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

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[Trees at Night: Stunning Rorschach Silhouettes from the 1920s]( [artyoung_treesatnight.jpg?fit=320%2C488]( Walt Whitman considered trees [the wisest of teachers](. Hermann Hesse found in them [sweet consolation for our mortality](. Wangari Maathai turned to them as [a form of resistance and empowerment]( 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](. “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. [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]( the concept is entirely Young’s own — no artist had done anything like this before. [artyoung_treesatnight2.jpg?resize=680%2C1072] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight6.jpg?resize=680%2C1061] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight7.jpg?resize=680%2C1070] Available [as a print]( 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. [artyoung_treesatnight9.jpg?resize=680%2C1059] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight10.jpg?resize=680%2C1058] Available [as a print]( In 1927, Young assembled the best of his arborescent silhouettes in the slim, lovely out-of-print treasure [Trees at Night]( ([public library](. 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.” [artyoung_treesatnight3.jpg?resize=680%2C1056] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight15.jpg?resize=680%2C1083] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight5.jpg?resize=680%2C1059] Available [as a print]( Printed on the opening page is an excerpt from an early-autumn entry in Young’s diary: [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? [artyoung_treesatnight4.jpg?resize=680%2C1048] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight16.jpg?resize=680%2C1046] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight14.jpg?resize=680%2C1081] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight13.jpg?resize=680%2C1023] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight12.jpg?resize=680%2C1065] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight1.jpg?resize=680%2C1074] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight11.jpg?resize=680%2C1034] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight8.jpg?resize=680%2C1079] Available [as a print]( [artyoung_treesatnight17.jpg?resize=680%2C506] Available [as a print]( Complement Young’s [Trees at Night]( with something he never lived to know but would have cherished knowing — the fascinating science of [what trees feel and how they communicate]( — then revisit philosopher Martin Buber on [what trees teach us about being human](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving I pour tremendous time, thought, heart, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and ad-free, and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy, stimulation, and consolation in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [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]( [fasterthanlight_nelson.jpg?fit=320%2C480]( “It’s so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,” the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson wrote in her [spare, lovely poem]( 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]( ([public library]( which she read at the third annual [Universe in Verse](. 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: [c0a07cab-8422-4a02-9e02-8ef1c022f649.png]( [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]( opens with the perfect tryptic of epigraphs, straddling two and a half millennia of culture at the boundaries of science, philosophy, art, and activism: [nelson_epigraph.jpg?resize=680%2C659]( For other highlights from [The Universe in Verse]( savor U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith reading her [ode to the Hubble Space Telescope]( astrophysicist Janna Levin reading Maya Angelou’s [cosmic clarion call to humanity]( Amanda Palmer reading [Neil Gaiman’s tribute to Rachel Carson]( poet Marie Howe reading her [stirring homage to Stephen Hawking]( and Rosanne Cash reading [Adrienne Rich’s tribute to Marie Curie](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [Borders and Belonging: Toni Morrison’s Prescient Wisdom on the Refugee Struggle, the Violence of Otherness, and the Meaning of Home]( [thesourceofself-regard_morrison.jpg?fit=320%2C483]( 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]( 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]( the Nobel Prize in Literature — returns to again and again throughout [The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations]( ([public library]( the final nonfiction collection that gave us Morrison on [the singular humanistic power of storytelling]( and [the search for wisdom in the age of information](. [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: [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. [shantellmartin_borderless.jpg?resize=680%2C647] Cover art by Shantell Martin for [Borderless Lullabies]( — 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: [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: [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. [overtherooftops2.jpg] Art by Nahid Kazemi from [Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon]( 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: [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?”]( — Morrison considers how the global fragmentation of identity has affected our private experience of belonging: [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. [youbelonghere2.jpg] Art by Isabelle Arsenault from [You Belong Here]( 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: [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]( with Amin Maalouf on [conflict, belonging, and how we inhabit our identity]( David Whyte on [how to be at home in yourself]( and Hannah Arendt on [the refugee plight for identity]( then revisit Morrison on [the deepest meaning of freedom]( and her spectacular [Nobel Prize acceptance speech about the power of language](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving I pour tremendous time, thought, heart, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and ad-free, and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy, stimulation, and consolation in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [---] You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Brain Pickings NOT A MAILING ADDRESS 159 Pioneer StreetBrooklyn, NY 11231 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](