RON HENGGELER

December 30, 2023
Miscellaneous images with reflections for the New Year beginning.

For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

T.S. Eliot

Oh friends, put aside these sounds!
Let us be more civil to each other,
And speak more joyfully.

Beethoven

In your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth, 
And all you behold, though it appears without, 
It is within, in your imagination, 
Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.

William Blake

Though the eye is small, the soul which sees through it is greater and vaster than all the things which it perceives. In fact, it is so great that it includes all objects, however large or numerous, within itself. For it is not so much that you are within the cosmos as that the cosmos is within you.

Meher Baba

You just have to live and life will give you pictures.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Do few things but do them well, simple joys are holy.

Francis of Assisi

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

Margaret Mead

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light.

Max Ernst

Humanity is the earth’s nerve-endings through which planetary vibrations are received for transmission.

Gurdjieff

Whoever laid the town out took the conventional checkerboard pattern of streets and without the slightest regard for the laws of gravity planked it down blind on. . . a confusion of steep slopes and sandhills. The result is exhilarating.

John Dos Passos 

The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word.

Marcel Duchamp

The original City Hall structure, completed in 1898 at McAllister and Larkin Streets, collapsed in a heap during the 1906 earthquake. The focal point of the Civic Center, the current City Hall, was designed by John Bakewell and Arthur Brown. This 1915 building covers two city blocks bounded by Polk, McAllister, Van Ness, and Grove. The huge lead-lined dome is modeled after Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome and dominates the area, rising 301 feet above the street, higher than the Capitol dome in Washington D.C. The building, 400 feet long and 300 feet wide, has an exterior of granite from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. In 1960, civil rights and freedom-of-speech protesters were washed down the central stairway with fire hoses. Mayor Dianne Feinstein was married at City Hall in 1980 and invited the entire city to her wedding reception. Badly damaged by the 1989 earthquake, City Hall’s arches were supported by large wooden struts until the building was closed in 1995 for seismic retrofitting. (San Francisco’s previous City Hall was built of inferior materials, including trash and newspaper, by a corrupt city administration.)

John Snyder

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.   

Paul Kantner of the rock band Jefferson Airplane

Color is the fruit of life.

Guillaume Apollinaire

My pictures are my eyes. I photograph what I see - and what I want to see.

Mario Testino

Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure.

Frida Kahlo

In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.

William Blake

The solution to the problem of the day is the awakening of the consciousness of humanity to the divinity within.

Hazard Inayat Khan

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

Emily Dickinson

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Susan Sontag

Don't shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.

David Alan Harvey

San Francisco

That City of Gold to which adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven. I wonder what enchantment of the 'Arabian Nights' can have equaled this evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the marshes and the blowing sand.

Robert Louis Stevenson

First in rapture
And first in beauty
Wayward, passionate, brave
Glad of life God gave.
The sea-winds are her kiss,
And the seagull is her dove.
Cleanly and strongly she is--
My cool, grey city of love.
                            

George Sterling

693,000 cubic yards of concrete and 100,000 tons of steel were used in spanning the Gate.  25,000,000 man hours went into building the Golden Gate Bridge. . .eleven men lost their lives during its construction. The bridge, as designed,  can sway 27.7 ft.  during high winds.

The main cables from which the span hangs (each 36.5 inches diameter and 7, 660 ft. long) are made up of 27, 572 strands of 0.2 inch diameter steel cable. . .22,000 tons worth and 80,000 miles long.  This 0.2 inch cable could circle the globe at the equator more than five times.  

To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

Lao Tzu

When one realizes one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.

P.D. Ouspensky

The red-orange color of the Golden Gate Bridge is somewhat of an accident. When the towers were constructed, they were coated in the red-orange primer, which was extended to the rest of the bridge as the work continued. Designers of the bridge liked the way the distinctive color complimented the hills of Marin County and provided a contrast to the fog that swirled through the towers, so the bridge remained International Orange. It also increases the visibility of the bridge in fog. The top coat of orange is replaced constantly because the auto exhaust and chilly, salty air eats away at the finish . A team is employed fulltime to apply about two tons of the coloring per week to keep the paintwork in good condition and prevent the bridge from rusting. It takes four years to apply one coat. The job is not for the faint-hearted. Painters have to be able to climb to the top of the bridge’s 746- foot towers and routinely brave 30-mile-per-hour winds.

John Snyder

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

Music is . . . A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy

Ludwig van Beethoven

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

William Blake

After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him. 

Jack Kerouac

What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

Jane Goodall

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Dorothea Lange

To some people a tree is something so incredibly beautiful that it brings tears to the eyes. To others it is just a green thing that stands in the way.

William Blake

Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children."

Ancient Native American Proverb

This whole universe, with all its vastness, grandeur and beauty, is nothing but sheer imagination. In spite of so many discoveries, researches and scientific knowledge, the creation remains a great unsolved riddle.

Meher Baba

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.

Jacques Henri-Lartigue

We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.

Buddha

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake

To a traveler paying his first visit,  San Francisco has the interest of a new planet.  It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world.

Friz Hugh Ludlow

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Ansel Adams

Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge began on January 5, 1933 and the last rivet was placed on May 27, 1937.  

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

Man Ray

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Buddha

Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.

Garry Winogrand

For all its contradictions . . . San Francisco remains a beacon,  always with that dangerous streak of insanity,  built in at birth.   

Herb Caen

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator

There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.

J.R.R. Tolkien

There is no stupidity great enough to ruin the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge. It has been the subject of terrible poetry and worse paintings, but it rises easily and grandly above the mundane, its towers poking through the fogs, natural and man-made. 

Herb Caen

Opened in 1937, the 4,200-foot suspension bridge was the longest in the world until 1959. It took four-and-a-half years and $35 million to build; in 1991, according to one estimate, it would cost $1.25 billion to re-construct. The 746-foot towers of the Golden Gate Bridge were the world’s tallest until 1997, when they were exceeded by a bridge in Denmark. The clearance between the roadbed and the water is 260 feet, a distance set by the military to allow ships to pass underneath. Over 2000 lawsuits were filed in an attempt to prevent the bridge from being built. One of the first obstacles was winning the approval of the War department. The military feared an enemy might bomb the bridge, which would block the harbor and the naval ships anchored there. The War department granted permission for the bridge in exchange for control of the structure in time of war and for allowing government vehicles to cross free of charge. 

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.

Aaron Rose

Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period.

Max Ernst

When we pay attention to nature's music, we find that everything on the Earth contributes to its harmony.”

Harat Inayat Khan

Everything has two aspects; the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction.

Giorgio de Chirico

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

William Blake

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.

Giorgio de Chirico

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.

Oprah Winfrey

The person who does not believe in miracles surely makes it certain that he or she will never take part in one.

William Blake

RH

1957

May Light always surround you:
Hope kindle and rebound you.
May your Hurts turn to Healing;
Your Heart embrace Feeling.
May Wounds become Wisdom;
Every Kindness a Prism.
May Laughter infect you;
Your Passion resurrect you.
May Goodness inspire
your Deepest Desires.
Through all that you Reach For,
May your arms Never Tire.

D.Simone

In your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth, 
And all you behold, though it appears without, 
It is within, in your imagination, 
Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.

William Blake