The first: In contemporary Western discourse... landscape may be defined in many different ways, but all incorporate the notion of time passing. Thus landscape as solid geology (as in a granitic landscape, a karst landscape) speaks to evolutionary time, aeons of time: all history in a grain of sand. Landscape as land form or topography (a desert landscape, a riverine landscape), again, has great time depth but may involve human interventions, human histories. With landscape as mantled (as in a landscape of peat and moor, a tropical landscape) the processes quicken, sometimes invoking seasonal transience. Landscape as land use (an arable landscape, a country house landscape, a plantation landscape) speaks of things done to the land action and movement, the effects of historically specific social/political/cultural relationships.
Monday, September 05, 2022
Landscapes and Time
The first: In contemporary Western discourse... landscape may be defined in many different ways, but all incorporate the notion of time passing. Thus landscape as solid geology (as in a granitic landscape, a karst landscape) speaks to evolutionary time, aeons of time: all history in a grain of sand. Landscape as land form or topography (a desert landscape, a riverine landscape), again, has great time depth but may involve human interventions, human histories. With landscape as mantled (as in a landscape of peat and moor, a tropical landscape) the processes quicken, sometimes invoking seasonal transience. Landscape as land use (an arable landscape, a country house landscape, a plantation landscape) speaks of things done to the land action and movement, the effects of historically specific social/political/cultural relationships.
Thursday, September 01, 2022
Ephemeral Sights
- Bill Jay (1940 - 2009)
"And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually."
- Jimi Hendrix (1942 - 1970)
"All is ephemeral, both what remembers and what is remembered."
- Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180)
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Order and Chaos
- Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983)
"Although I am even now still a layman in the area of mathematics, and although I lack theoretical knowledge, the mathematicians, and in particular the crystallographers, have had considerable influence on my work of the last twenty years. The laws of the phenomena around us order, regularity, cyclical repetition, and renewals have assumed greater and greater importance for me. The awareness of their presence gives me peace and provides me with support. I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems."
- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)
- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
Monday, August 29, 2022
Known and the Unknown
- Wynn Bullock (1902 - 1975)
Postscript. This diptych contains far too many "meanings" and associations than I can possibly make explicit using mere words. And yet, apart from images and words (as accompanied by omnipresent sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings & intuitions), what is our "world" if not an ever-churning ineffable broth of shared-but-solitary experiences that we wish to communicate some vestiges of to others? This past week, my wife and I had the honor and privilege of settling our youngest child (Josh) into college. It was simultaneously a most joyous and beguilingly melancholy affair, as all parents with college-age offspring know all-too-well. The images in the diptych above were taken a day after we waved to Josh one last time during our "settling-him-in visit" as he headed off to his dorm, at a beach not too far from his college. I was drawn to the fleeting patterns of sand and weeds as they self-organized by the gentle lapping of the waves, only to disassemble and re-organize into myriad other related shapes and geometries as each new wave rolled in. What are we if not conscious bits of "sand and weeds" trying to retain (and understand?) our own transient patterns in the vast - and vastly unknown - phantasmagoric "reality" we call life? What future manifestations of the "pattern" we now call "Josh" will the "waves" of life sculpt in future times? And so, here are some loose associations that this diptych will for me henceforth always be accompanied by whenever my eyes gaze upon it: rhythms (of waves, of winds, and life's energies); ephemerality; yin/yang; known & unknown; memories, longing, and anticipations; the simultaneity of past, present, and future; and - simply and irreducibly - a bird leaves its nest as Josh goes away to college.
Tuesday, August 16, 2022
Light Prancing
It can be found anywhere far from
where he lives or a few feet away.
It is always on his doorstep."
- Paul Strand (1890 - 1976)
Postscript. These images were all captured within minutes of each other in a garage near a local farmer's market this past weekend, as I was waiting for my wife to gather our grocery bags to go shopping. I have written before about how mesmerizing the "abstract cacophony" of shimmering reflections off car's hoods and hubcaps are to a photographer's eye 😊 What is hard to express in words (though I'm obviously trying, obliquely), is how joyful these few minutes' worth of prancing back and forth in-between park cars inevitably are to my soul (I look forward to my "light prancing" almost as much as the delicious recipes my wife cooks up with what we gather at the market!) My only regret (as usual) is that all I had with me was an iPhone.
Embrace light.
Admire it.
Love it.
But above all, know light.
Know it for all you are worth,
and you will know
the key to photography."
- George Eastman (1854 - 1932)
Friday, August 12, 2022
Structure of Life
- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)
Letters & Images
Sunday, August 07, 2022
Vedantic Complementarity
- Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962)
"The general opinion in theoretical physics had accepted the idea that the principle of continuity ("natura non facit saltus"), prevailing in the microscopic world, is merely simulated by an averaging process in a world which in truth is discontinuous by its very nature. This simulation is such that a man generally perceives the sum of many billions of elementary processes simultaneously, so that the leveling law of large numbers completely obscures the real nature of the individual processes."
- John von Neumann (1903 - 1957)
Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
"The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy... has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object."
- Erwin Schrödinger (1887 - 1961)
Thursday, August 04, 2022
Act of Perception
- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Wholeness and the Implicate Order
Saturday, July 30, 2022
Shapes, Lines, Curves, and Solids
- David Berlinski (1942 - )
Thursday, July 28, 2022
Geometric Patterns
"Every place is given its
character by certain patterns of
events that keep on happening there.
These patterns of events
are locked in with certain
geometric patterns in the space.
...
"I believe that all centers
that appear in space -
whether they originate in biology,
in physical forces, in pure geometry,
in color - are alike simply in that
they all animate space.
It is this animated space that
has its functional effect
upon the world, that determines
the way things work, that governs
the presence of harmony and life.
...
"All space and matter,
organic or inorganic,
has some degree of life in it,
and matter/space is more alive
or less alive according to
its structure and arrangement."
- Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)
Monday, July 18, 2022
Transient Beauty
- Andrew Juniper
Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence
Monday, July 11, 2022
Spiritual Experience
"You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience.
You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience."
- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)
Friday, July 08, 2022
Loosely Conjoined Cells of a Tissue
- Lewis Thomas (1913 - 1993)
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
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).
Sunday, January 23, 2022
Fragmentated Wholes
- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Wholeness and the Implicate Order