Brain Mulch: In Search of Connections (34.6)

Musician, artist, thinker David Byrne created drawings/diagrams (mostly) in the form of trees. The drawings were published by McSweeney’s as Arboretum in 2006 – straight from Byrne’s sketchbook, smudges and all, plus a four-foot foldout guide. It’s an eclectic blend of faux science, automatic writing, satire, and an attempt to find connections where none were thought to exist — a sort of self-therapy, allowing the hand to say what the voice cannot. Irrational logic, it’s sometimes called 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. 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.

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