Neither Time nor Space

"The scene of action of reality is not a three-dimensional Euclidean space but rather a four-dimensional world, in which space and time are linked together indissolubly. However deep the chasm may be that separates the intuitive nature of space from that of time in our experience, nothing of this qualitative difference enters into the objective world which physics endeavors to crystallize out of direct experience. It is a four-dimensional continuum, which is neither "time" nor "space". Only the consciousness that passes on in one portion of this world experiences the detached piece which comes to meet it and passes behind it as history, that is, as a process that is going forward in time and takes place in space."

- Hermann Weyl (1885 - 1955)

Looking at Things

"If we are always arriving and departing, it
is also true that we are eternally anchored.
One's destination is never a place but
rather a new way of looking at things.

...

You will then be ready to undergo initiation: an ordeal imposed by the Brotherhood of Fools and Simpletons. Three questions will be put to you. Just three. The first: 'How would you order the world if you were given the powers of the creator?' the second: 'What is it you desire that you do not already possess?' The third: 'Say something that will truly astonish us!' If you answer these satisfactorily you are then to return to your birthplace, sit quietly with hands folded, and meditate on the needs of all God's creatures... When you know what it is they need... you are to report back to the Brotherhood and dissolve the order.

...

Whoever uses the spirit that
is in him creatively is an artist.

To make living itself an art,
that is the goal."

- Henry Miller (1891 - 1980)
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

Singing Elephants

"Treading delicately during one of the loudest bursts of music he at last saw through the flowery branches a black something. Standing still whenever it stopped singing, and advancing with great caution whenever it began again, he stalked it for ten minutes. At last it was in full view, and singing, and ignorant that it was watched... the mouth wide open as it sang of joy in thick-coming trills, and the music almost visibly rippled in its glossy throat. He stared in wonder at the wide liquid eyes and the quivering, sensitive nostrils. Then the creature stopped, saw him, and darted away, and stood, now a few paces distant, on all four legs, not much smaller than a young elephant, swaying a long bushy tail... [there was no] fear. When he called to it it came nearer. It put its velvet nose into his hand and endured his touch; but almost at once it darted back and, bending its long neck, buried its head in its paws. He could make no headway with it, and when at length it retreated out of sight he did not follow it. To do so would have seemed an injury to its fawn-like shyness, to the yielding softness of its expression, its evident wish to be for ever a sound and only a sound in the thickest centre of untravelled woods. He resumed his journey: a few seconds later the song broke out behind him, louder and lovelier than before, as if in a paean of rejoicing at its recovered privacy."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
The Book of Imaginary Beings

Subtle Interconnections

"Living things (…) present situations in which a half-dozen, or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously, and in subtly interconnected ways. Often they present situations in which the essentially important quantities are either non-quantitative, or have at any rate eluded identification or measurement up to the moment. Thus biological (…) problems often involve the consideration of a most complexly organized whole.

...

The essence of science is not to be found in its outward appearance, in its physical manifestations; it is to be found in its inner spirit. That austere but exciting technique of inquiry known as the scientific method is what is important about science. This scientific method requires of its practitioners high standards of personal honest, open-mindedness, focused vision, and love of the truth. These are solid virtues, but science has no exclusive lien on them. The poet has these virtues also, and often turns them to higher uses.

...

If science deals with quantitative problems of a purely logical character, if science has no recognition of or concern for value or purpose, how can modern scientific man achieve a balanced and good life, in which logic is the companion of beauty, and efficiency is the partner of virtue?"

- Warren Weaver (1894 - 1978)
Science and complexity

Limits of the Possible

"A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus? If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.

...

"It is a good principle in science not to believe any 'fact' - however well attested - until it fits into some accepted frame of reference. Occasionally, of course, an observation can shatter the frame and force the construction of a new one, but that is extremely rare. Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind.

...
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist
states that something is possible,
he is almost certainly right.
When he states that something
is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the
limits of the possible is to venture a
little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic."

- Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)

Note. This is another one of a series of images I took with my iPhone during a trip my wife and I recently took to Monterey, CA. I had to resort to my iPhone because of an unfortunate "error" in judgement I made in packing my "minimal travel" photo gear for the trip. Thinking (correctly) that since my trip was ostensibly work-related and I had "only" a few days for our mini vacation, I (incorrectly) reasoned that I should only take an old camera and an even older (much older) lens. Well, the camera and lens both worked, separately, but - because of the age-mismatch - not together. So, for the first day, my photography consisted mostly of spraying iPhone shots at whatever my eye/I could find; things got a bit better the next day after B&H came through with an overnight delivery of a newer lens (I have no affiliation with B&H beyond simply being a long-time happy customer). While I soon put down my iPhone, I must confess that many of my favorite shots from this short trip - such as the one above of our younger son, Josh, musing on the marine life as it swam by in a large tank at the Monterey Bay aquarium - were taken with the iPhone.

Doors and Landscapes

"With an emphasis on a conceptual rather than visual manifestation of nature, ancient shanshui aims to convey an experience of ‘being in nature’ rather than ‘seeing nature’. This being in nature is not about any singular experience of when and where man encounters nature, but a perpetual truth experienced by man in/with nature, namely, the wholeness and universality of the cosmic, laws and cycles in nature, and the integrative harmony between man and things. This can be best explained by comparing the sense of vastness in nature found in both Western landscape and ancient shanshui . In Western art, the cosmic sense in nature often evokes a sense of might, and even the destructive power, of nature. A moment prior to a thunderstorm, as described earlier in Ruisdael’s work, Turner’s images of snowstorm and shipwrecks, as well as Friedrich’s depiction of graveyards and the Sea of Ice, are all about the omnipotent power of nature, so much so that it can be lethal. In contrast to landscape painters of the West, ancient shanshui painters were not attracted to the unrelenting power of nature. This explains why images of natural disasters cannot be found in ancient shanshui . To ancient shanshui painters, their images visualize not the unusual but the common and perpetual sense of nature. They convey a message of a transcendental experience of being in/with nature."

- Being in Traditional Chinese Landscape Painting, Sophia Suk-mun Law

Note. Like the image in yesterday's post (and perhaps like a few more to come) this one is a "quick grab" with my iPhone during a trip my wife and I recently took to Monterey, CA. "Objectively speaking," the image shows the central panel of an old dilapidated door that guards the entrance to a property on Ocean Avenue, Carmel, about a half mile or so from the beach. But, in my mind's eye, it is "really" an even more withered palimpsest of an ancient Chinese landscape. I have always been drawn to how Chinese landscapes lead you to gently experience the painting as a whole, rather than (as is more typical of Western art) to make you "see a subject." Apart from the academic paper I quoted from above, a wonderful book that explores the artistic and philosophical implications of this point of view is called The Great Image has no Form (by Francois Jullien, University of Chicago Press).

Finite Worlds

"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."

- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Note. The image is a "quick grab" with my iPhone of some lights on the ceiling of the hotel my wife and I recently stayed at in Monterey, CA. A basic photography lesson I learned and embraced long ago (though occasionally still forget to apply; happily, not this time) is this: if you are in a "dull, dull, insufferably dull" place for image taking (or, at least, think you are - like standing around in a hotel lobby with nothing to do or to "look at"), just look up or down ... something is sure to catch your eye 🙂