fluid lines through space

"There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes."

Bachelard, G. Poetics of Reverie, pp 99 

"By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams."

 Bachelard, G. Poetics of Reverie, pp 49

"The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth."

Bachelard, G. Poetics of Reverie, pp 59

"It is quite evident that a barrier must be cleared in order to escape the psychologists and enter into a realm which is not "auto-observant", where we ourselves no longer divide ourselves into observer and observed. Then the dreamer is completely dissolved in his reverie. His reverie is his silent life. It is that silent peace which the poet wants to convey to us."

 Bachelard, G. Poetics of Reverie, pp 45

"In our view any awareness is an increment to consciousness, an added light, a reinforcement of psychic coherence. Its swiftness or instantaneity can hide this growth from us. But there is a growth of being in every instance of awareness. Consciousness is in itself an act, the human act."

Bachelard, G. Poetics of Reverie, pp 5

play

 
ah

Pythagoras was said to have been the first man to call himself a philosopher; in fact, the world is indebted to him for the word philosopher. Before that time the wise men had called themselves sages, which was interpreted to mean those who know. Pythagoras was more modest. He coined the word philosopher, which he defined as one who is attempting to find out.

  

For example, the Tetraktys is often described as just the equation 1+2+3+4 = 10. What is meant is that the 4 perspectives of the Monad, the Dyad, the Triad and the Tetrad or double dichotomy completely explain any subject.

Pythagoras discovered the Tetraktys which is the philosophical technique of analysis that describes the whole as a single Monad, then describes the same as polar opposites. The line of development of the Triad describes the process with beginning, middle and end. The 4-fold or Tetrad is the double dichotomy best known in modern terms with the Cartesian x-y axes.

Together these form a total philosophical analysis. The first 10 hexagrams of the I Ching in the King Wen Sequence is a simple and effective example.

The first set of 10, from 1-Creative/Sunshine to 10- the deep water lake (or sea) under the sunshine that would next evaporate water to complete the water cycle. Hex 1 is quite literally the water cycle--sunshine burns off mist to make clouds (Ch'ien). This is the monad, the whole water cycle described in a single term. The ideogram of Ch’ien is an image of the rays of the sun evaporating the miasmal mist of a swamp to form clouds to water the fields.... continue ... water symbolism of the I Ching

psychoanalysis of water

"To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water... "

"The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.  

"The material imagination of water is always in danger; it risks eclipse when the material imaginations of earth or fire intervene. Therefore, a psychoanalysis of water images is rarely necessary, since these images are seemingly self-dispersing. They do not bewitch just any dreamer ... certain forms of water have more attraction, more compelling force, more consistency. That is because more material and profound reveries intervene, because our inner being is more deeply engaged, and because or imagination dreams more specifically of creative acts. Then the poetic power, which was imperceptible in a poetry of reflections, appears suddenly. Water becomes heavier, darker, deeper; it becomes matter. "

Bachelard, G. 1942 Water and Dreams: 
An Essay on the Imagination

"[Man] is not surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is but a small ocean. A man is related to all nature."  
Hart, T, 2007. Reciprocal Revelation: Toward a Pedagogy of Interiority in Journal of Cognitive Affective Learning, 3(2) (Spring 2007), 1-10 Oxford College of Emory University

knowing + revelation

Epistemic Companions: Art and the Sacred By Danielle Boutet
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10030/Default.aspx

The Artistic “Revelation”
 
For me, a lifetime of creative work has brought up the question of “artistic thinking,” i.e. art’s unique way of thinking and knowing. Informed by transdisciplinary studies and conversations, I have often posed the question in these terms: what does one know through art? Is there something, unknown through science or rational inquiry that can be known only through art? What does art contribute to knowledge, alongside other modes of knowing such as philosophy, psychology, theology, anthropology, or the natural sciences?
 
We are used to thinking of art as a form of expression, more than a way of knowing. Yet if artists do, indeed, express what they know about the world and about themselves in their work, it is most often the work—through the experience and the process of its making—that informs the artist about what it says. Many artists will agree that artistic creation is not so much a work of expression as a work of revelation. “What I do tells me what I am looking for,” says Soulages:⁵ meaning is revealed in the work, which the artist has indeed worked to “ex-press”—but not in the sense of “self-expression,” rather in the sense of “pressing out,” of “making appear” or “making emerge” from matter. The successful artwork surprises the artist, who is often the first to be taken by its meaning.
But how is this possible? 

How can the artwork make visible (audible or perceptible) meanings or layers that its author does not necessarily see prior to making the work? And if what is made visible belongs to the world and to what connects the artist to it, what does this say about the world? What is this world that makes itself known through art?⁶ 

Obviously, something of the world is revealed through creative practice and aesthetic contemplation. Paul Klee states, 

“Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible.”⁷ Art makes visible different dimensions or a revelation different from what science and philosophy, for instance, allow us to know.

I. Widening the Definition of Knowledge
Art in the Definition of Knowledge
 
To ask what is known through art requires a wider, more general definition of knowledge; one in which art would be an epistemology as essential and effective as science and advanced forms of philosophy. Yet in order to integrate art among the other fields of knowledge, we need to assume that knowledge could be at once scientific and non-scientific, sure and uncertain, objective and subjective. 

We must agree that only part of the truth can be observed or apprehended through reason and reflection: part is felt, part is imagined, part is revealed. Yet another part is indescribable: apophatic, “negative,” and irreducible, it comes through mystical experience or encounter with the sublime, or more ordinarily, from the intimate experience of the self.
 
READ ON ... http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10030/Default.aspx 

awe~full marvels

 

Speaking about the notion of the 'sin of curiosity' in pre-1600's thought, Lorraine Daston quotes Francis Bacon from The Great Instauration related to his theories on education.

"The reason why we have to pry into nature in order to find out how things work is because God is playing a game of hide and seek ... 'it is for God to make secrets and it is for a king to find them out'."

The New Atlantis - 'Salomon's House' or the 'College of the Six Days Work' ~ the modern research university in both applied and pure science (Bacon 1627) Project Gutenberg
"

"At the same time, and an age after, or more, the inhabitants of the
great Atlantis did flourish."

"But the divine revenge overtook not long after those proud enterprises. For within less than the space of one hundred years, the great Atlantis was utterly lost and destroyed: not by a great earthquake, as your man saith; (for that whole tract is little subject to earthquakes;) but by a particular' deluge or inundation; those countries having, at this day, far greater rivers and far higher mountains to pour down waters, than any part of the old world. But it is true that the same inundation was not deep; not past forty foot, in most places, from the ground; so that although it destroyed man and beast generally, yet some few wild inhabitants of the wood escaped. Birds also were saved by flying to the high trees and woods. For as for men, although they had buildings in many places, higher than the depth of the water, yet that inundation, though it were shallow, had a long continuance; whereby they of the vale that were not drowned, perished for want of food and other things necessary. 

 "we maintain a trade not for gold, silver, or jewels; nor for silks; nor for spices;nor any other commodity of matter; but only for God's first creature, which was Light: to have light (I say) of the growth of all parts of the world."

The notion of great knowledge/wisdom residing below the surface - an Atlantis Mind - below water in a liminal space. Peering, seeking, immersed, submerged...
ah

Jung's Iceberg analogy

Mandala Zone http://www.mandalazone.com/readingroom.html

Resources

http://www.answers.com/topic/analytical-psychology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Psychoanalysis

tra·jec·to·ry n ~ flow ~ ec·sta·sy

the path through space under the action of given forces 

"being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. the ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one"  Csikszentmihalyi 

http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html

 

" ... artists create a language of symbols for things for which there are yet to be words ... radical innovations of art embody the preverbal stages of new concepts that will eventually change a civilization. Whether for an infant or a society on the verge of change, a new way to think about reality begins with teh asimilation of unfamiliar images. This collation leads to abstract ideas that only later give rise to a descriptive language. "       Shlain, L Art and Physics 

 

ah

moans + sighs from immersion

im·mer·sion 

1. a. The act or an instance of immersing

   b. The condition of being immersed

2. Baptism performed by totally submerging a person in water

Annie Dillard - Earth Saint       

"Like boys on dolphins, the continents ride their crustal plates.  New lands shoulder up from the waves, and old lands buckle under.  The very landscapes heave; change burgeons into change. Gray granite bobs up, red clay compresses; yellow sandstone tilts, surging in forests, incised by streams.  The mountains tremble, the ice rasps back and forth, and the protoplasm furls in shock waves, up the rock valleys and down, ramifying possibilities, riddling the mountains.  Life and the rocks, like spirit and matter, are a fringed matrix, lapped and lapping, clasping and held.... The planet spins, rapt inside its intricate mists.  The galaxy is a flung thing, loose in the night, and our solar system is one of the many dotted campfires ringed with tossed rocks.   
 

"I am no scientist ...I am a wanderer with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts ... "As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery...I consider nature's facts -- its beautiful and grotesque forms and events -- in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit.  In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy." 

http://www.earthlight.org/earthsaint24.ht 

confluence, chaos + Nature

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

C G Jung

Philoctetes ~ http://www.youtube.com/user/philoctetesctr 

                  ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw7gSRaZ_JQ

Lorraine Daston 

The Moral Authority of Nature  Daston, L and Vidal, F 2004

Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science
Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150 - 1750 Daston, L and Park, K
listen to Daston ~ http://odeo.com/episodes/22550989-Lorraine-Daston

"Things become talkative when they fuse matter and meaning"

Daston talks about the deep theoretical need of humans to seek analogies and conceptual sources for our normative commitments in Nature. She diagnoses that we need to look for grounding in normativeness suggesting that our answer may lie in examining notions of order - but not specifics in nature.

Margaret Wertheim on the beautiful math of coral http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/margaret_wertheim_crochets_the_coral_reef.html 

and more http://www.ted.com/search?q=coral+reef&x=0&y=0 

  a href="http://www.ted.com">

new bones

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.  

Jung, C G, 1963 Memories, Dreams and Reflections

 

 " I was in a house I did not know, which had two storeys. It was "my house". I found myself in the upper storey, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in Rococo style. On the walls hung a number of precious old paintings. I wondered that this should be my house and thought "not bad". But then it occurred to me that I did not know what the lower floor looked like. Descending the stairs, I reached the ground floor. There everything was much older. I realised that this part of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The furnishings were mediaeval, the floors were of red brick. Everywhere it was rather dark. I went from one room to another thinking "now I really must explore the whole house." I came upon a heavy door and opened it. Beyond it, I discovered a stone stairway that led down into a cellar. Descending again, I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient. Examining the walls, I discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks, and chips of brick in the mortar. As soon as I saw this, I knew that the walls dated from Roman times. My interest by now was intense. I looked more closely at the floor. It was of stone slabs and in one of these I discovered a ring. When I pulled it, the stone slab lifted and again I saw a stairway of narrow stone steps leading down to the depths. These, too, I descended and entered a low cave cut into rock. Thick dust lay on the floor and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old, and half disintegrated. Then I awoke."

Jung, C. 1964 Man and His Symbols. Jung, C. (Ed.) Dell Publishing. 42-44

"The deeper 'layers' of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat further and further into darkness. . . . they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality. . . . Hence 'at bottom' the psyche is simply 'world.'" 

Jung, C G "Special Phenomenology of the Child Archetype" [pt. 2] [Psyche & Symbol])

"The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens into that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was a conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach."

Jung, C 1934 The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man

Joachim Patinir’s painting Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx

approaching

fishing the psyche

"where there is gross injury, the soul flees ... what a soul 
needs? .. nature and creativity, Diana ... represents the ability to 
hunt, track and recover various aspects of the psyche... teaching 
about the lone woman's life ... for some women air, night, sunlight 
and trees are necessities, For others, words, paper and books ... or 
colour form, shadow and clay ... One can take so much pride in being 
a survivor that it becomes a hazard to further creative 
development. .. Thriving means to put ourselves into occasions of the 
lush, the nutritive, the light, and there to flourish, to thrive with 
bushy, shaggy, heavy blossoms and leaves. It is better to name 
ourselves names that challenge us to grow as free creatures. That is 
thriving. That is what was meant for us ... "

 Pinkola Estes, C 1992,  WWRWtW Random House NY pg 209 - 211

Liminal Spaces are not metaphorical but real, inhabited, in-flow, internal and enfolded - a between space, in flux, a life, a body - states within states.

"consciousness is , in effect, the key to a life examined, for better and for worse, ourbeginner's permit into knowing ll about the hunger, the thirst, the sex, the tears, the laughter, the kicks, the punches, the flow of images we call thought, the feelings, the words, the stories, the beliefs, the music and the poetry, the happiness and the ecstasy. At its simplest and most basic level, consciousness lets us recognise an irresistible urge to stay alive and develop a concern for the self. At its most complex and elaborate level, consciousness helps us develop a concern for other selves and improve the art of life."

Damasio, A 1999 The Feeling of What Happens Harcourt Press, NY pg 5

Archetypes
"Jung traced the use of the term archetype to Philo Judaeus, who used the term with reference to the Imago Dei (God-image) in man, and to several other classical sources, noting that archetypal contents are transmitted through tribal lore, myth, fairy tales, and esoteric teaching (Jung, Archetypes 4). Archetypal contents are also found in dreams; Jung believed that the existence of typical mythologems in dream contents indicated that myth-forming structural elements must be present in the unconscious psyche and common to all people." 

http://eve3.wordpress.com/2007/10/

invisible worlds

http://mosaicstore.org/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=6_7&products_id=1By imposing the aesthetics of symmetrical order on 'chaotic nature' essentially, the aim is to create Forms and give form to archetypal wholes.
In alchemising the object's reflection with itself the simulacra reveals its concealed or secret archetypal form. This amalgamation of the corporeal with its counterpart creates a third - the Reconciling Third - the Form; marriage of flesh and reflection

lumens

The lumen (symbol: lm) is the SI unit of luminous flux, a measure of the perceived power of light. Luminous flux differs from radiant flux, the measure of the total power of light emitted, in that luminous flux is adjusted to reflect the varying sensitivity of the human eye to different wavelengths of light.

"Guest House"

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Rumi

spiral

"out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing
there's a field, I meet you there"

Why are you so afraid of silence, silence is the root of everything.
If you spiral into its void a hundred voices will thunder messages you long to hear.

Mevlana Rumi

"What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Bill Viola

'I'm interested in moments and places of instability: thresholds of transition in between two things. for example, my favourite times of year are springtime and the autumn. in the springtime, the flowers try to come up but sometimes it's still snowing. in the autumn, you have the trees holding on to their life, some of them are loosing their leaves and some are green. those are the kind of moments I like, where things are not clear and you can't decide between this and that. the age of computers is a very dangerous time for us because computers work on 'yes or no', '1 or 0'. there's no maybe, perhaps or both, it's only yes or no. I think this is affecting our consciousness, because nature doesn't work that way. nature works on maybe and poetry comes from maybe, not from a hard fixed order. those kind of transitions and thresholds are very very important in my work.

'... we have all come from a place of the unborn and we
are all here for a short period of time. we have to cross a
threshold of water and light to arrive and to leave. we will
ultimately all go back to this eternal non-spatial, non-temporal
world of potentiality. a lot of my work deals with questions
like this ...
http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/viola.html

VIOLA: In terms of video, it's interesting to note that when you look at Old Master pictures in historical art museums, there are two natural elements conspicuously under-represented - water, up close and flowing, and fire. There are reasons for that - those elements represent the fundamental dynamism of nature, and that's impossible to embody in a static form.
DOUGLAS: Unless you're Turner..

VIOLA: O yes! He got it when he was out in that storm tied to the mast! So did he Abstract Expressionists in a different way - they made the important breakthrough of equating the fluidity of paint with the flowing of time. They were really painting time itself.

Douglas, S 2005 The ArtInfo Interview: Bill Viola. ArtInfo, James Cohan Gallery, NY

You've been walking the ocean's edge, holding up your robes
to keep them dry.
You must dive naked under, and deeper under, a thousand
times deeper and deeper under

Rumi

Drawing Lines ~ Contested Spaces

Poïesis, Ecstasis, Techne + the Digital Humanities

Poïesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιέω, which means "to make". This word, the root of our modern "poetry", was first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world. Neither technical production nor creation in the romantic sense, poïetic work reconciles thought with matter and time, and man with the world.

In the Symposium, Diotima describes how mortals strive for immortality in relation to poieses. In all begetting and bringing forth upon the beautiful there is a kind of making/creating or poiesis. In this genesis there is a movement beyond the temporal cycle of birth and decay. "Such a movement can occur in three kinds of poiesis: (1) Natural poiesis through sexual procreation, (2) poiesis in the city through the attainment of heroic fame and finally, and (3) poiesis in the soul through the cultivation of virtue and knowledge."

Martin Heidegger refers to it as a 'bringing-forth', using this term in its widest sense. He explained poiesis as the blooming of the blossom, the coming-out of a butterfly from a cocoon, the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt. The last two analogies underline Heidegger's example of a threshold occasion: a moment of ecstasis when something moves away from its standing as one thing to become another.

Plato wrote that techne (in the sense of an art or craft) represented a threat to peace, order and good government for which Reason and Law “by common consent have ever been deemed best.” Aristotle saw it as representative of the imperfection of human imitation of nature. For the ancient Greeks, it signified all the mechanical arts including medicine and music. The English aphorism, ‘gentlemen don’t work with their hands,’ is said to have originated in ancient Greece in relation to their cynical view on the arts. Due to this view, it was only fitted for the lower class while the upper class practiced the Liberal Arts of ‘free’ men (Dorter 1973).

Is this at the heart of the dilema about Photography pre 1970's?

Socrates also compliments techne only when it was used in the context of episteme. Episteme sometimes means knowing how to do something in a craft-like way. The craft-like knowledge is called a ‘technê.' It is most useful when the knowledge is practically applied, rather than theoretically or aesthetically applied. For the ancient Greeks, when techne appears as art, it is most often viewed negatively, whereas when used as a craft it is viewed positively: because a craft is the practical application of an art, rather than art as an end in itself. In The Republic, Plato's knowledge of forms "is the indispensable basis for the philosophers' craft of ruling in the city" (Stanford 2003).

Techne is often used in philosophical discourse to distinguish from art (or poiuesus). This use of the word also occurs in The Digital Humanities (the study of how new technology affects the concept of knowledge itself) to differentiate between linear narrative presentation of knowledge and dynamic presentation of knowledge, wherein techne represents the former and poiesis represents the latter.

wikipedia 21 August '09

still water

you're not one
you're a thousand
just light your lantern

Rumi, 'One Live Flame' ~ Ghazal 1197 Translation by Nader Khalili
"Rumi, Fountain of Fire" Cal-Earth Press, 1994

ISEA2010 Ruhr and ISIS

ISEA

* Ecologies
Keywords: resources, sustainability, irreversibility, recycling, consumption, pollution, trash, spam, media ecology, free software, open hardware, knowlegde commons, diversity, access, low tech, urbanity, periphery, passages, intimacy

* Expanded Sounds
Keywords: electronic sounds, hybrids, image&sound, synaesthesia, immersion, expanded acoustics, body, space/time experience, sensory overload, sensory deprivation, sound pollution, silence, performance, live-ness, language, conversation.

http://www.isea2010ruhr.org/iseathemes

ISIS
http://symmetry-us.com/

Somatic Meaning ~ bringing images out of the body

Non-linguistic communication allows for multi-modal expression without verbal symbolisation. Embodied language can be made visible / 'readable' without wholesale reliance on a knowledge of paralinguistic modes. By tapping 'other ways of knowing' and bringing them to consciousness via images it is possible to honour 'silenced languages' and ancient pools of wisdom. Cultural chauvinism has its roots in a tangle of words.

sea horses/vase/brain stem/hogs with tiaras and piglets?

Hermann Rorschach's Psychodiagnostik, still used, provides a limited scientific access to the interpretation of personality, claiming to be a study of individual perception ~ it is open to bias as a diagnostic tool and ignores context.

on an oceanic plane

The object, removed from its domesticity becomes Other
Married with its reflection it takes on anthropomorphic qualities It is taken inside and folded into.


You are a well sprayed with cool rubies of sound

In which I bathe and rise with another skin
Like moon-stone passion slyly courting
The light breath of a tired dream.
I drop my heart into the depths
Of your disheveled serenity,
And stroll off empty.
When my heart has merged to your shades of pearl quietness
I return and once more drop within you.

 

Bodenheim, M 1918 Minna and Myself 
Pagan Publishing Company, NY

caving

the outer is a reflection of the inner

Sontag ~ On Photography p 3

Barthes ~ Camera Lucida p 6

Glass Bead Games

The ancient masters were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive.
The depth of their knowledge is unfathomable.
Because it is unfathomable,
All we can do is describe their appearance.
Watchful, like [men] crossing a winter stream.
Alert, like [men] aware of danger.
Courteous, like visiting guests.
Yielding, like ice about to melt.
Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood.
Hollow, like caves.
Opaque, like muddy pools.

Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching 1972 translation Chapter 15

Inner knowledge is intuitively arrived at.
What we need to know, we already know on some level;
but we have to rediscover it.

lambent memories too ...

Ouspensky p 38 Tertium Organum

The sky divided.

There's a storm approaching, its been gathering since midday and now its crawling across my sky catching the last yellow of a sunset over the hinterland. The breeze is a little more restless than a few minutes ago. I can see it in the trees and now I can feel it on my skin still moist from a deep yoga class. The palms are beginning to bend and their fronds start to crackle as they wake. Its a good sign - more rain - this time an after dark storm - but perhaps over the sea.

The weather is difficult to predict here - the wind shifts quickly, visibly moving a cloud bank kilometres within minutes, interrupting the sky's plan plotted all day. Now there's a crystal clear blue sky to the north and the cloud bank is breaking up over my centre line of vision to the south.

A quiet suspense.

After 20 years here I still can't read the sky or the winds that change it, even the sea is a mystery. In my old home I knew, always, what to expect beyond the thinking about it. There was never any guesswork in reading the air and water around me. But here, there is none of that familiarity so I wait and see what unfolds before I feel it inside

... the clouds have moved further south and the anticipated drama subsides.

I turn inside, a poet and a story about singing bridges - The Batman ... and I remember standing in the wind listening to its songs.

quantum uncertainties

I remember at 10 understanding - knowing, feeling without analysis how the Batman's cables resisted and played with the wind rushing along the Tamar to create that hum. I remember thinking this sound was in me - my vocal chords a replication of the same process and feeling comfortable with the idea that my body held all the secrets that people marvel at in the mirrored world. That thought placed me within - (a) part of it all.

"Why should the world appear to the animal as a surface?
First of all, because it appears as a surface to us.
But we know that the world is not a surface ..."

Ouspensky p89

"The phenomenal world is merely a means for the artist ... a means for the understanding of the noumenal world and for the expression of that understanding. At the present stage of our development we possess nothing os powrful, as an instrument of knowledge of the world of causes, as art. The mystery of life dwells in the fact that the noumenon, i.e., the hidden meaning oand teh hidden funtion of a thing is reflected in its phenomenon. A p[henomenon is merely the reflection of a noumenon in our sphere. The PHENOMENON IS THE IMAGE OF THE NOUMENON. It is possible to know the noumenon by the phenomenon. But in this field the chemical reagents and spectroscopes can accomplish nothing. Only that fine apparatus with is calle the soul of an artist can understand and feel the reflecion of the noumenon in the phenomenon. In art it is necessary to study ... the hidden side of life. The artist must be a clairvoyant: (he) must see that which others do not see; (he) must be a magician: must possess the power to make others see that which they do not themselves see, but which (he) does see.

"Art sees more and further than we do... we usually see nothing, we merely feel our way; therfore we do not notice those differences between things which cannot be expressed in terms of chemistry or physics. But art is the beginning of vision; it sees vastly more than the most perfect apparatus can discover; and it senses the infinite invisible facets of that crystal, one facet of which we call (man).

"The truth is that this earth is the scene of a drama of which we only perceive scattered portions, and in which the greater number of the actors are invisible to us."

Ouspensky p 145

a la Plato perhaps?

Ouspensky p89 Tertium Organum A Key to the Enigmas of the World 1955