Nature I loved, and, next to nature, art

This gunmetal-blue ladybug was introduced into Hawaii in a successful attempt to control an insect pest called the spiraling whitefly. But it also does an efficient number on aphids like the one whose not yet fully eaten body lies, for the moment, above.
“Liberty Loans. Official Liberty Bond car, and tank,” Washington, 1918. Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016869097/. Contrast and detail restored. Article: “British Tank Invades Capital. Crew of Tank Collect Big Tribute for Liberty Loan.” Washington Times, April 19, 1918, pages 1 and 2.

An optometry of ice cream

O.D.: Let the lamp affix its beam.

As the pioneer photographer Lewis Carroll understood, when a lens approaches a reflective surface

the surface can fold vision back on itself and make the act of seeing a complement to the state of being seen. Under that condition

(O.S.), there may seem to be seen (for instance) an orbit filled with a globe. In that globe, let there be partially visible below its half-reflective surface an image of a camera held by a man seeing through its lens.

You can visualize that. “Let be be finale of seem,” says the lamplighted poem to you, calling your attention to its flashy display. But of all the elements in that display, the lens, of all things, can’t be used for seeing. As soon as it started sinking into the globe, it stopped being an apparatus to serve you and became part of globe’s image, in globe’s orbit. And there you cannot enter. You are out in the black, where the light of O.D. shines past but not into. Empirical confirmation: you couldn’t see the man in the act of his being until you had read these words instructing you what his reflection was supposed to seem to be.