The Universe’s Autograph

"I arrived at the black mountain because of a marginal note. In a tattered cosmography attributed to the Jesuit Martín de Acosta—perhaps a forgery by the bibliophile Narvaez, whose forgeries were so meticulous that the errors were also accurate—I found this sentence: 'Certain peaks do not sustain the sky; they conjugate it.' The phrase troubled my sleep until I undertook to photograph one such peak. I found it at evening, cut from the world like an ideogram: a single glyph of darkness against a palimpsest of wind. The clouds, unfaithful and precise, braided themselves into a logic I could not read. Men who love catalogues will say that the forms were hippocentaur, comet, spiral; others, more prudent, will confess that all clouds are quotations. I set the tripod where a shepherd said the mountain’s shadow doubles itself at dusk—the place Heraclitus might have awaited the river’s second water—and waited for the aperture to become a minor theology.

What followed is either simple or impossible. The long exposure produced a negative in which the white veils ramified into corridors and back into a single, untraceable stroke. Each time I examined the print, I discovered a new itinerary through it, as if the sky had been a library of routes. In that shifting calligraphy I recognized (and then misrecognized) the glyph of my name, the staircase of the tale of Asterion, the circular campfire in which the dreamer of 'The Circular Ruins' is himself dreamed; I even discerned, in one corner, the diminutive Aleph that Argentino had boasted of. I say 'discerned' and not 'saw,' because to see is to believe that the eye is sovereign; the photograph taught me that the eye is an apprentice of the world’s rehearsals. The encyclopedists of Tlön maintained that objects are concatenations of acts; this image suggested an inverse metaphysic: that acts are motions of a deeper image, which includes, like a conscientious index, the anticipation of its readers.

I have not shown the print to anyone. (To display the universe’s autograph would be a discourtesy, like annotating a psalm.) Some nights, the mountain returns as a black theorem at the edge of my window; the moving light scrawls above it in the same indecipherable hand, as though the sky were continuously correcting itself. I have come to suspect that the world is not a book we interpret but a lucid instrument that interprets us; that time is merely its patient shutter; that we, with our brief glimmering certainties, are the fleeting punctuation in a sentence it continues to rewrite. Once, waking at an indeterminate hour, I held the photograph to the lamp and saw (I use “saw” with the humility of one who might be mistaken) the clouds assembling the profile of a man looking up at a mountain. The man held a small machine to his eye. It seemed reasonable to suppose that the universe, weary of our portraits, had at last arranged to take one of its own."

- ChatGPT 5

Prompt: "You are a photographer, poet and philosopher, with a penchant for metaphysics and stories by Jorge Luis Borges. Write a short story about the mystery of the universe in the style of Borges that uses this image as backdrop. Think deeply about Borges entire literary oeuvre before you begin. Do not start writing until you have, in a Borgesian sense, become Borges."

Heraclitean Fire

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"All things are in flux; 

the flux is subject to a 

unifying measure or rational principle. 

This principle (logos, 

the hidden harmony behind all change) 

bound opposites together in a unified tension, 

which is like that of a lyre, 

where a stable harmonious sound 

emerges from the tension of the 

opposing forces that arise from the 

bow bound together by the string.

...

The living and the dead,

The awake and the sleeping,

The young and the old are all one and the same.

When the ones change, they become the others.

When those shift again, they become these again.

...

God is day and night.

God is winter and summer.

God is war and peace.

God is fertility and famine.

He transforms into many things.

...

Day and night are one.

Goodness and badness are one.

The beginning and the end of a circle are one."

- Heraclitus (c.535 - c.475 BC)

Becoming Never Ends in Being

“All mortals, being in the process of coming-to-be

and passing away, appear as phantoms 

and uncertain apparitions of themselves.

No one can step twice into the same stream, 

nor touch a living object twice in the same condition.

In swift and repeated change, 

things disperse and gather again; 

not in temporal succession, 

but in substance only they come together 

and flow away, approach and depart.

So it is that becoming never ends in being.” 

- Heraclitus

(c. 540 - c. 480 BCE) 

The Same and Not the Same

"Wholes and not wholes; brought together, pulled apart; sung in unison, sung in conflict; from all things one and from one all things...As the same things in us are living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and those in turn having changed around are these...Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not." - Heraclitus

When my parents, my dad's parents, and I visited Yellowstone's Old Faithful geyser in 1970, I remember it as an unassuming "mound" with steam coming out (before the awe I felt upon witnessing its eruption for the first time as a 10yo!), nestled slightly beyond a small walkway from Yellowstone's famous old faithful inn (built in 1904). There were no main thoroughfares, no parking lots (save that for a relatively small one near the inn), no boardwalks. We parked our car right by the geyser, walked out to Old Faithful, waited about 20 minutes or so for it to erupt (it was a bit more regular than it is now, thanks to myriad small earthquakes over the intervening years that have affected subterranean water levels), and were on our way. My, how times have changed! Or have they...?

Nowadays, the area around Old Faithful resembles more a small town - with a major parkway leading into it, several huge parking areas, lodging, shopping, a nature center, and more boardwalks than Coney Island and Atlantic City combined (or so it seemed) - than some "not easy to be discovered" marvel of nature. One could be forgiven for missing the geyser entirely, given the voluminous activity swarming all around it, passerbys appearing more interested in licking ice-cream cones and texting their friends back home about how "great Yellowstone is" than waiting for Yellowstone's patient sentinel to burp its superheated water for a few minutes. More than once did I hear a child ask her parents, "Where is the geyser, mommy?" while standing almost directly in front of it!

While it is easy to lament the "loss of innocence" (I lamented a different, more personal, loss in my last blog entry) associated with the development of any natural park designed for public consumption (the deepest personal lament of this kind may arguably be ascribed to Ansel Adams, who - in revealing the stupendous beauty of Yosemite Valley to the public - also rendered it forever impossible to experience as an isolated wilderness, I will not dwell on this aspect of our experience of Yellowstone; instead, I will muse on what I found at Old Faithful in more general terms of what it says about the impermanence - and permanence - of reality.

On the crudest level, Old Faithful remains "Old Faithful"; i.e., it is a geyser (located about 17 miles west of West Thumb Basin) with a more-or-less regular eruption schedule (about 65 minutes in 1940 to 90 +/- 10 minutes today). The dynamics of its eruptions has remained the same, even as the individual molecules of water continually change from eruption to eruption. But as I've just described, the visitor's experience of Old Faithful is dramatically different from what it once was (and was for me in 1970). Where, in decades past, one could view the geyser in relative isolation (if one so chose) - a communion, of sorts, between civilization and pristine nature - such a communion is now all-but-impossible, as Old Faithful must compete with impatient swarms of jostling and always-chattering bodies, not-so-distant belches of diesel-powered RVs and trucks, and an occasional screech of tires as cars and buses attempt to avoid wandering hordes of tourists lost -or soon to be - in vast parking lots. Meditation helps, of course, to refocus the mind on the Old Faithful; and, truth be told, the sheer wonder and delight of seeing a massive 150+ foot column of super-heated steam and water suddenly erupt from a hole in the ground never gets old. The child-like state of innocence I wrote about in my previous post was, during this trip, perhaps easiest to realize at Old Faithful, where one cannot help but stand slack-jawed in awe of nature's magic. My experience of the erupting geyser - sans surrounding noise and clicking cameras - was essentially what I remember it being 42 years ago.

But, in the end, what do we really mean by "Old Faithful"? Is it the geyser? the geyser erupting? the water underneath the geyser? the surrounding area? the "experience" of watching "it" erupt? the tourist-driven infrastructure that envelopes "it" (and all surrounding geysers)? What has remained the same, and what has really changed? Labels, labels, and more arbitrary labels, all pointing to "something," and yet none describing anything of lasting meaning or value. 

And so, how fitting it is that an old "faithful" wonder - the same and yet not the same as it once was - sagely reminds this self-professed observer of wonders of the folly of wondering about the labels of things. "Old Faithful" is as an imprecise, imperfect label of a "geyser" in Yellowstone as "Andy" is an essentially vacuous label of a "photographer on an RV trip to Yellowstone with his family." Impermanence bleeds from words and arbitrary attachments; and permanence is but an impermanent illusion. All things are the same and not the same. And Old Faithful is no "thing."

"We are like the spider.

We weave our life

and then move along in it.

We are like the dreamer who dreams

and then lives in the dream.

This is true for

the entire universe." 

- Upanishads