Window Pictures
Part I
Surfaces, Reflections, Views, Perception
Revelations of the Visible and the Invisible
(first published in May, 2019; revised, July-August 2022)
Tracings of our two grand children's hands left on the interior surface of our picture window
"The Bird Ascending" Trace impression (on the exterior surface of our picture window)
of a bird soaring into the sky reflected on the glass
A window is a window because a region of light opens out beyond it;
the window is that very light itself . . . which, undivided-in-itself
and thus inseparable from the sun, is streaming down from
the heavens . . . If a symbol as carrier attains its end then
it is inseparable from the super reality it reveals.
Icons are "visible images of mysterious and supernatural visions."
An icon is therefore always either more than itself in becoming
for us an image of a heavenly vision, or less than itself in
failing to open our consciousness to the world beyond
our senses--then it is merely a wall [or other
surface] with some paint on it.
Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis
Introduction
In 2008 my wife Gloria and I moved from Milwaukee, where we lived and worked for 33 years, to Canandaigua, NY. The house that we now live in has a large picture-window that looks west, out and over our rather modest back yard and a beautiful large meadow that runs north and south, with two ponds and a tapering woods that borders the meadow's west side. I have been photographing the meadow and its ponds--oftentimes through the picture-window itself--from the very moment we moved into our new house. It was love at first sight between me and the meadow, and I have collected my favorite images made over the past fourteen years in the photography project entitled The Meadow to which I continually add new images. (In Part III of the Window Pictures project I survey the images and ideas that pertain to the theme "Window-Meadow Photographs.")
Besides the large picture window, there are two other smaller windows on either side of it, and further to the north of the living room there there are two large glass sliding doors--just next to our dining area--which open to our back deck which provides us with even more expansive views of the meadow. Because our house is set upon a hill that raises about 12 feet above the backyard and meadow area, all the views from our west side windows and the back deck provide a certain dramatic arial perspective on this part of the planet.
The old Victorian house we lived in for 33 years in Milwaukee did not have a view. The windows were small, and the bank of windows in our dining room faced the house just feet away from us. We had a very nice, small back yard and garden, but no view as such. Thus it has felt like a luxury to me to have such a vast view of the world behind our house, and such a beautiful view at that. The meadow's two ponds reflect the light from the sky and adds to the feeling of spaciousness of the meadow. The pond closest to our house is smaller; and the north meadow pond is further away but much larger. Our house is situated between the two, so when the light is just right, the two ponds appear to me as luminous eyes, eyes which are looking back at me! Beyond the woods--which seem to run to infinity in both its northerly and southerly directions as it tapers smaller and smaller on both ends--large rolling hills become visible in the background as the leaves begin to fall off the tress in October.
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This first part of the Picture Window project was inspired by the two title photographs (above) which I will be writing about, immediately below, in terms of the theme Surface Traces. I will also explore in this first part of the three-part series of projects the idea of the window as it relates to the history of photography and the ideas of the photograph as Mirror vs. Window, and the concept of the photograph as Symbol or Icon. In this first part of the Window Pictures project I also initiate a fairly complex survey of the history of images within my own personal creative process as it relates to the recurring theme of the window. In Part II I continue the survey in relation to my large Symmetrical photographs and my small square Studies photographs; then in the final PART III of the Picture Window project I complete the survey of my work as it pertains to the window-meadow relationship.
Surface Traces
In March, 2019, as I was growing more and more concerned about the Coronavirus Pandemic I made the photograph (above) of a cluster of hand prints and other indecipherable images that had accumulated over time in the lower interior corner of our picture-window. Our two grandchildren, Claire (age 4) and River (age 5 1/2) had deposited these fascinating tracings of their presence on the large glass while playing together in our house during the summer of 2018 and then again during the 2018 Christmas holidays. I had not seen these images on the inside surface of the glass until that particular day in early spring when the light comes streaming into our house at a particularly low acute angle which highlights the lower southern corner of our picture window. This illumination occurs for but a few days each spring and then I never see it again for another full year.
My initial intention in making the photograph above was simply to document the markings--as any loving grandfather would--that his two grand kids and left on the window as evidence of their presence in his life.
The second photograph, "The Bird Ascending" was made in the fall of 2018. when the light once again becomes more angular and lower and thus reveal surface details otherwise invisible. I actually heard the sound of a bird hitting the outside surface of our picture window on the window's far right side, and so I looked to see if any markings had been left on the window. The bird presumably had been in the process of soaring into the vastness of space of the meadow, the woods and sky above being reflected upon outer surface of our picture-window. I was surprised at how well defined the image of the bird's impact was on the windows outer surface. The lat fall sunlight was hitting the glass at the perfect angle to reveal every detail, so I took the picture more out of shock and curiosity than anything else at the time. The image was haunting, and I didn't know if this was subject matter that I wanted to make photographic art out of at the time.
But later, when I discovered the bird image's relation to the earlier photograph I had made of our grandchildren's hand prints, I became quite fascinated by their juxtaposition. Though foth photographs were initially made as straightforward, literal recordings of the images on the glass, later their relationship to each other grew in importance to me. Thus I attempted to make their relationship more dramatic and visually cohesive by adjusting the printing of each so that they more closely echoed each other in terms of visual drama, color tonalities, etc.
This pair of related images reminds me of the timeless ancient paintings and petroglyphs I have seen left behind on the surfaces of rocks in a landscape, and on the inner walls of caves. The image of children's handprints, the image of a soaring bird stopped abruptly in its free flight serve as an evocative reminders to me of how the tragic, the beautiful and the mystery of life's instantaneous passing of moments can be so closely aligned to each other in ways that the human mind often cannot grasp in terms of intellectual meaning; and how the presence of humans in the natural world can bring unintended dangers to its wildlife. The dangers we now face with Climate Change was at one time unimaginable. (See more images of Hands & Birds)
These two images that began as records of fact have become for me transformative images of meanings that transcend words. They have become images which function for me as True, living Symbols, or Icons.
Glass Plate Photography
There is a direct relationship between these two images which unexpectedly became revealed upon the inner and outer glass surfaces of our picture window to the an early (19th century) tradition in photography in which photographs were referred to as "windows on the world." There was a time when liquid photosensitive emulsion was coated onto glass plates, and then placed into a view camera, and exposed to light through a focused lens, while the emulsion was still wet. The expose emulsion would then be developed and "fixed" in (dangerous) chemistry before the emulsion dried. (visit Photographic glass plates). Looking out at our view of the meadow from behind our picture-window is not so unlike looking out at the world from behind a large glass plate view camera such as the one used by William Henry Jackson in the 1870's.
How photographs "mean," however, is a more complicated issue, for meaning involves more than simply What is recorded on the film. Meaning is relative to multiple factors including: How something is photographed; how the film is exposed and processed, how the negative is interpreted in the process of printing it into a positive image, and the context into which the image is placed for public viewing.
Perhaps even more critical is the unpredictable phenomena of how an image is perceived by its viewer, for once the image is placed before a viewer, it is impossible to know how the image will be received and processed within the mind of the viewer. It is all such a subjective (and also cultural) experience. How any image is perceived and interpreted as "meaningful" is often determined by the context in which the image is presented and seen, and multiple other subjective factors such as the viewer's personal beliefs, biases, expectations, past experiences and accumulated knowledge . . . all of which gets projected onto the image in the process of perceiving it.
In the 19th century photographs were assumed to be mechanical, chemical records of fact, a window on the world. However, although a photograph may be made with the simple intention to objectively record an outer appearance, a viewer may end up seeing unconscious or culturally conditioned aspects of themselves in the image. That is to say, the image may function as a mirror which reflects back to the viewer his or her personal remembrances and-or hidden (unconscious) psychological aspects of the viewer's personality, psyche, the most current cultural dogmas.
In more rare instances, an image may set off within the viewer an experience which transcends knowable meanings. In these instances unconscious contents may be awakened within the viewer which invoke feelings and insights that operate beyond the boundaries of the senses, beyond the boundaries of the intellect, and speaking more broadly, beyond the boundaries the mind. Such experiences of meaning, meaning which swells up from deep inside the heart, cannot be expressed in words, for language is based in our limited dualistic forms of knowledge, while the "meaning" of the Heart has to do with the Oneness of Being. Such images are functioning for viewers not as windows, not even as mirrors, but as Symbols, or Icons, images .
Following the presentation of the photographs below, I will present some additional textual reflections on the photograph that functions either as a self-revelatory "Mirrors" or an objective "Window;" and I will share a very personal story regarding a transcendent experience of perception that occurred as I was looking at the Grand Canyon. I will also offer a contemplation on the way I experience photographs when they function for me as Symbols and Icons; and then I conclude the project with a brief Afterword.
Regarding the 24 Photographs presented below
Many of the photographs in this project have been selected from previously published blog projects. Under each numbered photograph I have placed different kinds of information about the image. For those images which were selected from past projects I have given the title of the project. If you would like to see the full context in which the image was initially used copy the title, do a word search on my blog's Welcome Page for the hyperlinked title to the project.
I have also selected several images from my personal digital file folder labeled "Unpublished Photographs." I keep images in this folder images I feel are potentially publishable but which I have not yet found the right project into which I should place it. For example, the two Title Photographs above, of the children's handprints and the ascending bird, were for a time sitting in the folder waiting for me to discover their meaningful relationship.
I have divided the Window Photographs photographs below into three groups: House Interiors, Misc. Subjects and Places, and Black & White Postludes.
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Welcome to this first collection of Window Pictures, and I invite you to visit the other two collections of images at these links: Part II & Part III.
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Window Pictures
(House Interiors)
1. Shades pulled down over our picture-window, the right side window, the open transom windows above & the late afternoon sunlight 2. Hand tracings and drawings placed on the interior surface of our picture window by our two young grand children
3. "The Bird Ascending" Trace impression left on the exterior surface of our picture-window
4. This image is from two projects: The Bird . . . The Angle of Tears & Nocturne
5. The Conference of the Birds, II project
6. Reflection in a dark glass vase of a bedroom window and the silhouette of the photographer
7. Reflection in a bedroom mirror of a curtained window reflected in the glass of a framed photographed
8. Shadows of a hanging light fixture within a shape of light projected through a small transom window above our picture-window (see image #1)
9. Outside view (from our back deck) of our floor lamp through a screened window covered with raindrops
10. The Secret Cave project Reflection of another lamp in the smaller window just to the right of the picture window
11. The Letter project Sun rising over the morning fog as seen through the sliding glass door that opens out to the back deck
12 The Letter project Mark "X" on a window's outer surface
13. Homage to Robert Ryman, pt. I project Reflection of a sunlit curtain which is hanging to the right of the sliding glass do0r
14. Homage to Robert Ryman, pt. I Reflection in our deck's sliding glass door of a frame in which there is a reflection of a lamp
15. THAT ineffable invisible interior PRESENCE project Birds on the sliding glass door, light reflections, the tree next to our deck
Window Pictures
(Misc. Subjects & Places)
16. Sea lion swimming on its back viewed through a zoo pool window
17. View through a tour bus window, half shaded : sheep herders resting on the side of a hill in Turkey
18. View through a bus window : Night at the sight of a accident on a major road in Costa Rica
19. View--from the inside of a bus--of a dirty illuminated window and the top of a sleeping person's head
20. Airport windows and reflections
21. An illuminated window, partially covered by a dark curtain, and a silhouetted woman
22. A Garage window and a reflection of the garage
Window Pictures
(Black & White Postludes)
23. Exterior view of a storefront window, with a dotted street line reflection superimposed upon venetian blinds behind the glass
24. View of an empty room through a sweating, tearing window, with a styrofoam cup sitting on the floor near the back wall
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More Textual Reflections
Mirrors and Windows
A Personal "Visionary" Story
The Symbol and the Symbolic Photograph
Icon, Symbol, Idolatry
Afterword
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Mirrors and Windows
John Szarkowski, the internationally celebrated curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (from 1962-1991), mounted an exhibition of photographs in the late 1970's entitled "Mirrors and Windows." A book was published by the same title which included an essay by Szarkowski on the theme along with a collection of images from the exhibition. I suggest you read the essay--though I do not agree with many of the things he writes about.
Despite Szarkowski's seductive facility with the written word, and the sense of authority with which he writes--appropriate to the position of power he occupied in the world of art photography at that time--it seems to me his essay lacks true insight and understanding about perception and about images that function as symbols. Despite these reservations, the way he takes us through the history of photography, and how photographic images can mean in different ways for the photographer, the viewer, and the cultural mores operative at the time the photographs were made . . . all this is critically important.
My understanding of photography and its relation to the Creative Process has unfolded and expanded over the years as my relation to photography evolved, first from the perspective of a young hobbyist (1955-63), than from the perspective of a serious undergraduate and graduate student of photography (1963-1972), then as college level teacher of photography (1969-2007), and now as a student of Siddha Yoga Meditation (1987-present). Regarding the last, it has been my great good fortune to have been enabled to watch my practice of photography and my practice of yogic meditation both support each other, and then over time, gradually merge into each other.
Photographs can mean and deceive in so many ways; what has become most important to me now are those images which function for me as True, living Symbols, photographs which invoke transcendental kinds of meaning which in the yogic tradition would be identified as Self-knowledge. In recent years I have produced many projects based in the idea of the symbolic photograph and the Siddha Yoga teachings. (Visit my Sacred Art Photography Projects.) In any and every case, however, despite the picture-maker's and the viewer's intention, the meaning of a photograph is always based in perception, and perception is most often based in the workings of the mind, especially the intellect, sometimes the personal or collective unconscious, and much less frequently but most important to me, based in the Heart.
A Personal "Visionary" Story
We speak of "Views" when we look at dramatic photographs that reveal the majesty of the natural world. Gloria and I speak of the wonderful view we have from our picture window or back deck of the beautiful meadow, its two ponds, and the tapering woods that interfaces the meadow on its western border. When we visit a famous National Park, like the Grand Canyon, the parks create paths and designate "Lookout" places where spectacular views can be easily enjoyed. They sometimes place signs at various locations with pictures of cameras on them to indicate the best places for photographers to stand and make their own photographic "views."
On a June day in the year 2000 I was graced with an extraordinary experience while visiting the Grand Canyon that changed they way I understood perception and its relation to my Creative Process in photographic picture-making. The experience provided me--quite literally--with a new insight into the way I "see" the world; and my experience revealed to me the relationship between perception and how images can help me transcend the limits of ordinary dualistic ways of interacting with and understanding my world.
I wrote an essay about that experience entitled "Seeing the Grand Canyon." I think Henry Corbin would call the essay a "Personal Story," that is to say, a narrative about a personal visionary encounter with the Sacred or the Divine. Corbin wrote an entire book about this kind of story-telling entitled The Visionary Recital. In Siddha Yoga, my experience might be identified as an example of Darshan, a vision of the divine, an experience that transcends ordinary sense perception, a vision that can only occur through the Eye of the Opened Heart.
Here is my story:
Seeing the Grand Canyon
Each of us carries in himself the Image of his own world, his Imago mundi,
and projects it into a more or less coherent universe, which becomes the stage
on which his destiny is played out. He may not be conscious of it . . .
Henry Corbin: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital
I was on a road trip with my wife Gloria in June, 2000 to visit the Grand Canyon and other nearby National Parks. We assumed there would be plenty of places to stay overnight near the Grand Canyon's North Rim because of it being such a popular vacation destination, but we didn’t realize there were three Rim locations for visitors: the North, South and West Rims. The North Rim was closest to us after our visit to Zion National Park, so of course the North Rim had become our next destination but we journeyed on without knowing what we would be faced with.
When we got to Jacob Lake, Arizona, which is a 30 miles drive from the Grand Canyon's North Rim, we found that all the motels were fully booked. It was late in the afternoon so we drove on toward the Park in hopes of finding a motel along the way. The drive was essentially a road that passed through a beautiful meadow. Experientially it was a relaxed, meditative preludial drive to the relatively small and somewhat rustic North Rim Lodge; however as we got closer and closer to the Part entrance we grew anxious because there no motels along the way and night was rapidly approaching. Would the Park Lodge have any openings for us? We needed a place to stay for the night.
When we arrived at the Visitors Lodge, we immediately went to the Reservations Office. There was a long line of people checking in. When we finally were able to talk with the man at the desk he told us there were no available rooms, that reservations were usually made a year in advance, that cancellations were unusual, and that they didn’t have a waiting list. The only thing we could do was check back with him from time to time to see if any cancellations were called in.
Just as he was finishing telling us this, the phone rang . . . A couple had just canceled their room for the night . . . and we were permitted to fill the vacancy!
After checking in we walked out onto the Lodge Terrace for our first view of the Grand Canyon. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the canyon, its vastness, its soft layerings of colors. The late afternoon light filled the canyon’s misty space with a gentle, intimate, mysterious golden presence. The subtle colors in the canyon walls gently separated from the earthy dark browns and grays such that they appeared to be suspended and floating in slow motion toward me. I felt very close to the canyon's vast space, its gem-like luminous beauty. As so often happens when I encounter the sacred, tears began to swell in my eyes. My heart had opened.
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The next morning we drove along the edge of the North Rim which has multiple parking and look-out areas. At our first stop were able to look out over the rim's edge into the vast space of the Canyon in which we saw three different thunder storms over the Canyon, and each one had it’s own rainbow! In the Hindu tradition, rainbows are very auspicious signs of the the Sacred.
At the next stop we were able to walk out onto a long narrow viewing point. When I arrived at the point I felt as if I was in the center of the Canyon. As I tried to comprehend the vastness of the space before me and around me and above me and below me I noticed the wind blowing into my left ear in a rhythmic pulsating manner. This seemed to initiate in me a shift in my consciousness.
Slowly my whole being became pervaded with a deep sense of stillness. I could hear children playing and laughing in the parking lot behind me, and yet I felt enveloped in a profoundly deep palpable presence that I would identify as Silence. Time seemed to be slowing down to a halt. My visual perception began to contract until it was reduced to what seemed to me to be a highly concentrated point.
A wedge of luminous imagery was being projected out from within me--from within that point of conscious awareness . . . onto something in front of me that was like an unfathomably large screen. I was the "projector," and I was the "screen" that was receiving the projected imagery; I was the point of origin of the image, and I was the vast space expanding ever wider and deeper within me, a space so vast my mind couldn't comprehend it; I had become the seer and the seen, the projector and the scene . . . simultaneously.
I was seeing brilliant, astounding images of the Grand Canyon, and yet I was aware that the images were coming from me, from inside myself projected onto a "screen." It felt like I was experiencing the very center of All Space, the center of my opened Heart.
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Gradually, I began to sense the pulsation of the wind again in my ear; at first I was aware of being in a state of total openness and expansion, and then I became aware that a process of contraction was beginning to unfold. Gradually the extraordinary mode of perception--which was more like a mode of being--that I had been experiencing dissolved slowly away until I finally retuned nearly “to my senses.” Time seemed to be running again pretty much at its usual pace . . .
But my "heart" remained open for several hours after I returned to the car. The experience had transformed me, expanded me in a way I had never experienced before. I was overflowing with awe and wonder. The experience had shaken me to my core; I felt as if my whole being had been turned inside out. Every time I tried to talk about what I experienced with Gloria, I would start sobbing. I felt overwhelmed with love for the world, for myself and Gloria and my children . . . and for something I had no words for.
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That night, before going to sleep in our North Rim motel-like room, I reread--as I often did in those days--a few paragraphs from the monthly set of lessons I had received in June from Ram Butler, author of the Siddha Yoga Correspondence Course. Each month Ram would write a 10-12 page lesson focusing on a particular theme related to the Yogic scriptures and the Siddha Yoga teachings. (Gloria and I had been practicing Siddha Yoga since 1987, when we first met Gurumayi Chidvilasananda and received Shaktipat Initiation from her. See part 1 of my project Photography and Yoga).
In June, 2000 I received Volume 6, Lessons 15/16 of the Correspondence Course, and these two lessons focused on the themes of perception, the mind, the present moment, and the eternal moment. Ram wrote that when we truly are living in the present eternal moment our hearts are in a state of pure openness; we can observe and hear the things in the outer world, and at the same time we are fully aware of being in a space of absolute stillness and silence. He said, this is an experience of grace, an experience of our own Heart, our own Divine Self.
Then it dawned on me, as I was re-reading lesson 15 of the sixth Volume of the Course, that I had been graced earlier that day with a direct inner experience of the yogic teachings Ram had written about in the lesson. In a way the lesson was an elaboration upon a quotation Ram used, by Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, to conclude his lesson. Here is the quote by Gurumayi:
The sages, the great beings, and the scriptures all say that we create everything in our own minds, and then we live in the reality that we have created. They say that nothing is really outside us; whatever seems to be outside is our own projection. If we have this understanding, then we know God, we know the Self, we know what we really are.
Baba [Gurumayi's teacher, Swami Muktananda] used to say, "It is your thought that affects the environment, the atmosphere. It is your thought that affects other people." . . .
We should understand that we live in our own reality. We create it for ourselves. The scriptures say that all of nature, all the elements are also the creation of our own minds. The sky, the earth, the air, the mountains, and the rivers are all parts of the mind. They only appear to be outside. . . . the sages go on to explain that if our minds did not exist, then those things would not exist either. As long as our minds are still there, those things exist. Once our minds go, everything else goes too. So what we see outside is our own creation.
What is the mind? The mind is nothing but Consciousness, ultimate reality. There is a great philosophy called the Pratyabhijna-hrdyam, which discusses the recognition of the Self. This philosophy describes how Consciousness has become the mind. In the beginning Consciousness is expanded and without form. Then it gives up its lofty state and condenses into particular forms. It becomes various objects. It also becomes the mind. Everything is the manifestation of that Consciousness, and because Consciousness is not different from the mind, everything is the creation of the mind. Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, quoted in Vol. 6, Lesson 15 of the Siddha Yoga Correspondence Course.
(This marks the end of my story)
Note: I highly recommend a book entitled The Splendor of Recognition, which is authored by a Siddha Yoga teacher, Swami Shantananda. It consists of his modern-day commentaries on each of the twenty sutras of the ancient yogic text known as the Pratyabhijna-hrdyam.
The Symbol and the Symbolic Photograph
If we can look at a photograph with the detached conscious awareness that it's a depiction of the world we have personally created for ourselves, then we will be fine. But when we begin to believe or assume that a photograph tells us something True about the outer world--then we will be deceiving ourselves. Only a photograph that is functioning as a symbol can carry us into a realm of knowledge or meaning that transcends the ego and its dualistic vision. The symbolic photograph is an image that conjoins inner and outer corresponding images into a Unitary Reality, an image that gives visual form to the Oneness of Being, what in yoga is referred to as the ineffable One Supreme Consciousness, the divine inner Self.
The symbolic photograph is related to the pane of glass in a window; it is an image in which the inner and outer worlds meet and interact with each other. This in-between plane of reality has been called the "soul" by the 18th century poet, Novalis; and it has been called the Imaginal world by Henry Corbin. A True, living symbol is an ineffable "reality" that exists between the visible and the invisible worlds, between the physical and the spiritual worlds. The Imaginal world, says Corbin, is the "place of Origin" of symbols, the "place of transformation." It is the place where the physical turns into the spiritual, and where the spiritual turns into the physical. Human language is based in duality; symbols are based in the perfectly silent, perfectly still Imaginal world. In yoga, this ineffable, mysterious place, which is at the very center of the Universe, and at the very center of the Self, is called the Heart, the origin of everything in the created world.
Both of these images function for me as symbols, though as I've already written, I didn't recognize this at first. I thought I had simply documented interesting impressions deposited--spontaneously, by "chance"--upon the window's inner and outer surfaces. The beauty and mystery of each of the two images, however, began to turn me more inward as I contemplated them more closely, more carefully. My contemplations also took me to a meaning that exists in the space between the two images.
After a long period of contemplating these images, and a series of re-visions of the initial camera-made images through various adjustments in tonalities, etc., both images have come fully alive for me as individual images, and as a juxtaposed pair of images; they resonate with the kind of meaning that can only come from the still and silent world of the Heart; they invoke the kind of meaning that poet Robert Bly calls News of the Universe. These two images, plus the 22 others included in the project, have that palpable presence of noumena that awakens me to a subtler kind of meaning that, from the yogic perspective, is understood as forms of Self-knowledge. The images in this project function for me as True, living symbols, revelations of the Eye of the Heart.
All the World an Icon
In my thinking about windows and their relationship to the photographic image I was reminded of an earlier photography project I made entitled Window Onto the Invisible World. It is the first chapter in a larger project entitled The Photograph As ICON which consists of eight chapters in total.
The idea for the project came to me through a book I had been reading authored by Tom Cheetham which explores and comments upon the work and ideas of Henry Corbin. In Cheetham's book All the World An Icon several references are made to a book entitled Iconostasis, published in 1922 by Pavel Florensky, a Russian Orthodox priest, theologian, philosopher, and scientist. Florensky writes in depth about the sacred nature of a very special kind of imagery known as the Icon. He also writes about a wall of Icons and sacred paintings which is called an iconostasis. Both Cheetham's and Florensky's writings about the Icon has shed new light (for me) on the sacred nature of the Symbolic photograph.
Following are excerpts taken from Florensky's book Iconostasis; and then I will conclude with a quote from Cheetham's book All the World An Icon.
Icon and Symbol : Windows Onto the Invisible
The visible and the invisible world
In the beginning of Genesis--"God created the heavens and the earth"--we have always recognized as basic this division of all creation into two. Just so, when we pray the Apostle's Creed, we name God as "Maker of all things visible and invisible." These two worlds--visible and the invisible--are intimately connected, but their reciprocal differences are so immense that the inescapable question arises: what is their boundary? Their boundary separates them; yet, simultaneously, it joins them. How do we understand this boundary? Florensky, Iconostasis
Within ourselves, life in the visible world alternates with life in the invisible, and thus we experience moments . . . when the two worlds grow so very near in us that we can see their intimate touching. At such fleeting moments in us, the veil of visibility is torn apart, and through that tear--that break we are still conscious of at that moment--we can sense that the invisible world (still unearthly, still invisible) is breathing; and that both this and another world are dissolving into each other. Florensky, Iconostasis
The Symbol and the Soul's spiritual knowledge
Dreams are the images that separate the visible world from the invisible--and at the same time join them . . . What we say about the dream holds true abut any movement from one sphere to another. In creating a work of art, the psyche or soul of the artist ascends from the earthly realm into the heavenly; there, free of all images, the soul is fed in contemplation by the essences of the highest realm, knowing the permanent noumena of things; then, satiated with this knowing, it descends again to the earthly realm. And precisely at the boundary between the two worlds, the soul's spiritual knowledge assumes the shapes of symbolic imagery: and it is these images that make permanent the work of art. Art is thus materialized dream, separated from the ordinary consciousness of waking life. Florensky, Iconostasis
Opening windows
The wall that separates two worlds is an iconostasis. click here One might mean the boards or bricks or the stones. In actuality, the iconostasis is a boundary between the visible and the invisible worlds . . . Iconostasis is vision. Iconostasis is a manifestation of saints and angels--angelophania--a manifest appearance of heavenly witnesses . . . If everyone praying were wholly spiritualized, if everyone praying were truly to see, then there would be no iconostasis other than standing before God Himself, witnessing to Him by their holy countenances and proclaiming His terrifying glory by their sacred words. . . . The iconostasis opens windows in this wall, through whose glass we see what is permanently occurring beyond: the living witnesses to God. Florensky, Iconostasis
The Icon
An icon . . . is the outline of a vision. A spiritual vision is not in itself an icon, for it possesses by itself full reality; an icon, however, because its outline coincides with a spiritual vision, is that vision within our consciousness; finally, therefore, the icon--apart from its spiritual vision--is not an icon at all but a board. Thus a window is a window because a region of light opens out beyond it; . . . the window is that very light itself . . . which, undivided-in-itself and thus inseparable from the sun, is streaming down from the heavens. . . If a symbol as carrier attains its end, then it is inseparable from the super reality it reveals.
Icons are . . . "visible images of mysterious and supernatural visions." An icon is therefore always either more than itself in becoming for us an image of a heavenly vision, or less than itself in failing to open our consciousness to the world beyond our senses--then it is merely a board with some paint on it . . . Florensky, Iconostasis
Icon & Idolatry : the "Test of the Veil"
I want to return briefly to Tom Cheetham and his series of four books on the work and ideas of Henry Corbin: The World Turned Inside Out; Green Man-Earth Angel; After Prophesy; and All the World An Icon. I highly recommend all four of the books. (Note: If you want to read Corbin's writings directly, which can be quite challenging for anyone, but especially the uninitiated, I encourage you to read Cheetham's books first.)
Here is a brief taste of Cheetham's writing from All the World An Icon. The title alone states very directly not just an idea but the lived experience that contributed to Corbin's understanding, an understanding that echos the teachings of the Sufi mystics and yogic scriptures that Corbin explored and wrote about often, in great depth, with amazing lucidity, and within a comprehensively informed historical-philosophical-context.
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Tom Cheetham wrote in his own book, All the World An Icon:
An idol is any being understood as a totality unto itself, self-sufficient, independent. Any being understood as an end it itself is an idol. To idol-ize . . . is a way of seeing and of acting, an inability to perceive the transcendent dimension of the world.
Insofar as anything is perceived as determinate and comprehensible, to that degree it is a Veil of the divinity. And yet in truth all things are masks of the infinite, and their being is the gift of God. All things are organs by which God contemplates Himself and are not other than He. To overcome the Test of the Veil requires that we not become trapped in the literal face of any being, that we not idolize it but rather see in it a Face of God. Tom Cheetham: All the World an Icon
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Afterword
Swami Muktananda (Gurumayi's teacher and founder of the Siddha Yoga Path) wrote a spiritual autobiography which is entitled The Play of Consciousness. Below is a quote in which he speaks about "the play of consciousness." The divine creative energy he refers to is known as shakti. I found this quote in the Siddha Yoga publication Resonate With Stillness : Daily Contemplations (for March 4 & 6).
Consciousness, the divine energy, has created the universe out of its own being, without taking the help of anything outside itself. In the same way, when Consciousness becomes the mind by assuming limitations, it begins to create endless mental universes.
There are many outer universes, but they are all contained in Consciousness. In the same way, the universes that vibrate in the mind should not be seen as different from Consciousness.
No matter what thoughts and images arise in the mind, be aware that there is no concrete material from which they are being manifested. They are simply a phantasmagoria of Consciousness, and no matter how many worlds of desires, wishes, and positive and negative thoughts your mind creates, you should realize that they are all a play of Consciousness. Swami Muktananda, March 4, Resonate with Stillness
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This first part of the "Window Pictures" project was initially
posted on my blog's Welcome Page on May 2, 2019.
The project before you now is a revised version
of the original project. It was posted on
my Welcome Page in August, 2022
The Window Pictures project has three parts:
OTHER RELATED PROJECTS:
Welcome Page to my The Departing Landscape website/blog includes the complete listing of my online photography projects dating back to the 1960's, my resume, contact information, and more.
