Window Pictures
Surface Traces, Reflections, Views,
Revelations of the Visible and the Invisible
Revelations of the Visible and the Invisible
P a r t I
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
The house that my wife Gloria and I live in has a picture-window that looks out over a beautiful meadow with two ponds and a tapering woods beyond. I have been photographing the meadow and its ponds, oftentimes through the picture-window itself, since we moved to Canandaiqua, NY in 2008. (See my ongoing series The Meadow).
Interestingly, throughout the history of photography the photograph has often been referred to as a "window on the world." In this project I will be surveying the window picture, a theme that runs throughout my Creative Process. The project consists of two parts; this first part contains images never before published on my blog; and Part II contains images selected from several of my earlier blog projects.
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In late March, 2019, I made a photograph of a cluster of hand prints that had accumulated in the lower interior surface regions of our picture-window. (See the first of the two photographs above). Our two grandchildren, Claire (age 4) and River (age 5 1/2) had deposited these fascinating tracings of their presence on the glass while playing together in our house during the summer of 2018 and during the 2018 Christmas holidays. My intention was simply to document the markings so I could share the collaborative imagery with family and friends.
The second photograph above--"The Bird Ascending"--was made in September. It is for me a haunting image which serves as an evocative reminder of how the tragic, the beautiful and the mystery of life can be so closely aligned in our world . . . a world in which the interface of culture and nature is becoming an unimaginably dangerous dilemma. The impression of the bird on the outer surface of the picture-window was made (presumably) as it was in the process of soaring into the vastness of the sky reflected upon the glass of our picture-window.
Both photographs are rather straightforward, literal recordings of the visible evidence of these two events which had occurred spontaneously, in different time-frames, and on opposite sides of the glass. And, interestingly, the first image had been invisible to me just moments before I took the picture. The late afternoon light of an early Spring day in March illuminated, and thus revealed the hidden traces our grand children had left behind on the glass. At this particular time of year the sun strikes the picture-window at an unusually extreme angle as it sets low in the west such that its projected beam of sharply focused, warm golden light makes visible any and all substances deposited upon both sides of our picture-window.
The second image "The Bird Ascending" was made six months earlier, in September of 2018. Though I was interested in the image I was at that time working on the Water project, so I stored it in a digital folder for possible use in a future project . . . which is the project before you now.
Since making the two photographs, seeing them together and contemplating them more deeply, I have come to appreciate the images in a new way. Indeed they have taken on meanings for me that transcend a photograph's ability to record the appearances of worldly fact. In other words, both images invoke in me a sense of the magical; each is overflowing with poetic illumination; they have become (for me) carriers of ineffable messages similar to the timeless ancient paintings and petroglyphs I have seen left behind on the surfaces of rocks in the landscape, and on the inner walls of caves (see more images of Hands & Birds).
Glass Plate Photography
There is a direct relationship between my experience with our picture-window and an early (19th century) tradition in photography in which glass plates were coated with light sensitive emulsions and placed in a view camera to record the sharply focused light image projected upon it through the camera's lens. (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, and then how the negative is interpreted in the process of printing it into a positive image. Perhaps even more critical is the unpredictable phenomena of how an image is perceived by the 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. How any image is perceived and interpreted as "meaningful" is determined by the context in which the image is presented and seen, and multiple 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.
Although a photograph may be made with the simple intention to objectively record an outer appearance, a viewer may see aspects of themselves in the image. That is to say, the image may function as a mirror which reflects back to the viewer personal remembrances and hidden psychological contents--unconscious aspects of the viewer's personality, psyche, and the current cultural cannons which probably have conditioned the way a viewer is inwardly processing an understanding of the image.
In more rare instances, an image may set off within the viewer an experience which transcends knowable meanings. In these instances unconscious contents are awakened within the viewer which invoke feelings and insights that operate beyond the boundaries of the senses, the intellect and even more broadly, the mind. Such experiences of meaning cannot be expressed in words, for language is based in limited dualistic forms of knowledge, while the "meaning" that swells up from inside the Heart of a viewer invoke meanings that words cannot satisfy. Such images are functioning for the viewer as Symbols, or Icons.
Following the presentation of the photographs below, I will present some additional textual reflections on the photograph that functions either as a "Mirror" or a "Window;" 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 offer a contemplation on the way I experience photographs when they function for me as Symbols and Icons; and I conclude with a brief quote that will serve as an Afterword.
Regarding the 20 Photographs
All but the first of the 20 photographs that follow came from a digital folder which I have labeled "Unpublished Photographs." I collect images in the folder that I've made over a period of time--perhaps a year or longer--which I like but don't know how to use at the time I made them. I look at these images in the folder frequently, always in the hope of discovering images that can be included in a current project, or which are alive with visual and conceptual ideas that could be explored further and perhaps be amplified into a future project.
After I became more personally involved with the two Title pictures, they inspired in me the idea of the "Window Pictures" project. As I perused the collection of photographs in my "Unpublished Photographs" folder I was surprised to see so many "Window" images just waiting there for me to be recognized and included in this project! Welcome to this first collection of Window Pictures, and I want to take this opportunity to invite you to visit Part II of the project.
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Part 1
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Part 1
Previously unpublished
Picture-Window Photographs
Surface Traces, Reflections,Views Beyond the Visible
Picture-Window Photographs
Surface Traces, Reflections,Views Beyond the Visible
1. Tracings of the hands of our two young grand children left on the interior surface of our picture-window
2. "The Bird Ascending" Trace impression on the exterior surface of our picture-window
of a bird flying into the vast space of the sky reflected upon the glass
3. View through our picture-window of a sunset over the meadow, with internal reflections of our fireplace
and above the fireplace a framed photograph of the meadow I had made many years earlier
4. View through our steamy, tearing picture-window : early morning snow on the meadow and the trees beyond
5. View through a pool window : zoo sea lion swimming on its back
6. View through a bus window, half shaded : sheep herders resting on the side of a hill in Turkey
7. View through a bus window : scene of an accident, with bystanders, on a major road in Costa Rica
8. View--from the inside of a bus--of a dirty illuminated window and the top of a person's head
9. Reflection of a bedroom window--and the photographer's silhouette--in a dark glass vase
10. Garage window and reflection
11. Airport windows and reflections
12. Airport : reflections of windows upon a shinny floor and wall
13. View of the meadow through an oval that had formed on our rain-covered window screen
14. Reflection in a bedroom mirror of a curtained window reflected in the glass of a framed photographed
15. Shadows of a hanging light fixture within a shape of light projected through a small transom window (image #17) above our picture-window
16. Outside view of our floor lamp through a screened window covered with raindrops
17. Shades---pulled down over our picture-window and the right side window--illuminated by the late afternoon golden sunlight
18. Silhouetted woman standing in front of an illuminated window partially covered by a dark curtain
Two Black & White Postludes
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19. Exterior view of a storefront window, with a dotted street line reflection superimposed upon interior venetian blinds
20. 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, is critically important. (The complete PDF version of the book is available here: Mirrors and Windows: American photography since 1960.)
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 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).
Photographs can mean and deceive in so many ways; thus most important to me now are those photographs which function for me as symbols, images which invoke transcendental planes 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 based in the workings of the mind.
A Personal "Visionary" Story
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 the 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 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 that transcends ordinary sense perception, but rather occurs through the Eye of the Opened Heart.
Here is my story:
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
*
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.
Note: I highly recommend a book entitled The Splendor of Recognition, which is authored by a Siddha Yoga Swami, Swami Shantananda. It consists of his modern-day commentaries on each of the twenty sutras of the ancient yogic text, the Pratyabhijna-hrdyam. For a brief survey of his commentaries on the sutras, see my project: Photography and Yoga, part 3: "Flashing-Forth" - Creation, Perception, and the Pratyabhijna-hrdyam. Click here
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.
*
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.
Note: I highly recommend a book entitled The Splendor of Recognition, which is authored by a Siddha Yoga Swami, Swami Shantananda. It consists of his modern-day commentaries on each of the twenty sutras of the ancient yogic text, the Pratyabhijna-hrdyam. For a brief survey of his commentaries on the sutras, see my project: Photography and Yoga, part 3: "Flashing-Forth" - Creation, Perception, and the Pratyabhijna-hrdyam. Click here
The Symbol and the Symbolic Photograph
If we can look at a photograph in 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, for the symbolic photograph is an image that conjoins inner and outer corresponding images into a Unitary Reality, an image that gives visual form to what in yoga is named the ineffable One Supreme Consciousness, the divine 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 Novalis; and it has been called the Imaginal world by Henry Corbin. It is an ineffable "reality" that exists between the visible and the invisible, between the physical and the spiritual. 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.
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--by "chance"--upon the window's inner and outer surfaces. The beauty and mystery of the two images, however, began to turn me more inward as I contemplated them more closely, more carefully.
Now, both images have come fully alive for me; 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 19 others included below, have that palpable presence of noumena that awakens me to a subtler kind of meaning that I understand from the yogic perspective to be Self-knowledge. The images in this project function for me as 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 of eight chapters that together form the project entitled The Photograph As ICON.
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 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, and 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.)
I will now give you 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.
Cheetham wrote in 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 the founder of the Siddha Yoga Path--at the command of his teacher, Bhagavan Nityananda--wrote a spiritual autobiography which is entitled The Play of Consciousness. Below is a quote in which he speaks about "the play." 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 (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 posted on my blog's Welcome Page
on May 2, 2019
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.
