PART III
Notes from an Artist's Musings
NUDES, KNOTS & DIANE ARBUS
I browsed through a thick book of erotic black and white photographs by a number of photographers from different countries. The images were mostly of women. The images ranged from soft-core nudes, to bound S&M nudes in a series of usually boring poses. Besides being rudely chauvinistic, I found little in them that was truly imaginative or beautiful. The photographs veered from artsy and S&M to banal kitsch. Photography of the nude poses a great challenge to seeing. At the same time, we are expected to admire the photographs and to feel erotic arousal. As with movie monsters and serial killers, the real excitement and hair tingling effect comes from what isn't seen. We are frightened or allured when our own emotions are free to fill in the picture. A truly sexual image tickles, entices, or inflames the imagination. Marilyn Monroe on a grate with her skirt blowing up is very erotic although she is fully clad. Most of the images in the book showed bound and shackled women, cropped images of women, women embraced or embracing, women straddled against rocks or on littered floors or rumpled beds, and so on ad infinitum. What was missing was any feeling for the hapless subjects. The women's faces wore bored or tense expressions. To truly see a woman and feel attracted to her, you must peer or peek through a veil of mystery. Triple X movies and Playboy centerfolds are arousing, but they are rarely beautiful. Calvin Klein ads celebrate sex, but they show a fantasy world of beautiful people who appear to have no fondness or tenderness toward each other.
A number of contemporary photographers have captured a vision of the essence and the physical mystery of the human nude, man or woman. Among them are Howard Schatz ( Body Knots ), Flor Garduno ( Inner Light ), Robert Maplethorpe's S&M images, Bill Brandt ( Perspective of Nudes ) and Albert Watson ( Cyclops ). The challenge is to avoid cliché visions wrapped in studio lighting effects or displaying sham passions. The human body is a miracle of construction, nature's architecture at its most creative and beautiful. How to learn to see and photograph a nude must be incredibly difficult, given the usually disastrous results. Today's fashion magazines and fashion and beauty ads play on sexual themes. The subjects, often very beautiful or handsome, wear bored expressions. It is a sign of our times, in which real feelings are suspect.
The New York Times Magazine , Sunday, September 14, 2003 ran a lengthy cover story on Diane Arbus, Arbus Reconsidered . Arbus, rarely to my knowledge, photographed nudes. In her time, she was accused of photographing freaks, and of making “ordinary” people look like freaks. The Times article claims that she was interested in revealing the inner lives of the people she photographed, and that she really liked them. According to the article's subhead, “Now...an image of Arbus as a deeply empathetic artist is coming into focus.” Arbus veered between photographing true “freaks” and people who, in her images, often appeared somewhat or very freakish. She walked a thin line between empathy and caricature or distortion. Her early suicide reveals that she had difficulty deciding which world she inhabited. Too much troubled vision, as with many artists, can be dangerous. She began as a fashion photographer. After a number of years, she decided she hated it, and went off to do her own work. If you peer past the veil or the mask that most people wear, you find yourself reflected either ugly, beautiful or neuter. If, as Thoreau wrote, “Most people live lives of quiet desperation,” Arbus found it again and again in her work. Her last series took place in a home for the severely retarded in New Jersey. She was looking for something. It is dangerous to read too much into despair, into the often sad lives of malformed or crippled human beings. They deserve the best, never exploitation.
I recall that Stanislavsky's pupil Vakhtangov wrote the founder of the method theater about new exercises with young actors in his own workshop. He told Stanislavsky that his pupils were asked to greatly exaggerate every emotion, to be grotesque if necessary, in order to truly understand how to gesture and behave on stage. Stanislavsky wrote back that it was all wrong. The right way was for the actors to feel the emotions so deeply that the gestures well up and become absolutely real. Arbus made that balancing act her life, going from one extreme to another. She must have had a deep affinity and empathy for the afflicted and sadly grotesque people she met at freak shows or in homes for retarded people. She carried what she learned in these places into her more public work, revealing the grotesque underlying the facades in seemingly ordinary people. It was a sad and finally destructive path for her.
I choose to photograph people by bringing love, respect and the deepest empathy for their dignity and personas. In return, I get back the more sensitive and beautiful side of their natures. That is my way. We all may carry within us Jekyll and Hyde behavior. A suicide bomber embraces his young children and goes off to murder dozens of someone else's children. It is easy, too easy, to describe what an artist feels when he or she works. What really is at stake is invisible. If Arbus had only empathy for her subjects, why do they so often seem terribly troubled or in desperate straits? Perhaps she couldn't help herself. She let the demon out of the bottle. It cost her life. We see what we are compelled to see. It is a life's work to learn to see beyond our early conditioning and our unconscious needs.
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.
— DIANE ARBUS
CAI GUO-QIANG
Will a moon so bright ever arise again?
Drink a cupful of wine and ask of the sky.
I don't know where the palace gate of heaven is,
Or even the year in which tonight slips by.
I want to return riding the whirlwing! But I
Feel afraid that this heaven of Jasper and Jade
Lets in the cold, its palaces rise so high.
I shall get up and dance with my own shadow.
From life endured among men how far a cry.
SU TUNG-PO [Oldpoetry.com]
I stop at Asia House in New York City and encounter an exhibition by Cai Guo-Quiang. It records his lightworks explosions in Central Park on a day in September 2003. Cai set off gunpowder to make fireworks light up the night sky. In the large picture book of his work Gao Guo-Quiang by Phaidon Press, he wrote:
Realized projects are like bright firework flowers in the sky. Unrealized projects are the darkness of the night...but the difficulty of people looking up in the sky is that they want to see the fireflower, not darkness...Tatsumi Masatoshi, my technical assistant, often says that things that work out successfully do so by chance, while those that don't reflect the way things really are.
The exhibition hall at Asia House displays huge canvases. The canvases are inscribed with what look like strange hieroglyphics. The canvases are raw, without color. The ‘hieroglyphs' are shades of dark brown. A video demonstrates that these images were made by setting off what appeared to be firecrackers or gunpowder under various arrays of stones. I am struck by the originality of these canvases, by the way they were made and appear. In the Phaidon book, Takashi Serizawa discusses another project, “Going Beyond the Wall: Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters, Project for Extraterrestrials No 10. At the end of his article he writes, “Just before dusk, the fuse was ignited...It burnt at about 14 metres per second...as the small bags of gunpowder exploded at intervals, they created the effect of pulses of lightning...the fire ran across the desert as if it were a living thing...The light he sparked in that indefinite space between night and day on the earth is still flashing around the universe. It was an expression of our times; it was our expression of hope; it was an expression of union extended to the universe as a whole.”
Light is immortal. It knows not time. What forever means to light I do not comprehend. I know that light birthed the universe and that light is the reason we are alive. Guo-Qiang's art delves into the meaning of light. He said that Eastern philosophy asserts, “No law is the law. No method is the method, and all laws go back into one.” Attempts are being made today to discover the laws governing the universe or society through the concept of chaos. Chaos in art is the first clue to what is going on. From chaos comes the unexpected, like wild flowers in the desert or seashells on mountaintops. From seeming order comes little or nothing in the way of enlightenment. Learning to see requires that we accept chaos as the norm and from that shaky platform, begin to truly see.
THE CHINESE SCHOLAR'S GARDEN
I arrive at the Staten Island Botanic Garden. I have not been here. It is a beautiful day of sunshine and fast moving cloud layers. Low misty cumulus clouds speed by underneath an umbrella of high alto-cumulus. On the way to the Chinese Scholar's Garden, I stop to see the lily ponds. The bright full-blown lilies stare back at me. I bend very close and make macro lens photographs with my digital camera. The beauty of the lilies in the ponds tugs at my heart. I move on. Near the Scholar's Garden, I stop again. The cloudscapes intrigue me. Rarely have I seen such fast moving low clouds, which arrange themselves in a chaos of intriguing patterns. I aim at the sun, which peeps through the clouds and use a very tiny aperture (f.22 at a 250 th or 500 th of a second at ISO 50) to capture the full range of density in the image, to avoid blowing out the bright sunlit areas. Satiated for the moment, I move on into the Scholar's Garden. The following comes from the Staten Island Botanical Garden's website, sibg.org/cg.html:
Traditional Chinese gardens go back almost 2,000 years to the Han Dynasty though most Scholar's Gardens date back to the more recent Ming and Qing dynasties. A Scholar's Garden would have been built by a scholar or an administrator retiring from the emperor's court. It would have been an enclosed private garden always associated with a house which, in turn without its garden, would not have been considered whole.
This garden, designed and built by LAC, is enclosed by walls, a series of pavilions (eight in all), and covered walkways. These are all organized in an irregular manner to create in addition to the two major courtyards a series of six others of varying sizes. The art of the Chinese garden is closely related to Chinese landscape painting - it is not a literal imitation of a natural landscape, but the capturing of its essence and spirit. bbb The parallel could be drawn to a Chinese hand scroll painting which as it unrolls, reveals a journey full of surprises and meditative pauses.
The enjoyment of the garden is both contemplative and sensual. It comes from making the most out of the experiences of everyday life, as such, architectural elements are always a part of a Scholar's Garden. The painter's eye must be used to lay out the main architectural elements - the wall becomes the paper the rockery and plant are painted on. The structures playfully rise and fall, twist and turn and even "leave" the garden to take advantage of and even create a great variety of beautiful scenes. To paraphrase the 15th century garden designer Ji Ching:
The garden is created by the human hand, but should appear as if created by heaven
I walk slowly through the garden and seek views for my camera. The backdrop of swiftly changing clouds adds to the drama. Rock pillars, which appear sculpted, appear at various places. One tall pillar stands above a small pond in the courtyard. I have an abiding interest in rocks and sculpture. The rocks in the garden have an ancient history. The paragraphs come from The Viewing Stone website, shimagata.tripod.com/srhist.htm:
Scholars' Rocks are smaller than garden rocks and are selected for more refined qualities. The size of Scholars' Rocks varies from miniature stones of about one inch to rocks four or five feet in height. However, the normal size is one small enough to rest on a table or desk. Scholars took these portable mountains into their studios and used them for meditation and contemplation. Some were converted into utilitarian objects such as brush rests, censors or seals - but the majority were viewed as artistic creations in their own right. The most highly regarded rocks were of dense limestone that "emitted a bell-like ring when struck"
To the Chinese scholars, these rocks represented a focus for meditation of religious or philosophic principles and served for contemplation prior to writing poems or painting. Although most rocks resembled mountains (both famous and imaginary), mountain ranges, overhangs and similar natural wonders of the world around them, there were also many that reminded the connoisseurs of famous people, animals, and mythical creatures. Above all, these learned Chinese admired the rocks for "surfaces that suggest great age, forceful profiles that evoke the grandeur of nature, overlapping layers or planes that impart depth, and hollows or perforations that create rhythmic, harmonious patterns.
I walk around the rocks several times waiting for other viewers to leave the picture. Confronted by this masterpiece of a garden, I am aware that I will not see much consciously. I trust my no-mind or intuitive unconscious to see further.
One visit is not enough. To “dwell” in this garden demands a series of visits in different seasons, at different times of day, and with varying light conditions. The angle of the sun will make substantial changes in what I see and photograph. The need to descend vertically into a subject, to penetrate beneath the surface, is a measure of what you will attain in the art of seeing. Too often, while on assignments, I wandered through splendid landscapes for a short time and only skimmed the surface. I visited Point Lobos Nature Reserve in California many times. Over the years, I began to see the beauty of this small acreage of rocky beaches, cliffs, sea lions, birds, and trails winding through the cypress groves overlooking the sea. This, my first visit to the Staten Island Botanic Garden is an unexpected gift. We never know what surprises we will encounter until we venture forth from our safe harbors into the unknown.
Upon leaving the Scholar's Garden, I return to studying and photographing the changing skyscape of hurrying clouds. What I will find when I unload the digital information into my computer and into Adobe Photoshop is the delicious desert and abundant feast ahead from this day of extraordinary, unexpected beauty.
LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Glancing through the book Louis Bourgeoise, Drawings & Observations (Bulfinch Press) , I revel in the fact that her drawings and her observations make no literal sense, like dreams. Renowned for her sculpture, the reclusive artist was born in 1911. "I am a long distance runner and a lonely runner, and that's the way I like it," she said in an e-mal interview in June 2002 conducted by Laura Richard Janku. In his forward to the book, Josef Helfenstein, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Kunstmuseum, Bern, wrote, “This body of work bears none of the characteristic signs — increasingly encountered in the world of art—that indicate an artist is deliberately and calculatedly adapting his or her art to fit the given facts of the present-day art trade...The contemporary significance of Louise Bourgeois's work lies precisely in the way it transcends the narrower reality of present-day art.”
I, too, am a long distance runner. I hope you are as well. It is through the application of our minds, hearts and spirits to the enigmas and prophecies of art that we slowly come to knowledge of what we do not know. From that perplexity we derive all of heaven and hell, which is the domain of all who practice and love the arts.
In her introduction to The Insomnia Drawings of Loiuse Bourgeois, Marie-Laure Bernadac, writes, “...—a series of two hundred and twenty drawings—...reveals the tight link between drawing and writing that is so important to her work, while continuing the process of using her art to disclose key childhood fears and memories...we are plunged directly into the complex and ambivalent mechanisms of her creative thought processes, which consist of variation and repitition, poetic and musical phrases that result in the feel of a near automatic ebb and flow.”
Aren't we all insomniacs in some way and isn't this artist's insomnia work a clue to the deep unconscious workings that inform our emotions and our actions? I study her writings and the drawings as I would puzzle out the writings of Zen masters who often talk in riddles or give out the literally inoluble mind problems called koans . Enlightenment comes from not solving the riddles, but hearing the answer explode like fireworks in your brain and being. As in hearing unfamiliar music, I cannot fathom Bourgeois's art at first seeing. It takes immersion and periodic visits to begin to see the light. The creative art which pours from all of our unconscious minds is the fecund bud tip of evolution's workings, the aeons long elan vital , or passionate striving to make our knowledge of ourselves and of the world a constant surge upwards to the light.
Light shines from inside us like the auguries of a hidden volcano, rumbling during our sleep, smoking when we are awake, pouring red hot lava down the folds of our cerebral cortexes, often unnerving us with its seemingly violent potential. To free that light, to embrace the vivid flare-ups without fear, that is one of the great goals of the informed and creative life. Dare all, risk all, and live and love with the brilliant consequences. That is the incandescent glory of living with light, with bliss, with sacred knowledge.
FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT
We see light. We see because of light. Light is the mysterious engine that fuels the universe. According to Einstein, nothing can exceed the speed of light. Paradoxically, as explained below, the universe can expand faster than the speed of light. There is no limit to the speed of expansion of the universe. There is no limit to what we can see if we accept that seeing is a product of light waves which, although mysterious, behave according to the precepts which inform our vision. Those precepts occur at the level which we see, somewhere between the quantum level of photons and the macroscopic hugeness of galaxies. I believe that we can learn to see everything, although we must see things the way our eyes and brains work. The best way to enhance vision is to see what isn't there by discarding our reliance on preconditioned and/or genetic endowment. The following “explains” another enigma of light.
Light left the quasar when the Universe was less than a billion years old and when the quasar was 4.0 billion light years away, say Dr. Michael S. Turner, SDSS spokesman and chair of the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Chicago and Craig Wiegert, University of Chicago astrophysics graduate student.
Today, however, the quasar is 27 billion light years away. For each mile a photon moves towards us now, says Turner, the quasar light must travel an additional 5.8 miles due to expanding space. Light waves lengthen as they speed through expanding space and this means the total distance light travels from a galaxy to us lengthens. But, the light photons speeding from our quasar cannot exceed the velocity of light and neither can any other motion through the Universe.
"'How fast is the distance between us and this quasar increasing?,'" asks Turner and answers, "about 1.8 times the velocity of light." Does this exceed the speed-of-light speed limit? No. Einstein's theory does not limit the speed of space expansion—only motion through it.
Contemplating the speeds, distances, and times of light travel through the expanding Universe may appear paradoxical. Think of it this way, say Turner and Wiegert: The quasar's light from 4.0 billion light years away had to fight its way "upstream" against the stretching Universe to reach us in 13 billion years.
By the way, the Universe didn't start from a single point. "The big bang was an explosion of space (with matter carried along), says Turner, "not stuff exploding from a point into space."
How large is the universe? How large is the universe within us? There are no limits to our imagination and to our ability to learn and grow. The vision we seek emanates from within and without. Earlier on this day (Sunday, October 5, 2003) I walk on the Brooklyn Bridge. I photograph cloudscapes combined with the intricacies of the cables strung from the massive stone towers. Do I see the Brooklyn Bridge as a structure spanning the river or did I see illusions of space-time held in a grid of wires? Are the masses of clouds above the bridge background or were they timeless phantasms stretching back to the beginning of water on the Earth. For billions of years clouds have circled the planet. I see all of history in the mysterious wanderings of clouds across the planetary sphere. I practice letting go of my mind set, allowing the brilliant sunlight behind the clouds to free my no-mind. I am enraptured, oblivious to speeding bikers, roller-bladers and a swarm of pedestrian hikers.
A trance or reverie is the natural state of an artist photographer. To truly see the world around you, you must leave it, as a shaman does. “In The Way of the Shaman, author Michael Harner writes, “ Shamans are especially healers, but they also engage in divination, seeing into the present, past, and future for other members of the community. A shaman is a see-er... A shaman may also engage in clairvoyance, seeing what is going on elsewhere at the present moment... Shamans have to be able to journey back and forth between realities.” I must travel back and forth between realities on this bridge, the reality of my intuitive work with the camera, and the noisy reality of walkers, runners, bikers and the rest. Ideally, this state is attained when the unconscious or no-mind collaborates with the conscious mind in tandem, like a bicycle built for two, both pedaling in the same direction but unlike the bicyclists, free to experience separate realities.
Sunlight flares between masses of scudding clouds. The old bridge shakes and groans beneath the weight of a subway train. Am I here or somewhere in an infinite grid of space-time and ageless light, the Omega Point, the beginning and immortality of the universe? Author Frank J. Tipler has proposed that it is possible for intelligent beings to process and store an infinite amount of information in the universe, if certain conditions are fulfilled. His definition of the Omega Point is essentially a future c-boundary, which is a single point and an Aleph state, where Information processing continues indefinitely along at least one world-line gamma all the way to the future c-boundary of the universe. i.e. Life never dies out .
(http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/index-2.html#Omega)
My mind wings across this creaking span whose history is the history of this great city, now the center of the world. No more can I frame the Trade Towers behind the massive stone arches of the bridge. Walking this bridge is the end of innocence, for this city is framed by these stone towers whose metaphysical arches encompass the starry reaches of time and grandeur. On this shaky platform, I can move the earth with timeless vision. Our birth is but a “sleep and a forgetting,” as Wordworth put it in Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollecting Early Childhood :
...The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come...
I am my camera. I follow that ‘Star' beyond its setting, into the realms of light and chaos, the starry universe which unfolds like a saga so immense we cannot see but the shadowy reflections from the exploding cosmos. In FLASH, The Hunt for the Biggest Explosions in the Universe, author Govert Schilling writes, “The cosmos does not trouble itself with the death of one star...within those few seconds it took for the star to disappear from the stage, a gigantic rush of gamma radiation was blown into space...In a few seconds more energy comes free than the sun emits in its entire life.” I am on the Brooklyn Bridge, although my third mind, the shaman mind is far away across the cosmic reaches. My use of shamanic or no-mind trances while making images enables that part me to see “what isn't there.” Daydreaming is a kind of trance experienced by most people. Reverie is in our genes. We can see everything although often it is seen through a glass, darkly. Shake off inhibitions. The world flowers with wild enthusiasm every day.
The distinguishing characteristic of Shamanism is its focus on an ecstatic trance state called State of Flow in which the soul of the Shaman is believed to leave the body and ascend to the sky (heavens) or descend into the earth (underworld).
The Shaman makes use of spirit helpers called Familiar Spirits with whom he or she communicates, all the while retaining control over his or her own consciousness.
The ability to consciously move beyond the physical body is the particular specialty of the traditional Shaman. These journeys of Soul may take the Shaman into the nether realms, higher levels of existence or to parallel physical worlds or other regions of this world.
Shamanic Flight, is in most instances NOT an experience of an inner imaginary landscape, but IS the Shaman's flight beyond the limitations of the physical body and it's ability to fly.
(see*www.angelfire.com/electronic/awakening101/shamanism.html)
Because I am a human being and, like you, possess a brain of virtually unlimited capabilities, these tasks are natural, like breathing. You let go of your mind set and allow tremendous bursts of energy to emerge. You “fly” and you see. There is no end to the universe within a human brain. Underneath the real world, a mask which we encounter every day, lies the inspiring and exhilarating.
The One Way, unconditioned and signless, is spotless;
It unfolds the teaching of nonduality
of neither being nor nonbeing.
When both the seeing and the seen are negated,
the eternal ground of quiescence will be found.
When all thought determinations are exhausted, one will
meet with Mahavairocana (God).
He, like vast space, knows no duality of body and mind.
Adapting himself freely to all beings,
He manifests himself forever and ever. One must proceed further by receiving revelation.
The glorious mind, the most secret and sacred is
to realize one's own mind in its fountainhead
and to have insight into the nature
of one's own existence.
— Y.S. HAKEDA , Kukai, Major Works
MERCE CUNNINGHAM
I've been told I look like Merce Cunningham. I'd rather think like Merce Cunningham. Merce worked with John Cage among others. Both were interested in aleatory or chance compositions of dance and music. A feature article in the October 12, 2003 Sunday New York Times Amusement Section has Merce teaming up with a couple of rock groups, Radiohead and its Icelandic cousin Sigur Ros. At 77, in answer to the reporter's question about what keeps him going, Cunningham says “There is always something new, I don't mean I'm going to get it, but I keep looking.” Merce did a number of his modern dances with music by the Zen influenced composer John Cage.
JOHN CAGE
He was a famous eccentric, innovator and a lover of mushrooms. Composer and Zen influenced guru John Cage aimed at unraveling traditional and hidebound mindsets to help people hear and see the world. Cage said he enjoyed hearing the “music” of city noises outside his Avenue of the Americas apartment in New York City. A famous composition is “Four Minutes and 33 Seconds of Silence,” during which the only sounds were the musician opening and closing the lid of the piano and the audience breathing or coughing. Cage wrote of himself, “I once asked Arragon, the historian, how history was written. He said, ‘You have to invent it.' When I wish as now to tell of critical incidents, persons, and events that have influenced my life and work, the true answer is all of the incidents were critical, all of the people influenced me, everything that happened and that is still happening influences me.”
With Cage, nothing is what it seems, which often leaves acolytes in a stressed out state. Living with uncertainty may be the hardest thing anyone can do. Without uncertainty, chance, serendipity, the world is a barren, cold, nihilistic place. What warms the heart never seems to be right at first, or if it does, it too often fades like a morning mist. Here's John Cage:
The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason...I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
When I asked Schoenberg to teach me, he said, "You probably can't afford my price." I said, "Don't mention it; I don't have any money." He said, "Will you devote your life to music?" This time I said "Yes." He said he would teach me free of charge. I gave up painting and concentrated on music
In the late forties I found out by experiment (I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University) that silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around. I devoted my music to it. My work became an exploration of non-intention. To carry it out faithfully I have developed a complicated composing means using I Ching chance operations, making my responsibility that of asking questions instead of making choices.
The taste of Zen for me comes from the admixture of humor, intransigence, and detachment. It makes me think of Marcel Duchamp, though for him we would have to add the erotic.
QUEEN MARY 2
I stand on the state-of-the-art-ship's bridge as Captain Warwick takes QM2 on her first voyage under his command. The ship departs from the Chantiers d'Atlantique shipyard near St. Nazaire in Brittany where it was built. We are on the way to the Bay of Biscay outside of Vigo, Spain. Captain Warwick will practice maneuvering the world's newest and largest ocean liner. QM2 stood on end would be taller than the Empire State Building. At a cost of 800 million dollars, she is also the most expensive ocean liner ever built. Captain Warwick wants to get the feel of the gigantic ship before bringing her in through the narrow channel and shoals around Southampton, England. He was captain of the QE2 as was his father before him. He proudly stands on his new ship's bridge as she makes her first voyage into history. It is of the utmost importance to him that he encounters no problems with the ship as she approaches Southampton in two days.
The next afternoon, Captain Warwick kindly decides to lower a ship's tender (a small boat) for me to photograph QM2 in the Bay of Biscay. It is very generous of the good captain to take time out from his critical maneuvers to accommodate me. We are old friends. He has a number of my photographs of QE2 and of the construction of QM2. It is a perfect day, warm, with calm winds and brilliant sunshine. Since the tender was lowered at my behest, Officer Chris, the tender's driver, follows my instructions for maneuvering the tender into the best positions for photography. A film crew is aboard with us as well as a group of three photographers. This somewhat chaotic situation requires me to shout constant commands, and simultaneously ignore the others while I shoot. My intuitive no-mind or unconscious mind takes over; after many years of practice, it does all the work. Position is critical. I must anticipate the movements of QM2 guide our small boat while I am photographing. The giant ship moves slowly across the bay. We intercept her again and again, coming right up under her bow for close-ups and skittering away just in time.
I ask the driver Chris to radio Chris Wells, the staff captain, to please turn the ship towards the sun for the sunlight on her bow and side. The staff captain answers that he will do his best, but they are busy maneuvering with the bow thrusters and giant propeller pods. (The pods swivel and act as rudders, as the ship has no rudders.) I keep photographing. QM2 swings slowly around until her stern catches the light of the late afternoon sun. She stays in that position as she moves across the bay. That turns out to be the best of fortune. I receive a gift of the serendipity of the unexpected; the setting sun lights up the prow of QM2 from behind casting shimmering orange reflections in the rippling sea.
A favorite image, made from just under the bow, displays QM2 rising out of the sea like a behemoth, a gigantic black whale of a ship, with the setting sun behind her at the horizon. Red and gold, the last rays of sunlight glance off the bow and flame on the sea below. I scarcely remember this moment, as I was totally immersed in no-mind, firing without conscious volition. The composition appears ‘perfectly' asymmetrical. The flare of the setting sun and the horizon are placed in the lower third of the image along with a few tiny sailboats and a small dark profile of hills in the distance. The black waters glow below and the dark midnight blue hull of the ship towers towards the sky. Another image from that group of sunset images is selected for the cover of my QM2 coffee table book due for publication by Bufinch Press in early spring, 2004.
My photographs from the two-hour shoot present the ship from various angles, employing vertical and horizontal compositions. I made “classic” images of QM2 with blue skies above, a red water line, dark hull and white superstructure, and, as the sun went down, in sunset light, with ruddy flares and golden and orange reflections in the sea. This was the only opportunity for photography of QM2 during the historic first voyage to Southampton. The next day, in the Bay of Biscay at Vigo's harbor, the ship never went far from the cluttered dock. I am very grateful to the Captain Warwick and to the benevolent spirits that made these images possible. Although I photographed many images inside the ship of public spaces, suites and staff, that precious few hours in the tender enabled the mission to become a resounding success. Much of what happened during that brief time remains evanescent, gone from my conscious memory, preserved by my superb digital camera, the Canon EOS1Ds. The sword is the soul of the samurai. My camera has become my soul.
THE ART OF THE SAMURAI
In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. Lord Takanobu said, "If discrimination is long, it will spoil. " Lord Naoshige said, "When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn out badly. A warrior is a person who does things quickly.'' When your mind is going hither and thither, discrimination will never be brought to a conclusion. With an intense, fresh and undelaying spirit, one will make his judgments within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break right through to the other side.
—HAGAKURE: The Book of the Samurai
These words from the Hagakure sum up the will, direction and actions of my way of photography. There is not a single moment to hesitate, any more than a samurai could react other than in a split second to avoid a flashing sword and make his own cut. QM2 presented a moving target from a moving boat on a bumpy sea. In addition, the others onboard presented obstacles and constant confusion. Absolute concentration as in a matter of life and death eliminated the sounds and actions of the others from my no-mind. I practice much of the time, as a gymnast or a bowman must practice, to make the act, the release of the shutter instinctive and instantaneous. I cannot see or know what that fleeting instant is at the moment of firing. Only later will I discover what my unconscious mind seized as quickly as a peregrine falcon swoops and seizes its prey. (The Peregrine Falcon, a raptor, is the fastest living creature in the world, reaching speeds of over 150 km / hour.) Raptors are able to see twice as well as people and are able to detect very small movement from many kilometers away. When hunting they approach their prey at exceptionally high speed, and must be able to adjust the focus of their eyes rapidly.
Focus is everything, focusing the mind to ‘see' through the critical aperture of the eye which becomes the gateway to instant decision. Our conscious minds cannot react fast enough. The art of seeing emerges from a lifelong attention paid to what is around us. We see in short takes, called saccades, a quick, jerky movement of the eye that presents a flickering series of images which the brain composes into a streaming ‘video.' No-mind instantly reacts to the twenty-fourth of a second of image retention (which is why we see movies) and fires without the conscious mind being present or interfering. The art of seeing consists in this; the see-er become one with the seeing without conscious volition. This way of seeing, I call “The Zen of Fluid Motion Photography.” A raptor comes by its great speed through instincts and genetic inheritance. We humans must hone our minds and bodies like a splendid samurai sword honed to the keenest edge through constant dedication, execution and practice. Passionate practice enables us to let go at critical moments. No-mind, our intuitive unconscious, may then perform like a falcon or other raptor to instantaneously see and act. There is no other way.
MYSTIC VISION
When love has carried us above all things...we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and penetrating us. What is this Light, if it be not a contemplation of the Infinite and an intuition of Eternity? We behold that which we are, and we art that which we behold; because our being, without losing anything of its own personality is united with the divine truth.
— JOHN OF RUYSBROECK (Quoted in The Mystic Vision , BARING & HARVEY)
I add this treatise on the art of seeing thoughts of love, light and mysticism. While little is known about the true nature of light, it is the source of all life on earth as well as a paradigm for mystic concepts of love and spiritual visions of godheads. I believe that art and mysticism go hand in hand because art arises from the deepest parts of the human psyche. I believe that the art of seeing is handmaiden to a vaulting spiritual philosophy of life in this world. Rumi, quoted in The Mystic Vision, wrote :
Fly away, fly away bird to your native home,
You have leapt free of the cage
Your wings are flung back in the wind of God.
Leave behind the stagnant and marshy waters,
Hurry, hurry, hurry, O bird, to the source of life.
How do we learn to see “what isn't there” in this world? Trackers read signs in the wild, which are invisible to the rest of us. They see because they have trained themselves to see minute disturbances in the natural order of things. To observe is a enigmatic and metaphysical act in several meanings given in Merriam Webster online: “to inspect or take note of as an augury, omen, or presage,” and “to celebrate or solemnize (as a ceremony or festival) in a customary or accepted way,” and “a: to watch carefully especially with attention to details or behavior for the purpose of arriving at a judgment b : to make a scientific observation on or of.” We have here a coming together of the mystical or the sacred and profane which the act of observing or seeing constructs. The art of seeing requires that we separate this dichotomy and learn to see rather than to observe, although observing can bring its own rewards.
I believe that respect for spirits and spirit figures such as those that dwell in my living studio, “Spirit House,” have brought me much good luck on my missions around the world and at home. I believe that a belief in the mystic, whether it be belief in a god or in a holy manifestation of any religion, however narrow, is conducive to learning and growing. The art of seeing is handmaiden to spiritual and intellectual growth and to the attainment of great skill and excellence in any art or science.
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
– ALBERT EINSTEIN
To widen our circle of compassion, we must learn to see beyond what our conditioning and our brain demand that we see. Einstein disenthralled himself from Newtonian views of gravity and the cosmos in his time and discovered a new world. When we learn to truly see, we are as explorers discovering unknown continents and unseen beauty. What can be more inspiring than to awake each day to the knowledge that you are embarked on a voyage of adventures and new visions?
THE MIND & POETRY OF VISION
Jane Hirshfield in her excerpt from “Kingfishers Catching Fire: Seeing with Poetry's Eyes,” closes with, “...Seeing through poetry's eyes, we come to know ourselves as less tempered, more free than we were, and connected to—emancipated into, if you will—a larger world.” Vision and poetry intertwine like morning glory vines around the water bucket in Chiyo ni's 17 th century haiku poem,
The morning glory!
It has taken the well bucket.
I must seek elsewhere for water.
Poetry has become more popular here in America in the last decade although I doubt many poets make their living by writing poetry. Poetry illuminates the mind. When the mind catches fire like the kingfisher, the blaze enables the eye to see freshly, to see the invisible world.
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
— GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
I find this poem enigmatic, slow and elusive to grasp. Like learning to see, it takes hard work. With poetry reading out loud or reading over and over helps the eye and ear to feel mellow and bask in the seemingly unrhythmical meters. We read and feel poetry to tune our eyes and brains to the visual melody of the world.
CLOUDS
Rows and flows of angel hair,
And ice cream castles in the air,
And feather canyons everywhere,
I've looked at clouds that way.But now they only block the Sun,
They rain and snow on everyone.
So many things I would have done,
But clouds got in my way.I've looked at clouds from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow,
It's cloud illusions I recall,
I really don't know clouds, at all.
— JONI MITCHELL
I learn to see in clouds much more than is apparent to my naked eye. My eye sees only a small portion of the almost infinite variety of shapes, hues and textures embedded in these floating castles. My digital Canon EOS1Ds plays a symphony with cloudscapes. Later, I reveal, enhance or transform the images in Photoshop. I'll let a few images seen below speak for me. These images all began with cloudscapes photographed in different places, including from the rooftop of my building. The miraculous is always around us. We merely need to look hard, open our minds and no-minds, take a deep breath and let go.
O, it is pleasant, with a heart at ease,
Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,
To make the shifting clouds be what you please,
Or let the easily persuaded eyes
Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould
Of a friend's fancy.
— SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
IN TUNE WITH OUR BRAINS
Intuition and concepts constitute...the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.
— IMMANUEL KANT
We are, all of us, seekers after knowledge and growth. Intuition emerges from the genes and from the workings of the unconscious mind. Concepts come from education and thinking. They must be yoked together. In a book by Gordon G. Globus, entitled THE POSTMODERN BRAIN , Advances in Consciousness Research , I read, “Perception occurs when cognition meets the real world.”
And what, you may ask as I do, is the real world? The art of seeing is a blinding [sic] exercise into the quantum streams of consciousness which flows through our brains at every second. The book presents research which claims that the human brain is not a computer and does not compute in a digital fashion, but is a self-tuning chemically influenced neural network . “...The brain system is self tuning as it meets its surround.”
In an online essay “Overview of Autopoietic Theory,” Randall Whiteaker writes, “Cognition in the autopoietic view is no more and no less than a living system's effective behavior withing its domain of interactions. In other words, cognition is a matter of interacting in the manner(s) in which one is capable of interacting, not processing what is objectively there to be seen. ‘Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition.”
The following quotes from THE POSTMODERN BRAIN add light to this perplexing concept:
...A key idea here is that in a self-organizing, nonlinear dynamical system that undergoes chaotic regimes, brain states evolve under tunable constraint. The brain is self-tuning as it intersects with patterns of energy from the surround: the brain brings its own attunement to interactions with nonbrain, with other, with the world surround—and a flowing trajectory of states results. I identify self-tuning with cognition.
Those lines resound in my brain. I feel as though I were struck by a cosmic tuning fork. Music, the music of the spheres, the sacred music of chants and chorales, organs and primitive instruments, the music the earth makes in her spin around the sun, creaking glaciers in the polar latitudes, cracking, burning sands, howling winds atop high mountain peaks, the oceans rounding the globe with surf and sighs. It is the music of the human brain self-tuning itself with the earth, self-tuning itself with all things great and small, the infinite surround. A page later, Globus writes:
Francisco Varela aroused me from dogmatic slumbers to see that the brain does not represent the world. His seminal concept of “autopoiesis” was also influential. Autopoiesis is a process through which living systems form and sustain their own boundaries and maintain these boundaries when perturbated. (Nobel Prize winner) Prigogine's work on complex systems at far from equilibrium conditions was also most stimulating.
Without plumbing the depths of these enigmatic statements, I bring out a statement about poiesis which, strangely, at this same time I encountered in poet Edward Hirsch's book How to Read a Poem: And Fall In Love With Poetry. He quotes Emerson .
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive, that like the spirit of a plant or animal, it has an architecture of its own and adorns nature with a new thing.
Hirsch then writes, “Emerson does not forget here that poiesis means “making,” and that the poet is first and foremost a maker. He calls for an art that is organic and crafted, that emerges with an architecture of its own. He does not forget what he deems, “the instant dependence of form upon soul.”
Suddenly light begins to dawn. Poetry and the new observations of how the brain functions bear a deep, close, and enigmatic relationship founded on unheard music. It is about making and tuning, making the music of the brain and tuning it as a poet passionately listens to and records the tunes playing in his or her brain. If indeed our brains are self-making and tuning constantly, we have a limitless instrument at our disposal. The brain, unfettered, listened to, plays an infinity of mellifluous strains of music to endow us with cognition of life's wonders. According to Globus's and other new theories, our brains change and evolve every moment, a fabulous idea!
We ourselves are the piano tuners. Our own neural chemistry inside our brains interprets and plays the music. We modify our constantly evolving brains through a myriad of chemical processes which affect the neurons in our brains. The neural network does not merely transmit information brought in by our five senses from the outside world, but constantly evaluates and reevaluates the information. And that doesn't include our instinctive, intuitive reflex, Zen no-mind, or sixth sense response to the world about us. Viewed in this manner, our brains are infinite quantum computers, which like colossal organs, play all the sacred and profane music of the universe. We dare to take on the entire mystery of life itself in all of its wondrous epiphanies, apotheoses and revelations and say yes! yes! yes!
I am myself.
I am myself for a thousand years.
I am myself because I do not know myself.
I am the mysterious workings of the universe.
I am the deity in the machine.
I am the unknowable mind of the earth.
I am a crystal vision of eternity.
I celebrate my self-tuning brain.
I conclude Part III of The Art of Seeing with the optimistic and passionate belief and assurance that nothing is impossible. We who possess self-tuning minds may seek and find that which makes our short lives on this fair planet not only enjoyable, but a kaleidoscopic journey to the stars. It is within the power of everyone of us to transform the dross of dull existence into the silken many colored raiments of the aery spirits of love, compassion, kindness and understanding. Our worlds are unbounded like the fetch and swell of the sea and sounding surf which beats on the shores of distant and exotic ports of call. Within our minds and outside our minds we travel the many splendoured mythic roads to the fabled glory of Byzantium. It is our journey and only our journey that is real, that is our true home. Along the way we will touch many lives and be touched. That is the joy of living.
Beloved,
take me.
Liberate my soul.
Fill me with your love and
release me from the two worlds.
If I set my heart on anything but you
let fire burn me from inside.Beloved,
take away what I want.
Take away what I do.
Take away what I need.
Take away everything
that takes me from you.
— RUMI
Copyright © Harvey Lloyd, 2004