Wednesday, May 31, 2023
Singing Elephants
Saturday, May 27, 2023
Finite Worlds
- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Note. The image is a "quick grab" with my iPhone of some lights on the ceiling of the hotel my wife and I recently stayed at in Monterey, CA. A basic photography lesson I learned and embraced long ago (though occasionally still forget to apply; happily, not this time) is this: if you are in a "dull, dull, insufferably dull" place for image taking (or, at least, think you are - like standing around in a hotel lobby with nothing to do or to "look at"), just look up or down ... something is sure to catch your eye 🙂
Friday, May 26, 2023
Mysterious Worlds
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 - 1881)
Brothers Karamazov
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
Daliesque Dreams
be officially admitted that
what we have christened reality
is an even greater illusion
than the world of dreams."
- Salvador Dali (1904 -1989)
Tuesday, May 09, 2023
To See Takes Time
Wednesday, April 26, 2023
A Garage, Brazil, and a Stieglitzian "Equivalent"
"Harry Tuttle: Harry Tuttle. Heating engineer. At your service.
Sam Lowry: Tuttle? Are you from Central Services? I called Central Services.
Harry Tuttle: Ha!
Sam Lowry: But... I called Central Services.
Harry Tuttle: They're a little overworked these days. Luckily I intercepted your call...Officially, only Central Service operatives are supposed to touch this stuff...
Sam Lowry: Sorry. Wouldn't it be easier just to work for Central Services?
Harry Tuttle: Couldn't stand the paperwork. Yes, there's more bits of paper in Central Services than bits of pipe read this, fill in that, hand in the other listen, this old system of yours could be on fire and I couldn't even turn on the kitchen tap without filling in a 27B/6...Bloody paperwork.
Sam Lowry: I suppose one has to expect a certain amount.
Harry Tuttle: Why? I came into this game for the action, the excitement. Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble, a man alone. Now they got the whole country sectioned off, you can't make a move without a form...Ah ha! Found it! There's your problem.
Sam Lowry: Can you fix it?
Harry Tuttle: No, I can't. But I can bypass it with one of these.
[Holds up a bizarre device]
Harry Tuttle: My good friends call me Harry."
- Brazil (1985),
Screenplay by Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard & Charles McKeown
Postscript. I have written before about the mystery of what "sits behind" (and directs) the eye/I/camera to see and take a photograph; and about the equally mysterious joy of just going with the flow of it all. Why do some scenes/compositions attract our attention while we walk past others as if sleepwalking through a void? While it is easy to overthink (even obsess) about seeing, interpreting, and composing - which only disrupts the natural flow - indulging in an occasional self-reflection can also reveal a part of the creative process. In my case, I've always had a penchant for making split-second associations with something either imagined or recalled). What I don't know is whether my inner musings are synchronous-with, antecedent-of, or follow my photographer-self's gaze? I've no doubt experienced each of these variants countless times, but the question of what really happens remains a deep mystery to me. But I have also grown to savor this mystery whenever it presents itself, as it did this weekend, when my wife and I parked our car in a garage before going to see a play in Washington, DC. As I closed my door, and for whatever reason, the vista of pipes, lights, and soiled concrete that met my gaze conjured up a scene from the absurdist Monty-Pythonesque-movie "Brazil" wherein Robert De Niro (playing a character named "Harry Tuttle," who is part heating engineer and part special forces operative) breaks into the Sam Lowry's apartment (Sam is the "hero," played by Jonathan Pryce), and rips apart a section of Sam's wall to expose a bizarre mass of writhing, all-but-living, pipes and electrical conduits! So, there I stood transfixed beside our car, my mind a blank (with a silly grin on my face), mentally replaying what I could remember from this scene from Brazil. The image you see up above is my attempt at using my iPhone to record a Stieglitzian "equivalent" of what I was experiencing while gazing at the vista of pipes, lights, and soiled concrete in a Washington, DC garage 😊
Sunday, March 05, 2023
The Mind of Some Eternal Spirit
- Sir James Jeans (1877 - 1946)
The Mysterious Universe
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Eternal Energy
eternal energy which
appears as this Universe.
You didn't come into this world;
you came out of it.
Like a wave from the ocean.
So that in a way, when you look
deeply into somebody's eyes,
you're looking deep into yourself,
and the other person is looking
deeply into the same self."
- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
Another World
- Hal Zina Bennett (1936 - )
Spirit Circle: A Story of Adventure & Shamanic Revelation
Thursday, February 16, 2023
What's a Photographer to Do Without a 'Real' Camera?
- Chase Jarvis (1971 - )
As I wrote about in my last blog post, my wife and I recently visited our youngest son in college. Since the trip was only for a few days (cross-country, no less: we live in northern Virginia, but our son's college is in California), and our ostensible purpose was to attend "Parent's Day," I reasoned - foolishly, as it turns out - that there would be zero time for "real photography" (meaning: photography with what I call my "real" camera). Note that I intend no disrespect either to my iPhone (which I always have with me) or to anyone who's "real camera" is an iPhone. The iPhone is a great photographic tool and is more than capable of capturing wonderful images! I use this phraseology only to convey a truth of my own reality: if I am without the camera(s) that I am usually armed with when I go on my photo safaris I somehow feel less than whole - disarmed, as it were - photographically speaking (which in hindsight of course is, again, rather foolish). Which is not to say that my "eye" is not constantly searching for something to photograph (even as the brain behind the eye laments not having my "real camera").
The (abstract) triptych above is an assembly of a few miscellaneous "shots" I took with my iPhone while waiting to board one of our planes. A few other "quick grabs" I managed to take during the trip included: (1) a shot of the ceiling at an American Airlines' Admirals Club (the "upside down" view of which I much prefer over the "straight" version) ...
(2) a shot of a chandelier at LAX ...
(3) a series of "fire abstracts" (captured while waiting for our dinner to arrive at a restaurant close to our son's college) ...
Saturday, February 04, 2023
Worlds Within Worlds
- David Abram (1957 - )
The Spell of the Sensuous
Postscript. The quote is from a remarkable book that has nourished my soul since I first read it in the mid 1990s (whose author, by coincidence, attended the same university as I did - Stony Brook, NY; I suspect we walked past each other a few times during our overlapping time there, though we graduated with very different degrees). It is part of a longer section in which Abrams describes an awe-inspiring encounter with a spider. Though spiders have no direct connection to the triptych above (which, for those of you wondering, is "just" a sequence of crepes that my wife prepared for our breakfast this morning), I had only last night started my 10th or 11th re-reading of Abrams' book, and had - by coincidence? - earmarked the page on which that wonderful combination of words "...worlds within worlds..." appears (page 19). Of course, while I almost certainly would have captured the same images whether or not I had been rereading Abrams' book the night before (since my eye is naturally tuned to seeing "ordinary-yet-not-ordinary" abstract patterns, I was instantly drawn to the crepes' tapestry of web-like forms), the serendipitous indirect enfolding of crepes and spiders brought an added joy to this morning's breakfast 🙂
Wednesday, February 01, 2023
The Original Mystery
...
Thus the world, whenever it appears as a physical universe*, must always seem to us, its representatives, to be playing a kind of hide-and-seek with itself. What is revealed will be concealed, but what is concealed will again be revealed.
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
What is a Wave?
A stone is a vibration of quanta
that maintains its structure for a while,
just as a marine wave maintains its identity
for a while before melting again into the sea.
without carrying with it any drop of water?
A wave is not an object, in the sense that it
is not made of matter that travels with it.
flow in and away from us.
We, like waves and like all objects, or
a flux of events; we are processes,
for a brief time monotonous."
- Carlo Rovelli (1956 - )
Reality Is Not What It Seems
Monday, January 30, 2023
Forests of Symbols
- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)
"Nature is a temple in which
living columns sometimes
emit confused words.
Man approaches it through
forests of symbols, which
observe him with familiar glances."
- Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867)
Monday, January 23, 2023
Order in Consciousness
Friday, January 13, 2023
Inviting Childhood's Wonder
- Charles Sherrington (1857 - 1952)
Man on his Nature
Postscript. A much-deserved shout-out to Maria Popova and her extraordinary blog, The Marginalian, from which this quote - and the reference to this book (which I did not know of before, and immediately ordered!) - both come from. Thank you Maria! 😊 A little bit more about the book appears here.
Friday, January 06, 2023
Accidental Universe
of nature do not pin down a
single and unique universe.
According to the current thinking
of many physicists, we are
living in one of a vast number of universes.
We are living in an accidental universe.
We are living in a universe uncalculable by science."
Tuesday, January 03, 2023
Borgesian Batesonian Patterns II
to suggest, among other things,
that there are spiritual patterns
at work in the universe,
at least as far as we can tell,
and these spiritual patterns announce
themselves with impressive regularity
wherever human hearts and minds
attempt to attune themselves to
the cosmos in all its radiant dimensions.