- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Science, Order and Creativity
Saturday, October 01, 2022
Perceptive Play
Monday, September 19, 2022
Little Ripples
edge of a world of which
we have no experience, and
where all our preconceptions
must be recast."
- D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 - 1948)
On Growth and Form
Monday, July 25, 2022
Electromagnetic Phenomena
- Nancy Forbes (1952 - 2021)
Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field
Monday, July 18, 2022
Transient Beauty
- Andrew Juniper
Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence
Wednesday, July 06, 2022
Listen When the Mind is Quiet
Just observe yourself, how you are listening, and you will see that this is what is taking place. Either you are listening with a conclusion, with knowledge, with certain memories, experiences, or you want an answer, and you are impatient. You want to know what it is all about, what life is all about, the extraordinary complexity of life. You are not actually listening at all.
You can only listen when the mind is quiet, when the mind doesn't react immediately, when there is an interval between your reaction and what is being said. Then, in that interval there is a quietness, there is a silence in which alone there is a comprehension which is not intellectual understanding.
If there is a gap between what is said and your own reaction to what is said, in that interval, whether you prolong it indefinitely, for a long period or for a few seconds - in that interval, if you observe, there comes clarity. It is the interval that is the new brain. The immediate reaction is the old brain, and the old brain functions in its own traditional, accepted, reactionary, animalistic sense.
When there is an abeyance of that, when the reaction is suspended, when there is an interval, then you will find that the new brain acts, and it is only the new brain that can understand, not the old brain"
- Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986)
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
Celestial Light
that I may see and tell of things
invisible to mortal sight.”
“When you touch the celestial in your heart,
you will realize that the beauty of your soul
is so pure, so vast and so devastating that
you have no option but to merge with it.
You have no option but to feel the rhythm
of the universe in the rhythm of your heart.”
Postscript. This is (for now) the last of my recent "celestial leaves" series. In the context of "creative process," I thought it worth mentioning how these images came to be. As with 90%+ of my photographs, very little forethought went into them; at least, initially. After picking up the Sunday paper from the bottom of our driveway, turning and heading back to the house, I noticed a small shriveled leaf - perhaps two inches long or so (and that I couldn't immediately identify) - lying just off to the side of our walkway. I was mesmerized by its delicately translucent veins and patterns. The weathered leaf had clearly been "sitting" around for quite some time, as evidenced by its many rips and tears, and splotches of dirt and fungus. Still, in my mind's eye, it was radiantly beautiful. I knew instinctively that I needed to try to capture its essence. I had "pictured" it almost exactly as shown above (in what is effectively a digital negative, to highlight its luminescent quality), and as each of the other recent images appear. Despite a valiant effort to find similar-looking "dilapidated leaves" (including a 2 hour dedicated mini-hike around the woodlands in our neighborhood!), I managed to find only three others; which my wife finally identified as belonging to a simple hosta bush. But the real story as far as the "creative process" goes is just this: that one's muse prods when she will, on her own schedule; and that we must always be attuned to our muse's musings. I had nary a thought to whip out my macro lens to take still-lifes of dilapidated leaves this past Sunday morning; heck, I strolled out for the paper even before my first coffee! But that numinous little "celestial leaf" that I noticed by chance (or, better, that my muse's own eye wisely led me to) eventually - and happily - consumed my creative energies for days afterward 😊
Monday, February 14, 2022
Living Centers
"What is the life that we discern in things?"
...
- Christopher Alexander (1936 - )
The Nature of Order: Luminous Ground
Sunday, February 13, 2022
Cosmic Tree
- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)
Psychological Types
Saturday, February 12, 2022
Nothing is Dead
there was blackness,
pure and beautiful Nothing.
There was no thing in it,
no star, no wind,
no light, no word,
no broken heart.
But a time came when perfect,
restful Nothing was to vanish
forever. Something was
about to be.
Suddenly, there it was.
Something, all alone, king
of everything. Killer
of ancient, beautiful
Nothing. There was
a silence.
...till Nothing screamed
a death scream and
that scream is still screaming,
an expanding ring into the
universe that will never end.
Nothing is dead…"
- Joseph Pintauro (1930 - 2018)
To Believe in Things
Saturday, February 05, 2022
Mathematical Beauty
world is made manifest
in Form and Number,
and the heart and soul
and all the poetry of
Natural Philosophy are
embodied in the concept
of mathematical beauty."
- D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 - 1948)
Postscript. As may be the case with many of you, my day-job constraints leave me precious little time to devote to purely aesthetic pleasures (notwithstanding those that occasionally overlap with more mathematical pursuits). Sometimes, as now, even my weekend time is filled mostly with staring at gibberish on a computer screen, and pounding away at my keyboard to produce picture-less reams of technical reports (even as I day-dream of month-long photo-safaris in far-away lands). Thus, the short walks my wife and I take through our neighborhood after breakfast each day have become immeasurably important physical and spiritual oases for me. The simple pleasure of encountering beautifully haphazard arrangements of natural forms rejuvenates and nourishes my soul. The images in the triptych above were taken no more than a few minutes apart during a walk that itself lasted less than a half hour. But what a joy it is to stumble upon such humble transcendent beauty hiding in plain sight! The great polymath Thompson's book, On Growth and Form (the first edition of which came out in 1917, and which to this day remains an extraordinarily beautiful book to read) is essentially a 1100+ page erudite argument that biology can be reduced to mathematics (a sentiment that a much younger version of myself would have been happy to accept): "It behooves us always to remember that in physics it has taken great men to discover simple things. They are very great names indeed which we couple with the explanation of the path of a stone, the droop of a chain, the tints of a bubble, the shadows in a cup. It is but the slightest adumbration of a dynamical morphology that we can hope to have until the physicist and the mathematician shall have made these problems of ours their own." For those of you interested in exploring (taking a deep-dive, really, into) the broader entanglement of art and science, here are some slides I used for a 2017 presentation at a Humanities and Technology Association conference (held that year in Newport, RI). This lecture is one of three I've given in (relatively) recent years during which I wore both of my hats, as physicist and photographer. The other two lectures were given at the American Center for Physics (College Park, MD in 2009) and at the Morrison House (Alexandria, VA in 2011).
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
Nature's Simplicity
"I should like to propose that we look at this element of freshness, of newness, of strangeness, as a thread along which to place the activities of the consciously creative artist, the conscious patron and critic of the creative artist, and the common man — common in the sense that he has no specified part in creation or criticism. If we make one criterion for defining the artist (as distinct from the craftsman and the trained but routine performer of dance, drama, or music) the impulse to make something new, or to do something in a new way — a kind of divine discontent with all that has gone before, however good — then we can find such artists at every level of human culture, even when performing acts of great simplicity."
Friday, December 10, 2021
Mental Categories
mighty matter,
irresistible march of evolution,
reality ever newborn;
you who, by constantly
shattering our mental categories,
force us to go ever further
and further in our
pursuit of the truth."
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955)
Hymn of the Universe
Sunday, December 05, 2021
A Sea of Forms
"A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all, — that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms, — the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.
The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe."
Monday, November 29, 2021
Patterns
but patterns that perpetuate themselves."
- Norbert Wiener (1894 - 1964)
The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
Friday, November 26, 2021
Vuja de
Wednesday, November 17, 2021
Unheard Music
- Paul Bowles (1910 - 1999)
The Spider's House
Tuesday, November 02, 2021
Wu Wei
- Benjamin Hoff (1946 - )
The Tao of Pooh
Friday, September 17, 2021
Wholeness
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1842)
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
Evanescent Beauty
has its own beauty,
and in the same field,
it beholds, every hour,
a picture which was
never seen before, and
which shall never
be seen again."
Monday, September 06, 2021
Divine Language
exclusively intellectual but which
needs a sensory basis from
which to rise to higher levels.
be communicable or transmissible
by any other means, can be
communicated up to a certain
point when they are, so to speak,
incorporated in symbols which
will hide them for many, no doubt,
but which will manifest them
in all their splendor to the
eyes of those who can see.
those who know how to understand it.
of the Divine Word offered at
the beginning of time, then nature
in its entirety can be taken as
a symbol of supernatural reality."
- René Guénon (1886 - 1951)
Fundamental Symbols, The Universal Language of Sacred Science