I know so little of real life
that I just can’t help re-living
such moments as these in my dreams,
for such moments are something
I have very rarely experienced.
I am going to dream about
you the whole night,
the whole week,
the whole year."
- Arshile Gorky (1904 - 1948)
- Plato (c.424 - 348 BC)
Republic, "The Allegory of the Cave"
As for its origin—in the beginning was fable.
It will be there always."
- Paul Valery (1871 - 1945)
"On Poe's Eureka" in Selected Writings of Paul Valéry
- Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)
The Nature of Order: Luminous Ground
- Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)
- Stephon Alexander (1971 - )
The Jazz of Physics
"My mind is an attic full of crazy dreams that never quit or disappoint me, and I have been blessed with these eyes to see things differently and have people see me in a different way.
- J. Guven, J. Hanna and M. Müller,
"Whirling skirts and rotating cones,"
New Journal Of Physics (Nov, 2013)
Postscript. The images in the diptych that I took with my iPhone recently (of light reflecting off of cars parked onto the walls of a local garage) reminded me of Rumi's "Whirling Dervishes," about which you can read here and here (in considerably less technical detail than the one you'll find if you follow the link to the physics journal!)
“You are water, whirling water,
Yet still water trapped within,
Come, submerge yourself within us,
We who are the flowing stream.
...
We came whirling out of nothingness,
scattering stars like dust...
The stars made a circle,
and in the middle,
we dance.”
- Rumi (1207 - 1273
- Henry Fox Talbot (1800 - 1877)
Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing
- Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948 - )
- Minor White (1908 - 1976)
Postscript. The "Minor White: The Eye That Shapes" exhibit was hosted by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1989, with an accompanying book and catalog, edited by Peter C. Bunnell (used copies of which are sometimes still available, though they are not cheap: e.g., $80 from Amazon). Amazingly, MoMA has made a pdf of Bunnell's 322 page book available for free (it is a 62Mb download)! Kudos, MoMA 😊
- Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)
- Paul Strand (1890 - 1976)
Postscript. These images were all captured within minutes of each other in a garage near a local farmer's market this past weekend, as I was waiting for my wife to gather our grocery bags to go shopping. I have written before about how mesmerizing the "abstract cacophony" of shimmering reflections off car's hoods and hubcaps are to a photographer's eye 😊 What is hard to express in words (though I'm obviously trying, obliquely), is how joyful these few minutes' worth of prancing back and forth in-between park cars inevitably are to my soul (I look forward to my "light prancing" almost as much as the delicious recipes my wife cooks up with what we gather at the market!) My only regret (as usual) is that all I had with me was an iPhone.
- George Eastman (1854 - 1932)
- Minor White (1908 - 1976)
Postscript. In full disclosure, and unlike the "fabricated" (and eventually retracted Tweet by) physicist Étienne Klein - who playfully claimed that a photograph he took of a slice of chorizo taken against a black background was that of Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light years away, as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope - the image above is emphatically not a photograph of some spectacular celestial object! It is, in fact, just a Minor-White-like "poetic truth" rendering of ice-on-asphalt, bathed-in-red-light, as "seen" at some point a few months ago during a winter walk during sunset 😊