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 🙂

Mysterious Worlds

"Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it."

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 - 1881)
Brothers Karamazov

Talking to a Rock

"Hogen, a Chinese Zen teacher,
lived alone in a small temple in the country.
One day four traveling monks appeared
 and asked if they might make a fire
in his yard to warm themselves.

While they were building the fire,
Hogen heard them arguing about
subjectivity and objectivity.
He joined them and said:
'There is a big stone. Do you consider it
to be inside or outside your mind?'

One of the monks replied:
'From the Buddhist viewpoint everything
is an objectification of mind, so I would
say that the stone is inside my mind.'

'Your head must feel very heavy,' observed Hogen,
'if you are carrying around a stone like that in your mind.'"

- "The Stone Mind," Shaseki-shu (Collection of Stone and Sand)

"Yunyan asked a monk what he was doing.
The monk replied, 'I’ve been talking to a rock.'
Yunyan said, 'Did it nod to you (indicating that it understood you)?'
When the monk didn’t reply, Yunyan answered for him:
'It nodded to you before you even said anything.'"

- Yunyan Tansheng (780-841)

Quiet Light II

"There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing. We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us. "

- John O'Donohue (1956 - 2008)
 To Bless the Space Between Us

Quiet Light

"It is light that reveals, light that obscures, light that communicates. It is light I 'listen' to. The light late in the day has a distinct quality, as it fades toward the darkness of evening. After sunset there is a gentle leaving of the light, the air begins to still, and a quiet descends. I see magic in the quiet light of dusk. I feel quiet, yet intense energy in the natural elements of our habitat. A sense of magic prevails. A sense of mystery. It is a time for contemplation, for listening - a time for making photographs."

- John Sexton (1953 - )

Daliesque Dreams

 "One day it will have to
be officially admitted that
what we have christened reality
is an even greater illusion
than the world of dreams."

- Salvador Dali (1904 -1989)

To See Takes Time

"I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see--and I don't.

...

You paint from your subject, not what you see…I rarely paint anything I don’t know very well. It was surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.

...

To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time."

-  Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986)

Enfolded Energy Fields

 "In all ages even among scientific men,
there can be discerned the urge to
apprehend the living form as such,
to grasp the connections of
their external visible parts; to
take them as intimations of inner
activity, and so to master, to some
degree, the whole in an intuition."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Postscript. This image is of the garden peony that adorns the ground beneath our mail-box; more precisely, and paraphrasing Minor White, I should say that the image is what else the garden peony is. What you are "really" looking at is a digital-negative (i.e., wherein the white-to-black tonalities are reversed) of a zoomed-in portion of what started out being 1:1 macro shot of the folds-within-folds of petals inside a single peony flower. The distance from left to right is no more than about two inches. In my physicist's mind's eye, I see an undulating play of interpenetrating enfolded forms of some mysterious energy field; the same impression I get when gazing at Bruce Barnbaum's mesmerizing slit canyon abstracts. Images such as this also remind us that magical otherworldly realms are always near us, just waiting for our eye to discover.

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 😊