NuancesPhillip Pulfrey

In memory of my father

and for Jérôme,

my surrogate son.

I have been contemplating this particular perspective on the lake for twenty years.

A landscape constructed from momentary glimpses, grafted on to fragments of memory; pieces of a whole from which we are separated by time and perspective.

The camera pastry–cuts a rectangle from its seamlessness and analyses it into a grid of numbers. The unique moment of choice engraved in the memory of silver salts is replaced by the dynamic potential of the pixel; a tool for the considered hesitancy of a Cezanne: “is this what I saw, and at what moment ?”

We record a pattern of numbers; open to translation through process: screen, printer, paper; each offering its own particular interpretation.

We may, perhaps, slip through a breath of time; glimpse the divine, by entering deeper into this mystery of the moment, heightening our awareness, grasping change and changelessness across the nuance of nature, time, vision and memory.

Meditations on Perception, Expression and Reality

We take a handful of sand form the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. Robert Persig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Dynamic Process

The Buddha taught that beyond this world created by our own senses and limitations, the phenomenal world dissolves into a dynamic process. The true nature of reality lies beyond the realm of language and linear analysis. Helena Norberg–Hodge, Ancient Futures

In particular, it is the function of the beautiful to be, so to speak, an epiphany of the Absolute and formless void which is God. It is an embodiment of the Absolute mediated through the personality of the artist, or perhaps better, his ‘spirit’ and his contemplative experience. Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite

Waiting to grasp the ungraspable, you exhaust yourself in vain. As soon as you open and relax this tight fist of grasping, infinite space is there – open, inviting, and comfortable. Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

We need to realize that the tacit contains experience, the unconscious, the unknown, the limitless – in short, reality – and that the explicit is merely a map of experience. Michael Polyani, The Tacit Dimension

Intellectus

One does not see or sense, or perceive in isolation – perception is always linked to behaviour and movement, to reaching out and exploring the world. It is insufficient to see; one must look as well. Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars

Wabi–sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of con-sciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace. Leonard Koren, Wabi–Sabi for Artists, designers, Poets and Philosophers.

The old philosophy distinguished between knowledge achieved by effort (ratio) and the knowledge received (intellectus) by the listening soul that can hear the essence of things and come to understand the marvellous. But this calls for unusual strength of soul. The more so since society claims more and more and more of your inner self and infects you with its restlessness. It trains you in distraction, colonizes consciousness as fast as consciousness advances. The true poise, that of contemplation or imagination, sits right on the border of sleep and dreaming. Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

The Present Moment“The secret of Zen is just two words: not always so”Shunryo Suzuki Roshi

Seeing is the most arduous thing that a human being can undertake, for it calls for a disciplined, alert mind. But most people would rather lapse into mental laziness than take the trouble to see each person, each thing in its present moment of freshness. Anthony de Mello, Awareness

Zen is liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than the instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality. Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

If everything we see is changing, what can we identify in this process as ourself ? We can see what concepts or body image or deep sense of self we hold as “me” or “mine”, as who we are, and begin, and begin to question this whole structure. And perhaps, in deep stillness, we can come to that which goes beyond our limited sense of self, that which is silent and timeless and universal. Joseph Goldstein & Jack Kornfield, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom

Words move, music movesOnly in time; but that which is only livingCan only die. Words, after speech, reachInto the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,Can words or music reachThe stillness, as a Chinese jar stillMoves perpetually in its stillness.Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,Not that only, but the co–existence,Or say that the end precedes the beginning,And the end and the beginning were always thereBefore the beginning and after the end.And all is always now. T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets

RealityWe almost never see reality. What we see is a reflection of it in the form of words and concepts which we then proceed to take for reality. Anthony de Mello, Taking Flight

I saw that reality might not be a fixture – crudely, inescapably there – but a continuing, spontaneous enterprise of the imagination. It might be shaped, remade, revalued again and again through each act of perception, each inventive gesture of relationship. Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding

I had the strange hunch that nature itself was not out there, an object world eternally separated from subjects, but that everything external corresponded vividly with something internal, that the two realms were identical and interchangeable, and that nature was my own unconscious being. Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows. Are you imprisoned by your concepts ? Do you want to break out of your prison ? Then look; observe; spend hours observing. Watching what ?Anything. The faces of people, the shapes of trees, a bird in flight, a pile of stones, watch the grass grow. Get in touch with things, look at them. Hopefully you will then break out of these rigid patterns we have all developed, out of what our thoughts and our words have imposed on us. Hopefully we will see. What will we see ? The thing that we choose to call reality, whatever is beyond words and concepts. Anthony de Mello, Awareness

The art of meditation, prayer, space – call it what you will – creates a distance from ourselves; the perspective of seeing that the products of our own mind are but that, and embracing another framework of scale and time; ourselves in context of the universe and eternity. We bow to the brain; we forget, or ridicule, our potential for other forms of knowing.

How do you decide when to stop looking at something ? It is not like a book, page after page, page after page, end. You give it your attention, or you don’t. A.S. Byatt, Elementals

The soul craves depth of reflection, many layers of meaning, nuances without end… Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

O R I G I N A L S

© Phillip Pulfrey 2006

an originals production