The Spiritual Eye

"We are easily deluded into assuming that the relationship between a foreign subject and the objects in his world exist on the same spatial and temporal plane as our own relations with the objects in our human world. This fallacy is fed by the belief in the existence of a single world, into which all living creatures are pigeonholed. This gives rise to the widespread conviction that there is only one space and one time for all living things. Only recently have physicists begun to doubt the existence of a universe with a space that is valid for all beings. That such a space cannot exist is evident from the fact that all men live in three distinct spaces, which interpenetrate and complement, but in part also contradict one another."

...

"The mechanists have pieced together the sensory and motor organs of animals, like so many parts of a machine, ignoring their real functions of perceiving and acting, and have even gone on to mechanize man himself. According to the behaviorists, man’s own sensations and will are mere appearance, to be considered, if at all, only as disturbing static. But we who still hold that our sense organs serve our perceptions, and our motor organs our actions, see in animals as well as not only the mechanical structure, but also the operator, who is built into their organs, as we are into our bodies. We no longer regard animals as mere machines, but as subjects whose essential activity consists of perceiving and acting.  We thus unlock the gates that lead to other realms, for all that a subject perceives becomes his perceptual world and all that he does, his effector world. Perceptual and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt. These different worlds, which are as manifold as the animals themselves, present to all nature lovers new lands of such wealth and beauty that a walk through them is well worth while, even though they unfold not to the physical but only to the spiritual eye."

- Jakob von Uexküll (1864 - 1944)

Imagining the World

"Sometimes he seemed to be

saying that nothing existed

unless people thought it did,

and the world was really

only there at all because

people kept on imagining it.

But then he seemed to be

saying that there were

lots of worlds, 

all nearly the same and 

all sort of occupying

the same place 

but all separated by the 

thickness of a shadow, 

so that everything that 

ever could happen 

would have somewhere

to happen in."

- Terry Pratchett (1948 - 2015)
Equal Rites

Distant Memory

 "The Cosmos is all

that is or was or ever will be.

Our feeblest contemplations

of the Cosmos stir us -- 

there is a tingling in the spine, 

a catch in the voice, 

a faint sensation, 

as if a distant memory, 

of falling from a height. 

We know we are approaching

the greatest of mysteries."

- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
Cosmos

Broken Symmetry

"Passion for science derives from an aesthetic sensibility, not a practical one. We discover something new about the world, and that lets us better appreciate its beauty. On the surface, the weak interactions are a mess: The force-carrying bosons have different masses and charges, and different interaction strengths for different particles. Then we dig deeper, and an elegant mechanism emerges: a broken symmetry, hidden from our view by a field pervading space. It’s like being able to read poetry in the original language, instead of being stuck with mediocre translations."

-  Sean Carroll (1966 - )
The Particle at the End of the Universe

Eternally Complex Tapestry

"Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.

Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web.

It is without beginning or end.

It is complex to a degree

that humbles the mind.

It is a work of such beauty

that my soul wept...

..I have danced with the spider. 

I have cut a caper

with the dancing mad god."

- China Miéville (1972 - )
 Perdido Street Station

Wonder about Wonder

"How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all."

- V. S. Ramachandran (1951 - )
The Tell-Tale Brain

Narrow Borderland of the Senses

"Outside our consciousness

there lies the cold and alien

world of actual things.

Between the two stretches

the narrow borderland of the senses. 

No communication between

the two worlds is possible excepting

across the narrow strip. 

For a proper understanding of

ourselves and of the world,

it is of the highest importance

that this borderland should

be thoroughly explored."

- Heinrich Hertz (1857 - 1894)

Postscript. Brooks Jensen (editor of Lenswork) offers a neat "trick" to jump-start - and otherwise stimulate - the creative process: spread a portfolio of your images or artwork (small physical prints work best) on the floor, and just play with various arrangements. You may either find stepping stones to ideas percolating just beneath the surface of your muse; or (if you are especially lucky), you may discover latent patterns-of-patterns that define you as an artist - invisible threads that run through your work that only a meditative bird's eye glimpse can reveal; or, as has happened here, you just happily stumble upon heretofore unrelated images that combine to tell their own story to you. The three images assembled together in the triptych above are unrelated, except that all were captured by me at very different times: the left-most image was an "accident" (literally, a waterlogged remnant of a 20 yo print of trees, if you can believe it!); the middle image is an 8yo shot of my ongoing "synesthetic landscape" series; and the right-most image is an oil abstract taken about a decade ago (which, up until my self-imposed "Brooks-Jensenian-exercise," was quietly sitting on an old hard-drive in its pristine raw form). The three images inexplicably aligned themselves - in sequence and correct orientation! - as I threw the first batch of 50 or so small prints on the floor to view. I imagine some Arthur-Clarkian tale being woven of an alien world: first "seen" by a probe as it navigates its way through a hole in an orbiting asteroid; it hurls through the planet's atmosphere and plunges into a stormy methane ocean; and starts collecting data on strange boundaryless lifeforms. Or, it could just be a randomly assembled meaningless triptych of equally random meaningless images ... though, for me, meaning, as beauty, is in the eye of the beholder :) Indeed, I wonder how many other phantasmagoric worlds will remain forever invisible to me, because there are not enough moments of time left in my life to conjure the right sequence?