Ordering and Things Ordered

"Reality is of the senses, brain and mind – that which is knowable.  Existence is cause, ultimate cause. It is unspeakable, unknowable.  Reality is effect, manifestation of existence…  Ordering and things ordered coexist yet have independent significance…  The deepest and most profound emotion we can experience is the belief that the unknown really exists."

- Wynn Bullock (1902 - 1975)

The Photography and Philosophy of Wynn Bullock

Quietly Seeking Images

"The not-so-silent conversations between things are always present. What is not so often present is my sensitivity to these voices. As it is said, for every push there is a pull, with every affirmation denial, but with only these there would be nothing but a frozen, rigid wasteland. There could be continuing movement with each new balance point experienced. There is great beauty in this ever-shifting dance. This is very alive and transcends all notions of a static experience. This is what brings life, for without it I would be locked in without possibilities; there would be no sense of creation. All would be frozen before the existence of time, without realization; there would not be a universe. Fortunately, all is conversation and movement - or transformation - that awaits my awareness. There are many entities all about us. I refer to those entities as images (photographs that aspire to say something); they are symbolic cameos, or icons. They have an unambiguous influence upon my life - they move and their movements are instruments of transformation."

- Nicholas C. Hlobeczy (1927 - 2007)

A Presence Behind the Lens

Interpenetrating Fragments and Divisions

"[There is an...] almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for ‘a description of the world as it is’. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.

...the relationship of each moment in the whole to all the others is implied by its total content: the way in which it ‘holds’ all the others enfolded within it.

...both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible and unanalysable."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Chain of Connection

"In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely in its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general influence on the intellectual advancement of mankind, we find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments."

-  Alexander von Humboldt (1769 - 1859)

COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1

Wave - Particle Duality

"Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated “building blocks,” but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitute the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object's interaction with the observer. "

-  Fritjof Capra (1939 - )

The Tao of Physics

Representations of the World

"Many people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our consitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if it were of a given and immediate world."

- Francisco Varela

(1946 - 2001)

Infinity's Impenetrable Secret

"For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed."

- Blaise Pascal

(1623 - 1662)