Early Morning Walk

"An early morning walk is
a blessing for the whole day."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

"None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze."

- Frédéric Gros (1965 - )
 A Philosophy of Walking

Janusian Creativity

"There are two schools of thought on defining creativity: divergent thinking, which is the formation of a creative idea resulting from generating lots of ideas, and a Janusian approach, which is the act of making links between two remote ideas. The latter takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of beginnings, Janus, who was associated with doorways and the idea of looking forward and backward at the same time. Janusian creativity hinges on the belief that the best ideas come from linking things that previously did not seem linkable. Henri Poincaré, a French mathematician, put it this way: ‘To create consists of making new combinations. … The most fertile will often be those formed of elements drawn from domains which are far apart.’"

- Ainissa Ramirez (1969 - )

Postscript. I have written before about my lifelong penchant for sometimes seeing things not so much visually (at least, at first), but as free-form assemblages of rapid-fire associations and memories that percolate up from my unconscious. A recent example was when an obscure (and certainly not consciously retrievable) passage from a novel by Vonnegut I last read about 30 years ago made my head swivel to look at an equally obscure stain on a piece of driftwood. A similar experience made me look at what in "reality" is nothing but leaves entangled in a bit of ice, but which I "saw" as a melodic string that went, "Janus, Kandinsky, and Yin|Yang." This is close to literal truth. My brain was reacting to this string of associations before I consciously "recognized" what my eye/brain/I was actually looking at! These experiences are far from unique for me, but sadly do not appear very often. But when they do... Ahh, pure magic and joy; a Janusian creative moment, one might say 😊 

Signs of Nature

"Morphology rests on the conviction that everything that exists must signify and reveal itself. From the first physical and chemical elements to the spiritual expression of man we find this principle to hold. We turn immediately to that which has form. The inorganic, the vegetative, the animal, the human. Each one signifies itself, each one appears as what it is to our external and our internal sense. Form is something changeable, something becoming, something passing. The doctrine of metamorphosis is the key to all of the signs of nature."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Quoted in Morphology: Questions on Method and Language

Fine-Tuning

"On one thing most physicists agree. If the amount of dark energy in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, then life could never have emerged. A little larger, and the universe would have accelerated so rapidly that matter in the young universe could never have pulled itself together to form stars and hence complex atoms made in stars. And, going into negative values of dark energy, a little smaller and the universe would have decelerated so rapidly that it would have recollapsed before there was time to form even the simplest atoms. Out of all the possible amounts of dark energy that our universe might have, the actual amount lies in the tiny sliver of the range that allows life. As before, one is compelled to ask the question: Why does such fine-tuning occur?"

- Alan Lightman (1948 - )

The Accidental Universe

Postscript. And so, we have a repeat of the "apology" I made a bit over a week ago, after posting a "poor quality" iPhone image captured while out on my morning walk with my wife. But I continue to be mesmerized by the (unfortunately, dwindling number of) ice abstracts our walks sometimes reveal. This one is from this morning. And, as before, I am looking forward to resuming an earnest search for "otherworldly vistas" (with "real" camera in hand) tomorrow, as some cold weather is again predicted over the next few days. Stay tuned 🙂

Invisible Links

"In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of physical equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which in our rare moments of grace we are able to decipher a small fragment.

...

Einstein’s space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh’s sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist’s discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet.

...

The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flashes, or short circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links."

- Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983)

Different Schemes and Patterns

"It would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things."

Ernst Cassirer (1874 - 1945)
An Essay on Man

Ceaselessly Creative

"The past three centuries of science have been predominantly reductionist, attempting to break complex systems into simple parts, and those parts, in turn, into simpler parts. The reductionist program has been spectacularly successful, and will continue to be so. But it has often left a vacuum: How do we use the information gleaned about the parts to build up a theory of the whole? The deep difficulty here lies in the fact that the complex whole may exhibit properties that are not readily explained by understanding the parts. The complex whole, in a completely nonmystical sense, can often exhibit collective properties, “emergent” features that are lawful in their own right.

...

This web of life,
 the most complex system
we know of in the universe,
breaks no law of physics,
yet is partially lawless,
ceaselessly creative."

- Stuart Kauffman (1939 - )