Black & White

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Spirals

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"The unique properties of the Golden Rectangle provides another example. This shape, a rectangle in which the ratio of the sides a/b is equal to the golden mean (phi), can result in a nesting process that can be repeated into infinity — and which takes on the form of a spiral. It's call the logarithmic spiral, and it abounds in nature."

--George Dvorsky, Gizmodo

While my wife hunts for sea glass along the shoreline, I'm usually drawn more to the beach pebbles. I'm attracted to the variety of colors and patterns, and to holding one in my hand and knowing that each one is the expression of physical processes that may have begun deep in the earth or deep in the ocean. We gathered these stones on Rodeo Beach. I placed them on the sand and enjoyed the colors but didn't care for the shape I'd made. My wife rearranged them into this spiral.

Also found along the beach were these varied hues of layered serpentine, chert and other minerals. The original image is 24x53 inches. Shot with 105mm lens, I focus-stacked each vertical frame, then stitched the six resulting frames into a panorama.

My favorite stone was this interesting little pebble with patches of what I thought at first glance might be rose-colored quartz. Looking at it under a 10X hand lens, though, the reddish color looks like it could be embedded chert. In any event I enjoy the complexity of its construction and thinking about its formation over perhaps millions of years. (Then again, if you think about it, everything from the pebble to the fingers that picked it up off the beach, began to form at the very beginning of time itself.)

I photographed the pebble in a small abalone shell that brought me back to my wife's spiral on the beach and to thoughts of a nautilus shell she has at home. The nautilus is often used to describe the correlation between the Golden Ratio in art and architecture, and Fibonacci numbers in mathematics -- places where spirals are found.

The spiral is an interesting shape, expressed in nature from molluscs to galaxies, in art from petroglyphs to Andy Goldsworthy. Water spirals down the drain in our sink and spins into hurricanes over the ocean. Spirals occurred in sacred form from the Celts to the Aztecs. They are hardwired into our DNA and even occur, in a manner of speaking, in the depths of our psyche.

"The way to the goal seems chaotic and interminable at first, and only gradually do the signs increase that it is leading anywhere. The way is not straight but appears to go round in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals: the dream-motifs always return after certain intervals to definite forms, whose characteristic it is to define a center.... The development of these symbols is almost the equivalent of a healing process. The center or goal thus signifies salvation in the proper sense of the word."

--Carl Jung from Psychology and Alchemy

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Black-and-White

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Cosmos

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"At Riobamba, the town about a hundred miles south of Quito where the disastrous earthquake of 1797 had been centered, the travelers stayed for a few weeks.... Here Humboldt had the opportunity to inspect some sixteenth-century manuscripts written in a pre-Inca language called Purugayan, which had been translated into Spanish.... [T]he manuscripts related the dramatic story of a volcanic eruption and the religious and political significance that the local shamans had ascribed to it....

"The priests of those ages [Humboldt wrote to his brother] possessed sufficient knowledge of astronomy to draw a meridian line and to observe the actual moment of the solstice."

--From Humboldt's Cosmos, by Gerard Helferich

Plenty of people still believe that natural phenomena like floods and earthquakes are some sort of divine retribution for their sins (or someone else's sins). And we can't just write off such belief as a mark of stupidity, as evidenced by Humboldt's shaman astronomers who could ascribe religious significance to an eruption on one hand and calculate the solstice with the other. There is something deeply human about our sense of connection with the world, a connection that has both physical and psychological dimensions.

How do you feel when you're alone in nature? Do you feel invigorated and at ease, or constrained and anxious? Physically, the environment is the same whichever way you feel about it, but psychologically, your thoughts are busy coloring the landscape. These colorations, or projections, seem real, and we believe the place itself has attributes that exist only in our imagination. One place makes us feel at ease and happy, while another makes us feel anxious and troubled. We believe our "sixth sense" -- or maybe even our so-called common sense -- is telling us something true about our surroundings.

I like to do a little test when I have these feelings. I try to let go of whatever I've been thinking about. Just be there with my senses alert, letting the world inform me rather than coloring it with my own thoughts and ideas. Nine times out of ten, whether I'm in nature or in the city, I find the sense of foreboding was a projection of my own thoughts or bias, that my anxiety was unfounded. 

Once I was in a wilderness skills class where we were going to kill a couple of chickens by wringing their necks. We had only two chickens, so only two of the dozen or so students were going to do the deadly deed while the rest of us observed. It was a sunny day in a rural part of Santa Cruz. Birds were calling in the woods. Down in front of my feet, ants were hauling grass seeds toward their subterranean nest. A gentle breeze blew. I wondered if nature would react to our killing of these chickens. 

The killing time arrived, and the chickens' necks were broken. Their bright, beautiful combs faded and wilted as they perished. But the breeze did not change. No cloud obscured the sun. Songbirds did not fall silent. The earth did not tremble. The ants marched on with their seeds. Nature did not pass judgment. It neither condoned nor condemned our killing. If nature inflicts moral judgments on people, it does so simply and without malice. Over-consumption of natural resources leads to depletion and scarcity that affect human lives. Injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere changes climatic regimes that can turn cities into swamps and bread baskets into deserts.

As for my sixth sense, I sometimes wonder if it is actually a subconscious awareness of physical phenomena rather than some sort of supernatural communication. So much is always happening around us that we can't possibly put our mental finger on it all. Our sixth sense alerts us to some danger, whether small or great, that we then manage to avoid, and we believe we have been favored by supernatural means. 

It might have been luck, but it doesn't feel that way. We feel like we were tipped off -- and I believe we were tipped off, but I believe what happened is that we became subliminally aware of physical cues. Sounds that vibrated our eardrums, light that struck our retinas, molecules that sailed into our nose. And all of it acted upon by a body that wasn't about to wait around until it could put the whole thing into words for the benefit of consciousness. Interrelatedness happens.

You could say I'm a strict materialist. But if you look at what we know about material these days, you find that trouble abounds. The more deeply we probe into matter, the less "material" it becomes. That pair of jeans you like? It's just atoms, subatomic particles, and forces. And according to our own modern mythology, before there was any material, there was an infinitely small "thing" called a singularity. A singularity cannot be imagined. How can we imagine that the germ of 100 billion galaxies, including the one we're riding on right this minute, was once an invisible little speck? Even if you do away with the mathematical concept of a singularity (since infinities are generally taken to be errors), or trade it in for "space-time foam," you are still left scratching your head about how "all this" -- the entire cosmos -- came from basically nothing.

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End O' July

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I just finished reading The Invention of Nature -- Alexander von Humboldt's New World, by Andrea Wulf, and I so enjoyed reading about this interesting naturalist that I also just picked up Humboldt's Cosmos by Gerard Helferich. Cosmos was the name of Humboldt's 5-volume magnum opus on the world of nature. He finished the first two volumes in 1847 but decided there was more work to do and wrote two more volumes before he died in 1859 at the age of 89 (the fifth volume was published posthumously). The San Francisco Public Library has a copy of Cosmos that can be viewed only in the library, and one of these days I'll have to make the pilgrimage.

Humboldt's work and ideas inspired many scientists, artists and other interesting people of his day, from Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz to Frederic Edwin Church and George Catlin to Henry Thoreau and John Muir. He was greatly interested in America's new, free republic and was a friend of Thomas Jefferson (whom he admonished against slavery). If, like me, you've never really heard much about Humboldt -- whom King Friedrich Wilhelm IV dubbed "the greatest man since the Deluge" -- blame may go in part to World War I and the ensuing fear and loathing of everything German. Here in the USA, some 2,000 Germans, including 29 members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, were sent to internment camps, and numerous German-owned businesses -- including woolen mills worth $70 million -- were seized.

I've been wondering what inspiration I can take from Humboldt's life, whether I could apply anything to my jaunts to Mt. Tam and other nearby locales. The way he looked at the world as a whole of interrelated parts was an inspiration to many, as were his exotic adventures in South America.

I still remember when Mt. Tamalpais seemed exotic to me, and I wouldn't mind getting that feeling again, if possible. There are many other places I'd like to explore, and I hope to have the ability to do so someday, but for the next few years I'm going to be content with photographing close to home. Even Humboldt had to spend many years -- decades, even -- simply making a living when he'd rather have been exploring.

Today I ventured out once again on the Matt Davis Trail. The grasses were still tall and bowed across the path, but this time the fog was much lower and the grass was dry as tinder. I didn't get wet at all, and it was actually quite sunny and warm. I was glad to have gotten out early, before the heat and bugs would become a nuisance. I wasn't sure I was actually still going to be interested in the backlit thistles that I enjoyed seeing when I recently hiked past here without my camera, but they were okay, if nothing to get too excited about, and I enjoyed the hike in any case.

This is a view down one of the ravines along the trail. I had to descend just a bit to get an unobstructed view. There was a second ravine I wanted to explore, even steeper, but I was too lazy to climb down into it. I find that I sometimes want the perspective of a longer lens, but holding that lens horizontally doesn't give me as much vertical coverage as I want, as was the case from this viewpoint using a 105mm lens. The solution (when there is little or no wind) is to hold the camera vertically and shoot several frames across the field to be stitched together as a panorama.

Getting back to the car I picked up my trail camera (where the water hole likely dried up two weeks ago; see my previous post), then drove down toward Stinson Beach to see if I could catch any fog beams. I was lucky to find a pull-out where the beams were coming through the forest canopy near a patch of showy flowers.

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