Holistic Morphology

"Since nothing can exist that does not fulfil the conditions which render its existence possible, the different parts each being must be co-ordinated in such a way as to render possible the existence of the being as a whole, not only in itself, but also in its relations with other beings, and the analysis of these conditions often leads to general laws which are as certain as those which are derived from calculation or from experiment."

- Georges Cuvier (1769 - 1832)

Feel the Tide

"It was ours, the water at the farm, but it was no different from any other water, every drop of moisture that fell since there were only protozoa, trilobites, orthocones. It was inside every single human being. When I missed the sea, I could lean my face into another person—with worry or dangerous joy or grieving—and feel their tide. The World As It Is is only a furious tide of people, linked by blood and tears and sweat, a push toward each other we can’t stem. Water was over Mother’s grave, beside Father’s, under the boats, in my blood and the blood of everyone I loved. I felt it all. I felt the weight of all the water in the world."

- Eiren Caffall
All the Water in the World

Waves of Consciousness

"Waves of consciousness roll in, roll out,
leave some writing, and just as quickly
new waves roll in and erase it.
I try to quickly read what's
written there, but it's hard,"

- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )
Kafka on the Shore

"When left alone, quantum particles behave as multiple images of themselves (as waves, really), simultaneously moving through all possible paths in space and time. Now, again, why do we not experience this multitude around ourselves? Is it because we are probing things around us all the time? Why do all experiments that involve, say, the position of a particle make the particle suddenly be somewhere rather than everywhere? No one knows. Before you probe it, a particle is a wave of possibilities. After you've probed it, it is somewhere, and subsequently it is somewhere for ever, rather than everywhere again. Strange, that. Nothing, within the laws of quantum physics, allows for such a collapse to happen. It is an experimental mystery and a theoretical one. Quantum physics stipulates that whenever something is there, it can transform into something else, of course, but it cannot disappear. And since quantum physics allows for multiple possibilities simultaneously, these possibilities should then keep existing, even after a measurement is made. But they don't. Every possibility but one vanishes. We do not see any of the others around us. We live in a classical world, where everything is based on quantum laws but nothing resembles the quantum world."

- Christophe Galfard (1976 - )
 The Universe in Your Hand

Perfect Balance

"Nature may reach the same result in many ways ... A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

Secret Order

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits.

...

The grasping of the whole is obviously the aim of science… but it is a goal that necessarily lies very far off because science, whenever possible, proceeds experimentally and in all cases statistically. Experiment, however, consists in asking a definite question which excludes as far as possible anything disturbing and irrelevant. It makes conditions, imposes them on Nature, and in this way forces her to give an answer to a question devised by man. She is prevented from answering out of the fullness of her possibilities since these possibilities are restricted as far as practicable.

...

For this purpose there is created in the laboratory a situation which is artificially restricted to the question which compels Nature to give an unequivocal answer. The workings of Nature in her unrestricted wholeness are completely excluded. If we want to know what these workings are, we need a method of inquiry which imposes the fewest possible conditions, or if possible no conditions at all, and then leave Nature to answer out of her fullness."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

Frozen Homage

"There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Note. A long while back (on Feb 7, 2009 to be exact), I posted a lengthy set of musings on the Unconscious Influence and the Creative Process, wherein I speculated on the impact that seeing one of Fay Godwin's photographs led to one of my own decades later. The image above may be viewed from the opposite perspective, in that it was my conscious memory of one of Ansel Adams' well known Frozen Lakes and Cliffs photograph that drew my eye to the little scene here. While it lacks Ansel's abstract ethereality, I may not have captured the image at all were it not for my knowing (and being able to recall, at an instant's notice) Adams' oeuvre. Far from an "unconscious" influence, my humble image is an intentional homage. It is also a keepsake of a wonderful day my family and I spent on a completely frozen over part of the Potomac river in Maryland side of Great Falls Park that we had never before seen frozen (during our 26+ years of living in the area)!

Celestial Beauty

"Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

Greatest of Mysteries

"The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us - there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."

- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
Cosmos

Leafless Tree

"If we hadn’t our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries-the ice storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top – ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia’s diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold-the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong."

- Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

A Self-correcting System

"The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!

...

We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac.

...

The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, 'Why are we here?'"

- George Carlin (1937 - 2008)