Symphonic Geometry

"The human mind is only capable of absorbing a few things at a time. We see what is taking place in front of us in the here and now, and cannot envisage simultaneously a succession of processes, no matter how integrated and complementary. Our faculties of perception are consequently limited even as regards fairly simple phenomena. The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word. The symmetriad is a million—a billion, rather—raised to the power of N: it is incomprehensible. We pass through vast halls, each with a capacity of ten Kronecker units, and creep like so many ants clinging to the folds of breathing vaults and craning to watch the flight of soaring girders, opalescent in the glare of searchlights, and elastic domes which criss-cross and balance each other unerringly, the perfection of a moment, since everything here passes and fades. The essence of this architecture is movement synchronized towards a precise objective. We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint. It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it."

- Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)

Solaris

Experience, Emptiness, and Luminosity

"One of the points in the traditional Buddhist way of viewing the question of what reality is or what truth is, is that in fact we cannot perceive reality, we cannot perceive truth. This is not to say that there is no reality or truth, but rather that whatever we perceive, if we happen to perceive anything, we see in accordance with some particular language or approach, and we color it with our own styles and ways of looking at things.

...

The nonexistence of ego is not a philosophical matter, but simply a matter of perception. Perception is unable to trace back its existence {to an origin}, so it becomes just sheer energy, without a beginner of the perception and without any substance. It is just simple perception. Perception on that level has three aspects.

...

The first is perception as experience. In this case, experience does not refer to the experience of self-confirmation, but to experience in the sense of things as they are. White is white, black is black, and so forth.

...

Then there is {the second aspect}, the perception of emptiness, which is the absence of things as they are. Things have their room; things always come along with a certain sense of room, of space. Even though they may appear within the complexities of the overcrowdedness of experience, they provide their own space within the overcrowdedness. Actually, overcrowdedness and room are the same thing; overcrowdedness is room in some sense. This is because there is movement involved, because there is dance and play involved. At the same time, there is a shifty and intangible quality, and because of that the whole thing is very lucid.

...

There is experience, then space or emptiness, and then the final aspect, which is called luminosity. Luminosity has nothing to do with bright visual light. It is a sense of sharp boundary and clarity. There is no theoretical or intellectual reference point for this, but in terms of ordinary experience, it is a sense of clarity, a sense of things being seen as they are, unmistakably.

...

So there are these three aspects of perception: the sense of experience, the sense of emptiness, and the sense of luminosity. The point is that with that level of perception {that contains the three aspects}, one is able to see all the patterns of one’s life. Whether the patterns of one’s life are regarded as neurotic or enlightened, one is able to see them all clearly. That seems to be the beginning of some glimpse of the mandala perspective, the beginning of a glimpse of the five buddha energies."

- Chogyam Trungpa (1939 - 1987)
Orderly Chaos: The Mandala Principle

Equivalent

"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)

Ouroborosian Complexity

"In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we’re not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful."

 -  Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )
I Am a Strange Loop

Atomic Poetry

 "We must be clear that when it comes to atoms,
language can be used only as in poetry.
The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with
describing facts as with creating images
and establishing mental connections."

- Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962)

A Space-Time Event

"There is nothing mysterious about space-time. Every speck of matter, every idea, is a space-time event. We cannot experience anything or conceive of anything that exists outside of space-time. Just as experience precedes all awareness and creative expression, the visual language of our photographs should ever more strongly express the fourth dimensional structure of the real world.

...

I feel all things as dynamic events, being, changing, and interacting with each other in space and time even as I photograph them.

...

What you see is real - but only on the particular level to which you've developed your sense of seeing. You can expand your reality by developing new ways of perceiving."

- Wynn Bullock (1905 - 1975)

The Flux of all Things

"Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

Senses of the Mind

"From mirror to mirror - this is what I happen to dream of - the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)
 

"The senses are the tools of the mind
and the mind is the tool of the Spirit
When the mind becomes confused, it is
Spirit that brings back clarity and harmony.
...
A master who puts his senses to sleep is able
to perceive the unseen emerging from Spirit
Even in his waking state he dreams
dreams that open the gates to Divine Truth.
...
Do you know what you are?
You are a manuscript of a divine letter.
You are a mirror reflecting a noble face.
This universe is not outside of you.
Look inside yourself;
everything that you want,
you are already that."

- Rumi (1207 - 1273)

"To be" is to Inter-Be

"If you look deeply, you will see that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. 'Interbeing' is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix 'inter-' with the verb 'to be,' we have a new verb, inter-be.

...

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

...

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when you look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here – time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. 'To be' is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is."

- Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926 - 2022)
The Heart of Understanding

Postscript. As is likely obvious to even casual visitors to my humble blog during the last week, I am currently immersed in the world of cymatics (although my wife thinks of it as more of an obsession). "Cymatics" refers to the study of sound and vibration; specifically, when the two are combined in a way that creates complex patterns in different media such as sand, water, or - what Swiss physician Hans Jenny (who coined the term) liked to use - corn starch in water. For example, if a metal plate is covered with a thin layer of flour or sand and is made to vibrate at specific frequencies, so-called standing-wave Chladni patterns appear in which the flour or sand collects along "nodes" (i.e., lines or points that undergo minimal vibration), while areas that undergo the greatest motion (i.e., the "anti nodes") are effectively left empty as the vibration pushes the flour or sand away. Chladni patterns are named after physicist Ernst Chladni who performed the first such experiments in the late 1700s.

I thank my left-brain/day-job as a physicist for introducing me to cymatics in the late 1990s when I stumbled across this paper describing what (at the time, were never before seriously studied) complex emergent patterns in vibrating layers of small granular media (e.g., cylinders filled with BBs from a toy shotgun). One line from this paper immediately grabbed my attention when I first read it and that still haunts me (both as physicist and photographer): "These excitations [called "oscillons"] have a propensity to assemble into 'molecular' and 'crystalline' structures." I remember musing, Whoa!, pump energy into an otherwise static structureless pile of 'things' and get self-organized geometric patterns?!? It was during my (absurdly slow, pre-Google days) search for related experiments that I discovered Jenny's work on cymatics, the underlying dynamics of which has a far-from-superficial overlap with the physics of oscillons.

So, having known about cymatics for about 25 years - and having even posted about it briefly in 2006 on this same blog! - why has it taken me so long to photograph it? I have no easy answer to that, just as I cannot explain why I never photographed my dad-working-as-an-art-restorer when he was still alive, which is something that - 23 years after his passing - I now profoundly regret (see Postscript 1 in this post from 2010). The creative process and the muse that guides our path are both mysterious and ultimately unknowable, which is as it should be. So, I'll leave it at that. But, whatever the reason(s) for my flurry of recent purchases of frequency generators, vertical vibration generators, lights, and more plates, goblets and petri dishes than any sane photographer has reason to own (and our kitchen cupboards have room for), I am - at the moment (and for the foreseeable future) - completely and utterly "obsessed" with cymatics. The reason is simple enough to state: cymatics is a quintessentially perfect amalgam of all three of my aesthetic and intellectual passions - physics, photography, and mysticism. 

The first two separately play obviously critical roles. The physicist-side of my brain is giddy over the vast phase space waiting to be explored: vibration frequency + medium (type + mix type) + vessel (type + diameter + depth) + ... And the photographer side is not too far behind: light (type + source(s) + directionality) + angle-of-view + f-stop + exposure time + ... But it is the idea of "cymatics as creative bridge" between seen and unseen, between energy and pattern, and between physical and spiritual that I resonate most deeply with, and is most ripe with creative possibilities. (For example, it has not escaped my attention that, in a "mystical" sort of way, the energy that the universe ineffably pumps into an otherwise structureless bag full of 'elemental things' gives rise to an emergent multidimensional dynamic cymatic-like sentient geometry called "Andy")

Since I've only started exploring the cymatics-scape universe, I have no idea what patterns await to be discovered and/or how long the search will keep my interest. But, given that I'm still looking for synesth-scapes after being mesmerized by reflective patterns in my mother-in-law's Nambe-like metal salt and pepper shakers in 2009,  cymatics may take a while 😊

For those still reading this, here is a link to a newly revised version of Hans Jenny's opus, Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomenon and Vibration. This version includes both volumes of the original work, as well as new chapters that include a biographical sketch of Hans Jenny, a non-technical primer on the physics of cymatics, and commentaries by researchers, sound therapists, designers, and artists. Indeed, I strongly recommend perusing the entire CymaticSource website, since it is a veritable storehouse of additional information, books and videos. (I am not affiliated with this website in any way. But, having recently purchased the aforementioned reprint of Jenny's revised Cymatics volume, I can personally attest to its quality - it is a stunningly beautiful book.)

Multitudinousness Minds

"Mahamati, since the ignorant and simple-minded, not knowing that the world is only something seen of the mind itself, cling to multitudinousness of external objects, cling to the notions of being and non-being, oneness and otherness, bothness and non-bothness, existence and non-existence, eternity and non-eternity, and think that they have a self-nature of their own, all of which rises from the discriminations of the mind and is perpetuated by habit-energy, and from which they are given over to false imagination. It is all like a mirage in which springs of water are seen as if they were real. "

- Lankavatara Sutra (c.350–400 CE)