precision of the manipulations and the complexity of the apparatus; if, however, a single error were made in any part or if a single deviation from the customary method should force the manipulator along an unaccustomed path, it would give the investigator an opportunity to obtain a part or the whole of the secret. Thus. ... it seems likely that through the study of the abnormal or unusual, some insight may be obtained into that mystery of mysteries, the development of an organism."

- Harris H. Wilder (1864 - 1928)

Cosmic Strings

"A cosmic string is, put simply, a flaw. A crack. A defect. A fold in the very fabric of spacetime itself. If they exist, they were made in the earliest moments of the big bang, when the insane energies were capable of twisting and distorting spacetime so much that it left permanent wrinkles.

These wrinkles, known as cosmic strings, would be almost impossibly thin, no wider than a single proton. But that would pack a potent punch. At those densities, a stretch of cosmic string only a mile long would weigh more than the entire planet Earth. Based on our theories of how they would form, they could stretch from one of the observable universes to the other.

But ... we don’t know if they exist."

- Paul M. Sutter
The Sheer Awesomeness and Weirdness of Cosmic Strings

Dancing Rhythms

"Everything in the universe
has a rhythm,
everything
dances."

- Maya Angelou (1928 - 2014)

Cosmic Journey

"We are travelers on a cosmic journey — stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. But the expressions of life are ephemeral, momentary, transient. Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, once said, This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky, Rushing by like a torrent down a steep mountain. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment, but it is transient. It is a little parenthesis in eternity. If we share with caring, lightheartedness, and love, we will create abundance and joy for each other. And then this moment will have been worthwhile."

- Deepak Chopra (1946 - )

Altered State of Consciousness

"Let us review three cases from widely separated locations in the world. A Tungus shaman in Siberia agrees to the request of tribal hunters to locate game during a poor hunting season. Using a drumming technique, he enters an [altered state of consciousness] ASC and provides information to help his hunters. The Western interpretation—if it accepts at all the validity of this kind of information—would be that the shaman calculates the behavior of the game according to weather and well-known environmental conditions. In other words, his is information based on cognitive processing of sensory data. 

The explanation of the shaman himself is different: Guidance has been provided by forest spirits. On another continent, hunters of the Kalahari !Kung tribe leave the settlement to hunt for a period that may last anywhere from two days to two weeks. The tribe’s timely preparation for the return of successful hunters is necessary for processing the game. The people left behind make the appropriate steps long before the hunters’ reappearance. Their foreknowledge of the hunters’ return could be explained rationally by attributing it to a messenger sent ahead or the use of tam-tam drums or smoke signals. The tribesmen report, however, that it is the spirit of ancestors who informs them when the hunters will return. 

Next, we move to the Amazon basin. The Shuar shaman is facing a new disease in the community. An herbal remedy is sought by adding leaves of a candidate plant into the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca, a sacrament indigenous to the Upper Amazon region. The shaman drinks it and, upon return to ordinary consciousness, decides the usefulness of the plant in question. Is his decision based on accumulation of ethnobotanical knowledge of several generations in combination with trial and error? The headhunter Shuar are not likely to be merciful to an ineffective medicine man, and his techniques must be working. 

As Luis Eduardo Luna explained to me, according to ayahuasqueros, the spirit of a new plant reveals itself with the help of the spirits associated with the ayahuasca. Sometimes, they also tell which plant to use next. We can point to the following contradiction: Healers from different cultures are unequivocal in their interpretation of the source of knowledge, whereas rational thinkers use diverging, unsystematic explanations. Which side should be slashed with Occam’s razor? Also called the 'principle of parsimony,' Occam’s razor is usually interpreted to mean something like 'Do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily' or 'Do not posit pluralities unnecessarily when generating explanatory models.' The principle of parsimony is used frequently by philosophers of science in an effort to establish criteria for choosing from theories with equal explanatory power. At first glance it is the 'primitives' who multiply causes unnecessarily by referring to the supernatural. Yet Occam’s razor may be applied easily to the rational view, if those arguments are less parsimonious."

- Rick Strassman (1952 - )
 Inner Paths to Outer Space

Silent Knowledge

"Silent knowledge is the deep, innate wisdom that is in all things. It comes from the interconnectedness of all beings and creatures. It is the wisdom of the universe. For instance, if you've ever simply known the answer to a question without any logical way that your brain could have discovered it—like when a mother can feel that her child is in danger or when you know the moment a relative transitions into death—this is all silent knowledge. It is the universal wisdom that has always been at our fingertips, but that we often neglect to tap into, either because we don't know or have forgotten how."

- Don Jose Ruiz
Wisdom of the Shamans

Kal-Toh

"Ensign Harry KIM:
That's kal-toh, isn't it? Vulcan chess?

Lieutenant TUVOK:
Kal-toh is to chess as chess is to tic-tac-toe.

...
(Icheb is trying his hand at Kal-toh. Kim coughs just before he makes a move. Icheb moves the rod to another place and Kim nods slightly)
TUVOK: In the interest of fair play, I should inform you that Mister Kim has never defeated me at Kal-toh.
(Icheb places the rod at his first chosen place. The shape does not change.)
KIM: You should've listened to me.
(Tuvok's rod changes the shape.)
TUVOK: Kal-toh is as much a game of patience as it is of logic. An experienced player will sometimes take several hours to decide his next move, and in some cases even days may be necessary to
(Icheb places a rod.)
ICHEB: Kal-toh.
KIM: You beat him.TUVOK: Congratulations.
ICHEB: I'm sure it was just beginner's luck, sir. I'd offer you a rematch, but I'm due in Astrometrics.
TUVOK: Another time, perhaps.
(Icheb leaves. Kim takes his place opposite Tuvok.)
KIM: He may have to go, but I'm free and feeling lucky.
TUVOK: If you'll excuse me, Ensign.
(Tuvok leaves the table.)
KIM: It's just a game, Tuvok."

- Star Trek: Voyager (1995 - 2001)

Vibrating Universe

"Gravitational waves are fundamentally different. Not only is a gravitational wave a side-to-side, lateral wave like light, not a longitudinal wave like sound, but it isn’t a ripple through objects in spacetime; it passes through spacetime itself. When a gravitational wave passes by, spacetime squeezes and contracts. This oscillation influences matter, which exists in spacetime – but doesn’t require matter to be able to travel. It’s quite demeaning to gravitational waves to call their detection ‘hearing the sound of black holes in space’ as some have done. By comparison, sound is a trivial local effect. Gravitational waves make the universe itself vibrate."

- Brian Clegg (1955 - )
Gravitational Waves