THE ART OF SEEING

INTRODUCTION

People think that they see, but they don’t.

—HENRY MOORE

One sunny day in June, 2003, I go to the New York Botanic Garden to photograph roses at the
height of their bloom.. My challenge is to see the roses in a fresh way, a new way, different
from the thousands of images of these lovely flowers that I had seen. I wear my digital camera
with a macro or closeup lens attached. I walk through the Rockefeller Rose Garden in a
trance, relying on my forty years of photography to do the work. No- mind, a Zen concept and
intuitive, reflex action informs my camera. I am very, very close to these blossoms. A hidden
world, the spirit and soul of the roses appeared. It is difficult to photograph at extreme close
range. The slightest movement of the flower caused by wind, hand shake, or pressing the
shutter button too hard, too soon or too late ruins the image. I “dance” around the rose garden,
hypnotized and full of joy, out of my workaday mind. Back at my studio, after downloading
the images to my computer and reviewing them in Adobe Photoshop, I am happily surprised
at the results. I stretched the envelope and was granted entry to a hidden world. I spend the
entire week working with the images, revealing their inner beauty, enhancing them,
transforming them into images which speak to me of startling designs and hidden spiritual
essences. The roses take on a new life for me, one of asymmetric beauty and constant
revelations—epiphanies.
Do you have to work for forty years as I did to learn to see beyond the apparent reality of the
world? No, you only have to work at it much of the time, gradually peeling murky blinders of
conformity and cliche from your eyes. Seeing is taken for granted. We all have eyes. You may
believe that you see what I see. That is a false assumption. Everyone sees differently. You see
what you learn or have learned to see. Your brain processes visual information from your eye
and shows you, based on your conditioning, what you will see. The liberated artist’s eye sees
what “isn’t there.” That sounds odd.

"How can you see what isn’t there?" Picasso once said, “If only I could tear out my brain and
use only my eyes.” He knew and he saw and he wished to see more. The physiology of vision
is still an enigma to many scientific researchers. The largest portion of your brain is devoted
to seeing. How can you learn to see the wonders of this world? You don’t have to be an artist
to develop this skill. You can find your way back to the innocence of early childhood, when
you saw the magic of creation less edited, less conditioned by your elders, your peers and
your environment. Wordsworth, in his poem, “Intimations of Immortality... wrote:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of your;
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have see I now can see not more.

Wordsworth, of course, was bemoaning what he felt was loss of his ability to see with the
pure innocence of childhood. As a poet, he saw with keen vision the beauty of his own world
and revealed it in many poems. Still, he felt that as he grew older, something was lacking
which impelled him to write Intimations . It is a long and very beautiful spiritual poem, often
read during schooling. It speaks to an adult with a deeper meaning, for youth is blessed with
boundless optimism and everything seems possible. How to gain back and retain this vision
throughout your life is the subject of this book.
 'Genuine art, we say, has “vision,” and good poetry and good seeing quite
literally go together almost always. Yet before the more literal seeing can
liberate itself into that other vision we speak of, a transfiguration is needed: the
eye must learn to abandon its long habit of useful serving and take up instead
an active delight in its own ends.'

— JANE HIRSHFIELD : excerpt from Kingfishers Catching Fire:

Seeing with Poetry's Eyes

DO YOU “SEE” ANYTHING?

I beg your indulgence. Your eye does not see anymore than your computer thinks. Your eye is
a marvelous tool for recording and transmitting photons of light to your brain in the form of
electrical signals. Beginning at the retina, a series of computer like programs analyze, censor,
delete and send certain amounts of information to various parts of the brain. This is not widely
understood. Most of us were raised and taught that we see with our eyes.. Recent studies of
how the eye and brain work together bring to light the uncanny fact that our it is our brains,
not our eyes, which “see” and control our vision.. The Art of Seeing will reveal how early
conditioning and genetic inheritance determines how and what we see. We will come to
understand that we can learn to truly see the world in all of its miraculous beauty only after
hard work and deep insights. We will observe the processes of seeing and creating our world
vision. We will examine the strange phenomenon of many artist's works that do not resemble
the way we see the world.

I celebrate the art of true vision. It is the key to becoming one in heart and spirit with the
Gaena, the spirit of the earth. Light, holy light makes vision possible. Light and its bizarre
behavior is one of the great mysteries that still baffle physicists and mathematicians. Light
gives vision. How that process works is a visit to a strange new land. To truly see is to
enhance one's life and make visible the hidden universe of wonders which surround us.

LIGHTWORKS

Light is the source of all vision. It has been said that light is the face of God and/or the mind
of God. The Old Testament Bible begins (Genesis: 1) with “And God said, Let there be light.”
According to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, light is ageless, for at the speed of light time
stops. Imagine! A ray of light from a galaxy billions of light years away is no older than when
it “left” the star filled source! That light is an enigma even to current to science may surprise
you. Light behaves in strange ways; it can be a particle (photon) or a wave. It can be warped
by gravity. It cannot escape the “event horizon” of a black hole. And, as has been written by
scientists such as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, as you approach the speed of light,
time slows down. (Star Trek fans know that “crossing a galaxy or galaxies is negotiable in six
months in warp 9.999.”)

Without light, no life can exist. Without the light of the mind, we are rendered dumb and
speechless. Without the ability to see the light with child-like innocence, we lose the greatest
gift conferred on sapient beings. We must begin with training the eye to see “what isn't there.”
When you look through the eyepiece of a camera, you may not be aware that you are using
your “zoom” eye to see. You tend to focus on the main subject, be it a person, an animal, or a
significant part of a landscape, such as a great tree or a sculptural rock. You often do not
notice what appears in most of the image seen in the viewfinder. A photographer learns to
scan the entire frame in an instant to create an image.

The legendary photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, coined the phrase, “The decisive
moment,” meaning the moment when the subject and its significance come together for a split
second. His talented, practiced eye recognized those fleeting moments. He made compositions
in which all of the elements of the image related to each other in a striking or dynamic way.
Bresson was able to do this in a fraction of a second. To do this we must learn to see from
both sides of our eye without moving our eyeball. It takes practice. We may study examples
of traditional beauty such as flowers rearranged in a unusual way, one that takes us by
surprise. You will see this in the Japanese art of Ikebana or floral arrangements. When the
Japanese arrange flowers, they often do so in an asymmetrical way, a way that can enchant or
intrigue us with its tension and beauty. These arrangements often appear to teeter on the edge
of falling apart. In the feudal days of Samurai warriors in Japan, a noble samurai would make
an ikebana before going into battle. It was said that the outcome of the battle could be
predicted by the success of his floral arrangement.

Hiroshi Teshigahara is a renowned Japanese film director and headmaster of the Sogetsu
School of Ikebana. In the preface to his elegiac picture book The Art of Ikebana , he writes:

Ikebana can play a tremendous role in modern society. It has something

beautiful to offer the human spirit. Due to the character of its living materials,
ikebana has the power to change and add resonance to our increasingly sterile
modern spaces, thus transforming them into more vital places...Creation is the
act of discovering something new. Through applying this truth on a daily basis,
mundane activities can be imbued with new meaning. To create is to live; as
we more fully comprehend this relationship between creativity and our daily
lives, ikebana will become more and more interesting to us.

The presence of an exquisite asymmetrical composition of ikebana renews and refreshes our
vision. It wrenches our mind's eye out of its complacent socket of sedentary seeing, and
makes us aware that vision is not just what we see. It is what we are capable of uncovering in
the seemingly commonplace everyday environment. The great French art deco poster artist
Cassandre said that a poster must be a visual scandal in order to attract the attention of
viewers going on their daily rounds numb to everything but what is directly in front of them.
Ikebana combines visual surprise with its appearance of seemingly teetering on a precipice of
abstract arrangement. The loveliness of the flowers is displayed in exquisite handmade
stoneware or ceramic vases. We see the everyday beauty of flowers transformed and our eyes
are refreshed.

THE BACK OF THINGS

Monet is said to have asked Renoir how he arranged his flowers in order to paint them. Renoir
said that he went to the flower market early in the morning and bought the most beautiful
flowers. Back at the studio, he would spend the morning arranging them. Finally content, he
told Monet, he would walk behind the arrangement and paint that view. Learning to see
comes from taking one's self by surprise and absorbing the unfamiliar until the veil of mystery
dissolves. The German pre-romantic poet Novalis said, “Chaos in a work of art should
shimmer through the veil of order.”

...We dream of traveling through the universe - but is not the universe within
ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us - the mysterious way
leads inwards. Eternity with its worlds - the past and future - is in ourselves or
nowhere. The external world is the world of shadows - it throws its shadow
into the realm of light. At present this realm certainly seems to us so dark
 inside, lonely. shapeless. But how entirely different it will seem to us - when
this gloom is past, and the body of shadows has moved away. We will
experience greater enjoyment than ever, for our spirit has been deprived."

(Novalis, from 'Miscellaneous Observations', 1798)

Light is supreme. Inner light, the light with which we learn to view the world. The art of
seeing relies heavily on the light which comes from our minds, holy light which illuminates a
dark world with our imaginings and our dreams. How can we see through the veil of order
which imprisons us like caterpillars in a cocoon from which we will never emerge as shining
butterflies? The search for beauty is the truest meaning of life. Until we gain the ability to see
beauty in the simplest things, we cannot love in the highest meaning of the word. We learn to
love ourselves which brings about love of others. Life itself is love and art.

It is only with the more recent discoveries about the visual brain that our
concept of vision as a process has changed. We now view it as an active
process in which the brain, in its quest for knowledge about the visual world,
discards, select and, by comparing the selected information to its stored record,
generates the visual image in the brain, a process remarkably similar to what
the artist does...but these new facts have only come to light in the past twenty-
five years.

— SEYMOUR ZEKI, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain

I endeavor to see more each day. Gradually, as a flower unfolds in the springtime, glory in the
light, glory in the earth glows and sheds its radiance over my life. It is a process that will
never end. I do not speak of seeing only what is beautiful. Without the dark side, the beautiful
might become too commonplace. The poet Lorca spoke of duendé , the dark side of art.
Without duendé he wrote, the flamenco lacks spiritual depth. He tells of a gypsy woman
hearing a cello sonata by Bach being played and exclaiming, "That really has duendé
There is great beauty in the human countenance. Can you see it? Can you see it in the faces of
old people graven with the erosion of time and circumstance? We live with people, friends,
relatives, acquaintances, and rarely see them clear. It is well, at times, to take a loved one by
surprise with an outrageous, hilarious or scandalous comment and suddenly see him or her
again.

TREE LIFE

I am a tree hugger. I can think of nothing more beautiful than the shapes of noble trees, great
oaks, redwoods, pines, ancient olives, cypress and a hundred others. I take my nickname C.
W. from the Caucasian Wingnut tree. When I walk (dance) among the trees I see them as
anthropomorphic shapes, wise, benevolent, patient, and beautiful, grand sculpture that makes
my heart sing. I photograph them (late fall, winter, or early spring are best for seeing the bare
branches). I enhance, transform or otherwise “play” with the trees in Adobe Photoshop to
reveal what I believe to be their inner lives. It may not be the trees whose lives I truly see, but
my own imagination running riot in their lofty, regal domains. I think the trees would be
pleased at the attention. Our too often overly greedy society demands that we cut down many
old, irreplaceable growths for profit. It is sad that our vision is deprived of these great trees. I
grieve for their loss. Many would agree, but taking action demands a true understanding of
how we function in our materialistic society. I vote for the life of trees, and for a wise
compromise with our needs.

"I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it,
and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering
forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves,
traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space
heaven knows how fast and far!

— JOHN MUIR
We live on the surface of the earth and on the surface of our own beings. Our conscious brains
control but little of what we do. We are like captains on the bridges of ocean liners calling out
commands, but often little concerned with the complex and vast array of machinery below
that executes these commands. Over the sea itself, just as with our own unconscious minds,
they have little or no control. We ride these tempestuous seas hurled high into the sky by
monster waves in a storm. Suddenly, a rainbow appears, and we see how beautiful it is. We do
not control this. It is our privileges because we are endowed with an appreciation of “useless”
beauty.

NOBLE VISIONS
There are visions which never leave my mind because I have not seen them yet. I remember
the vast main temple at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, although I saw it clearly rather than with
depth. The clarity of the light in Antarctica, and the pristine archipelagos and icebergs which
spoke of time before man, compelled me to try to see these things well. Maybe next time. On
safari in the “Last Eden,” the Okovango Delta in Botswana, I recall flocks of birds, elephants
and cheetahs, the tall grass the and winding streams. Still, I saw them without truly
penetrating beneath the surface. The splendor of Moorea and Bora Bora in French Polynesia,
the green and turquoise waters there and in the Seychelles dazzled me, better to have looked
harder. I stood transfixed at Macchu Picchu, remembering Pablo Neruda's great poem, The
Heights of MacchuI Picchu. My images while handsome, do not dig deep into the Inca ruin.
Hong Kong still baffles me. My Great Wall and Forbidden City images are merely a breezy, if
professional look at these great works of antiquity. There is a need to learn to see and to work
in a vertical as well as a horizontal way, to penetrate deep down into the mystery and spiritual
life of places and peoples. A world roaming traveler skims the surface too much. Around our
familiar places, over time, we can penetrate to the heart of things. We can visit beloved places
over and over. That is a beginning.

LIGHT'S GENESIS

Where in the infinity of space and time does light come from? If indeed it is the mind of God
or the manifestation of His splendor, how can it permeate the universe without a beginning?
We needn't answer questions of such metaphysical depth to see the light. The very term “see
the light” bespeaks a seeing beyond what the eye itself sees. Consider the visual mystery of a
black hole. Can a huge collapsed star of such density and gravity exist from which light itself
cannot escape? Stephen Hawking and many other physicists believe this is so. Is a black hole
the wormhole(1) to other universes?

Quantum physics speaks of fluctuations in the space-time continuum from which vibrations,
waves or sub-atomic particles arise spontaneously, This implies a steady state universe, a
universe which emerges at random.. To some, this seems better than the Big Bang theory of
the universe exploding and expanding from a singularity, a point of infinite mass, density,
energy and gravity within which the laws of physics disappear. A singularity produces a
paradox of infinite forces if observed or experienced. Thus, a singularity is prevented from
having a physical, or observable existence by the process of cosmic censorship. Stephen
Hawking has said, in his writings, "the actual point of creation (of the universe) lies outside
the scope of presently known laws of physics," A black hole constructs an event horizon
around its singularity. You cannot penetrate it to observe the singularity without being
destroyed. If there was a Big Bang, was there light in the singularity? If not, where did the
light come from?

One thing is clear in our framing of questions such as `How did the Universe get started?' is
that the Universe was self-creating. This is not a statement on a `cause' behind the origin of
the Universe, nor is it a statement on a lack of purpose or destiny. It is simply a statement that
the Universe was emergent, that the actual of the Universe probably derived from a
indeterminate sea of potentiality that we call the quantum vacuum, whose properties may
always remain beyond our current understanding...

The fact that the Universe exists should not be a surprise in the context of what
we know about quantum physics. The uncertainty and unpredictability of the
quantum world is manifested in the fact that whatever can happen, does
happen (this is often called the principle of totalitarianism, that if a quantum
mechanical process is not strictly forbidden, then it must occur).

— (excerpt from (zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17.html)

What has this to do with the art of seeing? Seeing is not a mechanical process taking place
between the eye and the brain, in which light waves or photons enter the lens of the pupil,
strike the retina, are transported to the visual cortex, and voila, vision emerges. It is a complex
process in which photons are converted into electrical impulses which the brain censors,
deciphers and then decides what you and I see. I have not discovered from the above light's
origin. We will learn to see by shredding the veil of insubstantial conditioning and possible
genetic inheritance which causes us to see what seemingly is there. Although this is a
continuing mystery, light, the light of the visible spectrum, is our greatest joy.
Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes
. . . there we enter the realm of Art and Science.
— ALBERT EINSTEIN

YOUR EYE IS NO WINDOW

Light which enters our eyes through the pupils passes through a number of almost transparent
layers to arrive at the retina. Since there is sharpness of vision only at the fovea, a tiny central
zone of the eye, The eyeball must constantly move, in order to bring an entire scene into
focus. We do this with a series of quick glances called saccades ( A rapid intermittent eye
movement, as that which occurs when the eyes fix on one point after another in the visual
field.) We are not conscious of this, and may imagine that we see everything sharp. The
myriad photons of light strike the rods and cones which are wired to a complex “computer” in
the retina. Preliminary processing of the visual information takes place here. The eye is no
window! From the retina, the information goes on to a way station, the LGN (lateral
geniculate nuclesu) where it is sent to the primary visual cortex, and on to other parts of the
brain. Where, you may ask. Very little is known. The riddle of vision may be likened to that
of early explorers arriving at the continent of Africa for the first time and circumnavigating
part of this vast land mass. The interior is dark and mysterious.

Strangely, scientists find more information comes back to the LGN from various parts of the
brain than go from it to the brain. The actual process of seeing is performed by your brain
rather than your eye. Here we are being told what to see, or are we? More likely our
upbringing and our environment have mapped that which is “important” on our brains. Since
it takes energy to see, why waste this energy in a battle within ourselves to unmask the
outside world, to circumvent or overcome our early conditioning.? Let us “waste” this energy
because not to see is to be blind to the real meaning of life on a beautiful planet.
Look again. How do you see what isn't there? What “isn't there” is the real world of wonder,
chaos and beauty that you do not yet see. Start by educating your eye. We are surrounded by
images in our technological, digital world. Much of it is the ordinary, our daily fare. Why not
visit online the virtual realms of museums or museums themselves, or the host of books about
artists of every period and see how artists and photographers view and have viewed our
world. Is Van Gogh's “Starry Night” his true vision? Did Willem De Kooning see women like
the tortured paintings he became famous for? What about Picasso often sticking eyes in his
paintings anywhere but where they belong? He said that way people would notice them. Are
Dubuffet's grotesque paintings of people real.. Dubuffet studied the works of children and
mad people. No matter you say, they were painters. You may be a photographer or artist and
record what is there or you may be trying to see your world. First glance is only the beginning
of the process of truly seeing. As with music, you must listen to a great rock band, a
symphony or a piece of ethnic music a number of times to really hear it. It is easy to hear light
music the first time. It's like seeing what's there. Truly seeing comes from allowing the
shimmering mantle of light which envelops the world to envelop you like a two way mirror-
like garment which reflects and transmits light at the same time. Is that an impossibility, like
viewing a singularity? You are the mirror. Light comes from within and without. Try it, but be
patient.

POINT LOBOS

My work is a kind of music. Images play music to my eyes. How do you or I decode this
“music of the spheres?” Come with me to Point Lobos, a nature reserve which juts into the
ocean south of Carmel, California. I describe this place more fully in my picture book, THE
SAMURAI WAY: Spiritual Journeys with a Warrior Photographer (Ruder Finn Press, June
2004) . I often walked the rock formations at Pebbly Beach now called Weston Beach. The
tilted slabs of many hued rocks on the ocean's edge, the ancient Carmelo and sandstone
conglomerates, hide a world of abstract art, of shapes which mirror chimeras and gargoyles,
or anything else you might fancy. Walk these rocks slowly, on the outgoing tide early in the
morning, and you will see a rainbow of colors on the rocks. You will learn to interpret the
ikebana-like arrangements of the rocks and uncover their distinctive personalities. Not in one
day or two, but in many, your eyes will refresh themselves and begin to see what “isn't there.”
The same may be done nearer home. A walk in a botanical garden, a forest or around a lake
leads to new visions. Annie Dillard discovered a universe at Tinker's Creek.
 One day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw
the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning
doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on
the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and
utterly dreaming. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen,
knocked breathless by a powerful glance...I had been my whole life a bell, and
never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck

—ANNIE DILLARD , A Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

Vision is a process that produces from images of the external world a

description that is useful to the viewer and not cluttered with irrelevant
information.

—DAVID MARR, British neurologist

Irrelevant to who? Your doting brain busily keeps you from seeing all of the “irrelevant”
information that makes the world a place of beauty and wonder. Why, while walking past a
field of wild flowers early in the morning, stop to notice a bee supping on a dew drenched
golden cup? Why observe the unusual harmony of colors on sea drenched rocks on a storm
swept coast? Why study cloud castles? Do we construct worlds of visual processing all of us
alike, or do we humans have the ability to see beyond the constructs of early childhood and
later conditioning. Do we want to? It may be forbidden fruit, but where's the harm. Each of us
has the power to see in ways that few human beings have learned to see. Artists, of course,
whether with brush or camera, see a great deal that is invisible to many others. All that is
needed is the will to use the most powerful tool in our bodies, the magical tool which
worships the light, the human eye, to penetrate the fog and miasma of lazy looking and
wasted vision.

The knowledge we have now is really only the beginning of an effort to

understand the physiological basis of perception, a story whose next stages are
just coming into view...the striate cortex is just the first of over a dozen
separate visual areas, each of which maps the whole visual field...beginning
with the striate cortex, each area feeds into two or more areas higher in the
hierarchy...The ascending connections presumably take the visual information
from one region to the next for visual processing. For each of these areas, our
problem is to find out how the information is processed...We are far from
understanding the perception of objects...

— DAVID HUBEL , Eye, Brain, and Vision

The mystery of how vision works compels us to discover what we may truly learn to see. We
all live near or in the midst of trees. They are indeed lovely, arching into the sky, casting cool
shadows for us to linger under, altogether delightful. Shall we not look deeper and study their
marvelous construction? The art of nature is the source of all art. To see the beauty and
marvelous symmetry and asymmetry disguised or hidden in the twisting, turning, precariously
hung branches of huge trees that stretch over us takes sudden awakening of our ancient no-
mind, our intuitive mind. Joseph Conrad wrote, “The mind of man is capable of anything—
because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.”
ORIGINS

Two of NASA's Great Observatories, bolstered by the largest ground-based

telescopes around the world, are beginning to harvest new clues to the origin
and evolution of the universe's largest building blocks, the galaxies. It's a bit
like finding a family scrapbook containing snapshots that capture the lives of
family members from infancy through adolescence to adulthood. The Hubble
 Space Telescope has joined forces with the Chandra X-ray Observatory to
survey a relatively broad swath of sky encompassing tens of thousands of
galaxies stretching far back in time. Called the Great Observatories Origins
Deep Survey (GOODS), astronomers are studying galaxy formation and
evolution over a wide range of distances and ages. "This is the first time that
the cosmic tale of how galaxies build themselves has been traced reliably to
such early times in the universe's life," says Mauro Giavalisco, head of the
Hubble Space Telescope portion of the survey, and research astronomer at the
Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.

The astonishing Hubble telescope opens a new window on our universe. We can as well open
new windows in our brains to view the countless wonders of our own planet. The universe
within each of our brains contains more possible connections than the number of stars in all of
the galaxies combined. Roger Penrose, the eminent British mathematician, wrote in his book
Shadows of the Mind, that the human brain functions at the quantum level. That means the
processes in the brain are virtually infinite and cannot ever be completely understood because
of the workings of quantum indeterminacy. That's a miracle, a gift from the gods. We have
the unlimited potential to see what no one else has seen. Just as the Hubble telescope reveals
the more of the cosmic tale of billions of galaxies in interstellar space, so our probing minds
can discover and see the infinite variety of our whirling planet. From a drop of dew on a blade
of grass to vast ranges of glacier clad mountains, from the heart of a flower to tempestuous
seas that circle our planet, we can discover and see. We can illuminate our world as seers,
prophets, shamans and magicians see in their myths and necromancy, as artists see into the
future. We become visionaries.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the
feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the
deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to
death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of
dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows
small, and expires—and expires, too soon, to soon—before life itself.

— JOSEPH CONRAD

It is too soon to quit, to acknowledge that there is an end to life and growth. We will abide so
long as we increase our vision in ever expanding circles, like ripples in a cosmic sea. We will
increase our vision as we enlarge our cosmic curiosity which views all creation with a
wondering, wandering eye. We are more than crawlers on this earth, we are the stuff the stars
are made of, blobs of protoplasm which thinks, and while thinking see, becomes as though we
were gods on a high peak, Olympus. We invented the gods. We can see.

Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he
feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.

— PABLO PICASSO
LOOK WITHOUT FEAR
We are here to learn, here on this earth willy nilly, as in Shakespeare's words from King Lear:
“We must endure our coming hither as our going hence. Ripeness is all.” At no age is the
human mind limited. It is only when, shackled by the bonds of daily routine, mind-set and
fear, the mind lies fallow, filled with detritus of boring work. Once, while hovering in a
helicopter over a deeply crevassed glacier in the Darwin Mountains hard by the Beagle
Channel in Patagonia, I felt a chill of fear...of what am I doing here ? , Another time, ashore
in the Galapagos Islands, I walked among waved albatross courting, clicking their yellow bills
and dancing an ancient mating dance. I saw them. They did not see me. We are too often like
those albatross, used only to seeing what is there in our circumscribed world, able, but
perhaps unwilling, to take the risk of leaping into true vision, at whatever the cost.

She perceives what is yet unseen while looking into the world...She sees that
which is possible embedded in what is real bridging between seen and unseen
realms, with memory and imagination...

— LAURA SEWALL , Sight and Sensibility, the Psychology of Perception

TURNER’S LIGHT

J.M.W. Turner (1755-1851 saw and painted light. Perhaps the most famous
English Romantic landscape artist, he became known as 'the painter of light.' A
Londoner born and bred, he went to the Royal Academy School of art when he
was only 15 years old. Turner studied the science of light and color...He was a
unique artist, both in freeing himself from all past artist traditions and art
movements. He was to open the way for a visionary anticipation of modern
painting.

Venice was the inspiration of some of Turner's finest work. Wherever he

visited he studied the effects of sea and sky in every kind of weather. His early
training had been as a topographic draftsman. With the years, however, he
developed a painting technique all his own. Instead of merely recording
factually what he saw, Turner translated scenes into a light-filled expression of
his own romantic feelings.

These quotations from web pages on Turner (1775-1851) describe an artist painting during a
period when painting generally dealt with landscapes in a traditional manner. Turner saw
what “wasn't there,”to the painters of his day, the flamboyant and miraculous play of light on
water and sky. Such vision emerges from deep immersion into intuitive or Zen no-mind. The
artist using his or her skill, depicts the ravening energy of light which, like an alchemist's
stone, transmutes all into glory and beauty. We can learn to see this way by discarding our
preconceptions and seeing as we fantasize, a world of rainbows and light.
 But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on
wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition -- and therefore,
more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder,
to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives: To our sense of pity and beauty,
and pain.

— JOSEPH CONRAD , The Nigger of the Narcissus

VISION EMANATES

During the 13 th century, Robert Grosseteste (England). Magister scholarum of the University
of Oxford was a proponent of the view that theory should be compared with observation.
Grosseteste considered that the properties of light have particular significance in natural
philosophy. The rainbow was conjectured to be a consequence of reflection and refraction of
sunlight by layers in a 'watery cloud.' Most importantly to our dissertation, he held the view,
shared by the earlier Greeks, that vision involves emanations from the eye to the object
perceived. Current optical theory would disagree with this assertion, however there is a great
truth hidden here. (Experiments in quantum physics hint or show that the observer affects the
observed. The act of observing a wave/particle at the quantum level raises the probability of
that wave being there, i.e. the collapse of the wave function..)
We see what our brain instructs us to see. Our brains send messages to the LGN, the way
station between the retina and the visual cortex. Whether light or energy, these signals
emanate from our eyes and condition what we see. You might say that light from your eyes
creates your vision and that you can change that light by learning to truly see. I work with
sophisticated visual tools, high end cameras that digitally record images of scenes before me.
Does the light from my eyes influence what my cameras record? A scientist or physiologist
might laugh at this idea. We will see.
 Nature and nature's laws lay hid in the night,
God said, “Let Newton be" and all was light.

— ALEXANDER POPE

Laws of science should not trap us into complacency about how we see. The study of light has
revealed mystery atop mystery. Newton's theories of light as corpuscles eventually gave way
to Einstein and the enigma of light as both waves and particles (photons). Imagine that your
brain behaves as a black hole is believed to do in interstellar space. A black hole is
surrounded by the “event horizon” which is the limit beyond which even light cannot escape
the ravening gravity of the hole. Our own event horizons are the limits which our brains
enforce to make us see what is already there. Early in life, our brains map the visual world
according to our environments and from instructions received from our parents, teachers and
peers. While light cannot escape from a black hole, we ourselves are not constrained from
violating our self-imposed limits. Only fear, rigidity or laziness can prevent us from viewing
and enjoying the works and wonders of all creation.
In his book, Catching the Light , author Arthur Zajonc writes, “Goethe phrased it this
way,'The eye owes its existence to the light. Out of indifferent animal organs the light
produces an organ to correspond to itself; and so the eye is formed by the light for the light so
that the inner light may meet the outer.'...had light not “seen” man, we should never have seen
the light.” If light sees us, can we then learn to see the light? The eye/brain alliance is a kind
of camera obscura, a dark chamber which receives and emits light What form these light rays
take inside our brains is equally dark and obscure. We have the keys to unlock the box and
dwell in radiance.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and
knowledge.

— ALBERT EINSTEIN
WORLD ICONS

Often I am asked what is my favorite place in the world. During twenty-five years of circling
the globe I've encountered many enchanting scenes. Among them, for sheer beauty of the
landscape, the high plateau regions of the southwest in America are unsurpassed. While
photographing for my book of aerial photography Sacred Lands of the Southwest , I wrote the
following:

I awake from reverie, hypnosis, rapture of the deep or sky, oxygen deprivation
at ten thousand feet, slightly dizzy reverie, fire the camera and wave Michael
the pilot on to Canyonlands. The confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers
slides below, interwoven like an measureless Mobius strip, a bow-tie ribbon
twined in the petrified red hair of the Colorado plateau. To the right I see my
companion Shirlee's favorite southwestern garden, the green meadows of the
Needles and Chesler Park, spires and obelisks arrayed like marble hat pins.
Row on row of silent sentinels striated with browns and yellows, these ‘tapers'
burn in the orange light as in a cathedral where the devout light candles. Our
aircraft speeds ahead twixt Navajo Point and Navajo Mountain, one thousand
feet above the fissured rocks, one million light years from today.

Lake Powell glistens among black rock monoliths and crags. A red sky bands
the horizon. I lean out the open window to photograph the last light of evening
on the waters beneath the sky glow that reaches across the heavens.
Somnambulist of early evening, harbinger of tonight's full moon, chalice of the
universe, the desert blushing with harmony and music, the reddening sky and
the dark lake transfix me..

At five hundred feet over Lake Powell, Michael lowers the landing gear, sets
full flaps down and throttles back. The Cessna airplane bucks and slows.
Michael whirls the aircraft around in a steep turn. Window open, I lean out to
photograph Tower Butte framed by Wild Horse Mesa and the pinnacles round
the "Crossing of the Fathers." Fifteen minutes before sunset, the magic light
paints huge rock monoliths a deep shade of red. Lake Powell's waters grow
dark. I am chief of the dusk, riding my thunder stallion down the fading light,
chasing the buffalo rocks down to cliff's edge. The sun's bloody tomahawk
cleaves the distant ridge. Darkness.

Time's fleet arrow speeds across a distant sea of stars out beyond the known
universe, a blackness full of tears, the endless, sentient and universal realm of
mother earth, her chariot, her carriage and her dreams. I am filled with dreams
still aborning, a speck of protoplasm attached to earth's green bosom, a vibrant
breathing chalice of all that she has dreamed during an eternity of fecund and
felicitous birthing. We are one, the wistful mote and the wise macrocosm. We
feel the same. We know the same. All is beautiful. Hozho!
 Hozhó...the word means something like harmony, beauty and balance all
wrapped in one concept that dwells at the heart of the Navajo world view"

— PAUL G. ZOLBROD

..Thirty minutes before sunset, Michael, our acrobatic pilot of the Cessna
182RG (retractable gear), spins the light plane into a dizzying descent around
the Totem Pole and Yei Bi Chei rocks in Monument Valley. I lean out of the
open window. Long shadows march across the red desert floor, spirits of ghost
dancers awakening from the afterlife. Shirlee and I ride a winged metal spirit
that dances in the shimmering yellow sunlight like a mayfly, ephemeral, a few
minutes of epiphany, a glorious flight before the sun descends into the
underworld.

Michael banks and turns, whirling the Cessna towards the great stone "Hands
of the Great Spirit," the red rock mittens of Monument valley. The earth
tumbles beneath me. I gesture towards the flaming rock mittens, St. Elmo's
fire, or the immolation of heathens by the friars of the Inquisition. Mitten
crosses mitten, holy shadows on the desert. We veer and turn, a spinning,
whirring dervish suspended in thin air, shadowed by the sun's grim final
burning, ourselves ghost dancers. Loud is the propeller and louder still the
hush of millenniums.

Spires, castles, battlements, towers and rock cliffs rear out of the red desert
sand, and in the distance, tiny red mounds, hogans face east to greet each
newborn sun ball trailing a red placenta of clouds. I see no life, no sign of
Navajo or sheep, only the silent ghost dance of shadows, evidence of
crepuscular deities slumbering among the stone sepulchers. Time, deep desert
time, time that painstakingly sculpts wisdom and stone monuments weds
necromancy's dark invocations to shadowy spirits. Fiery embers glow on the
horizon. The setting sun hangs like a burnt brass cymbal. One instant more, we
fleet across the picket line of monuments— The King on his Throne, The
Stagecoach, Bear and the Rabbit, Big Indian . Dying shadows sink into the
parched land. Distant cliffs devour the sun shrouding the desert with scorched
tears. The ancient ones doze.

I was in a trance during those aerial encounters. Whirling and tumbling about, flying low and
close to the stone castles, ruins and monuments, I relied on no-mind to see for me, my
instinctive, intuitive training born of long years of practice. Images flashed across my vision,
triggering reflex actions on the camera's shutter button. What I saw was revealed later in the
developed film and it was good.
ZOOM EYES

A camera is a splendid tool to awaken and train the vision. To truly see through the camera
viewfinder, you must look hard, all around the perimeter of the image. This is the first step,
seeing what the camera sees through whichever lens you use. Our “zoom” eyes coax us to see
only that part of the image which is our subject, rather than studying the entire frame. That is
why too often, photographs taken on travels at home or abroad, are disappointing. We thought
our friends or companion were tall in the image, yet the print shows them as tiny figures in an
unresolved landscape, among majestic ruins, or a grand cityscape.
Use your camera as you would a magnifying glass to examine the exterior that you try to
capture. Study it until you really see it. No hurry! Otherwise your ‘snapshot' will only reveal
that you were careless and unseeing. The camera is a magical optical device which can, if
used with passion and vision, reveal the unseen world, from the macroscopic image of dew on
the petals of a rose to the sculptural nobility of a giant tree. The eye is no camera. Our eyes,
controlled by our brains, record what we “should” see, not what is there. Our eyes lie to us.
That is why eyewitnesses often disagree to what they see. Mood, emotion, stress, fear, anger
or love all influence what we think we have seen. Vision is as infinite in its many guises as
the universe within our brains.
RICHER THAN EMPERORS OR KINGS

...all I produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At
seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of nature...at ninety I
shall penetrate the mystery of things...and when I am a hundred and ten
everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive. I beg those who live as long
as I to see if I keep my word.

—HOKUSAI , Wood block Artist, Japan, 1760-1849),

( The Manga , JAMES MICHNER)
I acclaim these lines of Hokusai. He lived to eighty-nine in a time when that was very rare. It
must have been sheer energy. He changed his name many times as well. His modesty about
his work bespeaks an intense curiosity and desire to better know (see) his own world of Japan
and to never be satisfied. That's a great way to live, to learn and to see. An artist, if he or she
would accomplish much, must be curious and unending in the quest for new visions. Every
one of us can attempt the same. A writer was once asked if he could imagine writing like
Shakespeare. He answered that he used words as well. How they were used, just as how each
of us uses our eyes is another matter. Nothing can stop us from seeing except the tired habits
of mundane or aborted curiosity and striving.
The banquet of the world is always on the table. To see is to dine like a king or emperor. In
this age of onrushing technology and unlimited travel opportunities, we are richer in
opportunities than any rulers of the past. There is no need to fast in the midst of viands
beyond imagining. The earth and the heavens flower for us daily. The night sky filled with
constellations is a feast for the eyes. I've stood on a ship's deck at night far out as sea, far
forward away from all man made light, and gazed up at the Milky Way. I would shudder and
experience vertigo at the endless distances above me. I felt how fortunate to be able to
comprehend a little of the wheel of our galaxy and the immensity of the universe. Better to
drown in the search for knowledge than to languish on barren shores of discontent and
blindness.
HOW DO YOU SEE PEOPLE?

In Ways of Seeing, author John Berger writes, “The way we see things is affected by what we
know or what we believe...When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which
no words and no embrace can match...” We see people according to our own inner needs and
conditioning. Lovers appear wreathed in splendor, caring, giving or passion. Parents and
relatives stir conflicting emotions. Celebrities of screen, music or politics are usually seen
with a halo of power, riches and talent. ‘Ordinary' people are merely glanced at or ignored
unless we know them or plan to try to meet them. To truly see people, we need to love and
respect them. All human beings, whether celebrities or otherwise, wear masks. Look in the
mirror, then grin. If you would photograph someone you do not know, you must drop your
own mask to enable true seeing of the human being beneath. A smile goes a long way.

In A Natural History of the Senses, author Diane Ackerman writes:

We may pretend that beauty is only skin deep, but Aristotle was right when he
observed the ‘beauty is a far greater recommendation than any letter of
introduction.'...After all, in fairy tales, the first stories most of us hear, the
heroes are handsome, the heroines are beautiful, and the wicked sots are ugly.
Children learn implicitly that good people are beautiful and bad people are
 ugly, and society restates that message in many subtle ways as they grow
older.

What is beautiful and what is ugly is in the eye of the beholder. A young man from West
Africa saw a five foot high power figure from Zaire in my dwelling studio which I call Spirit
House. He is covered with ‘medicine' objects, shells, skulls, feathers and straw, wears a horn
on its head, and he displays a gaping smile with only three front teeth. The young man stared
for a while, then said, “That is very beautiful.” I think so too, but not as most westerners
might observe beauty. The appearance of beauty truly comes from within, from the eye of the
beholder. Those we love for their inner beauty appear more beautiful as time passes. Often,
the staring, contemptuous looks sported by fashion models in ads these days, are less than
beautiful.
We cannot define beauty. It arises from our own perception of the world just as everyone has
their own measure of what art they like or hate. As in developing a taste for eating oysters or
grasshoppers, or appreciating minimalists or abstract painters, time is needed. The appearance
of people and things changes as we come to know them. No one is truly ugly unless the
ugliness emanates from inside. In Japanese Noh plays, the actors, always men, wear
exquisitely carved male and female masks. To succeed, the actor must bring the mask to life.
How a mask can change expression is demonstrated in a website (now gone) which sold
exquisitely carved masks. Seen from above, straight on, or from the side or below, and
depending on the lighting, strangely, the expressions change.
In Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa's book The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan, we read that
tradition has it that a young man seeks to learn to act as the woman Komachi, a very difficult
part to play. He follows a fine old woman eighty years of age, in the street, and watches her
every move. Alarmed, she asks why he is following her. On hearing his reason, she tells him
it is bad for Noh. She tells him “For Noh, he must feel the thing as a whole, from the inside.”
And further on we read, “It is a Noh saying that, ‘The heart is the form.'”

FROM THE HEART

I wrote the following to a lovely lady. I've forgotten who she is, the memories linger on..

You are beautiful and that attracts the rich and powerful...it can be a curse in a
way for we need to be loved for who and what we truly are which, for the rich
and powerful, is often the surface of things. How can anyone spend their brief
 time on earth in the corporate world only grabbing for more money and things?
Only the insubstantial, the spiritual, the beautiful, the music of the earth can
bring great meaning and joy and open one's eyes to the splendor in the world.
That is a real tragedy; only those who inquire and learn can change. Material
success is too often an impenetrable fortress and prison for the mind and soul.

But you know that. You write with the spirit and soul of an artist who has
learned that to follow one's own bliss is the only way. We cannot really teach
those who will not hear or see. A woman with integrity, sensitivity, talent and a
great spirit shall be as a bird that has left its cage. She flies with those to whom
the spiritual life is all important and love is the banner which flaunts desire and
freedom.
I apply the word riskit to my name because I will risk and dare anything to find
the truth in art and the truth in love. I have known it; therefore it is no illusion.
We are free when our bonds with another are so light they are fairy spirits
darting back and forth—tenins, or feather spirits as in the Japanese Noh play
Hagoromo .
All that you say about life being fulfilled with a good companion is exactly the
way that I think, feel and love. To love, to care, to feel and be honest with each
other, to converse is bliss. To travel, and seek to learn ever more about the
mysteries of our confounding and delightful world, those are the wines of life,
the deepest meaning and the challenge.
To attract even one person to love is a great step forward. Our art is the present
we freely bestow it on all the others who will share these things. To keep alight
the torches of wisdom, inspiration, imagination,” we change the future by
living it and by creating.
Friendly, loving and not quite tame is a good motto. Free as an eagle, crane, or
albatross we soar into the light and see what only a few can see. We celebrate
the entire world bathed in holy light and filled with becoming, our source and
our inspiration.
P.S. I went to the Einstein exhibit at the Natural History Museum this
morning—relativity, kindness, wisdom and genius together—Einstein once
wrote, "I want to know God's thoughts, all the rest are details." So it is with art
and the life of creating. We immerse ourselves in evolution's great journey to
discover in that wisdom all we are and ever hope to be.

My forgetting of the lady reminds me of an elegant wine steward on a ship who told us about
a wine he recommends. It went like this. “A man says, ‘I've forgotten the lady. I've forgotten
the place, but I remember the wine, Chambertin.'” Isn't that the way it is? Some things are too
dear to keep alive except as smoldering embers.
THE SPEED OF LIGHT

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious; it is the

fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

— ALBERT EINSTEIN

I find it very mysterious that, according to Einstein's theories, no matter how fast an object or
human travels relative to the speed of light, the speed of light remains constant. If I could
travel at half the speed of light, light around me would still be speeding at its normal 186,000
miles per second. But of course, after much cogitating, this makes sense! The cosmos is afire
with light, not “arrows” of light going in special directions, but an all pervasive glow, a
radiance which fills the universe. I cannot race a “ray” of light anymore than I can choose to
swim with a wavelet among myriads fluttering in the sea.. The real enigma is light itself. It
appears to be the product of any kind of combustion, blazing stars, glowing galaxies, fire,
anything that burns although fusion, the kind that makes hydrogen bombs, may be a more
accurate description.
You cannot imagine light emanating from a frozen body in the blackness of space. You or I
can never travel at the speed of light or anything approaching it. According to Relativity
theory, as you approach the speed of light, mass increases. At the speed of light, your mass
would be infinite and that is impossible. Rays of light fill the universe in a kind of chaos of
the visible and invisible, for we only see a small part of the spectrum of electromagnetic
waves of which light is a part. To add to the mystery, as anything travels closer to the speed of
light, time slows down!
What is the light? Physicists seem happy to define it with formulas and the wave and photon
idea. Convenient, however it is a though we imagined countless waves from the sea arrive
along with a accompanying flurries of buckshot.. The waves and buckshot are like are
photons of light which experiments have shown actually behave as though they were both
waves and particles. It excites me that the medium of light, like the art of seeing, is so
wrapped in conundrums and mystery. “Can you see the light” contains more deep meaning
than it may seem. You can see, reflected from every living or inanimate thing colors which
are not the color of the object or thing. The actual color is not seen. If you see a red box, it is
really absorbing all the other colors and reflecting red. That's easy. What do you see when you
see familiar places? The heart of the matter is that we see the world indistinctly, fuzzily,
obscured. We see what we ourselves absorb and process. The true nature of things remains a
mystery.
A NEW BRAIN FOR EVERYONE

The September 2003 special issue of Scientific American magazine was entitled “Better
Brains.” I'm for that. Among the most interesting themes is the new research which indicates
that the brain constantly changes, sets up new circuitry, adds neurons, at any age. It had been
thought that these processes only happened at certain specific times, as when a child learns
several languages easily. In the chapter “The Mutable Brain, researcher Michael M.
Merzernich says, “The brain was constructed to change.” He and other researchers now
believe the human brain can be extensively remodeled throughout the course of one's life,
without drugs, without surgery. “Until recently,” Merzenich noted, “scientists thought that the
brain was like a computer...a hardwired black box...which established its critical functionality
in critical periods.” It now appears that exercise, proper diet and active use of the brain, such
as reading daily or cruising the Internet enhances its powers, and changes the way in which it
operates. This applies especially to older men and women who often do little to protect their
brains in these ways.
These findings are critical to helping overcome various disorders of brain function including
Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia. Here, however, we are discussing the art of seeing. If
your brain and mine can change all through our lives, we can learn to see what “isn't there.”
We can reroute visual paths through our brain which will enable us to see through the veils of
conditioning and mind-set which hide, disguise and distort much of the beauty and wonder of
living on earth. The Scientific American article ends with “The sky's the limit, and we are
trying to figure out the rules.”
Can you imagine and joy in the favt that our very brains are programmable at any time in our
lives, that we can grow new neurons, reroute the pathways around the brain, replace lost brain
cells. As we age, we lose brain cells constantly, however we have more than we need at all
ages, and use only a small portion. A recent study shows that brain cell loss holds steady with
aging. Brain cell loss is not the problem at any age. What is often the problem is lack of a
passionate, overweening curiosity about this earth. Youth thinks it has forever, and allows
atrophy, peer pressure and smug contentment to shroud the world from view. Later on, the
maturing adult takes what he or she sees for granted, as the real world. Only occasionally does
the middle-aged adult venture forth into the wide world of vision. “Oh, I take trips,” many
will say. It is easy to travel lugging the baggage of one's preconceptions like an old rug or
comforter, worn but homelike. Scientists now, marvelously claim that we have the ability to
change our brains, our ways of thinking, add circuits, grow new cells. That is a gift from the
gods.
SEEING IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT

Annie Dillard, in A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek writes of vision in a chapter called “Seeing.” She
says that she cannot see what a specialist such as a stone collector or a scientist who puts
drops of seawater under a microscope sees. Agreed. What she or we can see is all there as
well, waiting to be seen. She mentions walking toward an Osage orange tree which did not
appear unusual, when suddenly a hundred red-winged blackbirds flew out of the tree. As she
walked closer, another hundred took flight. “Not a branch or a twig budged. The birds were
weightless as well as invisible.” She says that it's a matter of keeping one's eyes open. I add
that you must practice seeing, not sit on the sidelines.

“A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices
what I do see, editing it for my brain,” says Donald Carr, pointing out that the sense
impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for their brain: ‘This is philosophically
interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive
the universe as it is.'”

That begs the question, for the simplest animals have no way to interpret what they see in a
conscious way. We, on the other side of the spectrum, can interpret if, and only if, we learn to
see. I remember dawn breaking over dark seas as I flew out over the Caribbean in a
helicopter. At such times, the sky lights up slowly, like the blush of opening roses. Dark
thunder clouds roil and tumble high into the dawn light. Silver sheen burnishes their lofty
edges as the sun begins to emerge far below. Out over the sea, I see a red ball dimly appear
through the dawn mist. Within minutes flares of light, God's rays, giant luminous ladders,
straddle the seas and rise into the heavens. The sky is afire. I live for these moments, whether
at sea, above mountaintops or on the land. .

Annie says there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. “When I see this way I
sway transfixed and emptied. The two difference between the two ways of seeing is the
difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera, I walk
from shot to shot reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my
own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this way I
am above all an unscrupulous observer.” I could as easily reverse that statement and say that
when I walk with a camera, my own shutter is always open. Instant flashes of light imprint
themselves on my camera's sensor because my no-mind sees them like lightning bolts flaring
across a western desert on a moonless night. We see what we see. What a camera sees
depends on the mind, heart, soul and passion behind the lens. With or without a camera, it's
rapture, epiphanies and endless wonder. An endlessly inquiring and insightful mind is as
restless as the shimmering mirror of the sea reflecting scudding cloud castles. Your eager and
inquisitive primal eye, the eye which lurks inside your eye, views islands hidden in grey
mists, props up rainbows, churns green and white in a tempest, glows pink and red in the
dawn. Burning like desire, it sees everything. I hope this phenomenal gift will be or is already
with you. The mead of the Gods tastes sweet, and vision is sweeter than wine.
Annie says it is possible in deep space to sail on a solar wind....”The secret of seeing is to sail
on a solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent,
broadside to the merest puff.” Isn't seeing more than a matter of metaphor, of writing and
thinking of what you see? Isn't it an almost orgasmic like delight of suddenly being jolted into
vision, rapt, disheveled, exhausted, content? Annie is impartial, a brilliant observer who
transforms daily visions into fragrant, sumptuous paragraphs which taste like vision, smell
like vision, sound and feel like vision. And she has a sense of humor. What is vision, life, love
or art without a sense of humor? Read A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek . You've read it? Read it
again! I will.

BETTER TO LIGHT A CANDLE...

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of
living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness
has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be
sufficient only for a herd of cattle.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

A see-er or seer cannot be too comfortable. To see is to understand the powerful currents that
rage across the seas and continents of the earth—dreadful visions of war and genocide,
ravages of floods and eruptions, the slaughter of millions of innocents, the scourge of
disease—endless travails which human beings have endured since the dawn of history. Such
spectacles mercilessly invade our vision through the roar and outpourings from newspapers,
tv, radio and the Internet. You and I are deeply troubled and moved by these things. Can an
artist or new vision make the world a better place? Art comes from truly seeing; it pours out a
balm upon a troubled world. “Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,” said Eleanor
Roosevelt. The candles lit by art burn brighter than the explosions of stars. Deep in the
playground of myths which inhabit our minds, passion, love, understanding and desire
inflame our souls. You and I are those fiery furnaces, lighthouses or blazing candelabra which
illuminate some small part of the darkness. There is a dark side to art, just as there is a dark
side to all of human nature. What we know of evil we cannot ever lightly accept. However,
without shadows we could not comprehend the light.

SIGHT UNSEEN—MYSTERIOUS IKEBANA

On July 6, 2003, I went with a friend to visit Wave Hill, an estate and garden in the Bronx
open to the public. I went equipped with my Canon digital cameras to see and record the life
of the flowers there. Dodging the sprinklers in the garden in front of the conservatory, I used
my macro lens and diffused strobe flash. I tried to peer deep into the flowers. Soon, I
exhausted the subject for the moment. We walked to an exhibition in the Glyndor Gallery
located inside a red brick house. It was called Perfection/Impermanence: Contemporary
Ikebana. I expected to see the ikebana I loved, flowers arranged asymmetrically in vases.
What I saw when I walked inside took me by surprise and puzzled me. There were room size
installations of various natural and inorganic materials which bore no resemblance to the
ceramic vases holding the ikebana I have known. I walked up to the man at the desk and
asked him where the ikebana was to be found. He pointed to the rooms and said that was the
contemporary ikebana. I took photographs of the installations in a somewhat shaken manner. I
could not yet see these things as ikebana. They were too large, to different from my mind set,
from my love of delicate ikebana arrangements. I never even noticed a giant explosion of
shrubbery attached behind the rear porch. That was fine. Now an then you need a good blow
along the side of the head to wake you up from smugness or complacency.. I write about
seeing and I just realized that I didn't see anything at first at the exhibit and, certainly, not
enough. The Wave Hill site on the internet: wavehill.org, said this in part about the exhibit:

Ikebana comes from a long tradition that celebrates life and respects plants as
living, breathing things. The practice requires a disciplined training in which
the artist strives to create perfection and impermanence in each installation or
display. The origins of the word stem from three verbs: ikeru to place or
arrange; ikiru –– to live, to be alive, to arrive at one's essence; ikasu –– to put
in the best light. Progressive Japanese flower artists have developed
Contemporary Ikebana, a form of arrangement that is released from the
confines of the vase. It employs natural and inorganic materials, and
encourages free expression and often takes the form of large-scale installations.
Arrangement, relationship to a space, use of living plants, the artists'' own
creative process and energy, and the concept of time or the transience of living
matter are all components of Ikebana.

To arrange, to live, to arrive at one's essence, to see in the best light, that heralds true seeing. I
went to Wave Hill to see flower gardens. I saw a new variation of a loved theme, ikebana, yet
I didn't see it. That provokes me to see it again until I see it. Annie said that without her
camera she was an unscrupulous observer, she saw everything. I see with my camera, but first
I have to constantly see anew. At Wave Hill, in those incredulous first moments, I saw little.
When I view “quiet” asymmetrical arrangements of traditional ikebana, I see the raging drama
of great storms at sea, the unheard clash of galaxies devouring each other in the blackness of
space, the roar and splash of icebergs calving, the silence of dewdrops on wild flowers in the
mist. What will I see when I learn to see the new contemporary ikebana?
There is more to ikebana. My own art of image making feeds on this Japanese art. It is only
through the asymmetric re-arrangement of dull order, the baffling discovery of chaos in a
dewdrop or heart of a flower, the broken, shattered, torn veil of dusty memories which
smothers insight, sight and true vision, that the newborn world emerges. To discover a
universe in a pot of flowers seems odd. I care only to see, to devour that which baffles my
sight, to probe and to understand what makes this reeling globe a fantasy and a kaleidoscope
of epiphanies. The following came from the web site www.ramalila.net:

Through the act of arranging flowers one can realize Gods ' blessing that
pervades all the universe and will be given eyes to see his own road to life.

— SENEI IKENOBO

The Japanese believe Ikebana speaks directly to the heart of the creator and the
viewer. It is sculpture that breathes and expresses stability and the spirit of
Nature, a link to the whole universe. The positive ( yoh ) and negative ( in )
energy, and the harmony therein, represent the energies of life and death and
the passing of time - past, present and future. The flower bud contains, for
instance, the energy force of life towards the future. There are generally three
principal parts to the Ikebana arrangement: ‘‘shin'' - the main stem representing
man ( yoh); ‘ ‘soe'' - representing heaven ( yoh ); and ‘‘tai'' - representing earth
( in) .

We have here another interpretation of the meaning of ikebana. In Japanese Shinto religion,
the gods (kami) can be present in any outstanding natural object or phenomenon. The artistic
expression of ikebana originated in Buddhist alter decorations honoring the dead. Floral
arrangements are part of the Zen aesthetics of the tea ceremony. An ikebana placed in the
display alcove may be the principal or only decoration in an otherwise virtually empty humble
room. Contemporary or installation type ikebana deviates greatly from the original form of
flowers arranged in a vase. Typically it is site specific, and is often room filling and three
dimensional.

Janet Koplos in her booklet about the exhibition Perfection/Impermanence writes, “Ohtsubo
once filled a room...with lightning like zigzags made of disposable chopsticks doweled
together with toothpicks. A younger ikebana-trained artist, Shogo Kariyazaki has exhibited
blocks of soil seemingly sliced straight out of the earth and a rowboat filled with
clay...Anyone who has ever relaxed on the grass and made a chain of clover blossoms can
recognize the elements, and anyone who has ever looked at a flower or a seed and envisioned
a universe can grasp its implications.”
I noticed that the contemporary ikebana at Wave Hill seemed less asymmetrical, more
concerned with room filling installations. Hiroshi Teshigahara's bamboo works however,
maintain a delicate balance of symmetry and asymmetry. What caused the early Japanese to
create a style so out of kilter with the symmetry and balance we westerners are so often fond
of? Here is one answer from the Sogetsu School of Ikebana:

Sofu Teshigahara was born in Tokyo in 1907. He learnt flower-arranging from

his father who had studied many styles of different schools. When twenty-five
he was ready to start the Sogetsu School of Ikeban. He believed that Ikebana is
not merely decorating with flowers, it is an Art. That the great difference
between floral decoration and Ikebana lies in the belief that once all the rules
are learnt, the techniques mastered, we must sculpt. Thus we create living
sculptures.

— onthenet.com , ikebana

In the introduction to his book, The Art of Ikebana , his son, Hiroshi wrote, “The expression
of beauty through natural materials, which is the essential art of ikebana depends on the
integrity of the person creating the composition. Ikebana is much more than a decorative
hobby...

I marvel at how the Japanese in the past high the ranking noble samurai, along with those
traditionalists left today managed to live in a way that surrounded them with visual and
audible beauty. The lower classes had no opportunity to create these things. Serene beauty
appears in the design of Japanese houses, temples and rock gardens, in their painted screens,
ikebana, bonsai or dwarf trees, in the masked ritual dramas of the Kabuki and Noh theaters, in
the tea ceremony. Shinto and Zen Buddhism were at the root of this way of life. The centuries
of civil wars all but ended after Ieyasu won the great battle at Sekigahara in 1600 and
assumed the Shogunate of all Japan. The noble samurai, at leisure now, learned sensitivity to
all of the arts.
We live in a time when vision is limited because it is saturated with popular art media of
every kind. To be in the middle of a clamoring traffic jam of media year after year can lead to
the loss of sensibility, to a numbness in the deepest part of the spirit. That is living death. My
greatest pleasure while visiting Japan was to walk slowly through and contemplate the many
Zen temples in Kyoto rather than the bustle, neon signs and madcap anarchy of downtown
Tokyo. In Kyoto, a great peace prevails in the asymmetrical “gardens” made of raked sand
and rocks.
THE CELESTIAL SPIRIT

Cherish your visions. Cherish your ideals. Cherish the music that stirs in your
heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your
purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all
heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will
at last be built.”

—JAMES ALLEN, As a Man Thinketh, Vision Quotes

We see with the eyes of poetry as in the quote from Jane Hirshfield. An especially beautiful
example is the play Hagoromo , translated by Pound and Fenollosa. The introduction reads,
“The plot of the play Hagoromo , the Feather-mantle, is as follows: The priest finds the
Hagoromo, the magical feather-mantle of a Tennin, an aerial spirit or celestial dancer,
hanging upon a bough. She demands its return. He argues with her, and finally promises to
return it, if she will teach him her dance or part of it. She accepts the offer. The Chorus
explains the dance as symbolical of the daily changes of the moon...In the finale, the Tennin is
supposed to disappear like a mountain slowly hidden in mist. The play shows the relation of
the early Noh to the God-dance.”
We learn to see through all of our senses. Poetry awakens our inner souls to the beauty that
censorship in the brain often disguises or discards. We read, we see; it is as natural as
breathing if we read with our hearts wide open and our souls bare. Here are two excerpts from
Hagoromo. The first occurs when the Tennin argues with the fisherman for the return of her
feather-mantle, the second while she does the sacred dance prior to disappearing.

Chorus :

Enviable colour of breath, wonder of clouds that fade along the sky that was
our accustomed dwelling; hearing the sky-bird, accustomed, and well
accustomed, hearing the voices grow fewer, the wild geese fewer and fewer,
along the highways of air, how deep her longing to return! Plover and seagull
are on the waves in the offing. Do they go or do they return? She reaches out
for the very blowing of the spring wind against heaven.

And later, near the end of the play:

Chorus :

The spring mist is widespread abroad; so perhaps the wild olive's flower will
blossom in the infinitely unreachable moon. Her flowery head-ornament is
putting on colour; this truly is sign of the spring. Not sky is here, but the
beauty; and even here comes the heavenly, wonderful wind. O blow, shut the
accustomed path of the clouds. O, you in the form of a maid, grant us the
favour of your delaying. The pine-waste of Miwo puts on the colour of spring.
The bay of Kiyomi lies clear before the snow upon Fuji. Are not all these
presages of the spring? There are but few ripples beneath the piny wind. It is
quiet along the shore. There is naught but a fence of jewels between the earth
and the sky, and the gods within and without, beyond and beneath the stars,
and the moon unclouded by her lord, and we who are born of the sun. This
alone intervenes, here where the moon is unshadowed, here in Nippon, the
sun's field.

How sacred and beautiful it is to have these visions bestowed by words. The vision of poetry
unlocks the shutters of our minds. We live for beauty, which can only appear, like the feather
spirit, when it is released into the winds, sky and light of the universe.
MYSTIC VISION

In his book, Eye, Brain and Vision , Noble prize winning scientist David Hubel writes:

The visual world is systematically mapped on the geniculate and cortex.

(Author: The geniculates are two way stations in the thalamus where visual
information from the retina is processed on the way to the visual cortex. Their
complete functions are still little understood although you may read that the
paths are charted.) What was not clear in the 1950's is what that mapping
might mean. In those days it was not obvious that the brain operates on the
information it receives, transforming it in such a way as to make it more
useful...the message of the next chapter will be that a structure such as the
primary visual cortex does exert profound transformations on the information
it receives.”

Digest that! What you see isn't what you get. What you get is what your brain decides, and
you can't control it, or can you? Detoxification, endless work at detoxification of the visual
structure of your brain is needed. It's worse than drugs or alcohol. I want to see everything,
don't you?. Poetry breeds visions as does the mystic, prophet or shaman's intoxicated
ruminations. The poet Rumi was born in Wakhsh, Tajikistan in central Asia on 30 September
1207 to a family of learned theologians. He wrote of the mystical side of life, approaching
God as though he was a great bird which wafted down sparkling feathers in the holy light. Do
any of you see visions in the church while eating the body of the Lord, or do you drink the
sacred wine and whirl off into unknown reaches of holy space, like pterodactyls? I neither
proselytize for or embrace any man's religion or woman's either. I will embrace every religion
in spirit, in clouds, and in metaphysical journeying. I want to see. The pulpit's a bully place if
the priest be wise enough, and has shed his or her mortal coils for the embrace of the
unseeable and holy of holies. We are not granted vision without cost. The vision of a shaman
must be earned by dying and rebirth, which, is not a bad way to look at the art of seeing.

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
—RUMI

The cage of restricted vision is like the steel cage used by divers to film the great white shark.
It keeps the shark out but it keeps you in while outside rainbow schools of fish flaunt
flamboyant colors. We can't all be divers hooked up to aqua lungs and oxygen tanks in or out
of cages. We can dive naked and filled with wonder into the flowering, wheeling, ratcheting,
spinning mystery of life on earth “to sail beyond the sunsets, and the baths of all the western
stars...”
One mild winter day, I visited the Bayard Cutting Arboretum on Long Island to see and
photograph the trees for a fine art project I'm working on. The lady with me said she watched
me “dance” around the trees which, shorn of leaves, displayed their sculptural grandeur. I was
in a trance, seeing deep into the hearts and spirits of these noble trees which flung their
convoluted, asymmetrical spreads of branches high over my head. Single branches often
appeared too massive and heavy to support themselves. I saw a singular kind of beauty. I put
saw in italics because my no-mind or intuitive reflex unconscious mind saw these trees. The
camera did its work. I presided like a floating spirit, dancing around the splendid trunks,
enraptured, not seeing but seeing.

VERY TREE
 Forget the tube of bark,
Alliterative leaves,
Tenacious like a hand
Gnarled rootage in the dark
Interior of land.

Bright incidental bird

Whose melody is fanned
Among the bundled sheaves
Wild spool of the winding word,
Reject: and let there be
Only tree.

Earth's absolute arithmetic

Of being is not in the flowering stick
Filled with the sperm of sun
But in a figure seen
Behind our eyelids when we close
Slow petals of the brain
to match the night's repose.

Colors pour in and out:

Here is a timeless structure wrought
Like the candelabrum of pure thought,
Stripped of green root and leaf,
Getting no seed to sprout.

— STANLEY KUNITZ
BRITTLE STARS

I've traveled to hundreds of ports of call around the world on great ships. They've been my
base during many adventures. This essay taken from my travel journals was written while
making an Atlantic ocean crossing on Cunard Line's QE2. It deals with the phenomena of
light in the depths of the sea.

Signalling or seeing, hiding or hunting, luring or decoying — color and

pattern are basic to communication and concealment among animals in the
ocean, as in the rest of the natural world...But in the gloomy abyss beneath,
color has little function; here, creatures communicate with light.

— THE OCEANS , A Celebration

Communicate with light? We humans do it, or at least we used to. At night, before the advent
of radio, ship captains at sea flashed coded light signals to each other. They still do at night
during wartime to avoid breaking radio silence. Deep beneath the surface of the sea, in eternal
night, a constellation of fish radiates light. Jellyfish, worms, clams, snails, squid, sea-squirts,
starfish, shrimps and other crustaceans convert chemical energy into light energy. We humans
get only 10 percent of electric energy out light bulbs in the form of light. The rest is lost in
heat. Beneath the sea nearly 100 percent of bioluminescent energy is converted into light.
At night the ocean's surface often glows with luminous light. Billions of single celled
organisms—dinoflagellates, half plant, half animal—flash myriads of galaxies dancing on the
murmuring waves. Far beneath, in that frightening abyss where light never calls, jellyfish and
their relatives the sea-pens arm themselves with light to dazzle, frighten, or alert themselves
to predators. A deep sea jellyfish spins like a wheel of fireworks; bursts of light flicker round
its body. Most wonderful, the brittle-star fish outsmarts its enemies with a brilliant strategy. If
a barrage of lights from its arms fail to frighten off its enemy, it sheds an arm tip, which,
miraculously, continues to flash. Meanwhile, lights out, the brittle star, minus one arm tip,
crawls off to safety, leaving a morsel rather than a banquet. I wish I could flash lights in the
dark and dance away from my sparkling body parts. What a dance that would be! No special
effects, biochemistry converting energy to light, an eternal delight.

At night QE2 sparkles with a thousand lights. Below the glittering QE2 in the abyssal sea,
miles down, another kind of celebration takes place—a celebration of light. Myriads of tiny
creatures flash lights, glow, luminescent signals to open up dialogues. In the Caribbean,
firefleas swim in groups, pulsing lights, veritable clouds of light. Each male flashes points of
light in unique individual patterns, coded mites. The females recognize their mate's patterns,
fly into the clouds of light, discover their consorts and mate in the dark. Angler fish,
themselves dark, dangle luminous 'bait' from their dorsal fin fishing poles to lure prey into
gaping, shark toothed jaws. The light comes from clouds of glowing bacteria inhabiting the
angler fish's lures. Glowing bacteria flash signals from the eyes of flashlight fish, who have
evolved eyelid like shutters to turn out the lights when danger comes. A few clever fish
employ a headlight which emits deep red light in the abyss where no colored light penetrates.
They alone can see the red shrimps, invisible to other predators who see no colors.
Ocean, you birth light as we live by light. Radiate, illuminate; I will glow with a terrible fire
to light deep seas of my mind. I will enter dreadful abysses where thoughts, like voracious
angler fish, dangle luminescent lures to entrap my conscious mind and bend my silver head to
darkness and despair. I think. I glow. I wrap myself in light's energy a thousand fathoms
down. In these labyrinthian corridors, clouds of shimmering thoughts wink on and off,
tapestries of fishy design. I am one with Oceanus's womb of sentient life, sparking and
spitting like a Catherine's wheel, a fireworks display to mock a billion whirling chalices of
stars birthing in deep space. Brittle star, you are my guiding light. I dance through the heavens
like the seven daughters of Atlas, shed my sparkling limbs round Jupiter and Saturn, journey
on the solar wind into deep space. My light shines forever, a beacon across billions of light
years. I ride beams of light into abyssal clouds, interstellar wastes trembling with nascent
novas sparkling amidst fiery seas of condensing dust. I alight where cosmic furnaces glow,
glitter, flame into furious fusion to cradle countless newborn stars in a universal ocean of pure
light. Light, light alone reigns supreme.

I want more ideas of soul-life. I am certain that there are more yet to be found.
A great life - an entire civilization - lies just outside the pale of common
thought. There is an entity, a Soul-Entity, as yet unrecognized……There is an
immense ocean over which the mind can sail, upon which the vessel of thought
has not yet been launched. There is so much beyond all that has ever yet been
imagined.

— RICHARD JEFFRIES , 1883, The Story of My Heart

THE GOD OF LIGHT

 ...There was a faint blue colour in the air hovering between the built-up banks,
against the lit walls, in the hollows of the houses. The swallows wheeled and
climbed, twittered and glided downwards. Burning on the great sun stood in
the sky, heating the parapet, glowing steadfastly upon me as when I rested in
the narrow valley grooved out in prehistoric times. Burning on steadfast, and
ever present as my thought. Lighting the broad river, the broad walls; lighting
the least speck of dust; lighting the great heaven; gleaming on my finger-nail.
The fixed point of day—the sun. I was intensely conscious of it; I felt it; I felt
the presence of the immense powers of the universe; I felt out into the depths
of the ether. So intensely conscious of the sun, the sky, the limitless space, I
felt too in the midst of eternity then, in the midst of the supernatural, among
the immortal, and the greatness of the material realised the spirit. By these I
saw my soul; by these I knew the supernatural to be more intensely real than
the sun. I touched the supernatural, the immortal, there that moment.

— RICHARD JEFFRIES , The Story of My Heart

I worship the sun god. I worship other gods as well, as a inquisitive world traveler and
recorder of the earth's cultures should. The sun is my familiar, the wild spirit which tints my
work with glowing colors. The sun filters through my thoughts the way it burns the mist off a
mountainside. I am alive because the sun wills it. I am light itself transposed into living mind.
Light and life embrace on this earth and throughout the misty regions of interstellar space.
Light is the great creator.
The light from the sun is filtered by the atmosphere and influenced by the angle with which it
reaches the earth. Dawn and sunset light, as we all know, is very beautiful. The very nature of
the air in different parts of the world imparts a variety of colors to way light is seen. Mists,
rain, snow, fog, volcanic eruptions which throw vast clouds of dust into the atmosphere, and
man's pollution all change the way we see light. In my travels, I have never seen the light the
same anywhere in the world, even when revisiting places. The light, like a spirit of many
colors, is evanescent, always changing, always surprising.

HELIOS was the all-seeing god of the sun. He was also, by extension, the god
of the gift of sight and of the measurement of time (the time goddesses - the
twelve sister Hours, the goddesses Day, Month and Year, and the three sisters
called Seasons - were said to attend his throne). Helios was a close friend of
the other fire-god Hephaistos.

— Theoi Project, A Guide to Greek Gods, Spirits & Monsters

I am infatuated with light like a lover, like a moonstruck swain chasing the reflections of the
moon in a pond (Li Po, eighth century A.D. poet, the first' hippie' or flower child and
considered the greatest of the Chinese poets, is said to have drowned watching the moon in a
pool, while drunk on wine). In his book, The Narrow Road to the Far North , Basho, the
seventeenth century Japanese master of the haiku or seventeen syllable form of poetry wrote:
“...all who have achieved excellence in any art, possess one thing in common, that is, to be
one with nature throughout the four seasons of the year. Whatever such a mind sees is a
flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon. Basho's short poems, like flashes of
lightning, illuminate the natural world. It is the same with the art of photography in its many
guises, for photographs tell no more truth than a wielder of the camera is capable of revealing.
Color is the great deceiver, because there is no such thing as “true” color. The light, whether
artificial or natural, dictates the color we see, and each of us sees color in his or her own way.
An easy test is to put a bright yellow card next to a blue card, then a red card, finally a black
card. You will see the yellow change its apparent hue each time. We see color in relation to
other colors. The beauty of art is that it is subjective. The artist creates color harmonies or
dissonances according to his or her desires or compulsions. In the artist's own time, the shapes
and colors are often not recognized as desirable or lovely, or they are ignored. Van Gogh,
Matisse, DeKooning, Pollock, and a host of others waited for the public's vision to catch up,
often, as with Van Gogh, too late. Here is a brief on the character of light:

In 1665-1666, Isaac Newton studied sunlight and discovered that it could be

broken down into a rainbow of colors by a prism. Today, we know that the
rainbow of colors one gets from a prism is a consequence of refraction and the
different wavelengths of different colors. "White" sunlight is not really white-
there is no wavelength of light that is white. Rather, it is a mixture of many
different colors that appears white to our brains after being processed by our
eyes. (See incandescent light below) In the same way that the sun can produce
light of many different wavelengths that appears white when mixed, televisions
and computer screens also mix light to produce different colors. If you
examine your computer screen or television with a magnifying glass, you will
see tiny dots, probably red, green and blue. By mixing these colors in different
amounts, a large range of colors can be produced.
The "electromagnetic spectrum" is simply a phrase used to describe
electromagnetic radiation of all wavelengths. This includes radio waves,
microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, x rays, gamma rays, and other
electromagnetic radiation of longer and shorter wavelengths. If all
electromagnetic radiation is fundamentally the same thing, you might ask,
"Why don't we see radio waves like we see light?" or "Why do we need special
infrared light bulbs to heat things up?" Although all portions of the
electromagnetic spectrum are governed by the same laws, their different
wavelengths and different energies allow them to have different effects on
matter. Radio waves, for example, have such a long wave length and low
energy that our eyes can't detect them and they pass through our bodies. The
wonderful variety of the electromagnetic spectrum is all a result of the same
laws, applied to different wavelengths and energies.

There are two basic types of light sources. Incandescence involves the
vibration of entire atoms, while luminescence involves only the electrons.
Incandescent light is produced when atoms are heated and release some of
their thermal vibration as electromagnetic radiation. It is the most common
type of light that you see everyday sunlight, regular light bulbs (not florescent)
and fires are all incandescent sources of light. Incandescent light is also known
as "black body radiation." This seemingly self-contradictory name arises from
the history of physics-scientists studying this type of light emission modeled
their theories on ideal materials that would absorb all colors of light, hence
appearing to be "black bodies". Depending on how hot the material is, the
photons released have different energies, and therefore, different colors. It was
found that at lower temperatures, these materials would emit radiation in the
infrared wavelengths which we feel as heat (fires, for example, emit most of
their energy in the infrared). As temperatures are increased, increasingly more
energetic radiation is emitted, so these materials would glow red, then orange,
then yellow, and eventually "white-hot." Although ideal black body materials
don't exist in reality, most substances are close enough that this color sequence
can be observed. This is why a fire tends to be redder than a halogen lamp-the
filament in a halogen lamp is heated to a higher temperature than normal fires.
Likewise, the hottest stars appear to be a blueish-white while cooler stars such
as our sun are more yellowish in appearance. Some sources of incandescent
light are: the sun, fire and light bulbs.
 Unlike incandescence, luminescent light occurs at lower temperatures, because
it is produced when an electron releases some of its energy to electromagnetic
radiation, not an entire atom. It turns out that electrons like to have energy at
specific "energy levels." Thus, when an electron jumps down to a lower energy
level, it will release a specific amount of energy which becomes a photon, or
light of a specific color. Therefore, continued luminescence requires something
to continuously give the electrons a boost to a higher energy level to keep the
cycle going. This boost may be provided by many sources: electrical current as
in florescent lights, neon light, mercury-vapor street lights, light emitting
diodes, television screens and computer monitors; chemical reactions as in
Halloween light sticks and fire-flies; or radioactivity as in luminous paints, to
name just a few examples.

—Discovering Light , ThinkQuest '99

Those paragraphs are like taking a run up a hill or mountainside. It's difficult, but the view is
enchanting and illuminating.

THE BIG BANG & LIGHT

At what incredible moment after the big bang ten or fifteen billion years ago did light
suddenly enter the universe? Was it there already and was light the creator of the universe? I
like to think that light is God's glowing mantle which He threw across the blackness to begin
the process of making galaxies, stars and planets. It's as good a theory as any. No physicist
truly believes he or she knows what started the colossal, perhaps infinite collection of
galaxies, star clusters, quasars, supernovas, black holes and a hundred thousand more
astounding events which daily explode around the universe. In the desert or at sea at night, I
feel the star filled cosmos suddenly race away from me into the limitless deserts and seas of
outer space. I am dwarfed, a pin prick of a being shivering in the night.
What is the peculiar quality of vision that we do not truly know from where inside our brains
or minds it emanates? In Flash of the Spirit, African & Afro-American Art and Philosophy ,
author Robert Farris Thompson writes ”...persons possessed of the spirit of a Yoruba
deity...look about grandly with fixed expressions...the radiance of the eyes, the magnificence
of the gaze, reflect ashe, the brightness of the spirit. ...According to the Yoruba:

The gods have “inner” or “spiritual” eyes (oju inun) with which to see the
world of heaven and “outside eyes” (oju ode) with which to view the world of
men and women. When a person comes under the influence of a spirit, his
ordinary eyes swell to accommodate the inner eyes, the eyes of the god. He
will then look very broadly across the whole of all the devotees, he will open
his eyes abnormally.

Is light the spiritual power of the universe? Is it the holy of holies, the grail itself, the
unanswered questions of creation? Life can exist without light, as in certain places deep in the
sea or in buried caverns, but this is not a life we would embrace. Blind people adjust to their
world of four senses, but they can only imagine the world of light, or do they somehow create
luminescence inside their minds. I like to think so. Lee W. Schvaneveldt wrote on the
Internet. “Albert Einstein and Steve Hawkings; he and he are twins that with and in their arts
bring alive in this earth the things that sing, that swing in the heavens. Let theirs be the light,
as theirs is the darkness. Lightness, Darkness. Light/Dark. There is here a relative big bang!
Albert Einstein: a brain is a silent Internet.”

SEEING WHAT ISN’T THERE

 ...Oh harp and altar, of the fury fused

(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)

Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,

Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,—...

Against the traffic lights that skim thy swift

Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,

Beading thy path—condensed eternity:

And we have seen night lifted in thine arms...

O Sleepless as the river under thee,

Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,

Unto us lowliest, sometime sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

—HART CRANE, Poem: To Brooklyn Bridge

On a breezy beautiful sunny summer day I walk across the Brooklyn Bridge with my Canon
EOS1Ds digital top of the line camera. The 11 plus megapixel camera creates huge 52.9
megabyte files for each image when decompressed. My aim is to capture the play of clouds
against the massive towers and myriad cables and wires. I will down load these images into
my computer and work with them in Adobe Photoshop. I am not interested in seeing the
“reality” of these images. That is what my brain forces me to do. That is what the camera,
which is designed to record approximately what I see will do. That has nothing to do with the
vast spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that plays invisibly all about me as I walk the
bridge. The digital camera and digital programs free me to discover worlds of colors, light and
shade, contrast, illuminations really. Suddenly, in the last few years, free of the constraints of
nascent technology and tyrannical mind set, I work with my digital files like an action painter,
abstractly, vividly recreating what is really there but cannot be seen. The digital image is my
sketch, the Photoshop program my brush and paints. I experiment with the images in a
boisterous, wild, audacious and unruly way like Pollock, Basquiat, or de Kooning, Pianist
Alfred Brendel quotes the German romantic poet Novalis, “...'chaos' now and then, even in
Mozart, can be seen shimmering through the veil of order.”
 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.

—NOVALIS

I'm intoxicated with exploding light and fireworks which burst from my digital brain
transmuted through my digital camera—into the holy grail of energy. I long to see light itself,
pure, painted with black rainbows, iridescent, flaring like the mystical sunrise in my brain
stem. I want to see deep, deep, down in the unconscious realms where primitive neurons
transmit a web of light which envelops the universe. I desire to see star births, quasars and
colossal galactic collisions crossing limitless chasms of outer space. I want to observe
ravening flares of pure energy thousands of light years across, spanning gravity's timeless,
tintinnabulations which ravish my inner eye. I prowl the infinitely tiny foam of quantum
mechanics where the universe quietly explodes insubstantial probabilities, busy with the
constant state of remaking itself, a hologram of gravity's impure architecture. Tiny, so tiny I
cannot see the light; I am the light. I am the cognizant photons of holy light, the all-knowing
light which irradiates my mind. I am lost in space, digital space and I see .

In the very beginning, there was a void, a curious form of vacuum, a

nothingness containing no space, no time, no matter, no light, no sound. Yet
the laws of nature were in place and this curious vacuum held potential. A
story logically begins at the beginning, but this story is about the universe and
unfortunately there are no data for the very beginnings--none, zero. We don't
know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billionth
of a trillionth of a second. That is, some very short time after creation in the
big bang. When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe,
someone is making it up--we are in the realm of philosophy. Only God knows
what happened at the very beginning:

—Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman

THE MYSTERIOUS EYE

The eye is the supreme organ created by evolution and it is totally misunderstood! That is so
important that some of the information below is repeated. You may jump ahead if desired.
The eye is not a window. Have you “flown” your eye? It is attached to your brain, not to your
skull. What you see isn't there. It's a dreary illusion fostered by evolution and nurture. Your
retina contains hundreds of millions neurons working in parallel. The computing power at
your retina exceeds that of the most powerful supercomputers. Right there at the retina, your
“desktop” computer analyzes and censors much of the fireworks entering your eye, the
quintillions of photons each split second which would literally blind you if accepted raw.
Rods and cones in vast arrays (120 million rods and 7 million cones) accept the incoming
photons as electrical signals and switch on and off accordingly. And that's just the beginning.
From the retina, the electrical impulses are sent through an electric cable containing over one
million wires called axons.
The optic nerve fibers from the eyes terminate at two bodies in the thalamus (the
aforementioned structure in the middle of the brain) known as the Lateral Geniculate Nuclei
(or LGN for short). One LGN lies in the left hemisphere and the other lies in the right
hemisphere. After further processing, the results travel on a new set of axons to the primary
visual cortex, also known as V1, and to other parts of your brain. Hubel , in Visual
Intelligence, writes: The German physicist and physiologist Herman von Helmhotz (1821-
1894) described vision as a process of unconscious inference:
 The psychic activities that lead us to infer that there in front of us at a certain
place is a certain object of a certain character, are generally not conscious
activities, but unconscious ones. In their result they are equivalent to a
conclusion,... it may be permissible to speak of the psychic acts of ordinary
perception as unconscious conclusions, thereby making a distinction of some
sort between them and the common so-called conscious conclusions.

Hubel goes on to say, “The British neurophysiologist David Marr (1946-1981) described
visual constructions by analogy to information processing in computers: “Vision is a process
that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to the viewer and
not cluttered with irrelevant information...”
The objects of obscure desire we think we see, see, or fantasize we see, relevant or irrelevant,
perplex neuroscientists today. Von Helmhotz surmised these things a century and a half ago.
We must strike through the masks of obscurity and mirage and uncover all the many colored
spices of Samarkand, visual feasts.

When I worked with my Brooklyn Bridge images, I discovered, in the cloud filled skies above
the bridge a kaleidoscope of elegant abstract swirls and eddies, like an evanescent whirlpool
of shifting shapes and colors. I sensed that these paintings in the sky were there, but my eye
could not see them, blinded by the need to eliminate irrelevant information. Playing with the
large digital files in Photoshop, I uncovered what my eye could not see. The computer has no
inhibitions; using what I imagined was there, it reveas what I entice it to reveal. In his preface
to Visual Intelligence, Donald Hoffman writes, “...what happens when you see is not a
mindless process of stimulus and response, as behaviorists thought for much of the twentieth
century, but a sophisticated process of construction whose intricacies we are now beginning to
understand.” Hoffman concludes his book with these words:

Visual intelligence occupies almost half of your brain's cortex...it is intimately

connected to your emotional intelligence and your rational intelligence. It
constructs the elaborate visual realities in which you live and move and
interact. It forwards these constructions to your emotional and rational
intelligence, which use them as raw materials in further constructions.
DIGITAL CAMERA GIGABYTES

Our new tools create the possibilities for discovering a new vision of the world. The large
(53.9 megabyte) files which come from my Canon EOSD1s digital camera contain a wealth of
information which my emotionally and rationally conditioned eye cannot see. As an artist, I
can imagine what is there. Playing, and I use the word playing in its most creative sense,
enables me to create images I have only imagined but never seen. Suddenly, my eye/camera
symbiosis gives me the vision of a painter who constructs from the raw material of nature his
or her wildest fantasies, or who subtly transforms realities. Such visionaries as Van Gogh,
Monet, Matisse, O'Keefe and de Kooning imagined, discovered and painted their fantasies on
richly colored, wildly flamboyant canvases. Today, at the cutting edge of digital technology,
we can paint our visions in the computer and print them.
First, we must learn to see. The art of image transformation begin with a new vision of the
world. It comes from an eye that learns to instantaneously recognizes significant patterns and
make strong compositions in the camera before clicking the shutter button. We must learn as
well to instantaneously recognize and discard cliche patterns which enthrall us with scenes
resembling our past visions. We must take chances and seek aleatory or chance compositions.
Hidden in chaos is a higher “order.” The well known computer adage goes, “Garbage in,
garbage out.” That should never stop us from making tens of thousands of “mistakes,” seeds
we continuously plant to await a bountiful harvest of beauty. Learning to see with a camera is
learning to see anywhere.
Onrushing technology gives a digital artist a suddenly extravagant and limitless palette
containing countless gigabytes of information—like the human brain and the starry universe.
Light from the sun radiates more photons each second than could be stored as bytes on all the
computers in the world. We live in an all encompassing shower of infinitely tiny meteorites,
photons which strike our eyes, enter our brains and coalesce into miracles or dreary dust.
Inspired vision trusts the intuitive unconscious, the Zen moment of being there, when the
conscious self dissolves into a hail and firestorm of flamboyant colors and shapes, or quietly
observes utter simplicity in shades of grey. We breathe slowly, relax and enter a universe of
bright mirrors which, like whirling kaleidoscopes, endow the world with beauty and agape —
intense romantic love.

THE HUT OF THE PHANTOM DWELLING

In a letter to a friend written in 1690, Basho describes his life in the simple hut in which he
lived for a while. The hut was near a shrine of Hachiman, the god of war, which was built in
1063.

I, too, gave up city life some ten years ago and now I'm approaching fifty. I'm
like a bagworm that's lost its bag, a snail without its shell. I've... bruised my
heels on the rough beaches of the northern sea where tall dunes make walking
so hard. And now this year here I am drifting by the waves of Lake Biwa. The
grebe attaches its floating nest to a single strand of reed to keep it from
washing away in the current...Azaleas continue in bloom, wild wisteria hangs
from the pine trees, and a cuckoo now and then passes by...

Basho's haiku poems were written with the inner eye, the eye that sees what isn't there. He
saw with his clear“camera” eye, a Zen intuitive eye. He saw in flashes of seventeen syllable
haiku the beauty, tenderness and sorrows of his world. Poetry often carries within it the
holograms of subtle allusions which only the most sensitive translations can begin to reveal. It
is the same with seeing and making images. Much of what is there escapes notice by the eye
conditioned to see what is “useful.” Near the end of his letter, Basho writes, “I've worn out
my body in journeys as aimless as the winds and clouds, and expended my feelings on flowers
and birds...and so in the end, unskilled and talentless as I am, I give myself wholly to this one
concern, poetry.

Red, red is the sun,

Heartlessly indifferent to time,

The wind knows, however,

The promise of early chill.

I am awestruck

To hear a cricket singing

Underneath the dark cavity

Of an old helmet.

—BASHO, The Narrow Road to the Far North (Penguin)

IN SIGHT OF SENSIBILITY

'In looking at an object we reach out for it. With an invisible finger we move
through the space around us, go out to the distant places where things are
found, touch them, catch them, scan their surfaces, trace their borders, explore
their texture. It is an eminently active occupation.

Impressed by this experienced, early thinkers describe the process of vision

correspondingly. For example, Plato, in his Timaeus, asserts that the gentle
fire that warms the human body flows out through the eyes in a smooth and
dense stream of light. Thus a tangible bridge is established between the
observer and the observed thing, and over this bridge the impulses of light that
emanate from the object travel to the eyes and thereby to the soul.'

—RUDOLPH ARNHEIM

I give myself every day to learning how to see. That is the beginning of my poetry, my work
with images, my music. At the beginning of her chapter titled “Imagine This” in Sight and
Sensibility, Laura Sewall quotes William Blake: “Let the world of rationalization and of the
senses be consumed in the fires of imagination. Free the eternal soul; let it taste again
Infinity.”
Sewall goes on to write about wrapping her imagination around a near quarter moon. She says
that imagination is a mode of consciousness, a unique capacity of the mind and the “deepest
voice of the soul, “ that it shimmers behind everything we do. What has imagination to do
with seeing? Our imaginations free us from the tedium of daily chores, the necessary
housekeeping which we all must endure. When I fire my camera, is it I who sees, or is it my
deepest imagination playing with fire, seeking images unseen and buried and immersed in my
unconscious? To see, you must free yourself as a child would who falls off a bike over and
over until it attains a certain balance and wheels freely away. The falls are part of the learning
process. We we must fall a lot to see this world in its ravishing beauty.
Once I was traveling through Utah and had stopped in the now bustling town of Moab, close
to Arches National Park. I went out for a walk very early that morning and had a sudden flash
of instinct or unconscious calling. The sky was beginning to light up in a curious way. I ran to
the motel, grabbed my camera, jumped into my car, and careened down the road to the Park
entrance. A soft reddish light filled the dawn sky. I arrived at the formation called Balanced
Rock just as the sky came on fire. I jumped out of the car, ran towards the rock, tripped on a
low fence and fell hard. I was up in a second, aimed my camera and watched transfixed at the
dawn light flaming behind the silhouette of the rock. I saw nothing anyone couldn't have seen.
It simply took quick action to capture the fleeting fiery dawn.
There's a wild side to seeing, which I excavate from among ideas and images found in
Japanese culture and in the work of abstract artists anywhere. Freed from constraints of early
conditioning, mind-set and fear of the new, any artwork has the power to invest the inquiring
eye and mind with a startling and eventually very pleasing taste. The power of wildness,
unfettered imagination, hurling away constraints may lead, in the beginning, to a kind of
chaos. It is well to swim hard and often in these uncharted waters until you float comfortably
under benevolent skies. We create our visual world with our malleable brains if we dare to use
them in seemingly irrational or dangerous ways.
According to Arnheim Aristotle conceives of the "universal character " of an object "directly
perceived in it as its essence rather than indirectly collected through the search of common
elements in the various specimens of a species or genus." But what is that essence? Did
Aristotle imagine that his eyes were deceiving him? It is always the essence which we seek?
In his diary, art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) writes of a simple scene, “I looked at it with
the possession-taking grasp of the imagination—the true one; it gilded all the dead walls, and
I felt a charm in every vine tendril that hung over them. It required an effort to maintain the
feeling; it was poetry while it lasted, and I felt that it was only while under it that one could
draw, or invent, or give glory to, any part of such a landscape...” The art of seeing begins with
discovery of beauty in the commonplace. So obvious an idea is not so easy to achieve. We
discard much of the beauty in life because it occurs in unlikely places.
SEEING WHAT ISN’T THERE
I walk through the flower market on 28th street off Sixth Avenue and study the displays. I
love sunflowers because they speak to me of light's mysteries and shed a cheerful glow on the
world. These markets are filled with visual banquets of flowers. The owners pleasantly agree
to my photographing their displays. A display of orange flowers, I don't know their name,
catches my eye. The flowers are wrapped in white paper which makes arabesque-like patterns.
I photograph the display rather casually, I think, and walk on. A few days later, I am in my
studio with a young student intern studying the images from the flower market on one of my
computers. The orange display catches our eyes. Using Adobe Photoshop, I sharpen it, add a
bit of brightness and contrast, intensify the color, but it looks rather uninteresting. For fun, I
take it into ‘curves' and play. Suddenly the image jumps into life, newly revealed contrasting
colors sharply define the elegant arabesques which my cerebral eye did not see then or now. I
had observed this now intensely curvaceous asymmetrical composition when I was making
the photograph with my inner or unconscious intuitive eye. I am struck by the sudden
knowledge, that I don't consciously see as much as I think I see. Even when my inner eye sees
certain images and triggers the camera, I cannot truly see it on the computer screen
immediately. I must manipulate the image in odd ways and coax it to reveal itself.
We are on the verge of a visual revolution brought on by the emergence of digital
photography and digital image programs such as Adobe Photoshop. The computer programs
give us a sudden, new power to reveal what our conscious minds censor or obliterate. The
computer sees anew. It has no censor built in. It has a formidable power still in its infancy.
The effect on our vision cannot be predicted, although I view the new digital technology as an
alchemist's stone which reveals what ‘isn't there.'

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something
and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who
 can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is
poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.

— JOHN RUSKIN

On the next day, Sunday, I go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to photograph more flowers. It
isn't calendar, postcard, greeting card images of flowers that I'm after. I will seek the hidden
heart of the flowers, their spirits veiled in the chiaroscuro of light and color, mysteries unseen
and beauty unfolding. My tool of choice is a 100 mm. macro lens. The lens enables me to
photograph deep in the heart of flowers if I wish. The technique sounds simple, but it is
difficult to execute. You must take the lens off the autofocus mode and focus by hand. Once
in very close to where you want to be, at intense magnification, you must move the camera,
not rotate the lens, to attain sharpness where desired. Since depth of field diminishes rapidly
the nearer you get to the subject, it is well to stop the lens down to f:16 or f:22. This will
require that you have a flash in the camera or an external flash such as my Canon speedlite
550EX. Waiting for the wind to stop, for your hand to steady, you maneuver the camera with
tiny movements until the image in the finder speaks to you and, suddenly, the camera fires. A
number of times my finger on the shutter at the moment of release pushes the camera slightly,
throwing the composition out of kilter, since the slightest movement is magnified at close
range. I must work on this.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, this Day in July, is a revelation. I expected few flowers in
bloom in the midsummer heat. Instead, I am greeted with a profusion of brilliantly colored
flowers from giant lotuses in the pond in front of the conservatory to lavish displays of lilies
and many more. Bees abound, buzzing quietly about their tasks, wings covered with yellow
pollen. I spot a large bee on a lily and move in very close, very fast, like a samurai warrior
wielding his sword in a split second. At close range with the macro, everything moves,
shakes, jitters. I must swoop in, and in a fraction of a second, see! Then, without volition, it
(the camera) fires. It is all about seeing, seeing what is almost invisible to the naked eye. It is
about seeing without restraint, and developing the technique to execute your vision with your
camera.

Vision: The art of seeing the invisible.

—JONATHAN SWIFT
BRIDGE WORKS

Training vision is a lifelong task. After forty or more years of making images with cameras, I
begin to truly see, to see more and more of what isn't there. Early in the morning one day, I
walk across the new pedestrian and biker's path on the Williamsburg Bridge in Manhattan.
Spectral sunlight winks in and out between the massive girders which support the bridge
along with a network of cables. Against the light, the spider web like thrust of girders make
ikebana-like patterns of asymmetry The girders are flung high and wide around me; they
groan as they brace this immense structure. I hear autos buzzing beneath me. A subway train
roars past. I am busy seeing on a large scale, the opposite of the closeup flower photography.
The resulting images become fodder for a series of joined canvases and psychedelic looking
images which I make into dazzling patterns of light, chiaroscuro, and unexpected colors. An
array of hidden colors appear like magic in the seemingly monotonous bluish sky hung with
misty clouds. What I saw with my inner eye when on the bridge, and what I discovered by
allowing my inner eye and a bit of chaotic ‘action painting' to arrange on the computer
surprised and pleased me. It is only by taking the greatest risks, avoiding self censorship, and
attempting to re-invent your visual world that you grow and see.

Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or
reputation on the line in support of an idea or enterprise. They willingly
assume responsibility for the success or failure of a venture and are
answerable for all its facets. The buck not only stops at their desks, it starts
there too
— VICTOR KIAM
We are all entrepreneurs in this life, willy nilly. If we don't dare the unknown, we create a
shallow life, filled with turbulent pitfalls that sadden us. The gift of vision is secured by
audaciously setting out into the unknown, like Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic alone, or
Livingston seeking the source of the Nile in unexplored Africa. The quest for vision is much
like daring feats of adventure. The sought after place or thing is shrouded in mysteries, with
no maps to go by. We toss about like shipwrecked sailors in a small boat on an immense sea
with no horizon in sight. That is good. By surviving in those seas we awaken to a sky filled
with a flaming dawn and we see. Whether making images, trying to see what isn't there, or
doing business, learning to see anew leads to success, the success of the brave and audacious..

A COLLABORATION WITH NATURE

Andy Goldsworthy, in his book Andy Goldsworthy writes “At its most successful my ‘touch'
looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things are part of a
transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient—only in this way
can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete.” His outdoor sculptures made
with stones, flowers, leaves, stalks, icicles and other natural flotsam and jetsam often last for a
few days or less. He records the sculptures with a camera. The commonplace, to
Goldsworthy, is fodder for his revelations of the unseen beauty in nature, unseen because we
have learned to take it for granted. Picture postcards rarely carry surprises or awakenings. We
admire the image or we ignore it. The ahhh! of beholding is gone. So it is with our normal
vision of the world around us, one which deprives us of much of the beauty which can enrich
our lives. We do not have to travel across the country or jet to another continent to discover
unexpected wonders, sudden revelations—colored lights reflected on the streets during rain, a
bee in the heart of a flower, light playing across cloud castles—there is no end. The gift of
sight is precious. You must work for it. Albert Einstein put it this way:
 The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little
child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books
in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written
these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the
languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the
arrangement of the books...a mysterious order which it does not comprehend,
but only dimly suspects.

Each of us is that happy child to whom all of creation from the earth to the starry universe
awaits recognition. Einstein's Relativity Theory revealed new world in which the speed of
light could not be surpassed, and time was not a universal clock—his concept of the space-
time continuum. He saw into the hidden workings of the universe. Each of us, genius or no, is
capable of seeing beyond the veil of self imposed or peer imposed “reality.” First we need to
understand that our eyes are as miraculous, or even more so , than the Hubble Space
Telescope. They are not windows. Our open eyes gatherer quintillions of photons every
minute. Such a myriad of riches must be organized. Our eyes and our brains have been
marvelously trained by evolution to do just this. They are trained to work at our daily tasks,
not to reveal the hidden world around us. We see everything, but we hide most of what we see
behind a veil in order to avoid being overwhelmed.
It's necessary to be overwhelmed now and then, to penetrate the veil, like a beginner a scuba
diving overcoming fear of drowning. Scuba techniques revealed the surprising rainbows of
wonders beneath the surface of the sea to our eyes and brains that had no pre-conditioning,
and therefore censored nothing. We glory in these wondrous visions, while all around us, a
thousand, thousand visions go unnoticed. Let us dive deep into the ‘sea' on firm land and
begin to see as children again.
In The Unfettered Mind (Kodansha), Zen Master Takuan Soho says:

The Existent Mind is the same as the Confused Mind and is literally read as
the “mind that exists.” It is the mind that thinks in one direction, regardless of
subject. When there is an object of thought in the mind, discrimination and
thoughts will arise. Thus it is known as the Existent Mind.

The No-Mind is the same as the Right Mind. It neither congeals nor fixes itself
in one place. It is called No-Mind when the mind has neither discriminations
nor thought but wanders about the entire body and extends throughout the
entire self.

This statement by Takuan is a clue to learning how to see. No-Mind or Right Mind wanders
freely to view what “is not there.” It's like hallucinations, or daydreaming. We relax our eyes
and take in everything. We try to detach ourselves from daily tedium and open our eyes like
children. It takes constant practice. Learn to love the gifts of light and enlightenment. The
rewards are beyond measure.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night
— DYLAN THOMAS , Do Not Go Gentle into That Dark Night

LIGHT DEVOURS THE WORLD

John Berger, in About Looking says, “Writing about a late painting called The Angel
Standing in the Sun , Turner spoke of light devouring the whole visible world. Turner's sea
paintings, wildly impressionistic at a time (mid-eighteenth century) when painting was mostly
realism, show that he dared to see and paint in a new way. The sea paintings carry within
them colors and shapes rarely seen at sea or anywhere, although we can learn to see many of
these enchanting displays of light and color. Our newly innocent eyes, freed of much
conditioned restraint, see beyond the surface of things. To see like Turner, we must abandon
safe harbors in the mind.
To paint The Snowstorm, Berger relates that Turner remarked, “...I got sailors to lash me to
the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt
bound to record it if I did...” It was a brave act, but the act of truly seeing the world is equally
brave. We discard tradition, ignore the opinions of others whether our peers, researchers or
mystics, and dare to believe that our own new vision is paramount. We stare out at the world
with our inner eyes, and unveil such ravishing beauty and resplendent natural wonders as
would make an emperor envious.

FLOWERS & BRIDGES

The world surprises me every day. For a time my work focuses on flowers and bridges in
Manhattan. What is there to see? Flowers are a universe unto themselves, in their endless
varieties, colors, and shapes. Bridges, gigantic in relation to flowers, are equally
extraordinary, elegant constructs of steel and wire. You must look hard. Walk across the
Brooklyn Bridge with its spider work of cables or the cantilevered Williamsburg Bridge and
study the wires, cables, girders, towers, and their myriad interactions designed to sustain
trucks, autos, and subway trains. The bridges sing a syncopated off key tune of creaking
girders, rumbling traffic, and roaring subway trains. Overhead, the sun peers out from
scuddng clouds. Far below, the blue waters reflect the sun. I see the intricacies of design
wrought in the girders, the eloquent lines of the wires and cables. These are giant harps,
flung across the waterways, bringing, singing a world of ethnic peoples together. I sight
through my camera and construct the raw materials of my digital painter's painter's palette.
What I see or do not see, my unconscious instinctive mind records in the camera. Later,
working with Photoshop, I discover myriad colors, shapes, patterns and designs hidden in
these seemingly somber structures.
VISION & PERCEPTION

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it,” she said, cupping
her hand and holding it closer to her face, “it’s your world for the moment. I
want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around
so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they
want to or not.”

—GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, One Hundred Flowers, (Knopf/Callaway)

In 1927, O'Keeffe's her large canvases of flowers seen closeup shocked and scandalized the
public and the critics. Some found them to be to sensual and erotic. Her avante- garde
husband, the photographer and gallery owner Steiglitz cautioned her against exhibiting them.
People simply had not seen flowers closeup. They were overwhelming, displaying huge
stamens and pistils. “O'keeffe let herself be seen, gave herself like a flower, and for a woman
that was too remarkable,” said Steiglitz.
Perception and seeing are two distinct, diverse means of viewing the world. When I stare
through my camera viewfinder and carefully view the scene with my normal mind, I see what I
am used to seeing. My perception, my unconscious, intuitive vision or no-mind sees something
else. I cannot see what it sees at that moment. I can trust it and allow the camera to record
what, to my eye, isn't there. Later, when the images are downloaded into the computer, when I
“develop” them in Photoshop, I see what I couldn't see. Our perceptions, like our dreams,
come in many colors, sizes and shapes. They swim around our unconscious like schools of
rainbow colored fish. Our lifelong work consists of allowing these swarms of perceptions to
surface, to unveil themselves in the light. This is the beginning of wisdom, of seeing the ever
changing, miraculous world around us. Such vision never diminishes. It only grows wilder
and more colorful, like a Titan's garden filled with luxuriant brilliant weeds and gaudy
flowers.. Entangled among the exuberant growth and ravishing colors we find single images
which delight us with their quiet and repose. In the midst of wildness, in the midst of chaos,
order shimmers through and we are comforted. Wisdom entails sifting all experience through
an uncensored sieve of unconscious desires and playful freedom. Nothing is banned.
ADDENDUM: THE VISIBLE SPECTRUM

We see only a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Colors that we do not see are
visible to other creatures on this earth. You may read the following explanation if you wish or
go on.

Electromagnetic waves exist with an enormous range of frequencies. This

continuous range of frequencies is known as the electromagnetic spectrum.
The entire range of the spectrum is often broken into specific regions. The
subdividing of the entire spectrum into smaller spectra is done mostly on the
basis of how each region of electromagnetic waves interacts with matter. The
diagram below depicts the electromagnetic spectrum and its various regions.
The longer wavelength, lower frequency regions are located on the far left of
the spectrum and the shorter wavelength, higher frequency regions are on the
far right. Two very narrow regions with the spectrum are the visible light
region and the X-ray region. You are undoubtedly familiar with some of the
different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The visible light region is the very narrow band of wavelengths located to the
right of the infrared region and to the left of the ultraviolet region. Though
electromagnetic waves exist in a vast range of wavelengths, our eyes are
sensitive to only a very narrow band. Since this narrow band of wavelengths is
the means by which humans see, we refer to it as the visible light spectrum.
Normally when we use the term "light," we are referring to a type of
electromagnetic wave which stimulates the retina of our eyes. In this sense, we
are referring to visible light, a small spectrum of the range of frequencies of
electromagnetic radiation.

Each individual wavelength within the spectrum of visible light wavelengths is

representative of a particular color. That is, when light of that particular
wavelength strikes the retina of our eye, we perceive that specific color
sensation. Isaac Newton showed that light shining through a prism will be
separated into its different wavelengths and will thus show the various colors
that visible light is comprised of. The separation of visible light into its
different colors is known as dispersion. Each color is characteristic of a
distinct wavelength; and different wavelengths of light waves will bend varying
amounts upon passage through a prism; for these reasons, visible light is
dispersed upon passage through a prism. Dispersion of visible light produces
the colors red (R), orange (O), yellow (Y), green (G), blue (B), indigo (I), and
violet (V). It is because of this that visible light is sometimes referred to as
ROY G. BIV. The red wavelengths of light are the longer wavelengths and the
violet wavelengths of light are the shorter wavelengths. Between red and
violet, there is a continuous range or spectrum of wavelengths. The visible
 light spectrum is shown in the diagram below when all the wavelengths of the
visible light spectrum strike your eye at the same time, white is perceived.
Thus, visible light is sometimes referred to as white light. Technically
speaking, white is not a color at all, but rather the combination of all the
colors of the visible light spectrum. If all the wavelengths of the visible light
spectrum give the appearance of white, then none of the wavelengths would
lead to the appearance of black. Once more, black is not actually a color.
Technically speaking, black is merely the absence of the wavelengths of the
visible light spectrum. So when you are in a room with no lights and
everything around you appears black, it means that there are no wavelengths
of visible light striking your eye as you sight at the surroundings.

—physicsclassroom.com

Shall we dance? In Zen & the Art of Archery , author Herrigel speaks of his master constantly
referring to archery as a dance. The archer dances his shots. Light is the greatest dancer. We
dance with light to the farthest reaches of human perception and understanding. We use our
intuitive no-mind and Zen like clairvoyance. We see what is not there. We see all of the
invisible spectrum of light which daily dances through our lives. The visible and invisible
rainbows of the electromagnetic spectrum are our lives.

EPILOGUE
AD ASTRA (Art is Worth Dying For)

I believe we go through an endless series of births and rebirths during our tenure and growth
on this earth. At certain periods in our creative lives, we encounter a pivotal time; we
undergo a rite of passage. A jazz singer on FM radio the other day sang a refrain, "Every
knock is a boost." So it is, especially if it knocks us up and away from our preconceptions. It's
too easy to begin an enterprise with innocent enthusiasm and passion, the greatest creativity,
and the will to make the desert flower. Moses spent forty years in the desert and never
reached the promised land. Perhaps "desert" is simply a staging ground, a metaphor for the
next great endeavour.
I believe every great enterprise, every campaign to acquire new knowledge, has a curve of
accomplishment: the beginning, hard work, success or failure, self-examination, beginning
again. Like life itself, youthfulness in ideas and in the work itself is everything . The best, most
sanguine and felicitous parts of novels and movies often occur in the first half when striving is
all, when the future beckons tantalizingly and everything is possible. Often, tedium overtakes
the climber in pursuit of meaning and creative growth. He or she, having reached a peak,
must rest from other necessary and tiresome labors unrelated to growth and creating. A
mountain climber trapped above twenty to twenty-five thousand feet or higher must come
down for oxygen soon or deteriorate and die. The body, like the brain feeds upon itself. Rest
and recuperation is needed before another attempt is possible. Once a challenging peak is
climbed, enjoy the view! The next step must be to another, higher peak, or back down the
mountain. Each new peak we attain reveals views of other heretofore hidden heights. Our
growth and perception never ends; the winding and endless road to knowledge is our home.

AUDACE!
 The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The
occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As
our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall
ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

— Lincoln's Second Annual Message to Congress.

Forward, always forward, "Audace, audace, audace" cried de Gaulle. We must act forcefully
before the routine and tedium of endless petty details despoil our dreams and defeat our ends.
We must, in Lincoln's words, "disenthrall ourselves" and move on to fresh, fecund fields
where new ideas may glisten in the dawn of new endeavors like early morning dew on flowers
and grass. The workaday "nitty gritty" conspires to shackle our talents. Shed it! We must each
take our inspired and abundant creative talent and free it from the itchy, cold harness of tasks
better left to career administrators. Life demands action; ideas won't wait. We must send them
roaming.

LIGHT THE SKY

The vitality of thoughts is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be

done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor and live for
it, and if need be, die for it.
 —ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

Everyone of us is an untapped reservoir of becoming. Great talent, great energy, great

ambitions crave great projects. If not, we wither in a stale environment where bean counters
rule and dreams die slowly and painfully. We must unleash our God given extraordinary
abilities and free them to race across the sky like the Sun God's fiery steeds, aflame with light,
color and beauty. We set out, seek and find venues that need, indeed demand, such
aspirations, that contain great challenges and require facilities to implement them on a grand
and worthy scale. Shouldn't we spend our time working on projects that illuminate the
darkness, which, like a blanket of oily soot, smothers the world of new ideas and visions?
Shouldn't we work on enterprises that wash away gloom and give birth to a new, soul
wrenching awareness of the cascading beauty and symbolism of life itself?

Whatever you can or want to do --

Begin it!
Boldness has genius,
Power and Magic
In it.

-- GOETHE

WE ARE NOT ALONE

In the movie Shadowlands, Anthony Hopkins playing C. S. Lewis speaks an idea garnered
from a student, "We read to know we are not alone." Isn't that the purpose of all of art and
creation, to make us know that? To make us know that placed here willy-nilly on this spinning
globe that sometimes seems like the Sea of Fertility on the moon—a nihilistic wasteland, a
ghostly apparition in an unblinking cosmos—that here on this speck of green earth whirling
round a small sun, we have purpose, talent, free will, and we are not alone ?
Enjoy life? Of course! We are born to sing, not grunt, to dance, not crawl, to fly on wings of
thought to far reaches of the planet and to the ends of the universe. What pleasure compares
to a new creative challenge, to the renewal of youthful dreams, to setting off on another
voyage into the unknown? Odyssus set sail again in search of new worlds after he regained
his kingdom Ithaca. In Nikos Kazantzakis's great poem “ The Odyssey, A Modern Sequel , we
read of Odysseus, "My voyages are my Ithaca." We work to display the joy of what we create
each day and each day is our reward. Always the journey, never the end, our destinations are
our inspiration, our efforts our lives. We are born to fly, to sally forth into the universes of
thought and action, or sadly, to crawl. Very little of value may be found between.

THE WINE OF PASSION

We read in Omar Khayyum's poem The Rubiyat , “What can the vintner buy one half so
precious as what he sells?" We are fortune's vintners pressing dreams from dew covered
grapes, dreams that make life real. Our dreams arise from inspiration, moral and cultural
values, love and creation, the sole elements that conspire to make us more than slouching
beasts. We must protect the God given flame of inspiration ere it flickers out in the temples of
money changers, in the offices of bureaucrats, in the cellars of misers and bean counters.
Passion and joy rule our lives, not recklessly, but as the fires of volcanoes renew the earth.
Without passion we create grey slag heaps of time worn existence. We are all poets at heart.
We were born to inhabit and create on a planet so fair and beautiful that "heaven" is but a
solipsism and a mockery of Paradise here and now

The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the
poet's to invent what is non-existent.

—ORTEGA Y GASSET, The Dehumanization of Art

We read in Omar Khayyum's poem The Rubiyat , “What can the vintner buy one half so
precious as what he sells?" We are fortune's vintners pressing dreams from dew covered
grapes, dreams that make life real. Our dreams arise from inspiration, moral and cultural
values, love and creation, the sole elements that conspire to make us more than slouching
beasts. We must protect the God given flame of inspiration ere it flickers out in the temples of
money changers, in the offices of bureaucrats, in the cellars of misers and bean counters.
Passion and joy rule our lives, not recklessly, but as the fires of volcanoes renew the earth.
Without passion we create grey slag heaps of time worn existence. We are all poets at heart.
We were born to inhabit and create on a planet so fair and beautiful that "heaven" is but a
solipsism and a mockery of Paradise here and now

The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the
poet's to invent what is non-existent.

—ORTEGA Y GASSET, The Dehumanization of Art

LONG AND HARD ARE THE SKY ROADS

Our creative desires and endeavors must not be reduced to shopping malls of clever exhibits
and boutiques, but rise to snow peaked mountains towering into the next world. We seek the
unknown. Such enterprises can be found, explored and made real, but hard and long are the
sky roads and many are those who would tame the spirits that ride with the chariot of the sun
god. I believe the sometimes hidden purpose of all art is to raise the level of the viewer's
perceptions, to shed light, to make life worthwhile. I add the caveat that art is , it is not made
for any decreed purpose. We embrace the human ability to rise to an occasion, to welcome
discoveries, however new and bold. It is not a viewer, or an audience that must be
enlightened, bewildered or chastened, it is the artist himself or herself who must discern what
really matters. From modesty comes grace, a fiery grace that lights the world. The artist, the
seeker of the way of art, must never bow to the whiplash of bureaucracy or cries for what is
politically correct. The true artist, see-er or seeker creates and grows because he or she is
creation itself. No power must come between that holy gift and the expression of it for the joy
of mankind.

ART MAKES US MORE HUMAN

We stand measured by the breadth of our expanding souls, our minds that will not age unless
left idle, our hearts filled with the sheer exuberance of liberation—liberation of our uncanny
abilities to grow and flower in the commonplace wastelands of over civilized citified cultures.
Removed from our close contact with the earth, surrounded by paved roads, concrete and
glass, we must find our way back to that exuberant dawn of innocence and spiritual dignity. I
often encounter this dawn roaming the earth into "primitive" places, places where human
beings embrace mother Gaea with innocence and praise her. I do not ignore the appalling
poverty and misery found in many undeveloped and developing countries. It is the wonderful
kindness, wisdom and hospitality of so many peoples that I speak of.
What else compares with the experience of art itself? All of art, the art of music and dance,
sculpture and science, music that comes from Bach in the B minor Mass or from the dying
Schubert in the late piano sonatas; the sound of wind and wave and rain; the paintings of Van
Gogh, Matisse, de Kooning, Basquiat, the sculpture of Moore, Brancusi or Rodin; the grand
architectonic "musical" forms of canyons, pinnacles and arches in the Southwest; the
uncanny beauty of worlds in collision, flaming nebulae millions of light years away; they are
one and the same. All of art and science beckons to human beings to look, to see, to hear, to
touch, to discover that we are not alone.

SPRINGTIME IN DECEMBER

Every formula which express a law of nature is a hymn to God.

—lARIA MITCHELL

Yes to that hymn, yes to the creative mind, and yes to going forward! I make no difference
between the God of the Christians, the Muslims, the Jews, the Buddhists, or anyone's search
for religious meaning in symbols or saints. Hard it is to wrench oneself from the turmoil of
self-created "necessary" mundane projects whose momentum, like a speeding freight train is
difficult to stop and makes a great screeching and squawking when slowed. Better to leave the
dilapidated train, launch, rocket off, fly to the places and palaces we dream of, forever
hastening to those places which capture our hearts, sing to our souls and reward us with
innocence. We will come to know again the joyful springtime that comes unexpected and
radiant late in autumn or dead of winter, when trees suddenly bud and flowers bloom out of
season. Then we may give thanks and praise and rejoice in the knowledge that we are forever
young, daring and beautiful.

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a horizon more clearly seen. It is the
distant hills once more in sight and the enduring constellations above them
once again.

—HAL BORLAND , Autumn is for Understanding

FOR THE HAPPY FEW (OR MANY)

We all may share the blessed lifelong burden of creating and loving, a labor fit for Hercules,
Prometheus, Aphrodite or Apollo in a flourishing civilization where greed and lust for power
often overshadow humanity's long journey to the stars. Great deeds begin with a multitude of
tedious details which may seem to deny the light of creation from rising each morning like the
sun. Our nascent light must not set in darkening shadows of discontent, or be made
unbearable by puerile and punitive endeavors. We were born to inhabit this halcyon paradise
of earth while we live (living means creating, else it is a lesser life) to strive and seek a distant
shore unmapped, uncharted and unbounded.
I am a lover and a fool, an insolent mouthpiece for Gaea, an unlicensed oracle, a cracked
bell. I will sing of joy. There is no end to energy, energy which is eternal delight in Blake's
words. If we be favored by the gods with energy, then we must and shall employ it for the
good of the earth insofar as we are capable of understanding that good. We must avoid
making godlike judgements as to what is good. It is the business of the future to be
dangerous,” said Alfred North Whitehead. We work, in Stendahl's words, for the happy few.
We toil for the coming happy many who seek what we seek, the thrice blessed godly virtue of
questioning. We toil to give form and space and song to what has not been seen enough
before, the burgeoning glory of an ever fecund, ever new, ever flabbergasting, glorious, green
and gratifying earth. We toil because we must.

WHO WILL STAND?

We happy see-ers, seekers and seers who fiercely create and bring these shattering and
seductive visions to light shall be as prophets of old, "blind" and dreaded. We bring to Gaea
(and Gaea is God and earth and holy) all that she is and wants to be and we cannot help
ourselves. We were born, brained and blessed to do Gaea's great bidding. Nothing else or
less will do. Who will or can stand with the Lord in his place and listen to his words? I
neither mock nor defile any religion nor use the cantos of praise other than with respect and
joy for spiritual enlightenment. Art is the religion of the spirit and the religion of the deepest
unconscious striving of the fecund but tip of evolution. Art is evolutions' way of knowing
herself.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast
understanding...When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God
shouted for joy?
-- THE BIBLE , Job XXXVIII

Open the gates for we are as sounding brass, the army of the Lord of hosts, Gaea's legions,
the legions of creativity, love and compassion. The sermon on the mount* goes unheeded, the
voice in the wilderness soon forgotten, the teachings remain. We must follow our hearts no
matter where, jubilantly, joyfully, a great jazz in the night, a tintinnabulation of ringing bells
to fill the mountain steeps with echoes of glory. With zeal, audacity, inspiration and courage
we do the bidding of gods and spirits, a mighty work which make this planet a vaulted heaven
where mortals convene and converse with gods.

*Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither
do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it
give light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that
they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven...

THE SERMON OF CREATION

Is not all of art and science part of that great sermon? Is not the act of creating art the same
act of reverence as lighting a candle? Isn't a human being born to create those things which
glorify the Father whether He or She be Buddhist, Christian, Moslem, Jew, Shinto, Father,
worshipper of Mother Earth or earth spirits? Bach loved the Father as he loved life itself, as
the Buddhist monk loves the Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths. Bach's music, the Zen
monk's traditional shakuhachi flute meditations or any other glorious religious music
celebrates the light, the light of God, the light that is God. Bach, no dry fugue maker, was as
passionate as a water lily in the dawn, as a sky flowering lightning and rainbows. Art which
comes from the heart, from the soul, from the spirit and from the love of life is holy.

CREATION'S STARRY LIGHTHOUSE

A wanderer on this earth, I witness the seemingly endless striving of fecund humanity to break
the shackles of earthbound tedium, to make a world where art and love blossom like cactus
flowers in vast deserts of ignorance. It is sometimes hard to keep my eye on the holy beacon of
creative enrichment, discovery and enlightenment, the mist shrouded lighthouse whose
radiant beams illuminate a thousand, thousand deadly reefs and shoals in a world often gone
mad..
Each new challenge begins in innocence. Starry eyed, filled with zeal and energy, we
undertake to make a world more fit for humanity's great mission, to seek, to find, to know, to
understand, to celebrate the earth. We stand together with artists and scientists, shamans,
preachers and prophets. We stand beside all who seek to know, whose lives become voyages,
voyages into the unknown, voyages away from stuffy, smothering sarcophaguses filled with
overripe, rotting fruit, the dregs of futile toil. Our labors flower and bear fruits in their
season. The fruit of our endeavors, like fragrant wildflowers, make beautiful solace for a
moment of rapture, memento mori of that place from which we came, the radiant genesis of
glory, a star swathed cradle of innocence.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting.
And cometh from afar:
Nor in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home...

-- WORDSWORTH , Ode on Intimations of Immortality...

In his monumental poem, Wordsworth bemoaned the seeming loss of his own innocence; he
saw shadows, shades of the prison house closing in; his great lament " Though nothing can
bring back the hour/Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower ." The entire Ode spirals
down to us like a glittering nebulae, a quasar billions of light years away shedding the
radiance of a giant collapsing star. The art's the thing; we shape the world we inhabit. Our
gifts, not measured out like cold coins or lifeless currency, yield love potions we toast to the
glory of the earth, for we contain in our mortal bodies the whirling troposphere of lightning
and great storms. We carry our heads high in the myriad constellations of glittering stars.

And time will come close about me, and my soul stir to the
rhythm of the daily round.
Yet, having known, life will not press so close,
And always I shall feel time ravel thin about me.
For once I stood
In the white windy presence of eternity.

— EUNICE TIETJENS
SUCCESS HAS TWO FACES

"Success" that duplicitous Janus-like goddess, defeats our aims. One head eternally young,
one head older than creation, "success" imprisons us in a grey claustrophobic, misbegotten
misinterpretation of the meaning of life. Not as solons in the great courts of kings, conquerors
or emperors, but as naifs, innocent and filled with joy at what we do not know yet yearn to
know, we are at play in fertile fields filled with spring freshets and flowers. We attain our
births and rebirths, the glory of the earth, the cycles of the seasons of art that bestow
everlasting youth. True success comes from our joy of learning, growing and creating, never
from the adulation of media, the tinsel worship of celebrities, the adoration of power and
money. Only constant change and growth fuel the engine of creating the new, the enigmatic,
and the seemingly dangerous. We will trail clouds of glory as long as we forbear yielding to
money-grubbing temptations. Ours is the earth and all that's in it.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety...she makes
hungry where most she satisfies..."

--SHAKESPEARE , Antony and Cleopatra

A THINKING REED

A creative human being, like legendary Sisyphus, often must push a heavy rock up a steep
mountain path to the top, only to watch it roll back down again. Albert Camus wrote in The
Myth of Sisyphus that “There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing..he knows himself to be
the master of his days...”. We begin anew each time, seeking new visions, gaining mountain
tops, starting over, happy in the knowledge that such efforts renew, renew as do the elements
and the seasons. We are one with earth. In his introduction to Zen and the Art of Archery ,
writer and Zen philosopher D. T. Suzuki said:

Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating
and thinking. "Childlikeness" has to be restored with long years of training in
the art of self-forgetfulness. Then this is attained, man thinks yet he does not
think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the
waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly
heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring
breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage.
IMMORTALITY OR BURN

Therein "ends" this essay. It is Sunday in winter. A cold blue sky over Manhattan turns slowly
pink. A thousand, thousand lights glitter in the dusk. Tomorrow I confront the daily exigencies
of city life. I must conspire to make illusive vagaries, rainbow spattered dreams, into whirling
butterflies and birds of paradise to float out into the great world beyond my small studio. The
themes of this essay, eternal themes, confront the perplexing mystery of life itself, the creative
life with its thousand broken idols and masks, its thousand fears and follies. These themes
flaunt fields of eternal energy, which, whirling and sparkling like the vast star studded hoop
of our galaxy, help define us as human beings. They ask us to consider what our presence on
this small green and lovely planet means.

We have but one overriding duty in life, to develop our powers to the utmost limits in order to
be of use to others and to ourselves, to add music to the earth, to shed light. Whatever blocks
our way must be rent asunder, as the Red Sea parted for Moses. We must endure, as Job
endured the trials of the Lord, for in the end, we were born to radiance, and, if we are willing
to burn for it, we will have it.

To be an artist is to fail as no other dares to fail,

that failure is his world, and to shrink from it,
desertion, arts and crafts, good housekeeping.

—SAMUEL BECKETT
Postscript:

LIBERATE THE UNIVERSE WITHIN

What should I or you or anyone do? Only those difficult, passionate and intransigent things
which can and will fulfill our dreams. We must freely and fruitfully undertake projects that
involve great energies, unbind our limitless creative powers, unleash ourselves from petty
ideas, housekeeping and clinging needs of those who must yet be inspired. Become as one
who midwives and creates things yet unknown, unseen. Seek and find a place in the sun that
understands and strengthens far reaching vision and reinforces your inner search for deep,
still untapped reservoirs of talent. Perform as one who inspires others to go beyond their self
imposed limits. Go where the wind blows, for it will blow a fair wind...

Come my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world...

for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
of all the western stars...
—TENNYSON , Ulysses