A Pattern or Dance

"Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.

Perhaps one of the reasons for this silence is that you have to know how to read music. For instance, the scientific article may say, “The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-half in a period of two weeks.” Now what does that mean?

It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat—and also in mine, and yours—is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away.

So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week’s potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago—a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out—there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday."

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Imagination Itself

"The tree which moves some
to tears of joy is in the eyes
of others only a green thing
that stands in the way. Some see
nature all ridicule and deformity...
and some scarce see nature at all. But
to the eyes of the man of imagination,
nature is imagination itself."

- William Blake (1757 - 1827)

Terra Mobilis

"Through the spectacles of geology, terra firms becomes terra mobilis, and we are forced to reconsider our beliefs of what is solid and what is not. Although we attribute to stone great power to hold back time, to refuse its claims (cairns, stone tablets, monuments, statuary), this is true only in relation to our own mutability. Looked at in the context of the bigger geological picture, rock is as vulnerable to change as any other substance.

Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time' - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body."

- Robert Macfarlane (1976 - )

Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

Light is a Thick Yellow Vitamin

"In the rain forest, no niche lies unused. No emptiness goes unfilled. No gasp of sunlight goes untrapped. In a million vest pockets, a million life-forms quietly tick. No other place on earth feels so lush. Sometimes we picture it as an echo of the original Garden of Eden—a realm ancient, serene, and fertile, where pythons slither and jaguars lope. But it is mainly a world of cunning and savage trees. Truant plants will not survive. The meek inherit nothing. Light is a thick yellow vitamin they would kill for, and they do. One of the first truths one learns in the rain forest is that there is nothing fainthearted or wimpy about plants."

- Diane Ackerman (1948 - )

The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds

The World as a Neural Network

"If the entire universe is a neural network, then something like natural selection might be happening on all scales from cosmological (> 10⁺¹⁵ m) and biological (10⁺² − 10−⁶ m) all the way to subatomic (< 10−¹⁵ m) scales. The main idea is that some local structures (or architectures) of neural networks are more stable against external perturbations (i.e. interactions with the rest of the network) than other local structures. As a result the more stable structures are more likely to survive and the less stable structures are more likely to be exterminated. There is no reason to expect that this process might stop at a fixed time or might be confined to a fixed scale and so the evolution must continue indefinitely and on all scales. We have already seen that on the smallest scales the learning evolution is likely to produce structures of a very low complexity (i.e. second law of learning) such as one dimensional chains of neurons, but this might just be the beginning. As the learning progresses these chains can chop off loops, form junctions and according to natural selection the more stable structures would survive. If correct, then what we now call atoms and particles might actually be the outcomes of a long evolution starting from some very low complexity structures and what we now call macroscopic observers and biological cells might be the outcome of an even longer evolution. Of course, at present the claim that natural selection may be relevant on all scales is very speculative, but it seems that neural networks do offer an interesting new perspective on the problem of observers."

- Vitaly Vanchurin
The World as a Neural Network

Time and Space

"Because of the hazy, nondefinite character of quantum physics (called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), at the dimensions of the Planck length, space and time churn and seethe, with the distance between any two points wildly fluctuating from moment to moment, and time randomly speeding and slowing, perhaps even going backward and forward. In such a situation, time and space no longer exist in a way that has meaning to us."

- Alan Lightman (1948 - )
Probable Impossibilities

 

Symbolic Communication

"Intellectual-level communication between more advanced terrestrial [non-human intelligences] NHIs and us will require direct access to our cognitive processes. They will have to directly modulate our own abstract references and modes. In other words, they will have to convey their ideas to us by prompting our own mind to articulate those ideas to itself, using its own conceptual dictionary and grammatical structures. And because their message—a product of their own cognition, incommensurable with ours—is bound to not adequately line up with our grammar and conceptual menu, this articulation will perforce have to be symbolic, metaphorical; it will have to point to the intended meaning, as opposed to embodying the intended meaning directly, or literally. 

 

There is plenty of clinical precedence for this in the literature of depth psychology. Analytical Psychology, for instance, maintains  that the deeper, evolutionarily ancient, instinctive layer of our mind, for not having the language capabilities of the executive ego, speaks to us in dreams and visions through symbols, and metaphors. It can’t tell us in English, for instance, that time is flowing while we procrastinate, prompting us to act. So it may, instead, trigger and modulate a dream in which we, say, accidentally drop our backpack in a fast-flowing river and watch helplessly as it floats away. If the deeper layer of our mind, for being phylogenetically primitive, is incapable of articulating the conceptual abstractions ‘time,’ ‘flow,’ and ‘procrastination,’ it can still point symbolically to its intended meaning; it can still confront us with imagery that evokes the same underlying feeling—a sense of urgency—that would have been evoked by the statement, “time is flowing while you procrastinate.” This is what intellectual-level communication looks like when the interlocutors do not have commensurable cognitive structures. And this is how we may expect NHIs to communicate with us, if they have the technology required to reach directly into our minds and manipulate our cognitive inner space."

- Bernardo Kastrup (1974 - )
UAPs and Non-Human Intelligence

Cosmogenesis

"We live in a universe where the mathematical equations of the beginning are alive in us. If you altered them in any way, we wouldn’t even be here. We would never have come forth. Those conditions at the beginning of time are exactly what they had to be for us to allow the mathematics of the universe’s beginning to think inside us."

...

"Our universe had been creating itself for billions of years and suddenly, through the work of a handful of human beings, the universe found a way to reflect on itself, on how it had developed over billions of years."

...

"The greatest discovery of the last four hundred years is the time-developmental nature of our universe. Scientists have come to realize we live not in a cosmos but in a cosmogenesis, a universe developing from a primordial simple state into ever more complex states."

- Brian Thomas Swimme (1950 - )
Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

Cosmic Serpent

"All the peoples in the world who talk of a cosmic serpent have been saying as much for millennia. He had not seen it because the rational gaze is forever focalized and can examine only one thing at a time. It separates things to understand them, including the truly complementary. It is the gaze of the specialist, who sees the fine grain of a necessarily restricted field of vision."

- Jeremy Narby (1959 - )
The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge

A Borgesian Wink and a small Gift to readers of my Blog

As a small thank you to all the kind visitors of my blog - think of it as a holiday gift - please feel free to download an extended version of my "Icelandic Abstracts" portfolio that was just published in the Dec issue of Lenswork magazine (and whom I thank for allowing me to offer it as a freebie here); clicking on the triptych above will take you to a 22MB Adobe pdf file. While it is always a thrill to be published in Lenswork (that belongs at the top of any list of the best "pure photography" magazines in the world; camera gear is only occasionally mentioned, and when it is, only to support the "story" behind the visual narrative; there are also no ads -ever- except those for Lenswork itself), it is a double pleasure for me this go around since my "Icelandic Abstracts" appears in the same issue as a portfolio by Sean Kernan. 

Although I do not know Kernan, I have long admired his talents as a photographer. And, devotees of my blog all know of my fascination with Jorge Luis Borges. The fact that Kernan's and my portfolio appear side-by-side in this month's Lenswork is therefore (from my perspective, at least) a quintessentially Borgesian twist of fate: Kernan's book of photographs accompanying Borges' tales - The Secret Books (published in 1999 and long out of print, it is unfortunately prohibitively expensive if/when found) - is among my most cherished literary/photography possessions! I'd like to think that (again, purely from my perspective, certainly not Kernan's) some otherworldly incorporeal incarnation of Borges just gave me a Borgesian wink 😉

Complexity

"Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. "

- Murray Gell-Mann (1929 - 2019)

Full of Fire

"When primitive man gained control over fire, it was a great step. However, the Universe is full of fire; consider the stars. Because we can think, and nothing else on our planet seems to be able to do so, it is natural for us to hold our intellectual prowess in great esteem. However, it may be that information processing, instead of being the sole province of us humans and our machines, may be a part of almost everything else in physics. Life itself, is clearly mediated by digital information; the genetic code. Digital Mechanics assumes that physics is also a process based on informational processes. We may need to rid ourselves of the prejudice that purposeful, thought related action is exclusively the domain of humans or perhaps aliens similar to humans. There are kinds of thinking that are qualitatively unimaginable to us though we can think about it quantitatively. We should not be afraid to consider intellectual activity as the driving force behind the creation of the Universe. By a close and quantitative examination of the possible parameters of Digital Mechanics, we can arrive at reasonable guesses as to what might be the purpose behind the creation of a universe like ours. That, in turn, can lead us towards intelligent speculations about Other, the space that contains the engine of our world."

- Edward Fredkin (1934 - 2023)
A New Cosmogony

Be Still With Yourself

"When you approach something to photograph it,
first be still with yourself until the object
of your attention affirms your presence.
Then don't leave until you have
captured its essence."

- Minor White (1908 - 1976)

Lily Math

"Philosophy is written in this all-encompassing book that is constantly open to our eyes, that is the universe; but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to understand the language and knows the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures; without these it is humanly impossible to understand a word of it, and one wanders in a dark labyrinth."

- Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)
Il Saggiatore

Orderly Action Within the Whole

"One must then go on to
a consideration of time as a
projection of multidimensional
reality into a sequence of moments.

...

Thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different.

...

Man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Illimitable Spirit

"My religion consists of a humble
admiration of the illimitable superior
spirit who reveals himself in the
slight details we are able to perceive
with our frail and feeble mind."

- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

"Blessed be you, mighty matter,

irresistible march of evolution,

reality ever newborn; you who,
by constantly shattering our
mental categories, force us to go
ever further and further
in our pursuit of the truth."

- Teilhard De Chardin (1881- 1955)

"What matters most:
What he had yearned to embrace
was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark,
the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
Wind, Sand and Stars."

- Richard Bach (1936 - )

Walls of the Worlds

"At least nine-tenths of all the original reality ever created lies outside the multiverse, and since the multiverse by definition includes absolutely everything that is anything, this puts a bit of a strain on things. Outside the boundaries of the universe lie the raw realities, the could-have-beens, the might-bes, the never-weres, the wild ideas, all being created and uncreated chaotically like elements in fermenting supernovas. Just occasionally where the walls of the worlds have worn a bit thin, they can leak in."

- Terry Pratchett (1948 - 2015)

Moving Pictures

Disorder to Order

"And here the fundamental dilemma appeared. The grim picture of cosmic evolution painted by the physicists—an engine that is slowly running down and grinding to a halt—was in sharp contrast to the evolutionary thinking of the biologists, who observed that the living universe evolves from disorder to order, toward states of ever increasing complexity. At the end of the 19th century, then, Newtonian mechanics, the science of eternal, reversible trajectories, had been supplemented by two diametrically opposed views of evolutionary change—that of a living world unfolding toward increasing order and complexity, and that of an engine running down, a world of ever increasing disorder. Who was right, the physicists or the biologists?"

- Fritjof Capra (1939 - )
Patterns of Connection

It’s a Visual World

Leonora Carrington (asked if there had been other artists in the family): My mother used to paint biscuit tins for jumble sales. That’s the only art that went on in my household.

Interviewer: I wonder where it came from?

Leonora Carrington: I have no idea.

Interviewer: No other artists in our family? None at all?

Leonora Carrington: Why are you fixed on the idea of heredity? It’s not hereditary … comes from somewhere else, not from genes. You’re trying to intellectualize something desperately, and you’re wasting your time. That’s not a way of understanding, to make a kind of intellectual mini-logic. You never understand by that road.

Interviewer: What do you think you do understand by then?

Leonora Carrington: By your own feelings about things …if you see a painting that you like… canvas is an empty space.

Interviewer: If I got one of your pictures down from upstairs and said to you what were you thinking when you painted this…?

Leonora Carrington: No. It’s a visual world, you want to turn things into a kind of intellectual game, it’s not… the visual world, it’s totally different. Remember what I’ve just said now, don’t try and turn it into a …kind of intellectual game. It’s not… It’s a visual world, which is different. The visual world is to do with what we see as space, which changes all the time. How do I know to walk –that’s one concept– to this bed and around it without running into it. I’m moving in space. Or I can have a concept of it and then I can see it as an object in space…”

 - Leonora Carrington (1917 - 2011)
Don't try to intellectualize art

Note. The text above is transcribed by Hugh Blackmer, whose blog is a "must visit" for anyone even remotely interested in photography, art, philosophy, whimsical musings on life and reality, and other thoughts on subjects that language alone is inadequate to describe (Hugh covers a lot of creative ground 😊. The post from which I pilfered Hugh's interview fragment contains links to far more material on Leonora Carrington than just this one interview. Thank you, Hugh! 

Fungal States of Minds

"Fungal organisms can perceive the outer world in a way similar to what animals sense. Does that mean that they have full awareness of their environment and themselves? Is a fungus a conscious entity? In laboratory experiments we found that fungi produce patterns of electrical activity, similar to neurons. The new field of fungal consciousness is opening in front of us. Let us discuss directions of future studies. Do fungi have holistic states of mind? Do they combine/modify such states? How many fungal states of mind could be described? Do fungi create specific relational contexts? Or are they, on the contrary, not capable of having holistic states of mind, and are just following completely prefixed patterns? At which extent can we include fungi affects into such cognitive processing? Fungal chemotaxis could be part of such proto-emotional states. A deeper consciousness state allows us to understand and accept sacrificing our 'self' for higher purposes (martyrs, heroes).

...

Given the peculiarity of fungi morphology and degree of connection, we may imagine how radically different computational schemes are embedded into a fungal consciousness. For example, rather than 3-dimensional visual perception, holographic perception might be possible, considering the quasi-flat distribution of mycelia and its mechanoceptive reconstruction of moving objects (animals) at the upper boundary layer. Non-causal consciousness might arise from this specific perception framework, eventually hindering the time perception. All of these remain open questions for further investigations."

- Andy Adamatzky, et al., "Fungal States of Minds"

Morning Fog

"Space and silence are two
aspects of the same thing.
The same no-thing. They
are externalization of inner
space and inner silence,
which is stillness: the
the infinitely creative womb
 of all existence."

- Eckhart Tolle (1948 - )

Yesterday was one of those special mornings that makes photography ... heck, life! 😊 ... so wondrously special.  Anticipating a long weekend "work" day (a long technical paper I need to start writing but that I've been putting off for days), I had wanted to get a bit of extra sleep before I got started. My wife, who is well attuned to my photographer's soul - and predilections - all-too-well, woke me up early saying, "Hon, there is "heavy fog" outside, maybe you'd...?" .... I was out the door before she finished her sentence. I was so entranced by what I found at the nearby lake I raced to - a dense fog that was gently caressing the water and surrounding woods, a preternatural stillness in the air, and not another person in sight - that, initially at least, all I could do was just stand by the lakeshore, not doing - or thinking about - anything, cradling my camera with a smile on my face, soaking in the precious Zen moment. The photographs I captured in the hour or so that followed (some are shown here) are perhaps nothing special. But, "My, Oh My!" what perfect Alfred-Stieglitzian "equivalents" they all are of what I felt during my early morning sojourn around the lake that morning!

Movement of Colors

"Light in Nature creates the movement of colors."

- Robert Delaunay (1885 - 1941)

"In nature, light creates the color.
In the picture, color creates the light."

- Hans Hofmann (1880 - 1966)

The Color Nearest the Light

"[Yellow] is the color nearest the light. It appears on the slightest mitigation of light, whether by semi-transparent mediums or faint reflection from white surfaces. In prismatic experiments it extends itself alone and widely in the light space, and while the two poles remain separated from each other, before it mixes with blue to produce green it is to be seen in its utmost purity and beauty.

...

As no color can be considered as stationary, so we can very easily augment yellow into reddish by condensing or darkening it. The color increases in energy, and appears in red-yellow more powerful and splendid. All that we have said of yellow is applicable here, in a higher degree. The red-yellow gives an impression of warmth and gladness, since it represents the hue of the intenser glow of fire.

...

As pure yellow passes very easily to red-yellow, so the deepening of this last to yellow-red is not to be arrested. The agreeable, cheerful sensation which red-yellow excites increases to an intolerably powerful impression in bright yellow-red. In looking steadfastly at a perfectly yellow-red surface, the color seems actually to penetrate the organ. It produces an extreme excitement, and still acts thus when somewhat darkened."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Theory of Colours

Leaves, Color, Wholeness

"When we understand what order is,  I believe we shall better understand what matter is and then what the universe itself is ... Learning to see … wholeness … not muddled or contaminated by words and concepts, is extremely difficult, but it is possible to learn …When we see wholeness as it is, we recognize that [its] seeming parts … are merely arbitrary fragments which our minds have been directed to, because we happen to have words for them. If we open our eyes wide, and look at the scene without cognitive prejudice, we see something quite different ... geometric wholeness is not merely beautiful in itself as an accompaniment to the beautiful color. It is essential, necessary, for the release of light. Color, far from being an incidental attribute of things, is fundamental to the living structure of wholeness. Inner light is not merely a phenomenon, but the character of wholeness when it ‘melts.’"

- Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)

Manifest Form

"The harmony of the world is
made manifest in Form and Number,
and the heart and soul and all the
poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied
in the concept of mathematical beauty.

...

Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower, are so many portions of matter, and it is in obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved, moulded and confirmed... Their problems of form are in the first instance mathematical problems, their problems of growth are essentially physical problems, and the morphologist is, ipso facto, a student of physical science."

- D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 - 1948)
On Growth and Form

Observer-Centric Virtualities

"Your Universe is in consciousness. And it’s a teleological process of unfolding patterns...The totality of your digital reality is what your conscious mind implicitly or explicitly chooses to experience out of the infinite.

...

Self-causation of reality becomes apparent when a phenomenal mind, which is a web of patterns, conceives a novel pattern and perceives it. All mass-energy, space-time itself emerge from consciousness. Those are epiphenomena of consciousness.

...

Mind instantiates oneself into matter. In a mathematical sense, matter is an “in-formed” pattern of mind. Time is emergent, and so is space. If space-time is emergent, so is mass-energy. All interactions in our physical world is computed by the larger consciousness system. In short, mind is more fundamental than matter. All realities are observer-centric virtualities."

- Alex M. Vikoulov, Theology of Digital Physics

The Total Perspective Vortex

"The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

...

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable."

- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

The Direction of Time

"There is no logical necessity for the existence of a unique direction of total time; whether there is only one time direction, or whether time directions alternate, depends on the shape of the entropy curve plotted by the universe."

- Hans Reichenbach (1891 - 1953)
The Direction of Time

Visual Echoes

"The goal of life is to
make your heartbeat match
the beat of the universe, to
match your nature with Nature."

- Joseph Campbell (1904 - 1987)

Mysterious and Unexplorable

"Every blade in the field -
Every leaf in the forest -
lays down its life in its season
as beautifully as it was taken up.

...

Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another. The oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mould, which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest. The pine leaves a sandy and sterile soil, the harder woods a strong and fruitful mould. So this constant abrasion and decay makes the soil of my future growth. As I live now so shall I reap. If I grow pines and birches, my virgin mould will not sustain the oak; but pines and birches, or, perchance, weeds and brambles, will constitute my second growth.

...

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Photographing Reality

"The line between the reality
that is photographed because it
seems beautiful to us and the reality
that seems beautiful because it
has been photographed is very narrow.

...

You only have to start saying of something 'Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!' and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore in order really to live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second, to madness."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

"The Adventure of a Photographer"

Flying Leaves of Autumn

"Autumn leaves don't fall, they fly.
They take their time and wander
on this their only chance to soar."

- Delia Owens (1949 - )
Where the Crawdads Sing

Perception of Autumn Color

"Every perception of color is an illusion,
we do not see colors as they really are.
In our perception they alter one another. "

- Joseph Albers (1888 - 1976)

Among the countless "rules" (or, more precisely, "rules of thumb") of photography, there are these three gems: (1) just because some "thing" or "place" is beautiful does not mean that it can be captured in a photograph; (2) how "good" a photograph is (whether judged by the photographer or viewer) has little or no correlation with how "hard" it was to get it; and - my personal favorite (and main focus of this short blog post; although all three apply) - (3) capturing "autumn colors" is among the hardest "simplest" things to do as a photographer. 

I admit that #3 may not be at the top of most photographer's list of "rules to learn to forget" - I mean, how hard can it be to take a picture of fall colors?!? Point and shoot, right? - but it is near the top of mine! Indeed, combining #3 with #1, I have always simultaneously both looked forward to and dreaded the "peak color" weeks of autumn. I, like most everyone else, find autumn colors (particularly those in my northern Virginia neighborhood) stunningly beautiful. Yet, I have also always found it particularly difficult to capture the beauty of fall colors with my camera. Taking it "all in" with a panorama certainly makes a colorful photo, but is hardly a step beyond the "cliche" shot. On the other hand, while artfully focusing in on a colorful tree or leaf might result in a credible "fine art" print, this is also just as likely to fall far short of expressing the "Wow!" one feels while entranced by the preternatural sun strewn colors of autumn. In my 50+ years of doing photography, I have yet to take a single image that comes close to capturing what I feel when I am surrounded by autumn colors at their best.

And so, we come to aphorism #2, and use it to contextualize the image that appears at the top of this post. This photograph was taken during a hike my wife and I took last weekend at a local park. The small but beautiful - and easily accessible - Scott Runs waterfall appears at the end of the first leg of the trail, and is visible to your left just as you turn toward the Potomac river. Indeed, most pictures of the waterfall are of this "head on" view of the falls from a vantage point near where the trail runs into the river. While I have an obligatory image captured from this position ...

... it is the image shown at the top of this post that I prefer. Why? Not because it is the better of the two (truth be told, I think this one is the superior photograph!); but simply because it required great effort on my part - with considerable help by my wife (without whom I literally could not have captured this image). To get this shot, I needed to first walk "around" a rock/sand embankment (and away from the falls), climb over some steep rocks, wade in slightly-above-knee water, climb back onto the steep rocks (while reaching over them to grab my camera and tripod that my wife was diligently holding for me), and find a position that approximated my "visualized" vantage point. In my mind, at least, and solely because of first-hand experience with the effort that was involved, I imbue the resulting image (the one that appears at the top of this page) with something "special"; for me, it is a "better image" because of what I needed to do beyond "just turning a corner and pressing the shutter." In truth? It's a toss up; whichever of the two images is "best" is - and ought to be - entirely up to the viewer. Sadly, of course, and as always, neither image captures the awe I felt as I was bedazzled by Virginia's autumn colors!

Geometry of Color

"Can't we imagine certain people having a different geometry of color than we do? That, of course, means: Can't we imagine people having color concepts other than ours? And that in turn means: Can't we imagine people who do not have our color concepts but who have concepts which are related to ours in such a way that we would also call them 'color concepts'? For here (when I consider Colors for example) there is merely an inability to bring concepts into some kind of order. We stand there like the ox in front of the newly painted stall door."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951)
Remarks on Color

"Song for Autumn"

"Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for
the birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way."

- Mary Oliver (1935 - 2019)
"Song for Autumn"

Capturing Surrealities - #2

"Far away there in the sunshine
are my highest aspirations.
I may not reach them, but I can 
look up and see their beauty,
believe in them, and try
to follow where they lead."

- Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888 )

This is a second batch of "surrealities," captured using my iPhone during a recent trip to Niagara, CA. Each is an example of the myriad photographic possibilities that almost always present themselves merely by looking up (or down) 😊... The "truth" revealed: the left and right images are lights on the ceiling of two restaurants we ate at, while the center image is the ceiling just outside the second floor entrance to the Table Rock Market, which overlooks the Canadian side of the falls.

Capturing Surrealities - #1

"Unlike other media, a photograph is always based on a real, material origin. Rather than looking at this as a disadvantage, we should understand that this same fact makes photography the ultimate surreal medium – simply because photography, although based on reality, is very far from the truth."

- Sergio Muscat – Abstract Photography/YouTube

While still on the subject of my wife's and my recent weekend trip to Niagara, CA (see posts 1, 2, and 3) - I am working on a few more images I will be sharing in the coming days - the triptych contains three "less than obvious" (surreal?) views of our trip as captured by my iPhone. The "truth" revealed, left to right: a plasma cylinder used to lure visitors into the House of Frankenstein ... a time exposure of a dynamic art display inside a wonderful Indian restaurant called The Dhaba On The Falls (I was given permission to take a shot while we waited for our food to arrive 😊... and an upside down view of some lights hanging on a wall by the luggage conveyor belt at the Buffalo the Buffalo Niagara International Airport. While these humble images may be a far cry from, say, epic Icelandic landscapes - and are probably not to everyone's tastes - I confess that these little surrealities provide me me no end of pleasure when I "discover" them in the wild. It is also worth remembering (by all photographers, from beginner to seasoned pro) that there are always compositional opportunities waiting to be seen and captured.

Expanding Our Vision

"Science seeks to understand complex processes by reducing them to their essential actions and studying the interplay of those actions; and this reductionist approach extends to art as well. Indeed, my focus on one school of art, consisting of only three major representatives [Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele], is an example of this. Some people are concerned that a reductionist analysis will diminish our fascination with art, that it will trivialize art and deprive it of its special force, thereby reducing the beholder's share to an ordinary brain function. I argue to the contrary, that be encouraging a focus on one mental process at a time, reductionism can expand our vision and give us new insights into the nature and creation of art. These new insights will enable us to perceive unexpected aspects of art that derive from the relationships between the biological and psychological phenomena."

- Eric Kandel (1929 - )
The Age of Insight

The Clearest Way Into the Universe

"And into the forest I go,
to lose my mind and find my soul.
...
Most people are on the world, not
in it — have no conscious sympathy
or relationship to anything about
them — undiffused, separate, and
rigidly alone like marbles of
polished stone, touching but separate.
...
The clearest way into the Universe
is through a forest wilderness."

- John Muir (1838 - 1914)

The image above was captured - or, more precisely (following on the heels of Kim Grant's superlative video meditation on the follies of doing photography while stressed; Kim is one of my favorite YouTube photographers: list here), was creatively seen while I was in a quiet state of mind - along a trail at the Niagara Glen Nature Centre I've been posting about recently. As Kim's beautifully eloquent vlog post says so much better than I am able to by using only lifeless words and a lonely image, it is only when we allow ourselves to slooooow down while doing photography, and let go of our everyday pressures and stressors (as I had the privilege of doing for a few happy hours last weekend while on a trip with my wife), that we can take those first steps beyond just "capturing" images to seeing them. Indeed, it is in those brief precious moments when we somehow manage to quiet the "chatter in our heads" (as Alan Watts liked to describe the constant internal noise we all live with as conscious beings), that the illusory boundary between "self" and "world" dissipates to reveal nature's bountiful creative possibilities. Thank you, Kim, for a wonderfully poignant reminder of the need to clear our minds and become one with nature and our surroundings, if only for a few moments 😊

Impressions of Niagara Falls

"Dream delivers us to dream,
and there is no end to illusion.
Life is like a train of moods
like a string of beads, and, as
we pass through them, they prove 
to be many-colored lenses which
paint the world their own hue..."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

I mentioned in my last post that my wife and I took a short trip to Niagara Falls, Canada last weekend. I also mentioned that I was a bit underwhelmed by the falls themselves; as a photographer "seeing" the falls for the first time (the "tourist" in me was enthralled, and my iPhone has about a half dozen snaps to prove it). Rather than taking photographs of the "falls as they appear in their full splendor," I instead took a series of more intimate "impressions" of the falls. 

Apart from their sheer size - the height varies between 70 and 100 ft, the Canadian portion is close to 2,600 ft wide, while the U.S. side is a bit over 1,000 ft) - Niagara falls are cacophonous and effervescent; indeed, they are best described as a thunderously loud living liquid chaos! While the images that accompany this post may fall (small pun intended) far short of conveying just how thunderously loud and chaotic the falls are, they do provide a sense of what the falls offer photographers apart from their (otherwise grand) splendor. 

The Justification of Taking Pictures of "Rocks and Leaves"...

"The mystique of rock climbing is climbing; you get to the top of a rock glad it’s over but really wish it would go on forever. The justification of climbing is climbing, like the justification of poetry is writing; you don’t conquer anything except things in yourself…. The act of writing justifies poetry. Climbing is the same: recognizing that you are a flow. The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. It is not a moving up but a continuous flowing; you move up to keep the flow going. There is no possible reason for climbing except the climbing itself; it is a self-communication."

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934 - 2021)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

From Iceland to Niagara Falls, Canada. While I still have an immense backlog of raw files from our recent Iceland trip (which I will post as soon as I find time to process them), I also have a few images I would like to share from a short trip my wife and I took to Niagara Falls, Canada this past weekend. The first set is the "quint-tych" you see above, which contains a modest sampling of the many rocks and boulders strewn along the trails at the Niagara Glen Nature Centre (about 10 min away from the center of town). For obvious reasons, this is a popular park for local bouldering enthusiasts. I enjoyed nearly 8 hours of restful hiking and composing with my travel camera (spread over two days: the first day with my wife, and the second day by myself while my wife was busy at a symposium). While I was a bit underwhelmed by the falls themselves (speaking purely as a photographer, not a tourist - I plan on posting an "impressionistic" image or two in the coming days), I was mesmerized by the rich store of "rocks and  leaves" compositional possibilities offered by the nearby nature center; to be sure, there was also plenty of "water" at the center, since the trails weave in and out of splendid views of the Niagara river (I will be posting a few of these as well in coming days). Following Mihaly's sage wisdom, my justification of taking pictures of "rocks and  leaves" (when, by all rights, I should have been back in our hotel room working on a technical paper that is soon due) is ... taking pictures of "rocks and  leaves"! 😊

The Eternal Energy of the Universe

"A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement - and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.

...

Zen is really extraordinarily simple as long as one doesn't try to be cute about it or beat around the bush! Zen is simply the sensation and the clear understanding ... that there is behind the multiplicity of events and creatures in this universe simply one energy -- and it appears as you, and everything is it. The practice of Zen is to understand that one energy so as to 'feel it in your bones.'

...

Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about,
because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

We Are Stories

"We are stories, contained within
the twenty complicated centimeters
behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces
left by the (re)mingling together of
things in the world, and oriented
toward predicting events in the future,
toward the direction of increasing entropy,
in a rather particular corner of this
immense, chaotic universe."

- Carlo Rovelli (1956 - )
The Order of Time