![]() This is one of several paradoxes Philip Heying's photographs evoke about the nature of perception and consciousness. Returning to his native Kansas after a long absence, Heying finds the commonplace riddled with mystery, and deserving of attention. His apparent strategy, or deliberate non-strategy, is to dismiss nothing out of hand and engage in an extended dialogue with the photographic canvas, the subject and himself. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.Pledging allegiance to no particular genre, the artist demonstrates suppleness and intellectual rigor. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self-your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. ![]() “To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. ![]()
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