In the Right Light, Nothing Is Not Worth Looking At

[Image: small portion of an infographic of intersecting timelines from films and television shows which feature time travel. (Click to enlarge.) The bright yellow line is that of time itself, and the lines which crisscross it represent the individual movies and shows. (No Dr. Who, though: presumably it would complicate things too much.) Lines are color-coded according to the means of time travel: bright blue for alien technology, red for time machine, and so on. The gray line terminating at a red dot, roughly in the center, is labeled “ULTRA PARADOX! Marty McFly meets the Star Trek crew and they both battle The Terminator.”
For more information, see the Information Is Beautiful site — especially, follow the link there to the
“how we made this image” page.]

From whiskey river:

You can’t understand, change, or improve something if you don’t even see it.

Start with looking. Open! Open! Open!

Then tilt your head and look again. Deeper…

Look from every angle. Don’t let one view satisfy your curiosity.

There is a beautiful wisdom found in seeing from a universal point of view.

(Danielle Marie Crume (“Dani”) [source])

…and:

We eat light, drink it in through our skins. With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically. I like feeling the power of light and space physically because then you can order it materially. Seeing is a very sensuous act — there’s a sweet deliciousness to feeling yourself see something.

(James Turrell [source])

…and:

5.

We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change.
Congratulations, if
you have changed.

6.

Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
fabulous reason?

And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure —
your life —
what would do for you?

(Mary Oliver [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Breakage

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred —
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

The key to taking the measure of biodiversity lies in a downward adjustment of scale. The smaller the organism, the broader the frontier and the deeper the unmapped terrain. Conventional wildernesses of the overland trek may indeed be gone. Most of Earth’s largest species — mammals, birds, and trees — have been seen and documented. But microwildernesses exist in a handful of soil or aqueous silt collected almost anywhere in the world. They at least are close to a pristine state and still unvisited. Bacteria, protistans, nematodes, mites, and other minute creatures swarm around us, an animate matrix that binds Earth’s surface. They are objects of potentially endless study and admiration, if we are willing to sweep our vision down from the world lined by the horizon to include the world an arm’s length away. A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.

(Edward O. Wilson [source])

…and:

X-rays are today a humble diagnostic tool but in their infancy were considered nothing short of miraculous. Nan Knight, director of the archives at the history center of the American college of Radiology, told me that Thomas Edison, who seems to have invented publicity along with everything else he invented, at one point announced a public demonstration in which he would take an X-ray photograph of the living brain,* showing actual thoughts as they darted here and there. Within a year after the ray’s discovery, Parisian hucksters were selling tickets to sideshows purporting to show ghosts captured as X-ray images… Somewhere along the way, a rumor surfaced to the effect that opera glasses could be outfitted with X-rays, considerably upping the appeal of a night at the opera for many a bored spouse.

_____________

*In reality, an X-ray of the head could not show the brain, because the skull blocks the rays. What appeared to be an X-ray of the folds and convolutions of a human brain inside a skull — an image that circulated widely in 1896 — was in fact an X-ray of artfully arranged cat intestines.

(Mary Roach [source])

….and:

A Table in the Wilderness

I draw a window
and a man sitting inside it.

I draw a bird in flight above the lintel.

That’s my picture of thinking.

If I put a woman there instead
of the man, it’s a picture of speaking.

If I draw a second bird
in the woman’s lap, it’s ministering.

A third flying below her feet.
Now it’s singing.

Or erase the birds
make ivy branching
around the woman’s ankles, clinging
to her knees, and it becomes remembering.

You’ll have to find your own
pictures, whoever you are,
whatever your need.

As for me, many small hands
issuing from a waterfall
means silence
mothered me.

The hours hung like fruit in night’s tree
means when I close my eyes
and look inside me,

a thousand open eyes
span the moment of my waking.

Meanwhile, the clock
adding a grain to a grain
and not getting bigger,

subtracting a day from a day
and never having less, means the honey

lies awake all night
inside the honeycomb
wondering who its parents are.

And even my death isn’t my death
unless it’s the unfathomed brow
of a nameless face.

Even my name isn’t my name
except the bees assemble

a table to grant a stranger
light and moment in a wilderness
of Who? Where?

(Li-Young Lee [source])