PART III SATORI
A. Zen and Photography
Introduction To Zen
Zen is a special transmission outside of the scriptures,
With no reliance on words and letters.
A direct pointing to the human mind,
And the realization of enlightenment.
Bodhidharma
Zen is the direct and immediate transmission of knowledge from the master to the student. It is a flash of lightening from a cloudless sky. It is a sudden experience of spiritual awakening. Zen does not rely upon faith, belief or doctrine. It is not based upon words; words may provide us with a description of an experience but never the actual experience itself. Words are always derivative of the experience. Zen, on the other hand, is the direct experience or reality, unmediated by the egoic mind. It is experience that is more subtle than thought; it can never be described. If it can be described, then it is not Zen!
There is an old Zen story in which the student asks the Zen master “What is Zen”? The master puts his shoe on his head and leaves the room without saying a word. The student is instantly enlightened. What can this possibly mean? Zen is not founded upon logic, analysis or religious scriptures. It is playing a very different game. It is a pathless path; the closer you think you have come the farther away it recedes.
From the scientific perspective, we believe that to name something is to know something. We name phenomena, place it into categories and then analyze the differences and similarities within those categories. This creates artificial divisions among phenomena that are so powerful they have become the way in which we see the world. This is dualistic thinking: “it” and “not it”.
The point of Zen is to reach a state of non-dual awareness. Zen seeks to short-circuit the analytical, intellectual mind (i.e., small mind), and allow us to directly experience Buddha mind (i.e., big mind). This is why so much of Zen writing and practice makes little sense to us; its goal is to frustrate and paralyze the intellect so that it will become silent and thereby open the door to greater awareness. It requires that we grasp the point directly through our own experience and yet, we cannot describe the point because it is more subtle than our minds! It is like trying to catch water with a net. Alan Watts describes Zen this way:
But in Zen there is always the feeling that awakening is something quite natural, something startlingly obvious, which may occur at any moment. If it involves a difficulty, it is just that it is much too simple. Zen is also direct in its way of teaching, for it points directly and openly to the truth, and does not trifle with symbolism.
Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
The last line of Bodhidharma’s definition of Zen is the realization of enlightenment or satori. What does satori mean? How do we describe the indescribable? Zen Master Dogen said that: “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the 10,000 things.” Enlightenment means the direct realization of the unity of our individual self with the 10,000 things or the entire universe. The division between my individual, egoic self and the universe has collapsed, and I become the universe. Satori is the sudden flashing into awareness of a new truth that we have never imagined.
Satori is neither one side of duality nor the other. It is not both, it is not neither, it is not one or the other. When we see the world from a place of non-dual awareness, we see a world that is beyond description by words, beyond understanding by concept, beyond thought by intellect, memories and fantasies. We are in a place of stillness, beyond time. We experience that which cannot be described in words; it is more subtle than thought.
D.T. Suzuki, a scholar who was instrumental in bringing Zen to the West, describes his experience of satori:
It is like coming across a light in thick darkness; it is like receiving treasure in poverty. The four elements and the five aggregates are no more felt as burdens; so light, so easy, so free you are. Your very existence has been delivered from all limitations; you have become open, light, and transparent. You gain an illuminating insight into the very nature of things, which now appear to you as so many fairylike flowers having no graspable realities. This is where you gain peace, ease, non-doing, and inexpressible delight. All the sutras and sastras are no more than communications of this fact; all the sages, ancient as well as modern, have exhausted their ingenuity and imagination to no other purpose than to point the way to this.
Suzuki at 47
The integral philosopher Ken Wilber describes his experience of satori:
You might be looking at a mountain, and you have relaxed into effortlessness of your own present awareness, and then suddenly the mountain is all, you are nothing. Your separate-self sense is suddenly and totally gone, and there is simply everything that is arising moment to moment. You are perfectly aware, perfectly conscious, everything seems completely normal, except you are nowhere to be found. You are not on this side of your face looking at the mountain out there; you simply are the mountain, you are the sky, you are the clouds, you are everything that is arising moment to moment, very simply, very clearly, just so.
Ken Wilber, The Essential Ken Wilber
Zen is the direct experience of the world. When I see mountains and rivers with Zen mind, the constricted awareness of my ordinary mind has expanded to include the entire world. There is nothing between me and the mountains and rivers; I become the mountains and rivers. I have united with the world, we are one, and only the world exists, as I witness it, moment by moment, arising in its perfection. There is no time. A second or an eternity; they are both the same to me.
I am it!
If I perceive the mountains and rivers as beautiful, I miss the point entirely. I am assigning qualities to an experience which is an activity of ordinary mind, not of Zen mind. Zen is not the thoughts or words that describe the world. When I am in the state of Zen mind, there is no “I” which perceives the world and assigns qualities and judgments that it perceives. I experience pure awareness of the world.
With our ordinary mind, we do not see the world as it is; we see symbols of mountains and rivers, we do not experience them directly as they are, as they arise moment to moment. We think about mountains and rivers; we do not see them. We end up only experiencing our thoughts over and over again. It is our ordinary minds that create the powerful perception we are limited beings, that our boundaries stop at our skins and that we are separate from the universe. This is the great delusion and is the source of our alienation and suffering. It is this delusion that Zen seeks to overcome by the insight that comes from the direct experience of the world, unmediated, unrestricted by the ordinary mind.
Although we can point to Zen, we can never grasp it with thought or language. It is like trying to grasp a handful of water with your fist; the water always flows through your hand. If you understand how to go straight ahead on a narrow mountain path with ninety-three curves, then you understand Zen!
Silent mind, Zen mind.
The Three Marks of Existence
No discussion of Buddhism is complete without understanding the three marks of existence. They are one of the main tenants of Zen. The three signs are (i) impermanence (anicca); (ii) suffering (dukkha); and (iii) not-self (anatta).
The first mark is impermanence or anicca. It is the foundation of the Buddha’s teaching and the essence of all phenomenal existence. Nothing, animate or inanimate, organic or inorganic, is permanent. Even during the time that we are observing something, it is changing. Everything is fleeting: the sunrise, the flowers, the song of the birds, the clouds, the sunset, and the mind that perceives all of these things.
Impermanent are all component things,
They arise and cease, that is their nature:
They come into being and pass away,
Release from them is bliss supreme.
Mahaa-Parinibbaana Sutta
The second mark is suffering or dukkha. The Buddha said: “I have taught one thing and one thing only, dukkha, and the cessation of dukkha.” Suffering arises from failing to understand the principle of impermanence. It is our basic human nature to grasp for things that we think will make us happy. But they always turn to dust and we suffer over our loss. Impermanence is founded upon the inescapable and universal experience of the human condition: old age, suffering and death.
The third mark is not-self or anatta. Hindu philosophy posits the concept of Brahman which is the permanent ground of all being and the atman, which is the expression of Brahman in the heart of each individual person. Brahman and atman are the same: “tat tsvam asi”! Our soul is identical with the source of the universe. Buddha rejected this view and held that we have no permanent, underlying self; there is no atman. Instead, each person is made of five aggregates that are constantly changing. Because the aggregates are not permanent, the atman does not exist. It is merely a label which is attached to the aggregates. If one searches for the permanent, unchangeable self with sufficient critical analysis, one will inevitably discover it cannot be found. All concepts of a permanent self are therefore based on ignorance and are incorrect.
Closely related to the principle of not-self is emptiness. Emptiness means that all phenomena—all things and events—lack intrinsic reality, their existence is contingent upon causes and conditions. The moment they come into existence their disintegration has already begun. When we realize the truth of emptiness, we can avoid becoming attached to such experiences as tranquility or bliss, and averse to such experiences as sadness or fear. This enables us to break free of the bondage of the afflictions which are the cause of suffering.
Barthes and Zen
Barthes was fascinated by Zen. He made many references to Zen in Camera Lucida, A Lover’s Discourse, Empire of Signs and The Neutral.
He loved Zen’s skepticism toward language and meaning (i.e.,Zen halts language and defeats the codes), its arts, and its belief that we must experience reality directly rather than using words as intermediaries to reality. “The whole of Zen wages a war against the prevarication of meaning.” (Empire of Signs 73) However, his interest in Zen appeared to be only theoretical. There is no evidence that Barthes practiced Zen as a spiritual path.
After Barthes visited Japan in 1966 he wrote Empire of Signs. In the Introduction, he wrote that the photographs in the book do not illustrate the text but rather, are visually uncertain and analogous to the loss of meaning we experience in the state of satori. Barthes displayed a remarkable understanding of Zen, even though it is unlikely he ever experienced non-dual awareness through practice. He writes a remarkable description of the distinction between our ordinary mind and Zen mind:
All of Zen, of which the haiku is merely the literary branch, thus appears as an enormous praxis destined to halt language, to jam that kind of internal radiophony continually sending in us, even in our sleep….to empty out, to stupefy, to dry up the soul’s incoercible babble; and perhaps what Zen call satori, which…is no more than a panic suspension of language, the blank which erases in us the reign of the Codes, the breach of that internal recitation which constitutes our person.
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs
Barthes writes of emptiness with considerable astuteness; he understood the equivalence of form and emptiness as expressed in the Heart Sutra:
Writing is after all, in its way, a satori…it creates an emptiness of language. And it is also an emptiness of language which constitutes writing; it is from this emptiness that derive the features with which Zen, in the exemption from all meaning, writes gardens, gestures, houses, flower arrangements, faces, violence.
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs
In Camera Lucida, Barthes experiences a satori while looking at the Winter Garden Photograph. He unites with his mother in a way that is beyond ordinary experience and cannot be described in words. He sees the indescribable essence of his mother, perhaps her soul, which is too subtle for words to describe. “There she is”!
I could read her “individual expression” (analogous photographs, “likenesses”); finally the Winter Garden Photograph, in which I do much more than recognize her (clumsy word): in which I discover her: a sudden awakening, outside of a satori in which words fail, the rare, perhaps unique evidence of the “So, yes, so much and no more.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
The Eidos of Photography: Emptiness
The body is the wisdom-tree,
The mind is a bright mirror in a stand;
Take care to wipe it all the time,
And allow no dust to cling.
Shen Hsiu
The qualities of a mirror are often used to express the idea of Buddha mind because the images reflected by the mirror do not attach to its surface. When an object is placed in front of a mirror, it reflects and “becomes” that object. This is true of all things that are placed in front of the mirror. It shows a beautiful object as beautiful, an ugly object as ugly, a moving thing as moving, a stationary thing as stationary. When nothing is placed in front of it, nothing is reflected. Everything is revealed in the mirror just as it is. The mirror does not discriminate. It does not accept or reject. When the thing reflected by the mirror disappears, there are no traces of anything left behind in the mirror. This state of non-attachment, this state of no-mind, this state of reflecting the world just as it is, this state of emptiness is Buddha mind. Pure awareness is seeing things as they are. Buddha mind does not grasp nor resist thoughts as they arise; it allows them to rise and fall, come and go.
All of this is elegantly described in the Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi, an ancient Zen poem by Tozan:
Move and you are trapped, miss and you fall into doubt and vacillation.
Turning away and touching are both wrong, for it is like a massive fire.
Just to portray it in literary form is to stain it with defilement.
In darkest night it is perfectly clear; in the light of dawn it is hidden.
It is a standard for all things; its use removes all suffering.
Although it is not constructed, it is not beyond words.
Like facing a precious mirror; form and reflection behold each other.
You are not it, but in truth it is you.
Song of Precious Mirror Samadhi
In Empire of Signs Barthes writes that the mirror is the symbol of emptiness. The mirror is empty because it does not have a fixed, immutable image or form; and yet, it reflects all forms placed before it. The mirror is both empty and full of form. They are equivalent.
In the West, the mirror is an essential!y narcissistic object: man conceives a mirror only in order to look at himself in it; but in the Orient, apparently, the mirror is empty; it is the symbol of the very emptiness of symbols (“The mind of the perfect man,” says one Tao master, “is like a mirror. It grasps nothing but repulses nothing. It receives but does not retain”): the mirror intercepts only other mirrors, and this infinite reflection is emptiness itself (which, as we know, is form).
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs
In Camera Lucida, Barthes is searching to find that essential feature by which photography is distinguished from the “community of images.” He attempts to classify photography but finds that it is “unclassifiable”. The photograph always leads back to the thing that it captures. The photograph “is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents)” it is as if “the Photograph always carries its referent with itself.”
Barthes observes that we do not see the photograph, we only see the referent; this is the source of the difficulty (and impossibility) of his quest. Barthes does not extend this line of thought to realize that, because photography can capture all of the referents (or things) in the universe, it, in some sense, equates to the universe itself. Therefore, the photograph cannot be distinguished from the universal; it does not exist as a subset of the universal; it is not distinguishable from the universal. To seek the essence of photography is the same as seeking the essence of everything in the universe; it is like trying to find the essence of a mirror.
Photography is life and death, light and dark, male and female, good and evil, studium and punctum, reality and illusion, and all the other dualities that we can name. The camera is empty. The camera captures emptiness with its mirror and form with its film. Its mirror (or sensor) reflects everything in the universe placed before it. All dualities collapse into the unity of the mirror’s reflection. Its film captures all light exposed to it and transforms the light to image. The camera does not discriminate. It captures an image of the thing reflected in its mirror (or sensor) and preserves it in a physical print (an image-object). The camera is empty and the photographs are the forms. In the same way that all forms arise from emptiness, the camera manifests all forms as prints.
The thing that distinguishes photography from all other art forms is that it encompasses both emptiness and form. It is a metaphorical Buddha mind. A painting, on the other hand, is only an object, it is a fixed, immutable thing. It cannot reflect any form but itself. It is nothing but form itself, devoid of emptiness.
Barthes said that a photograph is a message without a code but what is the message? Is it a certificate of the presence of a “thing” ? This is not true because the “thing” is an abstraction (a three dimensional form reduced to two dimensional image), a compression of time (the past observed in the present), a corruption of reality (the distortions inherent in making the photograph- the process from film to print and from sensor to image) and a lie (reality is framed, photographs are manipulated and meaning is relative to the observer). The photograph is a derivative image of a scene bounded by a frame that compresses space, volume, time, light and perception. It is a shadow, a mystery, a trace, a footprint…
The message of the photograph is emptiness. Because the photograph is empty, it has no fixed, definite, objective, immutable existence, and yet it can manifest all forms. It is within this very emptiness that creative potential resides.
Photography has no Form, no essence, no eidos. It has no “essential features” nor any “essential genius all of its own.” Barthes inquiry fails. The photograph always represents the particular and the singular; it never represents the essence, the multiplicity, the universal. Each photograph is a singular image-object that has no unique quality, no essence, perhaps no reality at all. Perhaps photography is dependent upon all of the objects of the world in the same way that all shadows are dependent upon sunlight and objects? Perhaps the photograph is everything and nothing, both at the same time?
Is the Form of photography a sheet of unexposed photo paper, a pure white field without an image or is it an over-exposed print left in the sun, black, the edges curled up, brittle, cracked? Or is it neither white nor dark but transparent? Is the Form of photography the unexposed photo paper or the pixels in the sensor?
The Form of photography is emptiness.
This is my palinode.
Haiku and Photography
The old pond;
A frog jumps in —
The sound of the water.
Basho
Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Barthes was fascinated by haiku; he understood that haiku opens the door to a deeper meaning that a traditional poem can never access. The splash of the frog in the pond awakened Basho. The splash is not language nor is it symbol. The splash is the splash! It is the sound and the sight. Haiku halts language; it silences the machinery of our minds, it empties us of words, it liberates us from the prison of our thoughts. Barthes writes in Empire of the Signs:
Deciphering, normalizing, or tautological, the ways of interpretation, intended in the West to pierce meaning, i.e., to get into it is by breaking and entering-and not to shake it , to make it all like the tooth of that ruminant of the absurd which the Zen apprentice must be, confronting his koan-cannot help failing the haiku; for the work of reading which is attached to it is to suspend language, not to provoke it…
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs
Haiku points to the world as it is and nothing more. Just so! It creates a gap, a space, a silence, a paralysis of language, an echo fading into silence and, in the silence of the still mind, an opening into spaciousness.
The word’s stone has been cast for nothing: neither waves nor flow of meaning.
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs
Haiku is the sound of a single note of the flute emerging from the silence. Without silence there is no sound, without sound there is no silence. Figure and ground, wave and crest, yin and yang, form and emptiness: the polarities, separate and one. The image is a vision emerging from the ground of light and darkness.
Barthes said that haiku is a flat language; layers of meaning cannot be superimposed on the haiku. The haiku is constructed so that an illogical impasse or a gap exists between the verses so that it stops the turnings of the mind. The mind becomes still. In that stillness lies satori.
Language is a wall between ourselves and reality. Language is not reality. Haiku stops language with language; it uses words to stop words. Haiku is the end of language. It short-circuits itself; it grounds its own electricity. It suspends meaning and frustrates analysis. The magic of haiku lies in the spaces between the words and in the silence of the void between the lines. It is that pause point between the leap of the frog and the splash of the water. Haiku points to emptiness, the ground of the 10,000 things.
Barthes compares haiku to the photograph:
A trick of vocabulary: we say “to develop a photograph; but what the chemical action develops is undevelopable, an essence (of a wound), what cannot be transformed but only repeated under the instances of insistence (of the insistent gaze). This brings the Photograph (certain photographs) close to the Haiku. For the notation of a haiku, too, is undevelopable: everything is given, without provoking the desire for or even the possibility of a rhetorical expansion.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
The punctum is a detail in an image that causes a short, sharp explosion of a sensation of pain; it is an instantaneous flash of pain, the cut of the knife is felt immediately. Likewise, the haiku, through its suspension of language and its conceptual “gaps”, stops the mind instantly. It is concentrated energy, the tension of suspended action. In the silence of the mind, expansion and compression, form and emptiness emerge, instantaneously and spontaneously. We cannot will the haiku to work its magic; we do not know what detail in an image will pierce us. Neither the haiku nor the wound need to be “developed.” Development is function of time; the haiku and the punctum are instantaneous, beyond time. The mind gap and the flash of pain arise instantly, timelessly.
On a withered branch
A crow is perched
In the autumn evening.
Just so!
Basho
In a flash of thought, the haiku illuminates the void and the forms.
In a flash of light, the camera illuminates the emptiness and the forms.
I stand face to face with the Buddha in the light.
Sun: light: consciousness: enlightenment.
Haiku is now!
Haiku is just so!
Haiku is two arrows meeting in mid-air.
Haiku is the flash of enlightenment between two frames of darkness.
Haiku is the silence of the emptiness between words.
Haiku is suchness! Haiku is tathata. Haiku is nothing more, only that.
Haiku: language: thought streams: stilled.
Haiku: images: thought streams: stilled.
Haiku: Zen mind.
Enso and Photography
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Enso means circle in Japanese. It is made by the master in one perfect explosive moment with brush and ink on white paper, simple yet infinitely complex. A single brush stroke: black on white. One breath, one motion, one perfect expression of Zen and image. A satori, an explosion.
The enso arises in the perfect state of awareness in which there is no separation between the master and the brush, the ink and paper. Omori Roshi describes this state of mind:
At the right time, you will be able to break through to the state of nothingness. You will attain this realization because of something and you will know with your entire being that you are at the center of absolute nothingness, at the center of an infinite circle. To be at the center of an infinite circle in this human form is to be Buddha himself. You have been saved from the beginning. You will know all these things with certainty.
Enso is an image of emptiness and form. Ink no ink, paper no paper, brush no brush, breath no breath, hand no hand, time and no time: sun, moon, the monk’s bald head, a rice cake, a wheel, a circle.
Enso is camera and no camera, an aperture, the circle, open and closed.
Enso is a butterfly returning to the branch, the crow sitting motionless on a withered branch, a leaf moving in the wind, a frog plopping into the pool, a bright full moon. Enso is the circle of the aperture; potentiality waiting to be released.
Enso is sitting in zazen as the incense burns to ash and the smoke rises to the shadows. Enso is the moment before the tea splashes in the cup. Enso is the moment the arrow is released from the bow. Enso is the moment the shutter is released.
The master waits until the perfect moment arises: the explosion of the brush, the ink and the paper: the enso appears. The photographer waits until the perfect moment, releases the shutter and the image appears. The master and the photographer create the image as an expression of present moment awareness; they do not make the image; it arises by wu wei, no action. Conscious photographs are made with the spirit of enso.
The essence of photography is enso.
Tathata- The Suchness of the Photograph
In Camera Lucida Barthes uses the notion of tathata to shed light on the essential nature of photography. He quotes Alan Watts:
In order to designate reality, Buddhism says sunya, the void; but better still: tathata, as Alan Watts has it, the fact of being this, of being thus, of being so; tat means that in Sanskrit and suggests the gesture of the child pointing his finger at something and saying: that, there it is, lo! but says nothing else; a photograph cannot be transformed (spoken) philosophically, it is wholly ballasted by the contingency of which it is the weightless, transparent envelope.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Tathata is present moment awareness, it is the world as we experience it right now! It is our direct non-verbal experience, unmediated by thought. It is beyond being or non-being, good or bad, past or future, here or there, now or then, permanent or impermanent, moving or still, pure or non-pure, sound or silence, beginning or end. It is beyond all dualities. It is the world just as it is. It is being itself. It is Zen mind, big mind. “In darkest night it is perfectly clear; in the light of dawn it is hidden. Turning away and touching are both wrong, for it is like a massive fire.” What can these words from the Precious Mirror of Samadhi mean?
In The Way of Zen, Alan Watts writes: “Tathatā indicates the world just as it is, unscreened and undivided by the symbols and definitions of thought. It points to the concrete and actual as distinct from the abstract and conceptual.”
Near the end of his life, the Buddha gathered his disciples to determine his successor. They sat in a small circle and waited. The Buddha silently held up a lotus flower. The disciples began analyzing and arguing about the meaning of this mysterious gesture. One of the disciples, Mahakasyapa, suddenly smiled and began to laugh. The Buddha handed the flower to him and he became his successor. Mahakasyapa was enlightened by the direct transmission of Buddha nature: no words: a smile and a flower. Tathata is the flower, held in silence. It is realization of Buddha nature.
I do not see the moon. I am the moon as it is arising moment to moment, just simply so. My separate self, my body and mind, are nowhere to be found. This is tathata. If I see the moon and wish that my beloved were with me to experience its beauty, I have lost Zen mind. My ordinary thinking mind has returned and I am no longer experiencing the present. I have moved from Zen mind to small mind; I have lost the state of pure moment awareness. I no longer see the moon; I think thoughts about the moon, I think about my wishes and longing. Thoughts arise between me and the moon; I see the moon through the barrier of a cracked and dirty window. I no longer see the moon in its suchness.
Look at the flower and smile.
Look at the seashore
and hear the windsea roar
waves flowing against the rocks
spray blown from the face of the wave
towering clouds
rockfalls from the cliffs.
There it is!
Tathata!
When the world is viewed as empty, then we realize its suchness.
Intrinsic to the notion of tathata are the concepts of impermanence and emptiness. Everything is endlessly changing, evolving, birthing, and dying; impermanence is the perpetual state of the universe. Nothing has an unchanging, immutable, center, there is no fundamental particle from which everything in the universe is constructed, the center is empty, it is only fluctuating supersymmetric strings of energy or perhaps a quantum vacuum. Likewise, the photograph is contingent, it is impermanent and it is empty. Causes and conditions are the reason that everything is empty. Since everything is contingent upon a pre-existing cause or condition, when that cause or condition changes or fails then the thing it supports also changes and fails. The photograph captures the myriad and infinite things of the world; all of the things are contingent and empty and all of the photographs are contingent, and empty. There is not center, there is no essence, there is no eidos or Form of photography.
Tathata!
Barthes wrote that the photograph is never distinguished from its referent. Since there are an infinite number of referents in the universe (and of course they are contingent, rising and falling, being and disintegrating) then it follows that there are an infinite number of photographs that can capture those referents. Infinity equals infinity, zero equals zero, zero times infinity equals zero or indeterminacy The infinite number of referents in the universe have no essence. The only truth is emptiness; it is the basic principle of all existence. If the referents are empty, the photograph is empty. Sunyata, emptiness, the image.
Tathata!
I remember the church bells of the Westerkerk as I sat on its front steps twenty years ago as the sun began to rise and the night began to fall and the canals and bridges came into focus out of the indigo night and the boats were so still and I was so in love with the overwhelming beauty of it all that I could not sleep because I did not want to miss a minute of seeing it and feeling it, the wonder of it all. The world was just there in perfect diamond clarity.
My egoic a “I” did not exist as the perceiver; the conscious thinking mind did not act as a filter, as an interpreter, as the voice asserting its anxieties, control and judgment over the experience at the Westerkerk. There was only an awareness of the world in its suchness, an awareness from a much deeper place than the “I’ of my conscious mind and the five senses. Unmediated awareness. Direct clear perceptual awareness. The world in its perfect suchness.
Tathata!
Conscious Photography
When the photograph is a mirror of the man,
and the man is a mirror of the world,
then Spirit might take over.
Minor White
If the energy is really flowing freely, the brush paints by itself, the camera photographs, the sculpture forms, the words write, the dance dances. The creator of the art, the subject of the art, and the expression itself merge into a single process in which there is no reflection or evaluation, just the art manifesting itself.
John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life
In Camera Lucida Barthes observes that the practice of photography involves three intentions: to do, to undergo and to look. These intentions refer to the photographer (the operator of the camera), the subject of the photograph (the referent) and the observer (the spectator) of the photograph.
Barthes paid little attention to the role of the photographer in making an image; he was too impatient to take photographs. He wanted to see what he had taken right away, he could not wait for the film to be developed. He wondered whether the emotion that the photographer experiences may have some relationship to the frame that the camera’s viewfinder places around the world. He did not consider whether photography could be used as a spiritual practice. He was much more concerned with the experience of the referent (“to undergo” when having a portrait taken), and himself, as the observer of the photograph, who is in an ontological struggle to define the essence of the photograph.
In the beginning there were few photographers. The equipment was expensive and heavy, the operation of the camera was awkward, and the developing and printing process was expensive, complex and mysterious, much like alchemy. Today, everyone with a phone is a photographer. Many people constantly take photographs to record the trivia of their everyday experiences. They upload the images to their social media feeds which then become part of the endless flow of images scrolling across the screens. The process of taking and viewing photographs has become hackneyed, superficial and banal.
Can the process of making and contemplating photographs have meaning? Can this become a spiritual practice? If this is possible, then the intention of the photographer in making the image is crucial. The point of spiritual practice is to still the mind which enables the practitioner’s consciousness to expand such that unity with Spirit is experienced. The point of traditional photography is to document places, people or things or to preserve memory. These may be irreconcilable goals. However, the photographer’s intention in making a photograph is the distinction between photography as a spiritual practice and photography as a mnemonic device. Is the intention to create images that document death, time and memory or is it to still the mind?
There are two leaders who deeply explored the intersection of photography and Spirit: Minor White, a photographer and teacher, and Daido Loori, a Zen master and student of White’s. White originated the notion of “conscious photography.” White wanted to tap directly into the well-spring of creativity. He discovered that, to make a creative photograph, we must see the world in a fresh and new way. He wanted his students to break their egoic habits and patterns that limited their ability to see the world and to respond to the world in a fresh, authentic and creative way. He encouraged intuition, serendipity, rule breaking, working in “illogical” ways and abandoning conventional ideas. He emphasized present moment awareness. He explored how other disciplines could be used to open the doors of photographic perception; he was interested in Zen, Jungian psychology, Gestalt psychotherapy, astrology, the I Ching and poetry. This was a radical departure from the prevailing practices of his time. White taught the principles of heightened awareness and creative audience.
The mind in a state of heightened awareness is like a frame of unexposed film: it is receptive to being exposed to any image that light brings to it in a fraction of a second. In this state, we see the world in a new way which makes us more receptive to seeing and capturing original images. White describes heightened awareness:
The state of mind of the photographer while creating is a blank. I might add that this condition exists only at special times, namely when looking for pictures…For those who would equate ‘blank’ with a kind of static emptiness, I must explain that this is a special kind of blank. It is a very active state of mind really, a very receptive state of mind, ready at an instant to grasp an image, yet with no image pre-formed in it at any time. We should note that the lack of a pre-formed pattern or preconceived idea of how anything ought to look is essential to this blank condition. Such a state of mind is not unlike a sheet of film itself-seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second’s exposure conceives a life in it.
Minor White, __________
For White, a “blank” mind means a still mind, a mind in which awareness has expanded beyond the limits of the constricted ego. We are free from our pre-conceptions and patterned thinking that limit our ability to see the world, we react authentically to what we see and we are free to make creative images. This state of consciousness allows us to be receptive to moments of intuition, resonance and revelation.
The act of taking photographs is performed in alignment with the Taoist principle of wu-wei: nothing is done but nothing is left undone. Work arises in a natural way, in harmony with the flow of nature. It is not forced by the grasping, goal oriented, controlling ego. The resulting images are more authentic, creative, poetic and powerful than those produced by the egoic mind. In the Tao Te Ching, it is written:
The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind. Precious things lead one astray.
Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.
He lets go of that and chooses this.
Lao, Tzu Tao Te Ching, Verse 12
Zen uses the practices of mindfulness and meditation to still the mind. When our minds are still we have removed the ego’s filter that prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is rather than only seeing our thoughts about the world. We are present. We are not attached to the past and we are not obsessed with achieving a goal. Our minds are like the mirror of a still pond that reflects the geese as they fly over the pond and then just empty blue sky. Minor White describes this experience as follows:
Possibly the creative work of the photographer consists in part of putting himself into this state of mind…The feeling is akin to the mystic and to ecstasy; why deny it? One feels, one sees on the ground glass into a world beyond surfaces. The square of the glass becomes like the words of a prayer or a poem, like fingers or rockets into two infinities-one into the subconscious and the other into the visual-tactile universe.
Minor White, __________
White felt that we must pay more attention to the creative process than to the success or failure of the photographs. He said: “Do not look for pictures; look at the subject until it is understood by a conscious you.” Our photographs will be more successful when we are resonating with inner selves and the world. Master Daido Loori describes the experience this way:
Venture into the landscape without expectations. Let your subject find you.When you approach it, you will feel resonance, a sense of recognition. If, when you move away, the resonance fades, or if it gets stronger as you approach, you’ll know you have found your subject. Sit with your subject and wait for your presence to be acknowledged. Don’t try to make a photograph, but let your intuition indicate the right moment to release the shutter. If, after you’ve made an exposure, you feel a sense of completion, bow and let go of the subject and your connection to it. Otherwise, continue photographing until you feel the process is complete.
John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life
White’s second principle is known as creative audience. It involves becoming more aware of the world and tapping into deeper levels of our consciousness. We move beyond the familiar responses dictated by our egos, habits and patterns. We integrate our mind, body and spirit so that we can capture images that express deeply and authentically who we really are and our relation to the world. In February of 1947, White wrote his credo in his journal:
That thru consciousness of one’s self one grasps the means to express oneself. Understand only yourself. The camera is first a means of self-discovery and then a means of self-growth. The artist has one thing to say-himself. The camera and its emphasis on the technique of observation will broaden him, deepen him immeasurably.
The role of the photographer has evolved from using the camera as a mechanical device to document places, people or things to using it as a tool for spiritual growth. The camera has become our vehicle for transporting us through the world with greater awareness. The photographic process of both making and viewing images moves us into deeper awareness of Spirit. We become image makers of the soul. Master Daido Loori describes the relationship between spiritual practice, creativity and art:
The creative process like a spiritual journey, is intuitive, nonlinear, and experiential. It points us toward our essential nature, which is a reflection of the boundless creativity of the universe. Zen Buddhism and, particularly, the Zen arts are a rich source of teachings to help us understand and cultivate our creativity.
John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life
What remains when our mind is still and our consciousness expands? There is no longer a barrier between ourselves and the universe; we see the universe as it is, in its “suchness” rather than just seeing our thoughts. We become the whole universe; we can drink the Pacific ocean in a single gulp as the Zen expression goes. Master Loori explains the idea this way:
Minor White expresses the same principle of the camera photographing by itself with similar language:
Photographs can be made while sitting quietly looking at nothing seeing nothing, camera packed away. This came about during contemplative work on the Zen koan: “What is the sound of one hand clapping”? It has taken over without my being aware. I was left to discover the occurrence in the photograph. I bowed to the spirit later; to its footprint.
Minor White, _______________
B. THE SUFFERING OF ROLAND BARTHES
The Dance of Impermanence
I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to become sick. There is no way to escape becoming sick.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that I hold dear, and everyone I love, is of the nature to change.
There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.
My actions are the ground on which I stand.
The Five Remembrances of Zen
Nataraja dances the universe into existence to the beat of his cosmic drum. Everything in the universe is made of vibrating energy emanating from the primal pulse. The universe simultaneously arises, evolves and dissolves in vast cycles of time and in a blink of his eyes. Everything is arising, evolving and dissolving from the macroscopic to the microscopic, from the cosmological to the quantum, from emptiness to form and form to emptiness, from the one to the many and the many back to the one.
The energy of the dance vibrates on the macrocosmic level: sunrise and sun fall, the rhythm of the tides and the moon, the seasons, the sun, stars, galaxies and universe expanding, being born, exploding into stardust and imploding into black holes and the singularity at their center.
The energy of the dance vibrates on the microscopic level: fundamental particles, atoms, elements, cells, tissues, organs, bodies and systems are living, dying and being reborn.
The energy of the dance vibrates on the quantum level: superstrings of energy vibrating in nine dimensional space. Probabilistic wave functions existing and not existing.
We fear the unknown and we cannot predict the results of change. We want to control our lives so that we will feel safe. We want security but deep in our hearts we know that to resist impermanence is to deny the essential movement and structure of the universe: the great cycle of creation, preservation and destruction that is true both in the microcosm and the macrocosm, from the cells to the stars. As above, so below.
J. Khishnamurti describes the psychology of impermanence:
Everything about us, within as well as without—our relationships, our thoughts, our feelings—is impermanent, in a constant state of flux. Being aware of this, the mind craves permanency, a perpetual state of peace, of love, of goodness, a security that neither time nor events can destroy; therefore it creates the soul, the Atman, and the visions of a permanent paradise. But this permanency is born of impermanency, and so it has within it the seeds of the impermanent. There is only one fact: impermanence.
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life: Daily Meditations With Krishnamurti
We crave peace, love and happiness but life gives us old age, sickness and death. This is the truth of the human condition which we find expressed in the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. Life is suffering.
The wood mallet chocking, slowly chocking on the wood block of the han, its rhythms calling us to zazen, the mallet wearing the wood away into dust. In time the han collapses and falls to the ground. Great is the matter of life and death; gone, gone, quickly gone, do not waste this life!
The world is in constant movement and change and yet, the photograph freezes the world. It stops it cold. We may think it preserves the past and makes it permanent but we are wrong. The print slowly fades to brown, becomes brittle, and collapses into shards and dust. Everything in the photograph ultimately decays and dies. Our memories fade and fail over time. We die and our memories die with us. Photographers transform the living to the dead and become agents of death in the process. The photograph illustrates death. Barthes only sees this side of photography.
There is another side to impermanence. Impermanence is the source of creativity and life. Things must die to be reborn. There is beauty in movement and change. This is the foundation of wisdom. If we accept the truth of impermanence, we experience a shift in perspective. We become inspired to appreciate the fragile and precious fact of our existence. We appreciate the beauty of the world because we know that it is fleeting. We learn to stop grasping and to let go. We learn to release our suffering.
Milarepa was a great mystical poet and Buddhist saint who lived in the Middle Ages in Tibet. His cooking pot was his only possession. He was lived in the mountains and his pot was his only way of preparing his meager meals of boiled nettles. One day the pot rolled down the mountainside and shattered. We might have been devastated by the loss of our only possession but Milarepa used the experience as a spiritual teaching. He wrote a poem:
This clay pot so important, the whole of my wealth,
Becomes my lama in the moment it breaks,
Teaching impermanence, how amazing!
Milarepa
I accept impermanence. I practice impermanence. I dance with impermanence. I live in alignment with the universe.
We light the incense. We sit quietly in zazen. The long stick of incense burns; smoke swirls and wisps vanish in the darkness. Ashes on the altar. A fallen flower. The stone faced Buddha sits, impassively, timelessly, watching in silence. The pot breaks and we rejoice. We contemplate impermanence.
Barthes, Buddhism and Suffering: Impermanence
When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might think that the shore is moving. When you keep your eyes on the boat, you see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine the 10,000 things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and essence are permanent. When you return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing has an unchanging self.
Dogen, The Genjokoan
Even though Barthes studied and wrote about Zen extensively, he did not practice Zen. He did not approach Zen as a spiritual practice which can radically challenge our assumptions about the world and provide us with a practice to resolving suffering.
We know the universe is impermanent. Yearning for permanence and grasping life too tightly are the root causes of suffering. The greater our attachments, the greater our suffering. We will experience pain; it is intrinsic to the human condition. We are free and we have a choice: pain is guaranteed but we can choose whether to suffer over that pain. Acceptance of impermanence opens us to growth, healing and wisdom. We can accept our suffering, find a spiritual practice that helps us resolve our suffering and learn from our experience. This process is spiritual work. We can choose to do the work or we can chose to suffer.
Barthes chose to suffer. He was trapped by small mind; he attempted to resurrect his mother with old photographs; he was locked in memory and suffering. His Mourning Diary is almost too painful to read:
Constantly recurring, the painful point: the words she spoke to me in the breath of her agony, the abstract and infernal crux of pain that overwhelms me.
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
In A Lovers Discourse, Barthes describes impermanence and the sadness of loss in a poetic and profound way. He uses principles of traditional Japanese aesthetics to map our emotional states:
Yet there are subtler clouds, all the tenuous shadows of swift and uncertain source which pass across the relationship, changing its light and its modeling; suddenly it is another landscape, a faint black intoxication. The cloud, then, is no more than this: I’m missing something. Summarily I inventory the states of dearth by which Zen has encoded human sensibility (furyu), solitude (sabi), the sadness which overcomes me because of the “incredible naturalness” of things (wabi), nostalgia (aware), the sentiment of strangeness (yugen). “I am happy but I am sad”: such was Melisande’s “cloud.”
Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse
Mono no aware is a Japanese aesthetic quality that reflects the pathos of the world due to the impermanence of all things. Even though we may accept impermanence, we become melancholy when we lose the things that we love. Melancholia:
The sound of the Gion shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sōla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.
The Tale of the Heike Clan
A mirror reflecting the absence of the daughter who has just left home after getting married.
The white cherry blossoms covering the ground in the Spring and fading a few days later.
Rain falling from the low, grey clouds on the solitary boat in the bay.
Faint echoes of the past on Moonlight Beach as the surf falls. Reflections in the shop windows fading as the sun falls behind the canal houses on Utrechtsestrasse. The raven’s hair on the pillow. The silence between the breaths. The evanescence of youth. Love and loss. Melancholia. Evocation of mono no aware.
Barthes did not sit at the feet of the greatest of all wisdom teachers: death. Rather than using the death of his mother as a stimulus to lead him to wisdom, her death led to his death. He chose the path of suffering. He never accepted the death of his mother. He never understood that impermanence is the way of the universe. He never understood that his mother’s death was the path to transformation and healing. He became obsessed with death. Photographers became agents of death. He began to withdraw from life and to fade like a print exposed to the sun. He died within a year after his mother.
We light the incense. We sit quietly in zazen. We contemplate impermanence as the incense burns; smoke wisps fade in the darkness. Ashes on the altar. A fallen flower. The stone faced Buddha sits, impassively, timelessly, watching in silence.
Marpa, Barthes and Acceptance of Loss
This dewdrop world.
It may be a dewdrop,
And yet, and yet….
Issa (after the death of his son)
The back cover of Camera Lucida Barthes contains this quote:
Marpa was very upset when one of his sons was killed, and one of his disciples said: You used to tell us that everything is an illusion. How about the death of your son? Isn’t it illusion? And Marpa replied: “True, but my son’s death is a super-illusion.
Why did Barthes choose this enigmatic story to be the last words of his last book? Marpa was a monk who was the founder of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He brought the mahamudra teachings from India to Tibet in the 12th century. Mahamudra is a Sanskrit word meaning the “Great Seal”. In the same way that wax seals are stamped on legal documents to establish their authenticity, the Great Seal is an authentic system of practices that brings enlightenment. It teaches that enlightenment may be realized both by ascetic methods practiced by monks and in ordinary householder life. Enlightened beings may be cobblers, arrow makers, sweepers, and even grinders of sesame seeds. Marpa lived an ordinary life as a farmer and a scholar.
As an awakened being, Marpa accepted the death of his son. He saw it as an opportunity to gain wisdom. He grieved over the loss of his son and accepted the impermanence of life. He acted as an ordinary person and an enlightened being at the same time.
There is an old Zen story of a monk who wept upon hearing of the death of a close relative. When one of his fellow monks objected that it was not proper to show such personal attachment and emotion he replied, “Don’t be stupid! I’m weeping because I want to weep.
Barthes did not accept the death of his mother. He did not open his heart to his loss. He did not work with his loss and suffering to gain wisdom but rather, he shut down emotionally. In his desperation he sought to escape from his suffering by resurrecting his mother from old photographs. Barthes describes his mental state in Camera Lucida:
The only “thought” I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed; between the two, nothing more than waiting…
Shortly after Camera Lucida was written, Barthes was hit by a car in Paris and died a month later. The doctors said that the accident was not the cause of his death; rather, it was a failure of the will to live, it was resignation and defeat. Barthes chose death over acceptance, ignorance over wisdom, and suffering over spiritual growth.
Cameral Lucida, Barthes and Duality
Everything seems to suggest that his discourse according to a two term dialectic: popular opinion and its contrary, doxa and paradox, the stereotype and the novation, fatigue and freshness, relish and disgust. I like/ I don’t like.
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
Barthes loves duality; he sees it as a form of erotic object that sends him into raptures. He works with the tension between two opposing concepts. He explores one side of a duality and then the other; he shades his views of each side with nuance, ambiguity and subtlety. He loves paradox. He writes with opacity, he lets meaning and form drift. He works with chance and he loves ellipsis. He oscillates. He loves and hates language, he trusts and distrusts words. He is protean.
Camera Lucida is a dualistic work. Camera lucida and camera obscura, studium and punctum, life and death, positive and negative, light and dark, banality and singularity, denotation and connotation, like and don’t like, perfect illusion and intractable reality. Even the book structure is based on a duality: Part I and Part II, the ode and palinode.
The two most important photographs in the work, Polaroid and The Winter Garden Photograph, are seen and unseen. Polaroid is on the inside cover and The Winter Garden Photograph is not shown. Duality and non-duality.
To live in a dual world is to live in a state of alienation and constricted consciousness; we are alienated from the world and we are trapped by the stories, habits, patterns of our egos. Alan Watts describes this feeling as follows:
The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe.
Alan Watts, The Book On The Taboo of Knowing Who You Are
I see the world as pairs of opposites. I see the world as male and female, light and dark, positive and negative, pleasure and pain, good and evil, life and death, matter and spirit, heart and mind, and form and emptiness. Like the Bodhisattva Ganjin, sighted and blind, gold leaf and clay. Seen and unseen. Duality is my default condition; it is my ordinary way of navigating the world.
I divide the world into my body and mind as being “in here” and everything else as being “out there.” I am inside “here” looking at everything outside “there”. I experience the world as separate and apart from myself. I am alone in an indifferent, hostile and dangerous world. I am afraid and I respond by embracing security and safety. I grasp at things and people to create a feeling of permanence and safety. I am driven by habit and pattern. I live by pursuing my insatiable desires and I am frustrated when I do not get what I want. I maintain a separate sense of self to create a feeling of security in a dangerous world.
I use repression, avoidance, denial, withdrawal, and projection to protect myself from danger. I know this is a false security; nothing can protect me from my ultimate fate: old age, sickness and death. I think constantly. All I experience is my thoughts. I identify with my thoughts. I believe that the personality constructed by my ego is who I really am. I live in a world of boundaries, labels and concepts. I am alienated from myself, other beings, nature and Spirit.
Camera Lucida is a poetic novella of suffering and despair. Everywhere Bathes looked he saw death: his mother’s death and his own. Even though he wrote that photographers are agents of death, Barthes struggled to resurrect his mother through photographs. This led to frustration and despair; and like Sisyphus, he was trapped in meaningless work. Barthes saw no escape from suffering and death but, unlike Sisyphus, he never experienced the joy of the view from the mountaintop. He only saw one side of the fundamental duality of the human experience: death. He never saw the other side of that duality: life. He did not have a spiritual practice so he never experienced the state of non-dual awareness that transcends both life and death.
Brahman and Barthes: Piercing the Veil of Maya and Release From Suffering
Barthes was lost in a labyrinth of dualistic thinking and its inevitable result, suffering. Where was Ariadne’s thread that would lead him out of the labyrinth and to peace? Was there a way for him to live that was not dominated by ego, delusion and suffering? Was there another plane of consciousness that could lead beyond duality and to a place of peace? Could photography have shown him the way?
In the Upanishads it was written:
As a man in the arms of his beloved is not aware of what is without and what is within, so a person in union with the Self is not aware of what is without and what is within, for in that unitive state all desires find their perfect fulfillment. There is no other desire that needs to be fulfilled, and one goes beyond sorrow.
Eknath Easwaran, The Upanishads
This passage describes the state of pure non-dual awareness. Unity with Spirit is the only true release from suffering and sorrow.
Because we naturally perceive the world as comprised of pairs of opposites, we tend to avoid one of the opposites, the one we find unpleasant, and seek the one we find pleasant. This is our default way of living. We avoid death and seek life, we avoid evil and seek good, we avoid pain and seek pleasure, we seek form and avoid emptiness. We tend to treat the boundary between the opposites as real and then manipulate (repress or embrace) one of the opposites created by the boundary. We believe that the opposites may never be reconciled, they are as different as night and day, and we have to seek the one and avoid the other.
It is a false perspective to see the world as a duality of life and death and to equate photography with only one side of the duality, death. Barthes, Araki and Sontag were wrong. Photography is not just an expression of death. As a photographer, I am not only an agent of death. I am also an agent of life. Photography must show us both life and death. It must transcend the false dualities and show us the truth of the unity state, the truth of non-dual awareness, the truth of Buddha mind, Tao, Brahman and Spirit. It must embrace both the yin and the yang. If it cannot show us both sides of duality, then it can never show us truth and photography remains a lie.
Photography dances with life and death, light and dark, positive and negative. Photography dances with impermanence and permanence.
Photography dances with creativity.
Photography lights our way on our journey to Spirit.
Spirit transcends death and life.
All opposites are aspects of a single underlying reality. Each element of the universe is a vibration of an underlying energy field. Everything that we consider to be opposites are like the crest and trough of a single wave on the ocean of consciousness. The wave is a unique event but it expresses itself through the opposites of crest and trough, high point and low point, movement and stillness, water and bubble. There is no such thing as a crest without a trough or water without bubbles. After the wave passes, the water is still and calm until the next swell arrives and breaks into another wave. All waves are manifested by the ocean.
When we look at the stars at night, we do not just see the stars. We see the stars against a field of darkness. We do not see stars in the day; there is no contrast between the light and the dark. We cannot see the one without the other, they are a single sensory experience. They are a Gestalt.
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other:
High and low rest upon each other.
Lao, Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Verse 2
There are no boundaries in the universe. Without the night we will never see the day, to destroy the negative is to destroy the positive. All opposites and boundaries are interdependent, one cannot exist without the other. Why do we not see this? Why do we live in a world of dualities and boundaries? Why do we feel separate and alienated from the universe and other beings? Maya is the answer.
Maya is the energy that manifests everything in the universe. Through the power of maya, Brahman (the ground of all Being, the one without a second) creates the illusion in which we see the many but we do not see the one, we see the multiplicity but not the unity. Maya is the source of the illusion that we live in a dualistic world and are separate from Brahman. Maya is the cause of our individual, constricted egos, of our alienation from the universe and ourselves and is the cause of our suffering and fear of death.
Through the power of maya, we see the dualities but not the unity. Brahman is like the potter spinning an infinite variety of pots made from the same clay. All forms in the universe come from the clay and dissolve back into the emptiness of the space inside the pots. We do not see that all pottery in its infinite shapes is made from the same clay. The pottery only differs in name and form.
This universe comes forth from Brahman, exists in Brahman, and will return to Brahman. Verily, all is Brahman.
The Chandogya Upanishad
The root cause of Barthes’s suffering, and all of our suffering, is that we mistakenly perceive that we are living in a dualistic world. We will be free from suffering only when we pierce the veil of maya and realize that we, in truth, are identical with Brahman.
All is one, all is Brahman, and we are one with Brahman. Tat Tsvam Asi!
Barthes enjoyed playing with dualities and surfing their boundaries. The Neutral is a masterpiece of playing the edges of dualities. However, the result was that it blinded him to the reality of non-dual awareness. Barthes was caught in the illusion of duality created by the power of maya.
The Polaroid and The Winter Garden Photograph: Maya, Duality and Non-Duality
On the inside front cover of Camera Lucida is Daniel Boudinet’s Polaroid. The mood of the image is dark, mysterious and gloomy. Notably, it is the only color photograph in the book. We see an empty chair facing a blue green curtain that divides the space into two rooms. The curtain is a shimmering evanescent veil of diaphanous, subtle light. There is a sliver of an opening in the curtain where a triangle of light glows softly. Behind the curtain we see nothing except a source of light. Perhaps the curtain represents the veil of maya and the light emanating from the second room represents enlightenment? Did someone part the curtain ever so slightly? Is someone hiding behind the curtain? Is someone in the first room, unseen, waiting? Perhaps the room is a hospital room? Did this image remind Barthes of his youth spent in sanatoriums recovering from tuberculoses?
Perhaps Polaroid represents a liminal space, a threshold, a transition between duality and non-duality? Questions.
The axis upon which Camera Lucida turns is the Winter Garden Photograph. Barthes discusses this photograph extensively but he does not show it to us; he writes that we would only be bored by a banal family photograph. The Winter Garden Photograph becomes the catalyst for the resurrection of his mother. On the other hand, Polaroid is the only photograph in Camera Lucida that Barthes shows but does not discuss. What does this mean? This photograph represents neither a person nor an experience; it does not function as a catalyst to stimulate memory like the Winter Garden Photograph. Rather, its blue-green tonality suggests Barthes’ suffering and its lack of human presence and emptiness suggests his loneliness.
Barthes the magus hides behind his veils made of words. Sometimes he shows us the light and, at other times, the darkness. Sometimes he spins more veils to deepen the mystery. He is an alchemist; his words emerge from watery chemicals bathed in red light. He is a master of duality but he does not show us the non-dual awareness, the Spirit, that lies beyond light and the dark, positive and negative, life and death, beyond all pairs of opposites. His magic is not strong enough for this.
In Varanasi the dancer spins her diaphanous veils of shimmering colors. Streamers of sparkling translucent light emanate from her body. She has bells on her feet and hands, a red sash around her waist, her veils swirl like gossamer, one hand shaking the dhamaru, drumming the primal sound of AUM, the energetic source of all forms in the universe. We are enraptured. Through the swirl of her veils we never see her true face as Shiva and Shakti, male and female, locked in a loving embrace, the dualities united into one, into eternity. The heat and the flame cannot be separated.
The sun sets, the darkness falls over the ghats, the corpses burn in the night fires, the temple bells ring in the gloom, the cows moan through the streets, the acrid, sulfuric smell of the smoke permeates everything.
C. THE NEUTRAL
The river is neither strong nor weak, neither wet nor dry.
The river is neither moving nor still, neither cold nor hot.
The river is neither being nor non-being, neither delusion nor enlightenment.
Dogen, Mountain and Rivers Sutra
The river is neither strong nor weak.
The river is neither moving nor still.
The river is neither cold nor hot.
The river is neither deep nor shallow.
The river is neither wet nor dry.
The river does not exist nor does it not exist.
The river is neither illusion nor reality.
The river is neither one thing nor the other thing.
The river is the third thing. It is beyond the two things.
The river, mud, clouds, trees, sun and flowers are all in the boat.
Binaries, Boundaries and Vibratory Existence
In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, he tells a story about his childhood that sheds light on an inquiry that ran throughout his entire life and work. It is about playing prisoner’s base in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. Barthes said that what he liked best about the game was freeing the prisoners (who were without a team and out of circulation) which put them back on the playing field. The prisoners disrupted the balance between the two opposing teams.
Barthes compares the prisoner’s game to understanding the meaning of language. Only one language has temporary supremacy over another language (i.e., only one team has captured most of the players on the other team). However, it takes a third language (i.e., a player who releases the prisoners who are on neither team) to scatter “the signifieds, the catechisms”. It is this third language, the player who releases the team-less prisoners that disrupts, energizes and renews the game. Language is like the onion without a skin or a game of scissors, paper or stone. It is this notion of the third language that he expresses in his concept of The Neutral.
Barthes loves the game of exploring the meaning of language. Language demands a choice between the binaries that constitute our world. These are such polarities as black and white, inside and outside, hot and cold, male and female, ego and Spirit, life and death. Barthes’ plays with the binaries like an erotic passion. He writes:
For a certain time, he went into raptures over binarism; binarism became for him a kind of erotic object. This idea seemed to him inexhaustible, he could never exploit it enough. That one might say everything with only one difference produced a kind of joy in him, a continuous astonishment. Since intellectual things resemble erotic ones, in binarism what delighted him was a figure. Later on he would find this (identical) figure again, in the opposition of values.
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
Ferdinand de Saussure said that meaning is created by the friction or interplay between the binaries. We tend to prefer one side of a binary over the other but, when we chose a side, the other side becomes latent. Barthes did not want to make a choice between sides, he was looking for something else, another possibility, one that did not limit meaning by being locked into one side or the other. This is the notion of the figure that Barthes conceived in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and became the structure of The Neutral. In Camera Lucida, Barthes is stuck in the binaries; he did not seem to have the fluidity to dance with the figures; perhaps he was too heavy with mourning.
Joseph Campbell observed that the action and reaction between the binaries is the energy source that powers the world. He quotes Bruno the Nolan:
The beginning, the middle, and the end, the birth, the growth, and the perfection of all that we see, come from contraries, through contraries, into contraries, to contraries. And where there is contrariety, there is action and reaction, there is motion, there is diversity, there is number, there is order, there are degrees, there is succession, there is vicissitude. (Giordano Bruno, as cited in Arthur D. Imerti, editor, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast)
Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce
In his book, No-Boundary, Ken Wilber examines boundaries. Why is it that we seem to live in a world of boundaries that always produce conflict? Since every boundary line may be a battle line, we see the human predicament: the more tightly you define your boundaries, the more entrenched are your battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I fear pain. The more I pursue goodness, the more I am obsessed with evil. The more I hold onto the past, the more I suffer when I loose it.
This raises the question of whether the boundaries reflect the actual state of the universe or are they artificial categories that mankind has drawn or superimposed upon the universe? If there are no boundaries, how does that affect our view of the world and the way that we live in the world? Wilber found that boundaries are illusions. They do not reflect universal truth but rather, they are they way that we map and edit our reality. We tend to confuse the map for the territory.
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu describes the interaction of the boundaries this way:
Having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other
High and low rest upon each other
Front and back follow one another.
Lao, Tzu, The Tao Te Ching, Verse 20
Alfred North Whitehead developed his philosophy of “vibratory existence” which suggests that all the “ultimate elements are in their essence vibratory” which means that they exist in unity rather than in opposition. Wilber explains:
That is, all the things and events we usually consider are irreconcilable, such as cause and effect, past and future, subject and object, are actually just like the crest and trough of a single wave, a single vibration. For a wave, although itself a single event, only expresses itself through the opposites of crest and trough, high point and low point. For that very reason, the reality is not found in the crest nor the trough alone, but in their unity (try to imagine a wave with crests but no troughs).
Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth
We should discriminate between light and dark, long and short, and inside and outside but understand that they are not independent and separate from each other. They are different aspects of the same thing: they are terms expressing relation not reality. These polarities do not stand in opposition nor are they mutually exclusive. They are one thing not two things. They are expressing interdependence not reality.
We find this same principle in Mahayana Buddhism. It is beautifully expressed in the Lankavatara Sutra:
False-imagination teaches that such things as light and shade, long and short, black and white are different and are to be discriminated; but they are not independent of each other; they are only different aspects of the same thing, they are terms of relation, not of reality. Conditions of existence are not of a mutually exclusive character; in essence things are not two but one.
We experience our lives and our relationship with the world as a duality. My body is “here” and the rest of the world is “out there”. I experience the world through the input of my five senses. There is a clear dividing line between me and you, and between my body and the physical world. This is the power of maya. However, from a spiritual point of view, our awareness and identity have no boundaries. We are made from the entire spectrum of consciousness, from matter to body to mind to soul to Spirit, from the gross to the most subtle forms of energy. Everything in the universe is an expression of divine consciousness.
In the mystical traditions one who sees through the illusion of the opposites is called “liberated” or “awakened”. If one is “freed from the pairs” of opposites, one is free from the conflicts inherent in the war of opposites. The liberated person does not manipulate the opposites against each other in his search for peace but transcends them both. The battle is no longer good verses evil but it is to see beyond good and evil. The liberated person unifies the opposites by discovering an awareness that transcends and encompasses them both.
What does this state of transcendental awareness look and feel like? Wilber describes it this way:
The clouds are arising within you-so much so, you can taste the clouds, you are one with the clouds, it is as if they are on this side of your skin, they are so close. The sky and your awareness have become one, and all things in the sky are floating effortlessly through your own awareness. You can kiss the sun, swallow the mountain, they are that close. Zen says “Swallow the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp,” and that’s the easiest thing in the world, when inside and outside are no longer two, when subject and object are nondual, when the looker and looked at are One Taste.
Ken Wilber, One Taste
All of this is to say that there is another view of the world in which we live. Our observed experience is one of duality and boundaries; this is the way that we perceive and navigate the world. It is illusory. There is another perspective: non-dual awareness, unity, vibratory existence, and Spirit. The dancer hides behind her veils.
The Neutral
In 1977 Barthes presented a series of lectures over thirteen weeks at the College de France on the topic of the “Neutral”. In these lectures he explored twenty-three “figures” or “twinklings” which correspond to certain binaries and anti-binaries that constitute the Neutral. He was careful to avoid listing the figures in alphabetical order because he did not want to impose an artificial order. He used a statistics journal to create a random order for the figures. To plan the order of the Neutral would establish the very paradigm that he was seeking to defeat.
Barthes describes the Neutral as follows:
I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call the Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm. For I am not trying to define a word; I am trying to name a thing; I gather under a name, which here is the Neutral. The paradigm, what is that? It’s the opposition of two virtual terms from which, in speaking, I actualize one to produce meaning.
Barthes, The Neutral
We can go back to Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes to gloss the meaning of the Neutral. Barthes dreamed of a world that is “exempt from meaning” and in which every sign is absent. Barthes did not want to find a “pre-meaning” or a “primal meaning” of language but rather, to find a “post meaning” so that he could extend the meaning of language. This concept of the Neutral would become the basis of his lectures at the College of France three years later.
Barthes was careful to point out that the Neutral does not mean the midpoint between two polarities. The Neutral is not the grey which results from a mixture of equal parts of black and white. Rather, it is a fluctuation between black and white, it is a non-color or a shade of grey. It is unstable. It may even be transparent. Barthes explains:
The Neutral is therefore not the third term-the zero degree-of an opposition which is both semantic and conflictual; it is, at another link of the infinite chain of language, the second term of a new paradigm, of which violence (combat, victory, theater, arrogance) is the primary term.
Barthes, The Neutral
The Neutral outplays the paradigm, the binary, the dialectic, the duality which is our standard discourse, the default way in which we see the world. It is a game like prisoner’s base; the Neutral represents the freeing of the prisoners who belong on neither team. It is a riverrun of words that describe a thing. To analyze both sides of a duality and determine that one side is right and the other is wrong, is to limit our understanding and knowledge. It is to be trapped by a binary that admits no possibility other than one side or the other side.
The Neutral is not one side or the other side of a binary. It is similar to both sides of the binary but it is slightly different, ambiguous, it indirectly points to an overtone, perhaps, a nuance, or an oscillation of the word waves, a variance in amplitude and shape. The Neutral does not take a position; it rests secure in the wisdom of unknowing. Perhaps this is viewing language as an analogue wave rather than as a digital form constructed of zeros and ones.
Neutral (I will be more brief) is not “social” but lyrical, existential: it is good for nothing, and certainly not for advocating a position, an identity: it has no rhetoric; the neither-nor speaks the discourse of the master: it knows, it judges ≠ the Neutral doesn’t know.
Roland Barthes, The Neutral
In the Neutral Barthes looks at several common binaries and shows us where the Neutral may be found: gender, neither masculine nor feminine; verbs, neither active nor passive; politics, those who do not take sides; botany, the neuter flower; zoology, the drones; physics, neutral bodies that do not have a charge; and chemistry, neutral salts, neither acidic nor basic.
We can draw a straight line from Writing Degree Zero to Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes to The Neutral. The Neutral is the endpoint of Barthes’ evolution from an obsession with dualities to finding a language or defining a thing that transcends the dualities. The Neutral is a suspension of the oppositional structure of meaning. It seeks to end the conflictual basis of discourse. It seeks to find the nuances of the dualities. It is an attempt to define a unique perspective on living. During the preparation of his course, he was looking for: “an introduction to living, a guide to life (ethical project): I want to live according to nuance.”
The Neutral is a complex and fascinating work and, in time, it will emerge as one of Barthes’ best and most important works. Of the twenty-three figures in the work a remarkable number of them concern Buddhism, Zen and Taoism. We see no evidence in The Neutral that Barthes had adopted a spiritual practice; however, his many references to these traditions suggest that he had given them a great deal of thought. At the same time, in the true spirit of the Neutral, Barthes observes that he knows nothing of these traditions and he is acting as an “artist”.
In The Neutral Barthes evolved from identifying and playing with the dualities, to exploring the spaces between the dualities and then to transcending the boundaries all together. Barthes understood that the dualities stand in relation to each other; they are interdependent and transcendental. This represents a philosophical movement from duality to non-duality which, in spiritual terms, is the movement from ego (which is always dualistic) to no-dual awareness, to Spirit.
In Camera Lucida Barthes creates a system of dualities but it does not seem that he had the energy to explore the spaces between the binaries or to dance with the polarities. It is a mystery as to why Barthes did not use the operations he created in The Neutral to resolve the dualities that he establishes in Camera Lucida. Perhaps he could find no way out of the most irreconcilable dualities of all: peace and suffering, life and death.
Tao and The Neutral
Barthes draws many parallels between the Tao and the Neutral; he views the Tao as an expression of the Neutral. Verse 1 of the Tao Te Ching contains the famous saying: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” This is a perfect Neutral and we can see why Barthes was attracted to it. Barthes notes that, even though we cannot speak of the Tao because that means we do not know the Tao, we must still speak of the Tao but lightly. To know the Neutral is “easy” but to know it and to speak of it is very difficult!
One figure in The Neutral who fascinated Barthes was Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu was the author of the Tao Te Ching but we know nothing of his life. The legend goes that, in ancient China, Lao Tzu wrote the Tao Te Ching on some rocks so that the rains would wash away his words. Fortunately, they were preserved by a disciple. Barthes quotes Verse 20 which describes Lao Tzu:
I am a fool. Oh, yes! I am confused.
Others are clear and bright,
But I alone am dim and weak.
Others are sharp and clever,
But I alone am dull and stupid.
Oh, I drift like the waves of the sea,
Without direction, like the restless wind.
Everyone else is busy,
But I alone am aimless and depressed.
I am different.
I am nourished by the great mother.
Lao, Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Verse 20
(Rather than using the awkward translation of the Tao Te Ching that Barthes used in the Neutral, I used the definitive the Jane English Edition.)
We can see the play of the paradigm that describes Lao Tzu-one of the great sages of the East- as a confused fool who is dull, weak and stupid, and who drifts with the waves of the sea, aimless and depressed. However, he is not like us; he is nourished by the great Mother, which of course, parallels Barthes’ relationship with his own mother: both the representative of the feminine energy that creates and animates the universe and that single manifestation of the mother who gives birth to and nourishes every one of us.
Wu-Wei and The Neutral
The Tao ideal would be to be sacred, without it being shown: contradiction in terms: an invisible Wu-Wei, which is to say that one cheated from the very moment it is uttered.
Roland Barthes, The Neutral
Wu-Wei is the principle of non-action. This does not mean passivity or laziness. It is action with a quality of not forcing the matter; it is rowing downstream rather than upstream. It is acting in harmony with the flow of the natural energies of the universe, rather than out of the demands and rigidity of our constricted egos. Lao Tzu expressed the principle of Wu-Wei in the Tao Te Ching when he wrote that the Tao does nothing but nothing is left undone.
In his work Tao and the Watercourse Way Alan Watts describes Wu-Wei:
Thus Wu-Wei as not forcing is what we mean by going with the grain, rolling with the punch, swimming with the tide, trimming the sails to the wind, taking the tide at its flood, stooping to conquer.
Watts used Wu-Wei to distinguish the Western and Eastern view of the creation of the universe. In The Way of Zen he explains:
The important difference between the Tao and the usual idea of God is that whereas God produces the world by making (wei), the Tao produces it by “not-making” (wu-wei)-which is approximately what we mean by “growing.” For things made are separate parts put together, like machines, or things fashioned from without inwards, like sculptures. Whereas things grown divide themselves into parts, from within outwards.
Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
Wu-Wei is the wisdom we gain by knowing the inner workings of the universe. We take the natural course, the path of the least resistance, just as the river flows from the mountains to the sea. We cannot cultivate Wu-Wei by practice, discipline and intention. We do not cultivate it by intellectual control. This is defeating its purpose. It is like putting legs on a snake. We come to Wu-Wei carefully, like watchful men crossing a stream, like the flow of the brush making calligraphy.
The principle of Wu-Wei as an expression of the Neutral for several reasons. The notion of the universe “not making” itself plays against the paradigm of God actively making the universe as a carpenter makes a table. Wu-Wei embraces the attitude of non-choosing. It plays against conventional Western culture because we feel compelled to choose carefully and analytically to achieve the optimum result. When we make a choice we struggle to obtain the result we hope to achieve. If we do not choose, we may be avoiding responsibility for our actions. With Wu-Wei we do not strive, we do not struggle, we do not choose. We yield to resistance and yet, we overcome it. Perhaps the path chooses us?
Not putting on a display,
They shine forth.
Not justifying themselves,
They are distinguished,
Not boasting,
They receive recognition.
Not bragging,
They never falter.
They do not quarrel,
So no one quarrels with them.
Therefore the ancients say, “Yield and overcome.”
Is that an empty saying?
Be really whole,
And all things will come to you.
Lao, Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Verse 23
I walk slowly around the meditation hut at Esalen downstream from the moss covered bridge and the high line of the eucalyptus trees on the ridge above. I hear the stream crashing beneath the wooden footbridge flowing down the gully to the rocky beach, the windsounds of the trees, and the rushsounds of the waves furling white and long. I see the cliffs that bend along the Big Sur coastline in the distance. I stop and bow to the faded calligraphy written on an old weathered board nailed to the side of the hut:
Tao follows the way of the watercourse
as the heartmind through meditation
returns to the sea.
In the West it is almost impossible to do nothing. We must always do something, we must meet our goals, optimize our actions, compete and win. But in the East, we may sit quietly without thought of profit and optimization. In the zendo, we sit quietly on our benches facing the wall, simply counting and following our breath. We are doing nothing; we are just sitting; yet, it is energetic and nothing remains undone. Wu-wei. Who can sit quietly while the muddy water clears?
Sitting quietly,
doing nothing.
Spring comes,
and the grass grows by itself.
Basho
Can we make photographs with an empty camera?
Can we make photographs without action?
Can we let the shutter open by itself without pressing the release?
Satori and The Neutral
The time will come when your mind will suddenly come to a stop like an old rat who finds himself in a cul-de-sac. Then there will be a plunging into the unknown with the cry: ‘Ah, this!
Barthes, The Neutral (Quoting DT. Zuzuki)
In The Neutral Barthes returned to the notion of satori that he explored in Camera Lucida and Empire of Signs. If one had to pick a single world to illustrate Barthes’ concept of the Neutral, it would be satori. Satori transcends the paradigm of meaning. Satori escapes the competence of language. Satori is beyond one or the other, neither or both. It is a spontaneous insight into the ultimate nature of things.
A thunderclap under the clear blue sky
All beings on earth open their eyes;
Everything under heaven bows together;
Mount Sumeru leaps up and dances.
Wumen
Satori is a break-through of consciousness to a state of non-dual awareness. Satori is an opening into the emptiness of the void. It is the unfolding of a new world previously unknown to the confusion and limitations of a dualistic mind. It is an emptiness of language that provides the background to which words can create meaning.
Writing is, after all, in its own way, a satori: satori (the Zen occurrence) is a more or less powerful (though in no way formal) seism which causes knowledge, or the subject to vacillate: it creates an emptiness of language. And it is also an emptiness of language which constitutes writing: it is from this emptiness that derive the features with which Zen, in the exemption from all meaning, writes, gardens, gestures, houses, flower arrangements, facts, violence.
Barthes, Empire of Signs
Satori does not arise by the intentional will of the ego; it only happens spontaneously. It is a combination of practice and grace. We cannot place satori into categories by saying, “Satori is this, Satori is not that.” In Zen, there are no categories; nothing is separate: Satori must be experienced in the here and now to understand that which cannot be communicated. Barthes wrote many figures about satori in The Neutral:
Satori is outside of the chain of expected logical continuity. It is an uncontrollable mutation. It arises at precisely the right moment (kairos) but we cannot predict the moment that it may arise nor cause it to happen.
Roland Barthes, The Neutral
Zen, with the aim of inducing the kind of empty flash within consciousness that is the satori (“illumination”: improper word: one sees nothing if not perhaps that there is nothing to see).
Roland Barthes, The Neutral
Satori is not the descent in oneself of a truth, of a god, but rather a sudden opening into the void; it is an “illumination.”
Roland Barthes, The Neutral
As an example of satori, Barthes points to Proust’s peak experience of the involuntary memory of his grandmother when he ate the madeleine cookie.
Perhaps something like a Western example of satori: Proust’s madeleine or, rather, the paving stones, the clinking, and the napkin: “Just as, at the moment when 1 tasted the madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared.
Roland Barthes, The Neutral
In Camera Lucida Barthes uses satori to describe his feelings when he discovers the Winter Garden Photograph; it produces a “sudden awakening” in which he discovers her essence but the experience is beyond his powers of description. He uses satori to describe the impact of punctum in a photograph. Its detail is like a detonation that triggers a “tiny shock” and the “passage of the void.” He associates satori with haiku because they both point to something that cannot be further “developed.”
Barthes, The Bardo and The Neutral
In my discussion of the Bardo, I rely upon the teachings of Pema Khandro Rinpoche. I express my gratitude for her wisdom and insight.
Bardo is a Tibetan word that means “in between the two.” The bardo is a transitional level of consciousness between life and death. It represents the potential for us to enter either a higher or a lower state of being when we are reborn.
We may enter the bardo when we experience a traumatic event or an unexpected life change. When our loved ones die, we feel that our lives have been upended. The ground has shifted beneath our feet and we feel unstable. We are confronted with the raw facts of reality; we cannot negotiate with the fact of death, loss and suffering. There is nowhere for us to turn; we cannot go forward or backward nor can we remain where we are. We have entered a liminal state between our old life and our new life.
After the death of his mother, Barthes’ life was torn apart. He was uncentered and unanchored. He felt that an alluvium of mud had been deposited on his heart. He was in a state of shock; he was dropped into the bardo. He wrote in the Mourning Diary:
Now, from time to time, there unexpectedly rises within me, like a bursting bubble: the realization that she no longer exists, she no longer exists, totally and forever. This is a flat condition, utterly unadjectival-dizzying because meaningless (without any possible interpretation). A new pain.
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
He lost his comfortable, familiar life and his new life was marked by loss and suffering. Nothing separated him from death but time.
This morning, painfully returning to the photographs, overwhelmed by one in which maman, a gentle, discreet little girl beside Philippe Binger (the Winter Garden of Chennevières, 1898). I weep. Not even the desire to commit suicide.
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
Barthes knows that he must change his life but he is paralyzed with uncertainty and fear. He does not know what his new purpose in life should be. Paralysis and inertia.
The desires I had before her death (while she was sick) can no longer be fulfilled, for that would mean it is her death that allows me to fulfill them-her death might be a liberation in some sense with regard to my desires. But her death has changed me, I no longer desire what I used to desire. I must wait— supposing that such a thing could happen-for a new desire to form, a desire following her death.
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
Recall that Barthes included a quote of Marpa lamenting the death of his son on the back cover of Camera Lucida. Milarepa, who was a student of Marpa’s, called the bardo and its core teachings on impermanence a great marvel: “The precious pot containing my riches becomes my teacher in the very moment it breaks.”
The more we learn to recognize and accept the inevitable fact that our lives will be ruptured by unpredictable and painful events, the easier it will be for us to let go of our belief in a fixed, inherent reality. We may find wisdom hidden in the loss of our precious riches. Before we are transported into the bardo, we believe that we have a fixed personality and our lives have an inherent continuity. However, in the dislocation caused by trauma we learn that this is a delusion and that we have been living with a false sense of security and comfort. We have found ourselves in the bardo when we least expect it. Can we use our time in the bardo to find wisdom? Can we learn to let go of our need for permanence? Can we let go of our riches and experience the world in a new way? Pema Khandro Rinpoche explains:
The cause of all suffering can be boiled down to grasping onto a fictional, contrived existence. But what does that mean? If we really come to understand, then there is no longer even a container to hold together our normal concepts, to make them coherent. The precious pot shatters, and all our valuables roll away like marbles on a table.
For Barthes, the disruption caused by the death of his mother produced a crisis so severe that his life fell apart and he questioned whether he could keep on living. Most of his old life was stripped away and he was reduced to doing the minimum just to survive. He entered the bardo. We can see Barthes struggling and trying to find his footing between his old life and his new life:
Today, around 5:00 in the afternoon, everything is just about settled: a definitive solitude, having no other conclusion but my own death. Lump in my throat. My distress results in making a cup of tea, starting to write a letter, putting something away-as if, horribly enough, I enjoyed the now quite orderly apartment, “all to myself,” but this enjoyment adheres to my despair.
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
We reach a point where our constructed reality collapses under the weight of exhaustion from our suffering. We cannot maintain the illusion that our old personality and life will continue after the disruption. The scaffolding upholding our old life collapses. We submit to the reality of our new life and we no longer construct a fabricated existence based on our old life. The tension is released. We open to just being. Not doing, not grasping, just being. Deep within the pit of suffering lies the jewel of joy if we can but see it.
The rupture presents us with a profound opportunity for transformation. We have the choice of either changing or suffering. Suffering contains wisdom. If we use the rupture when it comes, it can motivate us to change. The rupture becomes the rapture if we are willing to accept it.
Pema Chodron, a Tibetan Buddhist nun, explains how transformation comes from suffering:
In reality, when you feel depressed, lonely, betrayed, or any unwanted feelings, this is an important moment on the spiritual path. This is where real transformation can take place. As long as we’re caught up in always looking for certainty and happiness, rather than honoring the taste and smell and quality of exactly what is happening, as long as we’re always running away from discomfort, we’re going to be caught in a cycle of unhappiness and disappointment, and we will feel weaker and weaker. This way of seeing helps us to develop inner strength.
Pema Chodron, Practicing Peace In Times of War
We see a suggestion that Barthes has begun to to work with his suffering:
Not to suppress mourning (suffering) (the stupid notion that time will do away with such a thing) but to change it, transform it, to shift it from a static stage (stasis, obstruction, recurrences of the same thing) to a fluid state.
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
However, the Mourning Diary, Camera Lucida and The Neutral contain no evidence that Barthes was working with his suffering in an intentional way to transform his life. However, a spontaneous satori seems to have given him a few moments of peace:
Calm weekend of August 15; while the radio is broadcasting Bartok’s Wooden Prince, I’m reading this (in the visit to the Kashino Temple, the long account of Basho’s journey): “We remained sitting for a long interval in extreme silence.” Immediately I feel a sort of satori, mild, felicitous, as if my grief were being soothed, sublimated, reconciled, deepening without abating-as if “I were recovering myself.”
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
Barthes walks through the square in Saint Sulpice in Paris and has an epiphany. He realizes that he is always chasing one desire after another and that the struggle to satisfy endless desires leads only to frustration. Even the desire to be free from suffering is just another desire. Desire is always focussed on attaining something wished for in the future; it always frustrates living in the here and the now. What would it be like to sit on a bench in the square without any desire to get something in the future? What would it be like to sit with a silent mind, at peace, alive in the moment? Barthes observes that mourning can lead him to a state where he will be free from the tyranny of desire and he can simply sit on a bench just “to be”.
This morning, walking through Saint-Sulpice, whose simple architectural vault delights me; to be in architecture-I sit down for a moment; a sort of instinctive “prayer”: that I finish the Photo-Maman book. And then I notice that I am always asking for something, wanting something, always pulled ahead by childish Desire. One day, to sit in the same place, to close my eyes and ask for nothing . . . Nietzsche: not to pray, to bless. Is it not to this that mourning should lead?
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
When we release the psychological weight of the relentless pursuit of our desires and the grasping for our possessions when our desires are satisfied, we can rest in pure presence because we are not bound to the past and the future. We can sit on a bench at Saint Sulpice and just be, free of desire, and open to the blessings that presence givess us. We can witness the old men playing boules, the children running through the fountain, people reading newspapers on the benches, the smell of the flowers. We feel a sense of relief and a lightness because we no longer suffer from our past regrets, our future anxieties and our frustrated desires. We have broken the chains. We feel the freedom and creativity that comes from dancing with the impermanent universe. Life is play and our hearts are light. Thinley Norbu Rinpoche wrote, “Fish play in the water. Birds play in the sky. Ordinary beings play on earth. Sublime beings play in display.
The key to transformation is to empty our ordinary concept of the self. We must stop our grasping of the notion that we have a fixed, inherent personality. We must stop our attempt to control the flow of life by imposing our need for permanence and certainty. We must recognize that our true experience is based on a dynamic, responsive presence. This must be like a bird gliding with the currents rather than like a rock set in the earth. We must learn to follow the Tao and to trust the flow of the universe. We must loosen our control and relax with not knowing what may come next. There is freedom in being open to change and unpredictability. This way of thinking brings us into alignment with the fundamental truth and structure of the universe. The water flows to the sea.
Nothing in the universe is fixed, rigid or solid, there are no fundamental particles, just fluctuating energy fields. It is empty and we must stop grasping the forms that arise from emptiness. Its essence is change, endless change. Impermanence illuminates the ever-unfolding present moment. It is the mother of life. We must enter the flow of the universe, the impermanent, flowing, way. Pema Khandro Rinpoche describes the importance of not grasping the world in our futile attempts to make it permanent, predictable and safe:
When someone dies, don’t we suddenly see how unreal so many things are and how visceral the present space is? There can be a feeling of getting to the heart of things, a juxtaposition of real and unreal. That’s the beauty of not grasping onto an inherent reality. If we can find ways to disrupt our own habit of clinging to our continuity story, to just strip it all down—without having to wait to lose a loved one, or get that terminal diagnosis from our doctor, or lie on that gurney—then what we find there in any bare moment is creative, instantaneous playfulness.
Our time in the bardo offers us the opportunity to grow to the next phase of our lives. We can learn to stop grasping and to be open to painful experiences without running away. We can accept transformation even if it is painful.
Barthes entered the bardo after the death of his mother and he wrote Camera Lucida in an attempt to escape. Camera Lucida was his quixotic attempt to resolve his suffering by resurrecting his mother. He wanted to find her soul, her essence, and bring her back to life rather than face the fact that she was dead and gone forever.
The Starn Twins, Ganjin and The Neutral
Ganjin was blind…living in darkness but he was shotogaku, which means enlightened-he saw the light within the black. Light is also thought. Light has gravity, light is what attracts us… But black is not only the lack of light, black is the complete absorption of light….We are what controls us because what controls us defines us. The light is us.
Starn Twins
Ganjin was a Chinese monk who helped transmit Buddhism from China to Japan. From 743 to 754, he tried to visit Japan five times but did not arrive due to storms, pirates and other problems. When Ganjin finally arrived in Japan he contracted an eye infection and lost his eyesight as a result of the hardships he suffered during his journey.
Ganjin was called the “Great Teacher Who Crossed the Sea.” He founded the Toshodai-ji temple in Nara and died in 763. The Toshodai-ji temple has a famous statue of Ganjin that was made shortly after his death. It shows him sitting cross legged with hands folded in meditation. He sits, still, silent, impassive, outside of time. A garment gracefully drapes across his body. He is bald. His eyes are closed.
The statue was originally covered with gold leaf but, over the centuries, much of the gold leaf has worn away exposing the dark clay underneath. Most of the gold leaf has darkened but it appears bright in a few areas of the statue. This has created an effect like a photographic negative: dark is light and light is dark.
Light and dark.
Ganjin lived in darkness but he was an enlightened being; he radiated an inner divine light which illuminated his devotees. Ganjin’s eyes only percieved darkness but they were filled with a divine light.
Light and dark.
The gold worn by time. He’s a negative. Dark where there should be light. Bright where he should be dim. An 8th century monk called Ganjin. Light flows through his veins. He’s a man, he’s a god, he’s empty. His useless blind eyes see the light inside the black. Black is nothingness. Or emptiness? Or an empty vessel filled with light. Emptiness filled with everything. Emptiness drunk on everything.
The Starn Twins
Buddha said that light and dark are not different qualities; we should not discriminate between them. They are different aspects of the same thing. But what is the same thing? They are two faces of the same reality. They are not opposites, they are compliments of each other; they explain each other. They are interdependent qualities since there is no light without dark, and no dark without light. In the same way, there is no sound without silence nor silence without sound, there is no object without a background and no background without an object.
False imagination teaches that things as light and shade, long and short, black and white are different and are to be discriminated; but they are not independent of each other; they are only different aspects of the same thing, they are terms of relation and not of reality.
The Buddha
Light and dark.
Light, illumination, form.
Dark, ignorance, emptiness.
Positive and negative.
Form and emptiness.
The Starn Twin’s photograph of Ganjin is made of individual squares of Mulberry paper, eleven squares on each side. The paper is very fragile, the squares are brittle, they curl at the corners, they loosen from the frame. They are beginning to tear and fade. The tape that holds the tiles is losing its tackiness and the tiles are falling. This photograph is an elegant and powerful illustration of impermanence. It is a delicate image/object that is falling apart today but it shows a stone statue that has lasted for centuries and will only disintegrate in the far future. It is about time but it is not about death and memory.
Ganjin is a perfect Neutral.
Ganjin attracts meaning the way a lightning rod attracts lightning. Ganjin is a pure signifier; its function is to create meaning. Ganjin has many dualities that fluctuate; they are not fixed. The play of these dualities creates meaning. Hard and soft, impermanent and permanent, stone and paper, light and dark, gold and clay. The inside and the outside, seeing and being seen, the camera and the eye, the object and the image. Reality and illusion. Form and emptiness. Small mind and big mind.
Ganjin illuminates and transcends the dualities. Ganjin points to Buddha-mind and non-dual awareness.They are unified and become a whole. Dualities dissolve into the one.
Ganjin is a perfect Neutral.
This is what photograph can become when it is not entombed in the amber of death, time and memory.
An Ending: The False Choice of Camera Lucida; The Unanswered Question; Duality to Non-duality
Such are the two ways of the Photograph. The choice is mine: to subject its spectacle to the civilized code of perfect illusions, or to confront in it the wakening of intractable reality.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Camera Lucida is Barthes’ ontological quest to find photography’s special genius, its eidos, its Form. At the end of Part One he discovers that his subjective desires (erotic, pornographic and existential) and personal experiences lead to a dead end; they are not the path which leads to the discovery of photography’s Form. He recognizes that he must look more deeply into himself, perhaps to a level of consciousness beneath his ego, to discover the unique thing that distinguishes the photograph from all other images. This compels him to write his recantation of Part One, his palinode, in Part Two. However, Barthes loses his way, abandons his quest, and Camera Lucida evolves into a novella of memory and mourning, with interstices of philosophy, over the loss of his mother. At the end of the book, he leaves us with an unanswered question which he poses in dualistic terms. We can subject the spectacle of photography to “to the civilized code of perfect illusions” or we can “confront in it the wakening of intractable reality.” Barthes leave it up to us to decide whether photography is illusion or reality.
By closing Camera Lucida with his unanswered question, Barthes abandons much of his life’s work of resisting and defeating dualistic modes of thought. In The Neutral he rejects the discourse of opposition and polarization; he disrupts and destroys the “violence” of fixed meaning. He sets up a series of binaries and then finds new meanings in the ambiguities and fluctuating tensions that exist between the poles of the binaries. The operations that he employs in The Neutral are a rich source of insight.
In Camera Lucida Barthes sets up many binaries: ode and palinode, studium and punctum, mad and tame, seen and unseen, form and emptiness, life and death, illusion and reality. However, he does not use the operations he employs in The Neutral to actualize the binaries. To chose one and reject the other short circuits the exploration of spaces between the binaries, accepts the doxa, admits defeat to conventional thinking. In Camera Lucida, Barthes does not play his own game. He poses many dualities but leaves them unresolved. He leaves us suspended by asking us to pick one side or the other of the unanswered question. Did he become so overwhelmed with mourning that he lost sight of his purpose of finding the Form of photography? Did he have no Ariadne’s thread to guide him so he become lost in his own labyrinth? Barthes leaves us with a beautiful, complex and fascinating work of art but with many unanswered questions. This is quintessential Barthes.
In the end, the conventional paradigm, the unanswered question, won the game. Or did it? Barthes is nothing but a trickster, something like the coyote in Native American culture, cunning, elusive and mischievous, who teaches wisdom through his transformations, deceptions and games. Did Barthes leave us with a question without an answer or did he leave us with the wrong question? Must we now outplay the false paradigm he sets up and find the right question to ask?
The answer to Barthes’ question will not be not found by choosing one side of the question’s duality or the other. Ironically Barthes, who was a prodigious writer, academic and philosopher, posed a question that can only be answered by an experience which is beyond writing and analysis. The question is a perfect Neutral because its answer cannot be spoken, much in the same way that Tao cannot be spoken. Since photography has the unique characteristic of being able to record images of almost everything in the universe, we must understand the qualities of the universe to discover its essence. The universe is both dual and non-dual; it is both form and emptiness; it is both physical object and subtle energy; it is both reality and illusion. The truth is that the universe manifests from the Source, everything manifests from the most subtle energy states of the gods and goddesses to the gross form of the rocks. The universe is non-dual, it is one, not two, and our perception of it being comprised of binaries is a relative truth, but this is an illusion, caused by the power of maya. To find photography’s essence we must consider its potential of capturing both dual and non-dual states of being.
The first photographs were of landscapes, street scenes, people and things. Photography’s function was to capture images of the stuff of the world. Image proved existence. Since that time, much of the discourse has centered on analyzing photography’s basic and unique function of capturing images of form and the disconnect between an image of form and the “reality” of its actual existence. This has de-evolved into complex discussions establishing the trivial point that the photograph is not the same as the thing and that the existence of the thing is necessary to make a photograph. We sees this in the notion of indexicality. Photography is indexical because the represented object is “imprinted” by light and the chemical (or digital) process on the image-object which creates a visual likeness with a degree of “truthfulness” that is not attainable in iconic signs such as painting, drawing, or sculpture. It is obvious that photography bears a more direct relationship to representation of the object than does painting, drawing or sculpture. None of those art forms depends upon a physical thing to create the image. The deceitfulness of photography, particularly, in the digital domain has been well established. A digital image of a still life created in Photoshop that does not exist except in the imagination of the artist is indistinguishable from a photograph of a still life taken with a film camera. These are obvious points. Even Barthes struggled with the voice of singularity and the voice of banality: “To say what everyone sees and knows.” “That has been” indeed. This discourse remains stuck in the 20th century because it has not embraced modern scientific advancements in our understanding of the world and image making technology.
Unimaginably complex advances in science such as quantum mechanics and cosmology have radically changed our understanding of the relationship among time, light, matter and space. These are the new elements of photography. Although we began photographing Newton’s world, new discoveries in science and image making now provide us with the tools to photograph Einstein’s world.
By expanding our vision of photography’s potential as science progresses, we can now imagine capturing images of emptiness, of energy, of time, of movement. We are no longer bound to photograph only people, places and objects. We have captured the emptiness of a black hole and subatomic energies. If we accept that photography can capture both form and emptiness, new avenues for expanding photography’s potential to create images of a more complex and accurate understanding of the universe begin to open. Photography has almost limitless potential. Science has enabled it to move far beyond simply being a camera that transcribes images of the forms of the world.
Barthes never considered the notion that photography may be a spiritual process that can transform a photographer’s life and that a photographer who has awakened into the present moment awareness can capture unique images. This is holistic photography. It is a process that depends upon the state of consciousness of the photographer. With a still mind and open eyes, the photographer moves through the world in the here and now. The photographer makes images of the world “as it is”; images that are not clouded or obstructed by the constriction of the ego.
I am reminded of Gary Winogrand, the great street photographer, who had over 6500 rolls of undeveloped film when he died. When he was photographing the ebb and flow of life on the streets of New York, he was immersed in life, in experiencing being in the world, of seeing the world as it arises moment to moment, just as it is. Making photographs became unimportant; rather, it was the experience of being in the here and the now rather than the preservation of memory or making art that mattered. Photography became a spiritual practice, a process, a way of experiencing the world. Winogrand’s experience transcended the photograph.
Barthes closes Camera Lucida by posing that the essence of photography is one or the other of two sets of dualities: mad or tame, or reality or illusion. Photography has “two ways” and it is up to us to chose one or the other. This is a false construct based on dualities that leads to wrong answers; it rejects the operations that Barthes articulated in The Neutral. In The Neutral he writes that we should not choose one side or the other but rather, we should play with the ambiguities in between the two sides. He writes: The question terrorizes; it summons an inquisitorial apparatus: “Questioning: perhaps the worst violence. If we do not choose a side but instead, explore inside and outside, all and neither, then a world of nuance and creative potentiality opens. Photography may be mad, tame, real and illusory, all or none of these. It may be form and emptiness, life and death, punctum and studium, and admodium and silentium, or none of these. It may be something beyond dualities all together….
Perhaps Barthes cleverly posed his final question in Camera Lucida as a perfect Neutral? He created a game for us to play but, in Barthian style, he did not play his own game. If the Form of photography transcends the dualities, then the game cannot be solved by thinking and speaking. This is to defeat the game; not to do so, misses the game. We can only play by non-thinking, by undoing. We can find the answer to the final question only when our minds are silent.
In The Neutral Barthes lists a series of figures (twinklings and glimmerings) chosen at random in which the Neutral flashes insight, much like satori. We can make photographs that do not capture form but suggest stillness and emptiness and in that space our minds become still and we open to non-dual awareness, the true Form, the Neutral state. Both sides of the duality are true and false at the same time: the world is both illusion and reality and, simultaneously, it is one, the other and neither.
The better question with which to close Camera Lucida is the Japanese word “mu.” There is no English equivalent for this word. We may describe it as the space between things, perhaps it is an interval. It is emptiness full of possibilities. It is the silence between the notes, the white background of the drawing, the space between the flowers, the emptiness of the bowl, the inside of the enso. It is the entrance to the gateless gate. The Tao Te Ching describes this space as: “thirty spokes meet in the hub, though the space between them is the essence of the wheel.”
The Heart Sutra establishes the equivalence of form and emptiness. Photography easily captures form but it must also capture emptiness. Without emptiness there is no form. Without emptiness, photography is only a half truth. It must capture both the dual and the non-dual world; it must capture both form and emptiness, reality and illusion, the mad and the tame, the vernacular and the sublime. Photographers must become agents of both life and death, rather than just death. This is the essence of holistic photography.
My camera can capture the form of a flower, the reflections in the shop windows which are reflecting again in the widows of the tram cars running down the tracks on Utrechtsestrasse; the boats floating in the void of the canal waters; the silence of the long shadows and empty houses in the back streets of Pacific Beach; the fall of the surf waves at Moonlight Beach, the rocks and water of Point Lobos. It can capture my melancholy that reverberates across time and place. But how can the camera capture emptiness?
Hiroshi Sugimoto has captured emptiness in his series of Seascape photographs. These are images of subtle fields of grey tonalities that resolve into sea and sky, water and air. They are empty. There is no boundary between the elements; they are inter-dependent, they are one. Form and emptiness are one in these images. There is nothing for our minds to grasp; there is no person, place or thing to stimulate our thoughts; nothing to remind us of death, time or memory. They are neither reality nor illusion. Silence and emptiness.
When our lives are ruptured because we have lost a loved one, of what use are our photographs? Do we use them as a way to find the essential being of our loved one and to resurrect them? Do we use the photographs as a way to grasp our loved ones tightly because we cannot accept our loss? Do we use them to trigger memories and to increase our suffering? To create permanent artifacts in a futile attempt to defeat impermanence?
In Part One Barthes states that his purpose in writing Camera Lucida was to penetrate deeply into the eidos of photography from an analytical and philosophical point of view. However, he admits failure at the end of Part One. Of what use would resolving this question be when faced with a loss so profound that it threatened his very existence? He pivots. Part Two becomes an exploration of mourning and suffering over the death of his mother and the pursuit of the desire to resurrect and to reunite with his mother, to find her “truth” and her “being”. Turning to photography for this quixotic purpose and the abandonment of his stated purpose in writing Camera Lucida resulted in Barthes posing may unresolved dualities throughout the work and leaving us with the unanswered question in the final paragraph. Barthes had a “desperate resistance” to any reductive system but, ironically, he created a highly reductive system (i.e., punctum and studium, reality and hallucination) in Camera Lucida, and found only failure and frustration. How can something as complex and mercurial as photography be limited by a reductive system when it seems to reflect or reproduce all of the forms in the universe and all activities of mankind? Perhaps this is one reason why he identified with Sisyphus.
Barthes did not see that the rupture in his life caused by the death of his mother forced him to enter the bardo. He did not hear the call of conscience. He did not see that he was given an opportunity to heal and that photography could be an important practice to support his healing. He was not motivated to examine his life and consider how we could open to more potentiality and authenticity. He had no interest in following a transformative path by working with his great sadness. Barthes did not move toward a more authentic life: one aligned with Spirit and his true Self.
Barthes is a modern Daedalus, a great artist who built intricate mazes out of words. He became lost in his own labyrinth; he had no Ariadne to help him find his way out; he never resolved his “ontological” quest to find the essence of photography nor did he resurrect his mother; the Winter Garden Photograph was a delusion. In the center of his labyrinth was the Minotaur. Because he saw no reason to live after the death of his mother, he did not try to find his way out. He was slain by the Minotaur soon after he wrote Camera Lucida.
The Neutral becomes a memento mori, a figure of Barthes’ life and philosophy before he died. He writes in The Neutral: Memento mori = I remember → remember to die = re- member that you have lived (not: that you have finished living, but: that it is absolutely real that you did live). The thought of his death is not tragic for Barthes or perhaps it is tragic only in its banality: The Neutral would be the very movement, not doctrinal, not made explicit, and above all not theological that veers toward a certain thought of death as banal, because in death, what is exorbitant, is its banal quality.
After my long journey into Barthes and photography philosophy, how do I define photography’s Form? What have I learned?
The camera creates images of death, time and memory; we see these elements in almost every photograph. There is always the passage of time, there is always the memory, there is always death. Death, time and memory are interdependent; they are inseparable, they are the three sides of the triangle of existence. Time is death and memories are bound to time.
Cameral Lucida is a book of mourning over the death of the mother. Barthes said that every photograph is a catastrophe because it is evidence that its subject will die in the future. (Of course, this notion is easily defeated by referring to photographs of still life or landscape). Photographers become agents of death. The photographer opens the shutter and separates the world of the living from the world of the dead. The shutter stops energy’s vibration; life is frozen to degree zero. The living person is reduced to a flat, two dimensional death. In time, the photographer dies, the observer dies, the print disintegrates into dust, the camera is abandoned. In time, we grow old and our memories become dim and lifeless and lost; we meet our death. In time, the universe collapses into the void of Kali’s eyes; the goddess of time dances the universe into death.
The camera does not capture a slice of life by freezing time into an image. Nothing freezes time; time’s march is relentless. Time slays all. Time is always victorious. The camera transforms three dimensions into two and stops our perception of the flow of life. The photographer manipulates reality by framing and processing. Photography samples reality and turns it into illusion.
The camera uses time and light to capture an image. The quantity of light through the aperture is a function of time; the camera captures light in time. If the time is too short, the quantity of light needed to make an image is too small and the image is a black frame; if the time is too long, the quantity of light is too large and the image is a white frame. If the time and light are just right, the camera translates time and light into an image.
Memories are a function of time. Experiences that we have had in the past exist in our present memories. In time memories fade like a print left in the sun and they are lost when we die. Photographs may trigger our memories but they become dim, vague and distorted in time. It is false to see the world as comprised of the duality of life and death and then to equate photography with only one side of the duality, death. Photography is not just an expression of death. Barthes, Araki and Sontag had it wrong. It would be equally false to equate photography with the other side of the duality, life.
As a photographer, I am not an agent of death. I am an agent of death and life. I photograph both life and death. I photograph both the yin and the yang and the great circle that embraces them both. I use my spiritual practice to transcend the duality of life and death and create images that show the truth of non-dual awareness, the truth of satori, Tao, Spirit and Brahman.
My working thesis, my ode, was that the photography is comprised of three Forms: death, time and memory. These Forms manifest all of the photographs in the world. There is no image that exists outside of these Forms. These Forms do not change but the particulars that represent them, the photographs, are in a state of constant change because they reflect, they image, all of the particular objects of the world (the multiplicity) as manifesting death, time and memory. Barthes derives the Form of photography from the Winter Garden Photograph. He does not show us this photograph because we cannot see a Form; it is an idea, it is a perfection, it is unseen. Death, time and memory are all embodied within the Winter Garden Photograph; it is a single image that represents the Form of all of photography which, of course, we cannot see.
I move from my ode to my palinode. My palinode, a doubling back to the ode, is not a retraction but a modification and an expansion of the ode. The Form of photography is not just death, time and memory. I reject the banal notion that photography captures the past by freezing a slice of time. A photograph is not a static representation of an image-object receding into the past that stimulates the observer’s memory of longing, melancholy or death. It is not a predicate for mourning. It is not a record of the past to perpetuate melancholic mourning over the dead. It is not a fly trapped in amber.
My palinode is that the Form of photography manifests both life and death. Therefore, the Form of photography is life and death, time and memory. Behind these four Forms, however, there is a higher Form, the one true Form: a single essence that manifests the multiplicity of all Forms. It is named Brahman, the absolute, the ground of all being, the source that manifests everything in the world in its infinite form; from the one to the many. The qualities of the one true Form are satchidananda (being, consciousness and bliss). Everything, from the most subtle energies to the densest matter, emanates from this single source. The Upanishads teach that it is like the endless variety of pots are all made from the same clay. It is like the spider’s web spinning out and in, out and in, the manifestation of birth, life and death. Evolution and involution: the manifestation of all Form and then a collapsing back into itself as one, in endless cosmic cycles.
And to put it in Zen terms, the one true Form of photography is emptiness. It has no essential quality, no inherent or intrinsic existence, no essential feature, no fixed nature. The photograph does not exist in and to itself; rather its existence is dependent upon the referent. It arises from nothingness and collapses back into nothingness. It is empty but from that emptiness it reflects all of the forms of the universe. It is like a cosmic mirror reflecting all things but containing and holding nothing. Its very emptiness is the creative force that manifests all things.
Just as mist on a mirror fades the center and disappears, so does everything-the net of illusory manifestation dissolve into the clear light of emptiness.
John Powers. Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism
The Form of photography manifests as light. Eidos means light and perhaps it was no accident that Barthes defined his quest in Camera Lucida as finding the light that is the essence of photography. Without light there is no photograph. Brahman emanates the divine light of awareness as Surya, the solar god. Surya represents enlightenment as the highest state of expanded consciousness. In our sun salutations at sunrise, we recognize and worship Surya. Light is the Form that shines on the objects of the world that create the flickering shadows that we, as prisoners in the caves of our ignorance, perceive as real. It is only when we climb out of the darkness of the caves and enter the light of consciousness do we understand the truth of the real world. This is expressed in the Gayatri Mantra: “In each of the three planes of existence, we recall within ourselves and meditate upon that wondrous Spirit of the Divine Solar Being; may he guide our inner vision.”
We may use photography as an object of meditation to still our minds. With still minds and right practice we may realize unity with Brahman which ends all suffering and leads us out of the bardo. However, Barthes’ failed to see photography as a spiritual practice. He could have realized that the world is impermanent, accepted the loss of his mother, faced his suffering and, with the wisdom gained through spiritual practice, healed as a human being. It could have led him to a more authentic life. In the end, he never found the essence of photography, abandoned his quest, left us with an unanswered question in a brilliant work, mourned and died.
It is time for a new definition of photography. A photograph is an interpretation, a designation, a performance, a narrative, an exploration, a meta-question. It is no longer just a two-dimensional image showing us that objects have “existed” in the past. It may now be expressed as a hologram, as a sculpture, as a projection, as a mixed media installation. It may be made without a camera or a photographer. It may represent the non-dual world and the timeless state of expanded consciousness. It may be an abstract image with no predicate based on the observable world. It may show us that which is infinitely small or large; it may capture the void of a black hole. Photography is no longer limited to representing a rigid and false duality of present and past, of dynamic movement and stasis, of mourning and loss, of decaying and dying as time flows from present to past. It is no longer limited by Barthes’ false duality of being either an illusion or reality.
The photograph is an image generating system that is co-created by the photographer and the observer. The photographer makes an optical print which stimulates virtual images within the mind of the observer (derived from memory, emotion and perception) which, in turn, generate new images from the intermixing of these optical and virtual images. Or perhaps, as Barthes suggested, the photographer is dead, and it is solely up to us, the observer, to make meaning from the images that photographers make for us.
Photography is a dynamic system for making creative images inspired by multivalent explorations of meaning founded on modern, cosmologically valid and philosophically rigorous conceptions of time, space and light. It is a vehicle for exploring life and death, and time and memory. We now know that time is relativistic; it is a multiplicity of possibilities, a flow, a wave, a narrative, a becoming, a creating, a probability. Newtonian time has been replaced by Einstein’s space time continuum. Photography is inextricably bound to time. With a more complex and rich conception of time, we can expand photography’s potential and make new images that reflect modern advances in physics and cosmology. And if there is no light? We can even photograph the void. Beyond the event horizon of a black hole there is no light, no knowledge and no events; nothing can escape its infinite mass and gravity. Even so, we have photographed a black hole by building the Event Horizon Telescope, the largest and most sensitive camera ever constructed in the history of mankind. The aperture of this camera is the distance between the North and South poles and it captured an image 26,000 light years away.
The Starn Twins had it right all along. Photography is a vehicle for the deep exploration of light. The sun is the center of our universe and the sun emanates light. The great mass of the sun creates gravity. Gravity and light are fundamental forces that attract us. Gravity is a fundamental force that grounds us and gives us weight and stability. Gravity bends light. Light illuminates and is a metaphor for the expansion of consciousness that is the essence of the experience of unity with Spirit. Light is the medium and enlightenment is the message.
The Starn’s Gravity of Light installation is their masterpiece. It is part sculpture, part science experiment, part photographic exhibit. The Starn Twins explain the concept behind their monumental work:
Light is thought, light has gravity, light is what attracts us. The sun is what we want, who we want to be, who controls us. It is the future and the past. A Light too bright to look at, although light itself is invisible. The collection of light is black, and contradictorily, black is the absence of light. Black is both the void and the reservoir of what we need.
Mike and Dough Starns
The center of the installation is a carbon arc lamp that conducts a high voltage current between two carbon nodes and produces a point of light too bright for the naked eye; dark glasses must be worn to enter the exhibition space. Taped to the lamp is a copy of the Leonardo’s painting, St. John the Baptist. St. John is pointing to the heavens. This mysterious gesture has both religious and esoteric significance; it also suggests the importance of salvation through the baptism that John the Baptist represents. St. John has that same enigmatic smile as the Mona Lisa. Martin Barnes, senior curator of photographs at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, writes that this gesture “is like a rebuff, aimed at paltry human confidence in the face of eternity. Pure light is the carrier of this awesome power, at once the message and the messenger. And the news is this: light can bring, in equal measure, life and destruction, energy and fear, illumination and obscurity.”
The arc lamp casts bright, harsh, electrical light on seven huge photographs.They feel like individual chapels in an industrial cathedral. All of the photographs are concerned with light and are from earlier projects.
The Attracted to Light series are images of moths imprinted on huge grids of photographic paper. The moths are attracted irresistibly to the light that kills them. They are caught just moments before self-immolation. Light and death.
The Structure of Thought series depicts dense, gnarled, black tree branches. The photographs are printed on Thai mulberry paper and layered with wax encaustic and varnish. They resemble the dendrites of neurons in the brain or the veins and arteries of the human body. They link light to consciousness. They also show the process of photosynthesis in which light energy is absorbed and transformed into chemical energy. Light is transformed into carbon. The black silhouette of the tree represents the absorbed light. The photographs of Black Pulse were made from tree leaves which were scanned and digitally manipulated to depict the almost transparent shells of the leaves. These images of trees and leaves illustrate the element of transformed light, carbon, coursing through their veins.
On one wall is an enormous image of Ganjin, the Bodhisattva, who, even though he was blind, was illuminated by the light of consciousness. It represents the ability to see light in the dark. It is also constructed of panels of Thai mulberry paper which, due to its fragility, suggests impermanence.
In the Starn Twins’ book Attracted to Light, the essayist Demetrio Paparoni
describes the thinking behind the their attraction to light:
For the Starns, light is more than enlightenment; it is the gravity of all our past experiences and our future, the conscious and unconscious, the external and internal factors that drive our lives. The pull of gravity that light has over the corporeal body of the moths is like breathing, like thinking, impossible to deny; involuntarily, moth’s wings bring them to the light. These sensitive portraits of insects caught in the gravity of their desire are brought to view in the photographic prints … They reveal, the pathetic but real and gentle strength of the moth in its inexorable struggle to reach the light…
I am listening to the musical work, The Unanswered Question, by Charles Ives as I write these words. It poses the perennial question that mankind has asked through the ages: “What is the meaning of existence?” The score suggests many possible answers but, as it progresses, the instruments grow increasingly dissonant, frustrated and strident as they struggle to find resolution and meaning. At the conclusion of the work they fade into silence. Mankind’s great question remains unanswered . In the end we are left with a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem The Sphinx: Thou Art the Unanswered Question. Or, to put it in Hindu terms: Thou Art That.
I sit on Moonlight Beach as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean. With a silent mind, I contemplate the sea and the waves and the wind and the clouds as they arise moment to moment. I witness a perfect world that is beyond death, time and memory and that can never be captured by a camera. A seagull passes across the sun. Light, form, shadow. Light. I Am That.
Such is the way of photography. Not two. One.
FINIS
Del Mar, California
March 28, 2021