Fwd: Trees at night — stunning Rorschach silhouettes from the 1920s + Toni Morrison on borders, otherness, belonging, and the meaning of home + more

Sun Aug 11 08:31:44 CDT 2019

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[image: Welcome] Dear David Morris, welcome to this week's edition of the
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YOU. Trees at Night: Stunning Rorschach Silhouettes from the 1920s
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[image: artyoung_treesatnight.jpg?fit=320%2C488]
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Walt Whitman considered trees the wisest of teachers
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6000349e48&e=085ac54fc2>.
Hermann Hesse found in them sweet consolation for our mortality
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6411420508&e=085ac54fc2>.
Wangari Maathai turned to them as a form of resistance and empowerment
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that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. “The tree which moves some to tears
of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the
way,” William Blake wrote in his most beautiful letter
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=361e8b3b18&e=085ac54fc2>.
“As a man is, so he sees.”

A century after Blake, the artist, writer, and activist *Arthur Henry “Art”
Young* (January 14, 1866–December 29, 1943) originated a sumptuous new way
of seeing life, looking at trees.

In his forties, Young had risen to prominence with his political cartoons,
criticizing capitalism and war, railing against racism, and advocating for
women’s suffrage and the abolition of child labor. During World War I, they
had rendered in prosecuted on a charge of conspiracy to obstruct
recruiting. With some of Thoreau coursing through his veins, Young made his
art both an instrument of civil disobedience and a lens for contemplating
nature’s transcendent beauty.
[image: artyoung.jpg?resize=680%2C927]

Art Young

In his fifties, Young’s imagination fell upon a subject both wholly natural
and wholly original — the expressive humanlike shapes, states, and emotions
emanating from the silhouettes of trees at night. He began rendering what
he half-saw and half-imagined in pen and ink — haunting black-and-white
drawings full of feeling, straddling the playful and the poignant. These
visual poems, replete with the strangeness and splendor of nature and human
nature, become the kind of Rorschach test one intuitively performs while
looking at the sky, but drawn from the canopy rather than the clouds. While
the sensibility is faintly reminiscent of Arthur Rackham’s unforgettable
trees
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1b525269e7&e=085ac54fc2>,
the concept is entirely Young’s own — no artist had done anything like this
before.
[image: artyoung_treesatnight2.jpg?resize=680%2C1072]

Available as a print
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[image: artyoung_treesatnight6.jpg?resize=680%2C1061]

Available as a print
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[image: artyoung_treesatnight7.jpg?resize=680%2C1070]

Available as a print
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First published as a series in the *Saturday Evening Post*, Young’s tree
silhouettes were soon picked up by mainstream magazines like *Collier’s*
and *LIFE*. They drew impassioned letters from readers — some sharing poems
inspired by his art, some enclosing tree photographs they hoped Young would
draw, some simply thanking him for these uncommon portals into an unseen
world of beauty and emotion.
[image: artyoung_treesatnight9.jpg?resize=680%2C1059]

Available as a print
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[image: artyoung_treesatnight10.jpg?resize=680%2C1058]

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In 1927, Young assembled the best of his arborescent silhouettes in the
slim, lovely out-of-print treasure *Trees at Night*
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(*public library*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=68bf29ce9c&e=085ac54fc2>).
Upon the book’s publication, Brooklyn’s *Daily Eagle* exulted that it
“places Art Young in a class by himself” and Baltimore’s *Evening Sun*
lauded him as “one of the few real native talents that this country has
produced in art.”
[image: artyoung_treesatnight3.jpg?resize=680%2C1056]

Available as a print
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[image: artyoung_treesatnight15.jpg?resize=680%2C1083]

Available as a print
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[image: artyoung_treesatnight5.jpg?resize=680%2C1059]

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Printed on the opening page is an excerpt from an early-autumn entry in
Young’s diary:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]In common with most people
of artistic perception, I like trees. While looking out of my window toward
the wooded hills one summer night, a caravan of camels seemed to be humping
along the sky. They were trees of course but enough like camels to key my
imagination up to discover other pictures in the formation of foliage. The
rest of the summer nights I enjoyed hunting for tree pictures against the
light of the sky or thrown into relief by the glare of automobiles, and
drawing them next day. It seemed to me that this silhouette handling of
trees at night had never before been done by any artist. I felt that I had
discovered something.

After the caravan, I saw “a woman and a fan” and other subjects followed.
Any night I could walk or ride along the road and see interesting
silhouettes made by tree forms, many of them so clearly defined as to need
no improvement on my part. But aside from the appearance of a tree by day
or night, is it not kin of the human family with its roots in the earth and
its arms stretching toward the sky as if to seek and to know the great
mystery?

[image: artyoung_treesatnight4.jpg?resize=680%2C1048]

Available as a print
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[image: artyoung_treesatnight16.jpg?resize=680%2C1046]

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[image: artyoung_treesatnight14.jpg?resize=680%2C1081]

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[image: artyoung_treesatnight13.jpg?resize=680%2C1023]

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[image: artyoung_treesatnight12.jpg?resize=680%2C1065]

Available as a print
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[image: artyoung_treesatnight1.jpg?resize=680%2C1074]

Available as a print
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[image: artyoung_treesatnight11.jpg?resize=680%2C1034]

Available as a print
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[image: artyoung_treesatnight8.jpg?resize=680%2C1079]

Available as a print
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[image: artyoung_treesatnight17.jpg?resize=680%2C506]

Available as a print
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Complement Young’s *Trees at Night*
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with something he never lived to know but would have cherished knowing —
the fascinating science of what trees feel and how they communicate
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=37fe8c2c24&e=085ac54fc2>
— then revisit philosopher Martin Buber on what trees teach us about being
human
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Faster
Than Light: Marilyn Nelson Reads Her Exquisite Poem About the Purpose of
Life and How Our Impermanence Both Frustrates and Fuels Our Creative Drive
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“It’s so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,” the astronomer and poet
Rebecca Elson wrote in her spare, lovely poem
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6cdbcc8835&e=085ac54fc2>
celebrating the genius of Einstein’s theory of relativity — genius at the
heart of which was his bold and, at the time, countercultural decision to
fix the speed of light as an immutable constant around which all the other
variables converged to construct his groundbreaking model of spacetime,
which revolutionized our understanding of the universe.

The speed of light and the vibrating mesh of our understanding and
misunderstanding of the nature of reality come alive with uncommon
originality of thought and feeling in the title poem from Marilyn Nelson’s
2012 poetry collection *Faster Than Light*
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(*public library*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=232c9a64ce&e=085ac54fc2>),
which she read at the third annual *Universe in Verse*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=28e46d8a52&e=085ac54fc2>.
It is a long poem, a beautiful and poignant poem, a soaring, meandering
meditation on the nature of reality, the purpose of our existence, the way
in which our impermanence both frustrates and fuels our creative drive.
Enjoy:

[image: c0a07cab-8422-4a02-9e02-8ef1c022f649.png]
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[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]My poems: a handful of dust
trying to get back to supernova.
Like every longing, everything alive.

How lovely, too, that Nelson’s altogether magnificent *Faster Than Light*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b393c40076&e=085ac54fc2>
opens with the perfect tryptic of epigraphs, straddling two and a half
millennia of culture at the boundaries of science, philosophy, art, and
activism:

[image: nelson_epigraph.jpg?resize=680%2C659]
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=55c94f4b6a&e=085ac54fc2>

For other highlights from *The Universe in Verse*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=bde42dd7fc&e=085ac54fc2>,
savor U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith reading her ode to the Hubble Space
Telescope
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b29aafc0a2&e=085ac54fc2>,
astrophysicist Janna Levin reading Maya Angelou’s cosmic clarion call to
humanity
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=72f435aed7&e=085ac54fc2>,
Amanda Palmer reading Neil Gaiman’s tribute to Rachel Carson
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1e6213a5de&e=085ac54fc2>,
poet Marie Howe reading her stirring homage to Stephen Hawking
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c4b267b287&e=085ac54fc2>,
and Rosanne Cash reading Adrienne Rich’s tribute to Marie Curie
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Borders
and Belonging: Toni Morrison’s Prescient Wisdom on the Refugee Struggle,
the Violence of Otherness, and the Meaning of Home
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[image: thesourceofself-regard_morrison.jpg?fit=320%2C483]
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What does home mean and where do we anchor our belonging in a world of
violent alienation and alienating violence? I use “alien” here both in the
proper etymological sense rooted in the Latin *alienus*, “belonging to
another,” and in the astrophysical sense of “from another planet,” “not
human,” for the combined effect of a dehumanizing assault on belonging
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for those treated and mistreated as alien to a country or a community.

That, and some hint of the remedy for it, is what *Toni Morrison* (February
18, 1931–August 5, 2019) — one of the titanic thinkers and writers of our
time, and the first black woman to receive
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=db110ac14f&e=085ac54fc2>
the Nobel Prize in Literature — returns to again and again throughout *The
Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations*
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(*public library*
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the final nonfiction collection that gave us Morrison on the singular
humanistic power of storytelling
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and the search for wisdom in the age of information
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.
[image: tonimorrison.jpg?resize=680%2C428]

Toni Morrison (Courtesy Alfred A. Knopf)

In a timely piece titled “The Foreigner’s Home,” originally delivered as a
lecture at the University of Toronto in 2002, Morrison reflects on the
notion of foreignness and the traversing of borders in light of our own
disquieting feelings of otherness, whatever our national origin and
citizenship, and the tremors of our crumbling belonging in an increasingly
chaotic world:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Excluding the height of
the slave trade in the nineteenth century, the mass movement of peoples in
the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the
twenty-first is greater now than it has ever been. It is a movement of
workers, intellectuals, refugees, armies crossing oceans, continents,
immigrants through custom offices and hidden routes, speaking multiple
languages of trade, of political intervention, of persecution, exile,
violence, and poverty.

[…]

The spectacle of mass movement draws attention inevitably to the borders,
the porous places, the vulnerable points where one’s concept of home is
seen as being menaced by foreigners. Much of the alarm hovering at the
borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to me, by (1) both the threat and
the promise of globalism and (2) an uneasy relationship with our own
foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging.

[image: shantellmartin_borderless.jpg?resize=680%2C647]

Cover art by Shantell Martin for *Borderless Lullabies*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=833521c2b1&e=085ac54fc2>
— a charitable compilation of musicians and writers raising their voices in
defense of refugee children

With an eye to the central questions of belonging — how we decide where and
whether we belong, what convinces us that we do, what constitutes
foreignness and why it is so perturbing — she writes:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png][There is an]
inside/outside blur that can enshrine frontiers, and borders real,
metaphorical, and psychological, as we wrestle with definitions of
nationalism, citizenship, race, ideology, and the so-called clash of
cultures in our search to belong.

African and African American writers are not alone in coming to terms with
these problems, but they do have a long and singular history of confronting
them. Of not being at home in one’s homeland; of being exiled in the place
one belongs.

Morrison takes up the crux of this search for belonging — the meaning of
home — in another piece, titled “Home” and originally delivered as a
convocation address at Oberlin College in 2009:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]What do we mean when we
say “home”?

It is a virtual question because the destiny of the twenty-first century
will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world. The
question of cultural apartheid and/or cultural integration is at the heart
of all governments and informs our perception of the ways in which
governance and culture compel the exoduses of peoples (voluntarily or
driven) and raises complex questions of dispossession, recovery, and the
reinforcement of siege mentalities. How do individuals resist or become
complicit in the process of alienizing others’ demonization — a process
that can infect the foreigner’s geographical sanctuary with the country’s
xenophobia? By welcoming immigrants, or importing slaves into their midst
for economic reasons and relegating their children to a modern version of
the “undead.” Or by reducing an entire native population, some with a
history hundreds, even thousands of years long, into despised foreigners in
their own country. Or by the privileged indifference of a government
watching an almost biblical flood destroy a city because its citizens were
surplus black or poor people without transportation, water, food, help and
left to their own devices to swim, slog, or die in fetid water, attics,
hospitals, jails, boulevards, and holding pens. Such are the consequences
of persistent demonization; such is the harvest of shame.

[image: overtherooftops2.jpg]

Art by Nahid Kazemi from *Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b0f2e07836&e=085ac54fc2>
by JonArno Lawson — a lyrical illustrated meditation on otherness and the
consolation of finding one’s belonging

Noting that the violent handling of populations at and across borders is
not new, Morrison considers what history so clearly teaches us about the
consequence, if only we have the conscience and courage not to turn a blind
eye to it:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Forced or eager exodus
into strange territory (psychological or geographical) is indelible in the
history of every quadrant of the known world, from the trek of Africans
into China and Australia; to military interventions by Romans, Ottomans,
Europeans; to merchant forays fulfilling the desires of a plethora of
regimes, monarchies, and republics. From Venice to Virginia, from Liverpool
to Hong Kong. All these and more have transferred the riches and art they
found into other realms. And all these left that foreign soil stained with
their blood and/or transplanted into the veins of the conquered. While in
their wake the languages of conquered and conqueror swell with condemnation
of the other.

Two decades after Audre Lorde’s surprised encounter with the German women
of the Diaspora prompted her to ask the crucial question of otherness and
belonging — “How can we use each other’s differences in our common battles
for a livable future?”
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6d7d0aa3b0&e=085ac54fc2>
— Morrison considers how the global fragmentation of identity has affected
our private experience of belonging:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]This slide of people has
freighted the concept of citizenship and altered our perceptions of space —
public and private. The strain has been marked by a plethora of hyphenated
designations of national identity. In press descriptions, place of origin
has become more telling than citizenship, and persons are identified as “a
German citizen of such and such origin” or “a British citizen of such and
such origin.” All this while a new cosmopolitanism, a kind of multilayered
cultural citizenship, is simultaneously being hailed. The relocation of
peoples has ignited and disrupted the idea of home and expanded the focus
of identity beyond definitions of citizenship to clarifications of
foreignness. *Who is the foreigner?* is a question that leads us to the
perception of an implicit and heightened threat within “difference.” We see
it in the defense of the local against the outsider; personal discomfort
with one’s own sense of belonging (*Am I the foreigner in my own home?*);
of unwanted intimacy instead of safe distance.

[image: youbelonghere2.jpg]

Art by Isabelle Arsenault from *You Belong Here*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=160fb80ed6&e=085ac54fc2>
by M.H. Clark — an illustrated antidote to our existential homelessness

In a sentiment of chilling of prescience, offered a decade before her own
homeland barbed its borders with unprecedented violence, racism, and
inhumanity, Morrison adds a sobering admonition:

[image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]It may be that the most
defining characteristic of our times is that, again, walls and weapons
feature as prominently now as they once did in medieval times. Porous
borders are understood in some quarters to be areas of threat and certain
chaos, and whether real or imagined, enforced separation is posited as the
solution. Walls, ammunition — they do work. For a while. But they are major
failures over time, as the occupants of casual, unmarked, and mass grave
sites haunt the entire history of civilization.

Complement this particular fragment of *The Source of Self-Regard*
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=cd4835a649&e=085ac54fc2>
with Amin Maalouf on conflict, belonging, and how we inhabit our identity
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=89e29887e3&e=085ac54fc2>,
David Whyte on how to be at home in yourself
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e0c7a0effa&e=085ac54fc2>,
and Hannah Arendt on the refugee plight for identity
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0018f9d6c8&e=085ac54fc2>,
then revisit Morrison on the deepest meaning of freedom
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0af3d141d2&e=085ac54fc2>
and her spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech about the power of
language
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a2928eab13&e=085ac54fc2>
.
Forward to a friend
<http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b6aca43034&e=085ac54fc2>
/Read Online
<https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0b7451bc6e&e=085ac54fc2>
/
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