Thoughtfactory’s Notebooks: The Littoral Zone

This  study of sandstone cliffs  is from  a recent visit in March 2024 with friends to the Great Otway National Park in Victoria.  We were able to stay at the Cape Otway Light Station and they walked sections of the great ocean walk. 

I walked along the coast east of  Point Franklin towards Parker Inlet   at low tide scoping with a digital camera for a 5x4 photo session.  Sadly, I didn't do a 5x4 version of this picture. Access to this  coastal area could only be at low tide   The picture  that I did  make with e 5x4 have yet to be processed by the professional  photo  lab. 

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The close-up photo below is from a recent early morning poodlewalk with Maya amongst the coastal rocks between Petrel Cove and Kings Beach lookout in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula: 

We  usually walk along the coastal path from Kings Beach Lookout towards Petrel Cove 40 minutes or so before sunrise.   Then we make our way back along the rocks after sunrise with the sun behind us.   There is only the odd dog walker on the coastal path  or a solitary fisherman on the rocks at that time of the morning. So it is easy to be in the moment whilst amongst the rocks.  

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This is   rare event  at Petrel Cove near Encounter Bay on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula:

 A 2.7 metre wide bump-head sunfish (Mola alexandrini). It hasn't been attacked.

I initially thought that the waters of the Southern Ocean would have been too cold as they mostly live in temperate and tropical oceans and interpreted this an indication  of  increasing marine temperatures.  However, I was informed that  the waters along Australia's  southern coast are temperate and these waters  in the southern hemisphere are its habitat. 

I returned a few days latter and it had gone. The tides had swept it back to the sea. 

As I briefly mentioned  in my  previous post in September 2023  this low key  littoral zone project, with its grounding in Japanese aesthetics, went into a hiatus in 2023.  The  basic understanding  that I had been working with up to that point was that  a central tenet of  Japanese aesthetics is the transience or impermanence of life with its sorrow for the loss of transient things. The relevant concept is  mono no aware.  

The close-up or macro picture of seaweed  is from the 2022 archives. It was made before  we got Maya, our standard poodle pup, who arrived  in February, 2023.  

After Maya came  the   hiatus in the littoral  zone  project took the form of  the  project  grounding to a halt.  I only  walked along the coastal rocks between Petrel Cove and  Kings Beach infrequently  for most of 2023. What I lost in this period was the ritual of daily walking the path across the rocks with its mediative processes that focuses on the presence of things, the moment of now.  

There were multiple reasons for staying away from the rocks along the  coast. It was probably a mixture of reasons --- such as Maya when she was a puppy, the rugged weather conditions (the frequent rain and strong coastal winds), and my concentrating on seascapes.  I realized that I wasn't  open to what was around me when I was walking -- I wasn't aware of of  the light of the sun and the forms and patterns  of the shadows that soften everything --- as  I was too busy keeping an eye on Maya  I missed the nuances of perception in the shadows which are not permanent.  

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The Littoral Zone  project has been on hold in  2023.  The previous  Ephemeral post was in May 2023 after a 5 months hiatus. Then there is nothing until September -- a 4 month gap. So that is  one post in 9 months. What's more there were large gaps between posts before that. 

The two pictures in this post, which  were made in May 2023, pick up where I left off through reconnecting with the Japanese aesthetic concept of mono no aware. It's a return to familiar ground. 

The basic reason for the hiatus in 2023 is that I lost my way - or ran out of puff. The initial motivation was  a blog of photos and text linked to poodlewalks as a supplement.  Over time  it slowly evolved from a blog to a project that  connected the photos of the littoral zone that I made whilst on my daily poodlewalks to Japanese aesthetics.  The blog  became  a way or means for  me to work out  how to do this. 

What appealed about Japanese aesthetics was that it was based on the world of flux that presents itself to our senses being the only reality: there is no conception of some stable Platonic realm above or behind it.This  appealed because the littoral zone was a world of flux and it connected with  the process metaphysics in western philosophy  -- eg., Nietzsche's rejection of Platonism's two worlds  and his idea of the will to power  that sees the world as comprised of dynamic active and reactive forces in tension. 

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