enlightenment, ethics, fiction, humor, photography

Satori from a Consulting Gig

Posted on 2019-11-09 by Mellow Curmudgeon

The who and how of sudden enlightenment might transcend ordinary logic. To illustrate my short story about a weird instance of satori, I edited a NASA image formed by combining data from five telescopes. While the image is for real, the story is neither the literal truth nor a bogus claim to tell it.

(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

Management consultant Frank Dow showed no surprise at the new client’s evident desire for a genuine consultation rather than a canned endorsement of plans already made. Though unusual, the client’s sincerity was still less surprising than the client’s identity. The client was God. Dow listened intently as God began to describe His problem:

“Forget any twaddle you may have heard about omnipotence and omniscience. The universe is too immense and diverse to be micromanaged, even by Me. Roughly speaking, I built a big machine and let it run. But it’s not boringly deterministic. The universe is all about probabilities.”

As God continued, the proud-parent joy in his voice was clear:

“The probability that a randomly chosen planet will be suitable for life to appear at all is tiny. The probability that creatures with any ability to understand and appreciate the universe will evolve is tinier still, but not exactly zero. On the other hand, there are a lot of planets in the universe. There’s no need to crunch the numbers right now. The bottom line is that a few planets luck out. On your little blue planet, life thrived and your species evolved advanced abilities to observe and learn, to imagine and reason, to build bridges and write poems.”

With joy replaced by sadness and frustration now, God explained what He hoped Dow could provide:

“While I mostly let things run, I am not absolutely hands-off when a planet has intelligent life that blunders into being cruel or stupid. I nudge them in good directions by inspiring a few of them. In your planet’s case, I have had a little success and a lot of failure. I keep it simple and age appropriate, but they oversimplify half of what I tell them and obfuscate the rest. The Golden Rule gets through as something to proclaim but not as something to practice. Absurdly, much of what they think has been revealed to them is just their own bigotry and bullshit. The way they distort My message is so alien to the corporate culture here that nobody has a clue about how to handle it. As someone who is closer to the problem without being part of it, you may be able to help us.”

Given a temporary office with read access to the case histories (and full access to a plentiful supply of coffee and nutritious snacks), Dow went to work. A recurrent pattern emerged:

Inspirations that did not fizzle attracted disciples, often with authoritarian personalities. Authoritarian disciples misinterpreted God’s nudges and stridently claimed they could speak for God on all kinds of topics, now and forever. Many of those who were strident were also willing to coerce people they could not convince. Many of those who were willing to coerce were also willing to kill people they could not coerce.

Poring over the case histories was depressing, but Dow kept at it (with the able assistance of good coffee and good snacks). Eventually, he was ready to offer God a suggestion:

“I believe there is a personnel issue here. You have been inspiring people who mean well but score high on credulity and low on humor. Maybe it would help to go outside the box. For example, You could inspire a nerdy atheist who digs sacred music and pushes the envelope of haiku poetry.”

God was skeptical: “Does anybody like that exist?”

Frank Dow smiled the enigmatic Mona Lisa smile that sometimes appeared when he was moonlighting as a Zen master. He leaned forward and spoke softly: “Does anybody like You exist?”

At that moment, God attained enlightenment.

satori_840x782

Sources

How to illustrate the concept of satori? For this post, I cropped a NASA image of the Crab Nebula and told the Retouching tab in my photo editor that each star was a blemish to be removed. If there is intelligent life on any planets orbiting those stars, I hope that nobody will be mad at me for dissing their sun. Oh well, it’s a big universe. I will be long gone before they have a chance to find out.

In its present form, this post’s story first appeared in Volume 1 of The Rabbit Hole, an annual anthology of weird stories. None of the stories there are illustrated, and I had no good ideas for an illustration anyway. How I came to write a story about God hiring a consultant whose recommendations are outside the box is yet another story, somewhat weird but entirely true.

haiku, humor, photography

Fall Frolic

Posted on 2019-10-292019-10-29 by Mellow Curmudgeon

October is Chores Can Wait Month. I took a short walk that inspired a haiku, but the chore gremlins got their revenge when the haiku generated yet another chore. That’s OK. Writing about the nuts and bolts of haiku beats raking leaves.

(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

Fall Frolic #1
|Dancing on the breeze,
|ignorant of gravity:
|red leaf in blue sky.

Nuts and Bolts

My haiku has “#1” in its title to distinguish it from a similar haiku Fall Frolic #2. I prefer #1. Why bother with #2 at all? The answer to that question helps answer some others.

Fall Frolic #1 implicitly poses a riddle, then provides the answer. Who is the ignorant dancer? More subtly, why is (s)he said to be dancing “on” (not “in” or “with”) the breeze? The basic structure is the same as in Jane Reichold’s classic

roasting_veg_chkn_800x575

Haiku © Jane Reichold superimposed on
Photo © Vladlena Azima | ShutterStock

Now consider swapping the initial and final lines of my riddle haiku:

Fall Frolic #2
|Red leaf in blue sky,
|ignorant of gravity:
|dancing on the breeze.

While #2 describes the same scene #1, it lacks the suspense and resolution of the riddle structure. While both versions work, #1 works better. I still owe U an explanation: why bother with #2 at all?

The first draft for what eventually became #1 had initial and final lines that were very close to the corresponding lines in #2. The middle line had an entirely different way of hinting that the leaf’s freedom is a temporary illusion, between being stuck on the tree and stuck on the ground. The first draft’s hint would have been too obscure w/o either an appropriate picture or the explicit scene setting done by the initial line in #2.

Already unhappy with the first draft’s middle line, I swapped initial and final lines on a whim. The resulting riddle structure was motivation to get serious about clarifying the middle line.

Some haiku poets strive to have the initial and final lines be interchangeable. Unless I am responding to a challenge calling for haiku that work just as well when the initial and final lines are swapped, I usually do not consider swapping. Too gimmicky and arcane. But a swap while revising might help answer the eternal writers’ questions

Am I saying what I want to say?

Am I saying it clearly?

red-leaf_blue-2_haiku-144_840x465

haiku, humor, photography

Gray Squirrel

Posted on 2019-10-232019-10-30 by Mellow Curmudgeon

North American gray squirrels are famously good at raiding “squirrel-proof” bird feeders. At best, the obstacles persuade most squirrels to look elsewhere (most of the time). Dunno about Japanese squirrels, but they do have a tradition to uphold.

(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

Carpe Diem #1765 Squirrel …

squirrel_840x636

Gurērisu
|Jump! Grab! Swing hips up!
|Nimble ninja hogs the seeds.
|Birds have a long wait.

haiku, humor

And So It Goes

Posted on 2019-10-222019-10-22 by Mellow Curmudgeon

When I posted an ant haiku in 2016, I had no appropriate image and did not know the Japanese word [ensō]. My response to a CDHK prompt for an ant haiku embellishes the haiku from 2016 with a new image based on a freehand circle. Ensō it goes.

(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

Carpe Diem #1764 Ants …

smirking-ant_840x811

Kiss Overlay © OlyaTropinina | 123RF Stock Photo

Mission Accomplished?
|Ant with wings staggers,
|then dies. Did I see him smirk?
|Had he banged a queen?

haiku, humor, photography

Enemy of My Enemy

Posted on 2019-10-18 by Mellow Curmudgeon

To a female mosquito, I look like lunch: a big bag of nice warm blood. So the mosquito is my enemy. But I also have a friend. My haiku about their interaction could respond to a prompt for either the friend or the enemy.

(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

Carpe Diem #1762 Mosquitoes …

One day in 2015, I happened to arrange my lunch veggies so as to look a little like a dragonfly, with snow peas as wings. Hmmm. Maybe I could pull more veggies from the fridge and make an arrangement that looks a lot like a dragonfly to me. (No real dragonfly would be fooled.) This little project reminded me that a dragonfly is the enemy of my enemy, and thus my friend.

What’s for Lunch?
|Mosquitoes in flight
|are seen as meat on the hoof
|by a dragonfly.

fiction, humor, philosophy, science

A Tale of Two Kitties

Posted on 2019-10-14 by Mellow Curmudgeon

In Dickens’ tale, Madame Defarge is obsessed with vengeance. The characters in our tale have different obsessions. One of them is with understanding the code used to knit the fabric of reality.

(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

When they called for weird stories to be submitted for Volume 2 of The Rabbit Hole, the editors suggested science and/or weather and/or entertainment as themes. While the suggestion was not a requirement, many of the writers who responded did use those themes. In particular, You’re Not Late has great synergy between weather and an aspect of science other than weather forecasting. Maybe there are other great synergies; it will take me a while to read all the stories in RH-2.

Modern scientific theories are also stories, of a special kind. Tho hard to read w/o wrangling equations, they are gloriously predictive and useful. (U don’t need hard copy to read this post.) They are also weird. As the editors remark in the preface:

The stories are weird because life is weird; all these stories do is cross the boundary of our logic and assumptions, fetch a few samples from whatever lies beyond, and bring them back for you to see. Just as explorers did in ages past, and scientists do today.

Back in 1935, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger told a story to illustrate the weirdness of quantum theory. The story eventually became a celebrated meme, and here is yet another celebration:

Hmmm. Saying that the cat is “both dead and alive” is a common (and admittedly oversimplified) shorthand for the statistical limbo called “superposition of states” in quantum theory. Here is a closer approximation to what the theory actually says:

If the box is opened now, there is a certain probability P_q (which we can approximate) that the cat will be observed to be dead, along with the complementary probability 1-P_q that the cat will be observed to be alive. Before the box is opened, it makes no sense to say that the cat is “really” dead or alive.

Despite having a deterministic philosophy, Einstein had no qualms about common-sense probabilities:

The cat is really dead or alive, but we don’t know which. From what we do know, we can compute an approximate probability P_c of the cat being dead now and an approximate probability 1-P_c of the cat being alive now.

Is the clash between quantum theory and common sense just something for novice philosophers to argue about? Nope. To see why, we don’t need the nasty gadgets in Schrödinger’s story. We need two kittens from the same litter, in separate boxes some distance apart. We also — ah — ah — ACHOO! The cat dander is ticking off my allergy.

Never mind. There is a short humorous allegory about this stuff in my story Entanglements, with petting but no pets. Spoiler alert: quantum theory wins.

Getting You’re Not Late and Entanglements and 27 other stories is easy. Just buy RH-2. To consider buying it from Amazon as either a printed book at $11.50 or an e-book at $2.99, click here. To consider buying an e-book from other retailers at $2.99, click on the rabbit.

To see the Disney version of the Cheshire cat do its thing, U can get to a video on Facebook by clicking on the cat’s image here. Clicking twice on the cat’s image there will start the video, but only buying RH-2 will get U to the 29 weird stories.

history, humor, photography

Gourds, Peppers, and Progress

Posted on 2019-10-012019-10-02 by Mellow Curmudgeon

Unpacking groceries prompts me to salute a milestone in photographic history. Really. Nagging gourds and sexy peppers have a lot to say about kinds of progress and accepting responsibility for choices, in photography and beyond.

(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

gourds-1#_840x544

§1: 2019-09-23

“Buy me!” says the wonderfully colored gourd. I refuse:

“No, I’ve already bought what I need for this year’s fall decorations. There’s no room for another gourd.”

gourds-4#_840x794

“But I’m new and special. Look at the feathering between my greens.”

gourds-1#_feather_840x614

“OK.”

I put the gourd in the cart, check out, and drive home. As I unpack the groceries, I happen to set the new gourd down in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of a reclining nude. Then I recall a milestone in photographic history.

§2: 1927 — 1930

Edward Weston’s meticulous closeup photos of scores of common objects (notably bell peppers) are marvels of imagination and ingenuity. They also prompt one critic to remark that Weston’s peppers look like nudes while his nudes look like peppers.

Pepper-1930-30P

Weston works in grayscale (aka “black and white”). The color of a pepper would only be a distraction anyway. While people have various skin colors, nobody’s skin is red or green.

§3: 2019-09-27

“Buy us!” say 3 colorful gourds. I refuse:

“No, I’ve already bought an extra gourd that I will use to salute Edward Weston.”

“Last year, U bought a total of 10. We’ll just bring it up to 8.”

“Last year’s gourds were smaller and came in bags of 5.”

“Weston bought more than 30 peppers.”

“But he could eat them when he was done shooting.”

“Puhleeze!”

“OK.”

gourds-3#_840x547

I’m a pushover. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

§4: Now and Forever

Remember when cameras used analog film, color darkroom work was sorcery, and color prints faded under museum lighting? Artistic photographers had to work in grayscale. Viewers did not pine for color in the masters’ photos.

Sadly, some photographers mistook a temporary necessity for a permanent virtue. Wanna create a colorful image? Buy some tubes of paint. Stick with grayscale for artistic photography.

The sweeping general assertion of grayscale’s intrinsic superiority was a gross insult to Eliot Porter (and to all who hiked the trails he blazed in color photography).

Some photos do look better in grayscale than in color. Maybe something with interesting contours and textures happens to have distracting colors. Grayscale is great for Weston’s peppers.

Sometimes progress replaces an old thing with a new one that is all-around better, as in the transition from analog film to digital pixels. The transition from obligatory grayscale to color (in varying degress of saturation) is a subtler kind of progress that adds choices. Lots of choices.

Photo editing software supports having some color classes or parts of an image be more saturated than others. Done casually and obtrusively, it can be gimmicky. Done carefully and subtly, it can work with other edits to greatly improve a photo. One of the contemporary photographers I admire steps thru instructive examples:

What I Am Working On: Building Blocks

What I Am Working On: Fiddling

If U choose to desaturate a photo (either partially or all the way to grayscale), I may disagree with that choice. I will still respect it, but only as a specific choice. What I won’t respect is a blanket assertion that photos “should” be in grayscale. Or in color. Or have shallow depth of focus. Or have everything in focus. Or whatever.

Here is one blanket pronouncement that I do respect, in photography and beyond:

Don’t hide behind sweeping generalities.
Own your choices.