- Sean Carroll (1966 - )
The Particle at the End of the Universe
Monday, December 07, 2020
Broken Symmetry
Thursday, December 03, 2020
Eternally Complex Tapestry
- China Miéville (1972 - )
Perdido Street Station
Tuesday, December 01, 2020
Wonder about Wonder
- V. S. Ramachandran (1951 - )
The Tell-Tale Brain
Monday, November 30, 2020
Narrow Borderland of the Senses
Postscript. Brooks Jensen (editor of Lenswork) offers a neat "trick" to jump-start - and otherwise stimulate - the creative process: spread a portfolio of your images or artwork (small physical prints work best) on the floor, and just play with various arrangements. You may either find stepping stones to ideas percolating just beneath the surface of your muse; or (if you are especially lucky), you may discover latent patterns-of-patterns that define you as an artist - invisible threads that run through your work that only a meditative bird's eye glimpse can reveal; or, as has happened here, you just happily stumble upon heretofore unrelated images that combine to tell their own story to you. The three images assembled together in the triptych above are unrelated, except that all were captured by me at very different times: the left-most image was an "accident" (literally, a waterlogged remnant of a 20 yo print of trees, if you can believe it!); the middle image is an 8yo shot of my ongoing "synesthetic landscape" series; and the right-most image is an oil abstract taken about a decade ago (which, up until my self-imposed "Brooks-Jensenian-exercise," was quietly sitting on an old hard-drive in its pristine raw form). The three images inexplicably aligned themselves - in sequence and correct orientation! - as I threw the first batch of 50 or so small prints on the floor to view. I imagine some Arthur-Clarkian tale being woven of an alien world: first "seen" by a probe as it navigates its way through a hole in an orbiting asteroid; it hurls through the planet's atmosphere and plunges into a stormy methane ocean; and starts collecting data on strange boundaryless lifeforms. Or, it could just be a randomly assembled meaningless triptych of equally random meaningless images ... though, for me, meaning, as beauty, is in the eye of the beholder :) Indeed, I wonder how many other phantasmagoric worlds will remain forever invisible to me, because there are not enough moments of time left in my life to conjure the right sequence?
Saturday, November 28, 2020
Turning Matter Into Spirit
- Nikos Kazantzakis (1883 - 1957)
Friday, November 27, 2020
Order and Harmony
- Robert Jastrow (1925 - 2008)
The Enchanted Loom
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
Imposing of Order
if not the imposing of order
on phenomena that do not possess
order in themselves?
And all myths,
however they differ from
philosophical systems and scientific theories,
share this with them,
that they negate the principle of
randomness in the world."
- Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)
Highcastle: A Remembrance