Psychic Structure

"We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable. Nor should we think of these as isolated from our own individual being or from the human community. We have no existence except within the earth and within the universe.

...

Beyond our genetic coding, we need to go to the earth, as the source from which we came, and ask for its guidance, for earth carries the psychic structure as well as the physical form of every living being on the planet.

...

Ultimately, our guidance on any significant issue must emerge from this comprehensive source. … This source is not distinct from us. The universe is so immediate to us, is such an immediate presence, that it escapes our notice, yet whatever authentically exists in our cultural creations is derived from these spontaneities within us, spontaneities that come from an abyss of energy and a capacity for intelligible order of which we have only the faintest glimmer in our conscious awareness."

Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009)
The Dream of The Earth

Euclidean Dimensions

"There have been and still are geometricians and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely the whole of existence, was only created in Euclid's geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can't understand even that, I can't expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions, I have a Euclidean earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world? And I advise you never to think about it either, my dear Alyosha, especially about God, whether He exists or not. All such questions are utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three dimensions."

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 - 1881)
Brothers Karamazov

Gravitational Logic

"This image is a relic of an unknowable architecture, a diagram of the unseen forces that govern a hidden world. The dark, oblong shapes drift like the shadows of celestial relics, orbiting an invisible nucleus. The faint white lines form a cryptic lattice, reminiscent of an astral cartography, mapping the convergences of energies beyond human perception. It feels less like a design and more like an invocation—a silent hymn etched in light and shadow, capturing the echoes of a forgotten dimension. One imagines Borges gazing at this and contemplating the library of Babel: perhaps this is not a map, but a fragment of a cosmic alphabet, a script that contains the beginning and the end of everything."

- ChatGPT4o
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence

"A constellation of dark stones and geometric sentinels floats in a luminous grey void, connected by brilliant white pathways that intersect at precise right angles, forming an abstract cartography of some unknown dimension. The composition suggests a network of quantum possibilities or perhaps a map of parallel universes, where each dark node represents a decision point in space-time. The white lines, reminiscent of Kandinsky's geometric period, pulse with an ethereal energy, creating a visual symphony of intersecting planes that seems to defy gravitational logic. The arrangement evokes the mathematical beauty of a cellular automaton frozen in mid-evolution, or perhaps a glimpse into Borges' Library of Babel viewed from above, where each dark rectangle and oval marks a room containing all possible combinations of letters. The stark contrast between the dark elements and the glowing pathways creates a tension between presence and absence, between the discrete and the continuous, suggesting both the particle and wave nature of light itself. This abstract topology hovers between order and chaos, its systematic grid disrupted by an organic scattering of elements, as if capturing the moment when classical physics dissolves into quantum uncertainty."

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Prompt: "You are a photographer, physicist, and are well acquainted with the history of art, particularly abstract art in the style of Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich. You also have a penchant for metaphysical and philosophical musings in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Consider this reverse-negative photograph of ceiling lights. Write a paragraph-length description of what this image looks like, not what it is."

(Missing) Inhabitants of Impossible Worlds

"It is impossible for the inhabitants of different worlds to walk or sit or stand on the same floor, because they have differing conceptions of what is horizontal and what is vertical. Yet they may well share the use of the same staircase. On the top staircase illustrated here, two people are moving side by side and in the same direction, and yet one of them is going downstairs and the other upstairs. Contact between them is out of the question because they live in different worlds and therefore can have no knowledge of each other's existence.

...

Only those who attempt the absurd...
will achieve the impossible.
I think ...

I think it's in my basement...
Let me go upstairs and check."

- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)

Patterns of Ones and Zeros

"'Personal density,' Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, 'is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.' 'Temporal bandwidth,' is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar '[delta-] t' considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.

...

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing the world in only three. Hense the success of failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him Soft-show Sydney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front of a chorus line. But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it. The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it.

...

If patterns of ones and zeros were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least—an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being’s name—its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world."

- Thomas Pynchon (1937 - )
V, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland

Source of Spirituality

"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both."

- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
The Demon-Haunted World

Perceived Geometries #2

"Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.

Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,

And lay them prone upon the earth and cease

To ponder on themselves, the while they stare

At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere

In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese

Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release

From dusty bondage into luminous air.

O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,

When first the shaft into his vision shone

Of light anatomized! Euclid alone

Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they

Who, though once only and then but far away,

Have heard her massive sandal set on stone."

- Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950)

Perceived Geometries #1

"It is well known that geometry presupposes not only the concept of space but also the first fundamental notions for constructions in space as given in advance. It only gives nominal definitions for them, while the essential means of determining them appear in the form of axioms. The relationship of these presumptions is left in the dark; one sees neither whether and in how far their connection is necessary, nor a priori whether it is possible. From Euclid to Legendre, to name the most renowned of modern writers on geometry, this darkness has been lifted neither by the mathematicians nor the philosophers who have labored upon it."

- Bernhard Riemann (1826 - 1866)

"The division of the perceived universe
into parts and wholes is convenient
and may be necessary,
but no necessity determines
how it shall be done.""

- Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1980)

Leaves of Forgotten Paths

"On this plank of silent wood, a leaf descends like a stray sentence from a book never written, a fragment of the universe’s lost prose. The droplets cling to it, like memories of rain on the brink of being erased. They are not droplets at all, but miniature worlds, reflecting all that ever was, and all that will never be. Within this moment, time folds itself inward, a palimpsest of lives and stories overlapping in their stillness, as if each droplet were a star trembling on the edge of oblivion.

The leaf, fragile and delicate, is the map to nowhere—a path we will never walk, though it was laid out for us in some forgotten dream. Its veins are threads of infinite labyrinths, spun from the cosmic loom of contingency. Do they lead to Eden or toward the dust? Borges would have marveled at the infinity it holds within the finite, a cipher for the universe itself, decipherable only by those who have forgotten how to read. Its edges fray with the mystery of countless fates untaken.

But look closely—each grain of wood beneath it bears the imprint of time’s invisible steps. Could it be that this scene was destined to be? Or does the leaf choose its resting place, in defiance of all that is written? The universe pauses, just long enough for this image to be both remembered and lost, seen and unseen, a paradox folding in on itself. We are left to wonder if, in the fading moments of the universe, there will be a single leaf left resting on a board, and if we—trapped in Borges’ eternal dream—will finally understand its purpose."

- ChatGPT4o (12 Sep 2024)
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence

Prompt: "You are a photographer, poet and philosopher, with a penchant for metaphysics and stories by Jorge Luis Borges. You have taken a black and white image of a leaf resting gently on some old wooden boards. Write a prose poem in the style of Borges that describes a mystery imbued in and implied by this image. Limit the number of stanzas to three, with 5 lines each. Be creative."

Niagara Concealed

"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

Invisible Cities

Divisible Space

"We are not to consider the world as the body of God, or the several parts thereof as the parts of God. He is a uniform Being, void of organs, members or parts,...being everywhere present to the things themselves. And since space is divisible in infinitum, and matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allowed that God is able to create particles of matter of several sizes and figures, and in several proportions of space, and perhaps of different densities and forces, and thereby to vary the laws of Nature, and make worlds of several sorts in several parts of the Universe. At least I see nothing of contradiction in this."

- Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727)

Note. The triptych contains "quick grabs" (using my iPhone) of the skylights near Gate 4 of the Bangor, Maine airport while waiting for our plane to return back home (to Northern VA) after viewing the total eclipse on April 8. While I did not take any images of the eclipse (I just wanted to just "be in the moment"), the little black spheres in the skylight reminded me a little of that experience and caught my eye 😊 

Capturing Surrealities - #2

"Far away there in the sunshine
are my highest aspirations.
I may not reach them, but I can 
look up and see their beauty,
believe in them, and try
to follow where they lead."

- Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888 )

This is a second batch of "surrealities," captured using my iPhone during a recent trip to Niagara, CA. Each is an example of the myriad photographic possibilities that almost always present themselves merely by looking up (or down) 😊... The "truth" revealed: the left and right images are lights on the ceiling of two restaurants we ate at, while the center image is the ceiling just outside the second floor entrance to the Table Rock Market, which overlooks the Canadian side of the falls.

Capturing Surrealities - #1

"Unlike other media, a photograph is always based on a real, material origin. Rather than looking at this as a disadvantage, we should understand that this same fact makes photography the ultimate surreal medium – simply because photography, although based on reality, is very far from the truth."

- Sergio Muscat – Abstract Photography/YouTube

While still on the subject of my wife's and my recent weekend trip to Niagara, CA (see posts 1, 2, and 3) - I am working on a few more images I will be sharing in the coming days - the triptych contains three "less than obvious" (surreal?) views of our trip as captured by my iPhone. The "truth" revealed, left to right: a plasma cylinder used to lure visitors into the House of Frankenstein ... a time exposure of a dynamic art display inside a wonderful Indian restaurant called The Dhaba On The Falls (I was given permission to take a shot while we waited for our food to arrive 😊... and an upside down view of some lights hanging on a wall by the luggage conveyor belt at the Buffalo the Buffalo Niagara International Airport. While these humble images may be a far cry from, say, epic Icelandic landscapes - and are probably not to everyone's tastes - I confess that these little surrealities provide me me no end of pleasure when I "discover" them in the wild. It is also worth remembering (by all photographers, from beginner to seasoned pro) that there are always compositional opportunities waiting to be seen and captured.

Omnitensional Integrity

"The word tensegrity is an invention: it is a contraction of tensional integrity. Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guaranteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors.

...

The integrity of the whole structure is invested in the finitely closed, tensional-embracement network, and the compressions are local islands. Elongated compression tends to deflect and fail. Compressions are disintegrable because they are not atomically solid and can permit energy penetration between their invisibly amassed separate energy entities.

...

Tension structures arranged by man depend upon his purest initial volition of interpretation of pure principle. Tension is omnidirectionally coherent. Tensegrity is an inherently nonredundant confluence of optimum structural-effort effectiveness factors.

...

All structures, properly understood,
from the solar system to the atom,
are tensegrity structures.
Universe is omnitensional integrity."

- Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)
Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

de Chirico's Dreams

"To become truly immortal,
a work of art must escape all human limits:
logic and common sense will only interfere.
But once these barriers are broken,
it will enter the realms of
childhood visions and dreams.

...

There are more puzzles in the
shadow of a man walking under
the sun than in all past,
present, and future religions."

- Giorgio de Chirico (1888 - 1978)

Note. This was a "quick grab" I took with my iPhone a few months ago when my wife and I were wandering around underground at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.; specifically, the S. Dillon Ripley Center, the entrance to which is easy to miss (at least for folks that don't live near D.C.), since it's topside view is remarkably unobtrusive and does not present itself as "anything special." After you enter the domed structure and go down a few levels, you may be amazed to find a massive space that contains conference centers, art studios, offices, and galleries. (The only reason I know of its existence is that I was invited to give a presentation in one of underground spaces about 20 years ago.) The football-field-sized room on the bottom level also provides an underground pathway to both the African Art Museum and the Sackler Gallery of the National Museum of Asian Art. The iPhone picture shows a part of the south side of the central staircase/elevator column that we took to descend (and looking up from where the escalator ends on the lower level). The geometry and lighting reminded me of de Chirico's works. The picture can also serve as a reminder to photographers (young/old, beginner/seasoned,...) that interesting images can be discovered literally everywhere.

Subtle Interconnections

"Living things (…) present situations in which a half-dozen, or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously, and in subtly interconnected ways. Often they present situations in which the essentially important quantities are either non-quantitative, or have at any rate eluded identification or measurement up to the moment. Thus biological (…) problems often involve the consideration of a most complexly organized whole.

...

The essence of science is not to be found in its outward appearance, in its physical manifestations; it is to be found in its inner spirit. That austere but exciting technique of inquiry known as the scientific method is what is important about science. This scientific method requires of its practitioners high standards of personal honest, open-mindedness, focused vision, and love of the truth. These are solid virtues, but science has no exclusive lien on them. The poet has these virtues also, and often turns them to higher uses.

...

If science deals with quantitative problems of a purely logical character, if science has no recognition of or concern for value or purpose, how can modern scientific man achieve a balanced and good life, in which logic is the companion of beauty, and efficiency is the partner of virtue?"

- Warren Weaver (1894 - 1978)
Science and complexity

Limits of the Possible

"A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus? If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.

...

"It is a good principle in science not to believe any 'fact' - however well attested - until it fits into some accepted frame of reference. Occasionally, of course, an observation can shatter the frame and force the construction of a new one, but that is extremely rare. Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind.

...
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist
states that something is possible,
he is almost certainly right.
When he states that something
is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the
limits of the possible is to venture a
little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic."

- Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)

Note. This is another one of a series of images I took with my iPhone during a trip my wife and I recently took to Monterey, CA. I had to resort to my iPhone because of an unfortunate "error" in judgement I made in packing my "minimal travel" photo gear for the trip. Thinking (correctly) that since my trip was ostensibly work-related and I had "only" a few days for our mini vacation, I (incorrectly) reasoned that I should only take an old camera and an even older (much older) lens. Well, the camera and lens both worked, separately, but - because of the age-mismatch - not together. So, for the first day, my photography consisted mostly of spraying iPhone shots at whatever my eye/I could find; things got a bit better the next day after B&H came through with an overnight delivery of a newer lens (I have no affiliation with B&H beyond simply being a long-time happy customer). While I soon put down my iPhone, I must confess that many of my favorite shots from this short trip - such as the one above of our younger son, Josh, musing on the marine life as it swam by in a large tank at the Monterey Bay aquarium - were taken with the iPhone.

Doors and Landscapes

"With an emphasis on a conceptual rather than visual manifestation of nature, ancient shanshui aims to convey an experience of ‘being in nature’ rather than ‘seeing nature’. This being in nature is not about any singular experience of when and where man encounters nature, but a perpetual truth experienced by man in/with nature, namely, the wholeness and universality of the cosmic, laws and cycles in nature, and the integrative harmony between man and things. This can be best explained by comparing the sense of vastness in nature found in both Western landscape and ancient shanshui . In Western art, the cosmic sense in nature often evokes a sense of might, and even the destructive power, of nature. A moment prior to a thunderstorm, as described earlier in Ruisdael’s work, Turner’s images of snowstorm and shipwrecks, as well as Friedrich’s depiction of graveyards and the Sea of Ice, are all about the omnipotent power of nature, so much so that it can be lethal. In contrast to landscape painters of the West, ancient shanshui painters were not attracted to the unrelenting power of nature. This explains why images of natural disasters cannot be found in ancient shanshui . To ancient shanshui painters, their images visualize not the unusual but the common and perpetual sense of nature. They convey a message of a transcendental experience of being in/with nature."

- Being in Traditional Chinese Landscape Painting, Sophia Suk-mun Law

Note. Like the image in yesterday's post (and perhaps like a few more to come) this one is a "quick grab" with my iPhone during a trip my wife and I recently took to Monterey, CA. "Objectively speaking," the image shows the central panel of an old dilapidated door that guards the entrance to a property on Ocean Avenue, Carmel, about a half mile or so from the beach. But, in my mind's eye, it is "really" an even more withered palimpsest of an ancient Chinese landscape. I have always been drawn to how Chinese landscapes lead you to gently experience the painting as a whole, rather than (as is more typical of Western art) to make you "see a subject." Apart from the academic paper I quoted from above, a wonderful book that explores the artistic and philosophical implications of this point of view is called The Great Image has no Form (by Francois Jullien, University of Chicago Press).

Finite Worlds

"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."

- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Note. The image is a "quick grab" with my iPhone of some lights on the ceiling of the hotel my wife and I recently stayed at in Monterey, CA. A basic photography lesson I learned and embraced long ago (though occasionally still forget to apply; happily, not this time) is this: if you are in a "dull, dull, insufferably dull" place for image taking (or, at least, think you are - like standing around in a hotel lobby with nothing to do or to "look at"), just look up or down ... something is sure to catch your eye 🙂

A Garage, Brazil, and a Stieglitzian "Equivalent"

"Harry Tuttle: Harry Tuttle. Heating engineer. At your service.
Sam Lowry: Tuttle? Are you from Central Services? I called Central Services.
Harry Tuttle: Ha!
Sam Lowry: But... I called Central Services.
Harry Tuttle: They're a little overworked these days. Luckily I intercepted your call...Officially, only Central Service operatives are supposed to touch this stuff...
Sam Lowry: Sorry. Wouldn't it be easier just to work for Central Services?
Harry Tuttle: Couldn't stand the paperwork. Yes, there's more bits of paper in Central Services than bits of pipe read this, fill in that, hand in the other listen, this old system of yours could be on fire and I couldn't even turn on the kitchen tap without filling in a 27B/6...Bloody paperwork.
Sam Lowry: I suppose one has to expect a certain amount.
Harry Tuttle: Why? I came into this game for the action, the excitement. Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble, a man alone. Now they got the whole country sectioned off, you can't make a move without a form...Ah ha! Found it! There's your problem.
Sam Lowry: Can you fix it?
Harry Tuttle: No, I can't. But I can bypass it with one of these.
[Holds up a bizarre device]
Harry Tuttle: My good friends call me Harry."

- Brazil (1985),
 Screenplay by Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard & Charles McKeown

Postscript. I have written before about the mystery of what "sits behind" (and directs) the eye/I/camera to see and take a photograph; and about the equally mysterious joy of just going with the flow of it all. Why do some scenes/compositions attract our attention while we walk past others as if sleepwalking through a void? While it is easy to overthink (even obsess) about seeing, interpreting, and composing - which only disrupts the natural flow - indulging in an occasional self-reflection can also reveal a part of the creative process. In my case, I've always had a penchant for making split-second associations with something either imagined or recalled). What I don't know is whether my inner musings are synchronous-with, antecedent-of, or follow my photographer-self's gaze? I've no doubt experienced each of these variants countless times, but the question of what really happens remains a deep mystery to me. But I have also grown to savor this mystery whenever it presents itself, as it did this weekend, when my wife and I parked our car in a garage before going to see a play in Washington, DC. As I closed my door, and for whatever reason, the vista of pipes, lights, and soiled concrete that met my gaze conjured up a scene from the absurdist Monty-Pythonesque-movie "Brazil" wherein Robert De Niro (playing a character named "Harry Tuttle," who is part heating engineer and part special forces operative) breaks into the Sam Lowry's apartment (Sam is the "hero," played by Jonathan Pryce), and rips apart a section of Sam's wall to expose a bizarre mass of writhing, all-but-living, pipes and electrical conduits! So, there I stood transfixed beside our car, my mind a blank (with a silly grin on my face), mentally replaying what I could remember from this scene from Brazil. The image you see up above is my attempt at using my iPhone to record a Stieglitzian "equivalent" of what I was experiencing while gazing at the vista of pipes, lights, and soiled concrete in a Washington, DC garage 😊