"Drive-by shooting" in Skye

"Who forces time is pushed back by time;

who yields to time finds time on his side."

-  The Talmud

What is a "fine art" photographer (meaning: a photographer whose bills are paid by activity not directly related to photography) to do when, faced with extraordinary visual/compositional opportunities, but only relatively short bursts of photography are allowed? Or, to ask the question more directly, how does one balance a family vacation (with two teenaged boys in tow) with fine-art photography?

The truth is that the "constraint" I have just alluded to (of having only short bursts of photography) is mostly illusory. Certainly, in my case - and I've been taking photographs for well over 40 years at this point - the truth is that I take photographs whenever and wherever I can for as long (or short) a time as I can get. A few minutes here, a few hours there; and on rare occasions, day-long dedicated safaris (such as when I took a full day off work to have Luray Caverns all to myself). This has been my method for as long as I can remember. Whether I'm on my own, prowling around with my camera at a nearby park on a lazy Sunday, hiking around with my younger son (who is an SX-70 photographer), or on vacation with the entire family at some remote part of the planet, my process of doing photography is essentially the same. It is opportunistic and quick (well, "quick" in photographer's parlance, meaning - objectively - anywhere from a few moments to a few hours, as recorded by non-photographer-observers), and is seldom, if ever, shaped by specific "goals." I capture what captures me, so to speak. 

The overarching meta problem on Skye was that I was captured by everything! Skye's breathtaking beauty made it virtually impossible to look away, and not take pictures; impossible to just slow down and wait for the picture to reveal itself (my preferred method). Our stay in Skye can be best described as a continual struggle to maintain a balance between capturing Skye's Wagnerian-scale landscapes that the eye is inevitably first drawn to - particularly in a place seldom frequented and that has such dramatic mountainous forms and displays of light and shadow to offer - and yielding attention to the quieter, more intimate - often only subtly visible - elements of those same landscapes. Time was hardly ever sufficient to do real justice to the second - and as far as fine-art photography is concerned - most important class of images (if something beyond simple "postcard" impressions of a place is being sought). As my dad taught me throughout his life as an artist, one cannot hope to find (and reveal, whether by traditional means using  a canvas, in his case, or via photography, in mine) anything of lasting value in nature if one is not on the most intimate terms with her. Whenever my dad would encounter a meadow or forest or one of his beloved "болото" (Russian for "swamp"), he would spend hours, often entire days, just wandering around, hands clasped behind his back, and easel, paintbrushes and canvas quietly tucked away in the trunk of his car. This was his "getting to know a place" meditation time; his dialectic with an - as yet - unknown/uninternalized environment. Only when my dad gained a sense of unity with - of a belonging to - a place, a Goethian-holistic "feel" of the dynamics in play around him (and an implied - soulful - invitation for him to engage with the dynamics of a landscape), did he finally set up his easel and start to paint.

Of course, the ability to engage in these dialectic meditations is not always possible. On Skye, "drive-by shooting" was the norm: while cruising along some one-lane road (there is a detailed etiquette on dealing with approaching traffic on one-lane roads in Scotland), just "enjoying the sights," I'd suddenly exclaim something like, "Whoa, the light! We've got to stop!" My ever patient wife (who did all of the driving) would just as suddenly screech to a halt at the first available side of gravel, and - jumping out of the car with camera and tripod already in hand (an instinct honed and nurtured over years of practice) - I'd proceed to look, look again, run towards some spot my visual cortex deemed "best" (as I automatically extend the legs of my tripod), set up my camera, rifle off a few shots, and run back to the car with a thanks to my wife (and an apology to the kids, who would invariably still be rolling their eyes in the backseat at the temerity of "yet another stop for dad"). Run the clock another 20 or so minutes and repeat.

Though this "process of doing photography" may appear either silly or unrewarding (or both), in truth, with only minor variations (the major ones being that, when not traveling, I'm usually the one both driving and stopping and the kids are back home playing their video games), it is how most of my photographs are captured. To be sure, there are times when I do have the luxury of time to "get to know a place" before training my lens on it. But more often than not - for what I consider my "best" images - I "get to know a place" not by wandering around for a few days without a camera, as my dad once did without his brushes; rather, by repeated visits, accumulated over a long time, months, years even, enabled simply by virtue of living close enough to a place of interest to be able to do so. And it is the wisdom (if I can call it that) that these repeated visitations to local places has instilled in me that - when traveling abroad, with far less precious "getting to know a place" time available - I rely on to instinctively guide my eye to parts of an otherwise unknown environment most prone to harboring "quiet secrets." I am not always right, and I certainly prefer to discover these secrets in a more deliberate, circumspect way. But 40+ years of keeping my eyes and soul receptive to nature's gifts goes a long way; or so I keep telling myself as I rocket out of the car with my tripod and camera, and run toward what I'm sure is another "special, quiet place."

Scotland, Skye, and Schueler

"I wasn't sure if it was a place or a mood or what it was, but there was something I was looking for .... As I approached the sea near Mallaig and the Sound of Sleat I could see these massive forms like the Isle of Eigg and the southern tip of Skye and Rhum, and I could see these things sort of glowering in this kind of wild light that took place that day and the Geiger counter just went berserk. I'll never forget the excitement."

- Jon Schueler (1916 - 1992)

The Sound of Sleat: A Painter's Life

Those were words written down by abstract artist Jon Schueler after arriving in the remote fishing village of Mallaig in western Scotland in 1957, overlooking the Sound of Sleat and toward the isle of Skye. Except for the time and specific place (in my case, in 2009 during my wife's and my first trip to Kyleakin, Skye, and, more recently, last month, as our whole family arrived in tow to Trumpan, Skye - the northern part of Skye's "second finger" - including our two teenage boys), I could use Schueler's words to describe my own reaction to the preternatural splendor of Skye's landscapes and skies. It is a wondrous place that somehow exists both inside and outside of time; where shapes, textures, and colors appear, and disappear, fleetingly and constantly, that one swears have never before appeared anywhere else on earth; where so much Wagnerian-scale drama unfolds in its undulating land, sea, and cloudscapes during even that ephemeral instant between involuntary blinks of an eye, that one's aesthetic senses are delighted and overwhelmed. Oh, but what a magnificent symphony!

Over the next few weeks, I will be posting images as I "develop" them, and that I somehow (inexplicably) managed to capture in between slack-jawed exclamations of "Ooh!" and "Ahhh" and the occasional, "Just extraordinary!"; as Skye sporadically allowed hints of its ineffable mystery and beauty to enter my camera's lens and viewfinder.

Again, I cannot improve upon Shueler's own words:

"When I speak of nature, I speak of the sky, because the sky has become all of nature to me. And when I think of the sky, I think of the Scottish sky over Mallaig. It isn't that I think of it that nationally, really, but that I studied the Mallaig sky so intently, and I found its convulsive movement and change and drama such a concentration of activity that it became all skies and even the idea of all nature to me. It's as if one could see from day to day the drama of all skies and of all nature in all times speeded up and compressed. I knew that the whole thing was there. Time was there and motion was there - lands forming, seas disappearing, worlds fragmenting, colors emerging or giving birth to burning shapes, mountain snows showing emerald green; or paused solid still when gales stopped suddenly and the skies were clear again after long days of howling sound and rain or snow beating horizontal from the sky."

Perhaps Skye's deepest mystery, is how - despite the incessant drama of all of its basic forms, and unending froth of light and shadow - there is a deep, deep, spiritually infused fantastical quiet that envelops the senses (when the moment is right and Skye has chosen to briefly reveal that side of herself).

One's Real Self

"As the self is borne away, as the central ego or clot thins, so is the self more profoundly and centrally enriched. This is a common experience. It happens. The wording, the analogy, may be matter for debate. There is no doubt about the happening, about the feeling, the apprehension, that in those minutes one was with one's real self, and also with that which was beyond the real self but yet of which the real self was part...

...In that extraordinary moment when one becomes aware of oneself, self-aware, it is exactly as if there was an over-self seeing the ordinary self, and this creates a sort of amplitude of being in which there is light, and delight, and understanding. The 'first self' and the 'second self' (or, above, the ordinary and the overself) are now one, and second containing the first within its circle, which can - and generally does - expand outwards with a wonderful sense of freedom, or may narrow upon the first self with an understanding that has its own clear affection, a seeing that comprehends the whole, the unity and accepts within a - or the - region of ultimate reality."

- Neil M Gunn (1891-1973)

Postscript 1: The image above was captured in 2009 during a trip my wife and I took to Scotland, which is where we will again be for the next three weeks or so (mostly on the Isle of Skye). So, for those of you kind enough to frequent these pages every now and then, please rest assured that the apparent dearth of images over the interim means only that this humble blog's author is out capturing new images to post in the weeks to come.

Postscript 2: As a parting gift (at least to those of you with iPhones;-) here are links to a selection of my Synesthetic Landscape series resized as "screen backgrounds" for 4.7 inch (resolution = 1334 by 750) and 5.5 inch (resolution = 1920 by 1080) iPhones. 

Mystery

"There is nothing in the world

that is not mysterious,

but the mystery is more evident

in certain things than in others:

in the sea,

in the eyes of the elders,

in the color yellow,

and in music."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1896 - 1986)

Hearing Through the Eyes

“At the root of creativity is an impulse to understand, to make sense of random and often unrelated details. For me, photography provides an intersection of time, space, light, and emotional stance. One needs to be still enough, observant enough, and aware enough to recognize the life of the materials, to be able to ‘hear through the eyes’.” 

- Paul Caponigro (1932 - )

From Nothing to Being

"How comes the world to be here at all instead of the nonentity which might be imagined in its place?...One need only shut oneself in a closet and begin to think of the fact of one's being there, of one's queer bodily shape in the darkness (a thing to make children scream at, as Stevenson says), of one's fantastic character and all, to have the wonder steal over the detail as much as over the general fact of being, and to see that it is only familiarity that blunts it. Not only that anything should be, but that this very thing should be, is mysterious!...Philosophy stares, but brings no reasoned solution, for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge...All of us are beggars here, and no school can speak disdainfully of another or give itself superior airs."

- William James (1842 - 1910)

Some Problems of Philosophy

Order

“We adore chaos because

we love to produce order.” 

- M.C. Escher

(1898 - 1972)

Problem of Existence

"The problem of existence is a very interesting and difficult one. if you do mathematics, which is simply working out the consequences of assumptions, you'll discover for instance a curious thing if you add the cubes of integers. One cubed is one, two cubed is two times two times two, that's eight, and three cubed is three times three times three, that's twenty-seven. If you add the cubes of these, one plus eight plus twenty-seven- let's stop there - that would be thirty-six. And that's the square of of another number, six, and that number is the sum of those same integers. one plus two plus three...Now, that fact which I've just told you about might not have been known to you before. You might say Where is it, what is it, where is it located, what kind of reality does it have?' And yet you came upon it. When you discover these things, you get the feeling that they were true before you found them. So you get the idea that somehow they existed somewhere, but there's nowhere for such things. It's just a feeling...Well, in the case of physics we have double trouble. We come upon these mathematical interrelationships but they apply to the universe, so the problem of where they are is doubly confusing...Those are philosophical questions that I don't know how to answer."

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Door in the Wall

"The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

The Doors of Perception

A Deeper Order

"If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all." 

- Stuart A. Kauffman (1939 - )

Timelessness

"If we take eternity to mean

not infinite temporal duration,

but timelessness,

then eternal life belongs

to those who live in the present."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951)

Pleromatic and Thingish Worlds

"We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc. 

That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on. 

But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time. ...

Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker. 

It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions)."

- Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1980)

Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

Electrons, Protons, and Chess

"When you ask what are electrons and protons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave, how they move. I can describe the situation by comparing it to the game of chess. In chess, we have various chessmen, kings, knights, pawns and so on. If you ask what chessman is, the answer would be that it is a piece of wood, or a piece of ivory, or perhaps just a sign written on paper, or anything whatever. It does not matter. Each chessman has a characteristic way of moving and this is all that matters about it. The whole game of chess follows from this way of moving the various chessmen."

- Paul A. M. Dirac (1902 - 1984)

Light and Peace

"Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward

the town to gather alms,

and the two samanas recognized him

solely by the perfection of his repose,

by the calmness of his figure,

in which there was no trace of seeking,

desiring, imitating, or striving,

only light and peace."

- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)

Siddhartha

Constituent Parts

"The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts."

- James Lovelock (1919 - )

Organ of Perception

"If we see in thinking the capacity to comprehend more than can be known to the senses, we are forced on to recognize the existence of objects over and above those we experience in sense perception. Such objects are Ideas. In taking possession of the Idea, thinking merges itself into the World Mind. What was working without now works within. Man has become one with the World Being at its highest potency. Such a becoming-realized of the Idea is the true communion of man. Thinking has the same significance for ideas as the eye for light and the ear for sound. It is an organ of perception."

- Rudolf Steiner (1861 - 1925)

Complete Mind

"Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses; especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else."

- Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)

Outside Space and Time

"But the solution to the riddle of life and space and time lies outside space and time. For, as it should be abundantly clear by now, nothing inside a frame can state, or even ask, anything about that frame. The solution, then, is not the finding of an answer to the riddle of existence, but the realization that there is no riddle. This is the essence of the beautiful, almost Zen Buddhist closing sentences of the Tracticus: 'For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist.'"

- Paul Watzlawick (1921 - 2007)

Ocean of Being

"We should not for a moment

consider even our best-established

knowledge of existence as true.

It is awareness only of the

colors that our own vision paints

on the film of one bubble

in one strand of foam

on the ocean of being."

- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)

Beautiful Numinosity

"You enter a profound state of non-manifestation, which is experienced like, say, an autumn night with a full moon. There is an eerie and beautiful numinosity to it all, but it’s a "silent” or “black” numinosity. You can’t really see anything except a kind of silvery full­ness, filling all space. But because you’re not actually seeing any particular object, it is also a type of Radical Emptiness. As Zen says, “stop the sound of that stream.” This is variously known as shunyata, as the Cloud of Unknowing, Divine Ignorance, Radical Mystery, nirguna (“unqualifiable”) Brahman, and so on. Brilliant, silvery radiance, with no objects detracting from it.

This has an overwhelming spiritual feel. It becomes perfectly obvious that you are abso­lutely one with this Fullness, which transcends all worlds and all planes and all time and all history. You are perfectly full, and therefore you are perfectly empty. “It is all things, and it is no things,” said the Christian mystic Benmen.

Awe gives way to certainty. Of course, that’s who you are, prior to all manifestation, prior to all worlds. It is called “seeing your Original Face,” the “face you had even before your parents were born.” In other words, it is seeing who or what you are eternally."

- Ken Wilber (1949 - )

Stillness of Air

"The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga."

- Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

(1910 - 1995)

Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science

Sense of Aesthetics

"Why is there so much beauty in nature?' We do not believe that beauty is only in the eye of the beholder. There are objective features underlying at least some experiences of beauty, such as the frequency ratios of the notes of a major chord, the symmetry of geometric forms, or the aesthetic appeal of juxtaposed complementary colors. None of these have survival value, but all are prevalent in nature in a measure hardly compatible with chance. We marvel at the songs of birds, the color scheme of flowers (do insects have a sense of aesthetics?), of birds' feathers, and at the incomparable beauty of a fallen maple leaf, its deep red coloring, its blue veins, and its golden edges. Are these qualities useful for survival when the leaf is about to decay?"

- Henry Margenau (1901 - 1997)

The Miracle of Existence

Deep and Boundless

"You have only to rest in inaction and things will transform themselves. Smash your form and body, spit out hearing and eyesight, forget you are a thing among other things, and you may join in great unity with the deep and boundless."

- Chuang Tzu

(4th Century B.C.)

Geological Time

"The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation]."

- Kurt Godel (1906 - 1978)

Profound Repose

“I have visited, a great many years ago, the Sandwich Islands-that peaceful land, that beautiful land, that far-off home of profound repose, and soft indolence, and dreamy solitude, where life is one long slumbrous Sabbath, the climate one long delicious summer day, and the good that die experience no change, for they but fall asleep in one heaven and wake up in another."

- Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Letters from Hawaii

Hanalei Bay

"Fall after fall of shining water hastens down green, abrupt slopes and across brief shore lands to the sea held within the broad curving arms of Hanalei bay. To the south of this green valley of Waioli stand its three peaks. Namolokama at the center, flanked on the west by Mamalahoa, on the east by Hihimanu. eastward still further, wandering in the wide bends of the sea, lies the more open valley of Hanalei, largest river of all the islands and drawing its source direct from Waialeale's summit lake."

- Ethel Damon (1883–1965)

Koamalu: A Story of Pioneers on Kauai and

of What They Built in That Island Garden, 1931

Kauaian Verdure

"Here nature has wrought with bold hands and on a large scale, gouging profound valleys out of massive mountains, scoring them deep with gorges and buttressing them thick with ridges, and then throwing them over them a veil of tropic verdure that half reveals and half conceals and wonderfully softens, the bold hard features of the geologic. Nature has contributed the magnificent semi-circular bay with its fine beach and swimming, a succession of splendid cliffs and broad fertile valley, bounded by mountain walls down whose sides leap numberless thread-like waterfalls which now and again lose themselves in the foliage."

- J. M. Lydgate (1854 - 1922)

The Wreck of the Saginaw: Notes of Halford Interview

Memories ... regarding the wreck of the ship

“Saginaw” off the coast of Hanalei (Kauai, Hawaii)

Matter is Spirit

"Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(1881 - 1955)

Doing Things from Your Soul

"When you do things from your soul,

you feel a river moving in you, a joy."

- Rumi

(1207 - 1273)

Trees are Poems

"Trees are poems

that the earth writes

upon the sky."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

Sand and Foam

Postscript: watch one humble human planting his poems here.