Early one summer evening in Istanbul over a decade ago, as the evening darkness filtered through an electric blue sky, I was walking down a hill toward the Bosporus. I looked up and saw a dome above me, as though in a mosque. The pattern quickly resolved into the overlapping branches and delicate leaves of an acacia tree. It then shifted back into a dome, and back again into a tree. I realized: pattern is not abstraction, but representation. The difference comes from me. My imaginary image of 'a tree', seen in profile from a distance, did not match my experience of treeness, looking up, bewildered by the dancing geometries of lights between its shades. There is nothing more realistic about the picture of a tree seen from far away than the geometry in a tiled dome. They represent the same object. Differently. Several years later, visiting my other former home, I took my four-yearold daughter to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I happily described the serenity of the Buddha and Shiva Nataraja's dance of creation and destruction. I thought she might find the medieval European section boring, so I ushered her through. She stopped in the middle of the gallery. "Mommy. .. " she asked, "why are there so many naked men with their arms out?" I laughed: the sheer impossibility of thinking that. "Sweetheart, that's not such a good story for children," I said. Not wanting her to conclude that so many people we know, followers of the largest religion in the world, believe the rather peculiar story of a violent God killing his own son, I kept silent. I immediately realized that my answer was bizarre. Of course, it is a perfectly fine story for children. For centuries, Christian children everywhere have learned the story of the Crucifixion with no greater trauma than all the other children learning about all the other violent deities. I imagined looking at these paintings without already knowing what they mean. The Crucifixion is so inextricable from hegemonic Western cultures that the body of Christ depicted on the cross instantly metamorphoses into a symbol. We are incapable of seeing the (near)-naked-manwith-his-arms-stretched-out that my daughter saw. Repeatedly witnessing 1
