EVOLVE

Biblical characters grope their ways toward psycho-spiritual enlightenment in this illustrated work.

Weill retells three stories from the book of Genesis, subtly inflecting them with psychoanalytic and existentialist motifs. The first is the advent of Adam in “the garden of now”—Eve never appears—where his task is to complete the act of creation by seeing and naming the things in the world, a metaphor for a child’s efforts to gain awareness as an independent being. Upon eating the fruit of the tree of Evil and Good, Adam becomes aware of his failings and is expelled from the garden of now and “tossed into history” and “suffering.” The author continues to the story of Cain, whose murder of his brother, Abel, embodies the psychic conflicts of adolescence. Cain tries to define himself by putting his own desires for love, fame, and power over his regard for others, although he worries that it’s all a meaningless fracas that ends only in death. His personal moral crisis plays out against images of war, tyranny, and religious antagonism. The soulful book’s third part meditates on the story of Abraham’s readiness to obey God’s commandment to sacrifice his son, Isaac, only to be stopped at the last moment by an angel. The episode is a turning point that leaves Abraham fully mature and capable of freely defining himself through moral choice. Weill’s beguiling text unfolds in simple, poetic lines, limpid and earnest. (“When Cain stands at the mirror to examine his face / and he peers into eyes of concern, / he fears his existence is a mechanical race / that there is nothing to win and nothing to earn.”) The author pairs the text with knotty yet lyrical illustrations that usually foreground a man, often in a business suit, engaging pensively with an uncertain landscape—gazing into mirrors, trudging along railroad tracks toward an unknown destination, or hula-hooping when the way forward becomes clearer. Painted in pastel washes of color and populated with whimsical, cartoonish renderings of everything from dinosaur skeletons to ice cream cones to a minimalist caricature of Gandhi, Weill’s visuals bring out the work’s themes in surprising and delightful ways.

A luminous fusion of art and verse that finds penetrating new insights in sacred traditions.