Silence Between Silence

"Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality."

- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)
Thoughts in Solitude

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.

Aoraki

Aoraki/Mount Cook, New Zealand

"When Cook-lamented, and with tears as just
As ever mingled with heroic dust,
Steer’d Britain’s oak into a world unknown,
And in his country’s glory sought his own,
Wherever he found man, to nature true,
The rights of man were sacred in his view"

- William Cowper (1731 - 1800)

Formless Void

"...your tranquil yes to the changing
over into the formless void
of the unlimited."

- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)

Element of The Inscrutable

"It has happened to me, while taking solitary walks through the woods of Baarn, that I would suddenly stop in my tracks and stand stiff as a board, overcome by a frightening, unreal and yet blissful sense of  standing eye to eye with the inexplicable. The tree there in front of me, as an object, as part of the woods, is perhaps not so amazing, but the distance, the space between it and me, suddenly seems unfathomable. He who wants to depict something nonexistent has to follow certain rules. Those rules are more or less the same one as for fairy tales. The element of the inscrutable, on which he now wants to focus attention, needs to be surrounded, to be veiled by a perfectly common everyday evidence, recognizable to all. The true-to-nature environment, acceptable to any superficial spectator, is indispensable for creating the desired shock."

- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)
The Magic of M. C. Escher

Cohered Confusion

"[It] is the peculiar gift of the truly great
detective that he can apply to the inexorable
rules of logic three catalyzers:
an abnormal observation of events, 
 knowledge of the human mind and
an insight into the human heart.
...
It is your task to cohere confusion,
to bring order out of chaos.
...
...the pattern must exist.
It’s the same story in detection:
recognize the pattern and you’re within
shooting distance of the ultimate truth."

- Ellery Queen
a.k.a., Frederic Dannay (1905–1982)
and Manfred B. Lee (1905–1971)

Note. I have written before about the meta-pattern that describes the pattern of how I search-for/discover photographic compositions while on travel (e.g., see my short essay, Fox-like Hedgehogian Photography, that describes my experience in Iceland). The first few days in any new place (or old place, newly revisited) are inevitably filled with excitement, awe, and an Ansel-Adams-esque drive to capture Wagnerian-epic landscapes in all their glory. My wife's and my recent trip to New Zealand certainly matched this pattern; and how could it not with truly otherworldly vistas such as Milford Sound! But, predictably, after a relatively few days of rapid-fire "Ooooh" and "Aaahhh!" shots, my eye/I reverted back to its typically quieter less dramatically Wagnerian reflective state to find the sorts of images I love best - i.e., those that are obviously grounded in places I visit, but which may have been taken anywhere - intimate patterns that catch my attention not because they scream "Capture me to show others before the light goes bad!", but because they mirror something looking through the lens, a thought, a memory, a feeling, whatever. My favorite images (however humble and possibly "uninteresting" they may be to others) are those that lift the veil between inner and outer realities. The very best are fragments of mystical experiences. To be sure, the image above is certainly not in that last category. But it is a typically Andy-esque post-first-travel-week intimate composition grounded on "seeing" an inner pattern depicted externally. In this case, a self-organized "Q" that remined me of Ellery Queen's signature letter that adorned the covers of his early mystery books. I wonder, would I have even "seen" this intimate landscape (captured in New Zealand, but not an image of New Zealand, per se) had I not spent the better part of my teen years devouring early Ellery Queen mystery novels?

Whispering Trees

"I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them.

...

The forest is queer.
 Everything in it is very much more alive,
more aware of what is going on.

...

In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon, but loved best the stars; and they wandered in the great forests that grew tall in lands that are now lost. They dwelt most often by the edges of the woods, from which they could escape at times to hunt, or to ride and run over the open lands by moonlight or starlight; and after the coming of Men they took ever more and more to the gloaming and the dusk. Still elves they were and remain, and that is Good People."

- J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)

The One "Before Whom Words Recoil"

"The purpose of all words is to illustrate the meaning of an object. When they are heard, they should enable the hearer to understand this meaning, and this according to the four categories of substance, of activity, of quality and of relationship. For example cow and horse belong to the category of substance. He cooks or he prays belongs to the category of activity. White and black belong to the category of quality. Having money or possessing cows belongs to the category of relationship. Now there is no class of substance to which the Brahman belongs, no common genus. It cannot therefore be denoted by words which, like 'being' in the ordinary sense, signify a category of things. Nor can it be denoted by quality, for it is without qualities; nor yet by activity because it is without activity—'at rest, without parts or activity,' according to the Scriptures. Neither can it be denoted by relationship, for it is 'without a second' and is not the object of anything but its own self. Therefore it cannot be defined by word or idea; as the Scripture says, it is the One 'before whom words recoil.'"

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)
The Perennial Philosophy

A Light From the Shadows Shall Spring

"All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king."

- J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)
The Lord of the Rings

Hungry Beeches

 

"Why is the world full of color anyway? Sunlight is white, and when it is reflected, it is still white. And so we should be surrounded by a clinical looking, optically pure landscape. That this is not what we see is because every material absorbs light differently or converts it into other kinds of radiation. Only the wavelengths that remain are refracted and reach our eyes. Therefore, the color of organisms and objects is dictated by the color of the reflected light. And in the case of leaves on trees, this color is green.

But why don't we see leaves as black? Why don't they absorb all light? Chlorophyll helps leaves process light. If trees processed light super-efficiently, there would be hardly any left over-and the forest would then look as dark during the day as it does at night. Chlorophyll, however, has one disadvantage. It has a so-called green gap, and because it cannot use this part of the color spectrum, it has to reflect it back unused. This weak spot means that we can see this photosynthetic leftover, and that's why almost all plants look deep green to us. What we are really seeing is waste light, the rejected part that trees cannot use. Beautiful for us; useless for the trees. Nature that we find pleasing because it reflects trash? Whether trees feel the same way about this I don't know, but one thing is for certain: hungry beeches and spruce are as happy to see blue sky as I am."

- Peter Wohlleben (1964 - )
The Hidden Life of Trees

Reality is Not Symbols

"If you want to know what reality is, you must look directly at it and see for yourself. But this needs a certain kind of concentration, because reality is not symbols, it is not words and thoughts, it is not reflections and fantasies. Therefore to see it clearly, your mind must be free from wandering words and from the floating fantasies of memory."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Land of Mordor

"And as the captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell."

- J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)
The Return of the King

Intimate Landscapes

"Though it is generally accepted that abstract art refers to those works inspired by the imagination of the artist rather than by objective reality, in photography, in which images are produced by the lens, this distinction is difficult to sustain. In the broadest sense of the term, an optical image is an abstraction from the natural world-a selected and isolated fragment of what stands before the camera. When the selected image is self-explanatory and does not imply more than what lies within its area it is usually referred to as abstract, that is, independent of its surroundings-a pattern of rock, for example, or lichens, or grasses. On the other hand, in the wider scenic view common in most landscape photography, the selected image implies a world outside the limits encompassed by the lens."

- Eliot Porter (1901 - 1990)
Intimate Landscapes

New Zealand Light #2

 "The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
-Version 1-
...
The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
-Version 2-"

-  J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)
"The Walking Song," The Lord of the Rings

Notes. Version 1 of the "The Walking Song" is "sung by Bilbo when he leaves the Shire and is setting off to visit Rivendell." Version 2 is "spoken by Bilbo in Rivendell after the hobbits have returned from their journey. Bilbo is now an old, sleepy hobbit, who murmurs the verse and then falls asleep." [Ref]

New Zealand Light #1

"We are all constantly in the midst of light. We are surrounded, bathed, and nourished by it. This miracle we call light can transform. It can teach, reveal, evoke, and heal. It speaks in many voices. We tend to see light as something that makes form visible, but light reveals much more. It reveals us. In the subtle, soft undulations of a snowscape illuminated by an overcast sky, in the raw presence of a backlighted, towering, ancient oak, both subject and photographer are revealed. Light makes visible the invisible. It can show us love where there seems to be only a rotting log or a solitary rock perched on a ledge. Sometimes the subject is illuminated by light, sometimes the subject is illumination itself. Then the subject itself glows; there are no shadows."

- John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)
Making Love With Light

New Zealand Zen #3

"Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet...
Every step makes a flower bloom.
...
When a leaf falls from a tree,
when a river flows to the sea,
when a bee flits from flower to flower,
it happens without "action" or "doing."
Nature is simply being.
In the same way,
human beings should simply be.
...
... when we look out at the world,
we are nature gazing upon itself."

- Philip Toshio Sudo (1959 - 2002)
Zen 24/7: All Zen, All the Time