Words of Wisdom

Humans can create infinite needs. The market dominates us, and it robs us of our lives. Humanity needs to work less, have more free time and be more grounded. Why so much garbage? Why do you have to change your car? Change the refrigerator? There is only one life and it ends. You have to give meaning to it. Fight for happiness, not just for wealth.

Q: Do you believe that humanity can change?

It could change. But the market is very strong. It has generated a subliminal culture that dominates our instinct. It's subjective. It's unconscious. It has made us voracious buyers. We live to buy. We work to buy. And we live to pay. Credit is a religion. So we're kind of screwed up.

Q: It seems you don't have much hope.

Biologically, I do have hope, because I believe in man. But when I think about it, I'm pessimistic.

Q: Yet your speeches often have a positive message.

Because life is beautiful. With all its ups and downs, I love life. And I'm losing it because it's my time to leave. What meaning can we give to life? Man, compared to other animals, has the ability to find a purpose. Or not. If you don't find it, the market will have you paying bills the rest of your life. If you find it, you will have something to live for. Those who investigate, those who play music, those who love sports, anything. Something that fills your life.

….

I have one thing. The magic of the word. The book is the greatest invention of man. It's a shame that people read so little. They don't have time. Nowadays people do much of their reading on phones. Four years ago, I threw mine away. It made me crazy. All day talking nonsense. We must learn to speak with the person inside us. It was him who saved my life. Since I was alone for many years, that has stayed with me. When I'm in the field working with the tractor, sometimes I stop to see how a little bird constructs its nest. He was born with the program. He's already an architect. Nobody taught him. Do you know the hornero bird? They are perfect bricklayers. I admire nature. I almost have a sort of pantheism. You have to have the eyes to see it. The ants are one of the true communists out there. They are much older than us and they will outlive us. All colony beings are very strong.

….

Life is a chain and it is still full of mysteries.

What a complicated animal man is. He's both smart and stupid.

How to Be Truly Free: Lessons From a Philosopher President

NYTIMES, Aug. 23, 2024

**Barbati, Venezia an arena, a group exhibition presented in collaboration with Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles**
group exhibition an arena April 17 – June 20, 2024

Helpful to remember, lest one confuse contextual representation with reality when parsing the intricacies of the incorporeal and ineffable. Angels don't have blond hair because angels don't have hair; angels don't have blue eyes because they don't have eyes (or they have dozens of them). There is nothing wrong, of course, with imagining angels in the form of humans, only with mistaking a small segment of examples for the universal standard. Which is what's so fascinating about the earliest representations of such beings, which flout the conventions of the angelic as they've been transmitted in Western culture, or for that matter the response from those who suffered under colonialism and imagined angels as appearing like themselves. In the contact zones of early modern colonialism, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing until the modern era, and with a particular zenith during the so-called Age of Reason, people developed syncretic religious traditions between Christianity and their own indigenous faiths, in which divine intermediaries often played an integral role. From Africa to Latin America, India to North America, artists often depicted angels in the visual idiom of their own cultures.

Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology

Ed Simon - pg 215