Tuesday, February 14, 2023
Infinitely Visible World
Tuesday, February 07, 2023
One Model of Reality
born is just one model of reality.
Other cultures are not failed
attempts at being you; they
are unique manifestations
of the human spirit."
- Wade Davis (1953 - )
Saturday, February 04, 2023
Worlds Within Worlds
- David Abram (1957 - )
The Spell of the Sensuous
Postscript. The quote is from a remarkable book that has nourished my soul since I first read it in the mid 1990s (whose author, by coincidence, attended the same university as I did - Stony Brook, NY; I suspect we walked past each other a few times during our overlapping time there, though we graduated with very different degrees). It is part of a longer section in which Abrams describes an awe-inspiring encounter with a spider. Though spiders have no direct connection to the triptych above (which, for those of you wondering, is "just" a sequence of crepes that my wife prepared for our breakfast this morning), I had only last night started my 10th or 11th re-reading of Abrams' book, and had - by coincidence? - earmarked the page on which that wonderful combination of words "...worlds within worlds..." appears (page 19). Of course, while I almost certainly would have captured the same images whether or not I had been rereading Abrams' book the night before (since my eye is naturally tuned to seeing "ordinary-yet-not-ordinary" abstract patterns, I was instantly drawn to the crepes' tapestry of web-like forms), the serendipitous indirect enfolding of crepes and spiders brought an added joy to this morning's breakfast 🙂
Thursday, February 02, 2023
Photograph-Not-Taken, Taken
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." 😊
Wednesday, February 01, 2023
The Original Mystery
...
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.
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
What is a Wave?
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.
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.
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
Monday, January 30, 2023
Forests of Symbols
- 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)