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INTRODUCTION
People think that they see, but they don t.
HENRY MOORE
One sunny day in June, 2003, I go to the New York Botanic Garden to photograph r
oses at the
height of their bloom.. My challenge is to see the roses in a fresh way, a new w
ay, different
from the thousands of images of these lovely flowers that I had seen. I wear my
digital camera
with a macro or closeup lens attached. I walk through the Rockefeller Rose Garde
n in a
trance, relying on my forty years of photography to do the work. No-mind, a Zen
concept and
intuitive, reflex action informs my camera. I am very, very close to these bloss
oms. A hidden
world, the spirit and soul of the roses appeared. It is difficult to photograph
at extreme close
range. The slightest movement of the flower caused by wind, hand shake, or press
ing the
shutter button too hard, too soon or too late ruins the image. I dance around the
rose garden,
hypnotized and full of joy, out of my workaday mind. Back at my studio, after do
wnloading
the images to my computer and reviewing them in Adobe Photoshop, I am happily su
rprised
at the results. I stretched the envelope and was granted entry to a hidden world
. I spend the
entire week working with the images, revealing their inner beauty, enhancing the
m,
transforming them into images which speak to me of startling designs and hidden
spiritual
essences. The roses take on a new life for me, one of asymmetric beauty and cons
tant
revelations epiphanies.
Do you have to work for forty years as I did to learn to see beyond the apparent
reality of the
world? No, you only have to work at it much of the time, gradually peeling murky
blinders of
conformity and cliche from your eyes. Seeing is taken for granted. We all have e
yes. You may
believe that you see what I see. That is a false assumption. Everyone sees diffe
rently. You see
what you learn or have learned to see. Your brain processes visual information f
rom your eye
and shows you, based on your conditioning, what you will see. The liberated arti
st s eye sees
what isn t there. That sounds odd.
"How can you see what isn t there?" Picasso once said, If only I could tear out my
brain and
use only my eyes. He knew and he saw and he wished to see more. The physiology of
vision
is still an enigma to many scientific researchers. The largest portion of your b
rain is devoted
to seeing. How can you learn to see the wonders of this world? You don t have to b
e an artist
to develop this skill. You can find your way back to the innocence of early chil
dhood, when
you saw the magic of creation less edited, less conditioned by your elders, your
peers and
your environment. Wordsworth, in his poem, Intimations of Immortality... wrote:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of your;
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have see I now can see not more.
Wordsworth, of course, was bemoaning what he felt was loss of his ability to see
with the
pure innocence of childhood. As a poet, he saw with keen vision the beauty of hi
s own world
and revealed it in many poems. Still, he felt that as he grew older, something w
as lacking
which impelled him to write Intimations . It is a long and very beautiful spirit
ual poem, often
read during schooling. It speaks to an adult with a deeper meaning, for youth is
blessed with
boundless optimism and everything seems possible. How to gain back and retain th
is vision
throughout your life is the subject of this book.
'Genuine art, we say, has vision, and good poetry and good seeing quite
literally go together almost always. Yet before the more literal seeing can
liberate itself into that other vision we speak of, a transfiguration is needed:
the
eye must learn to abandon its long habit of useful serving and take up instead
an active delight in its own ends.'
JANE HIRSHFIELD : excerpt from Kingfishers Catching Fire:
Seeing with Poetry's Eyes
DO YOU SEE ANYTHING?
I beg your indulgence. Your eye does not see anymore than your computer thinks.
Your eye is
a marvelous tool for recording and transmitting photons of light to your brain i
n the form of
electrical signals. Beginning at the retina, a series of computer like programs
analyze, censor,
delete and send certain amounts of information to various parts of the brain. Th
is is not widely
understood. Most of us were raised and taught that we see with our eyes.. Recent
studies of
how the eye and brain work together bring to light the uncanny fact that our it
is our brains,
not our eyes, which see and control our vision.. The Art of Seeing will reveal how
early
conditioning and genetic inheritance determines how and what we see. We will com
e to
understand that we can learn to truly see the world in all of its miraculous bea
uty only after
hard work and deep insights. We will observe the processes of seeing and creatin
g our world
vision. We will examine the strange phenomenon of many artist's works that do no
t resemble
the way we see the world.
I celebrate the art of true vision. It is the key to becoming one in heart and s
pirit with the
Gaena, the spirit of the earth. Light, holy light makes vision possible. Light a
nd its bizarre
behavior is one of the great mysteries that still baffle physicists and mathemat
icians. Light
gives vision. How that process works is a visit to a strange new land. To truly
see is to
enhance one's life and make visible the hidden universe of wonders which surroun
d us.
LIGHTWORKS
Light is the source of all vision. It has been said that light is the face of Go
d and/or the mind
of God. The Old Testament Bible begins (Genesis: 1) with And God said, Let there
be light.
According to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, light is ageless, for at the speed
of light time
stops. Imagine! A ray of light from a galaxy billions of light years away is no
older than when
it left the star filled source! That light is an enigma even to current to science
may surprise
you. Light behaves in strange ways; it can be a particle (photon) or a wave. It
can be warped
by gravity. It cannot escape the event horizon of a black hole. And, as has been w
ritten by
scientists such as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, as you approach the spee
d of light,
time slows down. (Star Trek fans know that crossing a galaxy or galaxies is negot
iable in six
months in warp 9.999. )
Without light, no life can exist. Without the light of the mind, we are rendered
dumb and
speechless. Without the ability to see the light with child-like innocence, we l
ose the greatest
gift conferred on sapient beings. We must begin with training the eye to see what
isn't there.
When you look through the eyepiece of a camera, you may not be aware that you ar
e using
your zoom eye to see. You tend to focus on the main subject, be it a person, an an
imal, or a
significant part of a landscape, such as a great tree or a sculptural rock. You
often do not
notice what appears in most of the image seen in the viewfinder. A photographer
learns to
scan the entire frame in an instant to create an image.
The legendary photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, coined the phrase, The decis
ive
moment, meaning the moment when the subject and its significance come together fo
r a split
second. His talented, practiced eye recognized those fleeting moments. He made c
ompositions
in which all of the elements of the image related to each other in a striking or
dynamic way.
Bresson was able to do this in a fraction of a second. To do this we must learn
to see from
both sides of our eye without moving our eyeball. It takes practice. We may stud
y examples
of traditional beauty such as flowers rearranged in a unusual way, one that take
s us by
surprise. You will see this in the Japanese art of Ikebana or floral arrangement
s. When the
Japanese arrange flowers, they often do so in an asymmetrical way, a way that ca
n enchant or
intrigue us with its tension and beauty. These arrangements often appear to teet
er on the edge
of falling apart. In the feudal days of Samurai warriors in Japan, a noble samur
ai would make
an ikebana before going into battle. It was said that the outcome of the battle
could be
predicted by the success of his floral arrangement.
Hiroshi Teshigahara is a renowned Japanese film director and headmaster of the S
ogetsu
School of Ikebana. In the preface to his elegiac picture book The Art of Ikebana
, he writes:
Ikebana can play a tremendous role in modern society. It has something
beautiful to offer the human spirit. Due to the character of its living material
s,
ikebana has the power to change and add resonance to our increasingly sterile
modern spaces, thus transforming them into more vital places...Creation is the
act of discovering something new. Through applying this truth on a daily basis,
mundane activities can be imbued with new meaning. To create is to live; as
we more fully comprehend this relationship between creativity and our daily
lives, ikebana will become more and more interesting to us.
The presence of an exquisite asymmetrical composition of ikebana renews and refr
eshes our
vision. It wrenches our mind's eye out of its complacent socket of sedentary see
ing, and
makes us aware that vision is not just what we see. It is what we are capable of
uncovering in
the seemingly commonplace everyday environment. The great French art deco poster
artist
Cassandre said that a poster must be a visual scandal in order to attract the at
tention of
viewers going on their daily rounds numb to everything but what is directly in f
ront of them.
Ikebana combines visual surprise with its appearance of seemingly teetering on a
precipice of
abstract arrangement. The loveliness of the flowers is displayed in exquisite ha
ndmade
stoneware or ceramic vases. We see the everyday beauty of flowers transformed an
d our eyes
are refreshed.
Light is supreme. Inner light, the light with which we learn to view the world.
The art of
seeing relies heavily on the light which comes from our minds, holy light which
illuminates a
dark world with our imaginings and our dreams. How can we see through the veil o
f order
which imprisons us like caterpillars in a cocoon from which we will never emerge
as shining
butterflies? The search for beauty is the truest meaning of life. Until we gain
the ability to see
beauty in the simplest things, we cannot love in the highest meaning of the word
. We learn to
love ourselves which brings about love of others. Life itself is love and art.
It is only with the more recent discoveries about the visual brain that our
concept of vision as a process has changed. We now view it as an active
process in which the brain, in its quest for knowledge about the visual world,
discards, select and, by comparing the selected information to its stored record
,
generates the visual image in the brain, a process remarkably similar to what
the artist does...but these new facts have only come to light in the past twenty
five
years.
SEYMOUR ZEKI, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain
I endeavor to see more each day. Gradually, as a flower unfolds in the springtim
e, glory in the
light, glory in the earth glows and sheds its radiance over my life. It is a pro
cess that will
never end. I do not speak of seeing only what is beautiful. Without the dark sid
e, the beautiful
might become too commonplace. The poet Lorca spoke of duendé , the dark side of ar
t.
Without duendé he wrote, the flamenco lacks spiritual depth. He tells of a gypsy w
oman
hearing a cello sonata by Bach being played and exclaiming, "That really has due
ndé
There is great beauty in the human countenance. Can you see it? Can you see it i
n the faces of
old people graven with the erosion of time and circumstance? We live with people
, friends,
relatives, acquaintances, and rarely see them clear. It is well, at times, to ta
ke a loved one by
surprise with an outrageous, hilarious or scandalous comment and suddenly see hi
m or her
again.
TREE LIFE
I am a tree hugger. I can think of nothing more beautiful than the shapes of nob
le trees, great
oaks, redwoods, pines, ancient olives, cypress and a hundred others. I take my n
ickname C.
W. from the Caucasian Wingnut tree. When I walk (dance) among the trees I see th
em as
anthropomorphic shapes, wise, benevolent, patient, and beautiful, grand sculptur
e that makes
my heart sing. I photograph them (late fall, winter, or early spring are best fo
r seeing the bare
branches). I enhance, transform or otherwise play with the trees in Adobe Photosho
p to
reveal what I believe to be their inner lives. It may not be the trees whose liv
es I truly see, but
my own imagination running riot in their lofty, regal domains. I think the trees
would be
pleased at the attention. Our too often overly greedy society demands that we cu
t down many
old, irreplaceable growths for profit. It is sad that our vision is deprived of
these great trees. I
grieve for their loss. Many would agree, but taking action demands a true unders
tanding of
how we function in our materialistic society. I vote for the life of trees, and
for a wise
compromise with our needs.
"I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it,
and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering
forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves,
traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space
heaven knows how fast and far!
JOHN MUIR
We live on the surface of the earth and on the surface of our own beings. Our co
nscious brains
control but little of what we do. We are like captains on the bridges of ocean l
iners calling out
commands, but often little concerned with the complex and vast array of machiner
y below
that executes these commands. Over the sea itself, just as with our own unconsci
ous minds,
they have little or no control. We ride these tempestuous seas hurled high into
the sky by
monster waves in a storm. Suddenly, a rainbow appears, and we see how beautiful
it is. We do
not control this. It is our privileges because we are endowed with an appreciati
on of useless
beauty.
NOBLE VISIONS
There are visions which never leave my mind because I have not seen them yet. I
remember
the vast main temple at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, although I saw it clearly rather
than with
depth. The clarity of the light in Antarctica, and the pristine archipelagos and
icebergs which
spoke of time before man, compelled me to try to see these things well. Maybe ne
xt time. On
safari in the Last Eden, the Okovango Delta in Botswana, I recall flocks of birds,
elephants
and cheetahs, the tall grass the and winding streams. Still, I saw them without
truly
penetrating beneath the surface. The splendor of Moorea and Bora Bora in French
Polynesia,
the green and turquoise waters there and in the Seychelles dazzled me, better to
have looked
harder. I stood transfixed at Macchu Picchu, remembering Pablo Neruda's great po
em, The
Heights of MacchuI Picchu. My images while handsome, do not dig deep into the In
ca ruin.
Hong Kong still baffles me. My Great Wall and Forbidden City images are merely a
breezy, if
professional look at these great works of antiquity. There is a need to learn to
see and to work
in a vertical as well as a horizontal way, to penetrate deep down into the myste
ry and spiritual
life of places and peoples. A world roaming traveler skims the surface too much.
Around our
familiar places, over time, we can penetrate to the heart of things. We can visi
t beloved places
over and over. That is a beginning.
LIGHT'S GENESIS
Where in the infinity of space and time does light come from? If indeed it is th
e mind of God
or the manifestation of His splendor, how can it permeate the universe without a
beginning?
We needn't answer questions of such metaphysical depth to see the light. The ver
y term see
the light bespeaks a seeing beyond what the eye itself sees. Consider the visual
mystery of a
black hole. Can a huge collapsed star of such density and gravity exist from whi
ch light itself
cannot escape? Stephen Hawking and many other physicists believe this is so. Is
a black hole
the wormhole(1) to other universes?
Quantum physics speaks of fluctuations in the space-time continuum from which vi
brations,
waves or sub-atomic particles arise spontaneously, This implies a steady state u
niverse, a
universe which emerges at random.. To some, this seems better than the Big Bang
theory of
the universe exploding and expanding from a singularity, a point of infinite mas
s, density,
energy and gravity within which the laws of physics disappear. A singularity pro
duces a
paradox of infinite forces if observed or experienced. Thus, a singularity is pr
evented from
having a physical, or observable existence by the process of cosmic censorship.
Stephen
Hawking has said, in his writings, "the actual point of creation (of the univers
e) lies outside
the scope of presently known laws of physics," A black hole constructs an event
horizon
around its singularity. You cannot penetrate it to observe the singularity witho
ut being
destroyed. If there was a Big Bang, was there light in the singularity? If not,
where did the
light come from?
One thing is clear in our framing of questions such as `How did the Universe get
started?' is
that the Universe was self-creating. This is not a statement on a `cause' behind
the origin of
the Universe, nor is it a statement on a lack of purpose or destiny. It is simpl
y a statement that
the Universe was emergent, that the actual of the Universe probably derived from
a
indeterminate sea of potentiality that we call the quantum vacuum, whose propert
ies may
always remain beyond our current understanding...
The fact that the Universe exists should not be a surprise in the context of wha
t
we know about quantum physics. The uncertainty and unpredictability of the
quantum world is manifested in the fact that whatever can happen, does
happen (this is often called the principle of totalitarianism, that if a quantum
mechanical process is not strictly forbidden, then it must occur).
(excerpt from (zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17.html)
What has this to do with the art of seeing? Seeing is not a mechanical process t
aking place
between the eye and the brain, in which light waves or photons enter the lens of
the pupil,
strike the retina, are transported to the visual cortex, and voila, vision emerg
es. It is a complex
process in which photons are converted into electrical impulses which the brain
censors,
deciphers and then decides what you and I see. I have not discovered from the ab
ove light's
origin. We will learn to see by shredding the veil of insubstantial conditioning
and possible
genetic inheritance which causes us to see what seemingly is there. Although thi
s is a
continuing mystery, light, the light of the visible spectrum, is our greatest jo
y.
Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes
. . . there we enter the realm of Art and Science.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
YOUR EYE IS NO WINDOW
Light which enters our eyes through the pupils passes through a number of almost
transparent
layers to arrive at the retina. Since there is sharpness of vision only at the f
ovea, a tiny central
zone of the eye, The eyeball must constantly move, in order to bring an entire s
cene into
focus. We do this with a series of quick glances called saccades ( A rapid inter
mittent eye
movement, as that which occurs when the eyes fix on one point after another in t
he visual
field.) We are not conscious of this, and may imagine that we see everything sha
rp. The
myriad photons of light strike the rods and cones which are wired to a complex co
mputer in
the retina. Preliminary processing of the visual information takes place here. T
he eye is no
window! From the retina, the information goes on to a way station, the LGN (late
ral
geniculate nuclesu) where it is sent to the primary visual cortex, and on to oth
er parts of the
brain. Where, you may ask. Very little is known. The riddle of vision may be lik
ened to that
of early explorers arriving at the continent of Africa for the first time and ci
rcumnavigating
part of this vast land mass. The interior is dark and mysterious.
Strangely, scientists find more information comes back to the LGN from various p
arts of the
brain than go from it to the brain. The actual process of seeing is performed by
your brain
rather than your eye. Here we are being told what to see, or are we? More likely
our
upbringing and our environment have mapped that which is important on our brains.
Since
it takes energy to see, why waste this energy in a battle within ourselves to un
mask the
outside world, to circumvent or overcome our early conditioning.? Let us waste thi
s energy
because not to see is to be blind to the real meaning of life on a beautiful pla
net.
Look again. How do you see what isn't there? What isn't there is the real world of
wonder,
chaos and beauty that you do not yet see. Start by educating your eye. We are su
rrounded by
images in our technological, digital world. Much of it is the ordinary, our dail
y fare. Why not
visit online the virtual realms of museums or museums themselves, or the host of
books about
artists of every period and see how artists and photographers view and have view
ed our
world. Is Van Gogh's Starry Night his true vision? Did Willem De Kooning see women
like
the tortured paintings he became famous for? What about Picasso often sticking e
yes in his
paintings anywhere but where they belong? He said that way people would notice t
hem. Are
Dubuffet's grotesque paintings of people real.. Dubuffet studied the works of ch
ildren and
mad people. No matter you say, they were painters. You may be a photographer or
artist and
record what is there or you may be trying to see your world. First glance is onl
y the beginning
of the process of truly seeing. As with music, you must listen to a great rock b
and, a
symphony or a piece of ethnic music a number of times to really hear it. It is e
asy to hear light
music the first time. It's like seeing what's there. Truly seeing comes from all
owing the
shimmering mantle of light which envelops the world to envelop you like a two wa
y mirrorlike
garment which reflects and transmits light at the same time. Is that an impossib
ility, like
viewing a singularity? You are the mirror. Light comes from within and without.
Try it, but be
patient.
POINT LOBOS
My work is a kind of music. Images play music to my eyes. How do you or I decode
this
music of the spheres? Come with me to Point Lobos, a nature reserve which juts int
o the
ocean south of Carmel, California. I describe this place more fully in my pictur
e book, THE
SAMURAI WAY: Spiritual Journeys with a Warrior Photographer (Ruder Finn Press, J
une
2004) . I often walked the rock formations at Pebbly Beach now called Weston Bea
ch. The
tilted slabs of many hued rocks on the ocean's edge, the ancient Carmelo and san
dstone
conglomerates, hide a world of abstract art, of shapes which mirror chimeras and
gargoyles,
or anything else you might fancy. Walk these rocks slowly, on the outgoing tide
early in the
morning, and you will see a rainbow of colors on the rocks. You will learn to in
terpret the
ikebana-like arrangements of the rocks and uncover their distinctive personaliti
es. Not in one
day or two, but in many, your eyes will refresh themselves and begin to see what
isn't there.
The same may be done nearer home. A walk in a botanical garden, a forest or arou
nd a lake
leads to new visions. Annie Dillard discovered a universe at Tinker's Creek.
One day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw
the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning
doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on
the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and
utterly dreaming. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time see
n,
knocked breathless by a powerful glance...I had been my whole life a bell, and
never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck
ANNIE DILLARD , A Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek
ALEXANDER POPE
Laws of science should not trap us into complacency about how we see. The study
of light has
revealed mystery atop mystery. Newton's theories of light as corpuscles eventual
ly gave way
to Einstein and the enigma of light as both waves and particles (photons). Imagi
ne that your
brain behaves as a black hole is believed to do in interstellar space. A black h
ole is
surrounded by the event horizon which is the limit beyond which even light cannot
escape
the ravening gravity of the hole. Our own event horizons are the limits which ou
r brains
enforce to make us see what is already there. Early in life, our brains map the
visual world
according to our environments and from instructions received from our parents, t
eachers and
peers. While light cannot escape from a black hole, we ourselves are not constra
ined from
violating our self-imposed limits. Only fear, rigidity or laziness can prevent u
s from viewing
and enjoying the works and wonders of all creation.
In his book, Catching the Light , author Arthur Zajonc writes, Goethe phrased it
this
way,'The eye owes its existence to the light. Out of indifferent animal organs t
he light
produces an organ to correspond to itself; and so the eye is formed by the light
for the light so
that the inner light may meet the outer.'...had light not seen man, we should neve
r have seen
the light. If light sees us, can we then learn to see the light? The eye/brain al
liance is a kind
of camera obscura, a dark chamber which receives and emits light What form these
light rays
take inside our brains is equally dark and obscure. We have the keys to unlock t
he box and
dwell in radiance.
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and
knowledge.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
WORLD ICONS
Often I am asked what is my favorite place in the world. During twenty-five year
s of circling
the globe I've encountered many enchanting scenes. Among them, for sheer beauty
of the
landscape, the high plateau regions of the southwest in America are unsurpassed.
While
photographing for my book of aerial photography Sacred Lands of the Southwest ,
I wrote the
following:
I awake from reverie, hypnosis, rapture of the deep or sky, oxygen deprivation
at ten thousand feet, slightly dizzy reverie, fire the camera and wave Michael
the pilot on to Canyonlands. The confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers
slides below, interwoven like an measureless Mobius strip, a bow-tie ribbon
twined in the petrified red hair of the Colorado plateau. To the right I see my
companion Shirlee's favorite southwestern garden, the green meadows of the
Needles and Chesler Park, spires and obelisks arrayed like marble hat pins.
Row on row of silent sentinels striated with browns and yellows, these tapers'
burn in the orange light as in a cathedral where the devout light candles. Our
aircraft speeds ahead twixt Navajo Point and Navajo Mountain, one thousand
feet above the fissured rocks, one million light years from today.
Lake Powell glistens among black rock monoliths and crags. A red sky bands
the horizon. I lean out the open window to photograph the last light of evening
on the waters beneath the sky glow that reaches across the heavens.
Somnambulist of early evening, harbinger of tonight's full moon, chalice of the
universe, the desert blushing with harmony and music, the reddening sky and
the dark lake transfix me..
At five hundred feet over Lake Powell, Michael lowers the landing gear, sets
full flaps down and throttles back. The Cessna airplane bucks and slows.
Michael whirls the aircraft around in a steep turn. Window open, I lean out to
photograph Tower Butte framed by Wild Horse Mesa and the pinnacles round
the "Crossing of the Fathers." Fifteen minutes before sunset, the magic light
paints huge rock monoliths a deep shade of red. Lake Powell's waters grow
dark. I am chief of the dusk, riding my thunder stallion down the fading light,
chasing the buffalo rocks down to cliff's edge. The sun's bloody tomahawk
cleaves the distant ridge. Darkness.
Time's fleet arrow speeds across a distant sea of stars out beyond the known
universe, a blackness full of tears, the endless, sentient and universal realm o
f
mother earth, her chariot, her carriage and her dreams. I am filled with dreams
still aborning, a speck of protoplasm attached to earth's green bosom, a vibrant
breathing chalice of all that she has dreamed during an eternity of fecund and
felicitous birthing. We are one, the wistful mote and the wise macrocosm. We
feel the same. We know the same. All is beautiful. Hozho!
Hozhó...the word means something like harmony, beauty and balance all
wrapped in one concept that dwells at the heart of the Navajo world view"
PAUL G. ZOLBROD
..Thirty minutes before sunset, Michael, our acrobatic pilot of the Cessna
182RG (retractable gear), spins the light plane into a dizzying descent around
the Totem Pole and Yei Bi Chei rocks in Monument Valley. I lean out of the
open window. Long shadows march across the red desert floor, spirits of ghost
dancers awakening from the afterlife. Shirlee and I ride a winged metal spirit
that dances in the shimmering yellow sunlight like a mayfly, ephemeral, a few
minutes of epiphany, a glorious flight before the sun descends into the
underworld.
Michael banks and turns, whirling the Cessna towards the great stone "Hands
of the Great Spirit," the red rock mittens of Monument valley. The earth
tumbles beneath me. I gesture towards the flaming rock mittens, St. Elmo's
fire, or the immolation of heathens by the friars of the Inquisition. Mitten
crosses mitten, holy shadows on the desert. We veer and turn, a spinning,
whirring dervish suspended in thin air, shadowed by the sun's grim final
burning, ourselves ghost dancers. Loud is the propeller and louder still the
hush of millenniums.
Spires, castles, battlements, towers and rock cliffs rear out of the red desert
sand, and in the distance, tiny red mounds, hogans face east to greet each
newborn sun ball trailing a red placenta of clouds. I see no life, no sign of
Navajo or sheep, only the silent ghost dance of shadows, evidence of
crepuscular deities slumbering among the stone sepulchers. Time, deep desert
time, time that painstakingly sculpts wisdom and stone monuments weds
necromancy's dark invocations to shadowy spirits. Fiery embers glow on the
horizon. The setting sun hangs like a burnt brass cymbal. One instant more, we
fleet across the picket line of monuments The King on his Throne, The
Stagecoach, Bear and the Rabbit, Big Indian . Dying shadows sink into the
parched land. Distant cliffs devour the sun shrouding the desert with scorched
tears. The ancient ones doze.
I was in a trance during those aerial encounters. Whirling and tumbling about, f
lying low and
close to the stone castles, ruins and monuments, I relied on no-mind to see for
me, my
instinctive, intuitive training born of long years of practice. Images flashed a
cross my vision,
triggering reflex actions on the camera's shutter button. What I saw was reveale
d later in the
developed film and it was good.
ZOOM EYES
A camera is a splendid tool to awaken and train the vision. To truly see through
the camera
viewfinder, you must look hard, all around the perimeter of the image. This is t
he first step,
seeing what the camera sees through whichever lens you use. Our zoom eyes coax us
to see
only that part of the image which is our subject, rather than studying the entir
e frame. That is
why too often, photographs taken on travels at home or abroad, are disappointing
. We thought
our friends or companion were tall in the image, yet the print shows them as tin
y figures in an
unresolved landscape, among majestic ruins, or a grand cityscape.
Use your camera as you would a magnifying glass to examine the exterior that you
try to
capture. Study it until you really see it. No hurry! Otherwise your snapshot' wil
l only reveal
that you were careless and unseeing. The camera is a magical optical device whic
h can, if
used with passion and vision, reveal the unseen world, from the macroscopic imag
e of dew on
the petals of a rose to the sculptural nobility of a giant tree. The eye is no c
amera. Our eyes,
controlled by our brains, record what we should see, not what is there. Our eyes l
ie to us.
That is why eyewitnesses often disagree to what they see. Mood, emotion, stress,
fear, anger
or love all influence what we think we have seen. Vision is as infinite in its m
any guises as
the universe within our brains.
RICHER THAN EMPERORS OR KINGS
...all I produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At
seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of nature...at ninety
I
shall penetrate the mystery of things...and when I am a hundred and ten
everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive. I beg those who live as l
ong
as I to see if I keep my word.
HOKUSAI , Wood block Artist, Japan, 1760-1849),
( The Manga , JAMES MICHNER)
I acclaim these lines of Hokusai. He lived to eighty-nine in a time when that wa
s very rare. It
must have been sheer energy. He changed his name many times as well. His modesty
about
his work bespeaks an intense curiosity and desire to better know (see) his own w
orld of Japan
and to never be satisfied. That's a great way to live, to learn and to see. An a
rtist, if he or she
would accomplish much, must be curious and unending in the quest for new visions
. Every
one of us can attempt the same. A writer was once asked if he could imagine writ
ing like
Shakespeare. He answered that he used words as well. How they were used, just as
how each
of us uses our eyes is another matter. Nothing can stop us from seeing except th
e tired habits
of mundane or aborted curiosity and striving.
The banquet of the world is always on the table. To see is to dine like a king o
r emperor. In
this age of onrushing technology and unlimited travel opportunities, we are rich
er in
opportunities than any rulers of the past. There is no need to fast in the midst
of viands
beyond imagining. The earth and the heavens flower for us daily. The night sky f
illed with
constellations is a feast for the eyes. I've stood on a ship's deck at night far
out as sea, far
forward away from all man made light, and gazed up at the Milky Way. I would shu
dder and
experience vertigo at the endless distances above me. I felt how fortunate to be
able to
comprehend a little of the wheel of our galaxy and the immensity of the universe
. Better to
drown in the search for knowledge than to languish on barren shores of disconten
t and
blindness.
HOW DO YOU SEE PEOPLE?
In Ways of Seeing, author John Berger writes, The way we see things is affected b
y what we
know or what we believe...When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completen
ess which
no words and no embrace can match... We see people according to our own inner nee
ds and
conditioning. Lovers appear wreathed in splendor, caring, giving or passion. Par
ents and
relatives stir conflicting emotions. Celebrities of screen, music or politics ar
e usually seen
with a halo of power, riches and talent. Ordinary' people are merely glanced at o
r ignored
unless we know them or plan to try to meet them. To truly see people, we need to
love and
respect them. All human beings, whether celebrities or otherwise, wear masks. Lo
ok in the
mirror, then grin. If you would photograph someone you do not know, you must dro
p your
own mask to enable true seeing of the human being beneath. A smile goes a long w
ay.
In A Natural History of the Senses, author Diane Ackerman writes:
We may pretend that beauty is only skin deep, but Aristotle was right when he
observed the beauty is a far greater recommendation than any letter of
introduction.'...After all, in fairy tales, the first stories most of us hear, t
he
heroes are handsome, the heroines are beautiful, and the wicked sots are ugly.
Children learn implicitly that good people are beautiful and bad people are
ugly, and society restates that message in many subtle ways as they grow
older.
What is beautiful and what is ugly is in the eye of the beholder. A young man fr
om West
Africa saw a five foot high power figure from Zaire in my dwelling studio which
I call Spirit
House. He is covered with medicine' objects, shells, skulls, feathers and straw,
wears a horn
on its head, and he displays a gaping smile with only three front teeth. The you
ng man stared
for a while, then said, That is very beautiful. I think so too, but not as most we
sterners
might observe beauty. The appearance of beauty truly comes from within, from the
eye of the
beholder. Those we love for their inner beauty appear more beautiful as time pas
ses. Often,
the staring, contemptuous looks sported by fashion models in ads these days, are
less than
beautiful.
We cannot define beauty. It arises from our own perception of the world just as
everyone has
their own measure of what art they like or hate. As in developing a taste for ea
ting oysters or
grasshoppers, or appreciating minimalists or abstract painters, time is needed.
The appearance
of people and things changes as we come to know them. No one is truly ugly unles
s the
ugliness emanates from inside. In Japanese Noh plays, the actors, always men, we
ar
exquisitely carved male and female masks. To succeed, the actor must bring the m
ask to life.
How a mask can change expression is demonstrated in a website (now gone) which s
old
exquisitely carved masks. Seen from above, straight on, or from the side or belo
w, and
depending on the lighting, strangely, the expressions change.
In Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa's book The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan, we r
ead that
tradition has it that a young man seeks to learn to act as the woman Komachi, a
very difficult
part to play. He follows a fine old woman eighty years of age, in the street, an
d watches her
every move. Alarmed, she asks why he is following her. On hearing his reason, sh
e tells him
it is bad for Noh. She tells him For Noh, he must feel the thing as a whole, from
the inside.
And further on we read, It is a Noh saying that, The heart is the form.'
FROM THE HEART
I wrote the following to a lovely lady. I've forgotten who she is, the memories
linger on..
You are beautiful and that attracts the rich and powerful...it can be a curse in
a
way for we need to be loved for who and what we truly are which, for the rich
and powerful, is often the surface of things. How can anyone spend their brief
time on earth in the corporate world only grabbing for more money and things?
Only the insubstantial, the spiritual, the beautiful, the music of the earth can
bring great meaning and joy and open one's eyes to the splendor in the world.
That is a real tragedy; only those who inquire and learn can change. Material
success is too often an impenetrable fortress and prison for the mind and soul.
But you know that. You write with the spirit and soul of an artist who has
learned that to follow one's own bliss is the only way. We cannot really teach
those who will not hear or see. A woman with integrity, sensitivity, talent and
a
great spirit shall be as a bird that has left its cage. She flies with those to
whom
the spiritual life is all important and love is the banner which flaunts desire
and
freedom.
I apply the word riskit to my name because I will risk and dare anything to find
the truth in art and the truth in love. I have known it; therefore it is no illu
sion.
We are free when our bonds with another are so light they are fairy spirits
darting back and forth tenins, or feather spirits as in the Japanese Noh play
Hagoromo .
All that you say about life being fulfilled with a good companion is exactly the
way that I think, feel and love. To love, to care, to feel and be honest with ea
ch
other, to converse is bliss. To travel, and seek to learn ever more about the
mysteries of our confounding and delightful world, those are the wines of life,
the deepest meaning and the challenge.
To attract even one person to love is a great step forward. Our art is the prese
nt
we freely bestow it on all the others who will share these things. To keep aligh
t
the torches of wisdom, inspiration, imagination, we change the future by
living it and by creating.
Friendly, loving and not quite tame is a good motto. Free as an eagle, crane, or
albatross we soar into the light and see what only a few can see. We celebrate
the entire world bathed in holy light and filled with becoming, our source and
our inspiration.
P.S. I went to the Einstein exhibit at the Natural History Museum this
morning relativity, kindness, wisdom and genius together Einstein once
wrote, "I want to know God's thoughts, all the rest are details." So it is with
art
and the life of creating. We immerse ourselves in evolution's great journey to
discover in that wisdom all we are and ever hope to be.
My forgetting of the lady reminds me of an elegant wine steward on a ship who to
ld us about
a wine he recommends. It went like this. A man says, I've forgotten the lady. I've
forgotten
the place, but I remember the wine, Chambertin.' Isn't that the way it is? Some t
hings are too
dear to keep alive except as smoldering embers.
THE SPEED OF LIGHT
To arrange, to live, to arrive at one's essence, to see in the best light, that
heralds true seeing. I
went to Wave Hill to see flower gardens. I saw a new variation of a loved theme,
ikebana, yet
I didn't see it. That provokes me to see it again until I see it. Annie said tha
t without her
camera she was an unscrupulous observer, she saw everything. I see with my camer
a, but first
I have to constantly see anew. At Wave Hill, in those incredulous first moments,
I saw little.
When I view quiet asymmetrical arrangements of traditional ikebana, I see the ragi
ng drama
of great storms at sea, the unheard clash of galaxies devouring each other in th
e blackness of
space, the roar and splash of icebergs calving, the silence of dewdrops on wild
flowers in the
mist. What will I see when I learn to see the new contemporary ikebana?
There is more to ikebana. My own art of image making feeds on this Japanese art.
It is only
through the asymmetric re-arrangement of dull order, the baffling discovery of c
haos in a
dewdrop or heart of a flower, the broken, shattered, torn veil of dusty memories
which
smothers insight, sight and true vision, that the newborn world emerges. To disc
over a
universe in a pot of flowers seems odd. I care only to see, to devour that which
baffles my
sight, to probe and to understand what makes this reeling globe a fantasy and a
kaleidoscope
of epiphanies. The following came from the web site www.ramalila.net:
Through the act of arranging flowers one can realize Gods ' blessing that
pervades all the universe and will be given eyes to see his own road to life.
SENEI IKENOBO
The Japanese believe Ikebana speaks directly to the heart of the creator and the
viewer. It is sculpture that breathes and expresses stability and the spirit of
Nature, a link to the whole universe. The positive ( yoh ) and negative ( in )
energy, and the harmony therein, represent the energies of life and death and
the passing of time -past, present and future. The flower bud contains, for
instance, the energy force of life towards the future. There are generally three
principal parts to the Ikebana arrangement: shin'' -the main stem representing
man ( yoh); soe'' -representing heaven ( yoh ); and tai'' -representing earth
( in) .
We have here another interpretation of the meaning of ikebana. In Japanese Shint
o religion,
the gods (kami) can be present in any outstanding natural object or phenomenon.
The artistic
expression of ikebana originated in Buddhist alter decorations honoring the dead
. Floral
arrangements are part of the Zen aesthetics of the tea ceremony. An ikebana plac
ed in the
display alcove may be the principal or only decoration in an otherwise virtually
empty humble
room. Contemporary or installation type ikebana deviates greatly from the origin
al form of
flowers arranged in a vase. Typically it is site specific, and is often room fil
ling and three
dimensional.
RUMI
The cage of restricted vision is like the steel cage used by divers to film the
great white shark.
It keeps the shark out but it keeps you in while outside rainbow schools of fish
flaunt
flamboyant colors. We can't all be divers hooked up to aqua lungs and oxygen tan
ks in or out
of cages. We can dive naked and filled with wonder into the flowering, wheeling,
ratcheting,
spinning mystery of life on earth to sail beyond the sunsets, and the baths of al
l the western
stars...
One mild winter day, I visited the Bayard Cutting Arboretum on Long Island to se
e and
photograph the trees for a fine art project I'm working on. The lady with me sai
d she watched
me dance around the trees which, shorn of leaves, displayed their sculptural grand
eur. I was
in a trance, seeing deep into the hearts and spirits of these noble trees which
flung their
convoluted, asymmetrical spreads of branches high over my head. Single branches
often
appeared too massive and heavy to support themselves. I saw a singular kind of b
eauty. I put
saw in italics because my no-mind or intuitive reflex unconscious mind saw these
trees. The
camera did its work. I presided like a floating spirit, dancing around the splen
did trunks,
enraptured, not seeing but seeing.
VERY TREE
Forget the tube of bark,
Alliterative leaves,
Tenacious like a hand
Gnarled rootage in the dark
Interior of land.
Bright incidental bird
Whose melody is fanned
Among the bundled sheaves
Wild spool of the winding word,
Reject: and let there be
Only tree.
STANLEY KUNITZ
BRITTLE STARS
I've traveled to hundreds of ports of call around the world on great ships. They
've been my
base during many adventures. This essay taken from my travel journals was writte
n while
making an Atlantic ocean crossing on Cunard Line's QE2. It deals with the phenom
ena of
light in the depths of the sea.
Signalling or seeing, hiding or hunting, luring or decoying color and
pattern are basic to communication and concealment among animals in the
ocean, as in the rest of the natural world...But in the gloomy abyss beneath,
color has little function; here, creatures communicate with light.
THE OCEANS , A Celebration
Communicate with light? We humans do it, or at least we used to. At night, befor
e the advent
of radio, ship captains at sea flashed coded light signals to each other. They s
till do at night
during wartime to avoid breaking radio silence. Deep beneath the surface of the
sea, in eternal
night, a constellation of fish radiates light. Jellyfish, worms, clams, snails,
squid, sea-squirts,
starfish, shrimps and other crustaceans convert chemical energy into light energ
y. We humans
get only 10 percent of electric energy out light bulbs in the form of light. The
rest is lost in
heat. Beneath the sea nearly 100 percent of bioluminescent energy is converted i
nto light.
At night the ocean's surface often glows with luminous light. Billions of single
celled
organisms dinoflagellates, half plant, half animal flash myriads of galaxies dancing
on the
murmuring waves. Far beneath, in that frightening abyss where light never calls,
jellyfish and
their relatives the sea-pens arm themselves with light to dazzle, frighten, or a
lert themselves
to predators. A deep sea jellyfish spins like a wheel of fireworks; bursts of li
ght flicker round
its body. Most wonderful, the brittle-star fish outsmarts its enemies with a bri
lliant strategy. If
a barrage of lights from its arms fail to frighten off its enemy, it sheds an ar
m tip, which,
miraculously, continues to flash. Meanwhile, lights out, the brittle star, minus
one arm tip,
crawls off to safety, leaving a morsel rather than a banquet. I wish I could fla
sh lights in the
dark and dance away from my sparkling body parts. What a dance that would be! No
special
effects, biochemistry converting energy to light, an eternal delight.
At night QE2 sparkles with a thousand lights. Below the glittering QE2 in the ab
yssal sea,
miles down, another kind of celebration takes place a celebration of light. Myriad
s of tiny
creatures flash lights, glow, luminescent signals to open up dialogues. In the C
aribbean,
firefleas swim in groups, pulsing lights, veritable clouds of light. Each male f
lashes points of
light in unique individual patterns, coded mites. The females recognize their ma
te's patterns,
fly into the clouds of light, discover their consorts and mate in the dark. Angl
er fish,
themselves dark, dangle luminous 'bait' from their dorsal fin fishing poles to l
ure prey into
gaping, shark toothed jaws. The light comes from clouds of glowing bacteria inha
biting the
angler fish's lures. Glowing bacteria flash signals from the eyes of flashlight
fish, who have
evolved eyelid like shutters to turn out the lights when danger comes. A few cle
ver fish
employ a headlight which emits deep red light in the abyss where no colored ligh
t penetrates.
They alone can see the red shrimps, invisible to other predators who see no colo
rs.
Ocean, you birth light as we live by light. Radiate, illuminate; I will glow wit
h a terrible fire
to light deep seas of my mind. I will enter dreadful abysses where thoughts, lik
e voracious
angler fish, dangle luminescent lures to entrap my conscious mind and bend my si
lver head to
darkness and despair. I think. I glow. I wrap myself in light's energy a thousan
d fathoms
down. In these labyrinthian corridors, clouds of shimmering thoughts wink on and
off,
tapestries of fishy design. I am one with Oceanus's womb of sentient life, spark
ing and
spitting like a Catherine's wheel, a fireworks display to mock a billion whirlin
g chalices of
stars birthing in deep space. Brittle star, you are my guiding light. I dance th
rough the heavens
like the seven daughters of Atlas, shed my sparkling limbs round Jupiter and Sat
urn, journey
on the solar wind into deep space. My light shines forever, a beacon across bill
ions of light
years. I ride beams of light into abyssal clouds, interstellar wastes trembling
with nascent
novas sparkling amidst fiery seas of condensing dust. I alight where cosmic furn
aces glow,
glitter, flame into furious fusion to cradle countless newborn stars in a univer
sal ocean of pure
light. Light, light alone reigns supreme.
I want more ideas of soul-life. I am certain that there are more yet to be found
.
A great life -an entire civilization -lies just outside the pale of common
thought. There is an entity, a Soul-Entity, as yet unrecognized There is an
immense ocean over which the mind can sail, upon which the vessel of thought
has not yet been launched. There is so much beyond all that has ever yet been
imagined.
RICHARD JEFFRIES , 1883, The Story of My Heart
THE GOD OF LIGHT
...There was a faint blue colour in the air hovering between the built-up banks,
against the lit walls, in the hollows of the houses. The swallows wheeled and
climbed, twittered and glided downwards. Burning on the great sun stood in
the sky, heating the parapet, glowing steadfastly upon me as when I rested in
the narrow valley grooved out in prehistoric times. Burning on steadfast, and
ever present as my thought. Lighting the broad river, the broad walls; lighting
the least speck of dust; lighting the great heaven; gleaming on my finger-nail.
The fixed point of day the sun. I was intensely conscious of it; I felt it; I felt
the presence of the immense powers of the universe; I felt out into the depths
of the ether. So intensely conscious of the sun, the sky, the limitless space, I
felt too in the midst of eternity then, in the midst of the supernatural, among
the immortal, and the greatness of the material realised the spirit. By these I
saw my soul; by these I knew the supernatural to be more intensely real than
the sun. I touched the supernatural, the immortal, there that moment.
RICHARD JEFFRIES , The Story of My Heart
I worship the sun god. I worship other gods as well, as a inquisitive world trav
eler and
recorder of the earth's cultures should. The sun is my familiar, the wild spirit
which tints my
work with glowing colors. The sun filters through my thoughts the way it burns t
he mist off a
mountainside. I am alive because the sun wills it. I am light itself transposed
into living mind.
Light and life embrace on this earth and throughout the misty regions of interst
ellar space.
Light is the great creator.
The light from the sun is filtered by the atmosphere and influenced by the angle
with which it
reaches the earth. Dawn and sunset light, as we all know, is very beautiful. The
very nature of
the air in different parts of the world imparts a variety of colors to way light
is seen. Mists,
rain, snow, fog, volcanic eruptions which throw vast clouds of dust into the atm
osphere, and
man's pollution all change the way we see light. In my travels, I have never see
n the light the
same anywhere in the world, even when revisiting places. The light, like a spiri
t of many
colors, is evanescent, always changing, always surprising.
HELIOS was the all-seeing god of the sun. He was also, by extension, the god
of the gift of sight and of the measurement of time (the time goddesses -the
twelve sister Hours, the goddesses Day, Month and Year, and the three sisters
called Seasons -were said to attend his throne). Helios was a close friend of
the other fire-god Hephaistos.
Theoi Project, A Guide to Greek Gods, Spirits & Monsters
I am infatuated with light like a lover, like a moonstruck swain chasing the ref
lections of the
moon in a pond (Li Po, eighth century A.D. poet, the first' hippie' or flower ch
ild and
considered the greatest of the Chinese poets, is said to have drowned watching t
he moon in a
pool, while drunk on wine). In his book, The Narrow Road to the Far North , Bash
o, the
seventeenth century Japanese master of the haiku or seventeen syllable form of p
oetry wrote:
...all who have achieved excellence in any art, possess one thing in common, that
is, to be
one with nature throughout the four seasons of the year. Whatever such a mind se
es is a
flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon. Basho's short poems, lik
e flashes of
lightning, illuminate the natural world. It is the same with the art of photogra
phy in its many
guises, for photographs tell no more truth than a wielder of the camera is capab
le of revealing.
Color is the great deceiver, because there is no such thing as true color. The lig
ht, whether
artificial or natural, dictates the color we see, and each of us sees color in h
is or her own way.
An easy test is to put a bright yellow card next to a blue card, then a red card
, finally a black
card. You will see the yellow change its apparent hue each time. We see color in
relation to
other colors. The beauty of art is that it is subjective. The artist creates col
or harmonies or
dissonances according to his or her desires or compulsions. In the artist's own
time, the shapes
and colors are often not recognized as desirable or lovely, or they are ignored.
Van Gogh,
Matisse, DeKooning, Pollock, and a host of others waited for the public's vision
to catch up,
often, as with Van Gogh, too late. Here is a brief on the character of light:
There are two basic types of light sources. Incandescence involves the
vibration of entire atoms, while luminescence involves only the electrons.
Incandescent light is produced when atoms are heated and release some of
their thermal vibration as electromagnetic radiation. It is the most common
type of light that you see everyday sunlight, regular light bulbs (not florescen
t)
and fires are all incandescent sources of light. Incandescent light is also know
n
as "black body radiation." This seemingly self-contradictory name arises from
the history of physics-scientists studying this type of light emission modeled
their theories on ideal materials that would absorb all colors of light, hence
appearing to be "black bodies". Depending on how hot the material is, the
photons released have different energies, and therefore, different colors. It wa
s
found that at lower temperatures, these materials would emit radiation in the
infrared wavelengths which we feel as heat (fires, for example, emit most of
their energy in the infrared). As temperatures are increased, increasingly more
energetic radiation is emitted, so these materials would glow red, then orange,
then yellow, and eventually "white-hot." Although ideal black body materials
don't exist in reality, most substances are close enough that this color sequenc
e
can be observed. This is why a fire tends to be redder than a halogen lamp-the
filament in a halogen lamp is heated to a higher temperature than normal fires.
Likewise, the hottest stars appear to be a blueish-white while cooler stars such
as our sun are more yellowish in appearance. Some sources of incandescent
light are: the sun, fire and light bulbs.
Unlike incandescence, luminescent light occurs at lower temperatures, because
it is produced when an electron releases some of its energy to electromagnetic
radiation, not an entire atom. It turns out that electrons like to have energy a
t
specific "energy levels." Thus, when an electron jumps down to a lower energy
level, it will release a specific amount of energy which becomes a photon, or
light of a specific color. Therefore, continued luminescence requires something
to continuously give the electrons a boost to a higher energy level to keep the
cycle going. This boost may be provided by many sources: electrical current as
in florescent lights, neon light, mercury-vapor street lights, light emitting
diodes, television screens and computer monitors; chemical reactions as in
Halloween light sticks and fire-flies; or radioactivity as in luminous paints, t
o
name just a few examples.
Discovering Light , ThinkQuest '99
Those paragraphs are like taking a run up a hill or mountainside. It's difficult
, but the view is
enchanting and illuminating.
At what incredible moment after the big bang ten or fifteen billion years ago di
d light
suddenly enter the universe? Was it there already and was light the creator of t
he universe? I
like to think that light is God's glowing mantle which He threw across the black
ness to begin
the process of making galaxies, stars and planets. It's as good a theory as any.
No physicist
truly believes he or she knows what started the colossal, perhaps infinite colle
ction of
galaxies, star clusters, quasars, supernovas, black holes and a hundred thousand
more
astounding events which daily explode around the universe. In the desert or at s
ea at night, I
feel the star filled cosmos suddenly race away from me into the limitless desert
s and seas of
outer space. I am dwarfed, a pin prick of a being shivering in the night.
What is the peculiar quality of vision that we do not truly know from where insi
de our brains
or minds it emanates? In Flash of the Spirit, African & Afro-American Art and Ph
ilosophy ,
author Robert Farris Thompson writes ...persons possessed of the spirit of a Yoru
ba
deity...look about grandly with fixed expressions...the radiance of the eyes, th
e magnificence
of the gaze, reflect ashe, the brightness of the spirit. ...According to the Yor
uba:
The gods have inner or spiritual eyes (oju inun) with which to see the
world of heaven and outside eyes (oju ode) with which to view the world of
men and women. When a person comes under the influence of a spirit, his
ordinary eyes swell to accommodate the inner eyes, the eyes of the god. He
will then look very broadly across the whole of all the devotees, he will open
his eyes abnormally.
Is light the spiritual power of the universe? Is it the holy of holies, the grai
l itself, the
unanswered questions of creation? Life can exist without light, as in certain pl
aces deep in the
sea or in buried caverns, but this is not a life we would embrace. Blind people
adjust to their
world of four senses, but they can only imagine the world of light, or do they s
omehow create
luminescence inside their minds. I like to think so. Lee W. Schvaneveldt wrote o
n the
Internet. Albert Einstein and Steve Hawkings; he and he are twins that with and i
n their arts
bring alive in this earth the things that sing, that swing in the heavens. Let t
heirs be the light,
as theirs is the darkness. Lightness, Darkness. Light/Dark. There is here a rela
tive big bang!
Albert Einstein: a brain is a silent Internet.
I'm intoxicated with exploding light and fireworks which burst from my digital b
rain
transmuted through my digital camera into the holy grail of energy. I long to see
light itself,
pure, painted with black rainbows, iridescent, flaring like the mystical sunrise
in my brain
stem. I want to see deep, deep, down in the unconscious realms where primitive n
eurons
transmit a web of light which envelops the universe. I desire to see star births
, quasars and
colossal galactic collisions crossing limitless chasms of outer space. I want to
observe
ravening flares of pure energy thousands of light years across, spanning gravity
's timeless,
tintinnabulations which ravish my inner eye. I prowl the infinitely tiny foam of
quantum
mechanics where the universe quietly explodes insubstantial probabilities, busy
with the
constant state of remaking itself, a hologram of gravity's impure architecture.
Tiny, so tiny I
cannot see the light; I am the light. I am the cognizant photons of holy light,
the all-knowing
light which irradiates my mind. I am lost in space, digital space and I see .
In the very beginning, there was a void, a curious form of vacuum, a
nothingness containing no space, no time, no matter, no light, no sound. Yet
the laws of nature were in place and this curious vacuum held potential. A
story logically begins at the beginning, but this story is about the universe an
d
unfortunately there are no data for the very beginnings--none, zero. We don't
know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billionth
of a trillionth of a second. That is, some very short time after creation in the
big bang. When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe,
someone is making it up--we are in the realm of philosophy. Only God knows
what happened at the very beginning:
Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman
THE MYSTERIOUS EYE
The eye is the supreme organ created by evolution and it is totally misunderstoo
d! That is so
important that some of the information below is repeated. You may jump ahead if
desired.
The eye is not a window. Have you flown your eye? It is attached to your brain, no
t to your
skull. What you see isn't there. It's a dreary illusion fostered by evolution an
d nurture. Your
retina contains hundreds of millions neurons working in parallel. The computing
power at
your retina exceeds that of the most powerful supercomputers. Right there at the
retina, your
desktop computer analyzes and censors much of the fireworks entering your eye, the
quintillions of photons each split second which would literally blind you if acc
epted raw.
Rods and cones in vast arrays (120 million rods and 7 million cones) accept the
incoming
photons as electrical signals and switch on and off accordingly. And that's just
the beginning.
From the retina, the electrical impulses are sent through an electric cable cont
aining over one
million wires called axons.
The optic nerve fibers from the eyes terminate at two bodies in the thalamus (th
e
aforementioned structure in the middle of the brain) known as the Lateral Genicu
late Nuclei
(or LGN for short). One LGN lies in the left hemisphere and the other lies in th
e right
hemisphere. After further processing, the results travel on a new set of axons t
o the primary
visual cortex, also known as V1, and to other parts of your brain. Hubel , in Vi
sual
Intelligence, writes: The German physicist and physiologist Herman von Helmhotz
(18211894)
described vision as a process of unconscious inference:
The psychic activities that lead us to infer that there in front of us at a cert
ain
place is a certain object of a certain character, are generally not conscious
activities, but unconscious ones. In their result they are equivalent to a
conclusion,... it may be permissible to speak of the psychic acts of ordinary
perception as unconscious conclusions, thereby making a distinction of some
sort between them and the common so-called conscious conclusions.
Hubel goes on to say, The British neurophysiologist David Marr (1946-1981) descri
bed
visual constructions by analogy to information processing in computers: Vision is
a process
that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to
the viewer and
not cluttered with irrelevant information...
The objects of obscure desire we think we see, see, or fantasize we see, relevan
t or irrelevant,
perplex neuroscientists today. Von Helmhotz surmised these things a century and
a half ago.
We must strike through the masks of obscurity and mirage and uncover all the man
y colored
spices of Samarkand, visual feasts.
When I worked with my Brooklyn Bridge images, I discovered, in the cloud filled
skies above
the bridge a kaleidoscope of elegant abstract swirls and eddies, like an evanesc
ent whirlpool
of shifting shapes and colors. I sensed that these paintings in the sky were the
re, but my eye
could not see them, blinded by the need to eliminate irrelevant information. Pla
ying with the
large digital files in Photoshop, I uncovered what my eye could not see. The com
puter has no
inhibitions; using what I imagined was there, it reveas what I entice it to reve
al. In his preface
to Visual Intelligence, Donald Hoffman writes, ...what happens when you see is no
t a
mindless process of stimulus and response, as behaviorists thought for much of t
he twentieth
century, but a sophisticated process of construction whose intricacies we are no
w beginning to
understand. Hoffman concludes his book with these words:
Visual intelligence occupies almost half of your brain's cortex...it is intimate
ly
connected to your emotional intelligence and your rational intelligence. It
constructs the elaborate visual realities in which you live and move and
interact. It forwards these constructions to your emotional and rational
intelligence, which use them as raw materials in further constructions.
DIGITAL CAMERA GIGABYTES
Our new tools create the possibilities for discovering a new vision of the world
. The large
(53.9 megabyte) files which come from my Canon EOSD1s digital camera contain a w
ealth of
information which my emotionally and rationally conditioned eye cannot see. As a
n artist, I
can imagine what is there. Playing, and I use the word playing in its most creat
ive sense,
enables me to create images I have only imagined but never seen. Suddenly, my ey
e/camera
symbiosis gives me the vision of a painter who constructs from the raw material
of nature his
or her wildest fantasies, or who subtly transforms realities. Such visionaries a
s Van Gogh,
Monet, Matisse, O'Keefe and de Kooning imagined, discovered and painted their fa
ntasies on
richly colored, wildly flamboyant canvases. Today, at the cutting edge of digita
l technology,
we can paint our visions in the computer and print them.
First, we must learn to see. The art of image transformation begin with a new vi
sion of the
world. It comes from an eye that learns to instantaneously recognizes significan
t patterns and
make strong compositions in the camera before clicking the shutter button. We mu
st learn as
well to instantaneously recognize and discard cliche patterns which enthrall us
with scenes
resembling our past visions. We must take chances and seek aleatory or chance co
mpositions.
Hidden in chaos is a higher order. The well known computer adage goes, Garbage in,
garbage out. That should never stop us from making tens of thousands of mistakes, s
eeds
we continuously plant to await a bountiful harvest of beauty. Learning to see wi
th a camera is
learning to see anywhere.
Onrushing technology gives a digital artist a suddenly extravagant and limitless
palette
containing countless gigabytes of information like the human brain and the starry
universe.
Light from the sun radiates more photons each second than could be stored as byt
es on all the
computers in the world. We live in an all encompassing shower of infinitely tiny
meteorites,
photons which strike our eyes, enter our brains and coalesce into miracles or dr
eary dust.
Inspired vision trusts the intuitive unconscious, the Zen moment of being there,
when the
conscious self dissolves into a hail and firestorm of flamboyant colors and shap
es, or quietly
observes utter simplicity in shades of grey. We breathe slowly, relax and enter
a universe of
bright mirrors which, like whirling kaleidoscopes, endow the world with beauty a
nd agape
intense romantic love.
I am awestruck
To hear a cricket singing
Underneath the dark cavity
Of an old helmet.
BASHO, The Narrow Road to the Far North (Penguin)
IN SIGHT OF SENSIBILITY
'In looking at an object we reach out for it. With an invisible finger we move
through the space around us, go out to the distant places where things are
found, touch them, catch them, scan their surfaces, trace their borders, explore
their texture. It is an eminently active occupation.
Impressed by this experienced, early thinkers describe the process of vision
correspondingly. For example, Plato, in his Timaeus, asserts that the gentle
fire that warms the human body flows out through the eyes in a smooth and
dense stream of light. Thus a tangible bridge is established between the
observer and the observed thing, and over this bridge the impulses of light that
emanate from the object travel to the eyes and thereby to the soul.'
RUDOLPH ARNHEIM
I give myself every day to learning how to see. That is the beginning of my poet
ry, my work
with images, my music. At the beginning of her chapter titled Imagine This in Sigh
t and
Sensibility, Laura Sewall quotes William Blake: Let the world of rationalization
and of the
senses be consumed in the fires of imagination. Free the eternal soul; let it ta
ste again
Infinity.
Sewall goes on to write about wrapping her imagination around a near quarter moo
n. She says
that imagination is a mode of consciousness, a unique capacity of the mind and t
he deepest
voice of the soul, that it shimmers behind everything we do. What has imaginatio
n to do
with seeing? Our imaginations free us from the tedium of daily chores, the neces
sary
housekeeping which we all must endure. When I fire my camera, is it I who sees,
or is it my
deepest imagination playing with fire, seeking images unseen and buried and imme
rsed in my
unconscious? To see, you must free yourself as a child would who falls off a bik
e over and
over until it attains a certain balance and wheels freely away. The falls are pa
rt of the learning
process. We we must fall a lot to see this world in its ravishing beauty.
Once I was traveling through Utah and had stopped in the now bustling town of Mo
ab, close
to Arches National Park. I went out for a walk very early that morning and had a
sudden flash
of instinct or unconscious calling. The sky was beginning to light up in a curio
us way. I ran to
the motel, grabbed my camera, jumped into my car, and careened down the road to
the Park
entrance. A soft reddish light filled the dawn sky. I arrived at the formation c
alled Balanced
Rock just as the sky came on fire. I jumped out of the car, ran towards the rock
, tripped on a
low fence and fell hard. I was up in a second, aimed my camera and watched trans
fixed at the
dawn light flaming behind the silhouette of the rock. I saw nothing anyone could
n't have seen.
It simply took quick action to capture the fleeting fiery dawn.
There's a wild side to seeing, which I excavate from among ideas and images foun
d in
Japanese culture and in the work of abstract artists anywhere. Freed from constr
aints of early
conditioning, mind-set and fear of the new, any artwork has the power to invest
the inquiring
eye and mind with a startling and eventually very pleasing taste. The power of w
ildness,
unfettered imagination, hurling away constraints may lead, in the beginning, to
a kind of
chaos. It is well to swim hard and often in these uncharted waters until you flo
at comfortably
under benevolent skies. We create our visual world with our malleable brains if
we dare to use
them in seemingly irrational or dangerous ways.
According to Arnheim Aristotle conceives of the "universal character " of an obj
ect "directly
perceived in it as its essence rather than indirectly collected through the sear
ch of common
elements in the various specimens of a species or genus." But what is that essen
ce? Did
Aristotle imagine that his eyes were deceiving him? It is always the essence whi
ch we seek?
In his diary, art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) writes of a simple scene, I look
ed at it with
the possession-taking grasp of the imagination the true one; it gilded all the dea
d walls, and
I felt a charm in every vine tendril that hung over them. It required an effort
to maintain the
feeling; it was poetry while it lasted, and I felt that it was only while under
it that one could
draw, or invent, or give glory to, any part of such a landscape... The art of see
ing begins with
discovery of beauty in the commonplace. So obvious an idea is not so easy to ach
ieve. We
discard much of the beauty in life because it occurs in unlikely places.
SEEING WHAT ISN T THERE
I walk through the flower market on 28th street off Sixth Avenue and study the d
isplays. I
love sunflowers because they speak to me of light's mysteries and shed a cheerfu
l glow on the
world. These markets are filled with visual banquets of flowers. The owners plea
santly agree
to my photographing their displays. A display of orange flowers, I don't know th
eir name,
catches my eye. The flowers are wrapped in white paper which makes arabesque-lik
e patterns.
I photograph the display rather casually, I think, and walk on. A few days later
, I am in my
studio with a young student intern studying the images from the flower market on
one of my
computers. The orange display catches our eyes. Using Adobe Photoshop, I sharpen
it, add a
bit of brightness and contrast, intensify the color, but it looks rather uninter
esting. For fun, I
take it into curves' and play. Suddenly the image jumps into life, newly revealed
contrasting
colors sharply define the elegant arabesques which my cerebral eye did not see t
hen or now. I
had observed this now intensely curvaceous asymmetrical composition when I was m
aking
the photograph with my inner or unconscious intuitive eye. I am struck by the su
dden
knowledge, that I don't consciously see as much as I think I see. Even when my i
nner eye sees
certain images and triggers the camera, I cannot truly see it on the computer sc
reen
immediately. I must manipulate the image in odd ways and coax it to reveal itsel
f.
We are on the verge of a visual revolution brought on by the emergence of digita
l
photography and digital image programs such as Adobe Photoshop. The computer pro
grams
give us a sudden, new power to reveal what our conscious minds censor or obliter
ate. The
computer sees anew. It has no censor built in. It has a formidable power still i
n its infancy.
The effect on our vision cannot be predicted, although I view the new digital te
chnology as an
alchemist's stone which reveals what isn't there.'
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something
and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who
can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is
poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.
JOHN RUSKIN
On the next day, Sunday, I go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to photograph more
flowers. It
isn't calendar, postcard, greeting card images of flowers that I'm after. I will
seek the hidden
heart of the flowers, their spirits veiled in the chiaroscuro of light and color
, mysteries unseen
and beauty unfolding. My tool of choice is a 100 mm. macro lens. The lens enable
s me to
photograph deep in the heart of flowers if I wish. The technique sounds simple,
but it is
difficult to execute. You must take the lens off the autofocus mode and focus by
hand. Once
in very close to where you want to be, at intense magnification, you must move t
he camera,
not rotate the lens, to attain sharpness where desired. Since depth of field dim
inishes rapidly
the nearer you get to the subject, it is well to stop the lens down to f:16 or f
:22. This will
require that you have a flash in the camera or an external flash such as my Cano
n speedlite
550EX. Waiting for the wind to stop, for your hand to steady, you maneuver the c
amera with
tiny movements until the image in the finder speaks to you and, suddenly, the ca
mera fires. A
number of times my finger on the shutter at the moment of release pushes the cam
era slightly,
throwing the composition out of kilter, since the slightest movement is magnifie
d at close
range. I must work on this.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, this Day in July, is a revelation. I expected few f
lowers in
bloom in the midsummer heat. Instead, I am greeted with a profusion of brilliant
ly colored
flowers from giant lotuses in the pond in front of the conservatory to lavish di
splays of lilies
and many more. Bees abound, buzzing quietly about their tasks, wings covered wit
h yellow
pollen. I spot a large bee on a lily and move in very close, very fast, like a s
amurai warrior
wielding his sword in a split second. At close range with the macro, everything
moves,
shakes, jitters. I must swoop in, and in a fraction of a second, see! Then, with
out volition, it
(the camera) fires. It is all about seeing, seeing what is almost invisible to t
he naked eye. It is
about seeing without restraint, and developing the technique to execute your vis
ion with your
camera.
Vision: The art of seeing the invisible.
JONATHAN SWIFT
BRIDGE WORKS
Training vision is a lifelong task. After forty or more years of making images w
ith cameras, I
begin to truly see, to see more and more of what isn't there. Early in the morni
ng one day, I
walk across the new pedestrian and biker's path on the Williamsburg Bridge in Ma
nhattan.
Spectral sunlight winks in and out between the massive girders which support the
bridge
along with a network of cables. Against the light, the spider web like thrust of
girders make
ikebana-like patterns of asymmetry The girders are flung high and wide around me
; they
groan as they brace this immense structure. I hear autos buzzing beneath me. A s
ubway train
roars past. I am busy seeing on a large scale, the opposite of the closeup flowe
r photography.
The resulting images become fodder for a series of joined canvases and psychedel
ic looking
images which I make into dazzling patterns of light, chiaroscuro, and unexpected
colors. An
array of hidden colors appear like magic in the seemingly monotonous bluish sky
hung with
misty clouds. What I saw with my inner eye when on the bridge, and what I discov
ered by
allowing my inner eye and a bit of chaotic action painting' to arrange on the com
puter
surprised and pleased me. It is only by taking the greatest risks, avoiding self
censorship, and
attempting to re-invent your visual world that you grow and see.
Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or
reputation on the line in support of an idea or enterprise. They willingly
assume responsibility for the success or failure of a venture and are
answerable for all its facets. The buck not only stops at their desks, it starts
there too
VICTOR KIAM
We are all entrepreneurs in this life, willy nilly. If we don't dare the unknown
, we create a
shallow life, filled with turbulent pitfalls that sadden us. The gift of vision
is secured by
audaciously setting out into the unknown, like Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic a
lone, or
Livingston seeking the source of the Nile in unexplored Africa. The quest for vi
sion is much
like daring feats of adventure. The sought after place or thing is shrouded in m
ysteries, with
no maps to go by. We toss about like shipwrecked sailors in a small boat on an i
mmense sea
with no horizon in sight. That is good. By surviving in those seas we awaken to
a sky filled
with a flaming dawn and we see. Whether making images, trying to see what isn't
there, or
doing business, learning to see anew leads to success, the success of the brave
and audacious..
A COLLABORATION WITH NATURE
Andy Goldsworthy, in his book Andy Goldsworthy writes At its most successful my to
uch'
looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things a
re part of a
transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient only
in this way
can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete. His outdoor sculptures
made
with stones, flowers, leaves, stalks, icicles and other natural flotsam and jets
am often last for a
few days or less. He records the sculptures with a camera. The commonplace, to
Goldsworthy, is fodder for his revelations of the unseen beauty in nature, unsee
n because we
have learned to take it for granted. Picture postcards rarely carry surprises or
awakenings. We
admire the image or we ignore it. The ahhh! of beholding is gone. So it is with
our normal
vision of the world around us, one which deprives us of much of the beauty which
can enrich
our lives. We do not have to travel across the country or jet to another contine
nt to discover
unexpected wonders, sudden revelations colored lights reflected on the streets dur
ing rain, a
bee in the heart of a flower, light playing across cloud castles there is no end.
The gift of
sight is precious. You must work for it. Albert Einstein put it this way:
The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little
child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books
in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written
these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the
languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the
arrangement of the books...a mysterious order which it does not comprehend,
but only dimly suspects.
Each of us is that happy child to whom all of creation from the earth to the sta
rry universe
awaits recognition. Einstein's Relativity Theory revealed new world in which the
speed of
light could not be surpassed, and time was not a universal clock his concept of th
e spacetime
continuum. He saw into the hidden workings of the universe. Each of us, genius o
r no, is
capable of seeing beyond the veil of self imposed or peer imposed reality. First w
e need to
understand that our eyes are as miraculous, or even more so , than the Hubble Sp
ace
Telescope. They are not windows. Our open eyes gatherer quintillions of photons
every
minute. Such a myriad of riches must be organized. Our eyes and our brains have
been
marvelously trained by evolution to do just this. They are trained to work at ou
r daily tasks,
not to reveal the hidden world around us. We see everything, but we hide most of
what we see
behind a veil in order to avoid being overwhelmed.
It's necessary to be overwhelmed now and then, to penetrate the veil, like a beg
inner a scuba
diving overcoming fear of drowning. Scuba techniques revealed the surprising rai
nbows of
wonders beneath the surface of the sea to our eyes and brains that had no pre-co
nditioning,
and therefore censored nothing. We glory in these wondrous visions, while all ar
ound us, a
thousand, thousand visions go unnoticed. Let us dive deep into the sea' on firm l
and and
begin to see as children again.
In The Unfettered Mind (Kodansha), Zen Master Takuan Soho says:
The Existent Mind is the same as the Confused Mind and is literally read as
the mind that exists. It is the mind that thinks in one direction, regardless of
subject. When there is an object of thought in the mind, discrimination and
thoughts will arise. Thus it is known as the Existent Mind.
The No-Mind is the same as the Right Mind. It neither congeals nor fixes itself
in one place. It is called No-Mind when the mind has neither discriminations
nor thought but wanders about the entire body and extends throughout the
entire self.
This statement by Takuan is a clue to learning how to see. No-Mind or Right Mind
wanders
freely to view what is not there. It's like hallucinations, or daydreaming. We rel
ax our eyes
and take in everything. We try to detach ourselves from daily tedium and open ou
r eyes like
children. It takes constant practice. Learn to love the gifts of light and enlig
htenment. The
rewards are beyond measure.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night
DYLAN THOMAS , Do Not Go Gentle into That Dark Night
LIGHT DEVOURS THE WORLD
John Berger, in About Looking says, Writing about a late painting called The Ange
l
Standing in the Sun , Turner spoke of light devouring the whole visible world. T
urner's sea
paintings, wildly impressionistic at a time (mid-eighteenth century) when painti
ng was mostly
realism, show that he dared to see and paint in a new way. The sea paintings car
ry within
them colors and shapes rarely seen at sea or anywhere, although we can learn to
see many of
these enchanting displays of light and color. Our newly innocent eyes, freed of
much
conditioned restraint, see beyond the surface of things. To see like Turner, we
must abandon
safe harbors in the mind.
To paint The Snowstorm, Berger relates that Turner remarked, ...I got sailors to
lash me to
the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to esc
ape, but I felt
bound to record it if I did... It was a brave act, but the act of truly seeing th
e world is equally
brave. We discard tradition, ignore the opinions of others whether our peers, re
searchers or
mystics, and dare to believe that our own new vision is paramount. We stare out
at the world
with our inner eyes, and unveil such ravishing beauty and resplendent natural wo
nders as
would make an emperor envious.
ROY G. BIV. The red wavelengths of light are the longer wavelengths and the
violet wavelengths of light are the shorter wavelengths. Between red and
violet, there is a continuous range or spectrum of wavelengths. The visible
light spectrum is shown in the diagram below when all the wavelengths of the
visible light spectrum strike your eye at the same time, white is perceived.
Thus, visible light is sometimes referred to as white light. Technically
speaking, white is not a color at all, but rather the combination of all the
colors of the visible light spectrum. If all the wavelengths of the visible ligh
t
spectrum give the appearance of white, then none of the wavelengths would
lead to the appearance of black. Once more, black is not actually a color.
Technically speaking, black is merely the absence of the wavelengths of the
visible light spectrum. So when you are in a room with no lights and
everything around you appears black, it means that there are no wavelengths
of visible light striking your eye as you sight at the surroundings.
physicsclassroom.com
Shall we dance? In Zen & the Art of Archery , author Herrigel speaks of his mast
er constantly
referring to archery as a dance. The archer dances his shots. Light is the great
est dancer. We
dance with light to the farthest reaches of human perception and understanding.
We use our
intuitive no-mind and Zen like clairvoyance. We see what is not there. We see al
l of the
invisible spectrum of light which daily dances through our lives. The visible an
d invisible
rainbows of the electromagnetic spectrum are our lives.
EPILOGUE
AD ASTRA (Art is Worth Dying For)
I believe we go through an endless series of births and rebirths during our tenu
re and growth
on this earth. At certain periods in our creative lives, we encounter a pivotal
time; we
undergo a rite of passage. A jazz singer on FM radio the other day sang a refrai
n, "Every
knock is a boost." So it is, especially if it knocks us up and away from our pre
conceptions. It's
too easy to begin an enterprise with innocent enthusiasm and passion, the greate
st creativity,
and the will to make the desert flower. Moses spent forty years in the desert an
d never
reached the promised land. Perhaps "desert" is simply a staging ground, a metaph
or for the
next great endeavour.
I believe every great enterprise, every campaign to acquire new knowledge, has a
curve of
accomplishment: the beginning, hard work, success or failure, self-examination,
beginning
again. Like life itself, youthfulness in ideas and in the work itself is everyth
ing . The best, most
sanguine and felicitous parts of novels and movies often occur in the first half
when striving is
all, when the future beckons tantalizingly and everything is possible. Often, te
dium overtakes
the climber in pursuit of meaning and creative growth. He or she, having reached
a peak,
must rest from other necessary and tiresome labors unrelated to growth and creat
ing. A
mountain climber trapped above twenty to twenty-five thousand feet or higher mus
t come
down for oxygen soon or deteriorate and die. The body, like the brain feeds upon
itself. Rest
and recuperation is needed before another attempt is possible. Once a challengin
g peak is
climbed, enjoy the view! The next step must be to another, higher peak, or back
down the
mountain. Each new peak we attain reveals views of other heretofore hidden heigh
ts. Our
growth and perception never ends; the winding and endless road to knowledge is o
ur home.
AUDACE!
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The
occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As
our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall
ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Lincoln's Second Annual Message to Congress.
Forward, always forward, "Audace, audace, audace" cried de Gaulle. We must act f
orcefully
before the routine and tedium of endless petty details despoil our dreams and de
feat our ends.
We must, in Lincoln's words, "disenthrall ourselves" and move on to fresh, fecun
d fields
where new ideas may glisten in the dawn of new endeavors like early morning dew
on flowers
and grass. The workaday "nitty gritty" conspires to shackle our talents. Shed it
! We must each
take our inspired and abundant creative talent and free it from the itchy, cold
harness of tasks
better left to career administrators. Life demands action; ideas won't wait. We
must send them
roaming.
--GOETHE
In the movie Shadowlands, Anthony Hopkins playing C. S. Lewis speaks an idea gar
nered
from a student, "We read to know we are not alone." Isn't that the purpose of al
l of art and
creation, to make us know that? To make us know that placed here willy-nilly on
this spinning
globe that sometimes seems like the Sea of Fertility on the moon a nihilistic wast
eland, a
ghostly apparition in an unblinking cosmos that here on this speck of green earth
whirling
round a small sun, we have purpose, talent, free will, and we are not alone ?
Enjoy life? Of course! We are born to sing, not grunt, to dance, not crawl, to f
ly on wings of
thought to far reaches of the planet and to the ends of the universe. What pleas
ure compares
to a new creative challenge, to the renewal of youthful dreams, to setting off o
n another
voyage into the unknown? Odyssus set sail again in search of new worlds after he
regained
his kingdom Ithaca. In Nikos Kazantzakis's great poem The Odyssey, A Modern Sequ
el , we
read of Odysseus, "My voyages are my Ithaca." We work to display the joy of what
we create
each day and each day is our reward. Always the journey, never the end, our dest
inations are
our inspiration, our efforts our lives. We are born to fly, to sally forth into
the universes of
thought and action, or sadly, to crawl. Very little of value may be found betwee
n.
SPRINGTIME IN DECEMBER
Every formula which express a law of nature is a hymn to God.
lARIA MITCHELL
Yes to that hymn, yes to the creative mind, and yes to going forward! I make no
difference
between the God of the Christians, the Muslims, the Jews, the Buddhists, or anyo
ne's search
for religious meaning in symbols or saints. Hard it is to wrench oneself from th
e turmoil of
self-created "necessary" mundane projects whose momentum, like a speeding freigh
t train is
difficult to stop and makes a great screeching and squawking when slowed. Better
to leave the
dilapidated train, launch, rocket off, fly to the places and palaces we dream of
, forever
hastening to those places which capture our hearts, sing to our souls and reward
us with
innocence. We will come to know again the joyful springtime that comes unexpecte
d and
radiant late in autumn or dead of winter, when trees suddenly bud and flowers bl
oom out of
season. Then we may give thanks and praise and rejoice in the knowledge that we
are forever
young, daring and beautiful.
October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a horizon more clearly seen. It is th
e
distant hills once more in sight and the enduring constellations above them
once again.
HAL BORLAND , Autumn is for Understanding
EUNICE TIETJENS
SUCCESS HAS TWO FACES
"Success" that duplicitous Janus-like goddess, defeats our aims. One head eterna
lly young,
one head older than creation, "success" imprisons us in a grey claustrophobic, m
isbegotten
misinterpretation of the meaning of life. Not as solons in the great courts of k
ings, conquerors
or emperors, but as naifs, innocent and filled with joy at what we do not know y
et yearn to
know, we are at play in fertile fields filled with spring freshets and flowers.
We attain our
births and rebirths, the glory of the earth, the cycles of the seasons of art th
at bestow
everlasting youth. True success comes from our joy of learning, growing and crea
ting, never
from the adulation of media, the tinsel worship of celebrities, the adoration of
power and
money. Only constant change and growth fuel the engine of creating the new, the
enigmatic,
and the seemingly dangerous. We will trail clouds of glory as long as we forbear
yielding to
money-grubbing temptations. Ours is the earth and all that's in it.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety...she makes
hungry where most she satisfies..."
--SHAKESPEARE , Antony and Cleopatra
A THINKING REED
A creative human being, like legendary Sisyphus, often must push a heavy rock up
a steep
mountain path to the top, only to watch it roll back down again. Albert Camus wr
ote in The
Myth of Sisyphus that There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know
the night.
The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing..he knows h
imself to be
the master of his days... . We begin anew each time, seeking new visions, gaining
mountain
tops, starting over, happy in the knowledge that such efforts renew, renew as do
the elements
and the seasons. We are one with earth. In his introduction to Zen and the Art o
f Archery ,
writer and Zen philosopher D. T. Suzuki said:
Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating
and thinking. "Childlikeness" has to be restored with long years of training in
the art of self-forgetfulness. Then this is attained, man thinks yet he does not
think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the
waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly
heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring
breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage.
IMMORTALITY OR BURN
Therein "ends" this essay. It is Sunday in winter. A cold blue sky over Manhatta
n turns slowly
pink. A thousand, thousand lights glitter in the dusk. Tomorrow I confront the d
aily exigencies
of city life. I must conspire to make illusive vagaries, rainbow spattered dream
s, into whirling
butterflies and birds of paradise to float out into the great world beyond my sm
all studio. The
themes of this essay, eternal themes, confront the perplexing mystery of life it
self, the creative
life with its thousand broken idols and masks, its thousand fears and follies. T
hese themes
flaunt fields of eternal energy, which, whirling and sparkling like the vast sta
r studded hoop
of our galaxy, help define us as human beings. They ask us to consider what our
presence on
this small green and lovely planet means.
We have but one overriding duty in life, to develop our powers to the utmost lim
its in order to
be of use to others and to ourselves, to add music to the earth, to shed light.
Whatever blocks
our way must be rent asunder, as the Red Sea parted for Moses. We must endure, a
s Job
endured the trials of the Lord, for in the end, we were born to radiance, and, i
f we are willing
to burn for it, we will have it.
To be an artist is to fail as no other dares to fail,
that failure is his world, and to shrink from it,
desertion, arts and crafts, good housekeeping.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Postscript:
LIBERATE THE UNIVERSE WITHIN
What should I or you or anyone do? Only those difficult, passionate and intransi
gent things
which can and will fulfill our dreams. We must freely and fruitfully undertake p
rojects that
involve great energies, unbind our limitless creative powers, unleash ourselves
from petty
ideas, housekeeping and clinging needs of those who must yet be inspired. Become
as one
who midwives and creates things yet unknown, unseen. Seek and find a place in th
e sun that
understands and strengthens far reaching vision and reinforces your inner search
for deep,
still untapped reservoirs of talent. Perform as one who inspires others to go be
yond their self
imposed limits. Go where the wind blows, for it will blow a fair wind...
Come my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world...
for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
of all the western stars...
TENNYSON , Ulysses