Spirits

"Mountains are for me, a conservatory. It's there, that I am able to exist in the presence of transcendent sentient and symbiotic beings. From the mountains to the flora and fauna that lives on the mountains, I am both an awed witness to, and a humble beneficiary of their sprits. Sprits which are filled with life enriching light."

- Mekael Shane (1970 - )

Things in Their Very Essence

"l do not wish to impose my personality upon nature (any of life’s manifestations), but without prejudice or falsification to become identified with nature, to know things in their very essence, so that what I record is not an interpretation – my idea of what nature should be but a revelation – a piercing of the smoke screen artificially cast over life by irrelevant, humanly limited exigencies, into an absolute, impersonal recognition."

- Edward Weston (1886 - 1958)

Mirror of Water

"The light constantly changes,
and that alters the atmosphere
and beauty of things every minute.

...

The essence of the motif is the mirror of water,
whose appearance alters at every moment..

...

What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence."

- Claude Monet (1840 - 1926)

Dancing Soul

"One Autumn day I was in a park and I looked at a very small beautiful leaf, it’s color was almost red. It was barely hanging o the branch nearly ready to fall down. I spent a long time with it and I asked the leaf a number of questions. I found out the leaf had been a mother to the tree.

We usually think that the tree is the mother and the leaves are just children but as I looked at the leaf I saw that the leaf is also a mother to the tree. The sap that the roots take up is only water and minerals, not sufficient to nourish the tree, so the tree distributes the sap to the leaves, and the leaves transform the rough sap into an elaborated sap with the help of the sun and air and then send it back to the tree for nourishment. Therefore leaves are also a mother to the tree.

I asked the leaf whether it was scared because it was autumn and the other leaves were falling. The leaf told me, 'No. During the whole spring and summer I was very alive. I worked hard and helped nourish the tree, and much of me is in the tree. I am not limited by this form. I am the whole tree, and when I go back to the soil, I will continue to nourish the tree. As I leave this branch and float to the ground, I will wave to the tree and tell her, ‘I will see you again very soon….'

And after a while I saw the leaf leave the branch and float down to the soul dancing joyfully. Because as it floated it saw itself already there in the tree. It was so happy. I have a lot to learn from the leaf because it is not afraid – it knew nothing can be born and nothing can die.'"

- Thich Nhat Hanh (1926 - 2022)

Angle of Totality

"Guo Xi, a painter and writer who lived some four centuries after Xie He, indicated that the painter’s ability to see the spiritual meaning of things depended on his or her own spiritual character: 'A virtuous man takes delight in landscapes so that in a rustic retreat he may nourish his nature, amid the carefree play of streams and rocks, he may take delight.' To see in nature the qualities of excellence and virtue, the artist must be attuned to receive them.

...

Chinese painters ... often abandon normal limitations of perspective and unity of composition; they are emphasizing a scene not as it presents itself to the eye, but as it inhabits the soul. In a photograph, our vision is limited by the lens. In a painting ... we see the mountain, not as it appears from one vantage point at one time, but as it appears to a man who has walked among its nooks and crannies, loved it, and come to associate it with the various events of his life. Guo Xi called this freedom of perspective the 'angle of totality.' For the artist who lived in these mountains, each part of the scene has become a friend and reveals a personality."

- Nathan Beacom
The Prayers of the Chinese Nature Painters

Mountains of Music

New Zealand ... "is a land of song. Mountains of music swell in the rivers, hills of music billow in the creeks, and meadows of music murmur in the rills that ripple over the rocks. Altogether it is a symphony of multitudinous melodies. All this is the music of waters. The adamant foundations of the earth have been wrought into a sublime harp, upon which the clouds of the heavens play with mighty tempests or with gentle showers.”"

-  John Wesley Powell (1834 - 1902)

Quintessence

 

"In my experience the conscious mind can claim only a relatively central position and must accept the fact that the unconscious psyche transcends and as it were surrounds it on all sides.

...

We can hardly escape the feeling that the unconscious process moves spiral-wise round a centre, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the centre grow more and more distinct. Or perhaps we could put it the other way round and say that the centre – itself virtually unknowable – acts like a magnet on the disparate materials and processes of the unconscious and gradually captures them as in a crystal lattice. For this reason the centre is often pictured as a spider in its web.

...

The squaring of the circle breaks down the original chaotic unity into the four elements and then combines them again in a higher unity. Unity is represented by a circle and the four elements by a square. The production of one from four is the result of a process of distillation and sublimation which takes the so-called ‘circular’ form ... so that the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ shall be extracted in its purest state. This product is generally called the ‘quintessence."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)
Psychology and Alchemy

Dimensions of Reality

"My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary."

- Brassaï (1899 - 1984)

Self-Creation

"As the spider creates and absorbs...
so this universe proceeds from the immortal."

Commentary: "It was said the immortal is the source of all created things. How it is the source is explained by well-known analogies; as is well-known in the world, the spider without requiring any other cause itself creates, i.e., sends out threads not distinct from its own body and again absorbs them itself, i.e., draws them into itself or makes them part of itself; as medicinal plants, i.e., from the corn plant to the immovable, not distinct from the earth, proceed from the earth, and as from the living person the hairs proceed different in nature from him; as in these illustrations, so here, i.e., in the circle of samsara, all the universe of the same and different nature proceeds from the akshara above described, without requiring any other cause; the statement of many analogies is to facilitate easy understanding of the meaning; universe which proceeds from the Brahman proceeds in this order and not all at once, like the throwing of a handful of apples."

- S. Sitarama Sastri

Upanishads and Sri Sankara's commentary

Postscript. This is a cropped iPhone image of a stylized advertisement for a wedding dress that appears in the window of a local dry-cleaning company appropriately called "Cosmo Cleaners" 😊

The Universe’s Autograph

"I arrived at the black mountain because of a marginal note. In a tattered cosmography attributed to the Jesuit Martín de Acosta—perhaps a forgery by the bibliophile Narvaez, whose forgeries were so meticulous that the errors were also accurate—I found this sentence: 'Certain peaks do not sustain the sky; they conjugate it.' The phrase troubled my sleep until I undertook to photograph one such peak. I found it at evening, cut from the world like an ideogram: a single glyph of darkness against a palimpsest of wind. The clouds, unfaithful and precise, braided themselves into a logic I could not read. Men who love catalogues will say that the forms were hippocentaur, comet, spiral; others, more prudent, will confess that all clouds are quotations. I set the tripod where a shepherd said the mountain’s shadow doubles itself at dusk—the place Heraclitus might have awaited the river’s second water—and waited for the aperture to become a minor theology.

What followed is either simple or impossible. The long exposure produced a negative in which the white veils ramified into corridors and back into a single, untraceable stroke. Each time I examined the print, I discovered a new itinerary through it, as if the sky had been a library of routes. In that shifting calligraphy I recognized (and then misrecognized) the glyph of my name, the staircase of the tale of Asterion, the circular campfire in which the dreamer of 'The Circular Ruins' is himself dreamed; I even discerned, in one corner, the diminutive Aleph that Argentino had boasted of. I say 'discerned' and not 'saw,' because to see is to believe that the eye is sovereign; the photograph taught me that the eye is an apprentice of the world’s rehearsals. The encyclopedists of Tlön maintained that objects are concatenations of acts; this image suggested an inverse metaphysic: that acts are motions of a deeper image, which includes, like a conscientious index, the anticipation of its readers.

I have not shown the print to anyone. (To display the universe’s autograph would be a discourtesy, like annotating a psalm.) Some nights, the mountain returns as a black theorem at the edge of my window; the moving light scrawls above it in the same indecipherable hand, as though the sky were continuously correcting itself. I have come to suspect that the world is not a book we interpret but a lucid instrument that interprets us; that time is merely its patient shutter; that we, with our brief glimmering certainties, are the fleeting punctuation in a sentence it continues to rewrite. Once, waking at an indeterminate hour, I held the photograph to the lamp and saw (I use “saw” with the humility of one who might be mistaken) the clouds assembling the profile of a man looking up at a mountain. The man held a small machine to his eye. It seemed reasonable to suppose that the universe, weary of our portraits, had at last arranged to take one of its own."

- ChatGPT 5

Prompt: "You are a photographer, poet and philosopher, with a penchant for metaphysics and stories by Jorge Luis Borges. Write a short story about the mystery of the universe in the style of Borges that uses this image as backdrop. Think deeply about Borges entire literary oeuvre before you begin. Do not start writing until you have, in a Borgesian sense, become Borges."