A matter of perspective

"I told them a story almost devoid of events or achievements. Outsiders would have made little of it, but the plainsmen understood. It was the kind of story that appealed to their own novelists and dramatists and poets. Readers and audiences on the plains were seldom impressed by outbursts of emotion or violent conflicts or sudden calamities. They supposed that the artists who presented such things had been beguiled by the noises of crowds or the profusions of shapes and surfaces in the foreshortened landscapes of the world beyond the plains."

From Gerald Murnane's The Plains.

Perhaps something about a way of looking at life. The perspective difference. Rhymes with the philosophy of everything passes.

Certain writings, literature

I am browsing through a book about rocks. It is beautiful, talks of rock, water, earth and the billions of years that would have worked on a stone, about scale and mind's eye to be able to see through earth's history. 

This note though, is about writing. About somehow the pace of certain authors, and their peace, their stillness and tranquility is different. The one above that I am browsing through is like any other non-fiction: informative, opening thought tangents, and interesting. But there is something when say, Annie Dillard talks about the same things, rocks, sand, that lifts somehow everything to an existential, philosphical level and yet it has that unhurried, peaceful feel to it. And maybe it stands out only when you read others, the rest of the mortals. That others, the other mortals (people like us) are communicating, there is information being transmitted, and there's the pace of reporting, of communicating, the human conversation that is quick, efficient and yet sometimes beautiful. But then there is Annie Dillard, or perhaps she stands proxy for much other literature, where there is an unhurried pace, less of communication, perhaps more of reflection, contemplation, stillness. And in that stillness, gently somehow, they unfold the secrets of existence.

Somehow, there is a different depth, a different richness, and yet a stillness, un-heaviness, the riches that don't weigh you down, but make you calm, peaceful, quiet, tranquil, allowing you to perhaps enter a similar state of reflection, where you, like a mirror hold in you the thought that perhaps Annie Dillard held, and find similar tranquility.

Links - another bookblog

Here's another book blog link. Danny Yee's Book Reviews. There are over 1500 book reviews here.

Here's an interesting place to begin looking - subject list of books.

What I like - the range of books explored. Lists them by subject and countries. That way, a good place to look up if one is looking for a particular country fiction. I also like reading about the science books, and there are quite a few here. In fact, lots of non fiction books. I am a slow non-fiction reader, often not able to finish those books. But when someone writes a blog about them and explains the key ideas, I guess it is quite amazing. And when possible, I like to read these. (Long reading wishlist)

The age of internet

Sometimes everyday, sometimes more often, I am amazed at the age we live in. The age of internet. Where whatever one wishes to learn, say from the basics of cooking to the most advanced chef styled cooking, to cleaning, gardening, or perhaps most modern life skills, basic household skills to advanced level skills one seems to be explained visually on youtube. And then there is art. There is a lot that one learns when someone shows how to do certain things - be it sketching, painting or playing an instrument. And that so many people record what to do, how to do, and one can actually look up and do it. It is quite amazing and wonderful. Esp as a practice partner.

Even the royalty of previous ages would be hard pressed to find teachers like this around the world at instant access.

And then there are all those awesome blogs. Esp book blogs. Books automatically sort of lift up the conversation around them. There is someone's years or months of work that a reader has spent hours reading, and mostly it opens conversation with self, or a desire to note what one sees, learns, understands. And sometimes, this sharing guides other readers to newer wishlist. And at other times is quite enriching by itself, providing endless fodder for the thoughts to take off from.

Sometimes I go looking for blogs around authors I enjoy to find other reads. And along the process I discover some treasure troves of really big readers. (I am that way a small reader with big aspirations). At times, I'll be noting these links here for future ref. 

*

And since I talk about this age of plenty, in terms of accessible learnings, lessons and wisdom, I also wish to note (as a self reminder), that one doesn't need a lot. There is beauty in little things, in simplicity. As someone said, sometimes one just needs blank paper. Yet, there is a beauty in engaged, working, absorbed mind. So keep exploring, yet keep coming back, centering and consolidating. It is in the learning, the becoming, rather than the collecting.

The early eleventh century

 "The early eleventh century was a time when eastern Europe was doing better culturally than western Europe, and east Asia may have been doing better than either. Depending on definitions, western Europe had just emerged from or was about to emerge from the Dark Ages. Romanesque styles still prevailed. High Gothic would not come for another two centuries. The great early English literary endeavor, Beowulf, was two centuries in the past. Nothing more of great moment, except to specialists, would come until Chaucer, almost four centuries after the likely date of Genji.

It is arguable that Japan was enjoying a more golden age than China. The great T'ang period, ever since which, many a pessimistic Chinese will tell a person, China has been in decline, ended in 907. Japan was then a little over a century into the Heian period, its finest time."

From Introduction to The Tale of Genji. This work of Japanese literature was perhaps written sometime in early eleventh century. 

If Big Bang were January 1st

One way of considering the universe. From Orbital, a book by Samantha Harvey:

In the cosmic calendar of the universe and life, with the Big Bang happening on January 1st, almost fourteen billion years ago, when a supercharged universe dense-speck of energy blew open at the speed of faster-than-light and a thousand trillion degrees Celsius, an explosion that had to create the space it exploded into since there was no space, no something, no nothing, it was near the end of January that the first galaxies were born, almost a whole month and a billion years of atoms moving in cosmic commotion until they began to flock bombshell-bright in furnaces of hydrogen and helium we now call stars, the stars themselves flocking into galaxies until, almost two billion years later on March 16th, one of these galaxies, the Milky Way, was formed, and a six-billion-year summer passed in routine havoc until, at the end of August, a shockwave froma  supernova might have caused a slowly rotating solar nebula to collapse - who knows? - but in any case it did collapse and in its condensed centre a star formed that we call our sun, and around it a disc of planets, in some cosmic clumoing thumping clashing banging Wild West shoot-out of rock and gas amd headlong combat of matter and gravity, and this is August.

Four days later the earth came about, and a day after that its moon.

September 14th, four billion years ago (or so some think) came life of sorts, some intrpid little single-celled things that invited themselves into existence in a moment of unthinking and didn't know the holy mess they'd make, and two weeks later on September 30th some of these bacteria learned to absorb infrared and produce sulphates and a month after that the greatest feat of all, to absorb visible light and produce oxygen, our breathable liveable lungable air, though the earth was still lungless for a long time yet, and on December 5th came multicellular life, red, brown and then finally green algae which spawned in boundless fluorescence in the shallows of sunlit water, and on December 20th plants found their way to the land, liverworts and mosses, stemless and rootless but there nonetheless, then hot on their heels only thousands of years later the vascular plants, grasses, ferns, cacti, trees, the earth's unbroken soil now root-snaked and tapped, plundered of moisture soon restocked by the clouds, looping systems of growth and rotting and growth again, competitve barging and elbowing for water and light, for height, for breadth, for greenness and colour.

Christmas Day, though Christ's not yet born - 0.23 billion years ago, and here come the dinosaurs for their five days of glory before the extinction event that wiped them out, or wiped out at least those lanlubbing ones, the plodders and runners and tree-munchers, and left in their absence a vacant spot: Wanted - land-dwelling life forms, no time-wasters, apply within, and who should apply but the mammalian things, who quicksharp by mid-afternoon on New Year's Eve had evolved into their most opportunisitic and crafty form, the igniters of fire, the hackers in stone, the melters of iron, the ploughers of earth, the worshippers of gods, the tellers of time, the sailors of ships, the wearers of shoes, the traders of grain, the discoverers of lands, the schemers of systems, the weavers of music, the singers of song, the mixers of paint, the binders of books, the crunchers of numbers, the slingers of arrows, the observers of atoms, the adorners of bodies, the gobblers of pills, the splitters of hairs, the scratchers of heads, the owners of minds, the losers of minds, the predators of everything, the arguers with death, the lovers of excess, the excess of love, the addled with love, the deficit of love, the lacking for love, the longing for love, the love of longing, the two-legged thing, the human being. Buddha came at six seconds to midnight, half a second later the Hindu gods, in another half-second came Christ and a second and a half later Allah. 

 

Walk Tall

 Another one from Ruskin Bond:

Love the attitude :)

"The Night the Roof Blew Off

LOOKING BACK AT the experience, I suppose it was the sort of thing that should have happened in a James Thurber story, like the dam that burst or the ghost who got in. But I wasn’t thinking of Thurber at the time, although a few of his books were among the many I was trying to save from the icy rain and sleet pouring into my bedroom and study.

We have grown accustomed to sudden storms up here at 7,000 feet in the Himalayan foothills, and the old building in which I live has, for over a hundred years, received the brunt of the wind and the rain as they sweep across the hills from the east.

We’d lived in the building for over ten years without any untoward happening. It had even taken the shock of an earthquake without sustaining any major damage: it is difficult to tell the new cracks from the old.

It’s a three-storey building, and I live on the top floor with my adopted family—three children and their parents. The roof consists of corrugated tin sheets, the ceiling, of wooden boards. That’s the traditional hill-station roof.

Ours had held fast in many a storm, but the wind that night was stronger than we’d ever known it. It was cyclonic in its intensity, and it came rushing at us with a high-pitched eerie wail. The old roof groaned and protested at the unrelieved pressure. It took this battering for several hours while the rain lashed against the windows, and the lights kept coming and going.

There was no question of sleeping, but we remained in bed for warmth and comfort. The fire had long since gone out, the chimney stack having collapsed, bringing down a shower of sooty rain water.

After about four hours of buffeting, the roof could take it no longer. My bedroom faces east, so my portion of the roof was the first to go.

The wind got under it and kept pushing, until, with a ripping, groaning sound, the metal sheets shifted from their moorings, some of them dropping with claps like thunder onto the road below.

So that’s it, I thought, nothing worse can happen. As long as the ceiling stays on, I’m not getting out of my bed. We’ll pick up the roof in the morning.

Icy water cascading down on my face made me change my mind in a hurry. Leaping from my bed, I found that much of the ceiling had gone too. Water was pouring onto my open typewriter—the typewriter that had been my trusty companion for almost thirty years!—and onto the bedside radio, bed covers, and clothes’ cupboard. The only object that wasn’t receiving any rain was the potted philodendron, which could have done with a little watering.

Picking up my precious typewriter and abandoning the rest, I stumbled into the front sitting-room (cum library), only to find that a similar situation had developed there. Water was pouring through the wooden slats, raining down on the bookshelves.

By now I had been joined by the children, who had come to rescue me. Their section of the roof hadn’t gone as yet. Their parents were struggling to close a window that had burst open, letting in lashings of wind and rain.

‘Save the books!’ shouted Dolly, the youngest, and that became our rallying cry for the next hour or two.

I have open shelves, vulnerable to borrowers as well as to floods. Dolly and her brother picked up armfuls of books and carried them into their room. But the floor was now awash all over the apartment, so the books had to be piled on the beds. Dolly was helping me gather up some of my manuscripts when a large field rat leapt onto the desk in front of her. Dolly squealed and ran for the door.

‘It’s all right,’ said Mukesh, whose love of animals extends even to field rats. ‘He’s only sheltering from the storm.’

Big brother Rakesh whistled for our mongrel, Toby, but Toby wasn’t interested in rats just then. He had taken shelter in the kitchen, the only dry spot in the house.

At this point, two rooms were practically roofless, and the sky was frequently lighted up for us by flashes of lightning. There were fireworks inside too, as water sputtered and crackled along a damaged electric wire. Then the lights went out altogether, which in some ways made the house a safer place.

Prem, the children’s father, is at his best in an emergency, and he had already located and lit two kerosene lamps; so we continued to transfer books, papers, and clothes to the children’s room.

We noticed that the water on the floor was beginning to subside a little.

‘Where is it going?’ asked Dolly, for we could see no outlet. ‘Through the floor,’ said Mukesh. ‘Down to the rooms below.’ He was right, too. Cries of consternation from our neighbours told us that they were now having their share of the flood.

Our feet were freezing because there hadn’t been time to put on enough protective footwear, and in any case, shoes and slippers were awash. Tables and chairs were also piled high with books. I hadn’t realized the considerable size of my library until that night!

The available beds were pushed into the driest corner of the children’s room and there, huddled in blankets and quilts, we spent the remaining hours of the night, while the storm continued to threaten further mayhem.

But then the wind fell, and it began to snow. Through the door to the sitting-room I could see snowflakes drifting through the gaps in the ceiling, settling on picture frames, statuettes and miscellaneous ornaments. Mundane things like a glue-bottle and a plastic doll took on a certain beauty when covered with soft snow. The clock on the wall had stopped and with its covering of snow reminded me of a painting by Salvador Dali. And my shaving-brush looked ready for use!

Most of us dozed off.

I sensed that the direction of the wind had changed, and that it was now blowing from the west; it was making a rushing sound in the trees rather than in what remained of our roof. The clouds were scurrying away.

When the dawn broke, we found the window-panes encrusted with snow and icicles. Then the rising sun struck through the gaps in the ceiling and turned everything to gold. Snow crystals glinted like diamonds on the empty bookshelves. I crept into my abandoned bedroom to find the philodendron looking like a Christmas tree.

Prem went out to find a carpenter and a tin-smith, while the rest of us started putting things in the sun to dry out. And by evening, we’d put much of the roof on again. Vacant houses are impossible to find in Mussoorie, so there was no question of moving.

But it’s a much-improved roof now, and I look forward to approaching storms with some confidence!”

Excerpt From
Rain In the Mountains
Bond, Ruskin

The monk by the sea

 

The monk by the sea

A painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Painted around 1808-1810

The gate so strait, the path so narrow

A little note from Stephen Jay Gould on excellence:

No person can achieve excellence in a popular genre without a rigorous and undeviating commitment to providing a personal best at all times. At the first moment of compromise - the first "dumbing down" for "easier" or "wider" acceptability, the first boilerplating for reasons of simple weariness or an overcommitted schedule - one simply falls into the abyss. (I rarely speak so harshly, but I do believe that this particular gate remains so strait, and this special path so narrow.)

Truly excellent things are inspiring, are generally superior to so much of mediocrity, they carry more of a person's soul and commitment in them and automatically draw the eyes to what reigns within them. And since we be such influencible creatures, this mimetic ape, is fortunate to find excellence, inspiration like that. We learn, are influenced and informed by such things. 

I really like his reference to personal best. Anyone can be anywhere, in their own personal circumstances and yet make up their mind, or collect themselves to try and do their best. I know, I know it is tangential from what perhaps he means, but the inspiration to make wherever you are amenable to a personal best is priceless.

I guess excellence has such a pushing of the envelope, opening of space, flowering of universe feeling to it, it just lifts up the one encountering as well. Here's to keep looking for excellent things, instances, ideas, works. 

Later he says:

Even the most trifling materials in our panoply of forms can, in the right hands, be clothed in the magic of excellence.

One got to be inspired by the freedom it opens up. The lightness of being, the composure of self, and the mastery or personal best of whatever one is working with. The weight of the stuff in the world, the noise, the fragments of ideas, the horizontal circulation of more and more, and yet this beautiful promise of almost nothing and magic of a master.

Links - Wondering Minstrels

This one is from old internet:  Ths Wondering Minstrels.  Launched in 1999, this blog has a lot, a lot of poems and commentary and comments. And depending on how one is feeling, one can go look for a random poem to read or by the poet or by the month they put it up. It is not updated any more, but for things like these, it doesn't matter. There is plenty to read and browse and be inspired by. 

One poem I found today while browsing the website: 

Song

All suddenly the wind comes soft,
    And Spring is here again;
And the hawthorn quickens with buds of green,
    And my heart with buds of pain.

My heart all Winter lay so numb,
    The earth so dead and frore,
That I never thought the Spring would come,
    Or my heart wake any more.

But Winter's broken and earth has woken,
    And the small birds cry again;
And the hawthorn hedge puts forth its buds,
    And my heart puts forth its pain.

-- Rupert Brooke

(from here)

Another Saul Leiter

 

Saul Leiter

Certain photographs have a visual impact. I do not understand nuances around paintings and photos, but some things stand out, or I just find them exceptionally lovely. One of them is Saul Leiter. Don't know how I even came across him. Perhaps in 2013 when he passed away. His photos are memorable. Esp in this age of beautiful, striking photographs that one finds almost everywhere. I guess I try to copy  the style at times through filters.  (I do not think at the moment that there'll be much to put in the scrapbook in terms of photos/ photographers. But this name, to look up once in a while).

Here, a little about him:

1923-2013. American. Following from here.

Leiter moved to New York in 1946, ostensibly to be a painter, and it was his friend, the abstract expressionist Richard Poussette-Dart, who was already experimenting with photography, that encouraged Leiter to pick up a camera. Initially working in black and white, by the early 1950s Leiter was also using colour, well before most other photographers had started to adopt the medium. In later life, however, he would disarmingly say, “I’m supposed to be a pioneer…” not holding much truck with the idea, “I did what I wanted to do. I think from the very beginning, and maybe because I didn’t know any better, I did certain things.”

One of those things was to continue to both paint and take photographs, the two disciplines remaining of equal interest throughout his life. The use of colour within his photographs is often attributed to his enduring interest in painting, but, again, a self-deprecating Leiter had a different take, “I wonder sometimes if I would have been a better painter if I had just been a painter. Would I have explored certain areas of painting? But what’s the point of thinking about it — if you do both, you do both. And sometimes I think you’re lucky if you do both.

“As we see in his ‘Snow’ photograph, Saul Leiter had a knack for finding quiet moments in a bustling city. ‘I believe in the beauty of simple things,’ he would say. One of his most special gifts is coaxing us to slow down and pay attention. 

 Paris, 1959

San Carlo Restaurant 1952

Snow, 1970

And following, some of his paintings

More here.

Gustave Klimt

 Austrian. 1862-1918.

" Among the artists of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was the most influenced by Japanese art and its methods."

Some flowers and a lake. (From Google Arts and Culture)

Farm Garden with Sunflowers (1907)

On Lake Attersee (1900)

 

Temporary Post

Just read. Here for a few days to read again. (When sometimes a whole philosophy and way of seeing is encapsulated in a preface).

Unamuno. From here.  

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

I am writing these lines, to-day the 6th of June, 1924, in this island of Fuerteventura, an island that is propitious to calm thinking and to a laying bare of the soul, even as this parched land is bare, bare even to the bone. Here I have been confined now for nearly three months, no reason for my confinement having been given other than the arbitrary mandate of the military power that is de-civilizing and debasing my native country.

Hither came my friend Mr. J. E. Crawford Flitch to bear me company. He was entrusted by Mr. Alfred A. Knopf with the task of making an anthology or florilegium of my shorter articles and extracts from my more extensive writings which should present a conspectus of my whole literary work. It is he, my friend and translator, who is responsible for the selection of the pieces which form this anthology.

I am in principle an enemy of all such selections or anthologies of an author’s works, and the more so when the author’s influence is due primarily not so much to his ideas as to the passionate tone and gesture with which he expresses them, to his style. This work of selection appears to me to be as difficult as would be that of abridging a sonata or a picture. And what appears to me almost impossible is that the author{vi} himself should make the selection. It is not possible for us to see ourselves from the outside, to become part of our public.

In any case, a work like this is a kind of index or catalogue, and its chief utility is to incite in the public a desire to get to know the author better. It is, to put it bluntly, in the nature of an advertisement.

Collections of selected writings are most valuable when the chief importance of an author lies in his ideology, which may or may not be welded into a system; they are less valuable when he is distinguished not so much by his ideas as by the warm images which incarnate them. It is relatively easy to give a summary of an author when we are asked: “What does he say?” but not so easy when the question to be answered is: “How does he say it?” That is to say, it is possible to abridge a philosophic system, but not a poem. In the poem, that which we call the argument is the most external element of its form, and its essence, the essence of the poem, is the rhythm, the aroma of the words, the style. Rhythm may give birth to argument or subject, but subject does not always give birth to rhythm.

In selecting these pieces—torsos, arms and heads of statuary—my friend the translator has been guided by an artistic rather than by a philosophical or ideological criterion, and for this I am grateful to him. And when I say that I am grateful to him, I mean that in this way he has best served the public that seeks to know me—me, the man, and not a system, for I have no system. Like Walt Whitman I would say of each one of my works: “This is not a book, it is a man.” It is com{vii}paratively easy, for example, to synthetize the philosophical system of Descartes, or that of Kant, or that of Hegel, or that of Comte, or, still more so, that of Spencer; but it is not easy to synthetize Goethe or Nietzsche, in both of whom is a latent philosophy. And still less so to synthetize Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Shakespeare. And it has not been the object of my translator to present a summary of an ideology but to give an impression of a spirit.

To elucidate this point still further would lead us into an intricate examination of the relations which subsist between a man and his work, and to inquire whether the man makes the work or the work makes the man or whether each makes the other at the same time. The man makes himself in making his work and the work makes itself in making the man. The Creation makes God the Creator, and God the Creator makes the Creation, the Universe.

Strictly speaking, is not every translation in effect a new and original work? In being turned into English, however faithful the translator may be, shall I not say something different from what I have said in Spanish? Does a song say the same when played on the violin, the flute, the harp, the bassoon? Is a sonata the same when played on the piano and the organ? I know that when I have read my writings translated into another language I have been aware of echoes and reverberations which lay sleeping in the depths of my spirit, I have glimpsed horizons which the firm and severe contours of my native tongue did not permit me to see. And I have sometimes thought of making{viii} a new work based upon a retranslation of the translation.

Among these essays is one upon the religion of Quixotism. Hitherto I have been meditating and perhaps dogmatizing upon this religion—now I am living it. For it is here, where the waves murmur tidings of my native shores, the mountainous coast of the wild Bay of Biscay, it is here that I have felt most deeply all the melancholy grandeur of the ridiculous passion of the Knight of the impossible Chimera. While the cowardly comic-opera tyrants who have banished me here are dishonouring our Spain, her whom they call their mother, I am exalting and eternalizing her, and I call her my daughter.

There is a famous Spanish couplet which says that there is no handful of earth without a Spanish grave—

No hay un puñado de tierra

Sin una tumba española,

and it would seem that these unhappy rulers wish to extend the national graveyard. And I propose that there shall be no corner of heaven without a nest of Spanish thought.

Nests of Spanish thought are the pieces which compose this book.

And now I return to contemplate the sea, to feed my spirit upon it, to watch its white-crested waves which are born and die and succeed one another like the generations of men and of men’s works in the sea of history. I return to contemplate the all-consoling sea{ix} which smiles, with its superhuman smile, upon our tragic human frailties.

Greeting! my readers of the English-speaking world. And when, having read this book, you wish me farewell, may you carry with you something of the quixotesque passion which I have put into my work and which is the life of my life.

Miguel de Unamuno.

Fuerteventura,

June 6, 1924.

Later. This from William James

The human mind, however, is constituted on an entirely different plan. It has no such power of universal intuition. Its finiteness obliges it to see but two or three things at a time. If it wishes to take wider sweeps it has to use 'general ideas,' as they are called, and in so doing to drop all concrete truths.

 The human mind is essentially partial. It can be efficient at all only by picking out what to attend to, and ignoring everything else,—by narrowing its point of view. 

It is, then, a necessity laid upon us as human beings to limit our view. In mathematics we know how this method of ignoring and neglecting quantities lying outside of a certain range has been adopted in the differential calculus. The calculator throws out all the 'infinitesimals' of the quantities he is considering. He treats them (under certain rules) as if they did not exist. In themselves they exist perfectly all the while; but they are as if they did not exist for the purposes of his calculation. Just so an astronomer, in dealing with the tidal movements of the ocean, takes no account of the waves made by the wind, or by the pressure of all the steamers which day and night are moving their thousands of tons upon its surface. Just so the marksman, in sighting his rifle, allows for the motion of the wind, but not for the equally real motion of the earth and solar system. Just so a business man's punctuality may overlook an error of five minutes, while a physicist, measuring the velocity of light, must count each thousandth of a second.

There are, in short, different cycles of operation in nature; different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of one another, so that what goes on at any moment in one may be compatible with almost any condition of things at the same time in the next. The mould on the biscuit in the store-room of a 
man-of-war vegetates in absolute indifference to the nationality of the flag, the direction of the voyage, the weather, and the human dramas that may go on on board; and a mycologist may study it in complete abstraction from all these larger details. Only by so studying it, in fact, is there any chance of the mental concentration by which alone he may hope to learn something of its nature. On the other hand, the captain who in manoeuvring the vessel through a naval fight should think it necessary to bring the mouldy biscuit into his calculations would very likely lose the battle by reason of the excessive 'thoroughness' of his mind.

The causes which operate in these incommensurable cycles are connected with one another only if we take the whole universe into account. For all lesser points of view it is lawful—nay, more, it is for human wisdom necessary—to regard them as disconnected and irrelevant to one another.

Inspired by LDV

Beauty

Proportion. Balance. Restraint.

Harmony

Quiet simplicity

Intellectual high aspirations, stretching full like in dance (in everyday language, elevating, freeing, finding the high and good in self and other mirrors). Like in dance finding yourself in poses and actions that enliven something, beyond the daily you, in a stretch aspirations to the high way, a sense of achievement way, a positive fresh way.

Clarity. Perspective. Complex arrangements held together simply

..

This is the state, above stated. The path is perhaps always the simplest. Begin where you are. Do well at whatever is in front of you. Try to find the best in yourself and anyone you happen to interact with. But first, and first, take care of yourself, lift yourself up, get up if you fall, and that is plenty and more than enough. 

In simpler words, take care of yourself, take care of your surrounds, stretch and joy, good cheer and warmth.

LDV's practice for a little bit in a bigger painting.

All is vibration, at different frequency

 

On further exploration, I understand electrons vibrate at a yet higher frequency than Gamma Rays, perhaps where waves become particles of sorts. Or come across to other waves as some solid thing which they can't penetrate. And then perhaps perhaps - yet to look up, imaginative leaps, Quarks are yet higher frequencies blocking out electrons, pushing them away from protons, the energy creating a field of sorts, and perhaps it goes on like that. Perhaps all these are vibrations in something which we do not grasp, and because it is dark to us, we call it dark (like the way human brain works at times/ nonsensical). It might be the most brilliant thing ever. Anyway all hypothetical. The fascinating thing is how different frequencies are perceived by life as different inputs to construcing a reality in the mind.

Where to comes the energy for these vibrations? Whatever were energy? How come these ripples in something that is dark, or is bright? Rain on a quiet ocean? Rippling and changing frequencies of vibrations? Music of some meister?

*

Whatever were time? Can it ever be separate from observer, or consciousness? Is there anything objective at all? Absolute? But then it would need words to define it, it would be all, all in all. Words, like time perhaps exist in this subset, where consciousness lives. Words yet a subset, trying to grasp reality. But the moment intent leaves them, they fall like dead leaves.

Floating lands

Wondering, if there were some alien intelligence who thought or perceived at our dimensions and wavelengths, and if they did a fly-by 200 million years ago, and if they were to see Earth today, they probably will find an all newly arranged planet - very different from their notes, if they kept any. Wonder if they would still call it the same?

The high in everyone

I sometimes think that good, high quality infographics are a really beautiful way of knowledge transfer. But making one requires a level of mastery and understanding of the subject, and some sort of joy in the endeavor which expresses itself as beauty of the infographic. I often visit Visual Capitalist, Our World in Data for understanding the world through infographics. But one of the best places to find the most beautiful ones is Information is Beautiful.

Here, following is one inspiring one:

From here.

Reiji Hiramatsu

 

Poppies and museum under the moon（2011）

Looking up Google Arts and Culture, browsing around a particular shade, I came across a painting by Reiji Hiramatsu, who lives and paints in Japan. 

I found this one very beautiful, and so are his other works. Here, on his website, and here, on google arts and culture.