Friday, September 03, 2021
Forging One's Own Path
Thursday, September 02, 2021
Delusion of Separateness
whole called by us a universe,
a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself,
his thoughts and his feelings,
as something separate
from the rest, a kind
of optical delusion
of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind
of prison for us;
it restricts us to our
personal decisions and
our affections to a few
persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free
ourselves from this prison by
widening our circle of
compassion to embrace
all living creatures and
the whole of nature of
its beauty."
- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
Wednesday, September 01, 2021
Three Quarks for Muster Mark
- Murray Gell-Mann (1929 - 2019)
The Quark and the Jaguar
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Similarity of Form
of understanding and pays
no regard to similarity of form.
The world in general is attracted
by similarity of form,
but remains indifferent to
similarity of understanding."
- Lie Yukou (c.400 BCE)
Monday, August 30, 2021
Divine Spark
- Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890)
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Sunday, August 29, 2021
Transparent as a Dragonfly
- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)
Saturday, August 28, 2021
The Heavenly Gate
- Chuang Tzu (c.369 B.C. - c.286 B.C.)
Thursday, August 26, 2021
Conceptualizing Elephants
and the detail so precise and exquisite
that wherever you are you are isolated
in a glowing world between
the macro and the micro."
- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
Turning Matter into Spirit
- Nikos Kazantzakis (1883 - 1957)
Zorba the Greek
Tuesday, August 24, 2021
Sliding Down Earth's Spacetime Curve
"The air around you is filled with floating atoms, sliding down the Earth's spacetime curve. Atoms first assembled in the cores of long-dead stars. Atoms within you, everywhere, disintegrating in radioactive decays. Beneath your feet, the floor - whose electrons refuse to let yours pass, thus making you able to stand and walk and run. Earth, your planet, a lump of matter made out of the three quantum fields known to mankind, held together by gravity, the so-called fourth force (even though it isn't a force), floating within and through spacetime."
- Christophe Galfard (1976 - )
The Universe in Your Hand
Postscript. This height of this lovely waterfall - Rocky Brooks Falls near Dosewallips State Park, WA - is hard to judge from the picture alone, but it is among the Olympic Peninsula's tallest at about 230 ft! Rocky Brooks falls is also embarrassingly easy to get to: a short 4 mile journey by car on a paved road from the main highway that runs up the Hood Canal, and then (the truly embarrassingly easy part) a 200 yard (!) hike - though "hike" is not the best word: you'll hardly have time to take more than a few breaths before coming to the falls, and can keep the munchies and extra water back at the car. Well, maybe that last part is a bit premature... the falls are so extraordinary to experience in person - the sound, the smell, the subtle mist, the surrounding bird song, and the gentle burbling stream that both greets each expectant visitor and says farewell - that one is well advised to anticipate a longer-than-casual-length stay. Over the course of my family's two weeks on the Peninsula, I took four trips to this falls - the shortest of which lasted no less than 3 hours - and each time spent far more time just sitting and communing with its tender rhythms than prowling around with tripod and camera looking for compositions. A reminder that there are special places that - with "good motivation and appropriate merit" (ref: a blog entry I posted about a week ago) - palpably compel you to stop whatever you're doing and just ... be.
Monday, August 23, 2021
An Element of Absolute Chance
- Charles Saunders Peirce (1839 - 1914)
The Monist (1890-1893), quoted in Truth, Rationality, and
Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce by Christopher Hookway
Sunday, August 22, 2021
Forms and Shapes
changed a great deal relative to the ancient one,
the two have had one key feature in common:
i.e. they are both generally ‘blinkered’ by
the notion that theories give true knowledge
about ‘reality as it is’. Thus, both are led to
confuse the forms and shapes induced in
our perceptions by theoretical insight with
a reality independent of our thought
and our way of looking."
- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Wholeness and the Implicate Order
Saturday, August 21, 2021
Energy of Thought and Matter
- Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926 - 2016)
The Crack in the Cosmic Egg
Thursday, August 19, 2021
Chrono-Synclastic Infundibula
- Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - 2007)
The Sirens of Titan
Postscript. Do you see a "dog" in the image above? The photo is a rather straightforward shot of a stain on a piece of driftwood captured at the appropriately named "Driftwood Park," just down the road from the Coupeville Ferry Terminal on Whidbey Island, WA. My brain's strange lifelong affliction of conjuring associated memories of stories and books whenever an abstract image presents itself to my camera's viewfinder (the phantasmagoric mystical visions of Borges are a particular favorite of mine, as kind followers of my blog well know!) was in full force when this "dog-like stain" (or, more precisely, this "dog-like stain caught in an energy field") caught my attention. Why, that's "Kazak-the-dog running into the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibula!" I thought to myself, as I clicked the shutter with a smile (well, I almost remembered it correctly; I had to look up the reference later - but my brain got the gist). I'm not sure that this association - now that I've confessed it - makes the image any better (it's a very simple abstract), but I'll bet you can't now see anything else except "Kazak-the-dog running into the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibula!" :)
Sunday, August 15, 2021
Oysters, Beyuls, and Palimpsests
and powerless to penetrate beyond her.
I have written before of viewing old subjects with new eyes (that summarizes how a Kauai I thought I knew well after multiple visits that began in the early 1980s, gradually revealed new truths about herself, but only after I changed my own way of "looking"), but never before have I experienced this as deeply as I did on the most recent trip my family and I took to the Pacific Northwest; specifically, the eastern part of the Olympic Peninsula that opens into the Hood Canal. As on myriad past trips, my reading material played an unexpected but vital part in steering my eye/I toward specific elements of the physical environment. In Scotland, I was "accompanied" by a biographies of William James (in 2009) and of Jon Schueler (2016), and both shaped the photography I did on those trips; likewise, in Kauai (in 2014), my compositions arose in part from a book about the island's history that I was immersed in on that trip; and the same in Alaska (in 2018), when a book on Alaska's history gently fueled my imagery. On our first trip to the Northwest (in 2019), I was reading histories and biographies of 19th century Western/U.S. photographers (William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins), and my photographs from that trip tended toward the Ansel-Adams-ish "epic" macro landscapes. But, on this most recent trip, my lens was almost always trained on far quieter and subtler kinds of micro-landscapes.
To be sure, part of the reason was the weather. While July's "heat dome" (that descended over much of the Pacific northwest) had dissipated by the time we arrived, it had not gone entirely, and the area was blanketed in unseasonably high temperatures and perfectly clear skies (i.e., far from ideal conditions for landscape photography). Luckily, the book I chose to accompany me on this trip provided both solace (from the physical conditions) and nourishment (of a spiritual kind), that together compelled me to view an old subject with astonishingly new eyes.
The book is called The Heart of the World, one of seven that Ian Baker has written on Himalayan and Tibetan cultural history, environment, art, and medicine. This particular book - written in 2004, and one of the very best adventure/spiritual-quests I have ever read (!) - is ostensibly about finding a fabled colossal waterfall deep within an unexplored part of Tibet’s Tsangpo gorges in the Himalayas (Baker has subsequently been honored by the National Geographic Society as one of six ‘Explorers for the Millennium’ for the ethnographic and geographical research he was a part during his quest to find this waterfall), but is really an extraordinary (and extraordinarily spiritual) account of how one's state-of-mind/reality determines access to Beyul, or "hidden lands where the essence of the Buddhist Tantras is said to be preserved."
Writing of Beyul, the Dalai Lama asserts in the book's introduction, that "...such sacred environments ... are not places to escape the world, but to enter in more deeply. The qualities inherent in such places reveal the interconnectedness of all life and deepen awareness of hidden regions of the mind and spirit. Visiting such places with a good motivation and appropriate merit, the pilgrim can learn to see the world differently from the way it commonly appears..."
While in the Pacific northwest, I read small bits of The Heart of the World each day, cherishing and relishing it's quiet insights and deep wisdom before drifting off to sleep, and anticipating the next day's activities. The result was that my attention was drawn far less to "Wagnerian epic"-like vistas, and more (so much more!) to the timeless essence of place - such as the Oyster-shells seen in the triptych above. Why Oysters? For one thing, our Airnb rental was close to the Hamma Hamma oyster saloon near Lillywaup, WA; so - given the "non photographer's weather" - my wife and I wound up having a lot of time to kill during the day enjoying local quisine. For another - in dreams at least - oysters are associated with quiet meditation and “going within." And, since like palimpsests, oysters record both time and events, their ubiquity in Lillywaup (heck throughout the Hood canal) entwined with my nightly excursions into Tibetan Beyuls. Oysters became my own palimpsests of spiritual and aesthetic journeys, both real and imagined. I was utterly mesmerized by their siren call; the elegance of their form, and the numinous quality of their decaying shells. And on those rare occasions when I was lucky enough to have particularly "good motivation and appropriate merit" - such as when I chanced upon a small deserted beach strewn with oyster shells - the results were pure magic! I caught brief glimpses of the preternatural luminescence that permeates an ineffable Beyul-of-the-mind.
For those of you interested in viewing a few more examples of what I'm tentatively calling "Numinous Palimpsests," I have posted a small portfolio on my main website.
Wednesday, July 14, 2021
A Mere Hint of Outer Meaning
- Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)
Postscript. My apologies to subscribers who expect - rightfully - to receive an image, quote, and/or other musings on a regular basis! Due to the inevitable vagaries of "day job" responsibilities, it has been difficult to find time to re-acquaint myself with my camera ... so, please be patient, as I'll likely be "offline" for the next few weeks as well 😞 In the meantime, the lone image(s) I've managed to expose in well over a month, and arranged in triptych form above, provide a bit of solace. They are each (almost) undisturbed patterns I found under my feet as I was reading a research paper in my mother-in-law's garden in Florida. Followers of my blog may recall that I had - up until the age of 10 (i.e., 50 years ago!) - the most common form of synesthesia (a "crossing of the senses"), wherein I "saw" even numbers as "warm tones," and odd numbers as "cold" tones. But I also have a vestigial remnant of perceiving certain patterns as sound. It has never been as pronounced as my memory of the "visual/number - color" crossing, but it has been with me throughout my life. However, never have I had as intense a synesthetic experience as I did in mother-in-law's garden when eyes/brain glanced at the arrangement you see up above. I literally hear jazz-like music as I look at them. The Kandinsky quote appears of necessity in this context, since he was an acknowledged synesthete (and whose abstracts the natural “random” assemblies shown above remind me so much of!). For those of you who want a quick and fun read about what is currently known about synesthesia, a good place to start is a non-technical discussion by one of synesthesia's pioneer researchers, Richard Cytowic.
Friday, May 28, 2021
Universe as a Whole
- Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)
Summa technologiae
Thursday, May 20, 2021
Withered But Still Strong
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
The crownless again shall be king."
- J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)
The Fellowship of the Ring
Monday, May 17, 2021
And He Built a Crooked House
- Robert A. Heinlein (1907 - 1988)
And He Built a Crooked House
Sunday, May 16, 2021
A Borgesian Window
- Maria Kodama (1937 - )
Mr. Borges’s Garden
Saturday, May 15, 2021
A Mere Door
becomes in the world of
the spirit when an object,
a mere door, can give
images of hesitation, temptation,
desire, security, welcome
and respect. If one
were to give an account
of all the doors one has
closed and opened,
of all the doors one
would like to re-open,
one would have to tell the
story of one's entire life."
- Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962)
The Poetics of Space
Friday, May 14, 2021
Entropic Melodies
- Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882 - 1944)
Postscript. One of the first major publications that some of my work was featured in was Black & White magazine, way back in issue #41 (Feb 2006). The images were from what I called my "entropic melody" series. But the "melody" part applies equally to the images (as in "living melodies of otherwise visibly decaying parts") as it does to the - still ongoing - process of creating them (on a vastly different space and time scale). Though I like to think of my "synesthetic landscape" series as my longest "in progress" portfolio, the truth is that - having started "only" in 2009 - it takes a back seat to something I believe I'll never tire of: finding "life" in lifelessness. And so, on a recent "long weekend" vacation with my wife and youngest son (also a photographer), and armed with this spur-of-the-moment self-reflection, I found my eye and lens trained not (entirely) on the natural beauty in the West Jefferson area of North Carolina (of which there is plenty to be had, to be sure!), but rather on the regions' splendors of human-created and now neglected decaying beauty. Looking over the 30 or so "keeper shots" I returned home with, no less than 25 of them are of nothing but "withered but beautifully decrepit" sentinels - and occasional palimpsests - of times past. And, for the photographer, a glimpse of a longer-term "melody" playing out in an always evolving aesthetic landscape. I will be featuring a few of my favorites from this short-much-too-short trip in the coming days.
Thursday, April 29, 2021
Patterns
- Oliver Sacks (1933 - 2015)
Postscript #1. The triptych consists of images I captured one day last summer after my wife parked her car in a garage near a local farmer's market. I was mesmerized by the "organized cacophony" of shimmering reflections off other car's hoods and hubcaps that arranged - and revealed - themselves to anyone interested in looking. Though I lamented not having my "real" camera, I was happy to have my iPhone to capture this lovely visual feast! Yet another gentle reminder that we must always be on alert to the universe's ceaseless wonders. And, though I rarely talk about the "nuts-and-bolts of photography on my blog (and much prefer posting images and musings than highlighting what f-stop I used), here's a small - hopefully useful - foray into the "nuts-and-bolts" department: to better prepare for unpredictable contingencies (i.e., for when I'm out and about without my usual shoulder and/or back-breaking warehouse-in-a-bag assortment of cameras, lenses, and filters), I recently purchased a tiny - almost babyish-looking - camera; albeit one that is fully functioning! Since it is designed to fit in even a child's pocket (!), I've resolved to always have it on my person when leaving the house for any reason. For those of you curious, it's Canon's G1X Mark III, which is best described as an ultra-miniaturized mirrorless version of their (older) 80D DSLR. While its fixed-lens is neither particularly bright nor sharp, the sensor is effectively the same one used on the 80D; yep, an APS-C sensor in a body that fits inside a shirt pocket! You can check out a review here. So far, I'm loving it, though have yet to post any pictures captured by it. But I suspect that'll soon change :)
Postscript #2. For those of you saddened by not having Oliver Sacks' sage wisdom around anymore (though his books forever enshrine his genius), there is a wonderful new biography available, called Oliver Sacks: His Own Life. Highly recommended!
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
The Awe of a Flower
- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
The Beauty of the Flower
Tuesday, April 27, 2021
Cognition
- Donald A. Norman (1985 - )
The Design of Everyday Things
Postscript. The triptych consists of "iPhone snapshots" of staircases (OK, not quite head-on views of staircases) inside the office building I used to go before the pandemic hit. They were taken in 2017.
Monday, April 26, 2021
Focal Points
- Bernardo Kastrup
Dreamed Up Reality
Postscript. As I alluded to a few blog posts ago, owing to this will-it-ever-end-pandemic, my photo-safari opportunities are - as for most of you - few-and-far-between. Thus, quality "photography time" nowadays amounts to either immersing myself in an unfathomably deep gorge of unprocessed raw files or looking to make this gorge even more unfathomably deep by saving an endless stream of impromptu "experiments" with light and form in my home studio (i.e., my day-job work desk after I clear it of my day-job notes and scribbles). The diptych above (as well as the one from yesterday) combines these two practices; i.e., they are "experiments in abstraction" captured a few years ago with my iPhone. Yesterday's images are of two ceilings, one in a local grocery store, the other at a local department of motor vehicles (where I sat, bored, one day in 2017, while waiting for one of my sons to test for his driver's permit). Today's images come courtesy of a local mall. There is appreciable comfort (from my otherwise omnipresent angst over few-and-far-between photo opportunities) in knowing that there are always wonders to be discovered, even if such "discoveries" are of discoveries made long ago!
Sunday, April 25, 2021
Geometry and Space
- Bernhard Riemann (1826 - 1866)
Saturday, April 24, 2021
Other Worlds
and would even change the course of events not only on
earth, but in other worlds?” I asked my teacher.
“There is,” my teacher answered me.
“Well, what is it?” I asked.
“It’s...” began my teacher and suddenly fell silent.
But he was silent.
And I stood and was silent.
And he was silent.
And I stood, silent.
And he was silent.
We’re both standing and silent.
Ho-la-la!
We’re both standing and silent.
Ho-le-le!
standing and silent!"
- Daniil Kharms (1905 - 1942)
Postscript. Daniil Kharms is one of my all-time favorite authors of the "absurd." The best, purest form of absurdist literature - such as its uniquely Russian incarnation (called the Oberiu) in the 1920s and 1930s, which included such luminaries as Alexander Vvedensky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, and Konstantin Vaginov - shares much with its spiritual cousin, the Zen koan. Its twists of logic, humor, and hallucinatory distortions of babble and reality often - unexpectedly - point to the deepest truths. For those of you who share my affection for these kinds of inner journeys of discovery, a great place to start is with this collection of Kharms' writings: Today I Wrote Nothing, from which the following passage is quoted (from the story, “The Werld”):
"I told myself that I see the world. But the whole world was not accessible to my gaze, and I saw only parts of the world. And everything that I saw I called parts of the world. And I examined the properties of these parts and, examining these properties, I wrought science. I understood that the parts have intelligent properties and that the same parts have unintelligent properties. And there were such parts of the world which could think. And all these parts resembled one another, and I resembled them. And I spoke with these parts. And suddenly I ceased seeing them and, soon after, other parts as well. But then I understood that I do not see parts independently, but I see it all at once. At first I thought that is was NOTHING. But then I understood that this was the world and what I had seen before was NOT the world.
And then I realized
I am the world.
But the world - is not me.
Although at the same time
I am the world.
But the world's not me.
And I'm the world.
But the world's not me.
And I'm the world.
But the world's not me.
And I'm the world.
And after that
I didn't think anymore more."
Friday, April 23, 2021
Abide in Quietude
- The Mahavagga of the Vinya Pitaka,
The Buddha: His Life, His Doctrine, His Order,
by Herman Oldenberg (1854 - 1920)
Thursday, April 22, 2021
Secret from the River
secret from the river;
that there is no such thing as time?
That the river is everywhere at the same time,
at the source and at the mouth,
at the waterfall, at the ferry,
at the current, in the ocean and
in the mountains, everywhere and that
the present only exists for it,
not the shadow of the past
nor the shadow of the future."
- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
Siddhartha
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Continuous Cloth
big continuous cloth, no?
We habitually cut out
pieces of time to fit us,
so we tend to fool ourselves
into thinking that
time is our size,
but it really goes
on and on."
- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )
A Wild Sheep Chase
Sunday, April 18, 2021
Light of Skye
The mind, the Music breathing from her face,
The heart whose softness harmonised the whole —
And, oh! that eye was in itself a Soul!"
- Lord Byron (1788 - 1824)
Postscript. As photo-safari opportunities have dwindled (and though I do have a growing backlog of house-studio-facilitated abstracts to work on, as time permits), much of my "photo time" nowadays consists of discovering and reworking old images. This one is from the summer of 2009, captured during the first trip my wife and I took to Scotland; specifically, South Ronaldsay, one of the preternaturally beautiful Orkney Islands off Scotland's northeastern coast. The light there, as in all of Scotland, is not entirely of this world!
Thursday, April 08, 2021
Centering
- Dag Hammarskjöld (1905 - 1961)
Markings
Monday, April 05, 2021
Living Mirror
accommodation of all
created things to each other,
and each to all the others,
brings it about that each
simple substance has relations
that express all the others,
and consequently, that
each simple substance
is a perpetual,
living mirror of
the universe."
- G.W. Leibniz (1646 - 1716)
Monadology
Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Waves
that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing."
- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
Vibrant Hum
Monday, March 29, 2021
Subterranean Stream
- Marguerite Yourcenar (1903 - 1987)
Memoirs of Hadrian
Saturday, March 27, 2021
Vibrations
the dimensions of interconnectedness
are without end.
There is nothing independent.
All beings and things are
residents in your awareness."
Thursday, March 25, 2021
Virtual Delights
- Greg Egan (1961 - )
Permutation City
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
An Immense Landscape
of the sciences as an
immense landscape scattered
with patches of dark and light.
The goal towards which
we must work is either to
extend the boundaries of
the patches of light, or
to increase their number.
One of these tasks falls
to the creative genius;
the other requires a
sort of sagacity
combined with
perfectionism."
- Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784)
Thoughts on the Interpretation of
Nature and Other Philosophical Works
Monday, March 22, 2021
Stirrings of the Soul
- Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)