sixty-seven

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

I have decided to run an old essay series of mine that long ago did much to inspire clerkmanifesto. It is called "The Secret Secrets of Writing". If in my travels I am able to throw anything current onto clerkmanifesto it will be down below today's passage.

This is the fifth one of eleven secrets:

5. Don’t be afraid of writing badly.

My understanding, probably based on television shows, is that if you are afraid of spiders and no longer want to be an arachnophobe, you go to see a kind, gentle person who keeps just loads of tarantulas in their spare bedroom. There, in that spider wonderland, you gently acclimate to the spidery presence. Since I am afraid of spiders and have never undergone this delicate cure, the very phrase “Spidery presence” give me the absolute willies. However, supposedly, if I went to this beneficent, saint-like spider herder and spent regular hours with these miraculous eight-legged creatures that I shouldn’t fear because they are our friends and help control the number of nuisance insects in the world, if I hung out closer and closer with these spiders, I would, before long, be letting them crawl all over me while I blithely sipped cappuccinos and made Indiana Jones jokes.

Since this works, theoretically, so well with spiders, I thought I would take it as my model for helping cure my possibly damaging fear of writing badly. The idea would be to carefully jot down just a line or two of terrible prose and then breathe a lot and have warm drinks and tell myself kind things. Unfortunately it turns out that I am incapable of producing bad writing on purpose. No matter how wise and pure my intentions are the moment I sit down to write all my plans dissipate. It’s like a fever that seizes me without warning. I suddenly want to be funny, graceful, expressive, winsome and clear-headed. Yes, when I write, I can be boring, pedantic, egotistical, maniacal, cumbersome and obtuse, but I can’t do it on purpose! It just sort of jumps out at me, like a spider, causing me to shriek and flail and go hide in my room for a couple days trying to soothe myself. If a spider herder professional tried to cure people of their arachnophobia by waiting until they were feeling calm and comfortable and then  flinging spiders at them they would be disbarred from the Arachnophile Professionals Association faster than a black widow spider can eat the head off of her mate.

Coincidentally that’s just about how writing something awful makes me feel, the same way thinking about one spider eating the head off of another spider makes me feel. Nevertheless I do understand that both these things, cannibal spiders and bad writing, are part of the natural order of things. They are the way of the world, they happen, and I should not fear them, but instead should embrace them. Not literally though as I would get web and poisonous oozing spiders all over my shirt.

Hello again from the present. This is Clerk Manifesto down in the cave system below the already completed Clerk Manifesto posts composed back in August. I am even a little ahead of myself in these posts now, putting up some images that try to express the breadth and variety of Kyoto.

This is my third day doing that, so I may be scraping things out a little bit, and unfortunately repeating images. I do not know. So this may be it for this section of reporting the breadth of Kyoto through diverse pictures. Even as this posts, I think it is possible we will be leaving for Tokyo, so soon there may be new things to show.

But for now this is one last day of our variety of travel photos from Kyoto, a city of wonders, prettiness, and fantasy all at once.

sixteen

  

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Here is how we got to showing this picture:

While photographing bees yesterday I did also come upon one moth. I took a picture of it from as close as it would allow me to.

Then I spent some frustrating time making endless versions of it that I didn't really like. Then I posted them here. Then it bugged me, so I came back and deleted them. Then I tried again some more, over the course of hours, rather defeating the point of what I said in my introduction above (the one that you are seeing everyday but hopefully no longer reading anymore, which is just as well).

So then I thought that I would include the picture of the original moth, the image that is the original moth before it flew away, and then the zoomed in version. And then deciding that was not enough I again added in any number of pictures trying to bring up the overall quality of this post. But I just couldn't live with it. 

So I got rid of all the moth pictures. And then I took an old painting of a hatching bird I painted 25 years ago and sold at our estate sale a couple days ago. I tweaked this picture maybe a 6 on the scale of 1-10 with AI tools. And I am delighted to show that.

But then I felt like you'd want to see the moth after all this talk, just the original image before it flew away. So now I've included it too.

I think you'll be able to figure out the difference as to who is who.

My rainbow animals

 

You have seen a couple of them now, in the vast repertoire of my all consuming AI library short films: Rainbow animals!

You take an animal. You make the animal rainbow colored. You put the rainbow colored animal into my library. And after 75 attempts, prompts, nudges, and so on, you get a great 15 or 20 second clip all together of a real life rainbow animal alive in the world.

It's super exciting!

I showed you here one of the cats I made a few days ago. It was a rainbow cat!

They have a Reddit devoted to all things rainbow. I very rarely post to Reddit because, well, people are too mean. But the rainbow subreddit is all about rainbows! And it's all about not being mean. And it's very clear how they welcome everything rainbow no matter what.

So I thought "I'll show them my cat."

And they all yelled at me.

Not everyone likes AI!

So I went away and breathed and, after just a little bit, I was okay. 

And then I went and I made this rainbow animal to express my feelings. 

New theory developed with library patron

 

A ladybug has landed on my keyboard. Nothing in this column will be written using the F12 key! 

A library patron was waiting for my desk partner to return with something. And I warned them. "I can't help you do anything if it involves using an F12 key! There is a ladybug on my F12 key!"

"Are you sure it's a ladybug and not a Japanese Beetle?" The patron asked.

Then followed a short, confused, ill-informed discussion about the two varieties of red beetles with black dots. I am sparing you that discussion in this recounting in order to make this entertaining. 

Admittedly, I still have a ways to go.

I lifted the keyboard to show the patron the beetle. We decided it was probably an Asian Beetle because the red color was so washed out.

"Maybe ladybugs have just gotten more faded." The library patron suggested.

I liked this line of thinking. "Maybe the increased global heat of climate change is slowly blanching out the colors of all animals and plants everywhere and everything is going to become faded and washed out."

We ruminated sadly on this for awhile.

The ladybug moved over to the F9 key.

It was pale in color, and actually an Asian Beetle technically. 

But it was still a nice bug. 

Nest

 

I don't hardly believe in God. But I believe in gods. And maybe even more significantly I believe in symbols and signs. Our very spirits are in conversation with the world, and the world is alive in myriad ways, in a conversation with us that is elaborate, subtle, outlandish, and inscrutable. The world speaks with a language, a language of falling rain and birds, the smell of fire, the sound of thunder, and the taste of fruit and flesh.

Alas that this language is almost impossible to understand. It's like art, full of meaning and feeling, but only absolutely clear in strange and magnificent moments.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if I were here to tell you about one of those moments?

But it's a difficult language and even if I were to tell a tale of the world suddenly ringing clear as a bell in my soul, it would probably sound only like a dream to you, and maybe to me too in the recounting.

On Tuesday I woke up after a poor night's sleep, and my heart was heavy. I was, in short, sad and inclined to nothing. But at ten in the morning, I grabbed my camera and went out to walk in the snow. Not as a cure, but merely to continue to do what I do.

I headed carefully into the white woods. I am not good at photographing snow. And while the world can feel as distinctly beautiful in the purity of Winter as it can in any season, there always seems to me to be less to photograph.

But as I said before, the world speaks, and what it says, in the shape of reality itself, is informed by the location of our hearts.

I looked up.

There was a nest, the remains of a wasp's nest from the summer.

I don't know what it means.

But I know that it means something.

Bugs

Warning: This post includes PG-13 pictures of bugs. Or possibly NC-17 pictures of bugs, depending on your feelings on the matter of

Warning: The next phrase of this sentence will be PG-13 or possibly G-rated depending on your personal views of nature and the unsparing details of how it works.

animal procreation.

Most of the pictures coming up though will be the most innocent possible nature pictures. Of course this depends upon how you feel about bugs and alarmingly up close views of the natural world.

So while I have never given an MPAA Rating to one of my posts before, today I am assigning this one a G to NC-17 rating, depending on your proclivities, for:

1. Animal procreation

2. Possibly frightening images of bugs just hanging out harming no one.

3. Weird eyes.

I'm just saying, one of my co-workers told me she couldn't sleep so looked at my blog and was freaked out by a squirrel staring right into her soul! This could be the kind of thing that could happen to you today!

But it probably won't. Alas.

Shall we begin?

We have recently discussed my historical wariness as regard to bees. 

And in it we advanced the idea that photographing them has made me more comfortable around them. I pester them with my photographing until they get slightly irritated at which point I apologize profusely and all is forgiven.

This system works surprisingly well for me, and modestly well for the bees. They told me so.


Something similar is happening with bugs.

Historically I can be a little averse to bugs. And if some wee, innocent (or not particularly innocent creature) lands on me I have been known to leap into swatting, cavorting, gesticulating, brushing, gyrating action. Generally the bug leaves the area and everything in a seven foot radius around me is destroyed.

But now, in my journeys, I go looking for bugs. I don't have the luxury of destroying the world around me. It would ruin my pictures. Sometimes even mosquitoes land on me and I don't whack them; I am in the middle of photographing and can't be disturbed.

I have a few more mosquito bites than normal for this time of year.

A few days ago a gorgeous, radiant blue dragonfly landed on my hand on my camera when I was on the bluff over the Mississippi River. Instead of flinging my hand out and hurling my camera in alarm I just thought:

"Wow, this is lovely. But how will I photograph it?"

I did not figure out the answer to this. But here are a few pictures of the black and white dragonfly that I see a lot in the library swamp:

I really love the almost rough wing decorations.

I suppose dragonflies and butterflies and even bees would be the low hanging fruit of slightly bug-phobic insect photography. It would be hard for even a person such as myself to get the willies from a picture of a moth wing like this:

Fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on what MPAA rating applied to you in the preamble warning section of this essay), I have progressed further along than the exotic beauties of the flying insect kingdom.

I don't know if I'll ever dare to photograph a spider. And I saw an earwig the other day that after a brief moment of consideration I decided to take a pass on (have you ever seen a mass of earwigs spill out of something?). But while I started photographing with only the uniquely colorful beetle miscellaneous type bugs, I have since become open to almost anything:

Like this brown and black slightly spiky sort of fellow:

Or this complicated two-layered construction:

Fairly speaking, this one below has a touch of the rainbow to him, but he is also quite... buggy, if you know what I mean.

I think you know what I mean.

This one below is also a bit in the colorful category, but maybe it makes my point a little; up close they all get pretty interesting anyway, colorful or not, though a lot of the time even the not colorful ones are full of interesting colors, and the colorful ones are still... insects.

This fascinating character is more patterns and strangeness than any notable color.

This, coming up, outside of the lovely backdrop color, is more or less completely colorless, but it's hard to imagine it alarming even someone vastly more bug phobic than myself.

Although admittedly it is always hard to fully imagine and understand the depth of the phobias of others. 

It is a dragonfly, and the so picturesque and often dazzling dragonfly does have its horrifying elements from the right perspective. While this one below does not particularly disturb me, I can at least easily see how it would:

So as we approach our last picture what I'm saying is that in all these photographs I've been taking of insects, when I really look, and tap into all my fears and wonder, my love and hate, my itchiness and freedom, I think there are a lot of places where I can see something in two ways: 

Beautiful and ugly.






When there's a choice, a real choice, I'm trying to choose beautiful.