Hope ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #259
Morning Sun on Winter Wreath
Bird, bow, and berries
scatter rays of hope to me.
Today may be good.
Warmth ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #255
Spring
After the winter,
green plants spring back to savor
warmth and longer days.
I knew Everett from his being the part-time mail carrier who sometimes drove my home’s rural route. He was also a subsistence farmer who had veggie plots, chickens, and some goats who wandered at will despite attempts to corral them. While the Houdini goats were cause for resigned amusement, the predicament of a cow and her calf was cause for anxiety.
Mama was a small cow whose tryst with a large bull had produced a calf too large for her birth canal. Mama was lying on her side, with just the calf’s nose and front hooves protruding. Neither Everett nor I knew how to contact and compensate a veterinary surgeon who might perform a bovine C-section on short notice, but Everett had a plan.
He had tied the middle of a rope around the hooves. He would pull one end of the rope while another guy pulled the other end in the same direction, straight out from Mama. I would be the other guy. There was no mention of the possibility of pulling with a tractor, and Everett probably did not have a tractor anyway.
© S. Silver | 123RF Stock Photo
Was it thin rope or thick twine? Either way, it was old and frayed. (Before we started pulling, it was not quite so badly frayed as in the image above.) As we pulled, I feared that either the rope would break or some boots would lose traction. Either way, one or both of us would suffer an ignominious pratfall in the barnyard’s morass of mud and manure.
The rope held. So did our boots. Mama endured the ordeal with quiet stoicism, as her calf emerged slowly. Both survived.
My one and only obstetric accomplishment was decades ago, long before the 2016 election saw the USA’s ignominious pratfall into what passes for conservatism nowadays: a morass of mud and manure, with quicksand too.
Along with many others now, I am once again pulling on a frayed rope. Constitutional democracy has been badly frayed by dark money, gerrymandering, troll farms, and vote suppression. Will it hold long enough to extract my country from the morass? (We need two unlikely wins in Georgia on 2021-01-05 to flip the Senate.) When the future looks bleak, I think back to Everett’s frayed rope. We pulled; it held.
Carpe Diem #1839 colors of life
Snow Fall
Bright white and strong pink:
early snow on burning bush
predicts apple blooms.
The prophet month has come and gone:
July foretold the fall.
Then August did its autumn tease:
sly hints and that was all.
September barked “Start raking leaves!”
I did not hesitate.
October, just around the bend,
was when such chores must wait.
While we do it mostly by adding the suffix [-ing] (and maybe tweaking the spelling), we sometimes add [-ent] (or [-ant]) instead. There is a subtle but important difference when we turn [emerge] into an adjective. Leaves emerge and then go about the business of growing and photosynthesizing. It would be a little better to say that my photo shows “emerging leaves” because there is no “and then” for emergent things. They just are emergent. What they emerge from is still there.
For example, look again at my photo, not as leaves but as an image. It emerges from about 700,000 pixels encoded with about 480 KB of data in JPEG format. That matters if I want to e-mail it to somebody who pays for data flow over a slow connection. For many other purposes, to fret about the underlying pixels and bytes is a waste of effort. The shapes and colors and composition are not in the pixels themselves. They emerge from the way the pixels are arranged and interact with each other and the viewer.
My mild misuse of the [-ent] suffix for emerging leaves is a point of departure for considering bigger issues, not just a bow to the exact wording of Patrick Jennings’ challenge:
Emergent ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #232 – Pix to Words
Once we start looking for emergent things, we find that the world teems with them. (Water, ice, and steam all emerge from crowds of the same kind of molecule.) We find that fretting about “ultimate reality” may well be as pointless as trying to understand my photo by always diving down into those 480 KB and never looking at the emergent image. While some contexts demand a deep dive, others demand a shallow one.
One of many places with examples and discussion of various emergent phenomena is Sean Carroll’s book The Big Picture, which somehow manages to be a good read (and a mostly easy one) despite dealing with deep stuff in science and philosophy while being fair to other viewpoints.
While nothing in science is nailed down as tightly as 3+2 = 5 in math, there is much evidence that we are in a tiny corner of a vast universe that goes its own way with no overall design or purpose or supernatural intervention. Can we live fully and righteously in a cosmos that does not give a rat’s ass about beauty or goodness? In much more detail than I can hope to put into a blog post, Carroll argues that we can. Emergence is part of the story.
Tho a little queasy about Carroll’s use of the phrase [poetic naturalism] to name his upbeat attitude in the face of knowledge that would depress many people, I can’t think of a better name or a better attitude.
Don’t despair if love and justice seem as fanciful as unicorns when U consider only the underlying dance of atoms and molecules. Love and justice may be real enough, but emergent.
Nothing ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #231
Yes, the bulbs survived and put out leaves. And flower stalks. Which bloomed.
Year after year, the discarded tulips bloom in spring, while I do nothing for them. Maybe they are old Yankees like me: compulsively self-reliant.
Widower’s Song #4: This Urn
It held her ashes,
waiting until daffodils
came for them in spring.
Then it held one last bouquet
of her favorite flowers.
A ghostly translucent squid seems to hover in midair between the viewer and nesting herons. No, I did not combine a heron image with a squid image in my photo editor.
The photo is of a page from National Wildlife magazine, taped to window glass and lit from the outside. (The page blocks a reflection of the sun from a neighbor’s window.) The squid looks a good deal closer than the herons despite being farther away, but only by the thickness of the page. The illusion in real life is just like the illusion in the photo.
The photo below illustrates a haiku about a bright full moon shining thru autumn leaves. Is it really the moon or just a flood light? Neither.
The photo was taken by daylight. The sun was above and behind me, but the light was dappled by unseen leaves (between me and the sun) before reaching the leaves I photographed. I was hoping for some chiaroscuro and got more than expected by sheer dumb luck. Most of the photographed leaves were in shade. Thanks to some unusually reflective green leaves that were in bright sun behind the colored ones, those colored leaves seem to be transmitting light from behind them when they are actually reflecting light from in front of them (and behind me).
The photos displayed above were chosen from among several exposure settings, then edited only by cropping. More extensive editing may be needed to create other illusions or to compensate for differences between how cameras and eyes see things. In particular, consider the challenge that inspired this post:
Illusions ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #213
Here are smaller versions of the images displayed in the challenge:
Desaturating a deliberately underexposed photo turned day into night. At any single exposure setting, a photo of the contrasty daylight scene would be either washed out in light areas or blacked out in dark areas. (Maybe both.) Editing merged several exposures to approximate how the scene looked to human eyes. Visit the challenge for more details on HDR editing and a fine haiku with no technical prerequisites.
Carpe Diem #1781 The Quest For A New Masterpiece Continues … colorful autumn
Between Seasons #1
Lost autumn colors,
but garden flag remembers.
Snow on power lines.
The rules and examples for this challenge allow marking the cut with punctuation and tweaking the cut when swapping the initial and final lines. Let’s do that.
Between Seasons #2
Snow on power lines.
But garden flag remembers
lost autumn colors.
Fall Frolic #1
Dancing on the breeze,
ignorant of gravity:
red leaf in blue sky.
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
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?
Haiku poems often want (and sometimes need) to interact with images or prose, as in haiga or haibun. Here is a gathering of ten haiku that could stand alone if they had to. (Some would rather not.) They have been invited to come here and interact with just each other, while enjoying some good saké (or whatever).
Overlay © Incognito – Russian Federation | 123RF Stock Photo
A haiku inspired by an image may or may not speak to readers who have not seen the image. It’s hard for the writer to make this call objectively. That’s OK. As Stephen Jay Gould often told readers of his articles in Natural History, perfect objectivity is a myth anyway. (The path from my raw data to “facts” that matter to me depends on my cultural baggage and personal experience.) Rather than pretend that my judgement calls are objective, I try to compensate for my biases. In particular, some of my haiku were not invited to the party because they might be too dependent on their inspirations to stand alone. That’s OK too. Unlike me, they are not compulsively self-reliant.
Like some of the other guests, October was originally posted in a haiga or haibun context. That’s why the title it wears as a name tag is also a link. (When a pale yellow background indicates that several such guests arrived together from the same place, only one of them has a link.) Click on a link to see the guest(s) interact with an image or some prose that adds to the experience of the haiku.
Friendly Friday Photo Challenge – Feelings of Spring
[2019-03-22] Bummer. I want to photograph the inspiration for my haiku, but my old hands cannot go more than a few seconds w/o thick gloves in cold weather.
Hmmm. Tho unheated, my garage gets some warmth leaking from the furnace. I put on a pair of thin gloves that can be worn while doing some things that previously required bare hands. I open the garage door and look outside while standing just inside the garage. Maybe I can work enough of the camera’s buttons while wearing the thin gloves.
The lens zooms too quickly for fine control. I cannot move forward or backward to compensate for zooming too far out or in. Oh well, I can crop the image later to compensate for zooming too far out. Is there a serviceable view in some direction from where I can stand w/o getting too cold? Hmmm. I try five views and go with the last one.
While it does illustrate my haiku, my photo is admittedly not of standalone quality. I can live with that. Any partial workaround for growing old is a small triumph to savor.
Sky Circles
Riding the spring wind,
hawks with still wings and shrill cries
claim territory.
© Steve Byland | 123RF Stock Photo
A lot happens in the sky.
Hawks stake claims.
Clouds sometimes imitate clams.
Carpe Diem Weekend Meditation #63
The Quest For A New Masterpiece Continues … winter
