A ''blossom of some kind''

''The time of pristine places has passed'' says Julian Hoffman (the author of The Small Heart of Things). It is a sad reflection, and everybody knows what he means : the uncontrolled expansion of the UK (Urban Kingdom), pollutions of oceans and mountains, an almost perpetual criss-cross of airliners' white trails in the sky, etc. But here in Brittany countryside, I see everywhere fields, hedgerows and oaks, beeches, larches around my house, with robins, blackbirds, red squirrels, adders (often seen in summer, when I pick blackberries), salamanders, and even marble newts, and for sure, I will fiercely protect them against all possible ''country planning''. When I go outside, I have always a wonderful sensation of freshness, of physical newness, so that I have in mind an English poet (I am French but I have a strong liking for English authors) : Hopkins : ''And for all this, Nature is never spent'', and an English painter : Constable : ''Everything seems full of blossom of some kind and at every step I take, and on whatever object I turn my eyes, that sublime expression of the Scriptures, ''I am the resurrection and the life'', seems as if uttered near me''. He wrote this sentence in May (1819). He was talking about spring blossom, but not only. What did he mean by ''of some kind'' ? By the verb ''seems'' ? And he adds ''on whatever object'', so on stones, on stumps, on soil, on water, on everything. He sees every material thing as in bloom, -in other words : fresh and new.

Nature gives an incessant impression of freshness, of continuous newness. Why ? It seems that there is something in nature, in matter, which is always fresh, i.e. new, full of energy and pure, -pristine, like a flame. Have you ever seen an old flame ? One may think that old, dull and impure are unknown qualities in nature. Our human eye sees an old tree or a dead tree. Yes, these trees are old or dead, biologically. But their physics is always new, like flames. An old tree (like Major Oak) is incessantly a new thing. A continuous material newness shines in all things. There is in nature, everywhere on earth and at every moment a certain fire, a blossom of some kind, which will never pass. Joyful reflection.   

John Constable, Golding Constable's Garden.
Constable, quoted by Leslie :  I returned from Suffolk yesterday...Nothing can exceed the beauty of the country ; it makes pictures appear sad trumpery, even those that have most of nature (chap 12).  No doubt the greatest masters considered their best efforts but as experiments, and perhaps as experiments that had failed when compared whith their hopes, their wishes, and with what they saw in nature (chap 18).  

Winter, season of renewal

Spring : celebrated season of the vegetable flow : flowers, light and life. By contrast, scorned winter evokes numbness -frost, night and death. This vision of winter is too sad for me, and I think it is inexact. It needs to be amended. Frost : for sure, but not every day (in our European latitudes). Night ? Days are only shorter. Sun and blue sky are not a rare thing in December or January. Death ? The vegetable dormancy is secret, warm and concentrated life. In my garden, robins and blackbirds come and go and fly about everyday. Nature knows no off season. One of the most inspirational Emerson's phrases says : ''Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year'' (in Works and Days). So every February's day is also the best day.

There are three differences in winter : colder temperatures, shorter days and vegetable dormancy. No lack of intensity for all the rest : air is air, water is water -drops, rivers and seas, waves and foam -and ice is only solid water, soil is soil, and wood, stones, metals, sky and stars and every material thing.

And the substance of material things is always active. Matter in its innermost parts is so active that it is an illusion to think an atom is inert and physically the same during the shortest moment one can conceive : it doesn't cease to be a different thing, a new thing, at every moment.

Go outside in winter : and look at the blue -or dark and windy sky, at waters, and stones and trees' bark and branches -is there any lack of intensity in all these things ? Is wintry physical reality actually dull and dead ? My perception, my senses tell me : Nature is as fresh and new in December as in May. Winter, like other seasons, is a season of renewal, because Nature is a continuous renewal. At every moment Nature is a new object. Reality is always new.

Low temperatures and long nights : inconveniences for our practical needs. For our soul, Nature's incessant physical newness may be an incessant joy.

A. Huxley : ''I love matter, I find it miraculous''

Nature gives me a materialistic joy. When I pick a white pebble on the shore, or look at the bright transparency of a wave which falls, or at the bark of a tree, or at an apple or a sweet pepper, or wet moss after the rain -when I look at them closely and attentively, I feel that the matter of these objects is incessantly active and living and fresh and new. And I have in mind this idea : there is no old matter. Matter doesn't grow old. Physicists say the electron is almost eternal, but are there ageing and worn electrons ? My hypothesis is that billions and billions years after their creation, longlife particles are as active and as new as in the beginning. I would like to put this question to a physicist : are particles subject to ageing, to gradual physical degradation, like living beings or like a pan or a car or a house ? Are there rusty electrons ?

Huxley, in Calcutta, visited Bose's laboratory and wrote : ''I love matter, I find it miraculous''. (Jesting Pilate, 1926). For me, the miracle is that matter renews itself incessantly. Material things are always new. We see old things because we are imprisoned in the practical perception -in what French philosopher Bergson called ''practical simplification'' (in the famous digression of Laughter's third chapter : What is the object of art ). This practical perception is related to our needs. To survive, we have to perceive useful and harmful things. We need what we call clean and fresh food, and we throw away whatever we perceive as dirty or rotten. But in nature all is fresh and clean, and for some animals mud is a sweet and lovely home. We have to perceive the useful/harmful aspects of physical reality, and we may be blind to all the rest.

''Miraculous'' : one reads the same word in Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World :

''Reviewing their properties one by one, there seems to be nothing to choose between the two tables for ordinary purposes ; but when abnormal circumstances befall, my scientific table shows to advantage. If the house catches fire my scientific table will dissolve quite naturally into scientific smoke, whereas my ordinary table undergoes a metamorphosis of its substantial nature which I can only regard as miraculous.''

And is it not a miracle that an inert log in the basket becomes in the hearth light and heat and smoke and a few grams of ash ? What are the true properties of matter if wood can become light and heat ? Matter is not a living being in the proper sense of living, but it is an incessantly active being*, and all around us this active being renews itself at every moment. In the world of matter, the concept of ageing seems meaningless. Matter is energy, and in physical processes there is no loss of energy -no loss of youth : something new happens at every moment. Is not this continuous refreshing physical newness the most striking feature in nature ? 

  

Every step I take in any place, quiet streets and parks, or a village with small gardens, or a grassy path in the countryside -all the more so if the sun pours its incessant flux of sparkling photons, is a material enchantment (in Emerson's words : ''a perennial festival''). The more one's perception sharpens, the more one becomes an eager and nature-loving materialist.

 

* I like this sentence (on particleadventure.org) : Electrons are in constant motion around the nucleus, protons and neutrons jiggle within the nucleus, and quarks jiggle within the protons and neutrons.

The Power of New

Yesterday I watched a video about Eckhart Tolle : Meditation: Eckhart Tolle.

I posted this comment : 

6.56 : ''the ways in which life manifests continuously around you''. That's it : something new happens at every moment. I think this is the most wonderful property of the now : it is never the same now, the now is always another now, the now you live has never been lived before, because it is continuously new : the power of now is the power of new. And this newness is not a concept or a vague idea : all this world is material and matter is always active and always new. In another video (The Enjoyment of Being with Eckhart Tolle, New World Library) : he says : ''so-called inanimate objects have a life of their own''. What is that ''life'' -but an incessant physical newness ? Nietzsche wrote : ''the tree is something new at every moment''. There are no old objects : their aspect may seem old, but their matter is always new. Every object is continuously new, even a dry leaf. Is perceiving the now another thing than perceiving this continuous newness ?

The Power of Here

The celebration of the present moment is a cliché (which, perhaps, is the expression of a truth) of the spiritual literature. In the seventeeth century, Angelus Silesius shaped it in a beautiful distich :

              One must be limpid and live in the moment

              So that in oneself God sees Himself and softly reposes.

                                              (Cherubinic Wanderer, I, 136)

Like Huxley in Perennial Philosophy (chapter Time and Eternity), Eckhart Tolle quotes Rumi : ''the Sufi is the son of time present'' (The Power of Now).

The Transcendentalists, and close to them Whitman, also attempted to increase their lives increasing their perception of the ''everlasting Now'' :

Thoreau : Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages (Walden, chapter 2).

Walt Whitman :   I have heard what the talkers were talking,

                           The talk of the beginning and the end,
                           But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

                          There was never any more inception than there is now,
                          Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
                          And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
                         Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. 

                                                     (Song of Myself, 3).

But maybe nobody has never more powerfully formulated the ''power of now'' than Emerson, -in all his works, and for instance in Literary Ethics :

The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires. In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns. With inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has read the story of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home to the surrounding woods, the faint roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and marches in Germany. He is curious concerning that man's day. What filled it? the crowded orders, the stern decisions, the foreign despatches, the Castilian etiquette? The soul answers — Behold his day here! In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of these northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens, you meet, — in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea, and the puny execution; — behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, yet the same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day, — day of all that are born of women. The difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting the self-same life, — its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so admire in other men. Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable, obliterated past, what it cannot tell, — the details of that nature, of that day, called Byron, or Burke; — but ask it of the enveloping Now; the more quaintly you inspect its evanescent beauties, its wonderful details, its spiritual causes, its astounding whole, — so much the more you master the biography of this hero, and that, and every hero. Be lord of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history books.

So many people have celebrated the present moment -but who has been so coherent and insightful to celebrate also the here -in the proper sense of this word : the material nature as it is wherever you are. We read a lot about the now, but most of the time most of us think : ''Now is good, but elsewhere is best''. Of these two facets of reality, the here seems too often overlooked or forgotten. In Emerson's essays, the two facets shine with equal clarity :

Write it on heart that every day is the best day in the year (Works and Days).

The first step of worthiness will be to disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times, with number and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia, and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best (Heroism).

''...that every day is the best day'' : I have had immediately this sentence in mind when I read the story of Banzan in Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now : Before he became a great Zen master, he spent many years in pursuit of enlightenment, but it eluded him. Then, one day, as he was walking in the marketplace, he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer. ''Give me the best piece of meat you have,'' said the customer. And the butcher replied, ''Every piece of meat I have is the best. There is no piece of meat here that is not the best.'' Upon hearing this, Banzan became enlightened. 

It seems to me that the intuition of the Now and the intuition of the Here grow on the same root : the intuition of the New. And I think this intuition of the new is the central feature of Emerson's thought. One might call it neology -a concept used by one of the Transcendentalists, Frederic Hedge (cf Barbara Packer, The Transcendentalists, Georgia, 2007, p. 166). As soon as the first paragraph of his first book, Nature, Emerson states it loud and clear : Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe ? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe ? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. (And I cannot quote here all the countless extracts I have in store from his journals, sermons, letters, lectures and essays about ''the New'')

A French translation of Nature (Editions Allia, 2014) 

It is only in the present moment one can perceive nature's newness. But this newness is a property of matter, and nature is everywhere matter, so you can perceive this newness everywhere. Travelling is useless, it is a fool's paradise, as Emerson put it in Self-Reliance. Because matter renews itself incessantly, matter is ever other, and in this sense, one may say : elsewhere is here. Because the world is everywhere new at every moment, wherever you are, you are always everywhere elsewhere. Every moment is a new world : this sentence appears at least two times in Emerson's works (sermon n°158 and journal, Feb 22 1834), and one may add : every place at every moment is a new world. It is in this way I read this paragraph of the last pages of Thoreau's Walking : Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners' deeds, as it were in some far-away field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass; and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

Eveywhere at every moment our earth offers the enchantment of the New. The problems are in the conditions of its perception (everyday work and concerns, busy crowds, urban and noisy environment...). Travelling may be a solution, but only -besides the stimulation of a new setting, of a new landscape- to get better conditions of perception, no more. Whitman says : There was never any more inception than there is now. And he could say : There was never any more inception and freshness and newness elsewhere than there is here.

''The dearest freshness deep down things''

Perceiving nature's freshness is a joy. And with that joy is another joy, when you know that men cannot degrade this freshness, -they cannot alter it, cannot destroy it, because it is an incessant physical fact : at every moment, every material thing is a new thing. No one, nothing can rob you of this quality of freshness -no noise, no industry, no pollution, no war. These calamities can only alter your circumstances, your physical or mental health, can only disrupt your perception of nature, but they cannot disrupt the physical phenomenon of incessant newness -and seeing this is a joy. Cities are most of the time awfully noisy and oppressive, but cannot prevent physical things to be incessantly renewed, and (so far) you may sit for a while in a park, or travel, hike, walk, far from the urban built environment and wander in nature, lonely as a cloud, or even live in a country house with blue hydrangeas and a great garden with raspberries, and at every moment breathe a new air and see new leaves, new trees, new stones under a new sun.

These two joys inspired Gerard Manley Hopkins to write one of his poems, God's Grandeur :

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod ?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod ;

And all is seared with trade ; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge, and shares man's smell [...].

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things [...].

At every moment, you may go outside and feel, all senses awakened, that the world is continuously new, and may say to yourself : everything's fine : nature is never spent, freshness never faded.

And for all this, nature is never spent.

 

                                                                                                                      

A blue never seen before

 

The sky -above clouds- is always blue. Have you ever asked yourself why it is always so blue, why this blue never fade ? At every moment the sun throws light to the earth and the result in the atmosphere is this blue color. This physical phenomenon is always new. This blue color is always new. When you look at the sky, the blue you see has never been seen before in the past, because it is absolutely new, absolutely fresh. In fact, all color you see has never been seen before, because it is always physically new. There are no old colors. We may generalize : every physical object has never been seen before, because it is always physically new. Our earth offers an incessant physical freshness. Go outside and look at whatever object : look at it at close range : you will see what Huxley called the intensity of existence which animates every object when seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context (Heaven and Hell). What is this intensity of existence ? From what does it proceed ? There is intensity because there is physical activity. All object is a piece of energy -of active energy. Activity, and so change, modification, newness, freshness.

So Walt Whitman was right when he wrote (probably influenced by Emerson, whose works, -not only his essays, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Circles, Works and Days, etc, but also his sermons, poems (cf To-day), journal, lectures, addresses and letters, are a celebration of ''the New'' ) : 

 

I have heard what the talkers were talking,

the talk of the beginning and the end.

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now.

(Song of Myself, 3)

Emerson, in his journal (July, 1841, JMN, vol 7, p 457) : Ever and forever Heraclitus is justified who called the world an eternal inchoation.

Every moment is a beginning (or inception or inchoation, synonyms) and so as important and as beautiful as any moment in the past, and should be considered as a revelation. At every moment, the world we see has never been seen before. Nature has never been newer than it is now.

Blue fire

Newness, brightness, purity : you can see this three qualities in a flame. A flame is a new thing at every moment, is always a fresh thing. There are no old flames. Freshness of flames, freshness of fire. Every material thing on earth is fresh as a flame. A rose is a rose is a flame, is red fire, -a rose, or the hedge at the bottom of the garden, or four bamboo chair legs in the middle of a room :

A rose is a rose is a rose, but these chair legs were chair legs were St Michael and all angels. [...] I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. [...]

  The bold heraldic blossom of an iris in my garden (with my old nokia mobile phone)

 

 

Istigkeit -wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy -except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were -a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence. I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing -but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden" (Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception).

It seems to me that this qualitative equivalent of breathing is another name for freshness, for incessant newness, -pulsing newness :

From the French window I walked out under a kind of pergola covered in part by a climbing rose tree, in part by laths, one inch wide with half an inch of space between them. The sun was shining and the shadows of the laths made a zebra-like pattern on the ground and across the seat and back of a garden chair, which was standing at this end of the pergola. That chair -shall I ever forget it ? Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they could be made of anything but blue fire. [...] None too soon, I was steered away from the disquieting splendors of my garden chair. [...] A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision. So passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the blue. Like the chair under the laths, they protested too much. I looked down at the leaves and discovered a cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights and shadows, pulsing with undecipherable mystery.

The Doors of Perception -the first two-thirds of it -is the most beautiful text I have ever read. I read it first in French (in the old translation by Jules Castier, which is not flawless : A rose is a rose is a rose becomes : Une rose, si elle est une rose est une rose -with no note about Stein ; Wordsworth's daffodils becomes les asphodèles de Wordsworth, etc) and then in the 1994 Flamingo edition. 

''The tree is something new at every moment''

You see the freshness of flowers, or the freshness of fruit, and hour after hour, day after day, you observe the loss of this freshness. There is a degradation of their matter. But this loss of freshness is an illusion, it is not absolute, it is relative to your needs, to your senses. You call fresh what is healthy, you deny this quality of freshness to what is not. Degradation is a negative alteration, but this negativity is in your eye, in your senses, not in the things. Reality is an incessant renewing. Matter changes at every moment, alters itself incessantly, and so is always new, always fresh. The tree, wrote Nietzsche, is something new at every moment : the form is maintained by us, because we cannot perceive the finest absolute motion.

We add : every material thing is something new at every moment : water and stone, wood and grass, gold and gorse, animal and human bodies, sky and clouds, air and sun. This is why nature always gives you an impression of freshness.

''Even the leaves of the wintered-through oaks''

Fresh and freshness have three main meanings : newly produced (and so not yet faded, rotten or damaged) ; bright, healthy and full of energy ; and pure. Newness, brightness and purity : these three qualities (or two, or one) are ascribed to certain things, -and not to others : old stumps, dead leaves, faded flowers, apples with soft brown spots, -and other things decayed and useless. Useless ? Not for compost, which becomes more fertile : there is no matter without energy. Organic matter (and inorganic as well : particles in atoms are not fixed and inert) is not static, it changes at every moment, from the seed to the compost, it is new at every moment, and so it is fresh at every moment -even the leaves of the wintered-through oaks :

Already (listen!) you can hear the first

rakes ; once more the rhythm of men

through the held-back silence of the resolute earth

in early spring. What has so often

come to you is coming once more,

vivid as if for the first time. Now,

slowly, you await what you always hoped for

but never took. It always took you.

                                                                                                                                                                                      wikimediaImages

Even the leaves of the wintered-through oaks
seem in the twilight a future brown.
Breezes signal, then signal back. 

Black are the bushes. Yet heaps of dung 
lie more intensely black on the ground. 
Every hour that goes by grows younger.

(Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 25, tr. Stephen Mitchell, 2009)

Morning Manifesto

 Once I wrote a manifesto -for myself, for my own use :

   The sort of refreshing work from which I want increase myself : intensify the perception of this rough physical freshness of the outside, of this active, quivering quality of material reality -that which almost crackles visible in the transparent waves of the morning sun, that which by night also, that which relentlessly alters the air and the rocks and the trees -everything, soft fresh lightning, current of sharp particles that in whatever object, in whatever body, move and change incessantly -and blow my mind.

Perceive more acutely -by increase of attention, of alertness- this silent rustle of running water of physical reality's incessant renewing.

Multiply your sensory tree, over-branch in your skull this apple tree of freshness, so that there circulates and spawns and grows the sap of the incessant material newness, -for an incessant fructification.

I call poïetics this endeavor to produce a greater sensory consciousness. For my intention is not to create poems or any text or piece of art, forms of creation I deem secondary, but, in the morning wording of Walden, to affect the quality of the day.

I say morning poïetics  (it was the first title of this manifesto, but the word poïetics is a bit odd -but etymologically relevant, and used in science : cf for instance haemotopoïetics, or in cycling and blood doping : EPO, erythropoietin, red blood cell production -poïen means make, produce)  because morning is the moment of the day when the world appears to us with a certain quality of physical freshness. But with a minimum of attention, everyone would see that this newness is continuous : night and day, the world is a perpertual morning  :

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. [...] The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. [...] We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. (Thoreau, Walden, chapter 2).

In fact, it is not the quality of the day, that is, the quality of the world, that you have to affect, to transform, -it is your perception of the world that you have to sharpen. You can hardly act on the world, but you can act on yourself, on your own life, and particularly on your attention to the physical world.

The question of the communication (by words or by anything else) of my experience is secondary. What matters is this sensory experience : to improve it, to strengthen and sharpen it. Communication comes after. Distinguish poïetics, the first thing, and poetics, the second one. What matters is my consciousness, the sentient abyss of my perceptions, -the flow of freshness.

Perceiving this physical freshness is reaching another land, ever new, ever other. I have in mind these words of Meister Eckhart :

He who has thus abandoned all things on the lower plane where they are mortal, will recover them in God, where they are reality. Whatever is dead here is alive there, and all that is dense matter here is spirit there in God. (Meister Eckhart, Sermons and Treatises, vol 1, tr. O'Connell Walshe, 1987)

Spirit : breath, freshness. In nature, every object is new, incessantly new, absolutely new. -An old tree -but its matter is ever new, its old age is only biological. Its biology is old, but its physics is ever young, ever new. Whatever seems dead here, in the ordinary perception, is alive there, and all that is dense matter here is freshness there, in this sharper perception.

Go outside and renew in yourself -rusted axe which sparkles in the fresh air- or rather produce, create in yourself the attention to the freshness of stones, trees, air, intensify the alertness in yourself : all the earth and all things are crossed by this current, by this torrent, -continuously crossed, altered, renewed.

About pictures : ''Moi, les photos, je les vois pas.''

To abstract painters who showed him photos of their wives and children, Alberto Giacometti replied that he didn't see their pictures, that he didn't see any photo : ''Moi, les photos, je les vois pas''. (Interview with Georges Charbonnier, April 16, 1957, cf You tube : Alberto Giacometti -Entretiens (1953 et 1957) : 10.44 (in French) ; published in Le Monologue du peintre, Paris, Julliard, 1959). He didn't understand what they wanted to show him. He didn't think photos are acceptable representations of reality. 

A photographic reflection of a natural object is still, static, inert, lacks all physical activity. The real object is ever active, ever changing, even stones or oak logs. Its real being is more in this activity, in this perpetual newness, than in the fixed reflection captured by the camera.

I gave up drawing and photo precisely because they cannot catch the most interesting element of landscape, of nature : its incessant physical newness. The only physical newness of a picture (painting, photo -paper or digital) is that of its material medium.

So when I look at a photo, I have in mind that what I see is not fixed and inert, -that the reflection is fixed and inert, but that the reality is always actively, intensely new and fresh -and this thought is exhilarating, because it reminds me of the exhilarating fact of the continuous freshness of nature. Younger, I remember watching a movie : there were outside scenes : the landscape -sand, stone, south, sun- seemed to me so intense that characters and story became uninteresting and worthless : the important thing was not fiction and characters, it was the wonderful reality of the landscape in the sun. It was no more a movie, it was images of a natural phenomenon : sun on the bark and leaves of the trees, on the stones, on the ground, -images of their perpetual newness. The filmmaker had caught a reflection of the perpetual event of the physical newness of nature, but it was only for him an outside background, a secondary fact, -the primary fact was for him the fiction, not the amazing material reality of this world. What I saw was not reality -the reality you experience on the spot-, it was only its inert reflection, but it was sufficient to make the fiction uninteresting and pointless. By the burning bush (or, in a theater, by the reflection of the burning bush), fiction is a poor thing.

Morning violet

lemasdelafontaine.fr

Grignan (southern France), June : an active transparency, a limpid electricity circulates in the swift air, bathes the olive trees, the dry stone low walls, the lavender fields -rows the incessant light lightning of the sun heightens and burns, sharp morning violet. 

Like embers

When you perceive this freshness, you see every natural object (the surface of sandstone, the bark of spruce in the sun, the transparent substance of water) as embers, for like embers, like flames, they are ever active and ever new. Flames and embers are physically new at every moment. Have you ever seen old flames or old embers ? And you see them as embers because they also are physically new at every moment, -ever new, ever fresh.  

 

For Heraclitus, fire was the basic element : all things are in flux, and all things are flames. I read this in a book by Karl Popper (Conjectures and Refutations, 1963) :

There was no stability left in the world of Heraclitus. ''Everything is in flux, and nothing is at rest''. Everything is in flux, even the beams, the timber, the building material of which the world is made : earth and rocks, or the bronze of a cauldron -they are all in flux. The beams are rotting, the earth is washed away and blown away, the very rocks split and wither, the bronze cauldron turns into green patina, or into verdigris : ''All things are in motion all the time, ...even though this escapes our senses'', as Aristotle expressed it. [...] Thus there are no solid bodies. Things are not really things, they are processes, they are in flux. They are like fire, like a flame which, though it may have a definite shape, is a process, a stream of matter, a river. All things are flames : fire is the very building material of our world, and the apparent stability of things is due to the laws, the measures, which the processes in our world are subject to.

And in Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy (1958) :

In the philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus the concept of Becoming occupies the foremost place. He regarded that which moves, the fire, as the basic element. [...] Modern physics is in some way extremely near to the doctrines of Heraclitus. If we replace the word ''fire'' by the word ''energy'' we can almost repeat his statements word for word from our modern point of view. Energy is in fact that substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made, and energy is that which moves. Energy is a substance, since its total amount does not change, and the elementary particles can actually be made from this substance as is seen from many experiments on the creation of elementary particles. Energy can be changed into motion, into heat, into light and into tension. Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world.

Street scene at the archeological excavations at Ephesus (photo Ad Meskens). 
To my mind, the important thing to see in this picture is not the vestiges  :  it is the physical freshness of all what you see : all is always in flux, all is always physically new. 

 

In the words of Heraclitus, which I always keep in mind :  
This cosmos, none of gods or men made, but it always was and is and shall be : an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.

It is fresh

Open the door and go outside. And outside, something strikes you, delighting, refreshing, electrifying : the bright freshness of nature, its incessant material newness. When someone asked him what attracts him to the desert, Lawrence of Arabia answered : ''It is clean''. When someone asks us what attracts us to nature, we answer : ''It is fresh''. It has this amazing quality of renewing itself ceaselessly. We love the sun, granite and larches, forests and rivers, this or that landscape, but what enchants us above all, what enchants us most in nature, it is not a particular object, not a place, not a part, neither this nor that, -it is their physical intensity, the incessant brightness of their material newness, their freshness.  

                                                        A larch soft green needles in spring
                          (About  photographic images : cf About pictures : ''Moi, les photos, je les vois pas'' )