240 New Pictures to Look At
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The writings and teachings of the Baha’i faith motivate and inspire my photography. I am a Baha’i. My faith gives meaning to my life and infuses it with beauty and inspiration. Even when I was a child, I wanted to grow up to be an artist but later on failed to pursue my ambition. During a brief period that lived in Chicago, I visited the Baha’i House of Worship in Wilmette many times. I bought my first camera to take pictures of it. |
Some of my images of the temple in Wilmette offer unique views from upper balconies where tourists seldom go and the very top on the outside of the building where almost nobody is ever allowed to go.
| I have replaced all but two of the images that were on my website and added more than 80 new images that I haven’t exhibited before. The replacements are the result of rescanning and post processing about half of my photo library of 500 images. These are the majority of the images that survived a disastrous flood and that I chose to save. |  |
This article is a continuation of the four-part series that began with Through a Scanner Brightly.
The Gallery Catalog page asks a question taken from the movie Finding Neverland and poses an answer that I hope will resonate with you.
Did you like it?
It was magical.
Thank you.
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Through a Scanner Brightly – Part 4
The Writings of the Baha’i faith say: “Blessed is the spot, and the house, and the place, and the city, and the heart, and the mountain, and the refuge, and the cave, and the valley, and the land, and the sea, and the island, and the meadow where mention of God hath been made, and His praise glorified. –Bahá’u'lláh
One of the images I scanned during the past four weeks was processed in a special way. I took the photograph through a deep magenta filter. Although it was 35 mm slide film I developed the film as if it were a negative. The photographer’s term for that is cross processing. Insofar as visible light is concerned magenta and green are opposites. This is a detail of the image as it looked in the preview scan.
Similar to most of my other older images, this slide also had considerable damage in addition to fading and color degradation. The hexagons are an effect of lens flare which comes from pointing toward the light source without using a lens shade to reduce flare (it was deliberate). I configured the Silverfast scanning program to restore fading and colors. The end result revealed colors that I had only imagined but didn’t really exist in the original photograph. This shows the first glimmerings of sunrise near Crystal Springs Lake 15 miles south of San Francisco.
Say: O friends! Drink your fill from this crystal stream that floweth through the heavenly grace of Him Who is the Lord of Names.
Bahá’u'lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u'lláh
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
This detailed section shows what looks very similar to a painter’s brush strokes. It is, in fact, an unchanged and unretouched part of the original photograph. I developed a technique for doing this in the camera, the darkroom, and sometimes with the aid of an optical slide copier that I built out of spare parts. It was in the mid-1970’s when digital image processing did not even exist.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
O thou dear one! Impoverish thyself, that thou mayest enter the high court of riches; and humble thy body, that thou mayest drink from the river of glory, and attain to the full meaning of the poems whereof thou hadst asked.
Thus it hath been made clear that these stages depend on the vision of the wayfarer. In every city he will behold a world, in every Valley reach a spring, in every meadow hear a song. But the falcon of the mystic heaven hath many a wondrous carol of the spirit in His breast, and the Persian bird keepeth in His soul many a sweet Arab melody; yet these are hidden, and hidden shall remain.
Bahá’u'lláh, The Seven Valleys
This image felt dull to me so I had almost discarded it. Its title is Angels on a Ladder of Light.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
I rescanned it last week to restore its original colors. It still needs a little work but now it’s a little closer to what I wanted to convey.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
By pure serendipity I often come home with photographs that have exactly nine things in them, birds, flowers, trees or people. It’s actually just a fortuitous accident when it happens. Here is a recent photograph I took of nine birds.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
Say: Through the ascendancy of God, the All-Knowing, the Incomparable, the Luminary of divine understanding hath, in this day, risen from behind the veil of the spirit, and the birds of every meadow are intoxicated with the wine of knowledge and exhilarated with the remembrance of the Friend. Well is it with them that discover and hasten unto Him!
Bahá’u'lláh, Tabernacle of Unity
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The Name Enoch
In the sacred writings of the Baha’i faith we read, “How great the multitude of truths which the garment of words can never contain! How vast the number of such verities as no expression can adequately describe, whose significance can never be unfolded, and to which not even the remotest allusions can be made!”
(Baha’u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah)
Enoch is my true name and my given name, Cary, fits me well also. Cary derives from Germanic pre-English and means “dweller in a castle” or a fortified town. Its various forms are similar to Carl with assorted spellings and derivatives. Some of its feminine forms are Karen (with multiple spellings) and Carla. Cary rhymes with Harry, Larry, etc. It does not rhyme with “hairy.” People frequently mispronounce or misspell my name though it should be quite simple to say. The ‘a’ is short like in cat or have, the second syllable rhymes with ‘eee’ and the first one is accented.
This is my namesake. My parents told me they named me after Cary Grant.
Shortly after I became a Bahá’í in 1963 I took the middle name of Enoch. My parents had failed to give me a middle name and I wanted one. I eventually made it legal so it appears on my passport and other documents. Enoch who received only the briefest mentions as a prophet in the Old Testament occurs frequently in Apocrypha and related works of unknown origin. One of the translations of his name is Wise teacher which was what I aspired to be.
The Prophet Enoch sees a vision of a future Bahá’í House of Worship. (My personal interpretation! I am not a Biblical scholar. Nevertheless I’m aware of and sensitive to some of the inner symbolic meanings.) I feel it is important to stress that some of the Fundamentalist Christian views of Enoch are purely superstitious and mythological. Enoch did not physically enter into heaven because it is impossible and has never happened in the literal sense. Such stories contain symbolic rather than literal meanings.
“If any man be told that which hath been ordained for such a soul in the worlds of God, the Lord of the throne on high and of earth below, his whole being will instantly blaze out in his great longing to attain that most exalted, that sanctified and resplendent station…. The nature of the soul after death can never be described, nor is it meet and permissible to reveal its whole character to the eyes of men.”
(Baha’u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah)
…the habitation wherein the Divine Being dwelleth is far above the reach and ken of any one besides Him. Whatsoever in the contingent world can either be expressed or apprehended, can never transgress the limits which, by its inherent nature, have been imposed upon it. God, alone, transcendeth such limitations. He, verily, is from everlasting. No peer or partner has been, or can ever be, joined with Him. No name can be compared with His Name. No pen can portray His nature, neither can any tongue depict His glory. He will, for ever, remain immeasurably exalted above any one except Himself.
(Baha’u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah)
Baha'i House of Worship, Wilmette, Illinois
O Son of the Wondrous Vision. I have breathed within thee a breath of My own Spirit, that thou mayest be My lover. – Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words
This was what I read that directly inspired me to take the name Enoch:
And the vision was shown to me thus: Behold, in the vision clouds invited me and a mist summoned me, and the course of the stars and the lightnings sped and hastened me, and the winds in the vision caused me to fly and lifted me upward, and bore me into heaven. And I went in till I drew nigh to a wall which is built of crystals and surrounded by tongues of fire: and it began to affright me.
And I went into the tongues of fire and drew nigh to a large house which was built of crystals: and the walls of the house were like a tesselated floor (made) of crystals, and its groundwork was of crystal. Its ceiling was like the path of the stars and the lightnings, and between them were fiery cherubim, and their heaven was (clear as) water. [ ... ] I fell upon my face. And I beheld a vision, And lo! there was a second house, greater than the former, and the entire portal stood open before me, and it was built of flames of fire. And in every respect it so excelled in splendour and magnificence and extent that I cannot describe to you its splendour and its extent.
And its floor was of fire, and above it were lightnings and the path of the stars, and its ceiling also was flaming fire. And I looked and saw therein a lofty throne: its appearance was as crystal, and the wheels thereof as the shining sun, and there was the vision of cherubim. And from underneath the throne came streams of flaming fire so that I could not look thereon.
And the Great Glory sat thereon, and His raiment shone more brightly than the sun and was whiter than any snow. None of the angels could enter and could behold His face by reason of the magnificence and glory and no flesh could behold Him. The flaming fire was round about Him, and a great fire stood before Him, and none around could draw nigh Him: ten thousand times ten thousand (stood) before Him, yet He needed no counselor. And the most holy ones who were nigh to Him did not leave by night nor depart from Him. And until then I had been prostrate on my face, trembling: and the Lord called me with His own mouth, and said to me: ‘ Come hither, Enoch, and hear my word.’ And one of the holy ones came to me and waked me, and He made me rise up and approach the door: and I bowed my face downwards.
Baha'i House of Worship, Wilmette, Illinois
BOOK OF ENOCH, Chapter 14
From: The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament
by R.H. Charles, Oxford: The Clarendon Press
Note that the inner and outer walls of the 19-story tall Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois are constructed of concrete embedded with crystalline quartz.
Exterior Detail
Two of the images here are from the Bahá’í Media Bank which allows them to be reposted on the Web. I lived in the Wilmette vicinity for two years. That was what directly inspired me to get into photography. I made the exterior detail photograph above.
Fragments of biblical references to Enoch are scattered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is one of them.
One book is part of the Eastern Orthodox version of the Bible and not considered apocryphal by them. There are many possible and equally meaningful interpretations of these passages. If you question mine then read on.
There’s a unique circumstance that enables me to put forward such a free interpretation of scripture. The historical Enoch –assuming that one ever existed– wrote nothing that has survived and that’s verifiably from the historic Enoch. What comes down to us is called Pseudepigrapha because later writers took the pseudonym of a prophet to give weight to their writings. As an example, many Biblical scholars attribute the entire book of Isaiah to three authors from different time periods. That shouldn’t detract from their symbolic spiritual validity. They sound and feel inspired. There is historical evidence that the prophecies contained in that book were fulfilled.
I feel free to do the same thing with poetry and to some extent with nearly any insightful writing I come across. Another example is the e-mail signature line I’ve used for many years.
“Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.” — Joseph Campbell
The author doesn’t mean the same thing that Bahá’ís mean when they say “Manifestation.” To be brief, he doesn’t accept the individuals Bahá’ís know about as necessarily revealers of sacred text (Founders of the world’s great religions) but only as wise or enlightened teachers. But when Bahá’ís read the quotation they immediately leap to an association that’s meaningful to them. Such words and associations transcend the life of the writer. Thus those words may endure for a very long time.
“Countless works of art have been truly inspired and that inspiration stays in association with the work and is mirrored in the heart and the mind of the receptive viewer.” — Otto Rogers
Tags: Baha'i, Baha'i Faith, Bible, Cary Grant, counselor, Enoch, faith, Joseph Campbell, Photography, Prophets, Religion, Wilmette
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Illumined By Thy Streaming Lights
In the writings of the Baha’i faith we read this beautiful prayer:
Cast upon this poor and desolate creature, O my Lord, the glance of Thy wealth, and flood his heart with the beams of Thy knowledge, that he may apprehend the verities of the unseen world, and discover the mysteries of Thy heavenly realm, and perceive the signs and tokens of Thy kingdom, and behold the manifold revelations of this earthly life all set forth before the face of Him Who is the Revealer of Thine own Self.
Bahá’u'lláh, Prayers and Meditations by Bahá’u'lláh
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
May they arise to serve Thee and dedicate themselves to the Kingdom of Thy divinity, and set their faces toward the realm of Thy Self-Subsistence, and spread far and wide Thy signs, and be illumined by Thy streaming lights, and unfold Thy hidden mysteries. May they guide Thy servants unto gentle waters and to the fountain of Thy mercy that welleth and leapeth in the midmost heart of the Heaven of Thy oneness.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
And among His signs are His splendours, rising above the horizon of oneness, His lights streaming out from the dayspring of might, and the announcement of the Most Great Glad-Tidings by His Herald, the One, the Incomparable. Verily in this is a brilliant proof for the company of those who know.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
Thus will all peoples witness the power of the Most Great Name, and every nation acknowledge the might of the Ancient Beauty, and see how He hath toppled down the walls of discord, and how surely He hath guided all the peoples of the earth to oneness; how He hath lit man’s world, and made this earth of dust to send forth streams of light.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
…the Holy Manifestations of God are even as a looking-glass, burnished and without stain, which gathereth streams of light out of that Sun, and then scattereth the glory over the rest of creation. In that polished surface, the Sun with all Its majesty standeth clearly revealed.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
It is daybreak, and from the rising-point of the invisible realms of God, the light of unity is dawning; and streaming and beating down from the hidden world of the Kingdom of oneness there cometh a flood of abounding grace.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
O my Lord! Illumine their eyes by the light of love, and enkindle their hearts by the rays streaming from the heaven of the Supreme Concourse.
‘abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace
Strive day and night; perchance these sleeping ones may be awakened by the celestial strains of the city of melody and hear the soft, delicate music which is streaming down from the kingdom of El-Abha.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Divine Philosophy
