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)

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)

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) 

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

Scenery of Spring

 "In the scenery of spring,
nothing is better, nothing worse;
The flowering branches are

of themselves, some short,
some long."

- Ryōkan (1758 - 1831)

Consciousness and Memory

"We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself. [...] The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory. [...] But, then, I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, which does not change every moment, since there is no consciousness without memory, and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. It is this which constitutes duration. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more profoundly, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity."

- Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941)

Unintended Reflections

"Whenever a thought occurs, be aware of it,
as soon as you are aware of it, it will vanish.
If you remain for a long period forgetful
of objects, you will naturally
become unified. This is the
essential art of zazen."

- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091–1157)
Cultivating the Empty Field:
The Silent Illumination of Zen Buddhist Master Hongzhi

Maya's Veil

"Space-time-causation, or name-and-form, is what is called Maya. [...] Maya is neither existence nor non-existence. Both the Niagara Falls and the rainbow are eternally changeable. [...] Nature is Maya. Maya means name and form, into which everything is cast. Maya is not real. We could not destroy it or change it if it were real. The substance is the noumenon, Maya is phenomena. There is the real “me” which nothing can destroy, and there is the phenomenal “me” which is continually changing and disappearing.

...

Maya is not illusion as it is popularly interpreted. Maya is real, yet it is not real. It is real in that the Real is behind it and gives it its appearance of reality. That which is real in Maya is the Reality in and through Maya. Yet the Reality is never seen; and hence that which is seen is unreal, and it has no real independent existence of itself, but is dependent upon the Real for its existence. Maya then is a paradox - real, yet not real, an illusion, yet not an illusion. He who knows the Real sees in Maya not illusion, but reality. He who knows not the Real sees in Maya illusion and thinks it real."

- Swami Vivekananda (1863 - 1902)

Gentle Pulsing

"Over this great expanse there is no disturbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling circles seek the shore and all is smooth again. Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills of joy and thrills of pain are undistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the lake! Again the works of man shine as in the spring. Ay, every leaf and twig and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered with dew in a spring morning."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
Walden

Present Memories

"We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time."

- David Deutsch (1953 - )
The Fabric of Reality

View Nowhere

"Powerful as it has proven to be, this bleached-out physical conception of objectivity encounters difficulties if it is put forward as the method for seeking a complete understanding of reality. For the process began when we noticed that how things appear to us depends on the interaction of our bodies with the rest of the world. But this leaves us with no account of the perceptions and specific viewpoints which were left behind as irrelevant to physics but which seem to exist nevertheless, along with those of other creatures. Not to mention the mental activity of forming an objective conception of the physical world, which seems not itself capable of physical analysis. Faced with these facts one might think the only conceivable conclusion would be that there is more to reality what can be accommodated by the physical conception of objectivity. But to remarkable numbers of people this has not been obvious. The physical has been so irresistibly attractive, and has so dominated ideas of what there is, that attempts have been made to beat everything into its shape and deny the reality of anything that cannot be so reduced. As a result, the philosophy of mind is populated with extremely implausible positions."

- Thomas Nagel (1937 - )
The View From Nowhere

Entangled Paths

 "At quite uncertain times and places,

The atoms left their heavenly path,

And by fortuitous embraces,

Engendered all that being hath.

And though they seem to cling together,

And form 'associations' here,

Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether,

And through the depths of space career."

- James Clerk Maxwell (1831 - 1879)

Dissolving Mirror

"The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection,
and the water has no mind to retain their image."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Spirits Clad in Veils

"We are spirits clad in veils."

- Christopher P. Cranch (1813 - 1892)

"Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.

But I don’t want the present, I want reality;
I want things that exist, not time that measures them.

What is the present?
It’s something relative to the past and the future.
It’s a thing that exists in virtue of other things existing.
I only want reality, things without the present.

I don’t want to include time in my scheme.
I don’t want to think about things as present;
I don’t want to separate them from themselves,
treating them as present.

I shouldn’t even treat them as real.
I should treat them as nothing.

I should see them, only see them;
See them till I can’t think about them.

See them without time, without space,
To see, dispensing with everything but what you see.
And this is the science of seeing, which isn’t a science."

- Alberto Caeiro (1889 - 1915)
The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

"There are many faiths, but the spirit is one
— in me, and in you, and in him. So that
 if everyone believes himself, all will be united;
everyone be himself and all will be as one."

- Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910)
Resurrection

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

Perfect Imperfection

 "Wabi sabi is a state of the heart.
It is a deep in-breath and a slow exhale.
It is felt in a moment of real appreciation
—a perfect moment in an imperfect world."

- Beth Kempton (1977 - )
Wabi Sabi