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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." * The Fate of the Apples2/28/2005 01:09:09This is a picture that I made to give away but never gave, still uncertain that it communicates (ink and latex paint on canvas)...  And on the airplane this weekend, upon waking up from a nice nap 38,000 feet above the midwest, I realized the picture's interpretation. It is the Tree of Knowledge in Eden, which I knew while drawing it. The tree is an apple tree, though it looks more like the full-bodied lordly things and surround the house I grew up in. They are the monoliths I imagine. In Eden before the fall, this particular apple tree cannot be like the normal apple trees I imagine anyway. For normal apple trees, the apples ripen, ripen, and then fall onto the ground. Then they cease to be part of the tree and are tossed with all the other apples from all the other apple trees. Yet the commandment remains firm: And the woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'" (Gen. 3:2-3) The apples from this tree, even after falling from it, are still "the fruit of the tree" and are forbidden. But once they have fallen, there is no way to know which apples are bad and which are safe. Since the tree is in the midst of the dense Garden, surely another apple tree is nearby with fruit that, once fallen, intermingle. The possibility of ambiguity would thereby be introduced into the Garden of Eden. Yet it is in the nature of the Garden to be free of ambiguity, which is the marker of the fallen world, alongside shame and all suffering. It is a hardship that only the unfree endure, those strapped to the fallen world with its little thrills and sorrows. My little picture, I realized the moment I woke up, offers a solution to the problem; perhaps one of many. When the apples on the Tree of Knowledge grow ripe, they do not fall but turn into great balloons and float into the air, to be burnt up as they reach the sun. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
re: The Fate of the Apples - 2/13/2007 15:37:08
re: The Fate of the Apples - 5/10/2007 11:33:33
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