The Morning of Creation

"But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time. Such a silence is not a mere negation of sound. It is like a new element, and the world is suspended there, and I in it...

...

To walk out through the top of a cloud is good. Once or twice I have had the luck to stand on a tip of ground and see a pearled and lustrous plain stretch out to the horizons. Far off, another peak lifts like a small island from the smother. It is like the morning of creation. Once on Lochnagar, we had watched the dawn light strike the Cairngorms, like the blue bloom on plums. Each scarp and gully was translucent, no smallest detail blurred. A pure, clear sun poured into each recess. But looking south, we caught our breath. For the world had vanished. There was nothing but an immense stretch of hummocked snow. Or was it sea? It gleamed, and was the high hills as the sea washes rock.

...

Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.

...

I have walked out of the body and into the mountain."

- Nan Shepherd (1893 - 1981)
The Living Mountain

Memory

"The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness.
And knows that yesterday is but
today's memory and tomorrow
is today's dream."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

The Prophet

Copse of Birch

"When I can go just where I want to go,
There is a copse of birch trees that I know;
And, as in Eden Adam walked with God,
When in that quiet aisle my feet have trod
I have found peace among the silver trees,
Known comfort in the cool kiss of the breeze
Heard music in its whisper, and have known
Most certainly that I was not alone!"

- Andrew M. Greeley (1928 - 2013)

Place of Purification

"Solitude is the place of purification."

- Martin Buber (1878 - 1965)

"In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many of the earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

Sea of the Unreal

"Reality is, you know,
the tip of an iceberg of
irrationality that we've managed
to drag ourselves up onto for
a few panting moments before
we slip back into the sea
of the unreal."

- Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)

Metaphors for Life

"A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home."

- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)

The Eternal Energy of the Universe

"A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement - and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.

...

Zen is really extraordinarily simple as long as one doesn't try to be cute about it or beat around the bush! Zen is simply the sensation and the clear understanding ... that there is behind the multiplicity of events and creatures in this universe simply one energy -- and it appears as you, and everything is it. The practice of Zen is to understand that one energy so as to 'feel it in your bones.'

...

Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about,
because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

We Are Stories

"We are stories, contained within
the twenty complicated centimeters
behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces
left by the (re)mingling together of
things in the world, and oriented
toward predicting events in the future,
toward the direction of increasing entropy,
in a rather particular corner of this
immense, chaotic universe."

- Carlo Rovelli (1956 - )
The Order of Time

Thoughtful Reflection

"A sense of place is a conviction
in the individual’s choice to live there.
That is what gives the whole dignify and purpose."

- Halldor Laxness (1902 - 1998)

"Place is security,
space is freedom.
...
In a sense, every human construction,
whether mental or material, is a
component in a landscape of fear
because it exists in constant chaos.
Thus children's fairy tales as well
as adult's legends, cosmological myths,
and indeed philosophical systems
are shelters built by the mind in which
human beings can rest, at least temporarily, from
the siege of inchoate experience and of doubt.
...
It is by thoughtful reflection that the
elusive moments of the past draw
draw near to us in present reality and
gain a measure of permanence."

- Yi-Fu Tuan (1930 - 2022)

A Shadow to Another Light

 "Beauty is not in the face;
beauty is a light in the heart.
...
True light is that which
radiates from within a man.
It reveals the secrets of the soul
to the soul and lets it rejoice in life,
singing in the name of the Spirit.
...
And when the shadow
fades and is no more,
the light that lingers becomes
a shadow to another light."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931) 

This shot was taken somewhere along the southern shore of the Snaefellsnes peninsula after only our first full day in Iceland. The scene magically - and quickly - unfolded as we were driving along Route 54. One moment, our car was surrounded by a drab, grey landscape too dark to make one want to even look; the next - and only for a brief instant - the heavens opened up to bathe the landscape with effulgent light! There was just enough time to park the car (although highway pull-over spots are regrettably few and far-between in Iceland - my single complaint about what is otherwise a photographer's true heaven - there was one that fortuitously appeared just as the light broke through the clouds), ask my wife to hand me my camera, and take a quick hand-held shot while still sitting behind the wheel with a running engine. In the time I took to reach for my tripod to head out for a "proper" composition, the light had vanished and the landscape reverted to its prior drab, grey landscape too dark to make one want to even look.

Apart from the majestic landscapes, moody seascapes, waterfalls, glaciers, lagoons, .... the list goes on and on ... perhaps Iceland's greatest gift to insatiably hungry photographers' eyes is the omnipresent drama and spectacle of its glorious light and shadow. Literally anywhere you choose to stand for more than a few brief moments (it does not matter where or even for what reason!) is certain to be the center of a veritable storehouse of every-shifting ethereal luminescent patterns of both radiance and mystery. While our planet is inarguably home to a number of places in which it is nearly impossible not to take a beautiful picture - my wife and I have visited our fair share (e.g., Hawaii, Santorini, and the Isle of Skye) - I have heretofore rarely experienced quite so many "places" ubiquitously scattered around a single country!

Silver Water Plummets

"Our land of lakes forever fair below blue mountain summits,
of swans, of salmon leaping where the silver water plummets,
of glaciers swelling broad and bare above earth’s fiery sinews—
the Lord pour out his largess there as long as earth continues!"

- Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807 - 1845)

A kind note about the waterfall I featured in my last post (from a photography friend, Paul Cotter, whose exquisite portfolio and blog should be on the short list of anyone reading this - check out my links page to see what I think of Paul's work!), enticed me to ponder how differently I view my own images, depending on whether they were "easy" or "hard" to get — sometimes very hard, as when I tried capturing a view of the Selvallafoss waterfall. While it is easily accessible from a parking lot on the northern part of route 56 (on the eastern/inland part of Iceland's Snaefellsnes peninsula), I suspect that many tourists just take a quick look around (the parking area provides a gorgeous view of the volcanic lake, Selvallavatn), and get right back into their cars, oblivious to the beautiful falls that are hidden from view. 

I found it "difficult" to get this particular shot not because I needed to do any strenuous hiking (while there is a short walk involved along a mud-strewn and partly inclined path, the falls are almost within a stone's throw from the parking lot), but because my son (Josh, the next generation photographer/artist in our family) and I struggled with the ambient elements: (1) bitingly hard pelting rain, and - as if that wasn't enough - (2) unrelenting fierce mini-hurricane-strength "sentient" wind (that mysteriously swirled around us, seemingly without direction, trying to find a way to keep us an unbalanced as possible). In short, this was a beastly hard shot to get! - certainly by comparison to the image in my last post.

So, what does this have to do with the kind note from Paul Cotter? My kneejerk reaction was, "Many thanks, but now I'm embarrassed!" - where my "embarrassment comes not from being unable to take a compliment, but from the fact that I know that the earlier photograph was ridiculously easy to get: park car, walk 1000 feet to a bridge overlooking falls, set up tripod with a wide angle lens, screw on a 3-stop neutral density filter, and click. That's it! How can I possibly take any real credit (or be "rewarded" with a compliment) beyond simply asserting, "Well, I was there, saw an incredible scene in front of me, and went click"?

Objectively, I know (or ought to know) that "how good an image is" - regardless of what measure of "goodness" one uses - is not correlated with, or defined by, how hard (the photographer remembers) it was to capture. One can just as easily stumble across a timelessly "good" image as work furiously for days, even weeks, to capture a meh-level photograph. Yet, instinctively, my knee-jerk reaction is still always the same; I feel "embarrassed" when complimented on (what I know was) an easy-to-get image 😳 ... which the image above was assuredly not!

River and Time

"Time flows like a river,

halting for no one.

There’s nothing in this world

that can outlast time itself.
...
Time's arrow is the loss
of fidelity in compression.
A sketch, not a photograph.
A memory is a re-creation,
precious because it is both
more and less than the original.
...
Every night, when you stand
outside and gaze upon the stars,
you are bathing in time as well as light.
...
Time devours all."

- Ken Liu (1976 - )

This is a view of Iceland's Bruarfoss Waterfall, located just off Route 37, about 90 miles east of Reykjavík. In the unlikely event that you do not know what is waiting for you as you take the short walk that leads to this waterfall from the parking lot, you are in for a wonderful surprise; it was an amazing experience to find yourself looking at this magnificent display of raw power and beauty as my family and I rounded one last turn on our foot path.

Twigs and Rocks

"Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all - young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks at the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, 'I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.' The other creatures laughed and said, 'Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you shall die quicker than boredom!' But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks. Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, 'See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!' And the one carried in the current said, 'I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.' But they cried the more, 'Saviour!' all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Saviour."

- Richard Bach (1936 - )
Illusions

Icelandic Geometry

"To say that space is just physical
or geometrical is the same thing
as saying that the human being simple.
And both statements are false.
...
The imaginary is not formed in
opposition to the real, it is
not opposed to common sense,
it is not situated on another plane,
it is situated simultaneously on
all the planes of the real.

The real is always in movement,
it is always changing, always
becoming different-from itself.

Man is separated from the great
whole only because he consists of the
same substance as the whole,
which guarantees the union, a
substance which is doubtless more
substantial for being more rare."

- Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962)

"Murky Water, Dusty Mirror"

"Murky water is turbid;
let it settle and it clears.
A dusty mirror is dim;
clean it and it is bright.

What I realize as I observe this is
the Tao of clarifying the mind
and perceiving its essence.

The reason why people’s minds are not clear and their natures are not stable is that they are full of craving and emotion. Add to this eons of mental habit, acquired influences deluding the mind, their outgrowths clogging up the opening of awareness – this is like water being murky, like a mirror being dusty. The original true mind and true essence are totally lost. The feelings and senses are unruly, subject to all kinds of influences, taking in all sorts of things, defiling the mind.

If one can suddenly realize this and change directions, wash away pollution and contamination, gradually remove a lifetime of biased mental habits, wandering thoughts and perverse actions, increasing in strength with persistence, refining away the dross until there is nothing more to be refined away, when the slag is gone the gold is pure. The original mind and fundamental essence will spontaneously appear in full, the light of wisdom will suddenly arise, and one will clearly see the universe as though it were in the palm of the hand, with no obstruction.

This is like murky water returning
to clarity when settled,
like a dusty mirror being restored
to brightness when polished.
That which is fundamental is as ever:
without any lack."

- Liu Yiming (1734–1821)
Awakening to the Tao
(also available on the Internet Archive)

Infinite Storm of Beauty

"One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.

...

...when we contemplate the
whole globe as one great dewdrop,
striped and dotted with continents and islands,
flying through space with other stars
all singing and shining together as one,
the whole universe appears as
an infinite storm of beauty."

- John Muir (1838 - 1914)
Nature Writings

A Moment

"'Is this a moment?'
He asks in a very loud voice.

'No, not anymore.'
And this one? Not anymore either.
All you have is the moment to come.
The present is already past.'"

- Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977)

Tip of an Iceberg

"Everything - a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being - is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself."

- Eckhart Tolle (1948 - )

A Dizzying Trance Sublime and Strange

"The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—

Now lending splendour, where from secret springs

The source of human thought its tribute brings

Of waters,—with a sound but half its own,

Such as a feeble brook will oft assume

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,

Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,

Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river

Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

...
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion
Thou art the path of that unresting sound—
Dizzy Ravine! And when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantast,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;"

- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)
Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

The word "dizzy," when used as a verb, means "to make giddy"; and giddy, in turn, is "an adjective that describes a feeling of dizziness or lightheadedness. It can also refer to a feeling of excitement or euphoria that causes a person to feel unsteady or unstable. Giddy can be used to describe physical sensations, emotional states, or even situations that are overwhelming or disorienting [ref]." It is with these nuanced interpretations that the words "dizzy" and "giddy" often popped into my mind during our trip to Iceland, which is filled with dizzying landscapes that evoke giddy awe. As some of my earlier images from our recent trip have already hinted, Iceland is replete with dissonant scales of time and space. Distant mountains are just as likely to appear as illusory nearby foothills, as nearby crags are to easily fool you into believing they are remotely distant. (Neither of which may even be true, as Borges might have once said in some other world.) Iceland's landscapes tend to induce trance-like states of "giddy anxiety" - unabashed awe, really - unless, and until, visitors somehow find a way to calibrate Iceland's a priori incommensurate scales of time and distance. 

The image above conveys a bit of this mysterious tension. Look at the picture but first use a finger to block out the small cluster of white buildings in the lower right. The remaining part of the image appears to be a "landscape" like any other, with a trace of a distant (but otherwise “normal”) mountain range. Now, remove your finger and let your eyes absorb the complete scene. Assuming your reaction is in any way like mine, you will experience a sense of "dizzying vertigo" as your brain's visual cortex tries desperately to make sense of the dissonant scales of size and distance; and leaves you grappling with the absurdity of the mountains having instantly grown tenfold in height! I lost count of the number of times I felt this way looking at Iceland's landscapes through my camera's viewfinder.

Mereological Investigations

"Whole and part—

partly concrete parts and
partly abstract parts—are
at the bottom of everything.
They are most fundamental
in our conceptual system.

...

Whole and unity; thing or entity or being. Every whole is a unity and every unity that is divisible is a whole. For example, the primitive concepts, the monads, the empty set, and the unit sets are unities but not wholes. Every unity is something and not nothing. Any unity is a thing or an entity or a being. Objects and concepts are unities and beings.

...

In materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind. “Matter” refers to one way of perceiving things, and elementary particles are a lower form of mind. Mind is separate from matter."

- Kurt Godel (1906 - 1978)

Expanding a bit on my past blog post (in which I describe the "Fox-like Hedgehogian" style of photography I tend to engage in - mostly unconsciously - whenever I am on "vacation," consider the image at the top of this post. This is a rare (possibly unique?) instance in which I lead into my commentary by sharing a completely unprocessed image; save that for my opening it up in Photoshop using Photoshop's default raw filter conversion settings. I do this not because I think this image merits a moment of attention - indeed, I should immediately emphasize that IMHO it does not (i.e., I am responsible for capturing this landscape, but do not think this is a good picture) - but because I wish to use it to illustrate one of the points I was struggling to make clear in my previous post.

The short version of my last entry is simply this: that when I am "on vacation" - typically, but not always, somewhere I have never been before - my photography inevitably steps through three partly overlapping stages: stage-1, the "spray paint" stage, denotes a short time during which I engage in the vain hope of capturing majestic "Wagnerian" landscapes in the vain hope of "showing it all"; stage-2 consists of my "slowing down" and engaging the landscape on its own terms (whether it is vast and majestic, or more intimate); and (my much preferred) stage-3, that appears only after I remember to view landscapes not as "objects" to be captured, but as ambient experiential backdrops to my own state-of-mind (wherein the compositions I make are less about conveying aesthetic impressions of specific things captured in a given place and time, and more about revealing aspects of how I experienced specific things in given places and times while I was taking pictures of them).

And so, in this context, consider the "raw" image that appears at the top of this blog post. Since it was taken within a few hours of gathering our luggage at Iceland's Keflavík airport and heading out on our first day of exploring the country, it is not surprising (at least to me) that its quality falls decidedly into the "stage 1" category. Why is this image not very good? The most egregious reason (among many others), is that it is unclear what the photographer (namely, me) wants the viewer to look at (or experience)! The mountains? Perhaps, but they are obscured in shadow and require an effort to see beyond the bright foreground and large cloud; the clouds? Maybe, but they only partly cover half of the sky, and the main "point of interest" (cloud-wise) is a dominant blob that draws in too much of the viewer's' attention; or is the viewer meant to look at the waterfall quietly nestled within a beautifully lit foreground? If so, the lighting hardly does justice to the waterfall, which seems as almost a hopeless afterthought buried in deep shadow. 

My point is not to self flagellate (though constructive self-criticism is something I always engage in; just not quite so openly as I'm doing now 😊; but rather to illustrate how I sometimes use otherwise forgettable "stage 1" images such as this to help steer/reorient my aesthetics and (better prepare for) future compositions. While "stage 2" photographs do not - cannot - appear until I've thoroughly gotten my "capture the majestic Wagnerian landscape" instincts out of the way, "stage 1" images also invariably contain vestiges (unconscious reminders?) of what my "eye" was really looking at, even as it was distracted by the "big-picture." I'd like to think that - had I had more time (or, more precisely, had I gotten over my "Wagnerian" instincts before I encountered the landscape in the "raw" image above), that I would have "seen" and composed these more intimate ("Stage 2") photographs from the spot I was standing:

Alas, my "eye" saw these (embedded, latent, additional?) compositional possibilities only after returning home from our vacation; and the post-processed crops you see here hardly do justice to how I ought to have captured them. I did the best I could, and leveraged the relatively high resolution that my Nikon z7 provides. But my heart and muse both know that what essentially amounts to no more than a bit of "melancholy play" with Photoshop may also have produced significantly more meaningful "stage 2" or "stage 3" images had I been in a more receptive "state of mind," and been patient enough to wait for the right light. The one small bit of solace I have is that while my "eye" was unabashedly and myopically focused on capturing a "Wagnerian landscape," it was my "I" that pointed to what "eye" saw; why else was I even looking?