Photograph-Not-Taken, Taken

 "Without birth and death, and
without the perpetual transmutation
of all the forms of life,
the world would be static,
rhythm-less, undancing, mummified."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Postscript. This lovely image was captured early this morning both before and after my wife and I took our after-breakfast walk through the neighborhood (a habit we picked up during the early "stay at home" phase of the pandemic, and which we still try to do whenever our almost-back-to-normal work schedules permit). The "before" part consisted of me simply noticing - then, more deeply "seeing" - this beautifully rhythmic dance of half-decayed leaves on display on a corner of a neighbor's lawn. More to the point, and by sheer coincidence, literally seconds before I "saw" this static-yet-living form, my wife and I were chatting about a book I reviewed over 10 years ago called Photographs Not Taken. As the title suggests, the book is a collection of short stories by photographers describing images that, for whatever reason, were never taken; of course, the book itself contains no photographs! I reminded myself of the (lessons in this) book after heading out on our walk without my camera (not even an iPhone!) and immediately commiserating about "another gorgeous dramatic cloud-ridden sky gone to waste!" A split-second later, my eyes fell on the small patch of leaves you see above. What did the intrepid photographer do? Nothing. I merely continued commiserating: "Oh, if only I had brought my iPhone!" (How has my muse put up with me over the decades?) The "after" part of the image started about a mile or so later, as my wife and I returned to our house to start our workdays; the book - and the siren call of the little patch of leaves - were both still firmly on my mind. I grabbed my "walk around" camera, ran back to our neighbor's corner house, and made sure that, today at least, this was going to be a "photograph-not-taken taken." 😊

The Original Mystery

"Let us consider, for a moment, the world as described by the physicist. It consists of a number of fundamental particles which, if shot through their own space, appear as waves, and are thus… of the same laminated structure as pearls or onions, and other wave forms called electromagnetic which it is convenient, by Occam’s razor, to consider as travelling through space with a standard velocity. All these appear bound by certain natural laws which indicate the form of their relationship.

Now the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record. 

Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself. This is indeed amazing. Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.

 

But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i. e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself

It seems hard to find an acceptable answer to the question of how or why the world conceives a desire, and discovers an ability, to see itself, and appears to suffer the process. That it does so is sometimes called the original mystery. Perhaps, in view of the form in which we presently take ourselves to exist, the mystery arises from our insistence on framing a question where there is, in reality, nothing to question.
...
Thus the world, whenever it appears as a physical universe*, must always seem to us, its representatives, to be playing a kind of hide-and-seek with itself. What is revealed will be concealed, but what is concealed will again be revealed.

* unus = one, vertere = turn. Any given (or captivated) universe is what is seen as the result of a making of one turn, and thus is the appearance of any first distinction, and only a minor aspect of all being, apparent and non-apparent. Its particularity is the price wo pay for its visibility."

- G. Spencer Brown (1923 - 2016)

Laws Of Form

What is a Wave?

"...'An object is a monotonous process.'
A stone is a vibration of quanta
that maintains its structure for a while,
just as a marine wave maintains its identity
for a while before melting again into the sea.

...

What is a wave, which moves on water
without carrying with it any drop of water?
A wave is not an object, in the sense that it
is not made of matter that travels with it.

...

The atoms of our body, as well,
flow in and away from us.
We, like waves and like all objects, or
a flux of events; we are processes,
for a brief time monotonous."

- Carlo Rovelli (1956 - )
Reality Is Not What It Seems

Forests of Symbols

"So long as a symbol is a living thing, it is the expression for something that cannot be characterized in any other or better way. The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. But once its meaning has been born out of it, once that expression is found which formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined even better than the hitherto accepted symbol, then the symbol is dead, i.e., it possesses only an historical significance."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

"Nature is a temple in which
living columns sometimes
emit confused words.
Man approaches it through
forests of symbols, which
observe him with familiar glances."

- Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867)

Cognitive Fantasy

"It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence."

- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )
A Wild Sheep Chase

Hegelian Dialectics

"...life, beginning from a non-developed unity has run through the circle towards perfect unity. The world and the possibility of separation stood over against the non-developed unity. While evolving, reflection had always produced more opposites so as to reunify them by satisfying impulses until it has set the Whole of man in opposition to itself, until love transcends reflection in total inobjectivity, until it deprives the opposite of all foreignness, until it discovers life itself without anything missing to it."

- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831)

Order in Consciousness

"The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.

...

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how to the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe. Certainly we should keep on learning how to master the external environment, because our physical survival may depend on it. But such mastery is not going to add one jot to how good we as individuals feel, or reduce the chaos of the world as we experience it. To do that we must learn to achieve mastery over consciousness itself.

...

We cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” said J. S. Mill, “and you cease to be so.” It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it beautifully in the preface to his book Man’s Search for Meaning: “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

...

The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life."

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