A rabbit attempts to play a church organ, while a knight fights a giant snail and a naked man blows a trumpet with his rear end.
Painted with squirrel-hair brushes on vellum or parchment by monks, nuns, and urban craftspeople, these bizarre images populate the margins of the most prized books from the Middle Ages.
Their illustrations often tell a second story as rich as the text itself.
Some images appear in many different illuminated manuscripts, and often reinforce the religious content of the books they decorated.
For example, a porcupine picking up fruit on its spines could represent the devil stealing the fruits of faith-- or Christ taking up the sins of mankind.
Medieval lore stated that a hunter could only capture a unicorn when it lay its horn in the lap of a virgin, so a unicorn could symbolize either sexual temptation or Christ being captured by his enemies.
Rabbits, meanwhile, could represent human’s lustful natures— and could redeem themselves through attempts to make sacred music despite their failings.
All of these references would have been familiar to medieval Europeans from other art forms and oral tradition, though some have grown more mysterious over the centuries.
Today, no one can say for sure what the common motif of a knight fighting a snail means— or why the knight so often appears to be losing.
The snail might be a symbol of the inevitability of death, which defeats even the strongest knights.
Or it could represent humility, and a knight’s need to vanquish his own pride.
Many illuminated manuscripts were copies of religious or classical texts, and the bookmakers incorporated their own ideas and opinions in illustrations.
The butt tuba, for example, was likely shorthand to express disapproval with-- or add an ironic spin to-- the action in the text.
Illuminations could also be used to make subversive political commentary.
The text of the "Smithfield Decretals" details the Church’s laws and punishments for lawbreakers.
But the margins show a fox being hanged by geese, a possible allusion to the common people turning on their powerful oppressors.
In the "Chronica Majora," Matthew Paris summarized a scandal of his day, in which the Welsh prince Griffin plummeted to his death from the tower of London.
Some believed the prince fell, Paris wrote, while others thought he was pushed.
He added his own take in the margins, which show the prince falling to his death while trying to escape on a rope made of bed-sheets.
Some margins told stories of a more personal nature.
"The Luttrell Psalter," a book of psalms and prayers commissioned by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, shows a young woman having her hair done, while a young man catches a bird in a net.
The shaved patch on his head is growing out, indicating that he is a clergyman neglecting his duties.
This alludes to a family scandal where a young cleric ran away with Sir Geoffrey’s daughter Elizabeth.
The family’s personal spiritual advisor likely painted it into the book to remind his clients of their failings and encourage their spiritual development.
Some artists even painted themselves into the manuscripts.
The opening image of Christine de Pisan’s collected works shows de Pisan presenting the book to the Queen of France.
The queen was so impressed by de Pisan's previous work that she commissioned her own copy.
Such royal patronage enabled her to establish her own publishing house in Paris.
The tradition of illuminated manuscripts lasted for over a thousand years.
The books were created by individuals or teams for uses as wide-ranging as private prayer aids, service books in churches, textbooks, and protective talismans to take into battle.
Across all this variation, those tricky little drawings in the margins are a unique window into the minds of medieval artists.
She wrote: "When I become famous, I will tell everyone that I know a hero named Marlon Peterson."
Heroes rarely look like me.
In fact, I'm what garbage looks like.
No, not the most appealing way to open a talk or start a conversation, and perhaps you have some questions going through your head about that.
Why would this man say such a thing about himself?
What does he mean?
How can someone view him as a hero when he sees himself as garbage?
I believe we learn more from questions than we do from answers.
Because when we're questioning something, we're invested in taking in some sort of new information, or grappling with some sort of ignorance that makes us feel uncomfortable.
And that's why I'm here: to push us to question, even when it makes us uncomfortable.
My parents are from Trinidad and Tobago, the southernmost island in the Caribbean.
Trinidad is also home to the only acoustic instrument invented in the 20th century: the steel pan.
Deriving from the African drums and evolving from the genius of one of the ghettos in Trinidad, a city called Laventille, and the disregard of the American military ...
Well, I should tell you, America, during WWII, had military bases set up in Trinidad, and when the war ended, they left the island littered with empty oil drums -- their trash.
So people from Laventille repurposed the old drums left behind into the full chromatic scale: the steel pan.
Playing music now from Beethoven to Bob Marley to 50 Cent, those people literally made music out of garbage.
Twelve days before my 20th birthday, I was arrested for my role in a violent robbery attempt in lower Manhattan.
While people were sitting in a coffee shop, four people were shot.
Two were killed.
Five of us were arrested.
We were all the products of Trinidad and Tobago.
We were the "bad immigrants," or the "anchor babies" that Trump and millions of Americans easily malign.
I was discarded, like waste material -- and justifiably so to many.
I eventually served 10 years, two months and seven days of a prison sentence.
I was sentenced to a decade of punishment in a correctional institution.
I was sentenced to irrelevance -- the opposite of humanity.
Interestingly, it was during those years in prison that a series of letters redeemed me, helped me move beyond the darkness and the guilt associated with the worst moment of my young life.
It gave me a sense that I was useful.
She was 13 years old.
She had wrote that she saw me as a hero.
I remember reading that, and I remember crying when I read those words.
She was one of over 50 students and 150 letters that I wrote during a mentoring correspondence program that I co-designed with a friend who was a teacher at a middle school in Brooklyn, my hometown.
We called it the Young Scholars Program.
Every time those young people shared their stories with me, their struggles, every time they drew a picture of their favorite cartoon character and sent it to me, every time they said they depended on my letters or my words of advice, it boosted my sense of worthiness.
It gave me a sense of what I could contribute to this planet.
It transformed my life.
Because of those letters and what they shared with me, their stories of teen life, they gave me the permission, they gave me the courage to admit to myself that there were reasons -- not excuses -- but that there were reasons for that fateful day in October of 1999; that the trauma associated with living in a community where guns are easier to get than sneakers; that the trauma associated with being raped at gunpoint at the age of 14; that those are reasons for me why making that decision, that fatal decision, was not an unlikely proposition.
Because those letters mattered so much to me, because writing and receiving and having that communication with those folks so hugely impacted my life, I decided to share the opportunity with some friends of mine who were also inside with me.
My friends Bill and Cory and Arocks, all in prison for violent crimes also, shared their words of wisdom with the young people as well, and received the sense of relevancy in return.
We are now published writers and youth program innovators and trauma experts and gun violence prevention advocates, and TED talkers and -- (Laughter) and good daddies.
That's what I call a positive return of investment.
Above all else, what building that program taught me was that when we sow, when we invest in the humanity of people no matter where they're at, we can reap amazing rewards.
In this latest era of criminal justice reform, I often question and wonder why -- why is it that so many believe that only those who have been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses merit empathy and recognized humanity?
Criminal justice reform is human justice.
Am I not human?
When we invest in resources that amplify the relevancy of people in communities like Laventille or parts of Brooklyn or a ghetto near you, we can literally create the communities that we want.
We can do better.
We can do better than investing solely in law enforcement as a resource, because they don't give us a sense of relevancy that is at the core of why so many of us do so many harmful things in the pursuit of mattering.
See, gun violence is just a visible display of a lot of underlying traumas.
When we invest in the redemptive value of relevancy, we can render a return of both personal responsibility and healing.
That's the people work I care about, because people work.
Family, I'm asking you to do the hard work, the difficult work, the churning work of bestowing undeserved kindness upon those who we can relegate as garbage, who we can disregard and discard easily.
I'm asking myself.
Over the past two months, I've lost two friends to gun violence, both innocent bystanders.
One was caught in a drive-by while walking home.
The other was sitting in a café while eating breakfast, while on vacation in Miami.
I'm asking myself to see the redemptive value of relevancy in the people that murdered them, because of the hard work of seeing the value in me.
I'm pushing us to challenge our own capacity to fully experience our humanity, by understanding the full biography of people who we can easily choose not to see, because heroes are waiting to be recognized, and music is waiting to be made.
Thank you.
(Applause)