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'' )