Religious, naturally!

I haven't posted about the "After Religion" lecture course for a while, but it's been chugging along too. In recent weeks we've explored religious pluralism, new religious movements (including Earthseed), and new indigenous voices. Today's subject was "Nature/ religion," a topic introduced two years ago. It's evolved a little, now an overview of studies in religion and ecology, an introduction to religious naturalism, and an invitation to broaden the focus of our reflections beyond the human. This was the google.doc of the day:

Sixteen of seventeen participants responded in the affirmative, even though I'd told them the "we" in the question was a little sneaky. "We" refers to two different things in the two halves of the question. It might have been clearer to replace the second with "some of us" but I wanted to see if folks were comfortable with this elastic we. They decidedly are! And this was just primed by watching a short video where Jane Goodall claims chimpanzees are "as spiritual as we are."

Then I got to share my favorite passage from Ursula Goodenough and Terrence Deacon's "Sacred Emergence of Nature," which offers a "we" elastic enough to encompass all forms of life going way back. I'll discuss some of the students' responses in class next week - our last session before a final showcase of student projects - on my way to our final topic, which looks to technology and, of course, AI (a topic which has changed so much since last time that I may have to ask its help).

This contraption by Korean artist Wang Zi Won sent them on their way with today's questions and a taste of next week's provocations...

Streaming

bSo we managed something quite lovely today after all, but not only because students came pre-pared to be spontaneous! 

Some few had brought things: some soil; a braid of sweetgrass; some sage, palo santo and a piece from one of the trees removed last month, with a shell to place under them as they were ignited with a cigarette lighter; a spell, in a tiny bottle. We huddled around these for a while - flame is irresistibly fascinating - then someone noticed some crepe streamers in yellow, red and bright green ("the colors of the maple leaves"!), and these started to wind themselves around the trees, higher and lower, some looser and and some more tautly, swooping and circling like the birds that make a home in this little forest. Sunlight and little gusts of wind came to dance with them, some streamers looping, others swinging and several vibrating with surprising agitation. 

Before we took them down again (I insisted we not leave that to someone else) we let them play on their own. The shared life of our little woods made visible, the spaces of eddying energy between the trees activated, the delight of our own movements around and among them given ephemeral form ... magic!

(But if I hadn't picked the crepe up at Party City on my way in?)

Happily we also had our now regular ritual of drawing to hand, too.

Zine!

Editing challenges and the grainy distortions from multiple copying, redeemed by skills I dredged up from being editor of my junior high school newspaper "The Tide," made a mere flyer into a zine!

Scattering

Educated youth

One of the talented students in "Religion of Trees" designed this flyer for something we decided to do this week. We decided last week, but couldn't decide what to call it besides "gathering." ("Giving thanks" was sort of in the air.) I told the class today that we can't count on the same magic happening as happened last time. For one thing, the trees will be leafless and, given the enthusiasm of our resident leafblower, the ground beneath them will likely be bare, too. But they want it to be "spontaneous." No plan, no preparation. And so it will be! Even if it it doesn't measure up to the literally golden experience we had last time, it'll be a learning for us. And the trees? They won't mind.

To complicate things a little, the last assigned reading of the class was Chinese - a 1984 novella about "educated youth" sent to fell an ancient forest during the Cultural Revolution. It's full of Daoist resonances, but I didn't expect the class to pick up on them. I did half-hope some would look up "educated youth," though... 

But it's also the day after the Thanksgiving break, so I thought it better not to count on students having finished the reading, and fashioned a handout of three passages from Zhuangzi relevant to the book but meaningful on their own, too. Their common theme - the gnarled old trees which survive because human beings see them as useless, and, from this, the limits of human concepts of usefulness.

The longest, from Zhuangzi ch 4, is a little novella of its own. Here's the whole section, translated by Brook Ziporyn, but the most telling part for a class called "Religion of Trees" is the final bit. Carpenter Stony and his apprentice have been pondering a big tree around which humans have built a shrine. (Or perhaps it's being "used as the altar for the spirits of the land.") The apprentice thinks it would make good timber, but Stony tells him he can see it's old wood is useless. 

In a dream that night, however, the tree appears to Carpenter Stony, pities the "useful" trees humans work to death, wittily tells him it's been working on being useless for a long time ... I've finally managed it - and it is of great use to me, before challenging the capacity of a worthless man with one foot in the grave [to] know what is or isn't a worthless tree! Carpenter Stony awakens and recounts the dream to his apprentice, but the apprentice is nonplussed. If it's trying to be useless, he asks, what's it doing with a shrine around it?

Carpenter Stony said, "Hush! Don't talk like that! Those people came to it for refuge on their own initiative. In fact, the tree considers it a great disgrace to be surrounded by this uncomprehending crowd. If they hadn't made it a shrine, they could easily have gone the other way and started carving away at it. What it protects, what protects it, is not this crowd, but something totally different. To praise it for fulfilling its responsiblity in the role it happens to play - that would really be missing the point!"

I don't claim to know the point (worthless teacher!). But the image of a tree mortified by human devotions, though tolerating them as they're better than being cut down, may be enough to keep us from being overly sentimental. Full report on Wednesday!

Last of the leaves

Gnarly!

Spectral leaves

Going,

gone

Clearing

Last stand of the courtyard maples for this year

Softie

Met up with a young French scientist today, an atmospheric physicist. He's the grandson of the professor of literature who was my inspiration in becoming an academic, though he never knew his grandfather, who died before he was born. For that matter, I haven't seen the now physicist since he was a toddler, the year I spent in Paris! Today was very strange, not least because, bearded, he now reminds me of pictures of his grandfather as a youth!  

We spoke English but I kept thinking about what I should say were we speaking French. Perhaps he was speaking French inside too. When I explained that I'm at a university with as good as no sciences, he said that we have "soft sciences." Unfamiliar with this term, I rhapsodized on how English, unlike French and German, generally doesn't use the "science" word for the sciences humaines, though we do for social sciences... And I guess we do speak of "hard sciences"!

All this reminded me of how plentiful are the faux amis - words which look the same in two languages but have different meanings - between French and English. Collège and professeur generally refer to high schools, not universities, for instance. My physicist's mother, with whom I've only recently been in contact again after many years' hiatus, had written that her two sons had both become scientifiques. Does that make me a scientifique, too, albeit not dur but molle?

Bow often

In "Religion of Trees" today I decided to pull out the religion of trees poem, Mary Oliver's 2006 "When I am Among the trees."

When I am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It's simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

I decided today was the day in part because the assigned readings had miffed the three students who had submitted responses - and I suspected the other students hadn't had time to read them at all. The poem triangulates from what was interesting in a peevish Slate review of "the currently popular, everything-is-connected school of tree love" by someone who enjoys the difference of trees on daily walks in the woods and doesn't "expect them to teach [her] anything," and Thomas Merton's reflection on how trees give glory to God by being themselves - but it's not so simple for us sinful human beings. 

And we were able to discuss at least some of the issues through the poem. Working almost word by word through it, we noticed lovelinesses like the move from "especially" to "equally" in the second and third lines, and the way the phrases of the final stanza - from the trees - overflow the orderly lines of the poem, cascading like light through a tree's branches. But we spent the most time on the second stanza's account of the life the poet tries to lead, however imperfectly: a life of discerning attention to goodness, anchored in slow walking and frequent bowing (a lovely practice). It's from dejection at her failures to do this consistently that the trees "save" her with their gladness.

This saving seemed deeper than what the peevish Slate reviewer finds on her walks, taken to escape the exasperations of human contact, and less off-putting than Merton's talk of sin. Are Oliver's trees "teaching" her to flee her humanness into some kind of fantasy of arboreal being? It's not that simple. What's simple is the appeal of the repeated invitation to abide with them, not the doing of it.

Another red

Oak 

Unstrategic

With one thing and another, the last few years at The New School have been years of stopping and starting, so when our faculty were invited to a "visioning session" as part of a Strategic Planning process initiated by the president who walked out over the summer, we were a little weary. Strategic planning is be a good thing, of course! But we've been tumbling through overlapping accreditation, strategic planning and, well, presidential search processes, each of which would work better if the others were in place... So is it any wonder we drew a blank when asked to imagine The New School in 2030? Half of us (perhaps half of each of us) balked: so there will be a New School in 2030? The other half scoffed: that's just around the corner, too close to bring about meaningful changes. Plus ça change...

Among colleagues

Faculty meeting!

To ash we return

Our class doesn't usually draw from life but today we did. The big ash tree next door, whose brilliant yellow leaves had provided the materials for our improvised response to the removal of the dead maples from the courtyard last month, has now dropped all of its leaves, and, thanks to a leaf blower, they're gone without a trace.

From the 4th-floor skybridge, we drew the knotty skeletal branches of the ash peeking out above the remaining red of our maples. One student remembered the gift of the leaves with a golden heart. Another, recalling that the shade from the ash contributed to the dying of the maples, writes "the killer." Others just drew!

Last colors

Mary, don't you weep

My first experiment with generative AI that transforms words into images, something called Firefly which comes with Adobe. For any prompt it conjures up four images, which you can then tweak by choosing art or photo, a range of styles and moods, and of course altering the wording of the prompt. As with ChatGPT's glib words, the images can be pretty cheesy, and the four often offer a demo-graphically balanced set of images (as for "tree teachers" above).

But some of the images can be quite lovely (until you fully process that these are fake photo-graphs), like these gene-rated from a few sen-tences about torrey pine trees. But the coolest thing is that you can add to all this an image of your own for "reference" - colors and textures, I gather. Still, there be monsters. As I played around with more and less specific and more and less obscure prompts, I decided to see if it could generate something like an image I'd recently enjoyed at the Met, of Jesus, his mother Mary, her mother Anna, and her mother, too. Though I just put in Jesus, Mary and Anna this was a bridge too far; instead of Anna I kept getting Joseph. For fun, I added a photo I took of a voluptuous tree spirit I took at the "Tree & Serpent" show of early Buddhist art. 

And got these remarkable painted statues of holy families (the Indian "reference" I sent was just carved red sandstone, not painted). But wait. This Mary is a bearded! What's confounding isn't that Firefly got things so wrong but that it's so convincingly wrong.

Sunburst

Infinitesimal

We're small, very very very very small. Caption for this photo, from the Euclid Telescope: One thousand galaxies belonging to the Perseus Cluster with more than 100,000 additional galaxies visible farther away. Each can contain up to hundreds of billions of stars.

Falling into place

The leaves of Lang courtyard maples started turning color over the weekend, as the ash leaves we'd laid out around the holes where three maples had been taken out faded to yellow, our looping patterns blown away. In class I asked the students to describe what we'd done to those who hadn't been able to attend, and then asked those to describe what it sounded like to them. To one, we'd built a 

shrine. Other students added acts of worship or remembrance, honoring the root systems, actions (as in action art or mutual aid actions), natural growth; for one it felt "cyclical," the ash tree offering "payment" for having contributed to the dying of the maples beneath. We all agreed it had been very special. 

I emphasized that it had been spontaneous but it didn't come from nowhere. Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose Braiding Sweetgrass we started today, describes the Original Instructions as "an orientation, not a map." We went down to the courtyard last week ready to respond. 

But: what happens next time? There are at least seven more dead trees down there right now. We know they will be taken out. Class wanted to be there to respond when that time comes, but didn't want to prescribe our response, rather letting that moment, too, inspire us. Well and good: no religion of the courtyard trees just yet! But, I pressed, why wait until they're removed? Someone expressed a desire to offer a kind of "hospice" care once we knew they were going to be taken away. But why wait until they're dead at all? Why not celebrate a life while it's still shared? We'll see if these seeds take root ...

Fortuitously, Kimmerer was the assigned reading for today, and, after realizing that her "plant teachers" were not a metaphor but a relationship with arboreal people, we turned to the story with which the book begins, articulating the Original Instructions, "Skywoman Falling." While some tellings of this story tell us who this falling woman was and when and from where she fell, Braiding Sweetgrass begins with no backtory, the woman in free fall from a hole suddenly opened in the sky, as witnessed by other animals below, who come together to catch her, and wind up, with her, creating Turtle Island. It's something none of them had planned or even known could be, but all knew what to do, geese geesing, turtles turtling, muskrats muskratting, I proposed, alluding to the "grammar of animacy" of Kimmerer's Potawatomi language, 70% of whose words are verbs. And humans humaning - which means? Dancing, expressing gratitude that this world, which could not have been - one student said it seemed "almost accidental," to which I added gratuitous - continues to be created by all the peoples of our world.

It seemed only slightly heavy-handed to suggest a parallel between the accidental creation of Turtle Island and the way things fell into place in our unplanned shrine for the maples last week. How do we make this more than a one-off? 

The drawings above are of "Skywoman falling with a bundle in her hand." The student whose image is in the center made the connection with last week's ritual clear.

Shell game

One thing that might have disrupted the east-west teleology of "Acts of Faith" is a map like this one. Not just because it includes no boundaries of modern nation states, defamiliarizing already, but because of the way the land, decoupled from the convention of putting north at the top, seems unmoored. It's more like a world growing from the shell of a turtle! It also makes the spread of European settlement and nation-building seem haphazard and contingent - perhaps just the pull of gravity downward - and not final.

Manifests

Went with some students and colleagues on a curator-guided tour of a new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, "Acts of Faith: Religion and the American West." It's an intriguing show, which upends the "manifest destiny" myth by simply replacing it with fascinating local stories, and framing it not with famous images of western civilization drawn by providence ever westward but with a repainting of one such image by Seneca artist Ernest Smith in the 1930s, proving, by his very repainting of it, the falsehood of the "vanishing Indian" myth. Indians remain central to a story of diversity. The show starts with quotes 

demonstrating that religion was an idiom in which ideals were articulated, communities conceived, landscapes claimed, biases challenged and a national culture forged. Yet despite the best efforts to replace "manifest destiny" with new stories, the overall exhibition can't but reproduce its shape: a story which moves westward, bringing otherwise unknown lands into history. But the land wasn't waiting to be discovered...

What might really upend the narrative? After our tour and some discussion, some students and I explored "The Collection: New Conversations" upstairs, which brilliantly dislodges all sorts of received views and images with remarkable newer works. A case in point which left us stammering with admiration and delight was Shinnecock ceramicist Courtney M. Leonard's "Contact, 2,021" (2021), composed of 3500 porcelain shells bearing the artist's fingerprint, in colors evoking both the purple and white quahog shells used to make wampum, shell-adorned deerskins worn by her Shinneckock ancestors, and the map of the Empire State. 

On closer approach, many of these porcelain shells, including all those along the shores of Long Island and the length of the Hudson River, 

prove to be individually painted, evoking now seashell patterns, shards of Dutch porcelain and old engravings or photographs. 

Enraptured, we could have spent all afternoon in this work. Might something like this have reminded the viewers of "Acts of Faith" that Turtle Island had a history and spiritual significance before its de- and desacralization by those venturing westward voluntarily and involuntarily (displaced Indians, enslaved Africans, persecuted Mormons all have their moment in the exhibition), that these movements aren't the first in this divine land - or the last?

Driving while religious

On my way to pluralism and multiple religious belonging in "After Religion" today, we took a quick tour of the eponymous COEXIST bumper sticker. Students had watched a documentary about how a Polish poster designer's elegant monotheistic work became the rather more visually chaotic American phenomenon (not with his blessing) but it fell to me to introduce the world of COEXIST varieties, parodies and critiques. World religion logos repurposed as letters can spell TOLERANCE or CORNDOGS but also REPENT or even JESUS CHRIST.  

I settled for one from some cranky Evangelicals blaring CONTRADICT, conveniently posing the question that would lead us into exclusivism/ inclusivism/pluralism. But what was even more fun was thinking about these as bumper stickers, a quite specific form of (attenuated) communication. I remarked that, vague though it be, I'd rather share the road with someone sporting COEXIST than most bumper stickers - though one would need further research before predicting better road behavior. Seeing the US religious landscape as a highway was a bonus!

Tree wake

I thought the story of the day was going to be that the school paper just published an article about the courtyard trees "The Courtyard Trees are Dying. Has Anyone Noticed" but much more happened today. A student who happened to be sitting in the cafe by the courtyard wrote me an urgent email at 9:30: "They are taking down the trees in the courtyard!!!" Three of the most precarious of the dead trees along the western wall were pulled out, cut up and spirited away. I arrived on campus an hour later, in time to nab some of the last pieces; some students had expressed the hope they might use the wood.

In our classroom we spent some time with these three trunk sections and one upper branch, some students cradling or stroking them, others closely inspecting the history etched on and - because these trees had died - beneath the surface of the bark. The heartwood of one was still pink. There's been altogether too much death in the courtyard, one student said, and we learned that many birds have been crashing into the windows and dying, their broken bodies discreetly buried by students in a corner of the courtyard. Then a tiny spider emerged from a hole in one of the branches and it was clear we should head down to the courtyard.

We didn't go down with any plan in mind, but something happened. The removed trees had been so successfully spirited away that you hardly saw the holes. Only one left a visible scar, with bits of torn root showing. Students knelt down to put their hands in the soil. All three of the trees had already parted ways with their roots. Then someone, noticing the pretty lozenge-shaped leaves fallen from the ash next door, placed some leaves in a ring around one of the holes, and the others swiftly followed. Eventually the centers were covered too.

Then the leaf nimbus of the largest - the one with the exposed roots - began to flare out like a smiley sun, and then these became roots which meandered in all directions, connecting to all the other trees in the bed, absent and present, living and dead. By this time all of us were busily at work, our conversation having subsided into a rich, concentrated silence, students wordlessly coordinating their gathering and placing of leaves. Eventually one student thought the trees in our bed wanted connecting to those across a walkway and a leafy bridge flowed over to embrace the bases of several other trees.

When someone suddenly came up the ramp with a pull-cart, we thought the leaf bridge would be scattered but it was fine. But our relief was short-lived. Leaves had been falling with increasing frequency, feeling like a blessing of our blessing, but then one of the wind gusts that had been sending the leaves our way swept through the floor of the courtyard forest. One student said she'd been pained at the thought that our handiwork wouldn't last, but had assumed this would be because of things humans did, not the wind!

In fact the scattering of the leaves seemed a contribution of its own to our gesture of marking the passing of trees. Soon we scattered too - students had other classes to get to - but some of us tried to capture our skeins of sorrow from various angles before the wind rendered them unrecognizable. I found you could see them, like lines of flame tracing the living links of trees, from my office window, 4 floors up. 

All told, it was kind of magical. Unplanned, organic, a celebration of community and care, a rendering visible of the preciousness of connection. Like the pattern for a dance, I offered to a student, a dancer, who replied: "it already is a dance." Another student later told me he was impressed "we all knew what we had to do" but I wonder if it wasn't something more spontaneous, more open to the spirit of the place and the moment - and the trees. We knew we should do something, but didn't know, before we went down, what. It was the ash leaves that set our shared concern and creativity alight. 

Next time - other trees will certainly be taken down - we hope we'll be able to be part of it again. Perhaps the leaves that time will be the red leaves of the living members of this maple community, or some other inspiration will guide us. And we'll invite other members of the community of the courtyard, other students whose learning the trees have been witness to, perhaps even the birds.

Some of these images were taken by students, as was the video.

Unhappily relevant

It was a little disturbing to find materials I'd included in one of my lectures in "After Religion" quoted in a piece in the New York Times. This isn't because I don't wish in that class to be au courant, but because that was the lecture "The Elephant in the Room," about white Christian nationalism in America and its efforts to dial back the clock, and this was a piece about the unassuming new Speaker of the House of Representatives. The founding director of PRRI, some of whose recent studies I discussed with our class, is quoted saying:

while Johnson is more polished than other right-wing leaders of the G.O.P. who support this worldview, his record and previous public statements indicate that he’s a near textbook example of white Christian nationalism — the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.

Those last words name the dangerous lunacy of this theological persuasion more clearly than anything else I've seen. Even as, well, isn't that what lots of people de facto think "America" is about? Happily our students have been exposed to a richer and more complex history, and the need for "new stories" - stories in the plural.