Showing posts with label Quotes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quotes. Show all posts

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Entangled with Karma


“Can there be a completely different set of laws of physics in a different universe, or do the laws of physics as we understand them hold true in all possible universes? If the answer is that a different set of laws can operate in a different universe system, this would suggest (from a Buddhist perspective) that even the laws of physics are entangled with the karma of the sentient beings that will arise in that universe.”

- Dalai Lama XIV, (1935 - )

Friday, January 15, 2016

Ripples, Waves, and Rhythms


"To Nature nothing can be added; from Nature nothing can be taken away; the sum of her energies is constant, and the utmost man can do in the pursuit of physical truth, or in the applications of physical knowledge, is to shift the constituents of the never-varying total. The law of conservation rigidly excludes both creation and annihilation. Waves may change to ripples, and ripples to waves; magnitude may be substituted for number, and number for magnitude; asteroids may aggregate to suns, suns may resolve themselves into florae and faunae, and floras and faunas melt in air: the flux of power is eternally the same. It rolls in music through the ages, and all terrestrial energy—the manifestations of life as well as the display of phenomena—are but the modulations of its rhythm."

(1820 - 1893)

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Sacred Tree


"The sacred tree,
the sacred stone
are not adored
as stone or tree;
they are worshipped
precisely because
they are hierophanies,
because they show
something that is
no longer stone
or tree but sacred,
the ganz andere
or 'wholly other.'"

Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986)
Myths, Dreams and Mysteries

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Poetics of Space


"House, patch of meadow, oh evening light
Suddenly you acquire an almost human face
You are very near us,
embracing and embraced."


"Our house is our corner of the universe... it is our universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty... The house, like fire and water...[recalls]... flashes of daydreams that illuminate the synthesis of immemorial and recollected... Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasure of former days... We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection... The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace... The places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time."

- GASTON BACHELARD

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Dreaming with Open Eyes

"From the mast-head the mirage is continually giving us false alarms. Everything wears an aspect of unreality. Icebergs hang upside down in the sky; the land appears as layers of silvery or golden cloud. Cloud-banks look like land, icebergs masquerade as islands or nunataks, and the distant barrier to the south is thrown into view, although it really is outside our range of vision. Worst of all is the deceptive appearance of open water, caused by the refraction of distant water, or by the sun shining at an angle on a field of smooth snow or the face of ice-cliffs below the horizon."
(from Captain's log of "Endurance")

“...you go into a state almost like an aware kind of sleep, which means you’re all free, just let it be, let it become, and with tremendous compassion towards everything—maybe human beings, or nature, or objects—you incorporate. It’s almost like a... in Buddhism, you would say incarnation. You become things, you become at atmosphere. And if you become it, which means you incorporate it within you, you can also give it back. You can put this feeling into a picture. A painter can do do it. And a musician can do it, and I think a photographer can do that too. And that I would call the dreaming with open eyes."

Postscript: Kind readers/viewers wishing to learn the "truth" behind the surreal dream-like seascape depicted above, may reveal the unabashed "reality" by clicking here; but be forewarned that doing so will also unavoidably strip away all essential meaning. Perhaps there is an aesthetic / semiotic analog of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle at play here, wherein one cannot simultaneously both "know" (the truth behind) something and "understand" it equally well ;-)

Monday, January 16, 2012

Eternal Purity

"O King, you say that Atman is infinite. Well, that which is infinite must be unconditioned by time and space. Absence of duality in Atman renders it incapable of being a cause. A cause exists both before and after the effect, as clay does in respect of the jar. But, in Atman there is neither beginning nor end. Besides, a cause must modify or change itself to produce an effect. Atman being all and absolute is free from the possibility of change or modification. Atman is indestructible and immutable. It has never fallen from its nature. As there is no duality in Atman, so it is neither subject nor object. Nor is there any action in it. It is eternally pure like the blue sky or space. O King, and it is your own nature."

Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Rhythmic Orders


"As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit."

"Theoretical scientists who probe the secrets of the universe and philosophers who seek answers to existence, as well as painters such as Paul Klee who find the thoughts of men of science compatible with art, influence me far more than most photographers."

- Wynn Bullock (1902 - 1975)

Postscript: interested readers are invited to peek "behind the curtain" to see the "reality" behind the synesthetic landscape expressed above. I will soon have much more to say about this image, the (still growing) portfolio of images from which it comes, and how it all fits in - synchronistically - with a wondrous new book of Wynn Bullock's color light abstractions (from the early 1960s).

Sunday, December 11, 2011

My Dad's Gentle Nudge Forward


“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”


Postscript: Campbell's quote appears in my dad's handwriting on a yellowed strip of paper that accidentally fell out of page 133 of a book he bequeathed me - The Spiritual in Art - as I was thumbing through it for inspiration. Two other quotes adorn the page my dad evidently used Campbell's quote as a placeholder for (the bookmarked page is the first page of the chapter "Transcending the Visible" by Sixten Ringbom that appears on page 131 of the book). The first quote is a 1913 muse by Kandinsky that describes his early dilemma of understanding the "meaning" of an abstract work:

"A terrifying abyss of all kinds of questions, a wealth of responsibilities, stretched before me. And most important of all: what is to replace the missing object? The danger of ornament revealed itself clearly to me; the dead semblance of stylized forms I found merely repugnant... It took a very long time before I arrived at the correct answer to the question: What is to replace the object? I sometimes look back at the past and despair at how long this solution took me."

The second quote is by Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965, Belgian abstract sculptor and painter): "The great truth, or the absolute truth, makes itself visible to our mind through the invisible."

The synchronicity of these quotes becomes clear when one is informed of these basic facts: (1) the title of my portfolio book is "Seeing the Invisible" (which I produced a few years ago, before knowing of this quote), (2) the very next "project" I am to embark on is an expansion of this same portfolio (the "Seeing the Invisible" project is literally the next item on the "to do" list looking up at me as I type these words), and (3) just yesterday, I chided myself with the words "Andy, why did it take so long?" after finally finding a way catalyze a new series of abstractions (and which will no doubt be the basis of a future blog post). Even after 10 years of not being by my side in person, my dad still somehow manages to find a way to gently nudge my art forward ;-)

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Suprematicheskoe Zеркало

"Amongst all the changing phenomena
the essence of nature is invariable.
A1. The World as human distinctions
(God, The Soul, The Spirit, Life, Religion,
Technology, Art, Science, The Intellect
Weltanschauung, Labor, Movement
Space, Time) = 0.
1. Science and art have no boundaries
because what is comprehended infinitely
is inumerable and infinity and
innumerability are equal to nothing.
...
8. There is no existence either
within or outside me;
nothing can change anything,
since nothing exists that
could change itself
or be changed.
A2. The essence of distinctions.
The world as non-objectivity."
Artist (1879 - 1935)

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Spirit, Light, and Harmony



"It is not always needful
for truth to take a definite shape;
it is enough if it hovers about us
like a spirit and produces harmony;
if it is wafted through the air
like the sound of a bell,
grave and kindly."

"A man should learn
to detect and watch that gleam
of light which flashes across
his mind from within."

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Solitary Patterns

"The interpretation of our reality
through patterns not our own,
serves only to make us ever more unknown,
ever less free, ever more solitary."
Author (1927 - )

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

"Photographing the Photographer" Diptychs


"The universe as we know it
is a joint product of the
observer and the observed.”
Philosopher / Mystic
(1881 - 1955)

While looking over some old photos (going back to trips to Scotland in 2009 and Greece in 2008), I ran across an interesting set of pictures taken by my wife that I turned into what I call PPDs, or "Photographing the Photographer" Diptychs. My wife, an avid videographer and occasional still photographer, took a series of images showing yours truly in the act of "doing" photography.

Some of her photos contain "me" only in the sense that I am somewhere in the picture, but the shot itself is focused on something else; a landscape, our rental car, a hotel, the front of a restaurant, whatever. But many of them are (as my wife confessed) deliberately focused on my (not always elegant) photo machinations: my scurrying to and fro like a frenzied zombie, climbing, prowling, bending, scrunching up like a pretzel, maneuvering my body and tripod for decent angles. A few actually catch me in the "act" of going click.

For many of these I was able to find and match the "shot" I was capturing (or a shot taken at nearly the same place and time) with the shot my wife has of me doing so. I made a few diptychs to show my wife and friends, who all enjoyed them, commenting that the diptychs reveal something not normally seen, or appreciated.

The diptychs show two different - but obviously correlated - experiences by two different people of ostensibly the same "experience" (almost the same). While my wife and I were obviously both at the same place and time, we were looking at the world from our own (not quite identical) local reference frames and slightly different perspectives: she, as an empathic observer of "life (in this case, her husband's) in environment," and I, as landscape photographer immersed in Scotland's innate physical beauty. To my eyes, our respective images of a given time and place, combined in diptych form, achieve an interesting transcendent synergy. While neither image, if considered alone, shows anything more than it does by itself, when reflected upon simultaneously with its partner provides a tangibly more meaningful, deeper glimpse of our shared experience.

I have posted a small portfolio of ten such "Photographing the Photographer" Diptychs (8 from Scotland, 2 from Greece); if nothing else, it gave me an opportunity to revisit some of the many spectacular sights and visual delights my wife and I have been privileged to see. It also gives an opportunity to those of you (you know who you are ;-) who have, from time to time, seen a bespectacled photographer bent over a tripod somewhere, seemingly trained at nothing in particular, and been puzzled about just what this bespectacled photographer is looking at? My wife has kindly provided an answer.


Tuesday, May 17, 2011

It's Not About the Images


While there is perhaps
a province in which the
photograph can tell us
nothing more than what
we see with our own eyes,
there is another in which
it proves to us how
little our eyes
permit us to see.
(1895 - 1965)

"Writing is not about words.
Painting is not about pigments.
Music is not about tones.
As long as photographers
insist that photography
is about photographs,
the art is limited
and self-containing."
(Issue 18, Summer 1997)

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Quiet Mind


"Learn to be silent.
Let your quiet mind
listen and absorb."

“Only in quiet waters things
mirror themselves undistorted.
Only in a quiet mind is
adequate perception
of the world.”
- Hans Margolius

Friday, May 13, 2011

Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees


"There is simply no real separation line,
only an intellectual one,
between the object and its time-environment.
They are completely interlocking:
nothing can exist in the world
independent of all the other things in the world."
Artist (1928 - )

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Stillness


"The practice of true reality
is simply to sit serenely
in silent introspection.
When you have fathomed this,
you cannot be turned around
by external causes
and conditions.
This empty,
wide open mind is subtly
and correctly illuminating."
Buddhist monk
(1091–1157)

"Men cannot see their reflection in running water, but only in still water. Only that which is itself still can still the seekers of stillness...if water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe."
(4th century BCE)

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Stones and Percepions


"It may seem ironic or contradictory
that detailed pictures of so-called
reality become vehicles for moving
us beyond ordinary perceptions."

"Bells and stones have voices,
but unless they are struck,
they will not sound."



Thursday, April 14, 2011

Anicca / Mi rtag pa / Mujō


"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."

"All formations are transient (anicca)"
- Buddha Sakyamuni
(563 - 483 B.C)

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Snowflakes and Zen

"No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place."
-Zen proverb

Monk: "What is Zen?"
Tosu (Zen Master): "Zen."
Zen and Japanese Culture

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Luray Cavern Abstracts


"Into the dark beyond all light
we pray to come,
through not seeing and not knowing,
to see and to know,
that beyond sight and knowledge,
itself; neither seeing nor knowing."

"Any man working with the medium
sooner or later impinges,
merges into, fuses with
the fringes of mysticism."