Informant38

I wanted to say something about the Lovelock article, but kept stalling out around the commitment necessary, to one view or another of what it means, and to one opinion or another of how close to accurate prediction it might be.
So instead I want to lay out an incident that's typical of a lot of my internal metaphysical ramblings these days. They coincide in ways that aren't all that clear, even to me.
The click-through image on the flag picture above has a blurred figure in the center-left space. It's a bird. At first you'd think it was a bug much closer to the lens, but I was there, I know what happened.
What happened was I was riding my bike up toward the pyramid, coming up a short steep hill through some pine trees, and when I got to the top maybe 10 yards from the base of the pyramid itself, there was a bird up on the apex. And I got a little tingle of urgency, the kind of "get that" anticipation of having got the image and being all proud of getting it. "Captured that." But kind of knowing that by the time I got the camera out and on and ready the bird would probably have flown away.
Which is what happened.
What I want to capture here is the moment of disappointment and the going on, the after part of that. It's all about small stuff, trivial in many ways, but that one thing is pretty widely applicable I think. Because it was a kind of encouragement from around me, not great or dominant or even solid enough to be something recognizable at the time. But what happened was there was that sense of "go ahead anyway" and so I did, though while I took the picture I couldn't see the bird anywhere and figured I'd get just another backlit profile, of which I have maybe 30 already.
Then when I opened the day's photos up, at first what I saw was a bug, like I said. But it isn't. A better camera would show more in some ways, but of course any different camera wouldn't have been in my hands at precisely that moment.
I'm not looking for universal truth here, what I want to remember and tell is the surrounding energy of the moment, the original intensity of desire for what would have been sort of cute - a bird on the apex of the pyramid, backlit by the setting sun - turned into a surprising instant of a winged creature hovering there. Because I went with that encouragement.
The unexpected, unintended, but opened-toward. The acceptance of not getting what I thought I wanted became a beginning for something else that I'm grateful to have now.
In some profound and central ways this news of climate change and social danger and the truncation of human profusion and dominance is no different than news of our own individual mortality, and it's important to remember that we were raised to ignore our own transient physical natures, raised with the illusion of physical immortality, though it was never spoken or promised. So that reminders of it are incredibly shocking.
The steady diminishing of respect for the aged and the worship of the young that's become so common in America it's part of the national character now makes that illusion hard to see for what it is.
The relationship of morality to the expectation of human continuance is too large to start exploring here just yet, but it's a big part of what's so threatening about this subject. And of course it all hinges on the presence or absence of a greater context than the one our instruments reveal.
The idea of fire and apocalyptic chaos is exciting, and for some confirming, for others disheartening; what I want to get back to soon is contemplating the individual's connection and isolation in that, in this now and whatever comes later.