Burning ambition…

An image that haunts … I see what’s happening., and it near pushes me to want to self-immolate in front of some establishment whatever..
but I know it won’t make any difference. Any more than the monks in Vietnam. Or Norman Morrison..(does anyone remember, Norman Morrison? … . but it still haunts me, as a way out, as pain that may be sufficient to burn away the pain I feel inside me.

http://100photos.time.com/photos/malcolm-browne-burning-monk

Journal: November, 2016. Post election

I finally got a couple hours of sleep.

The rage has dissolved into tears, and the tears into grim resolve. It’s time to wipe the tears, to do what must be done… and then… to laugh, a laughter sadder than tears.

Do I bother to draw water to drink? Do I prepare food to break the fast? This pen, and these brushes? Is there any reason to pick them up, to make marks on this paper?

How many times I’ve wondered–what was it like, in Germany, 1933?

I think about the people who voted for … I will not write that name, or let it pass my lips… the ‘good Germans’

I will not be a ‘Good German.’ I will not be a ‘Good German.’

No more, the prattle of the ‘realists.’ No more talk of following those who ‘get things done.’ There is no longer any reality worth living, but that which we take up and create for ourselves.

Love, Solidarity, Imagination…RESISTANCE!

 

The Class War is Over…

What I think I’m seeing, is a stage where political power has become uncoupled from the economics that created it, a point where general prosperity, and the wealth it generates, is no longer an incentive for the ruling Class, but just the opposite. Why? –because they think they’ve already won the class war, and with that, would come a decrease in centralized power. A more democratic society. It makes more sense, appears less complicated, to jack up the State machinery of control by force.

Like ok… we can add billions to our wealth, doing nothing to provide for the general welfare–so why bother? We’ve already won the Class War. Now it’s just a matter of stomping out resistance from lower classes.

I think that’s where we are now.

Catching up…

Not since 2012 have I made fewer that 8 new pieces in a month… hope this will be coming to to an end.

Siatica sucks.

Like, I shouldn’t complain. It’s only sent me to ER once. Just makes walking… (and sitting)… kinda unpleasant .

Yeah, I’ve seen Youtubes of 85 year olds who work out 7 hours a day with body builder bodies… but who the fuck want’s to work out 7 hours a day! Jebus Fuck a Duck dudes! Get a LIFE!

For 79… I remind myself every day, how lucky I am, to be in the condition I am (never forgetting that I can lose all that in a minute)… but for now…

I can walk 10 miles in a day–even with the sciatica (though I’d rather catch a bus). I cook my own meals–no Moms Meals delivery pre-Nursing home fare– I can remember where I put my fucking keys hours or days after –IF I WAS AWARE of what I was doing at the time and not fumbling with packages and trying to get in the fucking door!

I can code switch from Sam Johnson Formal English, to Standard (the dialect of Power), to much preferred mixed demotic … and mostly know which is most appropriate, though I care fucking less…. since my mother is long gone and can’t hear me.

This is what it means to going on 80 for me.

#1154

30×21 Oil on canvas
#1154
View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.

Member:  DVAA-Da Vinci Art Alliance. Building community through art. My artworks are featured on my DVAA Member Profile: https://davinciartalliance.org/willard-johnson

Watercolour’s Magical Ingredient

debiriley's avatardebi riley

Magic of Watercolour?

A secret ingredient?  Look closer.

watercolor magic Watercolor Landscape, debiriley.com

We love, watercolours.

Happy colors. Objects we can define.

And yet, watercolours…. so often, seem to escape our mastery.

The More, we ‘try,’  the more muddled they become.  

Watercolour Mastery

I’d love to introduce you to Blamire Young. He is the true magician of watercolour!

Young, an English – Australian was born 1862 and died 1935. He had been meant to become part of the clergy, but chose to study mathematics at Cambridge instead. Later, travelling to New South Wales, Australia to become the mathematics master at Katoomba College. Young was busy. Busy painting in the bush, painting in the studio. He painted, and just didn’t stop.  I like that!

Blamire, has been  (after Fred Williams and John Olsen)  one of my all time, icons.

His love of the medium, of the brush, his enthusiasm for the…

View original post 502 more words

To somene who tells me I want Trump, when I say I’m not voting for Biden.

 

I am as horrified at what Trump has done as anyone. I also recognize that it’s more than Trump, more than one person. It’s an entire complex of institutions and ideology, and Trump occupies but one place in that system–Biden and the two parties, other places in the same system. We will never extract ourselves from it–from this web we’re caught in, by changing players on the insiders game board.

What matters most, is how we can change our relationships so they are not formations of the the structures we want to change; what matters, are the actions and organizing that comes out of that.

Voting is at best, placeholding. It may benefit some, but always at the expense of others, and it will not save us from the greatest threat to our existence since we emerged as a species–anthropogenic climate change. No one in the higher echolons of power are up to the task, and almost all are committed to blocking, even our very knowledge of this crisis.

If our only hope lies in leaders at the top saving us, and the electoral system that makes it look like it’s our votes that selected them–if that’s our hope, than there is no hope.

But it isn’t.

There are more and more people creating alternatives, not as abstract ideas, but as actions which give us the power to see beyond capitalism and it’s patriarchal, racist orders.

Maybe all you see is Trump, and the need to be rid of him. But there’s so much more. Please don’t assume that those who have no more trust in Biden’s ability to change our direction than Trump, have thrown up our hands in surrender. We have not.

Many are working tirelessly, and have been for years, to make a better world… and they get righfully pissed at being told they’re only helping Trump by having a larger vision of how we go about getting rid of him… and the whole system that produced him.