Saturday, December 29, 2007

buzzing infinity



If you look closely at this image you'll see that the leaves on the lower-left side of the branch are actually the wings of a butterfly -- the Indian Leaf Butterfly, which can disguise itself as any number of leafy plants. (The body of the insect is parallel to the branch, and the wings are seen in profile.)

Whenever I see something like this -- and in the world of birds and insects, the diversity is astounding -- I feel a bit like channeling Annie Dillard: How could there not be a God, with such attention to beauty and function, such elegance in the design, and the sheer shameless audacity of the numbers of incredible variations on a theme? As an artist, I can honestly say that the only justification for such over-abundance, particularly among insects, would have to be the pure joy of creation itself. I think the many millions of individual insect and bird species known to us are proof enough of the infinite -- a bejeweled yardstick that spans the distance between our reach and our grasp.

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