A World of Phantasms

"When, therefore, Philosophy proves that our knowledge of the external world can be but phenomenal—when it concludes that the things of which we are conscious are appearances; it inevitably arouses in us the notion of an illusiveness like that to which our visual perceptions are so liable in comparison with our tactual perceptions. Good pictures show us that the aspects of things may be very nearly simulated by colors on canvass. The looking-glass still more distinctly proves how deceptive is sight when unverified by touch. And the frequent cases in which we misinterpret the impressions made on our eyes, and think we see something which we do not see, further shake our faith in vision. So that the implication of uncertainty has infected the very word appearance. Hence, Philosophy, by giving it an extended meaning, leads us to think of all our senses as deceiving us in the same way that the eyes do; and so makes us feel ourselves floating in a world of phantasms."

- Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)
First Principles/Part I, “The Unknowable”

Rhythmic Harmony

"An artist, when he paints a tonal picture, has in mind the relative dark and light of colors, and their relative coolness and warmth. Let me explain. First the relative coolness or warmth of colors. The artist regards blue as the coolest hue. As a matter of fact violet reflects even less light than blue; still, for his practical purposes, an artist says that the cool hue is blue, and he associates with it violet and green. On the other hand, yellow, he treats as warm, and associates with it red and orange.

And, if you consider for a moment, the distinction of warm and cool hues, which is practiced by artists and founded on the nature of light, appeals to our own experience. You will have no hesitation in feeling that a bunch of violets, surrounded by green leaves, gives you a feeling of coolness, as compared with another bunch composed of red and yellow poppies.

Accordingly, if an artist has made up his mind that his tonal harmony shall be a cool one, he either composes it entirely of cool hues, or sees to it that some one or all of them shall ‘prevail.’ The warmer hues may be introduced for the sake of contrast, but very sparingly. And, of course, he will reverse his use of the hues, if he wishes the tone to be a warm one.

...

When all is said and done, tone is the result of color relations,
so arranged that they produce a rhythmic harmony."

- Charles H. Caffin (1854 - 1918)
A Child's Guide to Pictures

Omni Inter-Accommodation

"In short, physics has discovered
That there are no solids.
No continuous surfaces.
No straight lines;
Only waves.
No things.
Only energy event complexes.
Only behaviors.
Only verbs.
Only relationships,
Which, once discovered,
Can be kept track of
and employed
By both the integral brain
And the extracorporeal computer
But may never be discovered originally
By those physically limited tools.

And the why-for and how-come

Of omni-interaccommodation

Of all the known family

Of weightless, eternal, generalized principles —

Thus far discovered

By scientific observation

To be metaphysically governing

In elegant mathematical order

All Scenario Universe’s

Interrelationships, transformations and transactions,

Without one principle contradicting another —

Are all and together

Absolute mystery."

- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)
Intuition

Beauty for Ashes

"It would be idle to deny that there is in autumn - the fall of the year - an irrepressible note of decadence; it is echoed in a whisper by the rustle of falling leaves. Beneficent in their life, for all the plant’s wealth is due to them, they are beautiful in their dying. They have worked themselves out, for it is hardly a metaphor to speak of the industry of the leaf; supplies are running short, the sun’s rays are fewer, the first shock of frost has come, and the leaves must die. But before they die they surrender to the plant all that they have still left that is worth having. There is a retreat of particles down the leaf-stalk into the stem. Thus the leaves fall virtually dead, almost empty except of waste. They are like empty houses from which the tenants have flitted, breaking, and burning some of the furnishings as they went, leaving little more than ashes on the hearth. But nature is ever generous of beauty, for the dying leaves have a literal ‘beauty for ashes.’ [...] Climb the hill above the village, and watch the sun set over the withering woods. Look out over the sea of gold, mingled with fire, and broken by dark rocks which you know to be pines. Accept the withering but see also the harvest-fields; even on the bare boughs there are buds. Hear the birds pass overhead, quite a Babel of good-byes, but many at least will return. Watch the seeds drift off the dead plants as the wind sighs along the hillside, and know that the race continues. Look death in the face, and see that he is kindly and wise. Wait till the cows are driven home lowing, till the sheep are herded off the exposed moorland, till the colors pale in the brief twilight, till the birds that remain cease to sing, till the lamps are lit in the cottage windows. Wait on till the curfew tolls, till the lights are put out one by one, - then know the rest and silence of autumn."

- J. Arthur Thomson (1861 - 1933)

Emergent Order

"The infinite variety of forms which we observe in the realm of organic life not only delight our senses with their beauty and diversity, but also excite our curiosity, in suggesting the problem of their origin and connection. [...] The unity of the organic structure, which expresses itself everywhere in the fundamental features of living things and in the chemical composition and constructive power of their plasm, is also seen in the laws of symmetry in their typical forms. [...] In the protists … the constructive force of the elementary organism, the individual cell, determines the symmetry of the typical form and the special form of its supplementation; but in the histons … it is the plasticity of the tissue, made up of a number of socially combined cells, that determines this. [...] All the various fundamental forms that can be distinguished and defined mathematically are found realized in the graceful flinty skeletons of these unicellular sea-dwelling protozoa. [...] The great majority of organic bodies show a certain regularity both in their outer configuration and the construction of their various parts, which we may call ‘symmetry’ in the wider sense of the word. [...] These two branches of investigation have the common aim of detecting an ideal law of symmetry in the bodies they deal with and expressing this in a definite mathematical formula."

- Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919)
The Wonders of Life

Borrowed Ascent

"The growth of climbers, even more than all other plants, is upward towards the light. In the shade of the forest they rarely or never flower, and seldom even produce foliage; but when they have reached the summit of the tree that supports them, they expand under the genial influence of light and air, and often cover their foster-parent with blossoms not its own.

Here, as a rule, the climber’s growth would cease; but the time comes when the supporting tree rots and falls, and the creeper comes with it in torn and tangled masses to the ground. But though its foster-parent is dead it has itself received no permanent injury, but shoots out again till it finds a fresh support, mounts another tree, and again puts forth its leaves and flowers.
...
Mr. Darwin has now shown us the marvelous interdependence of every part of nature. Not only is each organism necessarily related to and affected by all things, living and dead, that surround it ... [The the natural world is a system of] complex relations and mutual interdependence, which link together every animal and vegetable form … into one grand organic whole."

- Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 - 1913)

Spiritual Correspondences

"The whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world...
…
...all things that have existence in nature … are correspondences...
…
...nothing can subsist from itself."

- Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 - 1772)
Heaven and Hell

Passing Forms

"I died as mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as man, to soar
With angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel soul,
I shall become what no mind e’er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones,
‘To Him we shall return.’"

- Rumi (1207 - 1273)

Radiant Geometry

"If we wander over the moor, where we tread on Nature's carpet, we find that all the little plants which nestle in the short mossy grass are "radiating ornaments" - that is, they are pretty objects which consist of parts spreading regularly from a center.

I cannot too strongly advise the young ornamentist to study the principles on which Nature works. Knowledge of the laws which govern the development of plant-growth is very desirable; but it is not our place to imitate even the most beautiful of plant-forms - this being the work of the pictorial artists. Yet it is ours to study Nature's laws, and to observe all her beauty, even to her most subtle effects, and then we may safely pillage from her all that we can consistently adapt to our own purposes. But in order that we produce ornament, we must infuse mind or soul into whatever we borrow from her."

- Christopher Dresser (1834 - 1904)
Principles of Decorative Design

Indeterminate Organization

"The great advantage, then, of indeterminate organization is that it cultivates that spontaneity, intelligence, and imagination without which many important objects would remain unintelligible, and because unintelligible, uninteresting. The beauty of landscape, the forms of religion and science, the types of human nature itself, are due to this apperceptive gift. Without it we should have a chaos; but its patient and ever-fresh activity carves out of the fluid material a great variety of forms. An object which stimulates us to this activity, therefore, seems often to be more sublime and beautiful than one which presents to us a single unchanging form, however perfect. There seems to be a life and infinity in the incomplete, which the determinate excludes by its own completeness and petrifaction. And yet the effort in this very activity is to reach determination; we can only see beauty in so far as we introduce form. The instability of the form can be no advantage to a work of art; the determinate keeps constantly what the indeterminate reaches only in those moments in which the observer's imagination is especially propitious. If we feel a certain disappointment in the monotonous limits of a definite form and its eternal, unsympathizing message, might we not feel much more the melancholy transiency of those glimpses of beauty which elude us in the indeterminate? Might not the torment and uncertainty of this contemplation, with the self-consciousness it probably involves, more easily tire us than the quiet companionship of a constant object? May we not prefer the unchangeable to the irrecoverable?"

- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)
The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory

Returning Presence

"The Father has looked around, and has seen the Morning Star, fearless between the rush of the oncoming yellow sun, and the backward reel of the night. So the Great One, whose name has never been spoken, says: Who art thou, bright watchman? And the down-star answering: It is I, the Morning Star, who in Mexico was Quetzalcoatl. It is I, who look at the yellow sun from behind, have my eye on the unseen side of the moon. It is I, the star, midway between the darkness and the rolling of the sun. I, called Quetzalcoatl, waiting in the strength of my days.

The Father answered: It is well. It is well. And again: It is time.

Thus the big word was spoken behind the back of the world. The Nameless said: It is time.

Once more the word has been spoken: It is time.

Listen, men, and the women of men: It is time. Know now it is time. Those that left us are coming back. Those that came are leaving again. Say welcome, and then farewell!"

- D. H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)
The Plumed Serpent

Photographer's Note. This image was captured in the pre-Columbian Mayan walled city called Tulum that my wife and I visited during a short trip to Mexico this past weekend. One of the last cities built and inhabited by the Maya, Tulum reached its peak between the 13th and 15th centuries. Although Mayans continued to occupy it for about 70 years after Spanish contact, the city was abandoned by the end of the 16th century. Today, it is one of the best-preserved coastal Maya sites.

Mycelial Dreams

"In the best interpreted dreams we must often leave one portion in obscurity because we observe in the interpretation that it represents the beginning of a tangle of dream thoughts which cannot be unraveled but which has furnished no new contribution to the dream content. This, then, is the keystone of the dream, the place at which it mounts into the unknown. For the dream thoughts which we come upon in the interpretation must generally remain without a termination, and merge in all directions into the net-like entanglement of our world of thoughts. It is from some denser portion of this texture that the dream-wish then arises like the mushroom from its mycelium."

- Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939)
The Interpretation of Dreams

Living Pattern

"Thou art confused, my beloved, at seeing the thousandfold union

Shown in this flowery troop over the garden dispersed;

Many a name dost thou hear assigned; one after another

Falls on thy listening ear, with a barbarian sound.

None resembleth another, yet all their forms have a likeness;

Therefore a mystical law is by the chorus proclaimed;

Yes, a sacred enigma! Oh, dearest friend, could I only

Happily teach thee the word, which may the mystery solve!

Closely observe how the plant, by little and little progressing,

Step by step guided on, changeth to blossom and fruit!

...

Here doth Nature close the ring of her forces eternal;

Yet doth a new one, at once, cling to the one gone before,

So that the chain be prolonged for ever through all generations,

And that the whole may have life, e’en as enjoyed by each part.

Now, my beloved one, turn thy gaze on the many-hued thousands

Which, confusing no more, gladden the mind as they wave.

Every plant unto thee proclaimeth the laws everlasting.

Every floweret speaks louder and louder to thee;

But if thou here canst decipher the mystic words of the goddess,

Everywhere will they be seen, e’en though the features are changed."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
 The Metamorphosis of Plants

Woven Becoming

"When we seek definitely to express the relations of events which arise from their spatio-temporal structure, we approximate to simplicity by progressively diminishing the extent (both temporal and spatial) of the events considered. For example, the event which is the life of the chunk of nature which is the Needle during one minute has to the life of nature within a passing barge during the same minute a very complex spatio-temporal relation. But suppose we progressively diminish the time considered to a second, to a hundredth of a second, to a thousandth of a second, and so on. As we pass along such a series we approximate to an ideal simplicity of structural relations of the pairs of events successively considered, which ideal we call the spatial relations of the Needle to the barge at some instant. Even these relations are too complicated for us, and we consider smaller and smaller bits of the Needle and of the barge. Thus we finally reach the ideal of an event so restricted in its extension as to be without extension in space or extension in time. Such an event is a mere spatial point-flash of instantaneous duration. I call such an ideal event an ‘event-particle.’ You must not think of the world as ultimately built up of event-particles. That is to put the cart before the horse. The world we know is a continuous stream of occurrence which we can discriminate into finite events forming by their overlappings and containings of each other and  separations a spatio-temporal structure. We can express the properties of this structure in terms of the ideal limits to routes of approximation, which I have termed event-particles. Accordingly event-particles are abstractions in their relations to the more concrete events. But then by this time you will have comprehended that you cannot analyze concrete nature without abstracting. Also I repeat, the abstractions of science are entities which are truly in nature, though they have no meaning in isolation from nature."

- Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947)
The Concept of Nature

Spirit-Matter

"Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

...

In a concrete sense there is not matter and spirit. All that exists is matter becoming spirit. There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. [...] Life represents the goal of a transformation of great breadth, in the course of which what we call ‘matter’ turns about, furls in on itself, interiorizes the operation covering, so far as we are concerned, the whole history of the earth. The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self‑conscious. It is a cosmic change of state."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)

Underlying Manifestations

"Mathematicians are beginning to view order and chaos as two distinct manifestations of an underlying determinism. And neither state exists in isolation. The typical system can exist in a variety of states, some ordered, some chaotic. Instead of two opposed polarities, there is a continuous spectrum. As harmony and discord combine in musical beauty, so order and chaos combine in mathematical (and physical) beauty."

- Ian Stewart (1945 - )

Broken Symmetry

"The state of a really big system does not at all have to have the symmetry of the laws which govern it; in fact, it usually has less symmetry. [...] In my own field of many-body physics, we are, perhaps, closer to our fundamental, intensive underpinnings than in any other science in which non-trivial complexities occur, and as a result we have begun to formulate a general theory of just how this shift from quantitative to qualitative differentiation takes place. This formulation called the theory of 'broken symmetry' may be of help in making more generally clear the breakdown of the constructive converse of reductionism."

- Philip W. Anderson (1923 - 2020)

Principial Unity

"All that exists, in whatever mode this may be, necessarily participates in universal principles, and nothing exists except by participation in these principles, which are the eternal and immutable essences contained in the permanent actuality of the Divine Intellect. Consequently, it can be said that all things, however contingent they may be in themselves, express or represent these principles in their own way and according to their order of existence, for otherwise they would be purely and simply nothingness. Thus, from one order to another, all things are linked together and correspond, to come together in total and universal harmony, for harmony is nothing other than the reflection of principial unity in the manifested world."

- René Guénon (1886 - 1951)

Enchanted Spirits

"Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for the change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
Seven Nights

Pointillist Flecks

"...the notion of depth is toyed with and finally subverted, until Klimt reduced the volumes of terrain to a series of flattened pieces comprised of a multitude of pointillist flecks. The sky disappears almost entirely from his compositions, as do, with a few exceptions, traditional methods of illusionism like linear and atmospheric perspective. [...] The paintings of the mid-aughts are gorgeous tapestries of narrow value range and scintillating color. They bear a superficial resemblance to French Post-Impressionism, but the offbeat elegance and nervous energy are unique to Klimt."

- LINEA, review of Klimt: Landscapes
at Neue Galerie New York (2024)