And then they woke up…

Shared from a post on FB

If you’re lucky in this life, a window
    appears on a battlefield
Between two armies. And when the
    soldiers look into the window
They don’t see their enemies, they see
    themselves as children
And they stop fighting and go home
    and go to sleep.
When they wake up, the land is well again.
     -- Carmen Penny (4th grader, Houston, Texas)

Goby’s Journal… on the Russian invasion of Ukraine

All human suffering is equal… and individual, and personal.

But not all human suffering is equal in the media.

Yemen. At the hands of the bloody most awful self-absorbed murderous clans on the planet–the Saudi Royal Familty.

But it don’t matter. Because what matters, is what’s always mattered in the history books. Power. The struggle between dominant powers. Never…. what a partnership of those dominant powers do (the USA, and the Saudis)

We see the suffering…and herosim of resistors–in Ukraine, but not Yemen. Not Gaza.

Because this is a tug-a-war between the Great Powers… or, more acurately, between the internal Masters within each of them.

Fuck all of them. The billionaires. The Oligarches. The presidents, the dicatators, the CEOs… all of them. All the fucking “Leaders.”

Tear them up… their images, like Sinead O Connor.

And then… themselves

Know your enemy!

Comment

#1235 A is for Antler L is for Light

35×28 Oil on Canvas. Additional work since the previoius post.
How to classify my work isn’t a major concern… but I do wonder what one would call these pieces–the oil painting since #1223–not quite surrealism. I suppose, “abstract” is good enough.

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

Nothing to see here…

We know that color isn’t an attribute of an object, though our senses make it appear so. Color is but one feature our organism has evolved to help us negotiate our way through life. But it’s not color alone that is a deceptive representation. It’s everything. Our senses are useful in helping us survive. We perceive what we need, but it’s all appearance… sound or vision. Even touch. We learn how the physical world is organized, it’s more basic reality, by moving beyond our senses. Those shadowy images of single atoms electron microscopy has given us… are translations. We aren’t seeing actual atoms, which are always in motion, unless… at Kelvin zero. Nothing is as it appears to us.

I guess the Buddhists… and Hindus, are right. It’s all Maya, an illusion, though we are welcome to draw different conclusions about what that means–for our ability to understand reality, about our place in this world. Still… it’s good to remind ourselves: Nothing is what it appears to be. Least of all–those images of our faces and bodies we so love.

What is real… though we have no access to what matters, but through our bodies, our senses… is never reducible to what we know by those senses.

I look at this old cat… 90 in human years… how she looks back at me. And we both know. Beyond words.

She teaches me.

We are so lost in this world of illusions. So lost.

#1233


24×30 Oil on canvas

		The Deer Itself


I saw a deer beside the wooded path

the deer itself

an absence

marked
in bone

without the deer
a leg 
without the flesh

		radius and ulna infused
		are one
		tibia and fibula infused
		are one

femur making three
bones
         one
deer  

disarticulate 
of space and time
beside the rock strewn stream
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