"Because of the hazy, nondefinite character of quantum physics (called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), at the dimensions of the Planck length, space and time churn and seethe, with the distance between any two points wildly fluctuating from moment to moment, and time randomly speeding and slowing, perhaps even going backward and forward. In such a situation, time and space no longer exist in a way that has meaning to us."
Monday, January 15, 2024
Monday, January 08, 2024
Symbolic Communication
- Bernardo Kastrup (1974 - )
UAPs and Non-Human Intelligence
Sunday, January 07, 2024
Cosmogenesis
- Brian Thomas Swimme (1950 - )
Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
Thursday, January 04, 2024
Cosmic Serpent
- Jeremy Narby (1959 - )
The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge
Sunday, December 10, 2023
Walls of the Worlds
Wednesday, December 06, 2023
It’s a Visual World
Leonora Carrington (asked if there had been other artists in the family): My mother used to paint biscuit tins for jumble sales. That’s the only art that went on in my household.
Interviewer: I wonder where it came from?
Leonora Carrington: I have no idea.
Interviewer: No other artists in our family? None at all?
Leonora Carrington: Why are you fixed on the idea of heredity? It’s not hereditary … comes from somewhere else, not from genes. You’re trying to intellectualize something desperately, and you’re wasting your time. That’s not a way of understanding, to make a kind of intellectual mini-logic. You never understand by that road.
Interviewer: What do you think you do understand by then?
Leonora Carrington: By your own feelings about things …if you see a painting that you like… canvas is an empty space.
Interviewer: If I got one of your pictures down from upstairs and said to you what were you thinking when you painted this…?
Leonora Carrington: No. It’s a visual world, you want to turn things into a kind of intellectual game, it’s not… the visual world, it’s totally different. Remember what I’ve just said now, don’t try and turn it into a …kind of intellectual game. It’s not… It’s a visual world, which is different. The visual world is to do with what we see as space, which changes all the time. How do I know to walk –that’s one concept– to this bed and around it without running into it. I’m moving in space. Or I can have a concept of it and then I can see it as an object in space…”
- Leonora Carrington (1917 - 2011)
Don't try to intellectualize art
Thursday, November 09, 2023
Observer-Centric Virtualities
Wednesday, November 08, 2023
The Direction of Time
- Hans Reichenbach (1891 - 1953)
The Direction of Time
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
Capturing Surrealities - #2
"Far away there in the sunshine
are my highest aspirations.
I may not reach them, but I can
look up and see their beauty,
believe in them, and try
to follow where they lead."
Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Capturing Surrealities - #1
Monday, October 23, 2023
Expanding Our Vision
- Eric Kandel (1929 - )
The Age of Insight
Wednesday, October 11, 2023
We Are Stories
the twenty complicated centimeters
behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces
left by the (re)mingling together of
things in the world, and oriented
toward predicting events in the future,
toward the direction of increasing entropy,
in a rather particular corner of this
immense, chaotic universe."
- Carlo Rovelli (1956 - )
The Order of Time
Sunday, September 03, 2023
Frost-Pale Stillness
strikes cliffs and woods, an empty country's harp,
and conjures colored music from the bonds
of frost-pale stillness, plays a merry dance
on the glowing yellow, green, and red that light the
flowers and heather, on the mist-blue mountain cap,
on the scattered flocks of sheep in summer white,
fissures sprayed with black, the lava's grey expanse.
my cherished, longer-for land, and turn to you,
my nerves aflame with the same welcoming joy
as when you first rose to me from the seas.
where I laughed as a child,
where I find joy and grace."
The image above is the center-piece of my just-completed "Icelandic Abstracts" portfolio that consists of images captured during an exhilarating two-hour plane tour of the area surrounding the Skaftafell National Park area, which is home to some of Iceland‘s largest glaciers, most prolific volcanoes and richest river deltas.
While I booked a "photographer's plane tour" covering the southern part of Iceland months in advance, I was also well aware of Iceland's notoriously finicky weather. Because of the popularity of such tours, I was told that - in the event of "bad weather" - my ticket would be refunded but a backup flight was unlikely to be offered. As luck would have it (at least at first), the weather during the morning hours of the day of the scheduled flight was awful. Visibility did not extend much farther than the hood of our car, and was certainly not good enough to allow a plane to take off; or, if the pilot was crazy enough to go ahead with the tour, to allow its passengers to see anything near the ground! However, a morning full of remorseful angst miraculously gave way to early afternoon bliss, as the clouds cleared (slightly but sufficiently) to provide two hours of photographic nirvana. Vacations and the vagaries of chance, indeed.
The images in this portfolio were created in a way diametrically opposite to how 95% of my portfolios emerge (meaning, the conditions were way out of my comfort zone): (1) rapid-fire "spraying" of shots (to get as many compositions in as possible in a very short time frame) vs. my usual "slow tempo" meditative approach; (2) slow-action oriented anticipation of "just the right framing with appropriate telephoto zoom" punctuated by quickly opening up to a wide angle view to help anticipate the next "frame" vs. my typically much more deliberate compositions centered on a narrow range of focal lengths; and (3) using (what for me are) very high ISOs (3200+) to achieve fast enough shutter times to minimize blurring vs. my normal "stick to base ISO" mantra.
Add to all this the fact that while the captain of my small Cessna was kind enough to give me the run of the cabin - he allowed me to unbuckle my seatbelt and move at will from the right window to left to right again, over and over again - this otherwise laudable "artistic freedom," when coupled with the 60 deg swings of the aircraft from horizontal the captain deliberately - and routinely - engaged in so that I could get the "best views," took its inevitable toll: each image represents a delicate compromise between maximizing aesthetics and minimizing nausea!
But, my-oh-my, what breathtaking images of its abstract frost-pale stillness Iceland had to offer this lucky photographer...thank you, Iceland!
Friday, June 23, 2023
Omnitensional Integrity
from the solar system to the atom,
are tensegrity structures.
Universe is omnitensional integrity."
- Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)
Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking
Sunday, June 11, 2023
A Personal Universe
every poetic language begins
by being a secret language, that is,
the creation of a personal universe,
of a completely closed world.
The purest poetic act seems to
re-create language from an
inner experience that …
reveals the essence of things."
- Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986)
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
Sunday, June 04, 2023
Cosmic Observer
of the state by a single observation...
to be an abandonment of the idea of
the isolation of the observer from the
course of physical events outside himself."
- Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962)
"The cosmos is within us.
We are made of star-stuff.
We are a way for the
universe to know itself."
- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
Thursday, June 01, 2023
Looking at Things
is also true that we are eternally anchored.
One's destination is never a place but
rather a new way of looking at things.
is in him creatively is an artist.
that is the goal."
- Henry Miller (1891 - 1980)
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
Singing Elephants
Saturday, May 27, 2023
Finite Worlds
- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Note. The image is a "quick grab" with my iPhone of some lights on the ceiling of the hotel my wife and I recently stayed at in Monterey, CA. A basic photography lesson I learned and embraced long ago (though occasionally still forget to apply; happily, not this time) is this: if you are in a "dull, dull, insufferably dull" place for image taking (or, at least, think you are - like standing around in a hotel lobby with nothing to do or to "look at"), just look up or down ... something is sure to catch your eye 🙂
Friday, May 26, 2023
Mysterious Worlds
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 - 1881)
Brothers Karamazov