the Jerusalem Cricket

Finding myself at a loss when I returned to the Recycling man project that I began earlier, I contemplated scraping the sketches shown on this blog. A combination of not knowing where I was taking the current imagery and being distracted by new ideas was overwhelming me.

The project was ultimately a multimedia study of “Memes” so I returned to the base description of a Meme.

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Meme:

A meme, as defined within memetic theory, comprises a unit of cultural information, the building block of cultural evolution or diffusion that propagates from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution.

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I then pulled out my sketchbook in order to try to determine what I was going to do with the imagery. Upon opening up my old sketchbook I came across an entry that mentioned Jerusalem Crickets.

The first Jerusalem Cricket I came across was in Northern California where I worked as a gardner. Digging through the black garden soil I was shocked when I came across the odd insect. Roughly the size of my thumb, it laid curled and unmoving. Its swollen body was colored with the yellow and black stripes of a wasp, its legs those of a cricket and its head large and disturbing. Even after being dramatically uncovered by my digging it didn’t move but just laid still in what seemed a hibernated state. So I covered it back up with soil and left it alone. Learning later that they were harmless insects that usually live underground and not considered a pest I continued to leave them alone when I came across them.

The old entry in my sketchbook was talking about when one observes ones thoughts and emotions from a somewhat detached state. I had used the Jerusalem cricket as a metaphor for unformed thoughts and described them as “something not of me, outside of my soul but within my skin. An oddly wedged creature that lives curled on my spine by the base of my skull.”.... ”well hidden but so vulnerable when found.”

That old entry, that left over “meme” mixed with the current idea and became an element that moved the imagery into a new direction. When looking up the Jerusalem Cricket I found its alternate names. One, “the old bald-headed man”, fit my recycle man image perfectly. So I went with it and related the character in the sketch to the hibernating underground cricket.

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Jerusalem Cricket:

Stenopelmatus fuscus
Jerusalem crickets (genus Stenopelmatus) are a group of large, flightless insects native to western United States, along the Pacific Coast, and south into Mexico. Because of their large, human-like head, they are commonly called niño de la tierra (Spanish for "child of the earth") . They are also often called potato bugs, or alternatively the old bald-headed man.