Quetzal Serpent

 " And then the earth arose because of them, it was simply their word that brought it forth. For the forming of the earth they said "Earth." It arose suddenly, just like a cloud, like a mist, now forming, unfolding.

...

This is the account of when all is still silent and placid. All is silent and calm. Hushed and empty is the womb of the sky. These, then, are the first words, the first speech. There is not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish, crab, tree, rock, hollow, canyon, meadow, or forest. All alone the sky exists. The face of the earth has not yet appeared. Alone lies the expanse of the sea, along with the womb of all the sky. There is not yet anything gathered together. All is at rest. Nothing stirs. All is languid, at rest in the sky. There is not yet anything standing erect. Only the expanse of the water, only the tranquil sea lies alone. There is not yet anything that might exist. All lies placid and silent in the darkness, in the night. All alone are the Framer and the Shaper, Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent, They Who Have Borne Children and They Who Have Begotten Sons. Luminous they are in the water, wrapped in quetzal feathers and cotinga feathers. Thus they are called Quetzal Serpent. In their essence, they are great sages, great possessors of knowledge."

- Popol Vuh

Plato's Cave

"Plato's Cave" Portfolio

"Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light - with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? [...] Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world - sunk in a deep grave - waste and lonely is its place. [...] More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts - needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul - that fills a loftier region with bliss ineffable. [...] No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence - they drew over themselves the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations - into it the gods went back - and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world. "

- Novalis (1772 - 1801)
Hymns to the Night

Postscript. Clicking on the image at the top will take you to a new Plato's Cave portfolio in my web gallery. For those of you who have not already guessed at how these images have been created (I posted the first in the series a few weeks ago with the heading, Platonic Forms), the title (and reference) will be obvious from the process: I shine thin beams of light (using one, two, or three flexible gooseneck LEDs with magnetic bases secured to a metal plate for stability) through a wide assortment of glass and acrylic geometric forms (squares, prisms, pyramids, circles, spheres, etc.) ranging in size from a quarter of an inch to about three or four inches and of varying translucency and color (the color of most forms depends on the direction of light that hits their surface), and photograph the most "pleasing combinations" of the resulting clusters of lights and shadows that appear on a black matte board pitched vertically some distance beyond where the LEDs are stationed. Note that while the images look noisy, it is not actual "noise" you are seeing, but rather the impression of noise due to the collective specular and diffuse reflections of light off the matte board's imperfectly speckled surface. 

Apart from my delight in being able to use this technique to explore a part of the abstract aesthetic latent space pioneered by László Moholy-Nagy, Itten, Kandinsky, Klee, Robert & Sonia Delaunay, and explored by my dad in his later years (albeit, in my case, on a woefully amateurish level compared to these extraordinary artists), I am intrigued conceptually, philosophically even, by how blatantly it blurs the distinction between traditional art and photography. I say this because for this series photography plays only a minor (and least important) role! Arranging and discovering a "pleasing configuration" of lights and forms requires a lot of time and patience. It typically takes me about 20-30 min to find a single geometry worth taking an image of. Indeed, the process of choosing the type and number of shapes, adjusting the light's intensity, direction, and the beam size, and making the myriad small changes (during which I often have to start from scratch because an arrangement is simply "not working") needed to gradually sculpt (reveal?) a "pleasing geometry" - for which the final "shot" is almost an afterthought -  is arguably more akin to making art than doing photography!

My lifelong fascination with the blurred distinction between art and photography has directly fueled my experiments in abstraction, wherein I deliberately try to tease apart (disentangle?) the creative tension between finding abstract patterns vs. creating them. Individual projects all follow their own style and rhythm. For example, for my Synesthscapes series, I search for patterns in what are essentially "fixed" environments (e.g., natural light refracting/reflecting through a rum bottle); for my Swirls, Whorls, and Tendrils series, I create singular "worlds" made up of ink and water, which I then photograph whatever time-slice of it proves to be sufficiently interesting; my perpetual winter passion to find ice abstracts consists of exactly that, finding patterns that nature herself has already produced; my light abstracts emerge from fixed geometries of light filaments and intentional random camera movements, wherein I decide whether an image is "good enough" to keep only after taking the photograph; and Cymatiscapes require little more of me than to choose a vessel type and size (e.g., a small soy sauce dish) and a vibration frequency before clicking the shutter in my camera's burst mode; I tend to think of this series (which I love!) as neither art nor photography (at least in the traditionally creative sense) and merely as an archive of my having observed something interesting. But, compared to all of these earlier experiments, the process of creating - literally, creating - images for Plato's Cave is obviously on an entirely different level! Of course, in the most fundamental sense, distinctions between art and photography (and, as someone has commented below) between art and life, are not nust blurred, they are entirely illusory.

Luminous Mind

 "Luminous, monks, is the mind.
And it is freed from incoming defilements.
The well-instructed disciple of the noble ones
discerns that as it actually is present,
which is why I tell you that—
for the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones
—there is development of the mind."

- Aṅguttara Nikāya
Luminous Mind

Pointillist Flecks

"...the notion of depth is toyed with and finally subverted, until Klimt reduced the volumes of terrain to a series of flattened pieces comprised of a multitude of pointillist flecks. The sky disappears almost entirely from his compositions, as do, with a few exceptions, traditional methods of illusionism like linear and atmospheric perspective. [...] The paintings of the mid-aughts are gorgeous tapestries of narrow value range and scintillating color. They bear a superficial resemblance to French Post-Impressionism, but the offbeat elegance and nervous energy are unique to Klimt."

- LINEA, review of Klimt: Landscapes
at Neue Galerie New York (2024)

Ephel Duath

"Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peering among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

-  J.R.R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)
The Return of the King
Sam, Chapter II: The Land of Shadow

Aboriginal Dreaming

"Although The Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also, in a sense, still part of the present. One cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen. We should be very wrong to try to read into it the idea of a Golden Age, or a Garden of Eden, though it was an Age of Heroes, when the ancestors did marvelous things that men can no longer do [...] Clearly, The Dreaming is many things in one. Among them, a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for Aboriginal man. [...] These tales are neither simply illustrative nor simply explanatory, they are fanciful and poetic in content because they are based on visionary and intuitive insights into mysteries; and, if we are ever to understand them, we must always take them in their complex content."

- W.E.H. Stanner (1905 - 1981)

Unconscious Activation

"The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

Spiritual Harmony

"The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct is its appeal. In any composition the material side may be more or less omitted in proportion as the forms used are more or less material, and for them substituted pure abstractions, or largely dematerialized objects. The more an artist uses these abstracted forms, the deeper and more confidently will he advance into the kingdom of the abstract. And after him will follow the gazer at his pictures, who also will have gradually acquired a greater familiarity with the language of that kingdom.

...

Form alone, even though totally abstract and geometrical, has a power of inner suggestion. A triangle (without the accessory consideration of its being acute- or obtuse-angled or equilateral) has a spiritual value of its own. In connection with other forms, this value may be somewhat modified, but remains in quality the same. The case is similar with a circle, a square, or any conceivable geometrical figure.

...

Every form is as sensitive as a puff of smoke, the slightest breath will alter it completely. This extreme mobility makes it easier to obtain similar harmonies from the use of different forms, than from a repetition of the same one; though of course an exact replica of a spiritual harmony can never be produced. So long as we are susceptible only to the appeal of a whole composition, this fact is of mainly theoretical importance. But when we become more sensitive by a constant use of abstract forms (which have no material interpretation) it will become of great practical significance."

- Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)

Primordial Ideas

"Colors are primordial ideas,
children of the aboriginal colorless light
and its counterpart, colorless darkness Light,
that first phenomenon of the world, reveals
to us the spirit and the living soul
of the world through colors.

...

Color is life, for a world without color seems dead.
As a flame produces light, light produces color.
As intonation lends color to the spoken word,
color lends spiritually realized sound to a form.
...
Between black and white there throbs the
universe of chromatic phenomena."

- Johannes Itten (1888 - 1967)

Fiery Light

"A fiery light, of the greatest flashing brightness, coming out of a cloudless sky, flooded my entire mind and so inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast like a flame — yet it was not blazing but glowing hot, as the sun makes anything on which its rays fall hot. 

...

And I saw as if in the middle of the southern sky an image, beautiful and wonderful in the mystery of God, like a human in form. Her face was of such beauty and radiance that I could more easily look at the sun than at her; and a great circlet of golden color surrounded her head. [...] And this image spoke: ‘I am the supreme and fiery force, who sets all living sparks alight and breathes forth no mortal things, but judges them as they are. Flying around the circling circlet with my upper wings - with my wisdom - I have ordered all things rightly. But I am also the fiery life of the essence of divinity; I flame above the beauty of the fields, and I shine in the waters, and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. With the airy wind I quicken all things with some invisible life that sustains them all. For the air lives in viridity [i.e., greenness] and in the flowers, the waters flow as if alive, and the sun lives within its own light.

...

The light that I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud that carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it the 'reflection of the living Light.'"

- Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179)

Platonic Forms

"And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision. [...] Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him? [...] He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day. [...] Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is. [...] This entire allegory you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed - whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life, must have his eye fixed."

- Plato (c.424 - 348 BC)
"The Allegory of the Cave" (Republic, Book Seven) 

Seed Unfolding

"The One, perfect in seeking nothing, possessing nothing and needing nothing, overflows and creates a new reality by its superabundance. [...] The process is like the unfolding of a seed, moving from simple origin to termination in the world of sense, the prior always remaining in its place, while begetting its successor from a store of indescribable power - power that must not halt within the higher realm [...] but continue to expand until the universe of things reaches the limit of its possibility, lavishing its vast resources on all its creatures, intolerant that any one should have no share in it. Nothing is debarred from participation in the Good, to the extent of its receptivity. "

- Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270 CE)
The Enneads

Plural Monism

"Monism allows for no such things as 'other occasions' in reality—in real or absolute reality, that is. The difference I try to describe amounts, you see, to nothing more than the difference between what I formerly called the each−form and the all−form of reality. Pluralism lets things really exist in the each−form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all−form or collective−unit form is the only form that is rational. The all−form allows of no taking up and dropping of connexions, for in the all the parts are essentially and eternally co−implicated. In the each−form, on the contrary, a thing may be connected by intermediary things, with a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion. It is thus at all times in many possible connexions which are not necessarily actualized at the moment.

...

Here, then, you have the plain alternative, and the full mystery of the difference between pluralism and monism, as clearly as I can set it forth on this occasion. It packs up into a nutshell:—Is the manyness in oneness that indubitably characterizes the world we inhabit, a property only of the absolute whole of things, so that you must postulate that one−enormous−whole indivisibly as the prius of there being any many at all—in other words, start with the rationalistic block−universe, entire, unmitigated, and complete?—or can the finite elements have their own aboriginal forms of manyness in oneness, and where they have no immediate oneness still be continued into one another by intermediary terms—each one of these terms being one with its next neighbors, and yet the total 'oneness' never getting absolutely complete?

...

Whatever I may say, each of you will be sure to take pluralism or leave it, just as your own sense of rationality moves and inclines. The only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it is a fully co−ordinate hypothesis with monism. This world may, in the last resort, be a block−universe; but on the other hand it may be a universe only strung−along, not rounded in and closed. Reality may exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after all. On that possibility I do insist."

- William James (1842 - 1910)
A Pluralistic Universe

Cosmic Soul

"I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.

...

It did not seem impossible that man himself was the germ of the world-soul, which, we still hope, is destined to awake for a while before the universal decline, and to crown the eternal cosmos with its due of knowledge and admiration, fleeting yet eternal. [...] It is even conceivable that every creative advance that any mind has ever made involves unwitting co-operation with the cosmic mind which, perhaps, will awake at some date before the End.

...

The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time."

- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)
Last and First Men and Star Maker

Shadow Belongs to Light

"All material in nature, the mountains
and the streams and the air and we,
are made of Light which has been spent, and
this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow,
and the shadow belongs to Light."

- Louis Kahn (1901 - 1974)

Nature's Mirror

"In this secluded spot the soothing silence,
Far from the clank of crowds, I stand or sit, musing,
Thoughts that are the hymns of the praise of things,
Largely learn’d from nature’s schooling.
Give me again O nature your primal sanities!
Thou hast, O nature! elements!
Utterance to my heart beyond the rest.
...
Somehow I feel the globe itself swift-swimming in space.
I merge myself in the scene, in the perfect day,
Never before did I get so close to nature—
absolute and unqualified acceptance of nature—
Never before did she come so close to me.
...
The mirror that nature holds is deep and floating
and ethereal and faithful, I see
my soul reflected in nature."

- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)
"The Poet in Nature"

A State of Information

"There are objects: cinnamon, microwaves, interstellar particles and scarecrows. There is nothing underneath objects. Or, better, there is not even nothing underneath them. There is no such thing as space independent of objects (happily contemporary physics agrees). What is called Universe is a large object that contains objects such as black holes and racing pigeons. Likewise there is no such thing as an environment: wherever we look for it, we find all kinds of objects—biomes, ecosystems, hedges, gutters and human flesh. In a similar sense, there is no such thing as Nature. I’ve seen penguins, plutonium, pollution and pollen. But I’ve never seen Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality).

...

Likewise, there is no such thing as matter. I’ve seen plenty of entities (this book shall call them objects): photographs of diffusion cloud chamber scatterings, drawings of wave packets, iron filings spreading out around a magnet. But I’ve never seen matter. So when Mr. Spock claims to have found 'Matter without form,' he is sadly mistaken... You can now buy a backpack that is made of recycled plastic bottles. But an object doesn’t consist of some gooey substrate of becoming that shifts like Proteus from plastic bottle to backpack. First there is the plastic bottle, then the production of the bag ends the bottle, its being is now only an appearance, a memory of the backpack, a thought: “This bag is made of plastic bottles... Nature [...] is 'discovered in the use of useful things.'

...

Matter, in current physics, is simply a state of information. Precisely: information is necessarily information-for (for some addressee). Matter requires at least one other entity in order to be itself... Instead of using matter as my basic substrate, I shall paint a picture of the Universe that is realist but not materialist. In my view, real objects exist inside other real objects. 'Space' and 'environment' are ways in which objects sensually relate to the other objects in their vicinity, including the larger objects in which they find themselves... There is no space or environment as such, only objects... The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained 'in' other objects... What are these objects, then, that claustrophobically fill every nook and cranny of reality, that are reality, like the leering faces in an Expressionist painting, crammed into the picture plane? On what basis can we decide that there is no top, middle, or bottom object, that objects are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, that they generate time and space, and so on?"

Timothy Morton (1968 - )
Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

Cosmic Trickster

"To explode or to implode - said Qwfwq - that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration and, by ingesting, cherish them. To steal away, to vanish; no more; to hold within oneself every gleam, every ray, deny oneself every vent, suffocating in the depths of the soul the conflicts that so idly trouble it, give them their quietus; to hide oneself, to obliterate oneself; perchance to awaken elsewhere, unchanged."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

Cosmic Rhythms

"Yesterday and today and tomorrow are not an arrow that shoots from past to present to future; rather all tenses, and sleeping and waking, mix and cohabit in an atemporal duration beyond clocks and calendars. The Aboriginal world began long ago when the Ancestors sang in Dreamtime the cosmic rhythms that give shape to the things we see, and it is the beginning right now, when a living Tiwi sings the Dream songs that continue, or are, the world."

- Huston Smith (1919 - 2016)

Boreal Abstraction

"Though winter is represented in the almanac as an old man, facing the wind and sleet, and drawing his cloak about him, we rather think of him as a merry wood-chopper, and warm-blooded youth, as blithe as summer. The unexplored grandeur of the storm keeps up the spirits of the traveler. It does not trifle with us, but has a sweet earnestness. In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends. The imprisoning drifts increase the sense of comfort which the house affords, and in the coldest days we are content to sit over the hearth and see the sky through the chimney top, enjoying the quiet and serene life that may be had in a warm corner by the chimney side, or feeling our pulse by listening to the low of cattle in the street, or the sound of the flail in distant barns all the long afternoon. No doubt a skillful physician could determine our health by observing how these simple and natural sounds affected us. We enjoy now, not an oriental, but a boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the shadow of motes in the sunbeams."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)