Uselessness.

The Compton Oak ...

We shall never fully understand nature or ourselves, and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.

John Fowles, from The Tree

Put usefulness first, and you lose it. Put beauty first, and what you do will be useful forever.

Sir Roger Scruton, from Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

Everyone knows how useful usefulness is, but no one seems to know how useful uselessness is.  The carpenter scorns the massive, crooked oak: Its trunk is so distorted, no one can get a straight plank out of it.  It’s not a timber tree—there’s nothing it can be used for. That’s how it got to be that old.  A crooked tree lives its years in peace; a straight one is the first to be cut down.

Chuang Tzu, from Zhuangzi

Perhaps.

For "crooked trees" everywhere ...

Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don't hate anything. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

Joint.

Morrissey, from Autobiography, recalls an unchanged classroom ...

With no identifiable human being behind their agonized persona, teachers are restored only by the general truth that the trapped audience before them cannot squeal, for no one would listen. The classroom is their stage, and each day is their theatrical execution — to our joint disadvantage. 

The physical threats of the past have been replaced by a tyrannical insistence on conformity to the prescribed intellectual pattern.  As with much of our culture, the spotlight remains tightly focused on a narcissistic tug-of-war, combatants making peacock pronouncements rather engaging in a clash of ideas.  

How is anything of importance achieved?

Ignorance of the arguments of intelligent dissenters will prevent them from understanding the truth as deeply as they should.

Robert George, from Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division 

The Reverend Dr. West and Dr. George recently discussed their book ...

Benefit.

Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.

Olga Tokarczuk

Happy Birthday, Boucher

Boucher, The Triumph of Venus, 1740

François Boucher was born on this day in 1703.

I swear that one of my professors in college used to repeatedly lecture on Boucher's paintings just to be able to quote Diderot's criticism that, "He does not paint a single nude woman without her bottom being made up as faces." His giggle was priceless and a lasting reminder ("... to this day, growing strong and growing strange") of the importance of humor and joy in learning.

Thanks to Dr. Herban, a fellow crooked tree, for joyously introducing me to Boucher and Diderot ...

Unsophistications.

The sheep-like tendency of human society soon makes inroads on a child's unsophistications, and then popular education completes the dastardly work with its systematic formulas, and away goes the individual, hurtling through space into that hateful oblivion of mediocrity. We are pruned into stumps, one resembling another, without character or grace.

N. C. Wyeth

Once upon a time there was a crooked tree and a straight tree ...

It's still happening. 

At school I notice the number of "crooked trees" are fewer each year.

The lumberjacks are getting better and better at cultivating straight trees.  They've successfully recruited young apprentices to aid in the process.

Schools are the worst place for crooked trees.  

The antidote is a housemade (God, I hate that word, but it's meaningful here) mixture of the following; each essential (none are available in a public school setting), all measured to-taste ...

• Fresh air sampling and studies, tree-climbing, water-wandering, and wind resistance (literal and figurative); exposure to raw weather 
• Books, read like a snacker snacks and like a savorer savors
• Commonplace books and an introduction to the love of a favored writing instrument
• Transportation: bikes, skateboards, boats, nothing motorized ... sturdy shoes
• Solitude

All.

Doisneau, Punished Child, 1956

Crooked trees stand alone, seeing and hearing all.

Umberto Limongiello

Abnormal.

Colville, Dog, Boy, and St. John River, 1958 

"Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."

"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?”

Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451

Thank you, Violet.

Crooked.

In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me ... I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you ... you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.

Kneller, Tom Waits' character in Wristcutters

Crooked.

My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day.

I told them this story:

In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me.  I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you.  You're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. 

And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.

Tom Waits

Counter.

PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Kinks, "Misfits"

Look at all the losers and the mad-eyed gazers
Look at all the loonies and the sad-eyed failures
They're giving up living because they just don't care
So take a good look around
The misfits are everywhere

This is your chance, this is your time

So don't throw it away
You can have your day
Yes it's true what they say
Every dog has his day