A Strange Painting

This painting is just really weird and really cool. I will ramble a bit about it.

I found this painting on Reddit. It was an entry in a collection of works by a Polish artist whose name I forgot but I feel like I could never forget this. The collection wasn’t all that unusual. I’m not sure if the genre has a name but it is characterized by lots of reds, a surrealist unrealism and a general dystopian vibe. There are never any people and it’s always dark and scary. War, or war imagery makes a frequent appearance. If we’re lucky we are treated to some cosmic horror. If I’m able to so simple define such a huge class of art that the collection falls within, why is this picture any special?

It’s So… Eerie

Pretty is definitely the wrong word for it, but it does a good job capturing the feeling I get when I look at it. Captivating, enraptured, entranced. Aesthetically pleasing, if the metric for pleasing was all fucked up. But I love it and I could sustain myself off the energy it gives off like a fungus feeding on the radioactive decay in a basement in Chernobyl.

It’s ominous and foreboding. Spooky. I can give lots of adjectives, and this painting exists in my head as a complex linear combination of all of them. I think the most attractive part is how everything the tree is. This tree is gargantuan, we don’t have a scale but in my head it’s about 100-200m tall, and it exists on this demonic plane. The tree is massive, but it is not incomprehensibly massive. We can see the edges of it, the ends of the branches and equally we can gauge the lengths of its roots. We can describe it as being smaller than things. We can conceptualize it in its entirety encapsulating all known information about the tree. We can describe a box that bounds the tree in all dimensions, constraining the abstract space in which the tree exists (placing limits on colour, size, etc). In a sense, we have “conquered the tree”. It is defined. What do I mean about it being everything? Well it is the only thing. The only deviation in an infinity of uniformity. A single one amongst a vast endlessness of zeroes. It’s the object that casts a shadow without which the existence of light cannot be proven. That makes it the most important part.

Once I saw a post on the internet asking if it were possible to “calculate 100000!”. The tongue-in-cheek answer said something along the lines of “sure, it’s just 100000!. Maybe you wanted a decimal number, but you didn’t say that. And there’s nothing that makes a decimal number ‘better’ or more ‘canonically normal’ than 100000!. And if anything, my answer is better because it so concisely describes how the number was constructed, and with that construction you can deduce all its properties which is incontestably more useful than being able to look up the 40th digit from the left in the decimal representation.”

Yes the plane is big as the number was big. The plane is even bigger! And still, when we describe the plane we can’t help but spend half our description on this so helplessly finite tree, because it’s the interesting part. It’s the part that matters, from which we can deduce all the other properties of reality in the universe.

Imprisonment

I can imagine being imprisoned on this planet. It almost seems like a punishment the Greek gods would inflict on a sinner, but somehow greater and more terrible. Just imagine: eternally wandering the plane. A bad dream, but not a nightmare- which is incidentally what the painting is called. Nightmare Tree. The tree never grows or tires. And you never grow old or hungry, it never grows or sheds leaves or bark. Just you and the tree and the two moons in the sky you’ll never reach, as real as the clouds painted on the edge of the soundstage, beyond the ocean that Truman can never cross.

Everything is fixed, everything is static. The weather never changes nor does the time of day. No wind, no rain, just endless bearable warmth. The green clouds cover the sky almost entirely, like a foggy carpet missing some bits. You can tell by the density of the green that they are drifting in a fixed direction at a fixed rate. If it were variable, you could observe it and track records and make deductions, but you can’t. At this stage, we’ve recreated the setting of the webcomic Tiresias with a little bit less world. What a mood, I love it! You’d feel alone, so alone. You are not just the only person, but the only thing. A single step up from floating aimlessly through a pitch black void.

It’s scary, make no mistake. I don’t see a freedom in such an existence, and the foreverness terrifies me. In fact, you’re chained to the planet, chained to the tree, no more free than we are in our hometown, or country, or planet, or universe. Fated to forever be limited to what is and what has been.

It almost reminds me of the post-apocalyptic wasteland that salad fingers roams.

It equally reminds me of a scene in The Witcher, a particular world that Ciri jumps through where the sky is fire and hellish and the ground is hard and dusty. And the world is sterile and empty, so Ciri can do nothing in it but leave. Which is only one thing (and somehow also everything) more than what we can do.

Or this rocks landscape from this classic xkcd strip. From rocks on a plane, the universe we live in simulated bit by bit. The rows blur past to compute a single step.

Maybe rocks are too generous, let me take them away. So you will cling onto the only thing you have left, the trunk of the tree. You will sit at the trunk, cursed with sanity. Your mind will never deteriorate, you won’t even feel the passing of time at all. And the infinity just carries on, unfeelingly.

You can walk, but you end up back at the tree. Just like how Coraline’s other world is centered around the other mothers house and the world is an illusion.

Or Maybe The Manifold is Globally Euclidean

In which case you walk for days, weeks, months, years and your limbs never fatigure and you never need to sleep and you don’t feel hungry or happy or horny ever. And you lose track of the tree, but in the infiniteness of time you always find it, always. The landscape never changes, and the only thing you have to go back to is your tree, your spawnpoint. It is the only thing that is. You can jump a little more than knee-high and the ground is too tough to dig through. So you have both an upper and lower bound on how far you can vary along the y-axis from the origin. You can walk or run, or anything in between to get from A to B.

Better than the void? Somehow it feels worse. Like giving you the bare minimum you need to not go insane, to keep your mind as locked up as your body.

The Soundtrack

I imagine white noise plays forever and always, it never gets louder and you never acclimatise. It’s enough to stop you from hearing the blood rushing in your ears. I like to think a deep rumbling accompanies the trebles, you get used to it quickly but it’s not something you can’t notice when you try.

And a feeling deep in your gut says that there are no living creatures on this world. Nothing to hunt you, and nothing to hunt. There’s nothing to interact with, let alone one you could use to kill yourself and escape.

This is the place you go to when you die.

The Question

It’s really hard to devote your life to something, because we humans aren’t really like that, we like seeking new challenges and yearn for stimulation. It’s something else entirely to give up everything in exchange for that one thing. Like a monk in a remote cave, but even they commit to their meditation with the assumption that death is a certainty, that their study is finite.

The task is to find something that makes an existence on the plane an object of desire. Can you see yourself giving up your life. Giving up life itself, to be transported to this world, to focus purely on an art? To be clear, you will not recieve any praise, and certainly there is no prestige for such a sacrifice. It is all about you creating the field and advancing it, single-handedly, on your own. For the sake of itself.

Why I Like the Painting, a TLDR

It makes me think about the essence of what I live for. When I see the desolate landscape I think, “what do I love so much that I would gladly take an eternity on the plane as an opportunity to think about that thing”. And I am yet to find an answer.