400 coups

Followers of Ousted President Storm National Legislature

Bowing to Former Strongman, Opposition Blocks Coup Investigation, Expels Dissenters

Provincial Lawmakers Alter Election Rules to Favor Deposed Premier

Experts Sound Alarm Over Democratic Backsliding in Nuclear-Armed Superpower

Some of the headlines we should have been seeing this past year, as imagined by Times columnist Farhad Manjoo and inspired by foreign policy journalist Joshua Keating's "If it happened there" efforts to present domestic stories in the terms our press uses for developments in other lands presumed less politically stable and enlightened than we. It's becoming clearer and clearer that January 6th was part of a failed coup, but the "provincial lawmakers" - and many national ones, too - were in on it, and are still pushing for it. Accidents of our creaky electoral system give the most unscrupulous of these people frighteningly good odds of taking over the country. But what headline could capture that these purveyors of what they know to be a big lie think their bad faith actions are the will of their god?

Gun-Toting Religious Fanatics Wage Multi-Front 'Holy War' Against Once Stable Democracy

Upaya?

One of the pleasures of teaching at The New School is students from Parsons School of Design who think in creatively different ways. This is the fruit of the final presentation by a student who had undertaken to explore why Jewish people are drawn to Buddhism and was supposed to share some of her findings and process. Instead, or as the presentation, she had her classmates gather around a table and told us we were going to create a mandala for our class. She gave each of us a piece of clay which we were to shape any way we wanted and then add to the "mandala" growing on a piece of crinkled foil. Before next week's (final) class she will fire it in a kiln, and bring it back with paints for us to add color. Everyone was enraptured but I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Perhaps as we apply colors next week she'll share thoughts from the paper version of the project:

Buddhism through its life has expanded far beyond the location of its conception underneath the Bodhi tree. While directionally, Buddhism moved through China toward Japan through the interconnectivity of the Silk Roads, as modernization grew and [given] the diasporic fate of the Jewish people, Buddhism’s journey toward the West has found refuge in the minds of many contemporary American Jews. An aspect of the unique quality of Buddhism is its capacity to preserve preexisting faith and cultures by enriching the practitioner’s devotion rather than using means of destruction or conversion.

While it's unorthodox to think of Buddhism as "finding refuge" rather than offering it, it makes a kind of sense of our clay concoction. Perhaps my student is a JewBu bodhisattva?

[Update 12/17: Our bodhisattva wasn't able to come to class, as someone she had come in contact with had tested positive for covid, so our mandalizing was interrupted. Or maybe a deeper Dharma saw a chance to remind us that in samsara everything is transitory!]

Tis the season

Job's children

"Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts" wrapped up today, with a festival of student creative projects. I was touched by several which mourn Job's lost family, who vanish as collateral damage in most tellings. (Students may have been responding to a scene of burial in Diane Glancy's Island of the Innocent.) 

Especially exquisite was a hand-printed booklet with a "Liturgy for Sleep and Survival," the prayers Jehorah, wife of Job, said each night for each of her lost children as if nothing had happened, tucking each child into bed as she had the night before, and the night before, and the night before that. Each prayer is a kind of dance evoking the personality of the child, the movements described like ritual instructions, and often illustrated with a long exposure of the artist performing it. Here are a few:

What a pleasure, what a privilege, to be able to teach such students.

Seeded

I almost was a rainforest tree for a few minutes today, in a sophisticated virtual Reality experience. Developed by the Rainforest Alliance and shown at Sundance, Davos and now in the exhibition space at the Olympic Tower, "Tree" incorporates not only visual but other senses, with sounds, smells, heat, vibrations. On entering I was given a kapok seed and asked to plant it in a pot of soil. Then I was equipped with a special small pack (which fit in the small of my back), VR goggles (which fit over my glasses), headphones and, eventually, two handheld sensors with which, I was told, I could move my branches. Here's how I recalled it in the subway a little later. 

So I was a tree

First a seed, my backpack throbbing, loamy smell, water beneath me, and dripping down

Pushed against the soil around me, full of roots

Broke through to the surface, a different soundscape - less agitation from my back - and fresher smell

Carpenter ants marching in a line with cut leaves!

Looking down I see a shoot beneath me

At one point spindly twigs, my branches!

As I grew up they thickened, saw their shadow - not the top

A huge parrot perched for a moment on left arm

Washed them about, though default was holding them over my head, when swinging then brushing sounds against others

And now breaking through the top just as night is falling

Milky way and, I later notice, a full moon

Mist below

A booming and sounds of humans far below

Wind

Suddenly a flight of flying birds, fleeing something, there are patches of light below

Fires

They come closer

Looking down, I am on fire

I waved my branches in pointless panic

I can't move

As I'm expecting the flames to climb, blackout

Back again, takes a while to noticed I'm rising, still, now above the canopy, patchy fires in all directions, moon and stars implacable

I notice my tree, me, beside me: I can still wave lower branches, the fire not yet beyond the base

But I'm aloft.

A seed again...

Not a tree in all the ways I'm coming to understand them - what about my growth downward and outward, its constitutive entanglement with fungi and other trees beneath the ground, and many other symbioses above ground too? - but still an interesting experience. What will stay with me won't be the smells and sights but the sense of powerlessness before fire, and the lightning shift from tree back to seed, flying.

As long as earth abides

My pash Rebecca Solnit posted some pictures of beach sand patterns on her FaceBook page whose tones and grains could have been from Del Mar. 

The beauty of the inorganic world will never stop as long as earth abides

she wrote. Her first image was an inverted detail of the one above, which of course doesn't look inorganic at all. "Trees!" cried the comments in delight. Reconstructing how it happened is dizzying, like seeing a tree 

materialize from its top in a rush of invisible downward energy. Wow!

もうもみじ

Japanese maples aglow in December?

Why not? It's the Anthropocene!

Worry dolls

It's time for the final show of student projects in my course on the Book of Job and the Arts. As in years past, projects run the gamut from intense to whimsical and operate in a plethora of media. One evocative project was a non-religious student's desire to make for her friends analogs to the small totem-like objects she's always handled when stressed. I guess having the tokens with me is an act of religious practice on my end, she muses. Making wishes to the tokens and praying to them makes me feel stronger and safe. So I created worry dolls for myself and my friends. Sometimes sharing pain with others helps letting it go. She asked some friends what causes them stress and what they do when overcome with worry and got to work. 

This "worry doll" is for a friend who says she fidgets with her fingers when under stress and seeks out water for consolation for sorrow. Not quite Job's potsherd, but somehow it scratches a kindred itch.

Surround sound

Even with a good portable speaker, watching the live recording of this year's St. Olaf Christmas Festival on a laptop didn't quite give the sense of being surrounded by nearly five hundred student musicians (one the daughter of a friend) - but it came close enough! Or maybe it's that they began, as they apparently always do, with Nimrod from Elgar's "Enigma Variations."

Tabled

A friend teaching at another college told me he traced suspiciously similarly analyses of the Book of Job in papers for one of his courses to this source, a sort of illustrated lecture available on youtube. "An invitation to trust God's wisdom" from the opaquely nondenomina-tional "Bible Project," it's rather less bad than I expected.

Sublime statuary

The small but stunning exhibition "Gilded Figures: Wood and Clay Made Flesh" at the Hispanic Society of America is full of wonders large and small. An anonymous, presumably Mexican, 18th century Mater Dolorosa arrests you with wide eyes. (Her cheeks may once have been streaked with crystal tears.) Scenes by Teresa Roldán (1652-1706) overflow with personified mystical energies. (That's the ecstasy of Mary Magdalen at left below, the mystical marriage of Catherine of Alexandria, right.)But the showstopper for me was the "Resurrection" of Gil de Siloe (active 1485-1501), with a weary Jesus (he's been through hell) poised atop a 3-D tomb surrounded by big sleeping soldiers. One is awake. 

Oh, this one too

Today's is one of those dates that seem like it should be meaningful: it's a palindrome. If you use some fonts, an ambigrammic number, too!

It works also both for the weird American way of sequencing dates and the more rational one which goes from largest unit to smallest.

It's just a concatenation of contingencies, of course, but I don't think there'll be another one of these days for, well, a very very long time.

Job well done

My course on Job and the Arts is almost done. Students are presenting final projects in the discussion sections this week, highlights from which weill be shared with the whole class in next week's final session. So today was my last time to lecture. As I've done before I let a collage remind them of all we've worked through together, and instead ran a final google.doc and discussed three "new frontiers" in Job reception, in biblical studies, political theory and literature. 

The first was Edward Greenstein's stark new translation of the Book of Job - the one which ends with a non-plussed Job declaring 

As a hearing by the ear I have heard you. / And now my eye has seen you. // That is why I am fed up; / I take pity on "dust and ashes." 

The second was William Connolly's framing of his new politics for the Anthropocene in terms of a Jobian "myth" which might accommodate even secularists under its banner of a "dissonant world of multiple forces that do not carry special entitlements or guarantees for any beings" and yet merits a nihilism-defying attachment: 

Its energies solicit our embrace in part because we and it are made of the same stuff.

The last was the scene from NoViolet Bulawayo's novel We Need New Names where the protagonist is reconciled with her father (dying of AIDS, timely on World AIDS day) as children dance a song about the suffering of Job with him:  

Jobho makes you call out to heaven even though you know God is occupied with better things and will not even look your way. Jobho makes you point your forefinger to the sky and sing at the top of your voice. We itch and we scratch and we point and we itch again and we fill the shack with song.

"Performing the problem of suffering" indeed! 

Woman-hating land

A terrifying article in the Guardian shows just what a dangerous place much of the US seems to be on the way to becoming as the Trump-tainted Supreme Court takes up abortion. Without the cover of Roe v. Wade, women would in a majority of states not only be unable to make decisions about their own pregnancies, but liable to criminal prosecution in a horrifying number of ways if their pregnancies don't come to term. An observation of Ellen Willis', quoted in Michelle Goldberg's column in the NYTimes, rings grimly truer than ever: "the central question in the abortion debate is not whether a fetus is a person, but whether a woman is."

Holidaze

Advent caught me unprepared this year, coming so early - just after the Thanksgiving and "Black Friday" and even before "Cyber Monday" and "Giving Tuesday"- though each of those has been announcing its arrival for a long time. It's hard to believe there was ever a time when Christmas shopping didn't jostle with Thanksgiving and even Hallowe'en for attention. Go figure: in this year of disjointed time and strange eclipses, Advent interrupts the jangling bells of commercial Christmas!

Losing all measure of pace

Among the other things we're juggling at the moment, next academic year's curriculum is being put together. I'm toying with the idea of teaching a religion and ecology course focused on trees - "The religion of trees," perhaps? Modeled in some ways on 2017's "Not to scale: on sacred mountains," it would give me a chance to dive deep into the growing literature on the sentience of trees, which readers of this blog know I find irresistably compelling. This goes way way back, Robert Frost's "The Sound of Trees" fascinated me already as a child:

I wonder about the trees.

Why do we wish to bear

Forever the noise of these

More than another noise

So close to our dwelling place?

We suffer them by the day

Till we lose all measure of pace,

And fixity in our joys,

And acquire a listening air.

They are that that talks of going

But never gets away;

And that talks no less for knowing,

As it grows wiser and older,

That now it means to stay. ...

Cumulative

The Time Lapse function on my smartphone is making me fall in love all over again with the vistas out our west-facing window. This filmlet was shot on a whim as clouds scudded in and out of blue, and, besides providing glimpses of the deep blue sky above (with its own cloud formations), confirms what this exercise has helped me appreciate: clouds are not just always on the move but ever changing shape.

Leaf shower

Wind after rain makes for a cascade of fall color...

... and each leaf has a story to tell, if we but knew how to hear it.

Wei to go

Complementing Monday's medieval Christian marvel in the daily calendar of the Metropolitan Museum is today's Buddhist treasure, a gilt bronze altar to Maitreya, dated 524 CE. This, at left, isn't the image shown but a picture of a detail I found online, a supporting bodhisattva below the central figure on an angle. I've been besotted by the grace (and beatific smiles) of Wei Dynasty Buddhist art since encountering it in Korean-inspired statues in the temples of Japan's ancient capital Nara.

Pie

Thanksgiving at Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen. Helping the usual

volunteers, parishioners portioned several dozen pumpkin pies...

Because of covid, meals for the last year and a half have been assembled by small teams inside and offered to hundreds of guests a day in to-go boxes from the church steps. (This is in addition to the food pantry program which offers hundreds of families bags of food three days a week.) On holidays this is supplemented by a dessert, distributed a few meters farther down. Costs of food, you'll have heard, are going up, so demand for both soup kitchen and food pantry keep rising, and costs too. Worth a donation!