Imagine

Once the human mind arrived upon the scene, heaven and earth shrank to make room for imagination.

Starry Night

I've always viewed Starry Night with joy and excitement, never as disturbing or terrifying, for the painting combines the night sky out there with the night sky in here (mind). The feelings of excitement of say a Hubble photograph sometime cannot be seen in the photograph alone (one often adds words and statistics to create the excitement, of course an image in hand of countless galaxies as tiny swirls needs the added knowledge that in fact these tiny swirls are say, 100,000 light years across in diameter, or 587,862,537,318,360,800 mile across). So I think that is when artists are at their best, when they can take that excitement that dwells in the mind and add it to the images on the canvas, and so van Gogh's night sky swirls with excitement -- without a fact or statistic needed.

Addendum
I also see the 'dualing' images 'pointing' to the heavens, the 'natural' cypress and the 'symbolic' church steeple, and too, some speculate this connection to Joseph in Genesis 37:9

"And he dreamed yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me."

Sometimes

Sometimes I know what I know and other times I know what I don't know and frequently I don't know what I know and more often than not I don't know what I don't know.

Trees, forests, and sounds

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" But of course it produces what we call sound waves, but then we normally think of sound as being a tango between two, that which produces sound waves and that which can sense and make sense of the produced waves. Our brains can make sense of the sound of the tree falling via the ears, as well a tape recorder in the forest could record the sound waves, yet the making sense of the sensed sound waves needs an intelligence, and that being the brain that listens via the ears to the tape recording of the sound waves that the fallen tree produced. But without any sensors to translate the waves into 'sounds', then I'm afraid the tree falling in the forest will produce only waves that are not sensed -- a solo tango-ist. Surely the waves from the fallen tree existed, but did 'sound' too exist? Or, as George Berkeley said, "Esse est percipi" -- to be is to be perceived.

The nature of nature

Nature as evidenced by our ongoing understanding of evolution is a forever progression of change, neither good nor bad, neither progression nor recession, yet always locked in time and space, its playground. We of minds have two choices, be children of nature or be children of thought. Most chose the mind (usually by the default of evolution and tradition), and so construct sense from a surrounding nature that knows not sense. Good/bad now can become real in the mind(s) of humans, this and other concepts are constructed within, yet not found without. Nature ignorant of such non-material matters, matters that only reside within skulls, and as far as we know, found nowhere in that night sky, nor anywhere among those fuzzy yet colorful blotches populating each of those amazing Hubble snapshots. But in the end, amazing to us only, for nature is dumb to it all.
 

Vexing words

With hammer in one hand and tongs in the other, gripping another vexing word, another of those misformed words that needs but the smite of my hammer to enform it to its should be shape, and smite I do, and to my amazement that thought to be iron-like word, that word that in my mind had but one shape, yielded to my smite, not like red-hot iron, but like clay, willing, if not eager, to mold to my mind, or to any mind, and assume a new guise, for that was its soul, to mean whatever like-minded minds wanted it to mean, and always ready to change, from this to that, and not from hammer beats, but from minds, minds that are ever reshaping the world, with its words.

The Nature of Art

I find both these artists of extreme interest, both are not only inspired by nature, but use the stuff of nature to 'construct' their work, and the results are what I'd call meditations on beauty that provoke the mind to pay attention! What do you think? Please leave a comment.

Nils-Udo

Andy Goldsworthy

Books, Honey, and We

I love the feel of a 'real' book, especially those printed before 1950 or so, those printed with 'hot type' where real lead type 'kisses' the ink to real paper pages, and if you look closely, those lead 'kisses' left behind a slight impression on each page. All this tactile pleasure I think is similar to a Jewish tradition of when a young child is first introduced to the Bible, a drop of honey is placed on the first page of the Torah, then the teacher or parent tells the child to lick the honey from the page, and forever more in the memory is the sensation that God's 'Word' is sweet.

And now we have come to a time when traditional paper and ink books are being replaced by electronic books. Even though I decry that time when traditional books will be no more, I have to admit that perhaps I'm not seeing the bigger picture, the bigger picture of what exactly is a book?

I think as we humans evolved, we more and more created things that became extensions of our senses, such as telescopes and microscopes to extend the range of our eyes, or every sort of audio device to gather and funnel every sort of sound wave to fit into our ears. And so books too extend our memory by solidifying thoughts by using a progression of symbols that the last of which are the printed words on paper. Yet perhaps the electronic page is a giant leap forward in that thoughts are not only solidified, but like the mind, are searchable. Ink on paper symbols need to be searched by the eyes in a very linear fashion, whereas electronic 'words' can be searched by the CPU, the 'brain' of the computer, in the blink of an eye.

Yet I find all of this so ironic, it is as though we have evolved over countless time with a very simple goal, that of recreating what is already here -- We.

Angels

An angel can illuminate the thought and mind of man by strengthening the power of vision.
--Thomas Aquinas

I would think angels are all about imagination, and so again the mind can take in the entire universe and still have room to create another, and another...

To Dis Appear

We of life, the living atop the evolutionary creative mechanism, humans, with minds that can create the universe within our many skulls, create a collectively unique universe, each mind similar enough in matter and design, design by what we call evolution, similar in sensors, in scale, so that we can collectively experience similar views, views constructed in our many minds, yet the constructed universe (the all) that is in our skulls is ours, and ours alone. This uniquely constructed universe in our minds exists only in our minds, in our collective human minds, for without a human mind (and all those brain/minds that are evolutionary less developed than humans, for they too view this universe in our uniquely mind-constructed way), this universe that we think we know would disappear -- vanish when the last mind is no more. Oh yes, you may think that time and matter and atoms and stars and galaxies will still exist, but certainly not in the way that our uniquely evolved sensors and minds have created them to appear.

Maybe this, maybe that

"Life in Universe - rare or unique? I walk both sides of that street. One day I can say that given the 100 billion stars in our galaxy and the 100 billion or more galaxies, there have to be some planets that formed and evolved in ways very, very like the Earth has, and so would contain microbial life at least. There are other days when I say that the anthropic principal, which makes this universe a special one out of an uncountably large number of universes, may not apply only to that aspect of nature we define in the realm of physics, but may extend to chemistry and biology. In that case life on Earth could be entirely unique."

--Carl Woese, Microbiologist

Our Unique Universe

And without the "I" all the other ceases to exist in the unique human brain/mind way, for no other life form has the exact same sensors as well as the unique way that humans unscramble the sensor data and reconstructing it "ALL" in the brain and thereby allowing the mind to take a stab at making sense of it all. And the sense it does make, is a unique sense, unique to how the human brain evolved and how it gave up much of the innate for the malleable, an infant brain "needs" to be shaped, shaped from the inside as well as the "outside" -- by the collective history of the entire universe.

Between Heaven and Earth

Musing on a hot summer day

I imagine that when the human brain evolved into a mind that could understand "love," "graciousness," and "justices" (and project those attributes onto a Creator that they could now think the originator of these positive attributes), this "new creature" observed and reasoned and also came to understand "jealousy," "anger," "hate," and "violence" and further understood that some attributes are positive to peace and tranquility, while others are negative. From all that came a new concept called values -- agreed upon positive behavior that could provide the most peace and tranquility to the most folks. A new tool -- common values -- allowed humans to move from the natural to the artificial with a degree of peace and tranquility, even when living in the most unnatural of settings, towns and cities.

YHWH

Physicists come up with words like, 'quark' (lifted from James Joyce) or 'charm' or 'up' or 'down' while theologians come up with words like tetragrammaton. That for how the Hebrew scribes penned the 'unpennable' or the 'unspeakable': YHWH. Four Hebrew consonants, and the 'missing' vowels. Without the 'missing' vowels, the 'word' is unpronounceable, or more likely, not to be uttered by humans. Even the modern-day Hebrew scribe writes in English: G-D. Yet most do utter YHWH, guessing with Yahweh and even further guessing at the unknown vowels and coming up with Yehovah or Jehovah. It is as though the original Hebrew scribes captured in writing the essence of the mystery of what most today, cannot imagine. For we simply utter God, or god, without a thought to the sacredness of our utterance.

New beginnings

Religion imagines;
Science reveals.
Together.
A journey begins.

Nature proclaiming

There is not a flower that opens, not a seed that falls into the ground, and not an ear of wheat that nods on the end of its stalk in the wind that does not preach and proclaim the greatness and the mercy of God to the whole world.

--Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

Hmmm, and what would Michael Jackson say?

Well, he did say a few things.

“In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.”

“The meaning of life is contained in every single expression of life. It is present in the infinity of forms and phenomena that exist in all of creation.”

Along the path

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."
--Lao Tzu

Just musing

I think that humans discover, assemble, or create in the limited sense that they assemble the tinker toys (as Chet Raymo has referred to all the stuff the universe is made of, the building block elements) in new and unique ways. All of God's tinker toys were here way before 5 billion years ago, all with their 'built-in' potential, potential to assemble and make more complex stuff, that which too with potential for ever increasing complexity. So do humans really create? Perhaps in a limited sense, for without the Tinker Toy set, humans are without. Are physics and mathematics creations of humans? Is the ability of a life form to think abstractly when seeing 4 objects, then looking at the hand and holding 4 fingers up, and understanding that apart from objects and fingers, 'four' is something unto itself. Living in a world full of discrete objects, being able to group similar objects and using an abstract idea (numbers) to hold/memorize a particular 'group' would have great evolutionary advantage to that creature that discovers this 'trick' -- a trick that resides only in the brain/mind.