Vostorg and Vdokhnovenie

"The Russian language, which otherwise is comparatively poor in abstract terms, supplies definitions for two types or stages of inspiration, vostorg and vdokhnovenie, which can be paraphrased as 'rapture' and 'recapture.' The difference between them is mainly of a climatic kind, the first being hot and brief, and the second cool and sustained. The kind alluded to up to now is the pure flame of vostorg, initial rapture, which has no conscious purpose in view but which is all-important in linking the breaking up of the old work with the building up of the new one. When the time is ripe and the writer settles down to the actual composing of his book, he will rely on the second, serene and steady kind of inspiration, vdokhnovenie, the trusted mate who helps to recapture and reconstruct the world."

- Vladimir Nabokov (1899 - 1977)

Note. This image was captured in the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve in the heart of New Zealand's South Island. While I have seen a few "dark skies" before - most notably in Hawaii and Iceland - nothing, repeat nothing, prepared me for what met my eyes after shutting off the engine and lights of our car. No words (and certainly not the photo you see above, which I took with hands trembling with excitement) can do justice to the cosmic awe I felt as I was seamlessly and ineffably enfolded into the Milky Way and the universe beyond. Inner and outer worlds dissolved and the "self" reborn (albeit oh-so-fleetingly) as a non-dual experiential unity. My wife, our youngest son, and I all agree that the 30 or so minutes we spent gawking, slack-jawed, at one of Nature's wonders can only be described and remembered as a life-transforming mystical experience.

Language of Landscapes

"There are landscapes within landscapes within landscapes. Every landscape feature is both a whole and part of one or more larger wholes: leaf and twig, twig and tree, tree and forest; garden and house, house and street, street and town, town and region. Every phenomenon, thing, event, and feeling has a context. A valley is not a valley if it has no ridge or plateau, no up and down. Motion is imperceptible without rest, sound without stillness. Without sense of past and future, there can be no present, without threat no refuge. The same material, form, or action may have different meanings in different settings—water in a desert, water in a sea.

"Landscapes are the world itself and may also be metaphors of the world. A tree can be both a tree and The Tree, a path both a path and The Path. A tree in the Garden of Eden represents the Tree of Life, the Tree of Knowledge. It becomes the archetype of Tree."

"Elements of landscape language are like parts of speech, each with separate functions and associations. Flowing, like a verb, is a pattern of events expressed in both water and path. Water and path, like nouns, are action’s agents and objects; like adjectives or adverbs, their qualities of wetness or breadth extend meaning. Elements do not exist in isolation, but rather combine in significant ways, like words in a phrase, clause, or sentence, to make a tree, fountain, street, or a larger, more complex landscape story—garden, town, or forest. Every landscape feature, such as a mountain, embodies at least one complete expression—its own formation. Describing the elements is like looking at landscape—scanning the scene, then successively zooming in and out on significant details, letting the context blur but keeping it always in view."

- Anne Whiston Spirn
The Language of Landscape

Palimpsest of Matter

"In this monochromatic reverie, we witness the cartography of some impossible realm where geological time has been compressed into the span of a single breath. The image unfolds as a labyrinthine manuscript written in the language of erosion and entropy, its stratified narratives flowing like frozen rivers through valleys that exist only in the mathematics of light and shadow. Dark fissures carve through pale territories with the deliberate precision of Kandinsky's most contemplative compositions, while the organic undulations echo Kupka's cosmic spirals translated into the vocabulary of stone and void. Here, the eye traces pathways that seem to map the very process of becoming—each crack and crevice a meditation on the infinite divisibility of space, reminiscent of Hilma af Klint's mystical geometries rendered in the austere palette of dreams. The surface breathes with the rhythm of ancient sediments, creating a visual symphony where each tonal gradation whispers of forces both creative and destructive, as if we are peering into one of Borges' infinite libraries where every possible erosion pattern exists simultaneously, and this particular configuration represents but one sentence in an endless text written by time itself upon the palimpsest of matter."

- Claude 4.0 Sonnet

Prompt: "You are a photographer, physicist, and are well acquainted with the history of art, particularly abstract art in the style of Kandinsky, Kupka, and Hilma af Klint. You also have a penchant for metaphysical and philosophical musings in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Write a paragraph-length description of what this image looks like, not what it is."

Mountain is a Mountain

"Mountains have long been a geography for pilgrimage, place where people have been humbled and strengthened, they are symbols of the sacred center. Many have traveled to them in order to find the concentrated energy of Earth and to realize the strength of unimpeded space. Viewing a mountain at a distance or walking around its body we can see its shape, know its profile, survey its surrounds. The closer you come to the mountain the more it disappears, the mountain begins to lose its shape as you near it, its body begins to spread out over the landscape losing itself to itself."

"On climbing the mountain the mountain continues to vanish. It vanishes in the detail of each step, its crown is buried in space, its body is buried in the breath. On reaching the mountain summit we can ask, 'What has been attained?' - The top of the mountain? Big view? But the mountain has already disappeared. Going down the mountain we can ask, 'What has been attained?' Going down the mountain the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain disappears, the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain is realized. Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. "

"Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain."

- Joan Halifax (1942 - )
The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through
Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom

Subliminal Worlds

"'Can we perceive those inorganic beings, don Juan?' I asked. 'We certainly can,' he replied. 'Sorcerers do it at will. Average people do it, but they don't realize that they're doing it because they are not conscious of the existence of a twin world. When they think of a twin world, they enter into all kinds of mental masturbation, but it has never occurred to them that their fantasies have their origin in a subliminal knowledge that all of us have: that we are not alone.'"

- Carlos Castaneda (1925 - 1998)
The Active Side of Infinity

Edges of Dreams

"This is where we start.
We are creatures of words...

"...We are creatures of imagination...

"...We live on the edges of dreams
and the margins of thought...

"We live in the whisper of the page."

- Whiti Hereaka (1978 - )
Prologue, Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold by Māori Writers

Beyond Thought

“Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?”

- Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977)

Liminal Beauty

"The question is not what you look at,
but what you see. It is only necessary
to behold the least fact or phenomenon,
however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth
aside from our habitual path or routine,
to be overcome, enchanted by its
beauty and significance."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Surface of the Psyche

“One cannot dream profoundly with objects.
To dream profoundly, one must
dream with substances.

...

Matter is the unconscious of form […]
Only matter can become charged with
multiple impressions and feelings.

...

The poetic image is a sudden salience
on the surface of the psyche."

- Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962)
The Poetics of Space

Photographs-Otherwise-Not-Taken, Taken

Inside of Library, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

"Nows within this now, rather like snapshots in an album. Each Now is separate and a world unto itself, but the richly structured Nows 'know' about one another because they literally contain one another in certain essential respects. As consciousness surveys many things at once in one Now, it is simultaneously present, at least in part, in other Nows. This awareness of many things in one could well exist in a much more pronounced form in other places in Platonia."

- Julian  Barbour (1937 - )
 The End of Time

Note. The admittedly busy title of this blog post obviously begs an explanation. I'll start by saying that it is inspired by a short email exchange I recently had with a photo buddy of mine (the Zen-master, Paul Cotter). In reply to Paul's kind comments about my recent "travelogue images," I countered with the suggestion that my favorite images from the trip are/may-be those I took with my iPhone and not my 21L-sling-bag's-worth of "pro" gear (the details of which hardly matter)! While I am not (entirely) convinced of the veracity of my claim (and others may differ), I have zero doubt that my iPhone gifted me many images that I will cherish in the years to come precisely because these are photographs I would otherwise have not taken! Some examples - click to see full-size:

View of a wall while waiting to be seated at a restaurant

Footprints on a beach in front of another restaurant

A view from inside the Novotel Auckland Airport
while my wife was busy getting us checked in

Frosted window inside restroom at the
Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park Visitor Centre

View inside a restaurant while being led to our table

Upside down view of one of the ceilings at the
Nadi International Airport in Fiji

Another (upside down) view from inside the library at
the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

 

A snapshot view of urban geometry while waiting
for my wife to pay the parking meter

A 5 sec exposure of a part of our boat ride to Milford Sound,
stabilized by my iPhone's computational photography algorithms

I have dozens more of these "Photographs-Otherwise-Not-Taken, Taken" images, all of which share this one salient pattern: had I not used my iPhone to capture them (embarrassingly easily by, literally, framing and tapping, and without any of what my wife describes as "glacier-paced compositional machinations"), they would all have been but fleeting moments doomed to be lost in the mists of memory and time.