Gurrutu

Grading is done so, as promised, some further appreciations of "Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala." I went twice, which was barely enough to begin to register what I was seeing! But the second time I was overlapping with a friend, arriving a little before I had to leave. I arrived earlier, managing to tag along as a docent led a tour and, once my friend arrived, offered my own introduction to the exhibition in a way which seemed to me closer to the curators' intent. So, for instance, I made a point of avoiding the "historical timeline" and map of Australia in the landing outside the exhibit, which the Aboriginal curators had resisted as privileging a western way of seeing the world, but were included, it was explained, with this caveat but in an effort to make the work accessible to a global audience. It might be helpful for first-time visitors to know where Yirrkala is, but not for getting to know what it means for the Yolngu, whose bark paintings communicate how this time and space live.

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The exhibition, I've learned, has had a few earlier iterations. This was the only one with all white walls; the predecessors seem all to have had at least some of the walls a deep blue. This showed the bark with its mineral-based colors in a different way, closer to the world from which they flowed. Our version (nearly) made up for this by starting in a separate room with a gorgeous video of salt water waves flowing into sweet as we heard a silhouetted singer sing, the giant video wrapped around a glass case containing the first of these bark wonders, painted by a Yolngu leader in 1935 for anthropologist Donald Thomson as they sought a way to defuse a political crisis. Sacred patterns had not been painted on bark before, we learned; they lived on dancing bodies and ephemeral sand drawings in specific places. These unprecedented works were painted at this point not as works of art but as political documents: articulations of the abiding relationships of the Yolngu with their country. They show balanda (whitefellas) as much as is sufficient for this purpose, no more.

The whole exhibit is structured with a similar intent - an invitation to a living country whose eternal "voice" is the Yolngu. The first time I went, I was transported by many of the bark paintings, but although I'd read the interpretive materials, I misread them as works of a community of individual painters telling clan stories. I should have known better: the stories, connected to country and the ancestral beings who shaped it, are charged to particular clans, yes, but all the clans - like everything in the Yolngu world - are kin. And "kin" not in some amorphous sense, but in the very structured forms of what's called gurrutu. Everything is associated with one or other moiety, and each moiety is in turn divided into eight clans; complicated rules of intermarriage maintain the mesh of these sixteen clans, and so of the country whose songs they sing. I remembered this from my course a dozen years ago but I hadn't connected it to the visual culture. Likewise, I knew that bir'yun - "shimmer," like light reflected on water - inhabits this area's cross-hatchings, but not that each clan has its own pattern of bir'yun called miny'tji which only they are free to use. (Permission may be granted to members of close kin groups for particular paintings, too.)

This was reflected on one of the cards made available to children visiting the show, but somehow deemed unimportant for grownups to know. Going through the exhibition a second time with this card in hand opened the works up in a way that figure-ground doesn't begin to describe. The organizing principle of the exhibition is gurrutu, and so works from the same clan are shown together, whether from the 1940s or the 2010s. Once I was keyed in to the distinctive visual language of each clan, I could see for the first time how each painter worked within it.

Witness, for instance, these works of the 1960s from the Gumatj clan. Can you see the strings of diamonds? But this is the visual currency also of more recent works, Rerrkirrwana Munungurr's "Gurtha/Ancestral Fire" (2018) or Gulumbu Yunupingu's "Ganyu'/Stars" (2009). Captions tell us the stories of the first three, and that the other two are newer: the last is "not a sacred story. This is a story for everybody to see." And the one before is actually painted by a member of another clan, with permission.

I took my friend from the room with the water video to the description of gurrutu, but before pressing the card of clan designs in her hand invited her to just look around for a while. Then we started seeing the clan designs and everything changed. (I think the same might be done following the songlines which often traverse and link clans; the exhibition website lets you follow both networks.)

So I said that I wound up particularly taken by Mawalan Marika’s 1959 "Djan’kawu Waŋarr Dhäwu 3/Djan’kawu Creation Story 3" - here's the bottom two-thirds of this tall work. I'd noticed it on my first visit since it's full of trees. But I didn't register that the miny'tji is that of the Rirratingu. Suddenly the background came alive and stayed alive. It wasn't background at all, more like the flowing water on whose surface evanescent patterns - trees, flying foxes, human beings - danced.

I stared, entranced. The shimmering parallels and perpendiculars - the miny'tji of the Rirratingu - danced, too, the ground and potentiality of all that happens. A two-dimensional picture suddenly seemed to have a depth that involved several more dimensions! I was put in mind of the gold or red of Orthodox icons or medieval religious paintings, representing the Holy Spirit beyond and before all created things, coursing with creativity and patterned harmony. I would love to live in this world, I found myself thinking, everything's here!

Except, of course, that this was but one painting, one of the stories of but one clan. Finally, with a little vertigo, I got a sense of the storied and interlaced terrain which all these paintings were telling, one whose life can't be captured by any single map. (On reflection the painting which grabbed me the first time I went perhaps seemed to me a map of maps.) Gurrutu is a world which can be known - only - in sixteen different ways! Nobody knows or can know more than one of them fully. It's a world which sustains itself through complementary songs, miny'tji, ceremonies, marriages - and bark paintings.

How fortunate to be able to get a glimpse of this teeming sparkling undulating world, the shimmer not only of individual bark paintings in particular miny'tji, but the profounder bir'yun of the spaces between and across and around them. I won't have a chance to be with these wonders again before the show closes, but the website - now that I have my multi-dimensional compass! - may help keep the memory fresh.

No man is an island

And back to California for the holidays! The movie player on the seat in front of me wasn't working so I had a chance to delve into Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism (2000) - just what I needed to start pondering my upcoming spring "Religion and Ecology" class, which I've promised will center "Buddhist perspectives." One very happy discovery, a short work by Japanese monk and visionary 明恵 Myōe (1173-1232) entitled "Letter to an Island," enacts the nonduality of animate and inanimate, Buddha and the rest, by addressing an island (conveniently if coincidentally called Karma) Myoen knows from childhood. 

Dear Mr. Island, it begins, How have you been since the last time I saw you? After I returned from visiting you, I have neither received any message from you, nor have I sent any greetings to you. then swiftly moves into preaching: I think about your physical form as something tied to the world of desire, a kind of concrete manifestation, an object visible to the eye, a condition perceivable by the faculty of sight, and a substance composed of earth, air, fire, and water that can be experienced as color, smell, taste, and touch. Since the nature of physical form is identical to wisdom, there is nothing that is not enlightened. Since the nature of wisdom is identical to the underlying principle of the universe, there is no place it does not reach. 

So Mr. Island isn't distant or even really an island, but assuredly a friend! After a little more learned disquisition, Myōe becomes personal again. 

Even as I speak to you in this way, tears fill my eyes. Though so much time has passed since I saw you so long ago, I can never forget the memory of how much fun I had playing on your island shores. I am filled with a great longing for you in my heart, and I take no delight in passing time without having the time to see you.

And then there is the large cherry tree that I remember so fondly. There are times when I so want to send a letter to the tree to ask how it is doing, but I am afraid that people will say that I am crazy to send a letter to a tree that cannot speak. Though I think of doing it, I refrain in deference to the custom of this irrational world. But really, those who think that a letter to a tree is crazy are not our friends. ...

This would make a nice bridge from "Religion of Trees"!

Myoe, "Letter to the Island," trans. George J. Tanabe, Jr., in Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism ed. Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft (Boston and London: Shambalah, 2000), 63-65; portrait of Myōe in a tree from Kōsanji, Kyoto

Religious dysfunction

A column by David French reminds me that, even as the presidential election turns out to have been a squeaker where handfuls of voters in remote places swung the destiny of a nation (in fact more people voted for someone other than the electoral college winner than for him), there are larger communities of people to blame for the coming debacle. Linking to the Washington Post's analysis of exit polls, French - a repentant ex-evangelical - is horrified that white evangelicals supported the lying abuser by an even bigger margin than before - 82% to 2020's 76%. French is trying to make sense of white evangelicals' full-throated support for an incoming administration full of sexual predators, many of them (like the nominee for Secretary of Defense) evangelical themselves. He connects it to the reckoning their churches refused to have over systematic abuse of women and children in their churches and summer camps. Misogyny, he concludes ruefully, runs deep. Men's continued harm to others is regretted but ultimately accepted.

It's not just evangelicals, of course, who cast their votes for American carnage. Catholics voted the same way, but with a 20%, not a 65%, margin. The threat evangelicals' hypocrisy (and the self-contempt of their women) constitutes to the nation is magnified and compounded by their wildly disproportionate power in American politics. What to do? I follow several progressive evangelical and ex-evangelical folks, like Tripp Fuller and Diana Butler Bass, but it may be time to take off my religious studies cap and assert, as a Christian, that they are not.

Salvage!

How to mark the end of a semester (our first one in a while uncomplicated by pandemic, strike or encampments)? My friend at Parsons invited folks to join him in the wood shop, where all left-over pieces of wood are discarded at the end of the year. We made them into benches! He and another colleague came in yesterday and used some leftover paint (we think it's 'Parsons red' but it looks seasonal) to add color. Today was for glue, a nailgun and unfettered creativity!

Multicolor

Seen around school: callery pear leaves photobomb a winter treebed spread; a detail of a Fred Tomaselli bird in the 14th Street station.

Bark paradise

A second time at "Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala," it was this bark painting, Mawalan Marika’s 1959 "Djan’kawu Waŋarr Dhäwu 3/Djan’kawu Creation Story 3," that wouldn't let me go. More on it and why, once I've finished my end of semester grading!

Public enemy?

This is the start of "Colleges scramble to shield amid growing hostility from GOP," a long article in today's Washington Post that brings together many of the threats we've been hearing over the last months. Not just months... There have been rumblings for years as right-wing media eroded trust in the public good of higher education, GOP-led state legislatures assailed their public universities, and a House committee sought the scalps of Ivy League presidents. What the coming years will bring is uncertain for now - we find ourselves in the strange haze of this political interregnum where all sorts of policy possibilities are floated but none can be enacted yet. But the vultures are circling overhead. I remain confused. Whose enemy is education?

Go West

Another iteration of "Theorizing Religion" is finished, producing some splendid final reflection essays and a slightly lower energy sharing of insights with each other. The latter was to be expected, as finals for other classes kick in, but the former was a bit of a surprise. They got it! What a privilege to teach a subject that people engage with such openness, curiosity and tenderness. Because many were quite personal I can't share them, but I can share some fun things that happened as gleanings from them were shared with the class. 

After giving the students the chance to share their final papers with two classmates, I invited everyone to come up to the board and talk - and to use the colored markers if they wanted. The first were the two open hands, above, from a student who reported their most religious experience was making things, when they felt at one most human and least human at the same time. Next came the rainbow, which, the drawer explained, could legitimately be appreciated as a sign from God by one person and a natural phenomenon by another. The heart with "magic" written at its center accompanied a story of a natural wonder which proved enduringly transcendent, even as the drawer had hoped it would recur and didn't. A shoe illustrated another students' religious devotion to clothing and fashion. A grave pointed to animals' funerary practices, which they of course don't call religious or need to. Others drew a cross (after saying "I don't think I have anything to draw") and described their growing disaffection with the influence Christian ideas of salvation have on people, a circle representing ineffabaility, a dark rectangle connoting the void at the heart of apophatic tradition. And another student cheerfully connected all the others with drawings of rhizomes!

But let me tell you especially about the outline of the continental US with a question mark at its center, which led to some remarkable and complicated insights. The student had written in their final reflection paper that our class had taken them from wondering “what does religion mean to me?” to the “more interesting” questions “what does it mean to be religious in America?”, or even “what does being American mean to me?” After drawing their map on the board they reported to the class that, for the final in a print-making class yesterday, they’d made a series of monoprints of the American west, a place they’d never been, based just on the images they’d gleaned from popular culture—things like the film “Paris, Texas” and the TV series “Breaking Bad.” They’ve never been farther than Missouri or Indiana, although someday they’ll surely go, but they wanted to preserve “the mysticism of this unknowing state,” something they’ll never be able to do again once they've actually been. In their reflection for our class, they had wondered about what the American land they haven't seen looks like (hence the question mark), something they imaged as full of awe. But there’s an awe at the thought of all this awe they haven’t seen, too, they added with coy eloquence, “which is a religious experience in itself.” 

They had the prints with them and I asked if they would show them to us. The prints were gorgeous, semi-abstract blocks of variegated blues, golds, reds, greens and browns suggesting horizons, skies, clouds, mountains. As they were held up, the artist named them: Arizona, Montana, Utah, Colorado… through California. We were transfixed. You managed to capture a very specific place in California, a Californian told them, the Tejon Pass! But it turns out that they had added the state names after the whole series was complete. They were all just evocations of "the west." This did not stop another Californian from asking if they were selling the prints, as she has a “California wall” in her apartment for when she gets homesick, and would love the one called "California" for it.

I'm not sure what this tells you about religion - or California! (Coming east from California myself I realized I had been living unwitting in uneasy eastern fantasies.) But it says something about the spiritual scrupulosity of a generation burned by public "religion" yet unsatisfied with the flatness of secularism. I can't generalize about, or from, the students who wound up in the class this semester, but many seem taken by the thought that "religion" might be alive and well not in the "religions" but in places superficially thought of as secular.

Incline

The courtyard looked different today. It emerged that three MA Interior Design students, originally from India, had created a multisensory experience inviting passersby to experience a day in the life of a graduate student. I tried it, walking - barefoot! - across materials representing the challenges and comforts of a day, apparently in a somehow Ayurvedic way, accompanied by little plastic cups, tied to the trees, full of warm spices, and rewarded, after I made my way gingerly across dried leaves, cork, cotton, foil, tea powder, shattered terra cotta and eggshells, with a warm cup of chai. (For no reason I can quite discern, my camera inverted the middle of these pics I took.) 

Time slices

Not sure where this originated, but this time zone map is trippy indeed! Can you find where you are? Without Argentina and India I'd be lost.

Inlaid

One of my favorite places in NYC, the Met's "Gubbio Studiolo."

Bir'yun

Made it finally to what I'd call the top show of 2024 if I were into making that sort of list, "Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala," at Asia Society. It's rare enough to see Aboriginal art in New York, but this exhibition is epic. More importantly, it's curated by Yolngu who have structured it along songline and clan lines to give guests a sense of the enduring cosmology of the world of which they, each from a lineage entitled to depict some things and not others, are the chroniclers and custodians. On a first visit I missed all that, taken just by the bir'yun, the "shimmer," I've read (and taught) about, of spectacular work after spectacular work. I'll find a way to go back. (For those not in New York, there's a tremendous online version.) I would go back even without all that, just for this 1942 bark painting by Mawunbuy Munungur, “Djan’kawu Däwu/Djan’kawu Sisters Story.”

Let's go back to that

Something lovely turned up in my feeds today, a poem - perhaps from 2018? - by Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Fresh mint!

To trees

We're into the final meetings of classes for this semester. For "Religion of Trees," today was for the final projects students were asked to develop collaboratively with a tree - fascinating, and (rightly) very personal. After presentations, we had time for drawing. They insisted I provide the prompt. "Two trees," I said, and they were off. And in what different directions they took this! Two different trees, old and young trees, trees connected underground or entwined in their canopies, trees making room for others, human as well as arboreal...

Windfall

Advent 1 already? Wasn't Thanksgiving just five minutes ago?!

At least we got to sing a hymn I've always loved - and a religion of trees hymn to boot! The writer of the text is unknown, but it dates back at least three centuries. What all did apple trees then connote?

Emotion wheels

Learned today about the latest developments in the analysis of "climate emotions," nicely watercolored for the Climate Mental Health Network. Emotion wheels are apparently regularly used by psychologists, since it's easier to address emotions if you can name them. (They are aids to recognition only; in reality, one might have several of these at a time, and there's no suggestion of equivalence or proportionality.) 

Emotion words vary from language to language, of course; the wheel is based on work by Finnish scholar Panu Pikhala, who notes that Finnish doesn't distinguish feelings and emotions. But linguistic scrupulosity hasn't stopped CMHN from offering translations in thirty languages.

In whatever imperfect language, I think it's a wonderful improvement on having just "climate anxiety" or "climate dread" - and how nice to include some positive climate emotions, too! And unlike a list or scale, a wheel allows one to acknowledge that awareness of climate crisis touches us in different and shifting ways at many different times. (I love the watercolors!)

I wonder if there's an emotion wheel available for the anger, sadness and fear-ful lead-up to US regime change?

Round trip

And back to New York again, along an unusually southerly route, but we'll be bouncing back to California again in sixteen days!

Forsaken

This picture, coming at the end of the second of four picture stories in the Washington Post about religious rituals affected by climate change, breaks my heart. The 100,000 indigenous participants in the Qoyllur Rit'i, held at the base of the sacred Colque Punku glacier in Peru, filled the other photos, but have now come and gone, leaving only a crucifix, whose position moves up the valley each year.

Seasonal colors

AAR!

I've come out the other end of a very satisfying meeting of the American Academy of Religion. As a generalist, this conference gives me a chance to get a chance to dip into fields I've long followed and others that are new to me, or the field as a whole. But it's also more than a little bit of a crapshoot, since there may be scores of panels on at any given time, and the two or three panels you most want to attend will always wind up scheduled at the same time! Most of us opt not to have the 400-page (!) program book mailed to us, rather picking a copy up on arriving at the convention center. Especially with the convenience of a searchable App, I think few of us look at most of the offerings, instead doing targeted searches on topics, fields, texts, scholars and friends we want to support. On registering I checked some of the program units which interest me, who kindly sent curated e-mail announcements of their offerings, and I confess that determined most of my choices. Here's my dance card, and some others which made my shortlist.

Teaching Religion Unit: Teaching Tactics

Plenary I: Exploring Nonviolence: Social Justice, Gender, and the Brain

Comparative Religious Ethics and Schleiermacher Units: "One Nation under...?" Nationalisms of the Religions of the World

Theology and Continental Philosophy Unit: Uprooting Thought: Religion and the Vegetal Turn

Anglican Studies Seminar

Interreligious and Interfaith Studies Unit: Christian Imaginations of the Other: The Impact of Religionization and Racialization on (Inter)Religious Studies

Religion and Ecology Unit: Rethinking Non-human Sentience and Sapience: Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Academic Relations Committee, Committee on the Public Understanding of Religion, and Publications Committee: Podcasting Religious Studies

Religion and Ecology Unit: The Role of Violence/Non-violence in Relgiion and Ecology: Slow Violence, Radical Environmental Activism, and Theological Visions for our Shared Future

Artificial Intelligence and Religion Exploratory Session: Experiments in Artificial Intelligence: Artificial Societies and Religious Simulations

To leave time for the book exhibit, serendipitous meetings, coffee and last minute-tweaks for my own paper, I didn't go to sessions back-to-back. But since each of these panels involved multiple participants, my short list translates to nearly fifty presenters, not to mention the Q&A. Not all were as good as the best were, but I am sated!