Ephel Duath

"Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peering among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

-  J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)
The Return of the King
Sam, Chapter II: The Land of Shadow

Unconscious Activation

"The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

Spiritual Harmony

"The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct is its appeal. In any composition the material side may be more or less omitted in proportion as the forms used are more or less material, and for them substituted pure abstractions, or largely dematerialized objects. The more an artist uses these abstracted forms, the deeper and more confidently will he advance into the kingdom of the abstract. And after him will follow the gazer at his pictures, who also will have gradually acquired a greater familiarity with the language of that kingdom.

...

Form alone, even though totally abstract and geometrical, has a power of inner suggestion. A triangle (without the accessory consideration of its being acute- or obtuse-angled or equilateral) has a spiritual value of its own. In connection with other forms, this value may be somewhat modified, but remains in quality the same. The case is similar with a circle, a square, or any conceivable geometrical figure.

...

Every form is as sensitive as a puff of smoke, the slightest breath will alter it completely. This extreme mobility makes it easier to obtain similar harmonies from the use of different forms, than from a repetition of the same one; though of course an exact replica of a spiritual harmony can never be produced. So long as we are susceptible only to the appeal of a whole composition, this fact is of mainly theoretical importance. But when we become more sensitive by a constant use of abstract forms (which have no material interpretation) it will become of great practical significance."

- Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)

Primordial Ideas

"Colors are primordial ideas,
children of the aboriginal colorless light
and its counterpart, colorless darkness Light,
that first phenomenon of the world, reveals
to us the spirit and the living soul
of the world through colors.

...

Color is life, for a world without color seems dead.
As a flame produces light, light produces color.
As intonation lends color to the spoken word,
color lends spiritually realized sound to a form.
...
Between black and white there throbs the
universe of chromatic phenomena."

- Johannes Itten (1888 - 1967)

Weltanschauung

"That everything is transitory is merely a simile. Everything we see is a proposal, a possibility, an expedient. The real truth, to begin with, remains invisible beneath the surface. The colors that captivate us are not lighting, but light. The graphic universe consists of light and shadow. The diffused clarity of slightly overcast weather is richer in phenomena than a sunny day. A thin stratum of cloud just before the stars break through. It is difficult to catch and represent this, because the moment is so fleeting. It has to penetrate into our soul. The formal has to fuse with the Weltanschauung"

- Paul Klee (1879 - 1940)

Fiery Light

"A fiery light, of the greatest flashing brightness, coming out of a cloudless sky, flooded my entire mind and so inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast like a flame — yet it was not blazing but glowing hot, as the sun makes anything on which its rays fall hot. 

...

And I saw as if in the middle of the southern sky an image, beautiful and wonderful in the mystery of God, like a human in form. Her face was of such beauty and radiance that I could more easily look at the sun than at her; and a great circlet of golden color surrounded her head. [...] And this image spoke: ‘I am the supreme and fiery force, who sets all living sparks alight and breathes forth no mortal things, but judges them as they are. Flying around the circling circlet with my upper wings - with my wisdom - I have ordered all things rightly. But I am also the fiery life of the essence of divinity; I flame above the beauty of the fields, and I shine in the waters, and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. With the airy wind I quicken all things with some invisible life that sustains them all. For the air lives in viridity [i.e., greenness] and in the flowers, the waters flow as if alive, and the sun lives within its own light.

...

The light that I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud that carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it the 'reflection of the living Light.'"

- Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179)

Platonic Forms

"And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision. [...] Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him? [...] He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day. [...] Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is. [...] This entire allegory you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed - whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life, must have his eye fixed."

- Plato (c.424 - 348 BC)
"The Allegory of the Cave" (Republic, Book Seven) 

Seed Unfolding

"The One, perfect in seeking nothing, possessing nothing and needing nothing, overflows and creates a new reality by its superabundance. [...] The process is like the unfolding of a seed, moving from simple origin to termination in the world of sense, the prior always remaining in its place, while begetting its successor from a store of indescribable power - power that must not halt within the higher realm [...] but continue to expand until the universe of things reaches the limit of its possibility, lavishing its vast resources on all its creatures, intolerant that any one should have no share in it. Nothing is debarred from participation in the Good, to the extent of its receptivity. "

- Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270 CE)
The Enneads

Luminous Forms

"Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody is agreed to that, the child, the savage and the metaphysician."

- Le Corbusier (1887 - 1965)

Plural Monism

"Monism allows for no such things as 'other occasions' in reality—in real or absolute reality, that is. The difference I try to describe amounts, you see, to nothing more than the difference between what I formerly called the each−form and the all−form of reality. Pluralism lets things really exist in the each−form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all−form or collective−unit form is the only form that is rational. The all−form allows of no taking up and dropping of connexions, for in the all the parts are essentially and eternally co−implicated. In the each−form, on the contrary, a thing may be connected by intermediary things, with a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion. It is thus at all times in many possible connexions which are not necessarily actualized at the moment.

...

Here, then, you have the plain alternative, and the full mystery of the difference between pluralism and monism, as clearly as I can set it forth on this occasion. It packs up into a nutshell:—Is the manyness in oneness that indubitably characterizes the world we inhabit, a property only of the absolute whole of things, so that you must postulate that one−enormous−whole indivisibly as the prius of there being any many at all—in other words, start with the rationalistic block−universe, entire, unmitigated, and complete?—or can the finite elements have their own aboriginal forms of manyness in oneness, and where they have no immediate oneness still be continued into one another by intermediary terms—each one of these terms being one with its next neighbors, and yet the total 'oneness' never getting absolutely complete?

...

Whatever I may say, each of you will be sure to take pluralism or leave it, just as your own sense of rationality moves and inclines. The only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it is a fully co−ordinate hypothesis with monism. This world may, in the last resort, be a block−universe; but on the other hand it may be a universe only strung−along, not rounded in and closed. Reality may exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after all. On that possibility I do insist."

- William James (1842 - 1910)
A Pluralistic Universe

Unreal Things

 "Unreal things have a reality of
their own, in poetry as elsewhere.
We do not hesitate, in poetry,
to yield ourselves to the unreal,
when it is possible to
yield ourselves."

- Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)

Photographer's note. There is an amusing story behind this image, which I took with my iPhone yesterday after my wife, our eldest son, and I finished dinner at a local Nepalese restaurant. As we were waiting for the bill to arrive, I was transfixed by what looked like - to my eye, anyway - a mountainous dune-like vista (such as we had recently seen during our visit to Death Valley, CA). In "reality" this is nothing but a three foot section of wall near the ceiling, with the play of light owing itself to some light fixtures on the ceiling itself (which I cropped out of the image you see above). The "amusing" part is that while I was transfixed by the real-but-unreal dunes (and took a few loooong moments, as I usually do, to get the composition just right), our waiter was politely waiting by our table, equally transfixed by my fascination with what - to him - was nothing but peeling paint on a wall that needed repair! Indeed, when I was finished and approached our table to sit back down, I heard the tail end of a conversation that ensued behind my back between our waiter and my wife. My wife was explaining (as she has done countless times before in similar scenarios) that I "see the world a bit differently," even as our waiter kept apologizing for not having yet "fixed" the wall. Light, shadow, texture, reflection, paint, wall in need of repair, or dunes in the desert, ... which of these are "real" and which imagined? And what of the infinite other Borgesian worlds left unperceived and unexplored? Seeing the world differently, indeed 😊

Thoughtful Imbibing

"Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light -- with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood -- the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it -- but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance. -- Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.

...

Aside I turn to the holy,
unspeakable, mysterious Night.

...

In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents."

- Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772 - 1801)
Hymns to the Night 

Shadow Belongs to Light

"All material in nature, the mountains
and the streams and the air and we,
are made of Light which has been spent, and
this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow,
and the shadow belongs to Light."

- Louis Kahn (1901 - 1974)

The Great Silence

"The first going-down into the desert is always something of a surprise. The fancy has pictured one thing; the reality shows quite another thing. Where and how did we gain the idea that the desert was merely a sea of sand? ...The dunes are always rhythmical and flowing in their forms, and for color the desert has nothing that surpasses them. In the early morning, before the sun is up, they are air blue, reflecting the sky overhead; at noon they are pale lines of dazzling orange-colored light, waving and undulating in the heated air; at sunset they are often flooded with a rose or mauve color; under a blue moonlight they shine white as icebergs in the northern seas.

...

The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love. You think that very strange perhaps? Well, the beauty of the ugly was sometime a paradox, but do-day people admit its truth; and the grandeur of the desolate is just as paradoxical, yet the desert gives it proof.

...

All, all to dust again; and
no man knoweth the
why thereof."

- John Charles Van Dyke (1856–1932)
The Desert

There is Light

 "Wherever there is light, one can photograph.
...
I have a vision of life, and I
try to find equivalents for it in
the form of photographs.
...
In photography there is a reality so subtle
that it becomes more real than reality."

- Alfred Stieglitz (1864 - 1946)

The Invisible Spirit

"Spirit selects its own photographer. 

All we can do is to be
open to Spirit.

...

For some reason I have a sense of 'mysticism.' ... The 'perilous world of the dream' is my most comfortable backyard. Since I turn everything to photography, I have tried to treat photographs in this same manner. Contrary to expectations I do not go for fuzzygraphs, I try to reach the dream, or the state of mind that is 'Visionary' ... From time to time various images in front of my eyes lift themselves up and beckon to me - I approach at their command - and make the expo sure, sometimes reluctantly, but always with such a complete projection of my mental state onto the object that it seems as if the object commanded and not myself. At this intensity I photograph. The result is a record of an experience between myself and the object. ... 'Mysticism' in photographs is a delightful idea, full of danger of overreading the visible elements, but perhaps intensely rewarding. I know its danger, and pursue it anyway.

...

...the invisible is made visible to the intuition,
the invisible organic, the invisible spirit."

- Minor White (1908 - 1976)

The Nature of Things Illuminated

"For even the light of the sun which it has in itself would perhaps escape our sense of sight if a more solid mass did not lie under it. But if someone said that the sun was all light, one might take this as contributing to the explanation of what we are trying to say; for the sun will then be light which is in no form belonging to other visible things … This, then, is what the seeing of Intellect is like; this also sees by another light the things illuminated by that first nature, and sees the light in them; when it turns its attention to the nature of the things illuminated, it sees the light less; but if it abandons the things its sees and looks at the medium by which it sees them, it looks at light and the source of light.

...

What is above life is cause of life; for the activity of life, which is all things, is not first, but itself flows out, so to speak, as if from a spring. For think of a spring that has no other origin, but gives the whole of itself to rivers, and is not used up by the rivers but remains itself at rest, ... or of the life of a huge plant, which goes through the whole of it while its origin remains and is not dispersed over the whole, since it is, as it were, firmly settled in the root.

...

The One is all things and not a single one of them: it is the principle of all things, not all things, but all things have that other kind of transcendent existence; for in a way they do occur in the One; or rather they are not there yet, but they will be. How then do all things come from the One, which is simple and has in it no diverse variety, or any sort of doubleness? It is because there is nothing in it that all things come from it. ... For something like what is in Intellect, in many ways greater, is in that One, it is like a light dispersed far and wide from some one thing translucent in itself; what is dispersed is image, but that from which it comes is truth; though certainly the dispersed image, Intellect is not of alien form."

- Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270 CE)

More Than the Mind Knows

"'Standing in the presence of' must be different than 'spirit taking over.' In the former I photograph my own blocks, veils, abstractions, etc. I know nothing of the latter. ... Be still with yourself. To establish condition - concentration heightened awareness with a still body and active mind ... To stand in the presence of... projection - empathy - to awareness of object and self ... Previsualization. (Become a camera. Let subject generate its own composition or impose, knowingly, yourself. when the subject presents itself as its own photograph.) Subject for what it is. Subject for what else it is ... [Written in upper margin: 'while holding firm to object and self-previsualizing its transformation as a photograph.] ... During a moment of rapport let recognition trigger exposure. Recognition of what? The thing for what it is (surface appearance and let the viewer go on if he wishes). Things for what else they are: A) inner truth or essence B) mirror of self. This means to do this at seeing prior [to] exposure and again at the instant of exposure ... The eye and the camera see more than the mind knows. Photo not understood fully at exposure. Sense of desiring of self and/or of world (by including heart and soul). Beyond verbal and visual, beyond this recognizable image rapport with spirit or depth [of] mind ... (Above delete this because it may become another Canon. Make each photograph a prayer.) ... Once a photo is a mirror of the man and man a mirror of the world, spirit may take over. Make each photo a prayer."

- Minor White (1908 - 1976)
Minor White, Memorable Fancies

Glorious Light

 "Light! Oh, how lovely, how sublime art thou!
The purest creature of the Almighty's hand,
Which human eyes behold! ...
Through unexplored immensity stretch'd out,
Perchance outspread to infinite extent
From this dark ball up to the throne of God?
O glorious Light ! how welcome to the eye !
How cheering to the earth! without thy smile,
All nature's face one pallid hue would wear,
All living things would droop, despair, and die
And this fair frame of being back return
To that chaotic state in which it lay,
Ere shone the sun, or with creative voice,
God said 'Let there be light!' - And light there was.
...
Form, though a palpable presence of—is still
A creature of the element of light;
A thing that offers converse to the eye,
And definition of all actual bulk.
By shape alone, whatever we regard
As beauty's line, through every mazy change,
With infinite delight the mind proceeds.
Nor merely man to perfect stature wrought
Nor beasts, birds, streams, mountains, fields, or trees
Nor sculptor's art, nor limner's, only please
But simplest lines and curves, transposed and join'd,
Attract, and fix the mind with wondrous charms,
As, if in the solution of their laws,
Or midst their combinations manifold,
The secret of man's happiness lay hid."

- John Holland (1794 - 1872)
Pleasures of Sight

Allegory of Light

"Picture the following in your mind. Imagine human beings living in an underground cave-like residence. Its entrance opens up to the light and reaches all along the cave. They have been there since their childhood, their ankles and necks chained, unable to move or turn their heads, forced to look ahead. The light from a fire blazing at a distance comes from above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised walkway. Imagine also a low wall built along the way, similar to the screen that divides puppeteers from the audience and allows them to show puppets over it.

...

Now imagine that people walk behind the wall and carry various artifacts that extend above the wall. These artifacts include carvings of humans and other animals made of stone, wood, and other materials. Some of the people carrying these object are talking, while others are silent. ...They are like ourselves. Now do you think they see anything else except their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which light from the fire casts on to the opposite wall of the cave? 

...

Now imagine what would happen naturally if the prisoners were released from their shackles and cured of their ignorance. Right after they are released and suddenly forced to stand up, turn their necks around, walk, and look towards the light, these activities will cause them pain; because of the bright glare they would be unable to see those things which they previously had seen only as shadows. Now what do you think they would say if one were to tell them that what they saw before was fooling them, but that now, when they are closer to what really exists and when they face that which more truly exists, they see more clearly, in a straightforward manner? What if that person pointed to the objects as they passed and asked the former prisoners to tell him what they were? Don’t you think they would be baffled and think that the shadows they formerly saw were truer than the objects that are now being pointed out to them? "

- Plato (c.424 - 348 BC)
"The Allegory of the Cave" (Republic, Book Seven)