Music of the Eyes

"What prohibits me from treating my perception as an intellectual act is that an intellectual act would grasp the object either as possible or as necessary. But in perception it is 'real'; it is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views in each of which the object is given but in none of which is it given exhaustively."

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

(1908 - 1961)

"Perhaps art is just taking out

what you don't like

and putting in what you do.

There is no such thing 

as Abstraction. 

It is extraction, 

gravitation toward a 

certain direction... 

It is nearer to music, 

not the music of the ears, 

just the music of the eyes."

- Arthur Dove

(1880 - 1946)

Celestial Melodies

"...above all, I perceive in me with joy, a new tone, sounded by a violin within my innermost being. Its strings are tensed or relaxed through simple differences of temperature and illumination from without. Yet from deep with our being (an instrument that the conformity of habit has condemned to silence), there appears a song - out of those derivations, out of those vibrations -  from which all music arises. The weather, on specific days, leads us perchance from one sound to another. We rediscover the lost melody, which - as we might have guessed - appears with mathematical necessity, and which we, without knowing it, sang from the first moment on. Only these inner modifications - inner, despite the fact that they came from the outside - renew the outer world for me."

- Marcel Proust

Remembrance of Things Past

"It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlit night, when all waves rolled by like scrolls of silver, and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the brow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea."

- Herman Melville

Moby Dick

Illumination and Purification

"The outcome is this...the whole conscious being is open to spiritual experiences of every kind. It turns toward spiritual truth in thought, feeling, perception, and action; it is adjusted to respond rightly... The second thing is the free influx of all kinds of spiritual experience, experience of self, experience of God and of the divine creative power, experience of the cosmic consciousness, a direct contact with cosmic forces and with the hidden movements of universal Nature, a psychic sympathy, union, inner communication and various kinds of reciprocal relationship with other beings and with Nature as a whole, illumination of the heart through love and devotion, through spiritual joy and ecstasy, illumination of the senses and of the body through higher experiences, illumination of dynamic action in truth and love, purification of mind and spirit, heart, and soul."

- Emma Kunz

(1893 - 1963)

"Complete consciousness is present to us at all times, every moment, but we reject it in order to maintain our prejudices, our ideas. But sooner or later we will relinquish our ideas in favor of response... Life is consciousness of life itself."

-Agnes Martin

(1912 - 2004)

Hermeneutic Mysteries

"I see photography as an extraordinary means to undertake an exegesis of the Real, prompted by the first and literal level: the image of the evident objects. Any subsequent new meanings are discovered and rendered manifest through a hermeneutic process unfolding from the limited surface of the photograph; new interpretation will spring from the depth of the apparently flat surface of its image.

...

As with the sacred texts, all levels of meaning of a photograph are contained within its boundaries, simultaneously present to be discovered and revealed. Through a photograph we may see and transcend the object, moving further from its literal sense.

...

We are the interpreters of a great mystery: we belong entirely to reality and are part of this mystery.

...

In a 1995 presentation that Michelangelo Antonioni made of Beyond the Clouds, the film that proved to be the last one of his life, he said:

...we know that beneath the image revealed there is another one more faithful to reality, and that beneath this image there is another one, and again a new one under this last one, up to the true image of the absolute and mysterious reality that no one will ever see..."

- Silvio Wolf

"Photography and Torah"

(quoted from The Edge of Vision, by Lyle Rexer,  p. 281)

Appearances and Consciousness

"The order and regularity

of the appearances,

which we entitle nature,

we ourselves introduce.

We could never find them

in appearances,

had we not ourselves,

or the nature of our mind,

originally set them there."

Immanuel Kant

Critique of Pure Reason

"Cosmic Consciousness is ... as far above Self Consciousness as is that above Simple Consciousness. The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe ... Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence - would make him almost a member of a new species."

- Richard Bucke

Cosmic Consciousness

Timeless Unity

"A timeless, limitless, perfect unity underlies all our feeling and thought, underlies every form of existence and every part of our self. We know this through a deep, inner awareness for which we can give no explanation or proof, because it is itself the source of all knowledge, proof, and explanation. Depending on our degree of personal development, this awareness in us may be obscure or clear.

In reason and in nature this highest reality appears to us in its internal and external manifestations. We feel ourselves to be a part of this reality. As creatures both of nature and of reason, we constitute an entity which contains both nature and reason , and thus partakes of the divine. This opens two different directions to our mental life. We may, on the one hand, try to reduce the multiplicity and infinity of nature and reason to their original, divine unity. Or we may try to represent the inner creative unity of our selves in an external multiplicity. In doing the latter, we exercise capability, in doing the former, we show insight. Insight produces knowledge and science. 

Capability produces art... [Art] owes its existence to the creative activity of the human spirit, and... sprung from a unity, it must itself be a complete, coherent, and quasi-organic whole."

- Carl Gustav Carus

Physiologist / Painter (1789 - 1869)

Nine Letters on Landscape Painting

Revery of the Unknowable

"Science of nature has one goal:

To find both manyness and whole.

Nothing 'inside' or 'Out There,'

The 'outer' world is all 'In Here.'

This mystery grasp without delay,

This secret always on display.

The true illusion celebrate,

Be joyful in the serious game!

No living thing lives separate:

One and Many are the same."

...

We can never directly see

what is true, that is, identical with

what is divine: we look at it

only in reflection, in example,

in the symbol, in individual

and related phenomena.

We perceive it as a life

beyond our grasp,

yet we cannot deny

our need to grasp it.

...

The highest achievement

of the human being

as a thinking being is to

have probed what is

knowable and quietly to

revere what is unknowable."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe on Science