The parts and the wholes...

Thanks to everyone for the comments and dialogue as I've published these partly sharp/partly blurred 'Edges' pictures.  I'm starting to understand a little more of what I have been trying to grasp as a result...

I'm realising that the way we use photography supports ideas of how we can break concepts down into smaller parts.  Freeze frame photos are brilliant for this; a moment captured in time.  Then all we need is to do is reassemble all those freeze frame moments and, as in cinematography, a 'movie' of our experience appears...

Except our senses don't freeze images like that.  The sense we make is much more like this...

Clearly, we don't 'see' this either - we have to 'intuit' the sensation.  And so... well, I guess my sense of 'Edges' comes from an experience of the hard, stationary rocks meeting the elusive, ephemeral, transitional flows and shapes of the water....

Where am I going with this....

A turn, perhaps, towards a path that scientists missed a few hundred years ago though one which artists have played with ever since.

At odds with much of the thinking of his time, the scientist/philosopher Goethe said that we understand organisation and unity in a way that has to be perceived through intuitive experience.  Goethe called this 'Anschauung', which "may be held to signify the intuitive knowledge gained through the contemplation of the visible aspect.'

So, rather than breaking the world down into its constituent 'parts', Goethe tried to understand the 'wholes'. Nowadays, for the sake of the world, a return to this way of thinking might not be a bad idea. Until then...

"Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words."

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)