Symmetrical
Snow Photographs
Homage to Alfred Stieglitz, Minor White,
the Equivalent photograph, and
the Equivalent photograph, and
composer Valentin Silvestrov
Introduction
The project before you, part 3 of the 4 part series as listed below, was revised and re-published on my blog in January 2020.
3 Symmetrical Snow Photographs : Homage to A Stieglitz, M White and V Silvestrov
4 Postlude To An Exhibition
This revised project consists of symmetrical photographs, transformed versions of selected straight photographs which appeared in the the second of the four projects: Snow Photographs : Homage to Harry Callahan and All My Teachers.
I have presented the symmetrical snow images, below, in two distinctly different sets. The second set of images has been identified with the title Inversions. The term refers to a technique which transforms an image tonally, turns the image "inside-out." For example, dark tones in the original image are turned into light tones; light tones in the original image are turned into dark tones; and colors undergo a color reversal as well (for example reds become greens, etc.).
The symmetrical photographs function for me as Symbols, a term I like to use that is closely related to the Equivalent photograph, a term first used in the history of photography by Alfred Stieglitz. After the presentation of the photographs I will write about Alfred Stieglitz and Minor White and their ideas about the photograph that functions as an Equivalent. I then conclude the project with an introduction to the music of composer Valentin Silvestrov and his ideas regarding Meta-Music (Metaphorical Music) and the Postlude.
The fourth and final project in this cycle of four related projects, Postlude To An Exhibition is a visual and written documentation of the mini retrospective exhibition presented at the Alice Wilds gallery in Milwaukee from March 17 - April 28, 2018. I revised that project in mid-January, 2020 as well. I included an Afterword which places the four part series of projects in context to important events that occurred in October, 20l9 at the Mid-West Conference of the Society of Photographic Education, which was held in Milwaukee.
The first project in the series of four related projects, The Rising Sun : Prelude To An Exhibition explains how the Alice Wilds retrospective exhibition came into being. It sets the stage for all that unfolded into the second, third and forth projects.
Symmetrical Snow Photographs
Re-Visions of images published in my previous project:
"Snow Photographs : Homage to Harry Callahan
and All My Teachers"
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Image #1
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Image #2
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Image #3
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Image #4
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Image #5
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Image #6
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Image #7
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Image #8
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Image #9
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Image #10
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Image #11
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Image #12 "Blue Pearl"
Inversions
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Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Inversion, Image #13
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Inversion, Image #14
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Inversion, Image #15
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Inversion, Image #16
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Inversion, Image #17
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Inversion, Image #18
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Inversion, Image #19
Symmetrical Snow Photograph ~ Inversion: Image #20 "The Golden Rising Sun"
The
Equivalent
and the
Postlude
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Homage to
Minor White
Alfred Stieglitz
Valentin Silvestrov
In Postlude To An Exhibition, the final project in a series of four projects related to the mini retrospective exhibition at the Alice Wilds gallery in Milwaukee (March 17 - April 28, 2018) I quoted Mary Lousie Schumacher, Art Critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who stated in her Art City blog entry for Friday, April 21, 2018 that I was a "student of Minor White." Then during one of the gallery talks I gave at the Alice Wilds someone asked me about my experience with Minor White. I want to take this opportunity to elaborate on that question.
Minor White
I studied with Minor White one semester only (in 1965) at the Rochester Institute of Technology, just before he left Rochester to set up a photography program at MIT. I was a sophomore at the time, and Minor's course (I think it was titled "Visual Communications") was required for the "fine arts"/ Illustration sub-major of RIT's photography program.
Well before taking Minor's class I had discovered Aperture, the fine arts photography quarterly at the RIT bookstore. Minor was one of the founding members of the quarterly and its editor. I had met some serious photography students at RIT who had studied with Minor, and we talked together quite a lot about Minor, his work and teaching. By the time I could finally take his course I was very excited to do so; Minor had achieved legendary status before he left Rochester, and was one of the new "Masters of Photography," at least in the world of "creative photography."
One of the first issues of Aperture I purchased (in 1963) after becoming a Freshman Photography Major at RIT was devoted entirely to Alfred Stieglitz. That special issue (8:1, 1960) and Minor White's essay Equivalence: The Perennial Trend were important influences on me as a budding young artist, even before I attended Minor's class.
Minor projected a lot of charisma as a teacher; indeed he seemed to want to be perceived as a kind of guru. He took on private students who lived with him at 72 N. Union St., above a hardware store, and assisted him in various house-keeping, publishing and photographic chores. He also held "print sessions" at his home on some Friday nights--by invitation only. It was an honor to be invited, and when I heard that one of my friends was invited to a print session I was hugely disappointed that I hadn't been invited as well. I asked my friend if ever he was invited again, would he please ask permission to bring me along to the session? My friend agreed, and later I was allowed to attend a print session.
That turned out to be a very disappointing experience for me, however. As the evening progressed (people in attendance would take turns sharing their perceptions, feelings, ideas, etc. about selected photographs on display for that purpose) Minor continued to drink more and more alcohol . . . until he became noticeably intoxicated. His talking became blurred, and at one point he became quite sad and teary-eyed.
It was obvious to me that Minor was a suffering soul. But seeing him in this way made me lose trust in him as a teacher. It brought up in me painful memories of my stepfather who often drank and gambled on Friday nights after work, often not coming home first or even calling my mother to let her know where he was.
I now have more understanding and compassion for what Minor must have been going through then, and certainly I acknowledge and appreciate Minor's contribution to photography as a fine art medium. He had a true and very intense commitment to the medium, and to photographic education; he made some very powerful images that resonate for me even today; and his Aperture publications are an enormously important contribution to the history of what he called "creative photography" or camera work (after the "Photographic Quarterly" of the same name which Alfred Stieglitz published from 1903-1917). Though Minor spoke often about "spirit" and transcendence in relation to photographic practice, I have often found that too much of his work was overly preoccupied with his own personal sufferings and struggle. I had been looking for a True teacher (though I didn't realize it until 1987), and probably a "father" because when I was ten years my father died, and as I have indicated earlier there were trust issues with my step father. So I tended to "test" many of the teachers I had direct contact with, and pretty much everyone disappointed in one way or another.
At last, in 1987 my wife, Gloria and I met Gurumayi Chivilasananda. Gurumayi is a yogic saint, a True guru, or Sadguru. Gloria and I have studied Siddha Yoga Meditation with Gurumayi for over thirty years now. Her grace, her teachings and the Siddha Yoga practices--all have been deeply meaningful and transformative for both of us. We have found Siddha Yoga to be a True Path. I am grateful to Minor White for the role he played in my search for a True teacher.
Alfred Stieglitz, the Equivalent and the Symbolic Photograph
I am also grateful to Minor White for introducing me to Alfred Stieglitz and the idea of the Equivalent photograph. For Stieglitz, Truth and equality were of the utmost essence, and the key to a photograph that functioned as an equivalent. Stieglitz wrote:
All true art is a picture to me--an equivalent
of a supreme order.
Where there is no equality of respect,
there can be no true relationship.
All true things are equal to one another.
The 1960 Aperture issue entitled Alfred Stieglitz - Introduction to an American Seer (number 8:1) was I believe largely responsible for setting me on a very clear and dedicated path to becoming an artist-photographer. The issue was written and compiled by Dorothy Norman, who met Stieglitz in 1927 and thereafter began making notes of her impressions of him and everything he said whenever they were together. The Stieglitz photographs and direct quotations she included in her Aperture monograph definitely awakened something deep inside me which has continued to grow and evolve over the past fifty plus years. Here are some of my favorite quotes attributed to Stieglitz by Dorothy Norman in the 1960 issue of Aperture:
There seemed to be something closely related to my deepest feelings
in what I saw, and I decided to photograph what was within me.
If one believes in something sufficiently, one will find
a form through which to create what one must . . .
Photography brings what is not visible to the surface.
Beauty is the Universal seen.
I wanted to photograph clouds to find out
what I had learned in 40 years about photography.
Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life--to show
that my photographs were not due to subject matter--
not to special trees, or faces, or interiors, to
special privileges--clouds were there
for everyone--no tax as yet
on them--free.
Alfred Stieglitz 1931 Equivalent
I feel the duality of world forces forever at work.
But it is when conflict hovers about a point
--a focal point--and light is in the
ascendancy, that
I am moved.
It is not the mere hitting of the target that interests me.
But rather the hitting of the center of the center
of the bull's eye. And then the point
even beyond that.
If one cannot lose oneself to something beyond one,
one is bound to be disappointed.
If what one makes is not created with a sense of sacredness,
a sense of wonder; if it is not a form of love-making
. . . it has no right to be called
a work of art.
All art is but a picture of certain basic relationships;
an equivalent of the artist's most profound experiences of life.
All true art is a picture to me--an equivalent
of a supreme order.
Where there is no equality of respect,
there can be no true relationship.
All true things are equal to one another.
When an artist finds his own truth, he will find that it fits in with
traditional truths, for traditional truths are but truths that
have endured over a long period of time. . . . as each
speaks his own truth from the depths of his own
experience, it must automatically be in the
great tradition of truth . . . It is this that
I mean in spirit when I say all true
things are equal to each other.
I refuse to identify seeing with knowing. Seeing
signifies awareness resulting from inner experience.
To see, means to know that one does not know, yet not be ignorant.
And then to act in the light of one's knowledge. To learn
signifies nothing unless what one claims to have
learned is transformed into act.
For me, all lived moments are equally true, equally important.
Thus, only in being true to all moments can one be true to any.
When I am no longer thinking, but simply am,
then I may be said to be truly affirming life.
Not to know, but to let exist what is,
that alone, perhaps,
is truly to know.
All quotes attributed to Alfred Stieglitz in Aperture 8:1, 1960 by D. Norman
The concept of the equivalent was essential to my development of the idea of the photograph that functions as a symbol. The symbolic photograph is an image which conjoins coinciding inner and outer images into a transcendent image of the Imaginal world, that is to say an image of Unitary Reality. Stieglitz said: To see means to know that one does not know, yet not be ignorant. / Seeing signifies awareness resulting from inner experience. These statements relate directly to yogic teachings I have studied and my idea of the symbol. For me a symbol is an image that invokes meaning of an order that transcends mere intellectual knowledge. (Indeed Jung himself said that a symbol was "the best possible expression for something unknown.") For me, symbols give visual form to an ineffable realm of being, a realm of meaning which transcends form, language, the known.
This transcendent realm of being and meaning, though nameless, un-seeable, and unknowable, nonetheless has many Names: it has been called God, Shiva, Guru, the Tao, the divine Self. Jung wrote in great depth about the Self, which for him was the goal of the psychotherapeutic process he developed; and the Self was also synonymous with the goal of the ancient alchemical processes Jung studied and wrote about in depth, a psycho-physical process which was symbolized by the transformation of base metals into gold.
The goal of the yogic practices is a direct and sustained identity or immersion in the divine Self, the Absolute, that which--according to the Guru Gita, is said to be beyond understanding, beyond form, and yet paradoxically it is that which takes the form of this entire universe. True Yogic Saints and Sadgurus live in the constant and conscious awareness of their union or Oneness with the Creative Power of the Universe, the divine Self.
Some of of Stieglitz's comments suggests an awareness of this kind of transcendence. For example:
It is not the mere hitting of the target that interests me.
But rather the hitting of the center of the center
of the bull's eye. And then the point
even beyond that.
This statement resonates with the philosophical ideas of Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, and with the infinitely beautiful Traditions of Sacred Geometry which is at the very heart of Islamic Sacred Art which I first became aware of in 2011 when Gloria and I traveled to Turkey. I experienced a series of epiphanies in Turkey which initiated the making of "An Imaginary Book," the first of an ongoing series of Sacred Art Photography Projects. The following three paragraphs are taken from my Preface to "An Imaginary Book."
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The four-fold [symmetrical photographs] are quite literally a visualization of the primary Islamic doctrine, Oneness; the Unity of Being. At the pure center, or true heart of the symmetrical image where the four mirroring images have crystallized into one, there is the imaginary Point, that primordial mystery, the Origin from which all created things emerge.
The circle is the archetypal governing basis for all the geometric shapes that unfold within it . . . reflecting the unity of its original source, the point, the simple, self-evident origin of geometry and a subject grounded in mystery. The circle has always been regarded as a symbol of eternity, without beginning and without end, just being.
Keith Critchlow: Islamic Patterns
The Heart corresponds to the centre of the [Islamic] Garden, the point where grows the Tree of Life and where flows the Fountain of Life. The Heart is in fact nothing other than this Fountain. . . The extreme significance of this penultimate degree in the hierarchy of centers is that it marks the threshold of the Beyond, the point at which the natural ends and the supernatural or transcendent begins. The Heart is the 'isthmus' which is so often mentioned in the Qur'an as separating 'the two seas' which represent Heaven and earth. . . Moses says: 'I will not cease until I reach the meeting-place of the two seas.' He is formulating the initial vow that every mystic must make, implicitly if not explicitly, to reach the lost Centre which alone gives access to transcendent knowledge. In the Sufi's turning away from the world in the direction of the Heart . . . there lies a powerful discipline of consecration.
Martin Lings, What is Sufism?
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"Perceive the One that Exists in All"
After I completed the above section on Alfred Stieglitz and the Equivalent, Gloria and I participated in a wonderful audio program at the Rochester (N.Y.) Siddha Yoga Meditation Center entitled "Perceive the One that Exists in All." It was a program that explored the yogic teachings regarding Equal Vision. Shortly after the program began it struck me that I was being graced with yet another occurrence of synchronicity, for Stieglitz's idea of the Equivalent photograph and the yogic teachings regarding Equal Vision are essentially One and the same. As Stieglitz said "All true things are equal to one another."
Similarly the concept of Equality Awareness is summed up in these brief statements: "Shiva alone dwells equally within everything, and within each and every person." "Shiva exists within us, as us." "Nothing exists that is not Shiva."
When, with the help of grace, we transcend the separateness and limitedness of ego perception, when we "see beyond the center of the center of the bulls eye and the point even beyond that" we then are seeing the world through "Shiva's eyes," through the eyes of our own Divinity, through the eyes of our own Heart, our own inner Self. In this state of Equal Vision we experience the Oneness of God's Creation, and our union with all that is, and all that is not.
Each word the Swami spoke in the program "Perceive the One that Exists in All" seemed an affirmation of everything that I had come to understand about the relationship between my Creative Process in photography and my practice of Siddha Yoga Meditation. Gurumayi once said:
So many things happen on this inner journey. If you're courageous
you go through them . . . Then, finally, you come
face to face. You see the image of love,
of the Truth, of God. It's there,
it's really there. And
it's everywhere.
Gurumay Chidvilasananda
Published Talk, Darshan #105
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If what one makes is not created with a sense of sacredness,
a sense of wonder; if it is not a form of love-making
. . . it has no right to be called
a work of art.
Alfred Stieglitz
Valentin Silvestrov and his Postludial Music
Now I want share with you my enthusiasm for a living composer Valentin Silvestrov and his hauntingly mysterious, nostalgic and yet transcendently beautiful music. I find his ideas about Meta-Music and the Postlude close in spirit to the Equivalent. I first introduced Silvestrov's music in June, 2019 with the project Studies X : 24 Photographs ~ Meditations on "The Moment" ~ Homage to Valentin Silvestrov.
Silvestrov, a Ukrainian composer, born in Kiev in 1937, once famously stated: "I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists." Writers who try to explain Silvestrov's music almost always resort to metaphor, because Silvestrov's music, like Stieglitz's equivalent photographs, is about what is beyond language, what is not-sayable. For example, in an essay (click here) published on ECM's website, the writer Paul Griffiths defines Silvestrov's Postludial music as a "black lake" of time. In his liner notes for the ECM recording of Silvestrov's Rquiem for Larissa (Silvestrov's wife, who died early in life) Griffiths wrote:
The water barely moves; the past refuses to slide away; and the slow, irregular stirrings of an oar remain in place. Nothing is lost here. A melody, which will rarely extend through more than five or six notes, will have each of those notes sounding on, sustained by other voices or instruments, creating a lasting aura. Elements of style, hovering free of their own original contexts, can reappear from Webern, from Bruckner, from Mozart, from folksong. But yet everything is lost. Every melody, immediately becomes an echo, sounds like the reverberation of something that has already gone. Every feature of style speaks of things long over. Silvestrov's creative destiny for many years has been the postlude: his works revive past music . . . in the very act of lamenting its disappearance."
Tatjana Rexroth wrote in the same essay:
It is as if Silvestrov's mind were constantly withdrawing into an interior space in order to find room for remembered images sheltered by music and uttered with its breath.
Memory, interior space and "suspended time" are at the very core of Silvestrov's music. I identify strongly with Silvestrov's music and ideas; I think of my photography in very similar terms. Indeed there are many things we share within our Creative Processes. For example, Silvestrov has been a prolific composer, and he has worked with "small forms" and "pure" melodies. He has written over 260 cycles for piano solo in such forms as waltzes, lullabies, postludes, nocturnes, barcaroles, pastorals, serenades. He describes his short pieces as bagatelles "in the center of which" he tries to "seize" and "halt the melodic moment," "intonations, calls and motifs . . . " (from an essay in Schott Music).
When I read these things I couldn't help but think of my miniature Studies photographs, my Thing Centered Photographs and my Garage Series photographs--sound images suspended, timelessly, in black space--a metaphor for silence.
Silvestrov's most recent works are stunningly beautiful choral compositions entitled Sacred Songs, music which (he says) is not intended for liturgical use. Interestingly, Stieglitz's first series of cloud equivalent photographs in the early 1920's were entitled Songs of the Sky; and Silvestrov once stated that music "is a song the world sings about itself; it is the musical testimony to life."
After my trip to Turkey in 2011 I began thinking of my photography--my Creative Process--as an "exploration of the possibility of creating Sacred Art within a contemporary art practice . . ." See my Sacred Art Photography Projects.
Much of Silvestrov's music involves fragments of melodic tunes from familiar compositions by well know composers, which appear and then quickly dissolve into silence as if "flickers of memory and dialogues with the past." Paul Conway, liner notes from Naxos recording "Moment of Memory II"
My Lake Series collages, and the collages I made for my Dream Portraits project consist of image fragments ("flickers of memories") intermingled within a larger image context.
Related to the Postlude is Silvestrov's concept of Meta-music, or Metaphorical Music, a music which "hovers around, above, and especially after all other musics" . . . "like an atmosphere encircling a post-apocalyptic globe." (Schott Music)
I created a large multi-chaptered project, in Homage to Morton Feldman, entitled The Departing Landscape. This phrase was Feldman's way of writing about the way sound exists in our hearing, the way sound emerges from silence, becomes suspended in space for a time, then "departs" us, or leaves us, as it dissolves back into silence.
Silvestrov's music has been compared to the music of Gustave Mahler and Morton Feldman. And again I cannot help but think of my Feldman inspired Garage Series photographs, and my Chromatic Field photographs. The images relate to what Silvestrov once wrote regarding coda and epilogue in his music: "a place" in which there is "a gathering of resonances," a musical space in which the music can "linger for a very long time."
Chromatic Field Photograph (Road Salt)
~click on the image to see finer detail~
Garage Series Photograph Digital Version
Just as musical memory has been a large part of Silvestrov's compositional process, visual images have functioned in various ways in my photography as a form of remembrance. The Garage Series photographs in particular invoke memories of my childhood:
I remember playing pitch and catch with my dad in the ally just behind our garage. / When I played "hide and seek" with my neighborhood friends at dusk, I would often hide in the rhubarb patch next to my neighbor's old garage; I would close my eyes and imaginatively merge into the space such that no one could find me. / When working on various projects in Milwaukee I loved walking up and down the alleys between the infinite rows of garages on either side, particularly in the twilight of evening. / In the digital versions of of the garage photographs (see the image immediately above) I like how the garage seems to have emerged from the black space (a metaphor for silence) and then, like a sound hovering timelessly in space (or a memory lingering in the mind) the garage appears to be on the threshold of dissolving back into silence:
It is as if Silvestrov's mind were constantly withdrawing
into an interior space in order to find room
for remembered images sheltered by
music and uttered with its breath.
Tatjana Rexroth,ECM records
As you will see in the fourth and final project of this cycle, Postlude To An Exhibition the blog page has become for me a space in which I am suspending and sustaining those memories of my recent Home Coming exhibition in Milwaukee, sheltering the memories of that entire experience from fading into silence. However . . . I also hear a silent voice inside me, reminding me to bring my focus back to the awareness of more transcendent, ineffable things: the One Truth, the Unitary Reality, the divine Self . . . those invisible, un-sayable things that only symbolic photographs can address through visual form enlivened by the breath of grace.
Valentin Silvestrov is for me one of the most important composers I know of, and with whom I feel kindred in spirit. I encourage you to visit my June, 2019 project Studies X : 24 Photographs : Meditations on "The Moment." Homage to Valentin Silvestrov.
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Recurrence of Imagery & Memory
In the fourth and final project in this series Postlude To An Exhibition Jon Horvath pointed out in the catalogue that accompanied the Alice Wilds exhibition which that I use images over and over again, in various ways, often in the same one project (as I do in the present project) but also across multiple projects, or in projects that offer variations on one subject (see The Meadow Series). I am constantly Re-Visioning and transforming old familiar (remembered) images, and in this way Visual Memory plays a vital role in my work. The subtle remembrance of a recurring image can invoke in a viewer or contemplator a feeling tone of meaningful presence, an echo of something once seen, something recognized and experienced as meaningful in a new, changed visual form, or perhaps in a new visual or conceptual context (see my Visual Poems).
Images remembered sparkle with their own unique interior light. Even when there is no conscious recognition, such images nonetheless are radiant and overflowing with the grace of the Creative Process; they are functioning perhaps metaphorically or poetically, perhaps as a felt presence or an intuitive awareness that can't be placed in a "known" or precisely remembered contextual framework.
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Below are two variations of one symmetrical image from this project, and the "source" straight photograph with which the symmetrical images were constructed, which was published in the previous, second project in this series, Snow Photographs : Homage to Harry Callahan and All My Teachers:
Straight photograph of snow from the "Homage to Harry Callahan" project
from this project , Image #12
"Blue Pearl"
from the project, Inversion--Image #20
"The Golden Rising Sun"
The middle Blue Pearl symmetrical image served as the source image for the "Golden Rising Sun" variation below it. The transformation included a process known as image inversion, which essentially turned the blue image "inside-out."
The Golden Rising Sun image brings us full circle back to the first of the three projects, The Rising Sun : Prelude to An Exhibition, and it's concluding image, reproduced below. The two images, in their echoings of each other, announce with golden brilliance some archetypal occurrence from within the Imaginal world, such as a Re-birth or Resurrection.
"The Golden Sun" from the project "The Rising Sun" Image #12
"The Golden Rising Sun" from this project
Inversion--Image #20
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The The Rising Sun project and the three projects created in association with--and perhaps in response to that project and the exhibition in Milwaukee at The Alice Wilds--has indeed been an inward journey for me, something akin to a Coming Home on multiple-subtle levels. The invitation to exhibit my work, and then the meditation experience of New Year's Day, 2018, and then the The Rising Sun project that came as a response to the meditation experience, and then the Space Between exhibition itself, and the catalogue, and the interactions I had with students, friends, colleagues, and the public at the opening--all of which is carefully documented in my final project Postlude To An Exhibition--was for me a gift of grace. The experience of the whole of it was for me tinged with a subtle feeling of destiny. That is to say, my Creative Process was fully in charge; I just tried to honor the integrity of the process by staying out of its way as best I could.
If one cannot lose oneself to something beyond one,
one is bound to be disappointed.
Alfred Stieglitz
The Golden Rising Sun, an image (the one immediately above) which unfolded spontaneously from within the Blue Pearl image, is a beautiful metaphor for all that has come to pass as if from the "point beyond the center of the center." But there is more to tell. In the Afterword I included in the January 2020 revised version of the final project of the four related projects, Postlude To An Exhibition, I placed the four projects into the context of important events that unfolded in 2019, a year after the closing of the mini retrospective at the Alice Wilds.
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Epilogue
The words of a poet-saint or Sadguru--one who lives in the constant, conscious state of union with the Absolute--are overflowing with blessings of spiritual energy, or grace. Thus I offer these grace-filled words of Gurumayi as a blessing upon this project, the other three related projects, and the related events--both the outward and inward--that were yet to unfold and manifest into the future.
Note: the following text excerpt is taken from the conclusion of a talk by Gurumayi Chidvilasananda published in issue #20 of Darshan (a Siddha Yoga publication) entitled "Aloneness." Gurumayi quotes a verse from the Upanishads, then she comments on the verse:
The Kaivalya Upanishad says:
I am subtler than the subtlest
And greater than the greatest.
I am this manifold universe.
I am that ancient being, the Lord of golden hue,
I am Shiva.
"I am" is the sound Om; Om is "I am." This sound resonates in being and in non-being. This sound is ancient, timeless. "I am" is bliss, "I am" is light, "I am" is the Truth.
Contemplate this.
It is the inner sound you must hear with the inner ear. This sound is the sound of ecstasy. This sound is the word of knowledge. This sound arises from the inner Self.
"I am."
Always remember "I am, I am." No matter what is happening. "I am" is constant. "I am" is the Truth. "I am" is the light. Through the Guru's grace you become "I am." As the syllable vanishes with the sound, only silence, the highest state, is experienced. Then there is complete silence.
If you can imagine how much silence there must have been upon this earth once upon a time, and then you multiply that silence by a billion times, that is the silence of the Absolute. It sill exists within us. When we reach this inner silence we feel fulfilled: we experience, "I have seen God": we merge into the Truth. In that silence there is no limitation. There is complete freedom.
We must discover it.
So we follow the sound of "I am,"
and it takes us to the absolute
silence, the absolute Truth
--it takes us to the
Absolute.
Gurumay Chidvilasananda
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This revised project was published in January, 2020.
It's original version was first posted on May, 21, 2019
This revised project is part three of a four part series:
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