The Tree of Life...not necessary to drive a car through it...but from the Norsemen to Eden, and on to Darwin and Terence Malick, the tree as an image of/metaphor for "life" has been pretty pervasive.
Is the Tree of Life the same one as the Tree of Knowledge...I forget...
I saw Malick's movie yesterday, and other than bitter reflections that Hollywood only has room for one artist at a time to be both fully funded and fully autonomous (Kubrick was the last one) - I had a pretty good time with it.
"There is the way of nature, and there is the Way of Grace"
I liked that. As an expression of all our inherited tensions, seemed okay to me. Some people got hacked off with the "creation" segment...from planetary accretion through the invasion of one single cell by another to make a complex cell etc, etc, etc but I rather enjoyed all that...The Book of Job plus dinosaurs...worked for me.
...and seeing glimpses of old favourites like the Grand Prismatic Lake...which looks like it came out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but is actually in Yellowstone Park (see below) and is rich in the anaerobic (ie non oxygen breathing) extremophiles from which it seems all life came...
(Had to...there WASN'T a breathable amount of oxygen for the likes of you and me for simply yonks - till the bacteria manufactured cells from sunlight and carbon dioxide and EXCRETED it -we are all breathing bacteria poo...you heard it here first!)
All very Stephen Fry...But my point, I think, is that Malick's audio/visual PRAYER...which is what that movie is...has the same preoccupations as I'm finding myself contemplating with this residency...that is, how do you relate one human life...a life cut short at a young age, in his case...to a grand vision of how everything works and where it all came from...
The cautionary thing for me was that whatever its joys, and it held joys aplenty, "The Tree of Life" wasn't a story. If I'd been in a bad mood, or even had had a head cold, I'd have dismissed it, as some reviewers have, as vacuous...
A bit like the Price equation in my last blog, if something is about everything, in some sense it is then also about nothing at all. The grander and more inclusive your metaphor, the less of a story you've got.
Stories are about the holes in the story that you leave for the reader or viewer to occupy...as well as the stuff you do show and tell...
The thing about the genomics eye view of life is that it's nuanced, holistic, much more so than the more driven, purer agency of the gene eye view...
It's more Ishmael than Ahab, and all the better for it...But still there is the Whiteness of the Whale...the blankness that comes from contemplating the sheer scale and depth of it all.
Wonder Ye then at the Fiery Hunt?
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