Memento mori

organ Library has an exhibition on Hans Holbein up which I went to see with my friend J. There weren't many of his celebrated portraits but instead we learned of Holbein's work in other genres. And in this cossetted place we felt - in ways which may or may not have been intended - the uneasy relationship of art and wealth, and how they together try to escape death by staring it down. The highlight was a series of woodblock prints Holbein designed and engraver Hans Lützelburger carved around 1526 which took the dance of death motif in virtuosic new directions. In scene after wittily designed scene, death surprises people in the midst of their lives. Here we have Death and the Clergyman, Priest, Monk, Nun, Old Woman, Doctor, Rich Man, Merchant, Skipper, and Knight, each a marvel - and only a fourth of the total set. Frustratingly, the exhibition gave little information about how these objects were used and by whom (some showed up in books) but it was hard to imagine the main effect was, or was intended to be, devotional. (Likewise the Death Alphabet of 1523, from which I took my opening capital.)

What about an image like this one, one of my favorites, Death and the Countess. You might think it would discourage wealthy people from ostentatious ornamentation - surely a temptation to the impish skeletons of death, ready to hang garlands of bones around your neck? It's a more complicated dance, as another part of the exhibition, devoted to opulent medallions Holbein also designed, suggests.

None of his medallions survive but some of his designs do, and this painting, of an unidentified woman wearing one. Centered on a luminous dark gemstone, it tells the hardly joyful story of Lot's Wife, seen at the moment at which she is punished for looking back at the burning cities of Sodom and Gomorrha and becomes a pillar of salt. Or precious stone? How is this supposed to communicate the piety of the wearer? She's learned from Lot's wife not to ... what? But it turns out these kinds of broaches and medallions were all pushing the envelope. The exhibition included a snazzy hatpin of John the Baptist's head on a silver platter full of blood, Prudence regarding herself in a gemstone (!) mirror, and Abraham ready to sacrifice Isaac.

Something is going on here that I don't understand (and the exhibition did not explain), a play of power, piety and performance, humanism, humility - and  allows humor! Death gets the last laugh, of course, but we're laughing along with it?

Porous classroom

The academic year's coming to a close. Summer beckons!

Sketchy

Sorting through things in my office (I'll be sharing with a colleague starting next semester) I stumbled on a sketchbook from my year in Paris, just before I came to New York. Fun to experience anew the apartment where I was living (my room was where the light is coming in diagonally from), the view across the street from the living room, St Etienne du Mont where I usually went to church..

And then I went to Prague, which practically draws itself.

Not half bad! But I stopped sketching when I got back to Paris... 

Orwellian

The latest by the indispensable Peter Hessler includes this pitch-perfect description of a certain kind of bookstore in China:

Last year, when I entered Xinhua Winshare, one of the largest of the bookstores that are overseen by the Party in downtown Chengdu, the first table displayed twenty titles that documented the career and theories of Xi Jinping in mind-numbing detail: “Xi Jinping’s Seven Years as an Educated Youth,” “The Story of Xi Jinping’s Poverty Alleviation,” “Xi Jinping in Xiamen,” “Xi Jinping in Zhengding,” “Xi Jinping in Ningde.” Less than thirty feet away, another table featured stacks of books marketed as the Dystopian Trilogy: “1984,” “Brave New World,” and “We,” a novel that was banned in the Soviet Union after it was written, around 1920, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Nearby, a security camera hung from the ceiling, and the cover of the Orwell volume declared, “War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. And Big Brother Is Watching You.” 

The article is classic Hessler, full of surprising discoveries and humanizing complexities, all perfectly structured to offer an unexpected and welcome three-dimensional view of people and issues usually represented in two (or one!). Its subject (though he always finds many connections) is a complaint placed anonymously on WeChat that he browbeat his students with ideologically unacceptable ideas. He was able to demonstrate that the alleged incident didn't happen - but his contract teaching in China was still not renewed (admittedly at a time when many such invitations dried up).

I'd be lying if I said his experience didn't make me wonder whether my summer school experience this year might be different than in years past, since the subject of the first dystopian table just spoke at my host university, calling for more political-ideological training in "building of world-class universities with Chinese characteristics."

Mother of all...

Will Mother's Day change its meaning when it comes to include forced motherhood for unwanted children, on pain of incarceration or worse?

Signs of spring

Some more spring denizens of Adirondack

First flowers

 Trout lilies

Mountain refuge

We're taking a little trip to our favorite place in the Adirondacks. Four hours due north and up from sea level to 2500 feet means moving back toward earlier seasons, always a strange sensation but particularly poignant this time. If only one could turn back time to before Russia launched its war on Ukraine (and the postwar order), when reproductive freedom was settled law ...

Pirouette

Something rather lovely happened in "Religion and Ecology" today - our final class session around an assigned reading. The reading was the last section of Braiding Sweetgrass, where Kimmerer takes on the kinds of questions of despair and hope we wrestled with Monday, and resolves them by reminding us we're not in this alone. As one student was to quote: It is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes, we have to put our hands in the Earth to make ourselves whole again - something the Earth wants too. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily. (327) 

Before we got to this, though, I had the class go up to the fourth floor to commune with the red maples we've been seeing out our classroom window - they're gloriously in leaf - and then descend to the courtyard. (I took this picture from our second-floor classroom, where I was guarding laptops.) They came back abuzz, having found some of the yellow maple samaras they'd seen clustered under pillowy green leaves above twirling down upon them. What are those helicoptery seeds called, one asked, another supplying the answer: whirligigs.

Time to turn to the text, pairs tasked with choosing an important passage and writing it on the whiteboard. They made excellent choices; going through them let us experience the poetry, the sweep and the detail of Kimmerer's text weaving. We ended the class listening to an excerpt of a new podcast where Kimmerer retells the story which frames Braiding Sweetgrass, where it is called "Skywoman Falling." (It's the April 26th podcast here, starting 3 minutes in.) 

The book starts (and ends) with the story of Skywoman in freefall, prevented from dying by the cooperation of many animals, and the question is never raised why or how she fell, or from where - though we know she has a bundle of seed plants in her hand, and later learn that she is pregnant. What came before doesn't matter: the world the animals and she create is our world. But now we learn about the world where she lived, about a great Tree of Life which seeded all plants but has been blown over by a storm, and a women who peers into the hole where the tree was and topples into it, grabbing onto a branch of the toppled tree in a vain effort to stop her fall.

Why tell this part of the story now - and why not before? We concluded it had something to do with the book's argument that our world is co-created and sustained by many peoples, including us. Maybe the more recent, fuller telling speaks more to the sense of ecological cataclysm - the tree of life uprooted by a storm?! - and the importance of holding on to what we can of our disrupted world. However she comes by it, and even if it didn't save her from falling, the branch she holds introduces plants to the emergent turtle island.

Our classmates outside the window were waiting for us to put two and two together, and finally it hit us. "Skywoman falling" - the story which begins the book and which Kimmerer starts to retell at the end, fighting off despair - starts like this: She fell like a maple seed, pirouetting on an autumn breeze (3) - a whirligig. What a gift of joy!

Whirligig

Seeds of our red maples, captured by a student...

Man's best friend

Wrapped "After Religion" with a short video of a funeral for robot puppies in Japan. Sony developed artificially intelligent "AIBO" in 1999 and, weaving together the human need and gift for care, machine learning and an endearing "mischievous" streak, they became the beloved companions of many, especially solitary older people. Production was discontinued in 2006 (a new generation arrived in 2018), and customer support ended in 2014. Other companies stepped in to repair still beloved AIBO with the parts of others who had finished their service, and one company decided to hold funerals at a nearby Buddhist temples for the "organ donors," employees standing in for the people with whose lives these AIBO had been entangled. 

There's much to appreciate here. The Japanese practice of kuyo (ritualized thanks to inanimate helpers) makes intuitive sense even to us, animists all. Even if it's really their human interlocutors whose spirits we sense in them, the fact is that these human experiences inhabit these robots, even broken down. But the video also includes a fascinating feature, shown but not discussed. Besides the human priest, we're shown a team of robot priests who chant and ritually gesture towards the assembled AIBO... and then we hear a chorus chanting sutras - the warp of Buddhist funeral ceremony - and not in deep human but light robotic voices. It's silly yet profound.

Broader questions present themselves. How different is any of this from most human religion, using the technologies of its day to mark human care, connection and loss? I suggested to the class that they might see the array of AIBO as like the ancient "religions" we inherit, use up and abandon - a rather cute thought. But, reeling as we all are at the savagery of the SCOTUS' Alito faction's assault on non-conservative Christan understandings of gender and reproduction, I find myself thinking it a little naive to imagine religions as warm caretaking puppies rather than ferocious attack animals. Debrief on the course will have to wait for another day, but the menace of virulently undead religion needs to be a bigger part of the next go. 

Supreme injustice

Looks like a shooting range. 

Sitting in it

As "Religion and Ecology" wends to a close - next week is for student presentations and the final class for closing syntheses - we experience the way two of our main texts wrap things up. Wednesday we'll reach the soaring conclusion of Braiding Sweetgrass; today we saw how Whitney Bauman and Kevin O'Brien send readers of Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology on their way. "As authors and editors," they start, "we are worried, that this book might be a bit of a bummer."

I have the same worry about our class - but also the worry that it might have not been bummer enough. So we spent today's class discussing Bauman and O'Brien's three proposals for responding to the despair that haunts ecological engagement: (1) to accept that the world we know is lost, (2) to focus on the local, (3) to work for a new global ethic to respond to global challenges. I tasked students with writing a reflection on flimate despair and hope in pairs, which we then read together and discussed. Consensus there was not, but all felt that "despair" is the wrong framing. We need to own the grief and anger, sadness and anxiety we feel (one pair proposed "sitting in it" as a practice, a phrase I borrowed for our discussion), if they are not to lead to numbness. We are worried about the complacency that "despair" ratifies, its disavowal of accountability. 

What about hope, then? We repurposed despair as a sign of heart-broken but still living hope, a stage in cycles of feeling. But how not to get stuck in it? "Community," someone suggested, though she felt most people don't have that kind of community any more. "Only human community," I asked, "or also with other-than-human kin?" 

Green

Spring creeps into every gap in our view, oblivious to human fears.

I've been obsessively looking at maps of Ukraine for weeks but there are other maps to fill one with fear, too. This is one from Las Vegas, NM. Pink is area burned by fire; green is evacuated. Included in the green is Montezuma, site of the United World College, where I finished high school.

Flask

In the Study Collection of Greek and Roman works I discovered looking for Pan at the Met, some of the oldest things look the newest - or is it the brilliance of the curation that lets them float free of time, in supportive convo with shades past and present?

Pluralistic Universe

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, the author of Pantheologies, visited our class today and it was suitably pluralistically in person! Although she was zooming in we decided to meet in person, having perfected a hybrid community over the course of the semester with our classroom (and sometimes others, as no other class meets Friday mornings on Lang's fourth floor) as well as my laptop, which over the course of the semester has hosted most of the students when covid precautions prevented them from attending in person, swinging this way and that as discussion moved around our table and sometimes even leaving the room to join a group working in another. (After all this hosting it hardly feels like it's just mine anymore, to tell the truth.)

From her home office Mary-Jane shared the laptop - projected today also on a larger screen - with a student on a deep sea research vessel (currently near Hawa'ii) and was passed around the room to meet each member of the class, one of whom is never without her canine companion, before we moved to an extended Q&A the class had prepared. (Look closely at the image above and, in the image from the media console in the corner of the room, you can see the laptop, as well as yours truly taking a picture of the screen, albeit mirrored.) 

Since we were using the laptop speaker (to avoid reverb), Mary-Jane's thoughtful responses, sometimes funny, sometimes moving and always incisive, were heard from each corner of the room as different students framed different questions. It all made for a three-dimensional encounter students said felt markedly different from other virtual class visits they'd experienced. More, it lived out the pluralism Rubenstein takes from James' ongoing overlapping Pluralistic Universe where Things are 'with' one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. 

Red tourism

Sent this picture of Japanese maples on West 12th Street to a friend confined within her housing complex in Shanghai. This was her reply.

Microaggression

Fuzzy nose-tickling filaments on the masks provided by our school reminded me of the cli-fi story a student in last semester's "Anthropo-cene Humanities" class wrote about future beachgoers terrorized by monstrous blue sea creatures composed entirely of the billions - trillions?! - of discarded masks generated by the covid pandemic.

Minor gathering

Had a gathering with some of our religious studies minors and two sympathizers in the Lang courtyard today. Their day jobs include politics, history, theater, fine arts and global studies. Several I hadn't seen without a mask, and some I haven't seen since before covid!