Cruel Aesop

photog Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner , , ,

The last two weeks have been unseasonably warm here in Dunwich.  And believe me I’m not complaining.  Summer-like days and mild nights is wonderful.  Not to mention I must be saving money on heating oil.  And it means we can enjoy the summer activities a little longer.  For instance, the raspberry bushes are still producing fruit.  Not as many as last month but enough to enjoy a treat from time to time.  And I can still go out and take some macro shots of insects and the few flowers that haven’t completely died.  In fact, the wolfbane is about to bloom in the next week or so.  And every night when I bring the dogs out for their final walk, I can hear the crickets chirping away.

And there is an enormous number of them because the sound is everywhere and it is fairly loud.  But at the same time, it has a different sound in the fall.  This is based on the air temperature.  The lower temperature means the sound will be lower pitched and slower.  It’s almost like a power hum that has fallen an octave.

And to my subjective ears it sounds sad and confused.  It’s as if the crickets don’t understand that they are preparing to die.  Unlike Rutger Hauer’s character in “Bladerunner;” Roy Batty, they don’t realize “it’s time to die.”  And that’s exactly the vibe I get when I see the last of the dragonflies moving around the fields.  They’re confused and slowing down and it’s as if their programming is failing.  It doesn’t cover the case where the weather stays warm after they’re supposed to have died from freezing.

It’s also the case of the preying mantises.  They’re still walking around the gardens trying to find food or mates but they’re running out of steam.  Their eyes are already dark and they’re going through the motions but they’re already the walking dead.  Even if I handed them food, I doubt they could eat it.

The only insects that haven’t succumbed to seasonal despair are the honey bees.  They still go around visiting the last living flowers gathering pollen and nectar to bring back to the hive.  And that’s because they have a future and a plan.  They’re filling up the remaining cells in their combs with food to keep the hive going right through winter and into spring.  Their program hasn’t run out.

Now, I am aware that this is just my emotional response to the realities of insect life and its relationship to seasonal variation.  Evolution has crafted the life cycle of most insects in the non-tropical regions to include the death of adults in late fall.  This is the result of millions of years of evolution and it’s a fact of life.  But humans are affected by these facts and have speculated about them going all the way back to Aesop in ancient Greece.  He talked about the ant and the grasshopper that brings up the same exact dichotomy that I see between the honey bee and the cricket.

And humans anthropomorphize these creatures making the ant a hard-working and thrifty fellow and the grasshopper a lazy, hedonistic good-for-nothing.  Well, Aesop was preaching.  While I find the cricket and even the dragonfly sad figures.  After all, don’t we all eventually find our lives winding down?  And even if it is the circle of life, it has a certain tragic aspect.  Well, just a bittersweet reflection on the beautiful Indian Summer that we’ve been gifted with this year.

Can It Happen Here?

photog Current Events , ,

Do you ever get the sense that human civilization is a juggernaut that basically has no one steering?  Our activities have become this unstoppable force that tramples anything that gets in its way but basically has no idea where it’s headed.  Now there are lots of people and their leaders who try to direct things but most of them seem to be idiots or so completely selfish that they only recognize their own priorities or even if they seem to exhibit some altruism, they’re completely mistaken in their beliefs about what are the important problems or at least what are the right things to do about them.

And now that humanity has increased to more than eight billion souls and with our capabilities to destroy enormous numbers of people with weapons of mass destruction, we seem to be constantly on the brink of blowing the whole furiously spinning human enterprise to smithereens.

I am aware that this is hardly anything new.  Going back to 1945 and Hiroshima we have been living in the shadow of Armageddon now for eighty years.  And going back to 1914 we have for well over a century been living in the seeming collapse of European Renaissance civilization.  But it does seem to have reached a breaking point.  With the current trends we have seen concerning population decline and apparent rampant psychiatric collapse of a sizable percentage of young people we must be reaching the point where either someone or some group rallies a core of people to step back from the brink of collapse or this whole civilization will break down into a dark age; something like what happened during the so-called late bronze age collapse.

In general, it looks like there needs to be a sanity check on what we value.  The current social media environment is so dysfunctional that if someone proposed destroying the internet he might become the next prophet; whether you want to compare him to Mohammed or Martin Luther.  But whatever the solutions that are selected there is no doubt at all that our present trajectory is disastrous.  And I have named religious reformers because it is obvious that the primary problem is not economic or technological.  It is spiritual, or if you prefer, psychological.  We have allowed nihilistic concepts and other harmful ideas to percolate into young minds through teachers who shouldn’t be allowed to interact with children.  And it’s having dire effects.  For this reason, it will require a reset of what we teach children.  I’ve begun to hear that some states and localities are purging the trans-gender subject matter and teachers from their schools.  But it’s going to take a much more systematic approach to get a handle on this poisonous influence on children.  And I fear that places like California it’s already too late to fix.  People will have to flee to save their kids.

The real question in my mind is, “Is it too late?”  At a certain point if a society can no longer provide the basic services and protections for its people, they will flee in search of a refuge.  It happened in the bronze age Eastern Mediterranean.  Can it happen here?  I think so.

You Pays Your Money and You Takes Your Choice

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews ,

So, I learned some stuff today about publishing a book.

  • There’s no such thing as an objective authoritative critic who can tell you whether your book is good, bad or indifferent. In other words, “You pays your money and you takes your choice.”  If you believe your book is good then you take your chances.  So that puts the onus back on me.  Do I believe in my book or not?
  • After you write it and put a cover on it and edit it, then you have to get influencers to tout it and reviewers to praise it. But after all that you have to advertise it on Amazon to the tune of thousands of dollars.  Otherwise, no one will know it’s there.

Well, now I’ll have to search my soul and decide just how much I want to get my book out in the world.  Do I put my money where my mouth is?  I guess I’ll find out.  Now, all this is still preliminary.  I have to get a cover and get an editor to tell me about all my typos and inelegant grammatical constructions.  And get a marketer to “alert the media.”  And for the next month I’m going to be buried under a project that will prevent me from concentrating on anything important.  But by the third week in November, I’ll be available (other than a Thursday where I’ll be buried under cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie).

Well, it was definitely a clarifying experience.  There’s no way to pass the buck on a thing like this.  The author has to search his soul and use the wisdom of Solomon to make the correct decision.  Well, so what?  What’s Solomon got that I ain’t got, in spades?  Darned right!

So, if you drive through Dunwich and you see a disheveled geezer picking up bottles and cans on the side of the road, it may be me trying to raise enough capital for the project.  With any luck I’ll strike oil in the north forty and I can start on the gold leaf hardcover edition that all of us “real authors” like so much.

Okay, so enough moaning and groaning.  The journey is the reward they say.  So, I’ll just follow my nose and see where all this ends up.  Of course, if I get too enthusiastic Camera Girl will wonder why the checking account has gotten so anemic.  And that could trigger all kinds of hazardous situations.  After all she has complete control over my food supply and knows my sleeping habits.  But I won’t allow artistic decisions to be influenced by cowardly and pedestrian concerns. “Ars gratia artis,” you know.

Well, back to something comical; the government shutdown!  I hear Trump is going to permanently terminate “hundreds of thousands” of federal employees to get back at the Democrats for shutting down the government.  That’s a pretty bold move.  I’m starting to believe there are no limits to what he plans to do to the federal government.  He seems to be borrowing Obama’s statement that he would “fundamentally transform the United States.”  And at this rate maybe Trump will actually do it!