Category: The Dish

“In the form of the tree,” writes Allison Meier, “artists found expressions of life, death, and the great beyond.” In a review of the Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibit on Romantic landscape art, she taxonomizes the various kinds of tree art on display:

One of the frequent, ominous tree symbols is the blasted tree. [In Hubert Robert’s La Cascade] a poor tree has been terribly wounded, perhaps by a recent lightning strike, although it’s often an old battle scar. What’s important is that the tree is usually still living, leaves clinging to its battered branches. To the Romantics it represented the cycle of nature, from death to life, all at once. It could also be a foreboding symbol for those venturing into the wild, a disruption of the pastoral peace, as the wrath of God can fell even these timber giants. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein declares himself a “blasted tree” in regards to his own destruction.

The blasted tree often crosses over with the lone tree. Here [above] Caspar David Friedrich has depicted a survivor. Its peak is fractured, yet it has endured. Below it stands a solitary shepherd, and there’s a subtext that as this man lives and dies, the tree will continue in its longer life. Also notice the church off in the distance, dwarfed by the tree. Friedrich wasn’t diminishing the spiritual, he was showing that it was deeper and more universal than the faith of one church.

(Image: Village Landscape in Morning Light (The Lone Tree) by Caspar David Friedrich, 1822, via Wikimedia Commons)

Lev Grossman meditates on how fatherhood transformed his writing:

When I came back to my book, after Lily was born, I saw it for what it was: cold, dull, lifeless, massively overthought – a labyrinth with no minotaur inside. I told myself I was just taking a break from it, but the truth was I binned it and started something new. I picked up an idea I’d had years before but hadn’t taken seriously at the time, because it was fresh and weird and risky and different from anything I’d ever tried before. Six months after Lily was born, I took a week off from work to explore it, and I wound up writing 25,000 words in five days. I’d hit an artery, and the story came surging out hot and strong. Not only was it the most productive week I’d ever had, I enjoyed it more than I’d enjoyed doing anything for literally years. I was more proud of it than anything I’d done in my entire life.

Something was afoot. I was waking up. Somewhere inside me the emotional pack ice was cracking and melting, ice that had formed long ago in the Fimbulwinter of my childhood, and feelings that I’d been avoiding for decades were thawing out and leaking through, both good and bad: joy, grief, anger, hope, longing. I was like some frozen extrasolar planet, where even gases exist only in neat, handy solid forms. But now I was warming up, and buried things were surfacing.

The cause of this cosmic disturbance was Lily. I didn’t see it at the time, probably because I had the emotional intelligence of a sea slug, but it was all her – she was the sun that was warming me. I couldn’t stay frozen around her. She wouldn’t have it.

A study indicates that we rate art more highly when we think fewer people were behind the work:

Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh is a monumentally famous painting. It is beloved by people around the world. If tomorrow, it was revealed that Van Gogh had actually worked with two other madly talented painters to create the masterpiece, would we think it any less beautiful?

The answer, according to findings in newly published research by Rosanna K. Smith and George E. Newman, is yes. In their study, Drs. Smith and Newman seek to understand whether viewers value single creator art better than art created through a collaborative process. Our perception of art, they found,  is largely dictated by the amount of time and effort we think went into it. This notion was first put forth by Denis Dutton in his book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, where he argued that we evaluate art not just by the final product, but also by the process that created it. We then use our evaluation of the process and final product to determine the quality of the piece we are admiring.

(Image: Starry Night by van Gogh, 1889, via Wikimedia Commons)

Reflecting on the “massive renaissance” that walking pilgrimages, such as the Way of St. James, have undergone since the 1980s, Matthew R. Anderson ponders just who is treading these centuries-old Christian paths:

The majority of modern walking pilgrims are not church-goers. Most even shy away from the title “religious”. Yet these pilgrims, many of them catalyzed to action by a milestone birthday, the death of a family member, or the loss of job or spouse, still follow ancient pilgrimage routes and find themselves open to questions of ultimate meaning. The shrines still exist. But most modern pilgrims emphasize the walk more than the arrival, and interior spirituality more than the bones of any saint. In this way, modern walking pilgrims, at least along western routes, are evidence of the religious revolution that swept western societies especially in the 1960s. The result of the “Is God Dead?” movement wasn’t so much that God was dead, but that the traditional churches were. They no longer met the needs of people who were moving from institutional religion to personal spirituality, and from a focus on tradition and culture to practices focused on personal growth.

Today’s spirituality is inner-directed, personal, ecumenical or inter-faith, and less worried about the destination than the voyage. In other words, perfect for a revival of walking pilgrimage. The modern western walking pilgrim doesn’t believe that a saint’s bones will provide a spiritual boon. His or her questions are more basic and existential: what is a good life, and am I living it? What will be my legacy? What is true friendship? Is what I am doing worthwhile?

(Hat tip: Micah Mattix. Photo of Monte de Gozo (Hill of Joy), part of the Way of St. James, by José Antonio Gil Martínez)

Michele Weldon speaks out for them:

Yes, a life without a father – or a mother – can be difficult. A litany of factors can contribute to a confluence of perilous outcomes stemming from economics, education, and health if there is no father in the family tree. Still, a motherless life does not assign guilt or invite shame the way a fatherless life does. The expectation is that without a father, like pouring dye in a river, you cannot emerge undamaged, unchanged. We do not damn motherless children the same way; we pity them and offer our sympathy, but do not assume they will fail at every turn. The problem is that with this singular belief in Fatherless Doom, we mandate that those who have lost fathers – or simply never found them – are permanently damaged. And that is not the wholesale truth. Salvation is not reserved only for those children with fathers and mothers at home.

Recent Dish on motherlessness on Mother’s Day here and here.

“God is the most obvious thing in the world. He is absolutely self-evident – the simplest, clearest and closest reality of life and consciousness. We are only unaware of him because we are too complicated, for our vision is darkened by the complexity of pride. We seek him beyond the horizon with our noses lifted high in the air, and fail to see that he lies at our vary feet. We flatter ourselves in premeditating the long, long journey we are going to take in order to find him, the giddy heights of spiritual progress we are going to scale, and all the time are unaware of the truth that ‘God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.’ We are like birds flying in quest of the air, or men with lighted candles searching through the darkness for fire,” – Alan Watts, from Behold The Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion.

(Hat tip: James Ford)