Powerful

A first alum came to visit "DIY Religion" today. It's the artist whose work graces the course syllabus! In real life, the nine sculptural feet of "Comfort ⇄ Control" made the pretty 8-inch splash on the syllabus almost vanish in comparison. 

The story of the work made it even more compelling. it was assembled over nine months out of discarded plastic wrappers and shopping bags retrieved in Thailand, Vietnam and London, which the artist discovered could be melted and fused by being ironed (through parchment paper) and then layered and stitched together. The work is part of a years-long feminist engagement with the way we are composed of what we consume... and with the ways we, especially women, are expected to make ourselves into consumables. It's meant to be beautiful and nauseating at once, ominous and enticing, substantial and insubstantial, personal and impersonal. The students, especially the young women, resonated strongly with it.

But what's it doing in a class called "DIY Religion," someone asked? I threw the question back to the class, who articulated ways in which it could be seen to model the "scrapbooking" of religious bricolage, to concretize the way we assemble personal religious worlds out of what we find around us, even to illustrate the fusion of different voices in a seminar. The artist emphasized the tension/dialectic of "control" and "comfort." I didn't need to add anything! I think our time with the work and its maker seeded important questions to our so far pretty uncritical celebration of "DIY Religion." Do we fully "control" any of the things we engage in our DIY?

In the subsequent class discussion I also raised some questions about the individualism of the "DIY" idea, and was inspired to go on a tangent about Japanese medieval Pure Land leader Shinran's distinction between self-defeating jiriki 自力 ("self power") and the tariki 他力 ("other power") of the Buddha Amida accessed when we recognize that we can't transform or enlighten ourselves. (My colloquial gloss: "I can't reach farther than I can reach.") Did the class know what a bodhisattva or Buddha was? Our visitor told us they were enlightened beings, and about their ability wisely to assume whatever form a suffering being needed in order to reach them, and then spoke of their relationship with the friendly gender-fluid bodhisattva 觀音 Guanyin - the subject of their senior work in Religious Studies, back in the day, and a regular interlocutor today!

All in all a very satisfying first encounter of future alums with an erstwhile first-year!