Like many of us all week, I could only consider the opposite of these noble thoughts. That the Hamas terrorists who entered the southern kibbutzim and so cruelly murdered men, women, children and babies had not a vestige of humanity, but only pure evil. To find a shred of humanity in those people who perpetrated these atrocities and took 150 hostages, including young children and Holocaust survivors, would make you question your own humanity. An axis of pure evil was visited on Israel last week.
And then I think of something I read that proves the polar opposite of inhumanity. It is the power of love shown by a dying mother shielding her 16-year-old son, Rotem, with her own bloodied body as Hamas murderers rampaged through their kibbutz. Alone with the dead bodies of both his parents and almost demented with grief, the young man turned aside from his initial thoughts of suicide and decided to return to his kibbutz, promising to honour his parents with the life they saved and which he will now lead. That is the humanity I understand.
They were rewarded for their faith as the fish eventually turned up and told Manu to use Vasuki, the snake god as a rope and tie the boat to its horn. The flood swept over the land but the boat was safe because it was protected by Lord Vishnu. Watching the death and destruction, Manu wondered why humanity had earned such a deadly end. At this, Lord Vishnu told him that he was the only moral man left on earth and he would go on to be the father of future generations of mankind, or the Manavas. After the storm abated, Matsya dropped them all off at the Himalayas, for them to begin the new Yuga and continue human civilisation.
Is this the latest wave of human shields? Hamas is trying to carry out terrorist activity using animals as their offensive. The IDF has claimed that not only are donkeys being used, but horses with carts of explosives and dogs with bombs strapped to them are being sent to carry out terrorist attacks.
My respect towards the objects makes me not only use them as raw material for subjective pictorial compositions, butalso to give them the freedom to develop their own lives within these constructions of reality. Any direct references tothe banal reality in these collages work as shields against any kind of presupposed meaningful content. Being liberatedfrom the ultra-meaning of the myth, the pictures regain their own, inner meaning. Their presentations are not gettingecclensed to become timeless symbols for human existence. The traces of the present, out of which they are built, aremeant to enable the viewer to experience social reality. By getting transparent as incisions in diachrony, the picturesturn themselves against the false nature of every-day-myths. These myths get lost in the chaos of signs and remaincompletely left to the whole of their absurdity.