Beauty, Symmetry, Truth

Dawn today

 Closing the back cover of wonderful books opens a delicious sigh: what next… Mark Taylor’s Picture in Question (see previous blog) gives a clue near his conclusion:

“Tansey finds in complexity theory a way to understand the intricate diversity of the networks within which we are forever caught. Different systems structured in different ways act and interact differently to produce the inescapable timely rhythms of life. The sites of these interactions are something like interfaces, which mark transitions between different phases of life. Life is neither totally ordered nor completely chaotic but is always lived at the edge of chaos. In figuring complexity, Tansey figures what can never be completely figured and thus must forever be refigured.”  p. 127, Mark C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation.

Hmmm…consider chaos/complexity theory. A second book I’d been reading alongside Picture in Question which I also just completed (as if a good read is ever done with) is Julian Hartt’s Theological Method and Imagination. His final chapter, “Story as the Art of Historical Truth,” also suggest direction:

“This does not mean that everything believed—and hated/cherished—to have happened actually happened. Indeed we learn over and over again how memory and story have warped the facts. But the corrections which matter most, in respect to history, are not corrections in fact-determinations. Leave those to the mole historians. In respect to historicality the decisive corrections are all personal, perceptual, dispositional. Can one come to accept the story? Can one come to see that it is one’s own story, that one’s own reality is contained in it? Can one come to see that one’s reality is not a product, a mechanical toss-off, of the past? Can one come to see that one is an actor in the story? For rightly to tell it is to reenact it passionally.” p 245, Theological Method and Imagination, Julian N. Hartt

Dawn today 2

With such guidance in mind and after considering the array of volumes around my desks, the winner is: Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design. Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 and has an earlier book Longing for the Harmonies. Opening pages are very promising:

“The new concept of reality…is that the primary ingredients of physical reality are not point-like particles, but rather space-filling fields. The new method is inspired guesswork. [emphasis in original]…

But what is the physicist’s ‘inspired guesswork’ inspired? Logical consistency is necessary, but hardly sufficient. Rather it was beauty and symmetry that guided Maxwell and his followers—that is, all modern physicists—closer to truth… [Maxwell’s] work, by clarifying the limits of perception, allows us to transcend those limits [of sensory experience]. For the ultimate sense-enhancing device is a searching mind.”  p. 7, Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design

Dawn today...

 

Framing Presence and Absence

October 18, Good Morning

Midway in Mark C. Taylor’s The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & the Ends of Representation, the dialectical wonder around presence and absence lightens shadows and complicates the clear. Might we draw closer to God, the Great Unknowable, as these phenomena happen? Again, the ever-present longing: Love, beauty, freedom, justice, truth. Perhaps we only have dissolving frames, another way of imaging. Taylor explores the artistic erasure of the picture: Is God more present in the admission of absence?

Before I press the shutter, I’m less moved to erase frames. To wonder and wander into depths of “reality,” perhaps the telephone pole belongs (possible reminder of a cross), the bumper of my 15-year-old car belongs in the edging of today’s glorious sunrise, including the glass and screen in the window allows the reflection of my partner in the pre-dawn display of autumn leaves. 

We’ve contemplated long on the life task of containing opposites. The yes and no. Life and death. Light and dark. Presence and absence.

God forbids making images, idols… Yet we’re said to be made in God’s image…and advised to know oneself is to know one’s Lord. There might also be comfort in considering God’s anger at idol-makers and in dealing with our feelings concerning the violence and craziness in living today…

“ A jealous God authorizes no delegates and sanctions neither representatives nor representations. ‘The uniqueness and unicity of God,’ as Peggy Kamuf observes, ‘must forever prevent His appearance through any kind of substitute, any doubling of the eternal One and the Same. God, who is unique and uniquely the one who is, cannot tolerate a double, a replacement, a representative.’ Always beyond reason as well as the imagination, the jealous God cannot be figured.” [p. 71 in Taylor; quoting Kamuf from A Derrida Reader, xxiii.]

Thus humbled and leaning thru sight and blindness…

Picture-taking & the Ecstatic

    Winnowing reflections on this first day of September, wondering what’s wanting to be drawn from the seine, like the folks fishing watch as water flows from their nets…Why not stand beside them, wondering if Jesus has spoken? And the term “Ekstasis” flits up in the mind with an uncertain recollection of where I was reading about it.  The book was probably giving the root of the term “ecstasy,” thus suggesting it has to do with positioned beside or outside oneself.  I’m not finding the place where I was reading but it probably came from one of these:

     Anyway, the point is that this magnetic attraction toward the ecstatic inclines us, sometimes with a more emphatic shove, toward realizing the divine alongside the everyday. Perhaps some of us need it, certainly I want the push toward increased awareness. How easy and how unfortunate it is to miss the sacred as it disappears due to unholy distraction. How often the visitation gone. The missing not even noticed.

     The picture shown above came through the default editing of the camera shutter this way:

Re-editing the image

happens partly because I walk outside most morning, predawn, and imagine how the darkish horizon might be imagined if I just attend further into the shadows, 

venturing through the invitation of foggy places, hoping with the early sunlight that bends over while mostly unseen, as if asking one to see through the veils. How might we move closer to the Presence? 

Messages from the mystics often feature “attending,” “interpretation,” entering the dark and/or silence. To stand beside, to experience the ecstatic, especially in the more subtle vibrations, might require “slow art.” The opportunity is to extend looking, to intensify attention, to open imagination, to go further than the default experience given by “normal” “default” time and space.

The framing and focus on my horizon has been re-set-ing through readings as well as in picture-taking and editing. Arden Reed in Slow Art (pp 120-121) quotes historian Jonathan Crary (Suspensions of Perception) who quotes William James (Principles of Psychology): 

In fact, Crary argues, attention and distraction came to define the modern self. For the psychologist William James (1842-1910) experience itself was not given but formed through acts of attention. He explained in painterly language: ‘Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses in ways which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to … Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground…Without it…consciousness…would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.’

For more of this excerpt from William James, Chapter XI, The Principles of Psychology, 1890, please see: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin11.htm 

      From the closing pages of Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams asserts: “Nature photographers particularly need to widen their subject matter if they are to help us find again the affection for life that is the only sure motive for continuing the struggle toward a decent environment” (p. 103). I’m also being moved by reading Denise Levertov. 

      In addition to picture-taking and editing, my response led to this draft:

The point obscure.

   Like ecstasy, likely obsessive. 

Direction? Where the center,

   illumination? 

Maybe the draw

   not to beauty nor truth. 

Separate no one

   from the ninety nine. 

Just attend with a sixth 

   or further 

sense toward the unknown,

   the Unknowable. 

Focus for the whispered 

   hint, the inaudible 

“Good enough”—

 

The Whole World

Today looking east

In the opening pages of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology, Douglas Christie quotes the source of the title: 

When the mind has put off the old self and shall put on the one born of grace, then it will see its own state in the time of prayer resembling sapphire or the color of heaven; this state scripture calls the place of God that was seen by the elders on Mount Sinai. --Evagrius of Pontus 

This compelling book culminated for me, fittingly, in the closing chapter with its focus on “Practicing Paradise.” The capacity to revision paradise developed through a recurring theme related to the ecstatic, which connects with those special moments in the mystical journey and yet must not be cut off from everyday experience in nature. 

… we come to know ourselves in relation to the living world. Ecstasy begets intimacy, an intimate knowledge that can come to us only through relinquishment of a narrow, bounded self and an openness to an ever-emerging sense of participation in a larger whole. Attention to these moments when such ecstatic expansion occurs can quicken and deepen one’s sensitivity to the world, can open one to the possibility of a continuous exchange, an ever-more encompassing exchange. (p. 235) 

 We must honor and suffer our deep inner truth while also feeling and engaging our interconnectedness with the whole world, with all people and the rest of creation. Thoreau and Merton are frequently referenced for illustration and modeling. Considerable attention is also given to Denise Levertov, Czeslaw Milosz, Simone Weil, and others to show the way while leaving space for the necessary individual design and fit. 

      While the up-side of the path brightens the way, the essential passage through darkness must not be diminished. The next to last chapter “Kenosis: Empty, Emptied” attends significantly to affliction. “Mysticism must rest on crystal-clear honesty, can only come after things have been stripped down to their naked reality” (p. 283, quoting Etty Hillesum). Extending from the work of Simone Weil, Christie asserts “Healing and renewal and hope can issue forth from such contemplative practice; but the practice itself cannot be predicated upon expectation of them. One is called to remain empty, open, alert, always attentive to the presence of the other, particularly the suffering other” (p. 287). 

      With this inclusive acceptance of the whole, both the light and the dark, Paradise shifts to a texture that may be more complex and yet more real, perhaps more accessible. After all, didn’t the Garden of Eden include the serpent as well as the apple, nakedness as well as fig leaves, the self encountering the Other. The closing pages of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind encourage us to constitute a restructuring of paradise that empowers resistance to the destruction of our healthy space for living. 

It seems increasingly clear that we need the language of paradise to help us feel and understand the enormity of what we have lost and what we might yet recover. Which is why the personal accounts of engagement with paradise—lost, broken, renewed—remain so important to the larger work of healing the world (p. 348).

Today looking north

Wake-Up Call

Sunset Last Night

Imagine attending each moment, as if looking back from beyond, clenched from after-death, certain this “now” is the last, the perfection; imagine the shaking free, like a golden retriever with an over-wet stick fetched from the river of life. 

“But if you escape from these dark places

And come to rebehold the beautiful stars…

The presence of the divine does not lead to contempt for the world. The divine is understood, essentially, as the end (or the destination) of everything. And the things that have been lost, the things one knows one must lose, the friends, the houses: all of it is loved all the more intensely. Death exists in order to stamp out the satisfaction of possession, which debases things. 

   (p. 257 in Notes, The Unforgiveable and Other Writings by Christina Campo, translated by Alex Andriesse and introduction by Kathryn Davis).

“Campo was born with a congenital cardiac malformation, the very condition she claims caused her to be thrown into the ‘thick of [her] own destiny,’ her deformity elevated into an unusual kind of power, the ‘ability to penetrate impenetrable places.’” (Davis, Introduction, p. viii) 

Imagine holding the presence of death, head-on, eyes wide-open, possessions cast-off, and thereby living free of distractions with intensity through this heightened sense of destiny! The key possession: keen focus, alert for the golden gate confronting any who dare to see, who dare to enter the divine which may never be undone. 

Else the fear of death goes slaying, at least wounding life, stripping off awareness, then high-gloss lacquering over deep-knowing, alike crimson lipstick depriving true taste, faking ecstasy. Like choosing Solomon’s half-child instead of cohabiting loss. Go not unconscious into the last night; take not hand with death-fear. Shake free that shadow. Choose the dance. 

Antonio Machado put it best: “All Jesus’ words are one word: ‘Wake-Up!’” (As remembered from Robert Bly’s translation in Times Alone.) 

Also coming to mind from well over fifty years ago: Mom’s attempt to get her children ready for the school bus, best sung off-key: “Wake with the buttercup! Come on, Get up, GET UP. Rise with the sun. No more sleepy head. Time—Get-Out-of-Bed! [Or, if you must, try youtube’s Kate Smith - Here Comes the Sun (1930) (with lyrics).]

On a similar note, Douglas Christie tells of Thomas Merton’s late stage of life:

Merton was seeking not so much a new or different place (at least not for its own sake) as a renewed sense of his own deepest center… it was the interior change that mattered most… centering upon the elusive but necessary task of clarifying and deepening his quest for God.” 

(pp. 134-5 in The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology)

Death is just a wake-up call from God. 

Today's Sunrise

The Realm of Truth

July 11, 2025  2:31AM

In addition to the full moon, a different kind of “highlight” brightens retirement by shortening sleep and thus expanding “free time.” Nights become unpredictable and often consist of several, maybe three, two-hour sleep-segments that get interrupted by bathroom breaks, legs cramping, head congestion (which thereby justifies a 3-4AM coffee break), then (not surprisingly) wide-awake hours spent reading… Anyway, since there’s no longer the eight-hour+/- workday, why live by that old eight-hour sleep rule? After all, the shorter night-sleep justifies a delicious “short” nap in the afternoon or possibly even late morning.

        Besides, doesn’t the Good Book say: “the spirit goeth where it listeth,” suggesting that the body/mind/heart followeth. [Before anyone objects, be advised that the corrected quotation is coming up soon.]

        Another justification: Paradoxical teachings appear to make more sense after midnight and before dawn light. Having been given this after-age-seventy dispensation, perhaps it’s allotted in order to attend to such mysteries. 

pre-dawn today 5:49A

        One of those pre-dawn readings (probably from William Johnston’s Mystical Theology: The Science of Love) explained the origin of “mystical” as coming from mystery. (Duh.) And the abundant genre of mystery deserves top rating and needs extra time. This is not to detract from increasing dedication properly devoted to mysticism.

       One unsolved puzzle that has particularly been stirred up by recent readings concerns the text referenced above, that which “bloweth where it listeth.” The specific text is John 3:8, but the extended passage also needs consideration. If we enter the text at verse five, Jesus answers Nicodemus, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” 

        The Mystery, a vital one that builds with increasing significance as life in this world moves ahead toward the finish line, wonders about the what, when, etc. of the full Realm of God. The text (John 3:6-12) continues with Jesus speaking:

   That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

   Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.

   The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

   Nicodemus answered and said unto him, How can these things be?

   Jesus answered and said unto him, Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?

   Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen; and ye receive not our witness.

   If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?

        For those of us “blessed” as heirs of the King James version (especially the “Lord’s prayer,” “Thy kingdom come…” Matt 6:10; “the kingdom of God is within you,” Luke 17:21; as well as “seek ye first the kingdom of God” Matt 6:33), the when? (now or later) along with the what/where/how? of this realm offers a recurrent mystery, and perhaps offers a key gateway into the Inarticulate, into more vital access to the space of Unknowing. 

        Of special relevance to this, Johnston gives extensive attention to The Cloud of Unknowing and to Saint John of the Cross. He also focuses on Jesus’ parables and elaborates Mark 4:11. “To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables…” Johnston continues, “What are these mysteries? What is the secret that the disciples alone can understand? The mystery is the kingdom of God.” (Mystical Theology p. 24).

     Regarding questions of this realm, I’m not sure who is to blame and/or give credit to for pushing me into the Gospel of Thomas, but thanks. That text opens with amazing invitations from/to the living Jesus. For example, from the first sayings:

“Seek and do not stop seeking until you find. When you find, you will be troubled. When you are troubled, you will marvel and rule over all. . .

the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and you are poverty.”

(Barnstone, Willis; Meyer, Marvin. The Gnostic Bible: Revised and Expanded Edition (pp. 44-45). (Function). Kindle Edition.)

And yet… this blessing seems to provide yet more mystery.

        In case anyone wants suggestions for wandering around in this wonder, texts I’ve consulted and found useful in this past year (often cited in previous entries) include Barbara Brown Taylor, Austen Farrer, Stanley Hauerwas, Rowan Williams, David Jasper, Robert Detweiler, C.H. Dodd, Thomas Altizer, Lissa McCullough, Nathan A. Scott, Jr., Mark C. Taylor, Norman Perrin, Brandon Bernard Scott, Karl Barth, Richard Valantasis, Soren Kierkegaard, and Bernard Lonegan. (This list doesn’t include the “escape” reading in mysteries and other fiction which might have played its own part.) Amazon/Goodreads also reminds me that I read Elaine Pagels’ Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas about a year ago, and so her writing might be blamed/credited. That’s enough for now. Of special significance, lifting off these texts particularly evident in the most recent readings from Lonergan’s Method in Theology and Johnston’s Mystical Theology is the gift of God’s love.

“… the First Epistle of St. John tells us that the one who loves knows God and the one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. Sacred Scripture does not say that the one who studies theology knows God, but the one who loves.

   The love of God, then, is poured into our hearts; we are united with God; we are one with God; and through this love comes the highest wisdom. . .

   God is known as unknown (quasi ignotus cognoscitur).

   God is known as mystery. (Mystical Theology p. 39)

today

Summer Bounty

 Abundant rainfall and mild temperatures make for a luscious spring. Strawberries are almost done but we're into the third decadent pie and other berries are on the way. Raspberries have just started as shown in pickings from the last two days overflowing the pint measure. The other item in the photo shows this morning's bread pudding--most of it anyway. The item is justified because it saves stale/sour bread/milk from waste. Also any fruit in the freezer that's left from last year can be used. This one has a cup or two of raspberries. The bread pudding is quick and easy to make in the microwave. Adapted from an on-line recipe:

Tear pieces of bread (about 4 cups) into microwave-save dish. Sprinkle brown sugar over the bread if needed. Raspberries benefit from sugar, maybe a half cup; peaches don't need it. Of course, this depends on how much ice cream you're going to put on the warm finished product. Add the fruit to the bread and a dash or two of salt. Then in a 4 cup glass measure pour 2 C milk and 1/4 C butter. Microwave the milk/butter to melt and when cool enough add 2 eggs. Mix it up and pour over the bread mixture.

Cook on medium high for 8-10 min or so. Wait as long as you can stand it and add ice cream. It's ok if it melts some. Yum.

Also for fun, visit those parks and museums. When you're out this way, try the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland. Here's Diana the huntress with her hound and admirer. They even had a Norman Rockwell amid a number of impressionist paintings.

Revelation: Resonance and Radiance

2AM or maybe three, with coffee in the dark. Notes from recent nights.

   Vibrations of sound and light offer guidance for travelers between the worlds. Solitude and silence mark access with entrances signaled and illuminated by the qualities of God, especially Beauty, Truth, Love. Those moments out-of-time whisper in silences soon past midnight, reverberating with “the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you...” (Rumi, of course) 

   Because Faces of the Divine reach beyond into the Unknown, the holy qualities shift with elusive forms, refusing to hold still while paradoxically affirming authenticity. 

   Resonance has become a closer friend over these seventy-eight years: Intimacy felt by absence as well as Presence; the sense of the vital-missing that leads most surely away from superficial enchantments--too material and too temporal. 

   The vibration, maybe that called “felt sense,” opens the boundary between worlds, becomes more hopefully trusting through repeated experiences in the beautiful/true/living that which awes/inspires/cares. It’s an intimate, interactive, almost unknowing, risky yet reassuring. 

   This texture knows loneliness and wishes for company in love, the textured kind that emanates from memoir—like when Mark Taylor writes of needing countryside instead of city, and my deep-knowing sighs. 

“Eventually, things reach the tipping point and more becomes different. Speed renders life ever more transient and thus increasingly ephemeral—everything solid melts into ether(nets). The proliferation of media, information, and telematic technologies in infinitely complex networks creates the new domain of cyberspace, where realities that are the ‘substance’ of our lives appear to vaporize and everything becomes virtual. In this placeless place so-called real time is no longer temporal yet not quite eternal. Glimpsing my face in Windows on terminal screens, I realize that I am no place, perhaps even nowhere.

   When real time interrupts ‘real time,’ the flow stops just long enough for me to realize that the time has come for me to return to the country.” (Mark C. Taylor, Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living, pp. 73-74)

In the countryside, Taylor writes and reflects in community with Kierkegaard, with his rock gardens, cites Melville, makes mind-pictures of wildflowers, clouds, reflects on memories. All this and more in order to amplify the knowingness of this text-ure-ing. And so my tipping-point nervousness recedes with the advent of such community, with Mark, reassuring and protective. I know in a way-not-known, by faith, by hope, by love. Tenuous. Scary. But enough, just enough. 

   Outside these windows, the view now blues, less gray, promising dawn, this hint of radiance. 

“‘God and the imagination,’ the poet Wallace Stevens avers, ‘are one.’ To appreciate this rich insight we must expand our notion of the imagination and transform our understanding of God. Wherever form emerges from formlessness or pattern appears in the midst of confusion, the imagination is at work. The imagination is not only within us but is also in the world around us. Theologians have had it wrong for centuries—God is the infinite process in and through which everything arises and passes away.” (Mark C. Taylor, Field Notes, p. 78)