FROM WANDERING TO ILLUMINATION

Deep wisdom can be gleaned from pictures of trees, according to this vaporous picture book–cum­–self-help guide.

Half of Bush’s tome is an exegesis of his philosophy of life as an oscillation between two states of metaphysical darkness and light. The first he calls Wandering, which manifests as feelings of alienation, anxiety, and suicidal despair in people and as virtually every bad thing, from pandemics to mass shootings and corporate greed, in societies. The opposite condition is Illumination, “an explosive expansion of consciousness,” which imparts a mind-blowing enlightenment and cosmic connectedness. Bush associates this scheme with many traditions, from Hindu mythology to Freudian psychoanalysis, but especially with the Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient Greek religious movement that ritually celebrated the harvest goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, whose migrations to and from the underworld govern the seasons. The other half of the book displays the author’s two titular photographic series, featuring pictures of tree branches seen against the sky, heavily edited into a four-fold rotational symmetry and Photoshopped into three-dimensional images. (3-D glasses come with the book.) The black-and-white Wandering series shows trees in winter, bare of leaves, while the color Illuminations series shows them clothed in green foliage in spring and summer, when Persephone returns from the underworld. The symmetry and three-dimensionality give the images a kaleidoscopic patterning and eerie depth, with tree canopies converging in diamond, star-shaped, and spiral geometries that recede from the viewer. These effects, Bush suggests, are so mesmerizing that readers can approach Illumination by staring at them. Bush’s text is often meandering and nebulous, written in prose that tends toward mystical effusion. (“I felt love for everything without exception,” he writes of his own Illumination, wherein “all distinctions and boundaries fell away, and all opposites were joined together—desire and acceptance, movement and stillness, masculine and feminine, energy and matter, sacred and profane, right and left, the depths and the heights—everything was one.”) Fortunately, Bush’s photos, with their arresting mix of abstract spatial harmonies and vital, earthy textures, are a visual feast that many will enjoy.

An unfocused New Age primer redeemed by captivating arboreal photographic studies.