The hypnotic beauty of slowness

 

One of the more valuable things that volunteers at my library do for us is empty our bins. Theoretically.

Our bins are robust, wheeled carts that automatically load and unload, and hook up to our giant automated check in machine. We have 26 of these sorting bins hooked up to the machine at all times, each one receiving a particular kind of material. For instance, one of the bins might accept all of our juvenile fiction. And when it fills up it gets pushed over to sit with other full bins. Those bins are all emptied onto shelving carts, allowing us to make use of the often in short supply empty bins once again.

 It is that part of the process I am here to talk about today.

It takes anywhere from two minutes to two hours to empty one of these bins onto a shelving cart. 

This is not a function of what is being emptied. The bins are all roughly the same effort to empty. It is a function of how they are being emptied. I would not normally imagine that emptying one of these bins could take more than ten minutes tops to empty. But alas that none of our volunteers who are capable of emptying these bins in an effective manner are at all interested in doing so. Bin emptying, for some odd reason, is our station of last resort. Only a volunteer or library helper of so little capability or ambition ends up emptying these bins and it

is

a

study

in 

slowness.

Today one of our volunteers was emptying a bin for an hour, but they hadn't quite cleared the bin yet. I was loading things onto the machine and had just completely run out of empty bins. So I dashed over and desperately emptied two of the full bins as quickly as I could. 

The volunteer was still putting the same book on the cart when I finished as they were when I started.

Surprisingly, this wasn't all that bad.

In a way I prefer it.

If I can just travel far enough beyond irritation... 

...I find myself...

fascinated.

Temperatures to plummet

 

Late at night on the automated check in machine, working yet again an evening at my library, I conjured, in my mind, an astounding tale of the shortcomings of my co-workers. And maybe you really would like to hear it. But you'd best go fishing in the waters of the great river of the history of clerkmanifesto. There are many accounts like that. And admittedly tonight I might have written another. But the end of the work night came so suddenly upon me, and I was busy, and a lovely fellow who rarely works at the library anymore was working just for the night, and wanted to watch The World Series, and talk about baseball.

So it all slipped away from me.

And now I am home. 

I talked with my absolutely lovely wife. 

I had a pecan whiskey. 

I sat down to write.

And everything is wonderful.

Raspberry picking

 

There might be some kind of secret wisdom here:

The morning looked promising, so my lovely wife and I raced off to go raspberry picking. I picked a pound of beautiful raspberries. They are in our refrigerator now, but I have hardly eaten any of them. They're fine, but they are not the same as the many I ate out in the field, the raspberries falling apart, partially dried out, and full of strange scars. Those were the ones that I did not want to infect all my carefully picked good ones with, or make my fine ones ugly by adding their strange shapes, and so instead merely saved from waste by eating them.

Those were the delicious ones.

The problem with wisdom

 

I like wisdom as much as the next sage. And though my following is perhaps not as large as Jesus or The Buddha, I still scatter my precious insights freely as befits a man of god, or gods, or no god at all, and if someone should find this wisdom in the dirt, and polish it off, and exclaim in epiphany, well, I have already exceeded my dreams. Or matched them. Or managed to chisel a fragment off of the great block of it.

Anyway, the wisdom I have for you today is about wisdom itself!

Wisdom is beautiful stuff, and a guiding light, but it doesn't entirely belong to the same universe we actually live in.

My case in point comes from a recent proverb I have been considering:

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

After thirty years working at a library, I would like to share with you something of my experience of this quote as it functions in the actual world. And if much of the beautiful wisdom seems drained out of it in this rendition, transplanted as it is to our regular old grimy world, might I suggest that the only real wisdom is in seeing things fully.

And so...

Do something for a man at the library, and one of his tasks is accomplished, teach a man to do something at the library, and he will return to have you teach it to him over and over again.

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.

A little bit of not caring

 

Upon my return to work at the library following a short bout with Covid, I found myself rather wrought up at everything. Whether this was primarily due to being tired from a slower health recovery than I hoped I was experiencing, or from a spate of understaffing at work, or from having a lot of responsibilities and not much authority, or possibly due to a combination of all of them, I don't know.

But it was doing me no good.

So I decided to try caring less.

Here I am caring less.

And though I duly noted a dump of irritating transit items left for me in an overnight bin this morning, or the bizarre way that my manager, who is currently inappropriately assigned to the whole back room, keeps coming out to the front desk to answer the phone dangerously close to my personal space, or the continuing problem with the automated check-in machine breaking down over and over in the same way, it is all viewed in the serene manner of a Zen master watching a log drift downstream.

It's just a log.

Breathe.

A burning log.

Breathe.

Full of disease, heading for a wooden town full of innocents!

I can't reach the log!

Oh my god, someone stop that log!!!

Frequency of miracles

 

My AI video generation obsession continues. Whether that is good news or bad news for readers of this long running bolt hole of the Internet is beyond me. However it goes for you in particular, the new instructions apply and are blessedly simple: click the enticing (or not at all enticing) picture below, and watch it come to life.

It is a miracle!

A miracle!

And to say that each miracle comes at the cost of a hundred slowly and obstinately misunderstood requests would be churlish.

The Universe has always been hard of hearing.

Clerk emeritus

 

I am back from vacation. And here I am yet again at the front desk of the library. Unclear on the exact dates, today may be the exact 30th anniversary of when I started working at this job.

I should fucking own this place by now!

So in this last year (yes, this will be my last year here working at this library), I will do my best to pretend I do.

I 

own 

this 

place.

And what does that mean? You may wonder.

Me too.

I think, after all the effort, and the accomplishment of my dreams, it might mean that it doesn't mean anything at all.

Moment of fortune

 

You go through a lot in life.

I mean you, personally.

But it has happened to me too.

So I know it's rough out there. And the way the odds work, I know that you had to have deserved more.

And I am keeping count.

But even though you didn't get the best deal maybe.

And it came from a crooked deck.

Playing at a table of cheaters.

Remember that time you still got lucky past your wildest dreams?

This happened to me too.

A meditation on my work

 

Let us not define our time here as negative space. Life is not the time between tacos. Life is not the time between blog posts! No, life is the time spent eating tacos, or, um, blog posts!

I am at work now.  

Am I simply awaiting the blissful time where I get to be home once again? Am I merely awaiting the sweet twinkling disappearance of the sun over Saint Minneapolis? Am I only awaiting watching a charming movie side by side with the one I love? Am I awaiting the comforts and freedom of home? The sweet spoken words of it. A glass of wine? A good book? The clarity of a day done right?

NO!

As glorious and perfect as this will all be, heaven cannot be promised, only delivered.

We must take what we have now and revel in every tiny joy in every present moment that we can!

At least, that's what I tell the library patrons when they ask me when their hold will be available.

Be careful what you dream

Yesterday I was talking about the dreams of clerkmanifesto. And it was all very fun and merry and I got to show amusing pictures of Big Bird going shopping for books, and then I thought that was done and dusted.

But then I went to sleep and dreamed of clerkmanifesto!

If only it had been an interesting dream. What a blogpost this would be!

And it's not like I'm keeping my dream from you. I barely remember it anymore. Though I think it had to do with trying to remember an idea I had for a clerkmanifesto blog post.

Yes, that was it. I am writing a blogpost about dreaming of a blogpost that's about dreaming of a blogpost for clerkmanifesto.

It's turtles all the way down.

Paul McCartney often tells the story of dreaming the tune for Yesterday, except he called it Scrambled Eggs at first. I dreamed an idea for a blogpost. It is, apparently, this one. It's the only thing that makes sense.

This causes you to ask:

Are dreams the product of some strange and magnificent intelligence of some mysterious nature, 

OR

are they merely their own kind of AI, plagiarizing our experiences, and then struggling unknowing to try to put them into any order that seems plausible?

Yes.

 

The elevator personality

Hey, doesn't that title sound like a juicy, almost interesting listoid from a pop psychology book? 

The Elevator Personality (Type number seven) is a personality that constantly goes up and down.

But no. I'm not here for that.

I'm simply here to talk about the personality of my elevator at the library. The back, "staff only" elevator, not the front one.

The back library elevator is like a peaceful, almost slumbering, old man, patient, and deep in thought. There is some deep wisdom there with this elevator, if you're willing to look for it, though sometimes it is hard to mark it out as different from the elevator's slowness or absence. 

I like to take the elevator upstairs when I have a cart of books, empty or full. I almost never go to the basement for anything on the elevator, and three floors is all this elevator covers. But even with so few floors, when I press the button on any floor the elevator takes a very long time to come.

"Don't hurry." The elevator hums quietly. "It is better to let the world move itself around you than it is to move yourself."

While the elevator is coming the up or down arrow is lit, or in the elevator the number of the floor is. But before the elevator doors roll open, everything goes still. The light goes out. Nothing happens. We wait.

"Did we push the button?" We wonder after a while. "Maybe we didn't push the button."

And then:

The door opens.

Is it just a really slow elevator? Or is it giving us an opportunity?

Does the door open, 

before the doors open?

Maybe we stay on the same floor all the time, and the world rises and falls all around us?

I cannot answer these riddles. You cannot answer these riddles.

Only the elevator can answer them, and we, if willing to wait, can listen.

Meditation

I have started meditating.

In preparation to start meditating I read some books and other things about it. I ended up settling provisionally on a method in which I set a timer for about 15 minutes and then count backwards from one hundred. I focus myself in the numbers, rooting in the present, and then with each breath slowly count down. If my attention wanders I start over again at one hundred.

The lowest I have gotten to is 98. 

But I have done this hundreds of times. 

Between 99 and 98 I may even have written this entire blog post in my mind, in tiny pieces.

"No, my darling. We are not writing blog posts. We are seeking presence and peace."

One hundred.

Ninety-nine.

Axis of the west wood

 

I was lying in bed, going to sleep after reading a couple of chapters about a raft, running from peril on the Thames, by Jonathan Stroud, and I had a strange thought. I had to get up and out of bed. Sleep would not come now.

What if all these pictures, of strange wilds, and mystical events, that I have been scattering thickly about in clerkmanifesto, are like the woods and wilds I have been wandering in and photographing? What if they're all just here, the world itself, and I can slip off the trail, climb up a stream that winds into the marshes, and gulp in the air?

No, like a dream, and maybe I was really asleep, it all is too hard to make sense of for you now.

Picture this:

You are walking in the woods. It is Autumn. When you started there were people around, but you have winded into the weeds and the back country and no one is around. Seeds cling to your pants. There is a creek to steer by and marvel at. There is a big old tree leaning over from its great trunk soul planted a mile deep in the mud. You glide over the grass on your small human feet.

You look down and see this note.

Only you can read it.

The holy woods

 

I have a dozen blog posts lined up to reflect my many trips in the woods of the last week. It is the best season of all, and I have never been so keenly out on so many walks here along the rivers of Minnesota. Sometimes I am out by myself, taking pictures that I later spend whole days mending and stitching and carefully trying to make into something. Sometimes I am out with my darling wife, and I like those walks best, but I don't take pictures on those.

The real problem of course, as it always is with art, is that try as I might I can never really take a photograph as good, as magical, as evocative as the places I see.

All these places along the river are just so... holy.

No god, fuck god, no great spirit, no mighty Lord of the Universe, but there is something. Something something something, invisible but apparent. Wonderful, Beautiful. Unphotographable. Holy.

I will never get a picture of one of those places, though they are weirdly easy to find.

But there is something in me driven to keep trying.

My angels and demons

 

I am regularly accompanied here by demons and angels.

So when I tell you about a coffee drink I am immensely fond of that includes the flavors of maple, coffee, and cherry, the demon cuttingly says:

"That sounds awful, but what would we expect from someone who, as an eight-year-old, loved ketchup on their cottage cheese?"

And the angel says "Right, because it's well established that cheese and tomatoes are a hideous combination."

The demon blushes, though it's hard to detect.

I say warmly to the angel "You are like a demon for demons."

The angel blushes a little too. But in a different way.

At the Japanese Temple, a question

 

I'm not really at the Japanese Temple. 

If I were at the Japanese Temple I might look over and see this.

"Wait." I could say. "That looks like..."

"No." I would respond to myself. "It can't be. They're fictional!"

But then why not, if I'm not really there anyway?

On the weighing of souls

Because of my long background in clerking I am sometimes asked to fill in working the registration desk in the afterlife.

My desk isn't the first place people come after they die, that would be kind of intense. They go first, as I understand it, to a neutral, pleasant place in order to adjust to being dead. This can be very quick or very slow depending, as everything does everywhere, on the person. But once they've accepted, in some basic way, that they're dead, they come to me, where I enter them in the system.

Sometimes we sit in chairs and I write their information in a large and beautifully bound ledger. Sometimes the information is absorbed into air screens, which is a technology most of us won't live long enough to see in the world. Sometimes I type it into my computer. But whatever the method, we are always in what looks like a library.

I ask them questions, but not always the same ones, which makes the whole thing way more enjoyable for me. I might ask one person how they liked the cheese on earth, and another for their email address. I can ask how someone did financially or I can ask about their first kiss, if they had one.

Not everyone has.

They have questions too. I can't answer most of them even if I try. A lot people ask me about God. What I usually say to a question like "Is there a God?" is "Yes. I'm sort of him for the time being." Just because a person is dead doesn't make the correct answers to spiritual questions any less ephemeral. Nevertheless there's plenty of good information in my answer, even if hardly anyone makes use of it, another common quality of spiritual wisdom.

I love when people are more generally curious. Like I'm always happy to turn my screen, or open my book to show footage of what dinosaurs really looked like, or a street scene in ancient Egypt. And if it's a slow night I don't mind letting the intake process get derailed like this for hours.

But eventually I always have what I need. I get their pin number, or social security number, or favorite color, and send them on their way to one of two doors.

In the end it's all very traditional.

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.

It's all one tree

 

It could be a metaphor.

 

All the depth, all the complexity, everything we feel, everyone we touch, every thought, every action, all the despair, all the fear, all the joy and courage, they all look like an infinite number of different things. But it's not many, it's all one. 

 

Or it could just be a picture I took, of a strange old tree, hollowed out, ancient, and full of layers. I looks like a sea cave to me.

But it's all one tree.