Received a new comment on AKID. Really like it, as somehow it nudges me to actually, and in every single endless moment, DO what I feel burbling up inside me, move into playful senescence! Here’s Kieron’s comment:

YES YES!

So, in the spirit of play — and remember, the great thing about old woman playing is she really doesn’t give a damn as to what YOU “think” of her. Reputation thrown to the wolves decades ago, she just lives to have fun, and in my case, given my double-Sagittarian nature, to also layer that fun with radiating meaning, as well as, let’s face it, as here, in this post, briefly lapse into my own mother’s snarkiness.

So, yes, in thr spirit of real and snarky playfulness, two photos, with superficial similarity, struck me today. The first feels so glorious it takes my breath away: a woman, dwarfed in wondrous color, gathers vegetables within a luscious field of concentrically planted rows of plants of various kinds crowded together — the way plants like it!

A permaculturist’s vision of paradise!

The work of growing food transformed into majestic art!

Okay, speaking of art, here’s another, similarly “green” photo, the already famous, or infamous “portrait” of Obama (and Michelle). But wait, let’s do the drama leading up to it.

At the Smithsonian, the unveiling ceremony, waiting with bated breath . . .

At last, they appear! Both simulated and in reality!

Note the need for making sure the above photo is correctly sourced. So very different from the photo taken of nature’s abundance. I wish I knew the source! I would be glad to credit the photographer.

But here we go, already; even with the natural photo, we plod knee deep into cultural requirements, one tiny detail of the thick, multilayered scrim that the magnificently creative human need for language (given that our original capacity for telepathy has been erased by fluoride to the pineal gland) overlays upon the real, palpable, physical world, driving us further and further into our “minds,” separating us further and further from our own physical bodies as sensitive, attuned antennas of the natural world!

In other words, humanity’s extraordinary creativity with language and other symbol systems, including photography and other forms of art, can work to enhance life or to kill it; can be used “for good” or “for evil,” and not just blatantly. Sometimes covertly, for example, via great masses of confusion stirred by contradictory disinfo and misinfo. For a current analysis of this phenomenon, see “The Confusion Principle” by Lisa Renee.

But I digress.

Let’s now look at the “presidential portraits” up close and impersonal:

Geez, are these cartoons?

(I’m not even gonna bother with the Michelle photo, which first of all, does not look like “her,” and features “the dress” bigley. After all, fashion is of the essence? But I do wonder what Michelle actually really thought about the portrait . . .)

So now, let’s call attention to Barack’s situation in his photo: on a chair? with larger than life hands, one of which appears to have six fingers? But never mind that. What I’m interested in is the foliage surrounding him. I’ve seen some comment that the foliage is “bushes,” symbolic of how Obama follows Bush, both Repubs and Demos being wings of the same monstrous, anti-life Deep State regime.

But officially? I read somewhere that the profusion of plant life in the portrait is supposed to represent all his accomplishments. Huh?

Oops, here we go. In this world of electronic (and other) verisimilitude, might it be that his “accomplishments” are digitally copied? That certainly would make it easier on the “painter.”

Somehow, I don’t think this happens in wild nature, nor in organic fields. Oh yes, I’m sure plant clones proliferate “in nature” too, given the tendency of Big Ag to want to repeat ad nauseam what brings in the most profits. But let’s just stick with the one glorious concentric ring photo in the field way above. Repetitions? NOT. Every single plant occupies its own unique niche, in concert with all the others. That’s part of what makes this painting of that field so glorious.

Furthermore, at least for me, what makes that photo glorious is that the human is dwarfed by nature’s bounty. So very different from a “portrait,” which puts the human in the center of creation. Always. That’s just what we do, at least we in the west who glorify the personal ego and allow the context to “fade into the background.”

But wait a minute! just as with Michelle’s photo, which stresses (bare arms in) an expensive “designer dress,” in the case of the Barack portrait, the context, “nature,” does not fade; in fact “nature” crowds in upon the human figure. That in itself is worth noting. Perhaps this painting prophesizes the takeover of nature, finally, from human pretense of “control”?

Oh yeah.

I wish it were that easy, to just erase the poisoned scrim of human attempts to dominate nature.

Okay, now look at how this photo lines up with all the oil-painted others, if it were to be chosen as the “official” presidential photo (and not just in the Smithsonian). Hmmm, doing a little internet sleuthing, wondering if the official presidential portraits are in the White House. Still haven’t found the official answer, but did discover that this photo will be part of “an exhibit in the [Smithsonian’s] National Portrait Gallery, the only place outside the White House with a complete collection of presidential portraits from George Washington to Barack Obama.”

Oh my. So this is what it will look like, in context?

Geez, it stands out like a green thumb, er, oops! I mean a sore thumb.

So tell me, which do you prefer, a photo of nature’s wonders cooperating abundantly with human needs, or a photo of faked, copied “plants” pretending to somehow enhance a “presidential portrait.”

Oh yeah, one more thing: someone on twitter wondered if some of the Obama plant leaves were poison ivy.

Ouch!