Hilma Af Klint, 1907

Blechnum Spicant. The British fern gazette. December 1912.

Frederick Hammersley (American, 1919-2009), Up with in, 1957-58. Oil on linen, 47 7/8 x 36 in.

What Derrida writes about the poem as the epitome of creative language could also be said of a life-form: It is never fully revealed, there is always a piece that is largely inaccessible because the bond to a living being, to a creative piece of reality, is always at the same time a separation. "No poem without accident," writes Derrida, "no poem that does not open itself like a wound, but no poem that is not also just as wounding. You will call poem a silent incantation, the aphonic wound that, of you, from you, I want to learn by heart. . . . The poem falls to me, benediction, coming of (or from) the other.

Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley

György Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science, 1956

The Beam of Light Enters The Darkness, 1938, Roman Vishniac (1897 - 1990)

We can neither escape personal responsibility by imagining that our dependence upon others determines how we are to act, nor escape this dependence upon others by imagining that our freedom enables us to shape our future inalienably. Instead, and this, for Merleau-Ponty, is the ‘modern form of humanism’, we have to accept that there is an inescapable ‘ambiguity’ in human life, whereby we have to accept responsibility for our actions even though the significance of everything we try to do is dependent upon the meaning others give to it.

Thomas Baldwin, from the introduction to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The World of Perception

Encyclopedia Britannica, Flowers at Work, 1956