Provisional Forms

"The world consists of colors, sounds, temperatures, pressures, spaces, times, and so forth, which now we shall not call sensations, nor phenomena, because in either term an arbitrary, one-sided theory is embodied, but simply elements. The fixing of the flux of these elements, whether mediately or immediately, is the real object of physical research. As long as, neglecting our own body, we employ ourselves with the interdependence of those groups of elements which, including men and animals, make up foreign bodies, we are physicists. For example, we investigate the change of the red color of a body as produced by a change of illumination. But the moment we consider the special influence on the red of the elements constituting our body, outlined by the well-known perspective with head invisible, we are at work in the domain of physiological psychology. We close our eyes, and the red together with the whole visible world disappears. There exists, thus, in the perspective field of every sense a portion which exercises on all the rest a different and more powerful influence than the rest upon one another. With this, however, all is said. In the light of this remark, we call all elements, in so far as we regard them as dependent on this special part (our body), sensations. That the world is our sensation, in this sense, cannot be questioned. But to make a system of conduct out of this provisional conception, and to abide its slaves, is as unnecessary for us as would be a similar course for a mathematician who, in varying a series of variables of a function which were previously assumed to be constant, or in interchanging the independent variables, finds his method to be the source of some very surprising ideas for him.

...

... we certainly shall wonder how colors and tones which were such innermost parts of us could suddenly get lost in our physical world of atoms; how we could be suddenly surprised that something which outside us simply clicked and beat, in our heads should make light and music; and how we could ask whether matter can feel, that is to say, whether a mental symbol for a group of sensations can feel?"

- Ernst Mach (1838 - 1916)
Popular Scientific Lectures

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

Hidden Depths

"All have numerous perforations, and there are passages broad and narrow in the interior of the earth, connecting them with one another; and there flows out of and into them, as into basins, a vast tide of water, and huge subterranean streams of perennial rivers, and springs hot and cold, and a great fire, and great rivers of fire, and streams of liquid mud, thin or thick. [...] And there is a swinging or see-saw in the interior of the earth which moves all this up and down… There is a chasm which is the vastest of them all, and pierces right through the whole earth; this is that chasm which Homer describes in the words, ‘Far off, where is the inmost depth beneath the earth;’ and which he in other places, and many other poets, have called Tartarus. [...] And the reason why the streams are always flowing in and out, is that the watery element has no bed or bottom, but is swinging and surging up and down, and the surrounding wind and air do the same."

- Plato (c.424 - 348 BC)
Phaedo, translated by Benjamin Jowett

Photographer's note. This was captured at Cenote Taak Bi Ha, an underground cave filled with stalactites and crystal-clear water, not far from Tulum (that I posted a few pictures from in an earlier post). While not large (quarter of a football field sized total area in all), it is a fun place to snorkel, dive, and (as in my case) just prowl around the (often slippery footpaths) to get different perspectives on a part of Homer's underworld.

Lines of Force

"The view which I am so bold to put forth considers,
therefore, radiation as a kind of species of vibration in
the lines of force which are known to connect
particles and also masses of matter together.
It endeavors to dismiss the aether,
but not the vibration.
...

I do not perceive in any part of space, whether
(to use the common phrase) vacant or filled with matter,
anything but forces and the lines in which they are exerted.

...

The aether is assumed as pervading all bodies as
well as space: in the view now set forth, it is the
forces of the atomic centres which pervade
(and make) all bodies, and
also penetrate all space."

- Michael Faraday (1791 - 1867)
Thoughts on Ray Vibrations

Whirling Energy

"We are whirling through endless space, with and inconceivable speed, all around everything is spinning, everything is moving, everywhere there is energy. There must be some way of availing ourselves of this energy more directly. Then, with the light obtained from the medium, with the power derived from it, with every form of energy obtained without effort, from the store forever inexhaustible, humanity will advance with giant strides. The mere contemplation of these magnificent possibilities expand our minds, strengthens our hopes and fills our hearts with supreme delight.

...

Nature has stored up in the universe infinite energy. The eternal recipient and transmitter of this infinite energy is the ether. The recognition of the existence of ether, and of the functions it performs, is one of the most important results of modern scientific research. The mere abandoning of the idea of action at a distance, the assumption of a medium pervading all space and connecting all gross matter, has freed the minds of thinkers of an ever present doubt, and, by opening a new horizon - new and unforeseen possibilities - has given fresh interest to phenomena with which we are familiar of old."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

Oneiric Spirits

"We [Hidatsas] believed, indeed, that this world and everything in it was alive and had spirits; and our faith in these spirits and our worship of them made our religion.

My father explained this to me. ‘All things in this world,’ he said, ‘have souls, or spirits. The sky has a spirit; the clouds have spirits; the sun and moon have spirits; so have animals, trees, grass, water, stones, everything. These spirits are our gods; and we pray to them and give them offerings, that they may help us in our need.’

...

Any one could pray to the spirits, receiving answer usually in a dream. Indeed, all dreams were thought to be from the spirits; and for this reason they were always heeded, especially those that came by fasting and suffering. Sometimes a man fasted and tortured himself until he fell into a kind of dream while yet awake; we called this a vision.

A man whom the gods helped and visited in dreams, was said to have mystery power; and one who had much mystery power, we called a mystery man, or medicine man. Almost every one received dreams from the spirits at some time; but a medicine man received them more often than others.

...

Believing as he did that the world was full of spirits, every Indian hoped that one of them would come to him and be his protector, especially in war. When a lad became about seventeen years of age, his parents would say, ‘You are now old enough to go to war; but you should first go out and find your god!’ They meant by this, that he should not risk his life in battle until he had a protecting spirit.

Finding one’s god was not an easy task. The lad painted his body with white clay, as if in mourning, and went out among the hills, upon some bluff, where he could be seen of the gods; and for days, with neither food nor drink, and often torturing himself, he cried to the gods to pity him and come to him. His sufferings at last brought on delirium, so that he dreamed, or saw a vision. Whatever he saw in this vision was his god, come to pledge him protection. Usually this god was a bird or beast; or it might be the spirit of some one dead; the bird or beast was not a flesh-and-blood animal, but a spirit."

- Edward Goodbird (1869 -1938)
Goodbird the Indian: His Story

Reflective Memory

"But what of the memory of mental acts:
do these also fall under the imaging faculty?

If every mental act is accompanied by an image we may well believe that this image, fixed and like a picture of the thought, would explain how we remember the object of knowledge once entertained. But if there is no such necessary image, another solution must be sought. Perhaps memory would be the reception, into the image-making faculty, of the Reason-Principle which accompanies the mental conception: this mental conception—an indivisible thing, and one that never rises to the exterior of the consciousness—lies unknown below; the Reason-Principle—the revealer, the bridge between the concept and the image-taking faculty—exhibits the concept as in a mirror; the apprehension by the image-taking faculty would thus constitute the enduring presence of the concept, would be our memory of it.

This explains, also, another fact: the soul is unfailingly intent upon intellection; only when it acts upon this image-making faculty does its intellection become a human perception: intellection is one thing, the perception of an intellection is another: we are continuously intuitive but we are not unbrokenly aware: the reason is that the recipient in us receives from both sides, absorbing not merely intellections but also sense-perceptions."

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

Still Clearness

"Every time I have started for the Yellow Flower River,
I have gone down the Blue-Green Stream,
Following the hills, making ten thousand turnings.
We go along rapidly, but advance scarcely one hundred li.
We are in the midst of a noise of water,
Of the confused and mingled sounds of water broken by stones,
And in the deep darkness of pine-trees.
Rocked, rocked,
Moving on and on,
We float past water-chestnuts
Into a still clearness reflecting reeds and rushes.
My heart is clean and white as silk; it has already achieved Peace;
It is smooth as the placid river.
I long to stay here, curled up on the rocks,
Dropping my fish-line forever."

- Wang Wei (699 - 761)

Circumscribed Energy

"Form is simply force circumscribed, condensed.
Force is simply form indefinite, diffused.
...

Whether we consider coarser matter which can be weighed and felt, or that more subtle, lively, and active matter we call ether, or again the spiritual principle, which is energy simple, we have then always before us only harmonious collections of forces, symmetrical activities, ordered powers, more or less conscious of the part they play in the infinite concert for which the Creator has composed the glorious music. Let us set aside for a moment the variety of groupings which determine the succession and the manifold aspects of these forces, and there will remain, as constituent principles of the web of the universe, as irreducible and primordial ingredients of the world, nothing but dynamic points, nothing but monads.

The term of the rigorous analysis of phenomena is, definitively, the conception of an infinity of centers of similar and unextended forces, of energies without forms, simple and eternal. We ask what these forces are, and we assert in answer that it is impossible to distinguish them from motion. Force may be conceived, but not shaped to the fancy. The clearest and truest thing we can say of it is, that it is an energy analogous to that whose constant and undeniable presence we feel dwelling in our deepest selves."

- Fernand Papillon (1847 - 1874)
The Constitution of Matter

Nested Worlds

"Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. [...] Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond. [...] And though the earth and the air which are between the plants of the garden, or the water which is between the fish of the pond, be neither plant nor fish; yet they also contain plants and fishes, but mostly so minute as to be imperceptible to us. [...] Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion save in appearance, somewhat as it might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming of fish in the pond, without separately distinguishing the fish themselves. [...] Thus, although each created Monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body which specially pertains to it, and of which it is the entelechy; and as this body expresses the whole universe through the connection of all matter in the plenum, the soul also represents the whole universe in representing this body, which belongs to it in a special way. "

- G.W. Leibniz (1646 - 1716)
Monadology

Stillness Without Seeing

"...Stillness without seeing,
Not moving in a dark room.

Wakeful without wandering,

The mind is tranquil yet bright.

All phenomena are real and eternal,

Profuse, yet of a single form.

Going, coming, sitting, standing,

Don’t attach to anything.

Affirming no direction,

Can there be leaving and entering?

There is neither unifying nor dispersing,

Neither slow nor quick.

Brightness and tranquility are just as they are.
They cannot be explained in words."

- Niutou Farong (594-657)

Liquid Mirror

"How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink—But oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through—” She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist."

- Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898)
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Psychedelic Visions

"The moment that I closed my eyes a vision of celestial glory burst upon me. I stood on the silver strand of a translucent, boundless lake, across whose bosom I seemed to have been just transported. A short way up the beach, a temple, modelled like the Parthenon, lifted its spotless and gleaming columns of alabaster sublimely into a rosy air--like the Parthenon, yet as much excelling it as the godlike ideal of architecture must transcend the ideal realized by man. Unblemished in its purity of whiteness, faultless in the unbroken symmetry of every line and angle, its pediment was draped in odorous clouds, whose tints outshone the rainbow. It was the work of an unearthly builder, and my soul stood before it in a trance of ecstasy. Its folded doors were resplendent with the glory of a multitude of eyes of glass, which were inlaid throughout the marble surfaces at the corners of diamond figures from the floor of the porch to the topmost moulding. One of these eyes was golden, like the midday sun, another emerald, another sapphire, and thus onward through the whole gamut of hues, all of them set in such collocations as to form most exquisite harmonies, and whirling upon their axes with the rapidity of thought. At the mere vestibule of the temple I could have sat and drunk in ecstasy forever; but lo! I am yet more blessed. On silent hinges the doors swing open, and I pass in.

...

It is this process of symbolization which, in certain hasheesh states, gives every tree and house, every pebble and leaf, every footprint, feature, and gesture, a significance beyond mere matter or form, which possesses an inconceivable force of tortures or of happiness.

...

Perhaps one of the most difficult things to convey to a mind not in the hashish delirium, by the symbols which there teach the manner of its process, or by any others, is the interchange of senses. The soul is sometimes plainly perceived to be but one in its own sensorium, while the body is understood to be all that so variously modifies impressions as to make them in the one instance smell, in another taste, another sight, and thus on, ad finem. Thus the hashish-eater knows what it is to be burned by salt fire, to smell colours, to see sounds, and, much more frequently, to see feelings."

- Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836 - 1870)
The Hasheesh Eater

In the Heart of the Spirit

 "In our hearts there burns a fire...
That burns all veils to their root and foundation
When those veils have been burned away
Then the heart will understand completely.
Ancient love will unfold ever-fresh forms
In the heart of the Spirit,
In the core of the heart."

- Rumi (1207 - 1273)

Illusory Categories

"The further we penetrate into the submicroscopic world, the more we shall realize how the modern physicist, like the Eastern mystic, has come to see the world as a system of inseparable, interacting and ever‑moving components with man being an integral part of this system.

...

Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ‘basic building blocks,’ but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way.

...

Our tendency to divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and to experience ourselves as isolated egos in this world is seen as an illusion which comes from our measuring and categorizing mentality. [...] all things and events perceived by the senses are interrelated, connected, and are but different aspects or manifestations of the same ultimate reality."

- Fritjof Capra (1939 - )
The Tao of Physics

Temples of the Sun

"The loftiest object of their worship was Light, represented by the Sun. Hence they built pyramidal Temples of the Sun. [...]

...

The Great Pyramid! Both, built in Atlantean times, stand as distinctive marks of the mysterious continent, and remain as mute legacies from a race of people who have departed as mysteriously as their own land. Both remind the successors of the Atlanteans of the glories of that lost civilization.

...

Light is the subtlest, most intangible of things which man can register by means of one of his five senses. It is the most ethereal kind of matter which he knows. It is the most ethereal element science can handle, and even the various kinds of invisible rays are but variants of light which vibrate beyond the power of our retinas to grasp."

- Paul Brunton (1898 - 1981)
A Search in Secret Egypt

Simple Light

"Know that before the emanations were emanated and the created was created, a supreme simple light filled all reality, so that there was no free place at all in the sense of an empty, hollow space, but everything was filled with that simple light of the En Sof. [...] And when it ascended in its simple will to create the worlds and emanate the emanations, thereby making the perfection of its works, its names and its attributes knowable, which was the reason for the creation of the worlds [...], the En Sof contracted at the middle point, truly in the middle of its light. It contracted the light and moved away on all sides around the center point. This left a free space around the center point, an empty, hollow space..."

- Isaac Luria (1534 - 1572)
Etz Chaim (Tree of Life)

Sorcery's Mirror

"Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. In the first case, the image is a good appearance - representation is of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance - it is of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance - it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation. [...] It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues—ever since Narcissus bent over his spring. Surprising the real in order to immobilize it, suspending the real in the expiration of its double. [...] Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true."

- Jean Baudrillard (1929 - 2007)

Quetzal Serpent

 " And then the earth arose because of them, it was simply their word that brought it forth. For the forming of the earth they said "Earth." It arose suddenly, just like a cloud, like a mist, now forming, unfolding.

...

This is the account of when all is still silent and placid. All is silent and calm. Hushed and empty is the womb of the sky. These, then, are the first words, the first speech. There is not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish, crab, tree, rock, hollow, canyon, meadow, or forest. All alone the sky exists. The face of the earth has not yet appeared. Alone lies the expanse of the sea, along with the womb of all the sky. There is not yet anything gathered together. All is at rest. Nothing stirs. All is languid, at rest in the sky. There is not yet anything standing erect. Only the expanse of the water, only the tranquil sea lies alone. There is not yet anything that might exist. All lies placid and silent in the darkness, in the night. All alone are the Framer and the Shaper, Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent, They Who Have Borne Children and They Who Have Begotten Sons. Luminous they are in the water, wrapped in quetzal feathers and cotinga feathers. Thus they are called Quetzal Serpent. In their essence, they are great sages, great possessors of knowledge."

- Popol Vuh

Plato's Cave

"Plato's Cave" Portfolio

"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? [...] Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world - sunk in a deep grave - waste and lonely is its place. [...] More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts - needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul - that fills a loftier region with bliss ineffable. [...] No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence - they drew over themselves the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations - into it the gods went back - and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world. "

- Novalis (1772 - 1801)
Hymns to the Night

Postscript. Clicking on the image at the top will take you to a new Plato's Cave portfolio in my web gallery. For those of you who have not already guessed at how these images have been created (I posted the first in the series a few weeks ago with the heading, Platonic Forms), the title (and reference) will be obvious from the process: I shine thin beams of light (using one, two, or three flexible gooseneck LEDs with magnetic bases secured to a metal plate for stability) through a wide assortment of glass and acrylic geometric forms (squares, prisms, pyramids, circles, spheres, etc.) ranging in size from a quarter of an inch to about three or four inches and of varying translucency and color (the color of most forms depends on the direction of light that hits their surface), and photograph the most "pleasing combinations" of the resulting clusters of lights and shadows that appear on a black matte board pitched vertically some distance beyond where the LEDs are stationed. Note that while the images look noisy, it is not actual "noise" you are seeing, but rather the impression of noise due to the collective specular and diffuse reflections of light off the matte board's imperfectly speckled surface. 

Apart from my delight in being able to use this technique to explore a part of the abstract aesthetic latent space pioneered by László Moholy-Nagy, Itten, Kandinsky, Klee, Robert & Sonia Delaunay, and explored by my dad in his later years (albeit, in my case, on a woefully amateurish level compared to these extraordinary artists), I am intrigued conceptually, philosophically even, by how blatantly it blurs the distinction between traditional art and photography. I say this because for this series photography plays only a minor (and least important) role! Arranging and discovering a "pleasing configuration" of lights and forms requires a lot of time and patience. It typically takes me about 20-30 min to find a single geometry worth taking an image of. Indeed, the process of choosing the type and number of shapes, adjusting the light's intensity, direction, and the beam size, and making the myriad small changes (during which I often have to start from scratch because an arrangement is simply "not working") needed to gradually sculpt (reveal?) a "pleasing geometry" - for which the final "shot" is almost an afterthought - is arguably more akin to making art than doing photography!

My lifelong fascination with the blurred distinction between art and photography has directly fueled my experiments in abstraction, wherein I deliberately try to tease apart (disentangle?) the creative tension between finding abstract patterns vs. creating them. Individual projects all follow their own style and rhythm. For example, for my Synesthscapes series, I search for patterns in what are essentially "fixed" environments (e.g., natural light refracting/reflecting through a rum bottle); for my Swirls, Whorls, and Tendrils series, I create singular "worlds" made up of ink and water, which I then photograph whatever time-slice of it proves to be sufficiently interesting; my perpetual winter passion to find ice abstracts consists of exactly that, finding patterns that nature herself has already produced; my light abstracts emerge from fixed geometries of light filaments and intentional random camera movements, wherein I decide whether an image is "good enough" to keep only after taking the photograph; and Cymatiscapes require little more of me than to choose a vessel type and size (e.g., a small soy sauce dish) and a vibration frequency before clicking the shutter in my camera's burst mode; I tend to think of this series (which I love!) as neither art nor photography (at least in the traditionally creative sense) and merely as an archive of my having observed something interesting. But, compared to all of these earlier experiments, the process of creating - literally, creating - images for Plato's Cave is obviously on an entirely different level! Of course, in the most fundamental sense, distinctions between art and photography (and, as someone has commented below) between art and life, are not just blurred, they are entirely illusory.