Macro and the Micro

"It is all very beautiful and magical here - a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)
Letter to Alfred Stieglitz

Postscript. The purest simplest joy of life is life itself: living, being, breathing, seeing, feeling, sharing, ... But there are preternaturally precious moments when the experience is so all-consuming and so far transcends what words alone are incapable of revealing (though the wisest among us are sometimes able, in Zen-like fashion, to capture glimpses of the deepest truths), that one is simply lost in the Einsteinian awe of it all ("I have nothing but awe when I observe the laws of nature," as quoted in Einstein and the Poet). For me, this happens (alas, far less frequently than I wish) when I become "lost" amidst the "macro and the micro"; when otherwise arbitrary language-driven distinctions among trees and forest and leaves and space and time ... all dissolve and become one and inseparable. A feeling that seems to be also shared by my eldest son, Noah, who is seen here contemplating his own universe of mysteries by the side of a small footpath he and I took this weekend in a local park:

This Place is a Dream

"This place is a dream.
Only a sleeper considers it real.
...
A man goes to sleep in the town
where he has always lived,
and he dreams he's living
in another town.

In the dream, he doesn't remember

the town he's sleeping in his bed in.
He believes the reality of the dream town.

The world is that kind of sleep.
...

We began as a mineral.

We emerged into plant life

and into animal state,
and then into being human,

and always we have
forgotten our former states,

except in early spring when we
slightly recall being green again.

That's how a young person turns

toward a teacher. That's how a baby leans

toward the breast, without knowing the secret

of its desire, yet turning instinctively.

Humankind is being led along an evolving course,

through this migration of intelligences,

and though we seem to be sleeping,

there is an inner wakefulness

that directs the dream,

and that will eventually startle us back

to the truth of who we are."

- Rumi (1207 - 1273)

Postscript. The triptych consists of three "quick grabs" with my iPhone during the trip my family and I took to the Pacific Northwest this past summer (e.g., see this blog entry). The left- and right-most images show the play of sunlight (reflected off the door of our car) with the pavement as we were going to breakfast one day in Sequim, WA. The middle panel shows a similar play of light (this time reflected off a kettle on our stove) with the stucco walls of the kitchen in the cabin we rented in the northern cascades. Most of my photography is quasi-deliberate, by which I mean that most of my images arise during planned "expeditions" (such as to a local park, or hikes on a family vacation 😊 using my "real" camera. But some of my favorite images - such the ones in this triptych - are captured purely by happenstance, and when my conscious "attention" lies elsewhere (such as on, say, getting breakfast at a restaurant or the first sip of coffee in the morning). Of course, any distinctions I may choose to draw among these various states of being and attention are, of course, at best illusory, and, at worst, utterly meaningless. Even as my "eye" looks toward the path to a restaurant or at the handle of a coffee kettle, my "I" never ceases to revel at the magic of light, color and form that surrounds us in each moment in time and space!

Timeless Way of Building

"...towns and buildings will not be able to become alive, unless they are made by all the people in society, and unless these people share a com­mon pattern language, within which to make these buildings, and unless this common pattern language is alive itself. 

...

The elements of this language are entities called pat­terns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.

...

No pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that is sup­ported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it. This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of na­ture, as you make it.

...

The Timeless Way of Building says that every society which is alive and whole, will have its own unique and distinct pattern language; and further, that every in­dividual in such a society will have a unique language, shared in part, but which as a totality is unique to the mind of the person who has it. In this sense, in a healthy society there will be as many pattern languages as there are people-even though these languages are shared and similar.

...

Since the language is
in truth a network,

there is no one sequence
which perfectly captures it."

 

- Christopher Alexander (1936 - )
A Pattern Language

Heaven and Earth

"'I lack nothing, I tell you!'
'Nothing?' I asked.
'Not even heaven?'
He lowered his head and was silent.
But after a moment:
'Heaven is too high for me. 

The earth is good,
exceptionally good–and near me!'
'Nothing is nearer to us than heaven.
The earth is beneath our feet
and we tread upon it,
but heaven is within us.'"

- Nikos Kazantzakis (1883 - 1957)

Unheard Music

"There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head, the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning, its advent can be a paralyzing experience."

- Paul Bowles (1910 - 1999)
The Spider's House

Why is the sky blue?

"[Why is the sky blue?] ... It’s a question every toddler asks, but it is also one that most great scientists since the time of Aristotle, including da Vinci, Newton, Kepler, Descartes, Euler, and even Einstein, have asked... One of the things I like most about this explanation—beyond the simplicity and overtness of the question itself—is how long it took to arrive at correctly, how many centuries of effort, and how many branches of science it involves.

Aristotle is the first, so far as we know, to ask the question about why the sky is blue, in the treatise On Colors; his answer is that the air close at hand is clear and the deep air of the sky is blue the same way a thin layer of water is clear but a deep well of water looks black. This idea was still being echoed in the 13th century by Roger Bacon. Kepler too reinvented a similar explanation, arguing that the air merely looks colorless because the tint of its color is so faint when in a thin layer. But none of them offered an explanation for the blueness of the atmosphere. So the question actually has two, related parts: why the sky has any color, and why it has a blue color.

...

The sky is blue because the incident light interacts with the gas molecules in the air in such as fashion that more of the light in the blue part of the spectrum is scattered, reaching our eyes on the surface of the planet. All the frequencies of the incident light can be scattered this way, but the high-frequency (short wavelength) blue is scattered more than the lower frequencies in a process known as Rayleigh scattering, described in the 1870’s. John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh, who also won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1904 for the discovery of argon, demonstrated that, when the wavelength of the light is on the same order as the size of the gas molecules, the intensity of scattered light varies inversely with the fourth power of its wavelength. Shorter wavelengths like blue (and violet) are scattered more than longer ones. It’s as if all the molecules in the air preferentially glow blue, which is what we then see everywhere around us.

Yet, the sky should appear violet since violet light is scattered even more than blue light. But the sky does not appear violet to us because of the final, biological part of the puzzle, which is the way our eyes are designed: they are more sensitive to blue than violet light.

The explanation for why the sky is blue involves so much of the natural sciences: the colors within the visual spectrum, the wave nature of light, the angle at which sunlight hits the atmosphere, the mathematics of scattering, the size of nitrogen and oxygen molecules, and even the way human eyes perceive color. It’s most of science in a question that a young child can ask."

- Nicholas Christakis (1962 - )
This Explains Everything (John Brockman, ed., 2013)

 

The Brown Autumn Came

"The brown autumn came. Out of doors, it brought to the fields the prodigality of the golden harvest, —to the forest, revelations of light,⁠—and to the sky, the sharp air, the morning mist, the red clouds at evening. Within doors, the sense of seclusion, the stillness of closed and curtained windows, musings by the fireside, books, friends, conversation, and the long, meditative evenings. To the farmer, it brought surcease of toil,⁠—to the scholar, that sweet delirium of the brain which changes toil to pleasure. It brought the wild duck back to the reedy marshes of the south; it brought the wild song back to the fervid brain of the poet. Without, the village street was paved with gold; the river ran red with the reflection of the leaves. Within, the faces of friends brightened the gloomy walls; the returning footsteps of the long-absent gladdened the threshold; and all the sweet amenities of social life again resumed their interrupted reign."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)
Kavanagh

Hatching of Self

"As an object prone to fertilization, the egg is an appropriate symbol and metaphor for the idea of potentiality. It is pre-creation chaos waiting to become cosmos. In psychological terms, it is the preconsciousness of the given culture – the collective being waiting to be made conscious of itself. To quote psychologist Marie Louise von Franz, 'we can easily recognize in it the motif of preconscious totality. It is psychic wholeness conceived as the thing which came before the rise of ego consciousness, or any kind of dividing consciousness'. In short, the egg is a symbol of pre-differentiation, differentiation being the essence of the creation of anything. The egg contains within itself male and female, light and dark, all opposites in a state of union. It is perfect entropy and signals the existence of creative power from the very beginning. By extension, the cosmic egg is a symbol of the individual’s preconscious state before the process of individuation allows for the hatching of Self."

- David A. Leeming (1937 - )
Cosmic Egg

A Moment or Two to Just Be

"While I sit here, I don’t beg to be somewhere else; I’m not pulled away by the future or by the past. I sit here, and know where I am. This is very important. We tend to be alive in the future, not now. We say, ‘Wait until I finish school and get my PhD; then I’ll really be living.’ Once we have it – and it wasn’t easy to get – we say to ourselves, ‘I have to wait until I have a job for my life to really begin.’ Then after the job a car, and after a car a house. We aren’t capable of being alive in the present moment. We tend to postpone being alive to the future, the distant future, we don’t know when. It’s as if now is not the moment to be alive. We may never be alive at all in our entire life. The only moment to be alive is in the present moment."

- Thich Nhat Hanh (1926 - )

Postscript. The picture above was captured not with my "real" camera but with my iPhone, whose ability to capture scenes such as this continues to impress. I was on a short "day job" related trip to the beautiful town of Newport, RI, and had a few precious moments of magic hour light at the Sachuest Point National Wildlife Refuge (just a few miles from the center of town). I was initially despondent over having not taken my real camera (and rationalized the "complexities" of mixing business with pleasure; what, with a laptop and pounds of technical notes already stuffed into my carry-on). I then got even more melancholy over having neglected to take my other "real" camera that I bought specifically for this purpose (an absurdly tiny but equally as absurdly capable digital camera I wrote about earlier this spring). But then I remembered Thich Nhat Hanh's sage advice (quoted above). Stilling my mind as best I could, and clutching my iPhone, I managed to find a moment or two to just be. 

A Little Round Grain of Rock

"I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars."

- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)
Star Maker

Symbols, Signs, and Time

"We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Universal Patterns

"Every unique thing in nature is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world. In geometric harmony of the cosmos there are ways that resemble, there are universal patterns, from blood vessels, to winter trees or to a river delta, from nautilus shell to spiral galaxy, from neurons in the brain to the cosmic web. A whole universe of connections is in your mind – a universe within a universe – and one capable of reaching out to the other that gave rise to it. Billions of neurons touching billions of stars – surely spiritual."

- Alejandro Mos Riera (1978 - )

Two Worlds

"There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters."

- Neil Gaiman (1960 - )
The Books of Magic

Postscript. This is a different view (or diptych-ed views) of the same Rocky Brooks Falls (near Dosewallips State Park, on the part of the Olympic Peninsula that faces the Hood Canal in Washington state) I uploaded a different picture of a few months ago. While, as I described in that earlier blog post, the falls themselves are almost embarrassingly easy to get to (since they are less than a 1/4 mile away from a small parking area), maneuvering in and around the falls in hopes of finding a better composition than the obligatory "Here is what my wide angle lens can capture!" is difficult; well, at least it's difficult for a 60yo with 59 years or so of wear and tear on the knees :) With the help of one of my sons (who was kind enough to act as a carry mule for my camera bag and tripod), I managed to catch either one or two non-obligatory shots (depending on how you slice the diptych) from a point well in front of the main falls (from which the bottom-most part of the falls is invisible). I think that while each "part" works well on its own, as an image, they are self-contained enough that the diptych adds a bit of contextual "interest." The relatively small area into which these falls descend has the remarkable property that just about any spot one stands on seemingly offers a veritable infinity of "different" compositions. Though it is, in truth, far more typical than not for photographers to feel this way about any spot (!), I have found this particular waterfall to be blessedly infused with this magical property more so than most. Despite having already taken close to a hundred different shots during our two trips (thus far), I am already looking forward to my next visit :)

Optimal Experience

 

"The theory of optimal experience is based on the concept of flow—the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

...

When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

...

The key element of an optimal experience

is that it is an end in itself."

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

Postscript. Sadly, the deeply inspirational Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi passed away on Oct 20, 2021. He joins an (equally sadly) growing number of spiritual/aesthetic mentors of mine that I have never had the pleasure of meeting in person (the last such being John Daido Loori, who passed away in 2009). I have written of applying Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" to photography a number of years ago on this blog (almost exactly 13 years ago, to be precise), but the wisdom and insights he leaves behind are of course timeless. Here is a link to a great TED talk that Csikszentmihalyi gave in 2004. May your soul forever revel in eternal flow, Mihaly! 

Wu Wei

"When we learn to work with our own Inner Nature, and with the natural laws operating around us, we reach the level of Wu Wei. Then we work with the natural order of things and operate on the principle of minimal effort. Since the natural world follows that principle, it does not make mistakes. Mistakes are made–or imagined–by man, the creature with the overloaded Brain who separates himself from the supporting network of natural laws by interfering and trying too hard.

When you work with Wu Wei, you put the round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole. No stress, no struggle. Egotistical Desire tries to force the round peg into the square hole and the square peg into the round hole. Cleverness tries to devise craftier ways of making pegs fit where they don’t belong. Knowledge tries to figure out why round pegs fit into round holes, but not square holes. Wu Wei doesn’t try. It doesn’t think about it. It just does it. And when it does, it doesn’t appear to do much of anything. But Things Get Done.

When you work with Wu Wei, you have no real accidents. Things may get a little Odd at times, but they work out. You don’t have to try very hard to make them work out; you just let them ... If you’re in tune with The Way Things Work, then they work the way they need to, no matter what you may think about it at the time. Later on you can look back and say, "Oh, now I understand. That had to happen so that those could happen, and those had to happen in order for this to happen…" Then you realize that even if you’d tried to make it all turn out perfectly, you couldn’t have done better, and if you’d really tried, you would have made a mess of the whole thing.

Using Wu Wei, you go by circumstances and listen to your own intuition. "This isn’t the best time to do this. I’d better go that way." Like that. When you do that sort of thing, people may say you have a Sixth Sense or something. All it really is, though, is being Sensitive to Circumstances. That’s just natural. It’s only strange when you don’t listen."

- Benjamin Hoff (1946 - )
The Tao of Pooh

Mind-Stuff

"The universe is of the nature of ‘a thought or sensation in a universal Mind’...To put the conclusions crudely—the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by ‘mind’ I do not here exactly mean mind and by ‘stuff’ I do not at all mean stuff. Still this is as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase."

- Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882 - 1944)

Postscript. I have long been intrigued by the propensity of some of history's great physicists to wax mystical when engaged about the "meaning" of it all (e.g., Stephen Hawking's "fire" that breathes life into our equations, and the "bit" behind John Archibald Wheeler's It-from-Bit:

"It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom, at a very deep bottom, in most instances, an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe." (John Archibald Wheeler, 1911- 2008)

For those of you interested in taking a slightly deeper dive into the possible relationship among the ontology of quantum physics, Jungian psychology, and Eddington's thoughts on a "conscious universe," there is also this open access paper that was published a few years ago in the Behavioral Sciences journal, and from which I borrowed the quote that appears above. While the paper makes only an indirect mention of art (and refers to photography even more obliquely), spiritually inclined readers are likely to resonate with its illuminating discussion of how consciousness is entangled with the "mystical mind"; and of how we - as conscious creative beings - both instantiate ourselves within and "see" the universe at large.

Dreams and Mirrors

 "I, who have felt the horror of mirrors
Not only in front of the impenetrable crystal
Where there ends and begins, uninhabitable,
An impossible space of reflections,

...

And in front of the silent surface

Of subtle ebony whose polish shows

Like a repeating dream the white

Of something marble or something rose,

Today at the tip of so many and perplexing

Wandering ears under the varying moon,

I ask myself what whim of fate
Made me so fearful of a glancing mirror.

...

It is strange to dream, and to have mirrors

Where the commonplace, worn-out repertory

Of every day may include the illusory

Profound globe that reflections scheme.

God (I keep thinking) has taken pains

To design that ungraspable architecture

Reared by every dawn from the gleam

Of a mirror, by darkness from a dream.

God has created nighttime, which he arms

With dreams, and mirrors, to make clear

To man he is a reflection and a mere

Vanity. Therefore these alarms."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
“Mirrors” in Dreamtigers

Limits of the World

"The limits of my language
mean the limits of my world.
Logic fills the world: the limits
of the world are also its limits.
We cannot therefore say in logic:
This and this there is in the
world, that there is not.

For that would apparently presuppose
that we exclude certain possibilities,
and this cannot be the case since
otherwise logic must get outside
the limits of the world:
that is, if it could consider these
limits from the other side also.

What we cannot think,
that we cannot think:
we cannot therefore say
what we cannot think."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951)
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

 

Seeing the Tree

"Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it."

- Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986)

 

The Nature of Water

"After spending many hours meditating and practicing, I gave up and went sailing alone in a junk. On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water! Right then—at that moment—a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu? Hadn’t this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer hurt. Again I struck it with all of my might—yet it was not wounded! I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.

Suddenly a bird flew by and cast its reflection on the water. Right then I was absorbing myself with the lesson of the water, another mystic sense of hidden meaning revealed itself to me; should not the thoughts and emotions I had when in front of an opponent pass like the reflection of the birds flying over the water? This was exactly what Professor Yip meant by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling was not sticky or blocked. Therefore in order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature."

- Bruce Lee (1940 - 1973)
Artist of Life

Beyond Language

"When I was nine years old, the world, too, was nine years old. At least, there was no difference between us, no opposition, no distance. We just tumbled around from sunrise to sunset, earth and body as alike as two pennies. And there was never a harsh word between us, for the simple reason that there were no words at all between us; we never uttered a word to each other, the world and I. Our relationship was beyond language—and thus also beyond time. We were one big space (which was, of course, a very small space)."

- Inger Christensen (1935 - 2009)
The Condition of Secrecy

Thoughts in a Universal Mind

"I found myself thinking about what, if anything, a tree might think. Not thinking the way we think, but the way a single neuron thinks, integrating information over time. It might take years to register the premonition of an idea, centuries for an entire forest, networked through synapses established by chemical signaling pathways among its roots, to form a thought. After three years I was no closer to an understanding, except to have gained a lingering suspicion that trees were, in some real and tangible way, as John Ambrose Fleming put it, 'manifested Thoughts in a Universal Mind.'"

- George Dyson (1953 - )
Analogia

Postscript. An experience I had during my family's recent trip to view New Hampshire's fall colors (see last three posts) reminded me of a funny story I wrote about years ago. It concerns Brett Weston, the second of Edward Weston's sons, and who was an accomplished photographer in his own right. Brett, who like his dad, spent most of his time taking photographs in California (e.g., Point Lobos and Big Sur), was one day invited by a friend to join him on a trip to Europe. Agreeing to go, after some cajoling, Brett and his friend visited Ireland, then Scotland, and later London. But Brett's eye, perhaps even more so than his father's, was tuned strongly toward abstraction. Thus, despite traveling though some of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet before arriving in London, Brett had not once pulled out his camera to take pictures! What he did come home with was a few images of rust on a small dilapidated metal plate that beguiled him as he was making his way across the London bridge. A more complete version of this story can be heard in a wonderful documentary about Brett Weston's life as a photographer. While my trip's "compositional oeuvre" was not nearly as single-mindedly-focused on a single abstract theme (I've already posted rather conventional fine-art "takes" on autumnal colors), I must admit that easily half of the shots I took were of the knots in the pinewood of our cabin's walls! Since the left part of my physics-trained brain kept seeing electromagnetic fields, space-time continua, and gravitational vortices just about everywhere my eyes looked inside the cabin, the right side of my brain insisted I search for abstract compositions. Interestingly, while these images contain no color (they are digitally reversed black-and-white shots, which I think work a bit better as "abstractions"), and were all captured inside a cabin, for me, they just as palpably capture the essence of experiencing New Hampshire's autumnal multispectral pleasures!

Intemporal Surreality

"It must be confessed, however, that Perception, and that which depends upon it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is to say, by figures and motions. Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain Perception."

- G.W. Leibniz (1646 - 1716)
Monadology

Postscript. Or, to paraphrase a well-known aphorism by physicist Werner Heisenberg (and italicizing my photo-centric alteration), "...what we observe and communicate is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to, and transformed by, our method of capturing it with our camera." Keeping with the same themes and questions that underlie my last two posts (i.e., how to best "capture" New Hampshire's gorgeous autumnal colors during a recent "long weekend" trip), one can start off by saying - tautologically - that any image I chose to capture must, by fiat, represent a particular slice of nature that I saw (through my lens). But how much of my experience of the totality of a given scene (the ambient conditions, light, sound, my state of mind, etc.) remains attached to whatever image(s) I chose to use to represent it? How much (or how little) of any of this is communicated and interpreted as such by the viewer? And, what can I do to instantiate and intensify this experience (for the viewer)? Of course, these kinds of questions have been asked since the dawn of photography, with no easy answers; from Alfred Stieglitz's equivalents to Minor White's admonition to take pictures of "what else" things are. The triptych communicates my early-afternoon experience at a quiet little roadside pond (that, objectively speaking, hardly even merits a "label" on a map; it is "just" a spot on the road from point A to point B on a nondescript stretch of a local highway) far better than any single image does. It does so in two ways: first, because it displays not one but several simultaneous and distinct but related views of the same scene, it gently insists that the viewer "fill in the gaps" in her own mind; which cannot be done except by imaging what it must of have been like to stand there taking these pictures (not to duplicate my experience, but to imagine what it was like, transformed by the viewer's own predilections); and second, because none of the individual images show off the colorful trees directly, but via reflection only (and using a slightly longer-than-normal time exposure, as well), there is an implied intemporal surreality (at least I hope that that is the impression it conveys), which is close to what I was "really feeling" when I took these shots. In the end, and as presaged by Leibniz wise words, it all boils down to the primacy and ineffability of perception. And to the even deeper question of who's "doing" the perceiving? 

The Intelligible Triad

"Man is a little world--a microcosm inside the great universe. Like a fetus, he is suspended, by all his three spirits, in the matrix of the macrocosmos; and while his terrestrial body is in constant sympathy with its parent earth, his astral soul lives in unison with the sidereal anima mundi. He is in it, as it is in him, for the world-pervading element fills all space, and is space itself, only shoreless and infinite. As to his third spirit, the divine, what is it but an infinitesimal ray, one of the countless radiations proceeding directly from the Highest Cause--the Spiritual Light of the World? This is the trinity of organic and inorganic nature--the spiritual and the physical, which are three in one, and of which Proclus says that 'The first monad is the Eternal God; the second, eternity; the third, the paradigm, or pattern of the universe;' the three constituting the Intelligible Triad."

- Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831 - 1891)
Isis Unveiled

Postscript. While still on the subject of yesterday's post (i.e., my family's "long weekend" trip to New Hampshire to experience its gorgeous fall colors), but on a decidedly less mystical level than Blavatsky's elegant passage describes, my problem as a photographer was to find a way to capture the "magic" of experiencing autumnal color. Of course, there are myriad ways of doing so, starting with the obvious: just take pictures of the gorgeous color! However, in practice (as with most artful things that matter), the devil is in the details, and "taking pictures of the gorgeous color" is far from trivial. The core difficulty, as all photographers know, is that a beautiful landscape seldom makes for a beautiful photograph. To be sure, I was surrounded - overwhelmed even - by the sublime beauty of endless assortments of multispectral colored ferns and bushes and trees and leaves ... and all of it is beautiful; but why this fern, or that clump of trees? In a nutshell, this is the core joy and frustration of photography, as a whole; a microcosm of an endless aesthetic struggle, one might say. Even though I captured a fair share of the obligatory "wide vistas" (I may share a picture or two in forthcoming posts), this trip turned out to be mostly about discovering smaller, quieter worlds within ostensibly grander "larger than life" explosions of autumnal color: a ragged leaf on an even raggedier lawn chair; a withered overturned leaf bathing in the cold waters of a small pond; and a newly fallen leaf gently resting on a moss-strewn rock (along the trail that led to the waterfall that appears in yesterday's post). None are Ansel Adams-ish "Wagnerian" landscapes, but the triptych, as a whole, nicely conveys a bit of what I felt as I was gazing at New Hampshire's Ansel Adams-ish "Wagnerian" landscapes of magnificent color - a microcosm inside the great universe!

Just Follow the Stream

 

"Be soft in your practice.
Think of the method
as a fine silvery stream,
not a raging waterfall.

Follow the stream,
have faith in its course.

It will go its own way,
meandering here,
trickling there.
It will find the grooves,
the cracks, the crevices.

Just follow it.
Never let it out of your sight.
It will take you."

- Sheng-yen (1931 - 2009)

Postscript. The image reveals the upper part of the 6th waterfall (out of a total of 7) that rewards hikers taking the "Brooks Walk" trail at the Castle In The Clouds conservation area in New Hampshire (located in the Ossipee Mountains of Moultonborough and Tuftonboro, to the northeast of lake Winnipesauke). Since my wife and I had only a few precious days over a long weekend to admire the gorgeous northeast fall colors, our time on trails was necessarily limited. Well known photographer-friendly hikes were all but off limits, partly due to the expected requisite time and effort and partly due to the vast - and unforeseen (at least by me) - crowds of fellow-hikers! Admittedly, the last time I was in New Hampshire was as a teenager on a family trip with my parents (c.1975); i.e., just a wee bit in the past. But while I didn't expect the half-dozen or so cars parked unobtrusively by the side of the road I remember seeing back then, I was still shocked to find massive 200+car parking lots with timed entry! It was the same kind of "dissonance between memory and reality" shock I experienced on a 2012 trip to Yellowstone. Luckily, other less populated areas (than, say, the Franconia Notch area where the parking/hiking logjam appeared most rampant) still exist; like the Castle in the Clouds, for which I have to thank my wife for finding! So, rather than giving up all hope and skedaddling back to our cabin (in very not-Zen fashion), within the span of a few hours I went from commiserating over being unable to park, hike, and take pictures, to parking (with ease), eating (at a nice cafe close to a parking lot with few cars), hiking (on a beautifully maintained trail barely 100 feet from both car and cafe), and having an almost embarrassingly easy time communing with and composing my pick of waterfalls! Lessons: (1) stop basing expectations on 50-yo memories, (2) be flexible and mindful of unforeseen opportunities, and (3) listen to what your wife suggests doing instead :)

Fiery Organisms

"Just imagine ... that somewhere, in the cosmic vacuum, close to absolute zero, there are creatures nothing like us, let’s say a kind of metallic organism, that are conducting various experiments. Among others they succeed—never mind how—suffice it to say they succeed in synthesizing a living protein cell. A single amoeba. What will become of it? Of course, only just created, it will immediately fall apart, explode, but its remains will freeze, because in a vacuum, the water contained within it will boil and instantly change into steam while the heat of the protein transmutation will immediately irradiate.

...

There exists—so I am told—only one kind of life: the development of proteins that is familiar to us, divided into the realms of plants and animals. At temperatures removed from absolute zero, in barely three hundred small steps, evolution occurs, and its crowning glory is the human being. Only man and those like him can oppose the tendency prevalent throughout the Universe for chaos to grow. Yes, according to this statement, everything is chaos and disorder—the terrible heat inside stars, the walls of fire of galactic nebulae set alight by mutual penetration, the gas balls of suns; after all—say those sober, rational, and thus undoubtedly correct people—no device, no kind of organization, not even the smallest trace of it can appear in oceans of boiling fire; suns are blind volcanoes that spit out planets, while planets, exceptionally and rarely, sometimes create man—everything else is the lifeless fury of degenerate atomic gases, a swarm of apocalyptic fires shaking their prominences.

...

...you think the Earth is a crumb of life within an ocean of nothingness. You think man is solitary, and has the stars, the nebulae, the galaxies as adversaries, as enemies. You think the only knowledge that can be obtained is the kind he has possessed and will continue to possess—man, the only creator of Order, endlessly threatened by a deluge of infinity that radiates distant points of light. But that is not the case. The hierarchy of active endurance is omnipresent. Anyone who so wishes may call it life. On its peaks, at the heights of energy arousal, fiery organisms endure. Just before the limit, at the point of absolute zero, in the land of darkness and of the final, hardening breath, life appears once more, as a weak reflection of that one, as its pale, dying memory—that is us. "

- Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)
"The Truth" in The Truth and Other Stories

Universal Causation

"But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages."

- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Energy Field

"Colors are not possessions;

they are the intimate revelations
of an energy field…
They are light waves with
mathematically precise lengths,
and they are deep,
resonant mysteries with
boundless subjectivity."

- Ellen Meloy (1946 - 2004)
The Anthropology of Turquoise

Wholeness

"When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as though in a great, beautiful, worthy, and precious whole, when his harmonious sense of well-being imparts to him a pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could experience itself, would, as having achieved its goal, exults with joy and marvels at the pinnacle of its own becoming and being."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1842)

Evanescent Beauty

"To the attentive eye,

each moment of the year
has its own beauty,
and in the same field,
it beholds, every hour,
a picture which was
never seen before, and
which shall never
be seen again."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
Nature

 

Wonderful Triangles

"The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?"

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
Walden

Connecting With the Ineffable

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable.
Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself,
and see if we may not eff it after all.”

- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

For dedicated readers of my blog, this entry will appear a bit out of the norm. For one thing it does not include any photographs taken by me; for another, I'm quoting an "Adams," but not one whose first name is Ansel. The diptych you see above contains two of my dad's acrylic paintings he completed in the spring of 2001, which (immediately after completing them) he called Premonition 1 and 2, respectively. And, as he commonly did with "new" work, he displayed them on my parents' living room's main wall; where they unceremoniously hung through 9/11. Today, Sep 11, 2021, marks the 20th anniversary of that day, one that is simultaneously best forgotten and never forgotten. Unlike the families of the 2977 people who were killed that day (including 2606 at the World Trade Center), my family did not suffer the pain of losing any loved ones in that tragedy; though we believed for a time that my mom, who was 70 years old in 2001 and worked on the 91st floor of the second tower, was, using a favorite turn of phrase of hers, "a goner." Somehow, miraculously, she survived (you can read a bit of her story in the New Yorker Magazine - just search the page for "Ilachinski"), and eventually died almost exactly 16 years later, on Sep 9, 2017. Like so many other "survivors," my mom suffered gravely from "survivors guilt," anguishing to her last days over why she, an "old timer" (her words) lived when so many young people did not. My dad, who was at home in bed at their home on Long Island as events unfolded (and only a few months away from passing away from cancer a few months later) was too weak and riddled with pain-killers to know or assimilate much of what happened that day. After my mom finally made it back to their home close to midnight, she was startled - shocked is a better word (if I remember how my mom characterized it) - by "seeing" my dad's theretofore innocently but provocatively named "Premonitions" - still hanging quietly on their living room wall - transfigured into truly prophetic - albeit unrecognized - warnings; which is at least how my parents now interpreted them. For me, all these years later, these paintings are touchstone reminders of the mysterious rhythms and patterns that make up our universe; echoes of even deeper connections that special souls (such as my dad the artist) are sometimes able to forge with the ineffable. As memories of 9/11 flood my mind on this anniversary, I find solace in the art my dad bequeathed me (even these two "Premonitions"; you can see more of his work here), and the memory of so many happy years I still had to share with my mom. My prayers go out to those who were not so lucky.

The Matrix of All Matter

"I regard consciousness as fundamental, matter is derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. There is no matter as such; it exists only by virtue of a force bringing the particle to vibration and holding it together in a minute solar system; we must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. The mind is the matrix of all matter."

- Max Planck (1858 - 1947)

Dynamic Interconnection

"The basic recurring theme in Hindu mythology is the creation of the world by the self-sacrifice of God—"sacrifice" in the original sense of "making sacred"—whereby God becomes the world which, in the end, becomes again God. This creative activity of the Divine is called lila, the play of God, and the world is seen as the stage of the divine play. Like most of Hindu mythology, the myth of lila has a strong magical flavor. Brahman is the great magician who transforms himself into the world and then performs this feat with his "magic creative power", which is the original meaning of maya in the Rig Veda. The word maya—one of the most important terms in Indian philosophy—has changed its meaning over the centuries. From the might, or power, of the divine actor and magician, it came to signify the psychological state of anybody under the spell of the magic play. As long as we confuse the myriad forms of the divine lila with reality, without perceiving the unity of Brahman underlying all these forms, we are under the spell of maya. (...) In the Hindu view of nature, then, all forms are relative, fluid and ever-changing maya, conjured up by the great magician of the divine play. The world of maya changes continuously, because the divine lila is a rhythmic, dynamic play. The dynamic force of the play is karma, important concept of Indian thought. Karma means "action." It is the active principle of the play, the total universe in action, where everything is dynamically connected with everything else. In the words of the Gita Karma is the force of creation, wherefrom all things have their life."

- Fritjof Capra (1939 - )
The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels
between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism

Divine Language

"… symbolism seems to us to be

quite specially adapted to the needs

of human nature, which is not
exclusively intellectual but which
needs a sensory basis from
which to rise to higher levels.

...

… the highest truths, which would not
be communicable or transmissible
by any other means, can be
communicated up to a certain
point when they are, so to speak,
incorporated in symbols which
will hide them for many, no doubt,
but which will manifest them
in all their splendor to the
eyes of those who can see.

...

… the world is like a divine language for
those who know how to understand it.

...

… if the world is the result
of the Divine Word offered at
the beginning of time, then nature
in its entirety can be taken as
a symbol of supernatural reality."

- René Guénon (1886 - 1951)
Fundamental Symbols, The Universal Language of Sacred Science

Forging One's Own Path

About 6-1/2 years ago, I blogged about my youngest son's (Josh's) joyous "discovery" of the magic of photography. Having (back then, newly and quickly) acquired a few "old" Polaroids, including the venerable SX-70, and moving on for a time to Canon's AE-1 Program (a model I learned from in the late 1970s!) before settling on a more modern Fuji XT-2 that he never leaves the house without, Josh's honeymoon with photography has never ended. I had no way of knowing any of this would come to pass when I wrote (back in march, 2015): "Of course, I have no idea how long Josh's enthusiasm will last. It may die out, it may intensify, or it may transform into some other related art form. But if these early indications are a valid data source, he has clearly been very deeply bitten by his creative muse. May they forever more remain inseparable." Prescient musings, indeed!

What a sincere joy it is - as a photographer and loving father - to witness Josh's continued - accelerating - maturation as a bona fide artist. He and I (Josh, somewhat reluctantly at first, humbly unsure of his pictures' aesthetic "worth") finally put together an on-line gallery to show off some of his best work. Speaking just as a father, it melts my heart to see this flowering of Josh's artistic passion. But speaking as a photographer, I am simply awed by his prodigious talent. To go from effectively never having "clicked a shutter" before 2015 (and ignoring Josh's very early foray into photography, when he was 5, and played with a Casio QV-10 for a few days before relegating it to his closet, and never touching it again), to the technically and aesthetically superlative images - any of which I would be proud to call my own, but alas, cannot, since they're all unmistakably Josh's! (Josh does all of his own editing, and has never taken a course on photography) - that you will find on his new website, is astoundingly rare. 

Whatever irreducible bias I may have as a father aside, Josh's images are infused with a palpable artistry. While his and my aesthetic spaces do overlap in places (we both love epic" landscapes and run toward magic light without cost to life or limb), the pattern-of-patterns of his images is uniquely his (this, despite, or possibly because of, being exposed to his dad's photography for so many years). To forge one's own aesthetic path is far from easy, but is a clear sign that something special is brewing. Although he is most passionate about taking - and expressing his photographic vision through - macros, his well honed eye for light, geometry, and composition in general is seen in all of his photographs. But enough gushing by an unreservedly - and unabashedly - enthused dad/photographer. Go take a look at Josh's work on his new website. You won't regret it!

Delusion of Separateness

"A human being is part of the
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)

Three Quarks for Muster Mark

"In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature."

- Murray Gell-Mann (1929 - 2019)
The Quark and the Jaguar

Similarity of Form

 "The Sage embraces similarity
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)

Divine Spark

"Those who love much, do much and accomplish much, and whatever is done with love is done well.... Love is the best and noblest thing in the human heart, especially when it is tested by life as gold is tested by fire. Happy is he who has loved much, and although he may have wavered and doubted, he has kept that divine spark alive and returned to what was in the beginning and ever shall be. If only one keeps loving faithfully what is truly worth loving and does not squander one's love on trivial and insignificant and meaningless things then one will gradually obtain more light and grow stronger."

- Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890)
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Transparent as a Dragonfly

"Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)