Drawing ritual

What have we been up to this week? Can you guess?

Morning shadow play

Storm-tossed

Nor'easter!

Having fun yet?

Hooked!

Can't really show you a picture of it, but "Religion of Trees" became a carpentry workshop today! My friend and colleague O, a Swedish design provocateur, led us in in a whittling workshop that ended up producing a piece of usable furniture - a coat rack, just in time for the colder weather. O had scouted a freshly fallen branch from Prospect Park and cut it into small enough pieces that each students was charged with whittling down one "hook." All of them were ultimately power-screwed to a stand assembled (also in class) of pieces of leftover wood from the wood shop. Here it is as you'll never see it, posed in an empty hallway without any coats or bags hanging from it. 

It was a deeply satisfying community activity. I'm hoping our hands-on work cutting the flesh of a tree (nice that it was from a fallen branch rather than a cut one) in making something of human use will also deepen our discussions of trees as what Roland Ennos calls "partners in life."

Weapon of mass destruction

Threatening genocide in the house of peace. A desecration. 

In another setting today (someone's discussion of international students' willingness to study in the US) someone said the damage done by this administration will last a generation, even if we kick the bums out. Kick them out we must, but the shame of their violation of every norm of decency, national or international, will endure for a long time.

Wounded/healed

The "Religion of Trees" class returned to the storm-damaged callery pear on 12th Street today. While I was the only person who'd been back to check on it since last week's class (...), I'd noticed that it had, in fact, grown back pretty valiantly. If they hadn't noticed its scars, that's because it wasn't just a wounded but a healed tree! 

Perhaps I was too focused on the scars. Our reading had faulted citified people for exaggerating the negative consequences of felling trees.

Historians ... have for the most part ignored the role of wood. ... The foresters and carpenters who were the real experts were generally humble folk who left few written records, while the few people who did write about wood, such as Pliny the Elder and John Evelyn, were aristocrats and gentlemen with no real hands-on experience. These writers were apt to be swayed by their personal experience of seeing trees being felled, a highly dramatic process that is far more memorable than the almost imperceptible growth of the trees around us that occurs throughout our whole lifetime.  

Roland Ennos, The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization (Scribner, 2020), 245

I confessed that I had never paid attention to that particular tree before the storm, giving them (generous!) cover for not having paid it much heed when drawing last week. This week's prompt was Wounded/healed tree. Compared to last week's drawings, you can really see the tree now.

God of all the nations

Decided to to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine this morning, and the whole world was there. In many senses! I'd known that artist Luke Jerram's "Gaia" was suspended in its cavernous nave, but not that the Cathedral celebrates the opening of the United Nations General Assembly - and this was the day!

Jerram's illuminated globe is designed to make accessible the "Overview Effect" reported by the tiny number of human beings who've seen the earth from space. So beautiful, so integrated (no borders!), so small, so precious... The 7m wide sphere turns gently - one rotation every two and a half minutes. We found ourselves seated beneath it. How big Antarctica is! The other continents were mere ciphers: I noticed the southern edge of Australia, and the southern tips of Latin America and Africa sweeping by on the margins. At a greater distance, when the globe is seen from the side rather than below, the true size of Africa and South America are clear - and of course the vast Pacific Ocean! Those northern hemisphere countries which ruled the roost in the Mercator projection maps just replaced by the UN General Assembly? Hard to see from any angle in this configuration. A skullcap at best!

"Let us pray that we may not steal futures from generations to come," Dean Winnie Varghese said in a sermon on the invaluable work of the UN and of all committed to the right of every human to a life free of poverty, hunger or fear - including fear of climate disruption or genocide. You can find it here.

The music was suitably pleasing (the UN Orchestra was there, making a jolly ruckus), but I was brought to tears by one of the hymns, a setting from Sibelius' Finlandia called "This is my song," written by an American in 1934. It starts

This is my song, Oh God of all the nations, 

A song of peace for lands afar and mine. 

This is my home, the country where my heart is; 

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine. 

But other hearts in other lands are beating, 

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

Word on the street

True that.

Teachable moment?

I tried an experiment in "Religion of Trees" today and it failed. Or maybe it succeeded. 

One of our readings for the day focused on images of trees, especially in art and religion; the other recommended we learn "tree thinking" from actual trees, and in their terms. After exploring the articles, I handed out a sheet with our first sixty class sketches (above). We marveled in the variety of styles and approaches. There's a lot of fancy in them!

After that, I announced we were going to do some "drawing from life," and told them to head out the door of our building and down the street; "draw the last tree on the left, the one just before o Cafe." After ten minutes we were to gather in the Lang courtyard and share what we came up with.

Well and good. The fifteen drawings were spirited and delightful. "We all saw a different tree," I quipped. There was only one problem. I'd selected that tree for drawing because it was one seriously wounded by a blizzard in February; three of its main branches are just splintered stumps now. Would all the students notice in their drawing or only some? In the end it was none of them! (The sketch at bottom right is my own.)

So much for drawing from life! It's not that hard to see the tree's wounds, or its asymmetry, if you're looking but the students were seeing something else: a flourishing, unblemished tree in all its splendor. I guess they were happy to be drawing an actual tree, not just sketching in a classroom. Except... were they drawing the actual tree?

I was initially discouraged that not even one student had noticed. Should I have told them to look out for wounds? Maybe they had never thought that trees could be injured? Or is it better this way: learning through experience that we don't really see trees even when we think we are seeing them, projecting all sorts of expectations and patterns instead. I could have told them this happens, but this shared experience makes the point far more convincingly.

When we gather again next Tuesday we're going back to the callery pear near o Cafe to draw. What will we see then?