Seeing the Stream, Being the Stream

Warren Greenwood article in the Ithaca Times

Posted: Wednesday, June 12, 2013 12:00 am

By Warren Greenwood | 0 comments

Fernando Llosa is an artist who lives in Trumansburg. He’s a painter, sculptor, and photographer, and he has created a new work: a print-on-demand book calledSeeing the Stream, Being the Stream: A Meditation. There is also an exhibit of photographs from the book on display at the Ulysses Philomathic Library.

The book includes a title page (with a magical winter photo of Taughannock Falls, two poems, some explanatory text, sixty photographic images, and a philosophical essay.

“The images used for this book,” Llosa wrote, “were culled from a large body of photographic work made from 2006 to 2012 in a relatively small section of Taughannock Creek in Trumansburg, N.Y., mostly upstream from the famous waterfall of the same name. There are a few, classically rectangular images that are single captures. The rest are generally more elongated composites comprising from three to nine different sections of a single scene stitched together using Adobe Photoshop.”

In these works, we see the patterns of the Universe … in the striations of the rock, the flow of the creek, the structure of the fallen leaves, the crystal architecture of frost and ice, the forest, the falls, even flying insects.

The Chinese word Tao translates as “the underlying natural order of the Universe.” This is what Llosa’s photographic creations are about. He is documenting the flow of the Universe, whether as wood or stone, ice or water, animals or flora.

This is made clear in Llosa’s concluding essay in the book. In a phone conversation, Llosa said, “The essay is a reflection that has several levels – on the situation of the world and the predicament of humanity.”

The essay reminds me of the work of my favorite philosopher, the late Alan Watts. And, curiously, I had just finished re-reading what is, quite possibly, Watt’s greatest work, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.

Once, in one of his many recorded lectures, Watt’s succinctly summed up his ideas thus: The Universe is all one thing. And you are IT.

Llosa is saying more or less the same thing. Our sense of a Universe of separate parts, our sensation of being a separate ego in a bag of skin, is a hallucination. It has nothing to do with the way things really are.

And in The Book Watts reasonably observes that this concept, that we are the whole Cosmos, is hard, if not impossible for us to grasp, because we’ve been trained since birth by what Llosa nicely calls “the well-trodden path of self-centered and culturally controlled consciousness.” 

Meaning: the standard-brand religions have pretty much had us by the throat since childhood. (Or as Llosa put it in a phone conversation: “We’ve been brainwashed.”)

Alan Watts pointed out that even our language is structured so we think in terms of a Universe of separate things (nouns) and actions (verbs), as opposed to one big flowing eternal Multiverse.

Llosa’s photo-creations are an antidote to this. You can meditate on them and catch a glimpse of the flow of Everything.

Watts further pointed out in The Book that this sensation of separateness from Nature, of being an isolated ego in a hostile universe, is at the root of humankind’s ongoing destruction of the planetary ecosystems that all life depends upon.

Llosa takes it a bit further and identifies this illusion of separateness as the root cause of all the wars and conflicts and social strife plaguing the human family. 

Unlikely as it may be that we’ll ever transcend that, it is valuable that someone can clearly identify the root problem as Llosa has, and provide, with his writing and art, a helpful meditative antidote, to, at least temporarily, relieve us from the perceptual confusion and psychic pain that we are suffering from.  

The “Seeing the Stream, Being the Stream” exhibit will be on view in the Local History Room of the Ulysses Philomathic Library, 74 East Main Street, Trumansburg, N.Y., (607) 387-5623, through June 2013. To view the book on-line, or purchase a print-on-demand copy, go to blurb.com and enter Fernando Llosa’s name.