Gathered around the storyteller

Yet another constella-tion of hybrid learning! An alum visited class today, from the Pacific Northwest, and my laptop made it an intimate encounter!

Our island home

In "Religion of Trees" yesterday we learned about Ethiopian church forests - the "forest islands" anchored by churches in a land that has over the last century lost 90% of its forest. Here was a religion that takes trees seriously, revering and protecting trees around its sanctuaries. Many now have walls to stop the encroachments of agriculture and herding, we learned, an idea which, forest ecologist Alemayehu Wassie Eshete, explained, "came from the church itself." 

If you see the rural church, they have the walls to protect the inner circle, which people think is the most sacred place. So let's move that wall to the outside and include the forest as part of the church itself. 

Students were enchanted at these "church forests" of the oldest form of Christianity but missed the real story. The walls encircling the diminished forest, making it a "part of the church itself," are not part of an ancient Ethiopian Orthodox tradition - though they might be an extension of it. A century ago, the only church walls kept the forest out. But my point wasn't that these residual "church forests" were historically inauthentic, but rather that they are soulful responses to the present. Is it completely wrong or just incomplete to say 

Preserved as an act of faith for centuries, these forests are proof of the power of spiritual ideas to create sustainable landscapes. Seen from above, the forests are demarcated by the stark boundary between sacred and secular, church and field, work and rest. They are places detached from everyday life yet central to it, informing human work and relationships within society. Like other objects within Orthodox traditions, the forests direct the worshipper to look beyond what is visible. 

Much to ponder - and topics for further research! Students are working on littler research projects and I wanted to prod them beyond the often facile and always ahistorical narratives of news pieces in religion and ecology. But I wanted them also to consider whether we, also inhabiting a land that's been deforested, aren't in the same situation as these Ethiopian church innovators, discovering something precious and perhaps even otherworldly in the remnants of what to our ancestors would just have been the world.

Under attack!

Brought my "Religion of Trees" students down to the Lang courtyard to draw a group/grove/ copse/forest of trees - trees are happiest when not on their own - and all was well until we noticed we weren't the maples' only visitors. These spotted lanternflies I managed to smush but most were beyond our reach.

Unhumanistic age

Someone at the Washington Post "Department of Data" was having altogether too much fun naming the graphs in their discouraging article about the collapse of humanities majors in American universities. It may be that results would be different if most students didn't have to go into such debt to get their education, but the results are still a sucker punch. I note that "Religion" is second from last here: majors, never numerous, have fallen by nearly half in just the last ten years. I suppose it make sense, given the rise of the religious "nones." Still...

Klimt

It's not in my budget, but I do hope that whoever buys Gustav Klimt's 1903 "Birchenwald," currently up for auction, lets other people see it! Klimt's square nature paintings have been favorites of mine since I saw them at the Belvedere as a tween, like this one, "Blühender Mohn."

And it was a poster of "Der Park," with its apparently solid block of green really a firmament of improbable purples and yellows (it resides at MoMA), that I long had on my wall... poor deciduous forest-starved Southern Californian! Was Klimt one of my teachers in seeing trees?

Seeds

My first year students are meeting with a peer mentor today so I took the chance to check out the Nest Summit Campus at the Javitz Center, part of New York Climate Week. I wanted to see David Opdyke's apocalyptic "Someday, all this" presented by the Climate Museum (images below), and taste what a gathering of ecopreneurs (a new word I learned) of the "climate solutions movement" feels like. (I also was curious to see the Javitz green roof.) I wasn't there long enough to really say, but I did catch a catchy talk by someone from Unilever on an app designed to help people reduce food waste in their refrigerators, and attended the launch of the "Seed to Forest Alliance" by an organization named Terraformation. 

Global efforts as part of the UN Decade of Ecoystem Restoration to plant a trillion trees require more, and more diverse, seeds stocks than are currently available, especially if the planting is to restore native, biodiverse forests. The allied organizations on many scales, are working together to address the problem. We heard from a traditional seed collector, an advocate for restoring mangroves along the world's coasts, the director of a digital hub linking 120,000 sites of "nature regeneration" across the globe, as well as the Silicon Valley engineer-turned-entrepreneur behind Terrraformation. Our moderator was from the nonprofit American Forests. The discussion was kicked off by someone from the World Economic Forum's 1t.Org, who opined that she was sure that even if someone developed a way to take all the carbon out of the atmosphere without "nature-based solutions." everyone in the room would still care about forests, right?

I do, of course, and felt buoyed by the large number of people attending the event, and the many more to whom they're connected doing this important work. And I was delighted when the moderator asked each panelist to introduce themselves and their favorite species of tree: mangrove, weeping willow, Texas ebony, strangler fig, banyan and white pine. (Actually I was given a little pause at the glee with which a strangler fig was remembered from a settler American's childhood experience in Costa Rica, its host long rotted away leaving it a delightful cylindrical ladder to the forest canopy.) Yet my readings left me noticing that the only species mentioned in the discussion were humans and the trees which matter so much to us.

The can-do vibe was quite different from Opdyke's scenes (composed of modified old postcards; you can zoom into individual cards on the website) of a landscape in free fall, giant bungee cords not enough to hold together an Anthropocene world beset by raging fires, creeping vines and giant butterflies - and voracious caterpillars.

Elephants never forget

Our wonderful undergraduate research librarian came to "Religion of Trees" today to help students with their projects on trees in world religions. She invited us to follow along her various tricks and strategies, and I followed her advice. Before I knew it I'd found a digitized version of the 1897 book The Sacred Tree. Its illustrations are included, among them one which pertained to our topic for the day - the pipal tree, one of whose religious roles is as the Bo tree at whose foot the Buddha attained enlightenment. Wild elephants worshipping the tree!

The drawing is of a relief from the ancient stupa site at Bharhut (2nd century BCE), one of the earliest Buddhist sites - and long long before representations of the Buddha found their way into iconography. I was happy to find a more recent image online. Excited to see what students make of a religion of trees that's not just human.

Change is not a metaphor

In my first year seminar we were reading about efforts to connect the Anthropocene to the ongoing shockwaves unleashed by settler colonialism, and I happened on a short recent piece by Eve Tuck, one of the authors of the hugely influential essay "Decolonization is not a metaphor." Invited by an arts organization under the rubric of "Invitations toward reworlding," Tuck proposes that we get in the habit of asking each other about our "theory of change." 

What is your theory of change these days? 

It truly is my favorite question. It definitely isn’t small talk, not because it couldn’t be small talk, but because we are out of practice with having discussions about our theories of change. It could be what we talk about when we are on an outing with an old friend, when we are texting before a date, when we wake up startled in the night, tangled in the covers. It could be what we talk about as we brush our children’s hair. What we sing about in songs. What we whisper with our hands covering our hearts and bellies. What we breathe over one another, when it is safe to share breath again. 

When we don’t talk about how we think change happens, we are left to assume that we are operating from the same, unexpressed, neoliberal and colonial theory of change. The default theory of change in settler colonial racial capitalism is that if we document the damage, get enough people to pay attention to it, then together our voices will convince so and so (who is in charge) to give up power and resources. This theory of change makes us over-invest in spectacle and empathy as an emotion that leads to change, in the innocence of the powerful, in the rationality of the powerful, and in their power to wield their power over us. It does nothing to contest the order of power, how they got that power, and their influence over our lives. They are the actors, and we are the acted upon. If we can prove our pain to them, they will be made aware, and this awareness will lead them to lessen our pain. We know this is a lie.

She's not recommending a particular alternative theory, though her work certainly suggests some, but rather making talking about this a common, even a mundane activity "so that we are not reliant on a broken theory of change." (There's a theory of change in trying to open up and reshape our everyday conversations, of course!)

While you’re signing the rider, riding on the subway, writing on the subway, reading your writing aloud at the reading, writing to your readers, writing home, running away from home, making your home, making-meaning, being mean, being refusing, being care, being careful, being kin, being beyond kin, caring for older-than-human kin, being full with care, let us be curious enough about one another and the world and the future to ask, What is your theory of change these days? Let this be the way we know and love one another. ...

Students weren't sure what to make of this invitation, so we'll take it up again next week, trying to articulate some other theories of change. The topic is germane also given where the syllabus is leading: week after next we are reading Parable of the Sower: 

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God 

Is Change.

Ungiven tree

It was bound to happen: in "Religion of Trees" today we denaturalized "trees." Are trees a naturally occurring set or category of beings? Is there anything more cultural than conceptions of nature and natural kinds - cultural and political? We got there by way of "tree diagrams" and the image they promote of the way the world works.

Chorister

I only had the briefest of stints on our church choir before the pandemic sent us all into

zoom boxes. What a joy to be at it again, with nicely contrasted

anthems, one from the nineteen fifties and the other from the fifteen hundreds! 

Three week mark

Specialists in "retention" say that most college first year students who wind up drop out or withdraw decide to do so within three weeks, so first year faculty advisers are encouraged to check in with their charges in the third week. This is our third week and I did as I was told, and while a few students didn't make it to the meetings ( ... ), those who did suggested the graft has been successful. Indeed, since I framed the conversation as about "tell me about your other classes, and what they're adding up to," I wound up green with envy at all they are learning about... and in their first weeks of college! I'm not thinking of the three weeks of Hegel in an aesthetics lecture, since that's an upper level class not designed for first years (but my two who found their way into it love it - and one even knew Hegel from high school!), but of those taking seminars in cultural studies, writing about animals, Pascal, cli-fi, poetry, capitalism studies, the Frankfurt School, doubt, "the souls of Black women," digital journalism, the politics of revenge, Brechtian cinema (?!) and much more. We do offer something different than most places, which sedate their first years with huge introductory lecture courses. Imagine getting such rich fare the same time you're living on your own for the first time, in a city for the first time, making decisions for yourself for the first time...!

Spotted

Behold the spotted lanternfly, an invasive species that poses such a threat to crops and trees in New York (it has no predators) that we are encouraged, should we see one, to squish (that's the term) it. These two are squished - and I did the squishing. The one on the left I 

despatched, with my shoe in my hand, on a wrought iron railing on West 10th Street yesterday. The one on the right I took care of by stomping today, in the Lang courtyard - a movement which led everyone quietly reading to look up in horrified disapproval. Painful.

What is (this) school for?

I speak to the first year fellows each year to help them plan a workshop around New School history, and this year I had the fun of speaking together with someone involved in the Women's Legacy at The New School project which has transformed our understanding of this history. What a different story their work on the "Founding Mothers" lets us tell - not university men planning an even better university, but an experimental school, one of many projects developed and supported by progressive suffragette women, projects which range from the Urban League to the New Republic.

My contribution, more hands-on, was a timeline for the fellows to use in explaining how The New School of today came together. I've offered something like this for a few years, but this year I included two more dates than before (1919 founding, 1933 University in Exile, 1970 merger with Parsons, 1985 founding of Lang, 2015, consolidation of the College of Performing Arts). One was the year the program our speaker from Women's History came from began, the 1943 establishment of our first undergraduate degree program. But the other was pitched to the fellows and their first year charges.

1919

1933

1943

1970

1985

2015

2035

2035 - the year Lang turns (inshallah) fifty! I included it also to acknowledge that we find ourself at another moment of transition and redefinition. Slowed by the challenges and the threats of the pandemic, we're in this year finally embarking on deferred strategic planning and the bold exploration of mission and vision the board selected our new president to spearhead. Our history suggests the future may not be straightforwardly conformable to the past. 

The name of this segment of the First Year Workshop is "What is (this) college for?" The intention seems to be to engage New School's quixotic history as a resource for clarifying the goals of their own experience of higher education. Where do they hope to be in 2035, how can the school help them get there and - extrapolating from that - where might that suggest the school itself is heading? 

The fellows' response was a surprise. One said she thought that by 2035 our college would have become independent of The New School, since they're so different in ethos and mission. This elicited in others expressions of longing for greater integration with the rest of the school... but it became clear that they have few experiences of and no sense of identification with The New School as a whole. Pandemic isolation has surely contributed to this sense of balkanization, but I was still surprised by it. Even those who yearned for greater integration voiced no particular reason for why integration of this ragtag group of schools was desirable. ... The history continues!

Patterns

I promised a while back to tell you about Bruno Munari's Drawing a Tree. Well, today it kicked off the drawing part of "Religion of Trees," something I know many students were anxious about. The exercise, inspired by an observation of da Vinci's known as "Leonardo's Law," helps children (of all ages!) craft fun and surprising trees by attending to only one thing: the branch that follows is always slenderer than the one before it. Focusing on trees which split into two at each branching (others are possible), Munari shows what a huge range of tree types can be generated this through simple iteration. Through thick and thin and curvy and wavy, The pattern is always the same. 

This growth pattern is so simple that anyone can draw it, he writes. Let's draw it then, even though we know that it's a pattern and that it will be difficult to find such a perfectly drawn tree in nature. To grow so exactly, a tree would have to live in a place where there was no wind and with the sun always high in the sky, with the rain always the same and with constant nourishment from the ground all the time. There would have to be no lightning flashes nor even any sharp changes in temperature, no snow or frost, never too hot or dry... But after sharing all manner of trees in this pattern, he brings us back to reality with some hurt and wounded trees ... though here too, he insists, you can still see the pattern - and so can the tree. New branches still shoot out, though, as though nothing has happened.

I think the exercise went well, and followed nicely from a discussion of the problems with idealized and generalized images of trees. (We were reading about the origins of "tree diagrams" in medieval books, none of which had much of anything to do with the way trees actually look or grow - like this illustration from an 1552 Corpus Iuris Civilis, in Manuel Lima, The Book of Trees [2014], 33.) Munari's is a drawing which, while simplified, doesn't abstract too much from the varieties and realities of tree growth. Let's see if the student start drawing in their little MUJI notebooks on their own!

Cloister garden

Is there anything happier than a garden after a rain?

Chinese Teachers' Day

Two missives from China I was happy to receive, one just for me 

from one of the students in last month's summer course, the other a Facebook missive from an English friend who teaches in China. 

How nicely he's put it: a civilizational treasure! 祝大家教师节快乐！

Joe

Happy to have encountered the work of Jannis Kounellis (1936-2017), a Greek sculptor who identified as an Italian painter. Senza titolo [Bilanchino e caffè] dates from 2014 and now resides at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, just an hour away. The scent of coffee is long past, though.

武汉加油

This otherworldly picture of folks hanging out on the dried Yangtze riverbed near Wuhan (masked, of course) demands to be used in some Anthropocene connection. If I teach "Anthropocene Humanities" for Renmin again next summer perhaps I'll put it on the syllabus...

A-quipping

It can be unkind to point out people's misspellings, but sometimes they're so inadvertently witty and unwittingly wise that I feel grateful for them. Typo or poetry? (Typoetry!) Students, thank you for these:

Lest I spoke, the more I heard; and in this state of being the entire vast expense of the cosmos felt truly free

I think I would be better aquipt to attend The New School in the 1920s or 1930s than I am in 2022

Treetop

This is the view from the window of our classroom for "Religion of Trees." There are trees to be seen if you peer down, and if you look up. But it's clear they are at best supporting characters in the story of the human city. A useful moral, I suppose. But to get students to think of trees as more than props and backdrops on the stage of human lives and histories perhaps unpropitious. Will they recognize the wisdom in old Max Müller's observation that

Trees, mountains, rivers and the earth seem all very tangible and completely perceptible objects, but are they so? We may stand beneath a tree, touch it, look up to it, but our senses can never take in the whole of it. Its deepest roots are beyond our reach, its highest branches tower high over our head. Besides, there is something in the tree which, for want of a better name, we call its life, and which to an unscientific, and possibly to a scientific generation likewise, is something mysterious, something beyond the reach of our senses, and it may be, of our understanding also. A tree, therefore, has something intangible, something unknowable, something infinite in it. It combines ... the finite and the infinite, or it presents to us something infinite under a finite appearance.

Max Müller, Natural Religion (London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1889), 150–51; qtd. in David L. Haberman, People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India (Oxford, 2013), 32

Irreligion

Time for another class-generated word cloud around "religion," this time from my "Religion and the Anthropocene" first years. These students are mainly in the class because of "religion" in the course title - but they're at this college in part because we're notoriously irreligious. Their thinking gravitated always to malevolent conservative Christians: with theocratic targets on their bodies, who can blame them? Still...

Come Labor On

Donated plastic cups before and after the Holy Apostles parishioners brigade filled them with ice cream (chocolate or vanilla), whipped cream, chocolate sauce, rainbow sprinkles, a maraschino cherry and a little flag. A homeless guest, receiving one of these handfuls of Labor Day cheer, wistfully mused, "What ever happened to America?" This?

Orderly retreat

Chlorophyl departing a parched leaf

Transformative

Needed to kill time in a Barnes & Noble today - first time in such a bookstore in years - and discovered worlds beyond my imagining. Just beyond several aisles of manga (like in Japan!), under a huge wall of graphic novels (like the BD in France!), came an American original: "Self-Transformation." (On another wall, under "Religion," are as many boxed versions of the Bible as this one offered of the Tarot.) Interesting to consider what still needs to be a physical book... 

And what pleasures of discovery are offered by an IRL bookshop! I found a charmer, pleasing to hand and eye, featured on the end between manga and LGBTQ+ young adult novels:  高宇洋 Laura Gao's Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American. Raised first by grandparents in the countryside outside Wuhan, then with parents in Texas, and navigating and somehow integrating American schools, stereotypes of Asians and much more... this is self-transformation!

Inundation

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, another unhinged-climate calamity - one third of the land flooded, villages destroyed, farmland devastated. (Image)