WHY?:
AN INTRODUCTION.
BY DAVID BYRNE
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Today marks the publication of Arboretum, a collection of drawings/trees/maps by David Byrne. It's always an honor to work with the man, and this book could not have turned out more perfectly. It's printed in a black-and-silver duotone for an uncanny graphite finish that preserves all the erasures and scribbles of the originals, its hard cover is wrapped in unassuming lunch-bag brown paper, and there's a 4-foot-long foldout explanatory guide. The drawings themselves—the diagrams, the webs, whatever you want to call them—we're not even going to reproduce any here, because one must see them en masse, in printed splendor, to fully appreciate their giddy, enigmatic power. Arboretum will be in stores in a couple weeks; until then, it's available only here.
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What are these drawings?
Why did I do them?
Will they be of interest to anyone else?
Of any use?
Do they need to be useful?
Well, I guess they're a lot of things. Faux science, automatic writing, self-analysis, satire, and maybe even a serious attempt at finding connections where none were thought to exist.
They began a few years ago as instructions to myself in a little notebook—"draw an evolutionary tree on pleasure," or "draw a Venn diagram about relationships," for example. Mental maps of imaginary territory; typologies of wine descriptions, East Village clubs and bars, and medieval war machines. Maybe it was a sort of self-therapy that worked by allowing the hand to "say" what the voice could not.
Irrational logic—I've heard it called that. The application of logical scientific rigor and form to basically irrational premises. To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense.
But how can nonsense ever emerge as sense? No matter how convoluted or folded, it will still always be nonsense, won't it?
I happen to believe that a lot of scientific and rational premises are irrational to begin with—that the work of much science and academic inquiry is, deep down, merely the elaborate justification of desire, bias, whim, and glory. I sense that to some extent the rational "thinking" areas of our brains are super-rationalization engines. They provide us with means and justifications for our more animal impulses. They allow us to justify them to both ourselves and then, when that has been accomplished, to others. "The hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge [as an explanation of nature] is as faith-based as intelligent design," says Leonard Susskind, inventor of string theory.
This might not seem a very optimistic view of intelligence, but even viewed this cynically, centuries of this cerebral activity have produced a lot of beauty, pleasure, and magnificent, well, stuff.
I watched a nature documentary with my daughter on a train today, and we saw creatures from the ocean's depths caught in the glow of deep-sea submersibles. Some of the creatures had never been seen before, or were not even thought possible. Things that spew time-delay fireworks, things that live where life was thought to be impossible, a fish on a kind of stalk. We both agreed they would have seemed preposterous, imaginary, and unbelievable, if the camera hadn't filmed them.
So, extrapolating from Mother Nature, if you can draw a relationship, it can exist. The world keeps opening up, unfolding, and just when we expect it to be closed—to be a sealed sensible box—it shows us something completely surprising. In fact, the possibly unacknowledged aim of science may be to know how much it is that we don't know—rather that what we do think we know. What we think we know we probably aren't really sure of anyway. If we can get a sense of what we don't know, at least we won't be guilty of the hubris of thinking we know any of it. Science's job is to map our ignorance.
So, here I am, pencil in hand, poking around in the dark ... wait, is it a pencil or a flashlight? ... maybe the pencil is a flashlight, and it roughly illuminates a tiny part of the above "knowledge." Maybe just enough to get it all wrong, but the puzzle pieces are us; we can recognize familiar pieces of ourselves, so they are scary, fascinating, and lovable.
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OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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Why?: An Introduction By David Byrne
Preliminary Betting Line—Bigfoot v. Aliens By Richard D. Ross
Anticlimactic Retellings of Near-Death Experiences Rejected for Inclusion in a Forthcoming Talk-Show Segment Entitled "Life, Death, and Beyond" By Eric Feezell
Bedtime Stories by Thom Yorke By David Hart
Some Children Like to Write Books, Some Children Like to Eat Books: Buy Tickets and Support Them Both
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