Monthly Archives: January 2019

clarity


salt1x4

All the world is taken in through the eye,
to reach the soul,
where it becomes more,
representative of a realm deeper than appearances:
a realm ideal and sublime,
the deep stillness that is,
whose whole proclamation is
the silence and the lack of material instance
in which,
patiently and radiantly,
the universe exists.
(Mary Oliver, “Emerson”)

Allegories and Agglomerations


vent Allegory

I’ve been thinking about this image ever since I captured it back in August, and wondering how to explain what I saw, what it means, and how it fits into my evolving sense of personal engagement with photography.

The train of thought came about during a yoga nidra session, as I lay immobile for 40 minutes or so with no other visual stimulus than a ho-hum quotidian ventilation duct on the ceiling 15 feet above me. The suggestion was that I close my eyes, but they decided to remain open. The eyes seem often to have minds of their own. The wider context included about a year of deep and deeper immersion in photography, including lots of reading and writing and thousands of photographs studied and taken.

Contemplation of the metal duct provoked the insight that narratives unfold —the case with most tessellations, and also with the presentation of groupings of images, exemplified by my galleries of faces on rocks and other materials. As one looks and studies and ponders, unexpected visions and associations arise, and underlying realities emerge, or (as it might be) are imagined.

The duct itself is pretty simple: a utilitarian presence with little or no artistic intent, a piece of unpretentious industrial design, one of many thousands of ducts, formed of sheet metal in a way that is sensitive to function and to market pricing, and surely not imagined by designers and manufacturers as the inspiration for anything. Geometrically it’s just a triangle, mirrored and then mirrored orthogonally into a symmetrical diamond shape. But upon contemplation it’s clear that there’s more to it: a something else that might be a Creature manifests, equipped with eyes and even a tongue. And suddenly the duct is not so simple, and inspires the viewer to consider Unfolding, and Creaturehood, and Allegory.

Namaste, tout le monde.

The next morning I returned with a camera and found that the Creature was still in residence, and was as provocative as it had been the day before.

The Full-frontal Spiritual Manifestations: gods, godlets, daemons and other beings project seems a direct outcome of the adventure with the duct.

Addendum: the wee hours found me considering that Agglomerations consist of Agglomera, and that the singular would thus be Agglomerum; Agglomeratio would be the act of gathering up Agglomera. By itself,

30xii1832
is just an oddly-shaped rock, but in company (Agglomerated) with others of its ilk, other possibilities emerge:

30xii1832 30xii1833 DriftInn1i1817

DI6ii077 DI7ii059 DI25i18072

DI2i1876 Wass29vii18079 28xii1816

fruits of the morning’s beachcombing

13i1901a

Stuff keeps washing up along my personal tidelines, some of it simple flotsam or jetsam, some of it elements in evolving sculpture and macramé, some of it of indeterminate utility. It All Counts, as my mentor Allen Smith said of the work of the Reference Librarian.

Two cases in point, the first an enduring puzzlement reeled in and partly digested a few months ago, the second a new discovery this morning, via a posting to The WELL’s State of the World (Paulina Borsook) which seems to make sense of the first:

  1. Timothy Morton’s
    Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

    “…Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls ‘hyperobjects’—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place… concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning.Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action…”

  2. Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz


    Five Understandings

    First understanding

    Nature’s economic system stores the energy that it does not immediately need
    mostly in carbon formations

    Second understanding

    Nature does not charge a profit as do culture’s economic systems

    Third understanding

    All natural systems are dissipative structures with individuals that form them living,
    reproducing then dying with indeterminacy as a norm

    Fourth understanding

    All natural systems have learned to nest within each other, and, within a context of
    symbiosis contribute to collective systems survival, sometimes with abundance

    Fifth understanding

    Human constructed artifacts particularly legal, political, economic as well as
    production and consumption systems seek constancy but are often in violation of the
    laws of conservation of energy pointing toward systems entropy

Working out the implications, awaiting the next tide…