Caravaggio's David and Goliath

 

Most of my AI video confections are me half being led around by what the technology can conjure on its own. I have ideas of my own, but the results pull me this way and that. If I try to impose my will I usually end up in a losing battle with the technology, a technology that can be mercurial, imperious, and blindingly idiotic. But sometimes I start out, develop an idea of my own, and am actually able (not without struggle) to make it into something bigger than I thought possible.

So it is with this 50 second music video interpretation of the great Caravaggio's painting of David and Goliath coming to life. The mere trick of the painting coming to life is the initial small thing, more messily done than I would have liked, but being able to develop it into its own study of the aftermath David's beheading was a surprising accomplishment for me.

As ever, click through the picture to watch and listen.

Faith for atheists

 

What about us freelancing atheistic, polytheistic, pantheists? What do we do about faith?

I have never considered the issue until recently, but I realized I was missing out. Faith always seemed faintly ridiculous, with its sanctimonious airs and, well, fundamental inaccuracy. Why have faith in something that doesn't exactly, I don't know, exist? 

And certainly not like that.

I mean, seriously.

But today, after seeing the reference to a biblical quote in an ugly tattoo on the calf of a young man in the library, I realized maybe the faith is the thing, not what one has faith in.

I'm just saying that after decades of faithless suspicions, it all seemed so restful.

There is nothing out there, or there are capricious spirits, perhaps there is a world of trouble, but I have faith. 

What do I have faith in?

I don't know, nothing? But I trust it.

Birthright

 

I am reading a book about the history of debt. It's pretty rich. So far it is about debt, the history of money, and, ultimately, about being human and what that even means, but it's barely getting started. In this early part of the book, there has been a lot of cultural and religious ideas concerning the idea of being born with a debt; to the gods, to parents, to society, and so on, and what that framing means, and how those debts are discharged. 

It is interesting!

But I'll admit I am still waiting and hoping that my perspective will show up, maybe even that the author of the book will, in some sense share my perspective on this:

When each of us has gone through the unasked for trouble of being born, for every last creature, a debt of the Universe is owed to us.

Warriors for Christ

 

While walking around my city with my darling wife, going to as many coffee shops as humanly possible, we came across what is probably a nearly constant protest of the local Planned Parenthood. 

People were carrying signs in a tireless vigil against...

I don't know?

Death?

But like so many people with energy, they had found precisely the wrong place.

Because the hardest place to protest...

Is in one's own head.

The parable of the library clerk

The parable of the library clerk is for advanced readers.

If you are stumbling through the Internet and by freak chance stumbled upon this page, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the power of its themes and allusions. I recommend practicing on a couple hundred of my more than 3,000 previous posts to prepare you for this one.

Regular readers, however, should find this to be a walk in the park.

The parable of the library clerk was inspired by a series of phone calls wherein library patrons wanted assistance with something on their library account, and, when asked for their library card, were surprised and unprepared even though they had never in their long lives done anything on their library account without using their library card. The parable of the library clerk took this scenario to such a dramatic extreme that it went beyond the exploration of library work, and ventured into a study of the fabric of the Universe itself, and has become part of the religious literature of mankind.

And so I present to you:

The Parable of the Library Clerk

"Good afternoon. This is the Feldenstein of the library speaking. How can I help you?"

""

"I'm sorry. In order to help you, I will need you to speak to me."

""

"I know sometimes it can be difficult to articulate our needs, but over the phone there is no way for me to divine what you desire without hearing spoken language, preferably in English."

"" 

"Unfortunately you simply must express words to me for me to help you."

""

"Okay, I will make an exception just this once, but you should be aware that this will not be something we can do for you here in the future."

""

"Okay, I have requested The Duino Elegies by Rilke. You're second in line, but we have several available copies so it should be in for you sometime later this week.

""

"You're very welcome. And remember, this is just a one time exception."

""

"You have a good day too. Goodbye."

Isaiah: Lion and straw and four votes

 

Today we feature, from the end of Isaiah 11, verse 7:

"and the lion will eat straw like the ox."

We have moved upstairs in my library for this scene, though after bringing in a lion and photographing him eating straw (I could not procure straw and so shredded plastic in our paper shredder to simulate it), I have had to make a few tiny changes to this real life scene in photoshop.

Sorry, I shouldn't joke. The Bible is no joke!

Anyway, we're continuing on with Isaiah here, though soon we'll come to the end of the iconographic portion, or at least to the end of the kind of iconography that interests me. I am not sure I'm interested in pictures of Ephraim not being jealous of Judah, or of them plundering the people to the east.

This will mean that there are going to be decisions to be made. 

I could:

1. Start at the beginning of the bible and do an image by image recreation of it, creating over 18,000 distinct images illustrating the text before dying of old age with my project still unfinished.

2. Switch to writing amusing anecdotes about library work for awhile.

3. Return to my abandoned project of rewriting Winnie the Pooh.

4. Return to my abandoned project of telling the mythical story of my through-hike across America with local deities.

5. Complain in an amusing, but mildly uncomfortable way about how my genius still largely goes unrecognized.

I could also just do whichever of these options gets four votes, leaving it in your, the readers' hands.

Actually, that's just a trick delay tactic. I've never gotten four votes in my life before!

Isaiah: Bear and Cow

 

Working, as I am, on a suite of Biblical Scenes (we are now in Isaiah, er, and have only ever been in Isaiah), readers naturally want to know: "Have you actually read Isaiah?"

No one has ever read Isaiah.

I have, however, skimmed some brief portions of Isaiah, and formed an astonishing number of off the cuff opinions! 

So that's pretty good, don't you think?

Ah, readers (hi readers!) want to know what I could possibly mean by 

"No one has ever read Isaiah."

Okay.

Here, read this:

Wumble the awful maker. I am great! The gracious will excel. Grass grows. In time, know this: Romantic Comedy fans will be friends with the fans of sleeping. 

End oppression when the mark is raised!

Burxel, dynamite, catastrophic insight into what I am telling you. Yes, that's how it is now, but if you close your eyes, ah, then. Then!

I hate Real Madrid. 

One can study that text. One can derive meaning from that text. One can say the words of the text. With some effort one might be able to summarize it, discuss its authorship, and/or talk about how it sets into history.

That is a ton of stuff one can do with it!

But read it?

Meh.

How does this relate to today's verse which is the first part of Isaiah Chapter 11 Verse 7?

I've tried to answer that question with another complex visual rendition of the scene.

The text reads:

"The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together,"

I hope you enjoy it, but if you don't, hang in there because the lion is coming back into it soon, maybe even tomorrow, and get this: 

The lion is going to eat straw like an ox!!!!

Wild.

But in the meantime, here we are in our fallen library, and we've got a cow, a bear, and their babies, which is pretty awesome in its own right.

Isaiah eleven continues and things still are cheery

 

Hello bible students!

Today we continue with Isaiah, which is crazy!

But where we are now isn't crazy yet. It's kind of the really nice part. And today's picture is still of verse six:

"the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them."

Though this is all pretty nice, I tried to give a "whole picture" kind of feeling to the proceedings.

Naturally I set it once again in my library.

Lion and lamb

 

Going through a religious, or anti-religious, or usurping-religious phase, when I settled down with some powerful, new, creative AI photography tools, I naturally drifted off into religious imagery. I found myself working my library, specifically the entrance area of the Children's Room, into a kind of post apocalyptic biblical scene.

And at the center I set the proverbial lion laying down with the lamb:

Immensely proud of this rich iconography I decided to go check out what the original verse was all about.

There isn't one!

In Isaiah 11, where this all comes from, the lion does not lay down with the lamb!

Crap.

Probably what it should be is this:

Yep. It's a wolf and a lamb that feature at the start of Isaiah 11-6. But to be honest, they really just live with each other:

"The wolf will live with the lamb" 

For actual lying down we need this from the next line:

"The leopard will lie down with the goat"

The uninitiated among you, and the non biblical scholars, might think I am making things up, but no, I'm pretty straight up when it comes to biblical reporting, feeling there is always plenty there to either:

A. Make its own points against itself.

or

B. Make all the points I want to make as is.

Anyway, the lion does come into it soon as part of a team of four, but we'll leave that one for another day.

The gift

 

I have been talking a little more than usual lately about not believing in god. It's a little more complicated than just that. And though I may have some seriously dark questions about your religion, peoples' varied beliefs in Greater Powers is of no great driving concern to me. From my lofty perch here on clerkmanifesto, at the slumping podium with an old armchair on the banks of a muddy river at the end of an abandoned alley full of cats, in Internetland, I let loose my torrid proclamation:

Believe as you will.

But for me? There is no god. And god does not mind that I feel that way.

But this does not mean that I don't believe.

I believe in more things than you can shake a stick at!

I believe them with a fever.

And here is one:

The Universe is so large, and full of so many pieces, that some of them, one, at least, was made just for you.

You do not own it. 

It is not yours.

It exists in full autonomy and independence, and it carries no debt.

But by some strange magic that is bigger than your overwhelming gods, it was made for you.

It's just one of those strange things I know.

On this day... 

Because of this day...

I know.

The mask conundrum

 

In these relatively early days of the normalization of Covid, the issue of masks seems to be settling out. Looking about my library I work at, most people don't wear masks now, though a tiny minority still do. I take no great Internet-appropriate view of this situation. This means that I am not particularly outraged about any aspect of it. Wearing a mask is mainly a personal risk mitigation issue at this point. Wearing one properly will decrease your chances of contracting (and spreading) airborne diseases. Wearing a ventilator would be even better protection. I don't wear either, but I understand that it's all a matter of how much risk one is willing to expose themselves to. 

Nevertheless, there is one kind of mask wearer I regularly see at the library that is mystifying to me. 

Or let me put it another way: Of all the kinds of mask wearers during the pandemic; the face shield wearers, the pristine N-95ers, the bandana folks, the "free handouts only" surgical maskers, etc., the very last kind of people I would have guessed to be still at it in the masking game are what I call the chin maskers.

Chin maskers are the people who walk around with ill-fitting masks either not covering their nose, or dangling from their face like they just emerged from an exhausting bit of surgery, or who have simply let the mask end up strapped below their mouth like a chin guard. These are the people who, when talking to you (the most important time to wear a mask), would lower their mask out of the way so as to be heard clearly. And to my total surprise, it turns out that these very people, the people who use masks ineffectively, of all people, are the ones who continue to sport masks. 

At the height of mandatory pandemic masking, I thought these chin maskers were garden variety political lunatics, passive aggressively expressing their contempt for any law that would dare try to... stop... a... plague. 

But since they have not abandoned masks, long past when they freely could, clearly I was wrong.

It turns out they believe in masks more passionately than almost any of the rest of us.

However, it turns out, their belief is more religious than scientific.

Am I hungry?

"Am I hungry?" I ask.

I don't know. Are you hungry?

I will try to answer then since you did.

Here is my answer:

Yes, no, I don't know, all the time, never.

I think that captures the feeling.

Did you know that Ramadan is currently being celebrated? In saying that I wondered whether it was more of an observance than a celebration. So I asked my co-worker who is celebrating Ramadan and with whom I am much paired with working today at the library. She said it is very much a celebration. It is celebrating how god will be rewarding them with something better than they can even imagine.

I like this because the whole fasting thing of Ramadan seems to kind of beautifully play into it. One fasts, or in the Muslim sense of it, does something for god, and then one gets to eat, which, let's face it, when it's good, is better than we could have imagined. Just because I have no clue on the hunger thing doesn't mean I'm not enthusiastic about eating! 

And so my co-worker and I have been talking Ramadan this afternoon, mainly about the fasting. She has a very hard time with fasting, but, as long as it's not Summer (with the longer daylight fasting hours), she doesn't find the fasting hours of Ramadan too taxing. I understood that it's the getting up really early to make food for her family that she finds most difficult. I, in turn, told her that I don't have very much difficulty with fasting myself. In fact, as I just reflected, outside of some coffee, it turns out that as it stands I haven't eaten anything at all for 23 hours.

Oh.

I guess I am hungry.

My Muslim co-worker and I

 

I'm out at the front desk with my Muslim co-worker. This person moved here from Pakistan not that long ago. Sometimes we talk about religion.

When this happens I think: Oh, maybe I will learn some interesting stuff.

And sometimes I do a little.

But mostly what happens is I end up giving 15-minute mini-lectures on the history of Jewish Practice, dietary law, or the evolution of Hebrew.

Christmastime

 

I know that most of my readers are Pagans.

Jewish.

Buddhist.

Forest animals.

River Gods.

Ghosts and angels.

Complicated alien beings from far distant galaxies.

And, after all, so am I.

But I can't help but look out my window right now and think:

Merry Christmas.

And that's okay with me too.

Recurring vowel joke

 

Clerkmanifesto apologizes for making a joke about omitted vowels for two blog posts in a row now. 

This was due to an unfortunate timing error. The fact is that we make some kind of a joke about needing vowels (ndng vwls) with some regularity around here, but we usually remember to separate those jokes by a couple hundred of other blog posts. This keeps the joke, if not fresh, then like a dear old friend it's a familiar pleasure to reencounter.

This begs the question: Why do we like this joke so much?

It's a tribute to our ancient Jewish heritage. 

The Torah was delivered sans vowels. That's right, the bible has no vowels at all! That almost seems like a joke in itself, but it's not. It's just consonants all the way from:

n h bgnnng gd crtd h hvn n t rth

clear to:

n n ll ht mghty hnd, n n ll tht grt trrr, Mss shwd n h sght f ll srl

Of course, that's a translation to English, which makes it look complicated.

Mostly in the Hebrew we all have it secretly memorized, so it's not an issue.

I used to be a Christian!

 

I used to be a Christian. 

I always really liked Jesus and still believe he's the son of god and everything, but I'm sorry, I just can't!

 Jesus has gotten so political lately! I don't know why he had to go all woke, but I just can't go along with it anymore. 

I first grew suspicious when Jesus said "For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted" which is so obviously a dig at Trump. Now I'm no radical righty, but "Do not judge or you too will be judged" and so I can't help but now serve judgement! There simply isn't any reason to bring politics into this! 

Can't we just all worship the Lord God without having to have it all be about the Democratic Woke SJW agenda?

So I started digging. Check this out this bit of news about Jesus:

"Then Jesus went about all the cities teaching and preaching the gospel of the Kingdom and healing all the sickness and disease among the people.

First of all, I never heard Jesus was an actual medical Doctor. Second of all, once you start handing out free healthcare the quality goes down and you end up with something like Canada, or France where the doctors don't even wash their hands! And third, maybe this Jesus should stick to being God and not go around spreading propaganda about socialist healthcare and let people pay to get healed by trained doctors!

Of course Jesus is still Jesus, and sometimes I think his perfectly good and godly advice is misinterpreted for the woke agenda. Like, when he says "Love your neighbor as thyself." he's probably not thinking you're going to be living around the wrong sort of people, and if you have the wrong sort of neighbors it'd probably be best if you just moved or encouraged them to move, then go ahead and love thy neighbors at that point.

But that said, Jesus has a tendency still to shoot his mouth off. Saying "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go into the kingdom of heaven" is alarmingly unamerican. Everybody is equal here, with one vote per person (supposedly!), but maybe he doesn't know about that where he's living, possibly in Europe. I'm not saying some rich bigwig should get to buy their way into heaven or anything, but I hardly think Jesus meant that a bunch of shiftless folks should get some kind of free pass in either. Either way, I'm guessing Jesus regretted saying this for a while when the donations for his church went way way down. A rich person has a lot more money to do good with than a poor person, that's for sure.

Then, alas, Jesus said this:

"I was hungry, and you gave me meat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in jail, and you dropped by. Verily, inasmuch as you have done the least of these to my brethren, you have done it to me."

And I had had enough. I realized Jesus really had gone fully woke! 

Plus, he's kind of a bum!

Sure, he's god, but he thinks we can simply give everything away to everyone and it will all work out which is pretty naïve. 

If this happens, no one will work anymore and there won't be any food to give out cause the farmers will just watch TV all day. And then we'll have no food for anyone and we'll get weak and the Muslims will take over.

So I could no longer be a Christian in good conscience!

I would as soon be a Democrat, or an Atheist!

I believe. Praise Jesus! But I cannot be a Christian!

So I'm looking into being a Catholic, or maybe a Protestant.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Social distancing

In the pursuit of my new found life goal to be the Jane Goodall of the squirrels and chipmunks, I head out most days into the neighborhoods of St Paul to document their still distant rodentine activities with my super zoom camera.

Unfortunately there is a pandemic going on, and I am doing this in a city, and I am not left alone.

One of the main ways we were combating this pandemic, which is one of the great and terrible International events of our lifetimes, was by social distancing. I won't explain social distancing because you are alive on the planet, and everyone knows about social distancing.

Unfortunately, where I live at least, even though everyone knows about it, no one knows how to do it.

When we went into Total City Shutdowns, and people's corpses started stacking up, people gave social distancing a go. They weren't very good at it, but they were alarmed, sometimes even terrified, and they occasionally tried it at least. But as the epidemic worsened, the attitudes of the extreme fringe lunatics (that we laughed at in horror in the early days of the Covid-19 spread) became the generally accepted public discourse.

To wit:

People die all the time.

That's what the crazy people said. Now it's us.

John Prine died.

People die all the time.

Little Richard died.

People die all the time.

Grandpaw died.

People die all the time.

Mike Pence died.

Really, how can you tell?

Er, no, um...

People die all the time!

There's a gun leveled at your head right now.

People die all the time. People die all the time. People die all the time.

We all became perfect Buddhists. Very enlightened. We follow the middle way. We accept fate.

Which we had better, because we don't know how to social distance! No one does! And it might kill us!!!!

People die all the time.

The old people, most at risk, don't know how to social distance. 

"What are you photographing?" They ask me, creeping up from behind.

"I was photographing that chipmunk 200 yards away from me until you scared him off and then tried to give me Coronavirus." I answer politely.

The very young people also don't know how to social distance. How could they? No one taught them its careful intricacies, and now they rampage through the streets, startling the squirrel population, in infectious gangs, more or less abandoned by their families who are all sick or dead at home.

And the in between aged people certainly don't know how to social distance either. They've had it. They're out with their friends biking and running on all the streets and river paths of the city, feeling too pure and virtuous to worry about any germs they might be spewing. Hell, they'll probably live through their inevitable viral disease encounter, but who knows? Their demographic sure doesn't always. Do they want to roll the dice?

Yes, they want to roll the dice.

People die all the time.

Actually though, it turns out that I know some good social distancers after all.

Squirrels and chipmunks. I can't get within 50 feet of them under any circumstances.

Alas, it makes it pretty hard to become the Jane Goodall of the chipmunks and squirrels.








Well at least they'll be fine.

God cuts us down like wheat

The Pandemic is about nothing if it isn't about death. Some are taken, most are not, but before it happens no one knows who or when. It's all guesses.

Except to God.

This is not a religious post.

I mostly don't believe in god, and where I do I am largely in disagreement. So if you came here to make your peace, try later.

God has a plan. And for God all the Coronavirus deaths have an order to them. For us, they are random- one here, one there,  Wuhan, a swath in Italy, a gouge of New York. But to God we are all lined up in a field in the order of our deaths. The combine works its steady pace, cutting us down with its tireless efficiency. We may hear its engine roar, but we only know our place in the field when the truck and blades are bearing right down on us.

Sometimes we don't even know then.

But God knows.

As it currently stands I don't know a single person who has died from the Coronavirus. I do know of one famous person who meant something to me though: John Prine.

I liked John Prine. 

Did John Prine have it coming? Did John Prine loudly announce to his followers that this virus was nothing but a flu and was nothing to worry about? Did he mock the health community's warnings? Did he insist on holding concerts after the dangers were clear. Did he protest sensible restrictions to gatherings by gathering to protest sensible restrictions? Did he advocate for commerce over humanity? Did he spread lies freely about the virus to suit his politics? Did he flagrantly ignore the urgings of social distancing?

Not that I know of. I don't think so.

Which begs the question: Do the people who did all or some of those things I mentioned deserve to die?

Sure, why not.

If God is going to cut us down like wheat perhaps a more sensible plan is in order.

I am no murderer. It is not to me, in my mere humanity, to strike another down except in the most direct self-defense. There is a great passage in The Lord of the Rings where the wretched creature Gollum is being discussed, and the danger he presents in his roaming free in the world.

Frodo says:

"It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance."

Gandalf: "Pity? It's a pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.

But many die and many live. And if God should have taken Boris Johnson, or Donald Trump, Kim Reynolds of Iowa, or Bolsonaro of Brazil, Xi Jingpin, the protesters out in front of my Governor's Mansion this past weekend, or even the whole swath of commissioners of my County, I say let God at them. For death I choose each of them over John Prine. I choose them over the Chilean author Luis Sepulveda, the Aids scientist Gita Ramjee, I choose them over Li Wenliang, the Chinese whistleblower doctor who issued early warnings about the coronavirus, and indeed I choose them over pretty much any Doctor or Nurse or low paid hospital worker, or over every suffering nursing home resident who died from this virus.

As a somewhat deranged library patron at my library is locally famous for complaining:

"People die every day!"

Yes, we do not know the end of all plans of all actions. Yes, I would prefer a gentler solution to the Universe than death. Yes, I love wildness and freedom and magic and free will. It brought me here. But people die every day. I cannot change that. God has not answered our prayers. 

And so it is.

But while it is not mine to choose who lives or dies, it is also not mine to give up on the hope for justice and for the fair reckoning of souls.

By a river at one in the morning

As I looked out on 2020 I was astounded at how late it had become. Late in the future. Late in the World. Late in my life, even if I am not so very old.

And a tiny piece of Buddhism flashed through my heart: 

Be here now.

There is a religion surely written by an old person! You can't be here now. Sure it would be nice. Yes, try for it if you will. But without the past and without the future there is no story. 

We are as much story as we are water.

Another vision of god

I don't believe in god. But when I do, I know that he keeps everything in Ball Jars. All his little worlds are on great racks of simple wooden slat shelves. They all sit in clear glass jars. There I am in one, typing this on my computer. My wife, who I adore, is to my right on her computer. It's a cozy jar.

I look out the curved glass of the jar and there is god's giant knee, and there are his sandals far below on the bare wooden floor. His toenails are getting long. In the sky his arm moves in its white robe. And I catch a glimpse of him far above, sleeping. Sleeping.

"What is it with god sleeping all the time?" You want to ask.

Trust me. It's better this way.

Although, I grant, your jar may vary.