Gifts of the sea

My last day before returning to (thankfully thawed) New York! I gave all these shells back to the beach except for the big one holding the others.

Nothing to see here

Took a dip in the ocean today: 4 minutes at 60˚! Birds unimpressed.

Straw man

This gentleman was my great-grandfather!

Job statistics

Job really is everywhere. His is in fact the very first name of a religious figure to appear in Pew Forum's U. S. Religious Knowledge Quiz. 

He gets to be the answer to a question as well (spoiler alert!).
Our man really gets around - though I could give you the numbers of a few Jobs who don't really match that description, too! The quiz is a cross-section of someone's idea of what religious literacy would look like. But an odd thing happens if (after a few tries) you get all fifteen questions right. Not in the top 1%! What do they know that I don't?

Slice of orange

Still pretty new moon just above the horizon

(in reality closer to the color of a blood orange)

Frida auf Erden

My mother and I went today to a very interesting exhibition. For the first time, all of Frida Kahlo's paintings on display in the same place! A miracle? Better. Nothing on show was painted by Kahlo herself. But all of them were painted. It's an exhibition not of copies but of replicas: not just photographs or 3-D prints, and not from some copy factory in China but the inspired work of "master painters" - tho', interestingly, Chinese ones. To add to the international wonder of it, this is the collection of a private museum in Baden Baden (where Frida's father came from), one of whose two corporate entrepreneur curators, an Italian-Swiss polyglot, has lived in Beijing for a decade. The collection was brought to San Diego by a LA-based promoter whose past successes include exhibitions of replicas of King Tut's tomb and original and recreated sets and costumes from "Star Trek" and "Titanic."

What to say? The exhibition's arrival in San Diego in October - "American premiere!" - was complicated by promotional materials that didn't mention that all the works were replicas, something it's a little hard to believe was an oversight (as was claimed). But I knew they were replicas - it's one of the reasons why I went. Kahlo's not one of my faves, but her almost oppressively self-referential works seemed a perfect test for the need for what Walter Benjamin called "aura" in art: how much would it bother me to encounter her work through replicas? If Kahlo at a remove didn't bother me much, "The Complete Frida Kahlo" might be what it hopes to be - the prototype for a whole new kind of art exhibit. (And yes, it would be cool to have been there at its start!) My other reason for going was the Chinese connection: how did that come to pass?

The exhibition's rationale is interesting. Seeing all the works of an artist (together with photographs and objects from her life, the latter all replicas, too) offers you insights into the oeuvre you can't get any other way. Since much of Kahlo's work is inaccessible (and the pieces in Mexico City aren't allowed to leave the country), the only way such an exhibition could happen would be through replicas. The first premise makes sense to me - it's the thinking behind exhaustive picture books, too - and the second seems valid, too. If picture books are OK, why not an exhibit (assuming that you could get truly effective replicas)? I've actually long thought it a shame that famous works of art can only be seen by country-hopping tourists and rich students of art history.
In this exhibition I did see works I never knew existed - many more self-portraits but also portraits of other people, still lives, etc. - and got a sense of Kahlo's finding her style over time. Did it help that these were painted replicas? I appreciated being able to see the works in actual size, to sense the difference between works on canvas, on masonite, on metal, etc., and when I noticed differences of brushwork I credited them to Kahlo, too. (I do not know enough of painting to sense the difference, as one critic did, between the four Chinese painters.) I don't think I ever forgot that these were replicas, but I did soon stop doubting if I was really encountering Kahlo's work. Am I willing to go as far as one visitor to the Baden Baden museum, who wrote on TripAdvisor

Die Bilder sind Repliken aber meine Gefühle sind ORIGINAL UND ECHT 

(The paintings are replicas but my feelings are ORIGINAL AND TRUE)

I could imagine that Frida lovers might feel the whole exhibition to be a travesty, indeed a profound violation, but one person's desecration may be another's act of reverencce. Many Frida lovers - who, of course, know her primarily through reproductions - have apparently felt her presence in the exhibit. Frida Kahlo's face is, in fact, so much reproduced that back when I taught my course on the meaning of saints, I encouraged students to reflect on the talismanic work of reproductions, teeshirts, fridge magnets and mugs of Frida (along with, of course, Ché Guevara!). Frida is undoubtedly more than just a painter to her devotés. The poster doesn't even show a painting, but a photograph of the artist (below).
We had the chance to talk to each of the two curators (they evidently spend a lot of time with their collection), and there can be no question that they are bona fide Frida lovers, too. While they might stand to make a buck off her now, I don't think their 30-year love of her work had this end in mind. Indeed, I sense that they will spend a lot of time with visitors to the exhibit wherever it goes, as they did with visitors to the museum, sharing the love. The disdain of some critics and the anger of museums confuses and ultimately bemuses them. (They've been able to do an end run around the museums because Frida left her work to Diego Rivera, who left it to the Mexican people, who continue to be the intellectual copyright owners of all her work - and who, after some courting, gave them authorization to commission and display "replicas.")

There's still something confusing to me about the whole thing, though. It's the work the "replicas" are supposed to be doing - work thought to be qualitatively different from what mere reproductions would do. I think it has something to do with "aura" after all: while this is the era of mechanical reproducibility, the "replicas" are touted as "original," "authentic," "one of a kind" works of art: while not Frida's work, they have the aura of being the work of "master painters" - true artists from the renowned arts village Songzhuang, not just copyists. But is aura transferable, or re-inhabitable like this? What would that even mean? (But see below for why you might want it to be possible.) It still jars that the painters are unnamed; the curators claim they wanted to acknowledge them, but these artists, not wanting to be mistaken for mere copy artists, preferred to go unnamed - just a little too convenient, that, even if the story is true!

I don't want to be naive. The intentions of the curators, even if they were purest homage, wouldn't tell us all we need to know. The purposes of the promoter Global Entertainment Properties 1 LLC - which appears to have bought the entire collection from the curators - are clearly commercial; their earlier exhibits didn't offer artist-made replicas but scientifically supervised ones. I don't want art museums and artists to be shut out of the art economy - or is that just nostalgia for a world well lost, well, in any case lost? And is it a bad thing to be facilitating "ORIGINAL AND TRUE" feelings in this unconventional way?

Somehow the China connection feels important to me - and not because I'm suspicious of "made in China." Chinese culture apparently honors the capacity to execute a convincing replica (a big part of traditional arts training in many cultures, of course). It's also in a moment, I imagine, where people are grateful such skills exist, as so much of its own cultural patrimony was destroyed in the cultural revolution, and much is being recreated as we speak. As I sensed already in Shangrila's rebuilt Tibetan monastery Songzanlin last year, fetishization of "authentic" "originals" may just be unhelpful in the context of a history of traumatic loss and recovery. I wonder how much these sorts of considerations affected our curators,as they hobnobbed with artists and businesspeople in Beijing, leading them to conceive of this transgressively unprecedented kind of project. I might look them up in Beijing!

Enough. A word about the images here (from here and here). The replica of the famous "Two Fridas" painting, apparently the first one the curators persuaded/dared a Chinese artist acquaintance to try to replicate. Three scenes from the exhibit - in the first two, replicas of things Kahlo wore in adjacent painting replicas somehow cheapen the experience; in the third, two paintings credited to a specific Chinese artist, the larger an enlargement of a photograph, something he was apparently famous for during the cultural revolution (the face isn't quite right). A famous photo of Kahlo by her last lover, an original. The end of the exhibit, including a replica of a late self-portrait with a portrait of Stalin (when I asked if Kahlo's a concept in China the answer was yes, yes - she had three Mao portraits in her bedroom!); on an easel next to a recreation of her painting studio, a replica of Kahlo's last painting with the words VIVA LA VIDA, as if she's just stepped out of the room.

Library calm

Spent a long day at Geisel, the futuristic UCSD library, strangely silent and wonderfully clean in its eucalyptus grove on the eve of a new academic quarter.

Thought through?

I'm starting to assemble the syllabus for my Spring course, a new one: Buddhism & Modern Thought. Like all my course titles, its constituent terms will be banged together in hopefully spark-producing ways until none looks the way it did at the start. (Recently banged: Religion, Secularism, Dialogue, Ethics, Liberal Arts.) The course description makes clear that now it's the turn of Buddhism and Modernity!

This course uses Buddhist traditions, ideas and questions to reimagine and renarrate the story of modern thought. After engaging debates about the "invention of Buddhism" in nineteenth century Europe, the class explores Buddhist influence in the history of western ideas, "Buddhist modernism" in Asia and the West, and Buddhist understandings of modernity and postmodernity in our own time. Students also conduct extended research on a figure or movement of their choice.

But just beneath the surface is another grand intention: challenging the idea that "modernity" is western and Buddhism not... and thus that "modern thought" is something that happened in the West except to the extent that Buddhist ideas affected it. "Renarrating the story of modern thought" promises a lot more. A global history of ideas, and Buddhist ways of understanding that history. Tall orders, both!

But what about "Thought"? What is Buddhist thought, or a Buddhist view of thought? Is Buddhism even interested in thought? Earlier generations of Buddhologists focused on the ideas, arguments and systems in Buddhism's voluminous corpus of texts, or the rankings, rules, rituals and lineages. Many of today's scholars see things a bit differently.

Once we begin to imagine Buddhists not as sravakas, pratyekabuddhas, and bodhisattvas but as people with lives outside the representations of Buddhist normative texts, the value of these texts for reconstructing Buddhist practice becomes fairly problematic. To be sure they tell us that some Buddhists spent their time writing books.

That's Zen specialist Carl Bielefeld, on a tear. Fun, fun! He goes on

Some of these books clearly had a wide readership; others probably did not. Most Buddhists before modern times couldn't read, and even the literate were lucky if they had access to a manuscript or block print. The books themselves were used for practices beyond reading: they were copied out and illuminated; enshrined on altars and worshipped; entombed in stupas and circumambulated; left in the ground for the future Buddha, Maitreya, to dig up; stuffed into statues; carried as talismans; put into potions; and so on. Similarly, the content of the books served a variety of functions beyond intellectual edification and spiritual training: it was memorized and chanted in liturgy and prayer, depicted in art and iconography, cited as authority (or dismissed as heresy) in debate, invoked by kings as justification for their reigns, recited by children as proverbs and by storytellers as entertainment.

Given the varied ways that Buddhists have used their texts, one cannot help but wonder to what extent they also practiced what is preached in them. Even a relatively concrete text of instruction on, say, a ritual procedure is not in itself evidence that anyone ever performed the ritual. Even from the detailed rules of a a monastic code, we might as easily infer that the monks were not following the rules as that they were; by the same token, the actions proscribed by such rules may have more to do with the monks' imagination than with their behavior....

Carl Bielefeldt, "Practice," in Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism,

ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Chicago, 2005), 240-41

Amen! But I'm not sure how this fits into the new course. The part "Buddhism" plays in the modern discourse of "religion" and the "lived religion" polemic which Bielefeldt's tirade parallels are "Theorizing Religion" topics more than "Buddhism & Modern Thought" topics. Perhaps "Thought" gives me permission to turn away from what people actually did, whatever it is? The history of thought, especially in the fraught area of cross-cultural encounter, is mostly imagination anyway. Hmmmm... I can think of some "Buddhist" ways of taking that and running with it!

Blueskying it

After the sun sets to gossamer cloudsa Geisel/Seuss-worthy cloudscape ushers in an evening of earthshine.

Guter Rutsch

I suppose garrulous Captain Bob of the Adventure Hornblower whale watching cruise finds a way to say "this is shaping up to be one of the best days so far this year!" each New Year's, but it was certainly apt today. The volunteers from the Natural History Museum claimed to have seen twenty-two grey whales in all, something of a record for any day.
To borrow some words from the new year's wish of my Berliner cousin A (who probably had a slightly different kind of friendly moisture in mind than these cetacean scenes): feuchtfreundlicher Rutsch ins neue Jahr!

End of another year...!

Dog days in Del Mar

Friends who just visited showed me a new side to Del Mar. They came with dogs (at right: Buffy) so I had to get to know where dogs are welcome. The highlight is Dog Beach, where pooches run free! But Del Mar, spectacular seen from the bluff above Dog Beach, is dog-friendly, too.

Water patterns, Solana Beach

All you need: sand in two colors, water, sun, gentle waves at low tide.

Chopped and diced

My book's most improbable distributor yet? But I suppose Job knows all about Household Blenders - Centrifugal and Masticating Juicers, too!

Scape

White gold, feathery cloud and a band of blue where they meet

Non-selfie

Is this a "selfie" - word of the year - or, as it's my shadow, a "shelfie"? In any case, there's more than self here. When I took it I noticed just the Christian mugs and Santa-hatted Buddha, but not the blue Pacific, or the Torrey Pine growing from the Buddha's hat.

Bardo bard

Recently finished another great book by Kim Stanley Robinson. Okay, so it's taken me more than a month - I took it along to AAR and Thanksgiving. But there's so much there, it's so smart, at so many levels at once. As he described it when visiting Lang, his work - whether science fiction or alternative history - explores "histories we can never know," works from whose vantage you can reflect powerfully on important moral questions.

The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) imagines how world history might have unfolded had the Black Death taken out all of Europe, and Christianity with it as a player. Central Asia, where Islamic and Buddhist cultures meet, is where much happens (maybe Robinson wrote this book just so he could refer to what we call the Middle East as the Midwest!). The Americas are colonized, but from the Pacific side, by Chinese and Japanese - Yingzhou and Inka are the continents' names; eventually the world's greatest city winds up close to where San Francisco now is - though on the north edge of the "Gold Gate." By a clever plot device most of the Plains Indians are inoculated against Old World diseases, are able to keep the Chinese confined to the west and the Muslim colonists from Firanja (Europe!) to the east coast; they develop the most promising model for peaceful coexistence of peoples (taken up by South Indians liberating themselves from the Mughals), and on it goes. Robinson's stories are always well-researched and very scientifically literate - he's a great science fiction writer, after all - so nothing here happens capriciously. Everything is an inspired reflection of events, tensions, potentialities in our world history. Each is in a style appropriate to the time and place. And, most important, his characters are intriguing, engaging. Their joys thrill, their tragedies devastate.

Robinson's figured out a great way of telling a story encompassing the whole world over centuries: his characters are reborn, passing through the Bardo (from the Tibetan Book of the Dead) on their way, which changes aspect as times change. The same set of characters, known as a jati, appear in each chapter, recognizable by the first letter of their names but also by certain traits of personality. If it gets a little wearisome after centuries, the characters are the first to say so. Rebirth loses its charm eventually.

In the final section, corresponding to our present, scientific discoveries lead to secularization, at least among scientists and intellectuals. Buddhism and Sufism have long since come to an understanding (in the absence of nasty Christian crusaders, it's non-Sufi Muslims who are this book's villains) so the form secularization takes is skepticism about reincarnation. How the author handles that is indicative of his gifts. He has people discuss various views of the shape of history, all of which have, in one way or the other, animated his narrative (some are the work of characters from past chapters). The discussion winds up being about the importance of storytelling, of teleological "dharmic" vs. nihilistic "entropic" history. A wise character recommends:

I suggest that as historians, it is best not to get trapped in one mode or another, as so many do; it is too simple a solution, and does not match well with events as experienced. Instead we should weave a story that holds in its pattern as much as possible. It should be like the Daoists' yin-yang symbol, with eyes of comedy and tragedy dotting the larger fields of dharma and nihilism. That old figure is the perfect image of all our stories put together, with the dark spot of our comedies marring the brilliance of dharma, and the blaze of tragic knowledge emerging from black nothingness. (736)

This would be precious if it came early and unearned in the book, but coming at the end it adds another level of knowing pleasure to the remarkable achievement of the book. And there's a twist at the end (consistent with the approach attributed to the "Samarqandi anthologist Old Red Ink" on 739), as a character whose name starts with B, like our first protagonist long before, seems to be coming gently to the final - earned, enlightened - end of his last (and perhaps only) life... I won't tell you: read the book!

I read the The Years of Rice in Salt, having devoured his more recent 2312, in part as prep for China. It's also one of those death-wish books - like Leslie Marmon Silkoe's Almanac of the Dead - where one contemplates the possibility of his nonexistence. Would it really have made such a difference? Or so little? An interesting challenge religiously, too. As in his more recent 2312, there's a lot of religious questioning in this book (most extensively 141ff and 573ff). I'd love to find a way to use one of his books in a class...

Dreaming of a white Christmas

The star of Torrey Pines State Beach today: wish I'd thought of that!

Venite adoremus

Christmas greetings from our little Mexican nativity set, this time with flowers and plants from the garden, and lots of seeds of local Torrey Pine trees... and a brace of turtledoves!

Fall of night

The sine curve-like pattern of waves on the beach inspired these shots.