Honorable dignity
Firm determination
Long-term resilience
Duncan Plaza is a small public park in New Orleans located not far from our hotel of temporary lodging. An underutilized green space across from City Hall, it functions as a convergence locus that connects several distinct and diverse downtown neighborhoods, including the homeless.
“Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.” – Aristotle
Material universe
Notion of motion
Original exposition
Moving through space and time on the fringes of civilization, long shutter speeds blur reality into an illusionistic experience. Because we only see energy patterns, the theory or doctrine that the material world is a delusion has merit. Perceivable objects are simply shallow shells hiding a deeper underlying reality.
“Not only do the moments of this duration seem to be external to one another, like bodies in space, but the movement perceived by our senses is the, so to speak, palpable sign of a homogeneous and measurable duration.” – Henri Bergson
Luminous abstraction
Cultural center
Straddle the boundary
In New Orleans, a twilight view from the sixth floor of the Le Pavillon Hotel overlooks One Shell Square.
“All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.” – Christopher Morley
Particular phenomena
Succession proceeds
Through freedom
Spinoza could not tolerate separation between ideas and things outside us. In his formulation, Ideal thought and real objectivity are intimately united in our nature. They are only modifications of one and the same ideal nature, an infinite from which arose affections and modification of an endless series of finite things.
“The ideal world presses mightily towards the light, but is still held back by the fact that Nature has withdrawn as a mystery.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Silent procession
Field behind stable
Thoroughbred strain
The secret of creation is to seize sharply the opposition between the particular and the universal. In the same indivisible act, simultaneously grasp the former in the latter and the latter in the former.
“Horses make a landscape look beautiful.” – Alice Walker
Fathoming the depths
Local manifestation
Vital process
By being embodied in concrete forms, primordial knowledge, flowing from a single center, shapes the whole of cognition. Meanwhile, the pure universal must appear to the understanding as essence without form. Nevertheless, essence without form is also actuality with form.
“What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” – Roland Barthes
Methods of explanation
Mechanical causality
Intelligent finality
The impulse and the desire to investigate the essence of things is deeply implanted in humans. The creative faculty, like intellectual intuition, can also be developed, enhanced, and its resources multiplied ad infinitum.
“Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness by art.” – Anselm Kiefer
Molecular movements
Walls of significance
Organized strata
Moving in close isolates intimate details of the American Duchess, a river paddlewheeler based in Baton Rouge.
“The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.” – Gilles Deleuze
Recurrently modified
Magnetized by myth
Dynamic territory
Becoming aware of environmental potential is an endless process. Things presented sometimes are surprising in the moment, other times much later.
“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” – Andy Warhol
Wandering through
Every essence
Fickle wind
Beauty is a productive conduit to truth when exercising the mental faculty of acquiring knowledge, by either direct observation or by understanding. The true, the good, and the beautiful are by nature eternal, in the midst of time yet independent of time. In actuality, for Schelling the philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet.
“Nature meets us everywhere, at first with reserve, and in form more or less severe. She is like that quiet and serious beauty, that excites not attention by noisy advertisement, nor attracts the vulgar gaze.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling