What a day for news! Even in worlds I don't follow, barriers breaking!
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Saturday, May 10, 2014
Minutiae
For Alumni Day, faculty were invited to give brief presentations of our work - and by brief they meant one minute! A sort of variety show, the "New School Minute" was introduced last year to great acclaim. And no wonder. The variety of topics and styles of presentation is dazzling, and at a minute (or two or three...) there's few chances to get bored.
Of course there's also something absurd about asking for such brief presentations of research but that was the key to the pleasure of it all. Everyone's in the same situation... and it turns out to be rather fun to find something you could say in so few words and hear your colleagues doing the same. My sixty seconds of fame came between a professor from Design & Management on "Empathetic Creativity – Transforming Challenges to Opportunities" and one from the Mannes School of Music on "Does Music Matter?" I spoke, of course, on Job. If you exclude the opener (cheating a little, but at least I didn't restate the obvious absurdity of what was going on), I kept to the assigned time, too:
Of course there's also something absurd about asking for such brief presentations of research but that was the key to the pleasure of it all. Everyone's in the same situation... and it turns out to be rather fun to find something you could say in so few words and hear your colleagues doing the same. My sixty seconds of fame came between a professor from Design & Management on "Empathetic Creativity – Transforming Challenges to Opportunities" and one from the Mannes School of Music on "Does Music Matter?" I spoke, of course, on Job. If you exclude the opener (cheating a little, but at least I didn't restate the obvious absurdity of what was going on), I kept to the assigned time, too:
I’ve just published a book
on interpretations of the book of Job which came out of a seminar at Eugene
Lang. Here’s a taste:
Most people know the Book of Job through a single line: “the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away” [1:21] or “He destroys the perfect with the wicked” [9:22] or “I will maintain mine own ways before him” [13:15]. My favorite: “Have pity upon me, o my friends; for the hand of God has touched me” [19:21].
Most people know the Book of Job through a single line: “the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away” [1:21] or “He destroys the perfect with the wicked” [9:22] or “I will maintain mine own ways before him” [13:15]. My favorite: “Have pity upon me, o my friends; for the hand of God has touched me” [19:21].
The story of Job’s devastation and restoration is basically a one-liner, too. But most of the book isn’t about what happens. It’s a discussion among friends trying to get beyond the one-liners to make sense of what’s happened.
As you might have heard, it’s not the best discussion ever. People don’t listen. They get angry. They go all ad hominem on each other. God condemns Job’s friends - but he also has Job rehabilitate them. Job’s friendships are the first part of his life to be restored.
People often describe Job as “the book of God and man,” but in fact Job is never alone with his God. For the most painful and powerful questions we wrestle with, the challenge and comfort of human discussion is beyond price. If you have no friends near, read the Book of Job. It’s a discussion, and you can enter into it.
(OK, it was 1:15.) It's a quixotic assignment, and one you don't entirely want to succeed at. Can what you've worked on really be digested into such a little nub? On the other hand, it was great fun to be part of a kaleidoscope of such nubs. And who knows, someone might be intrigued enough by one of these nubs to follow up. Or to come study with us!
Friday, May 09, 2014
Witness
Some of the powerful work in the Brooklyn Museum of Art's exhibition
"Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties." George Tooker, Supper 
(1963), Norman Rockwell, New Kids in the Neighborhood (1967), Faith
Ringgold, Black Light Series: Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger (1969).
(1963), Norman Rockwell, New Kids in the Neighborhood (1967), Faith
Parsley tree
I've let the parsley plant which survived when everything else died last summer do what it wants to do, and - inspired perhaps by all Springing trees outside - what it evidently wants to do is be a tree! I gave it a stick to lean on and it's been steadily moving up it. Where will it stop?
Thursday, May 08, 2014
Nest
A friend in Berkeley found this out walking today.
She thinks it must be a hummingbird nest. Wow!
Me talk piaoliang one day
We're getting to the point in learning Chinese where its apparent straightforwardness and simplicity give way to something else entirely - you see you can no longer translate word by word but have to translate sentence by sentence. Here's where we stumbled on this:
大卫：下午你在哪儿？我给你打电话，你不在宿舍。
山本：我在操场踢球呢。你找我有事吗？
The grammatical construction we're learning is for an action in progress, 在 and/or 呢, but the text doesn't bother pointing out that this form, unlike the apparently corresponding English be ... -ing, is the same whether you're talking past (was ... -ing), present (is ... -ing) or future (will be ... -ing). We had to figure that out ourselves.
Having missed Tuesday's class I'd prepared this lesson and figured out from the context that the dialogue was about the past (presumably Dawei calls Shanben in the evening) but my classmates were reading it for the first time and were confused just as I had been. Dawei asks Shanben Afternoon you be where? and all assumed he was asking about the future. The following line I call you on the telephone, you not be in dorm sounded a little odd but Shanben's answer, I be kicking ball in sports ground, seemed to fit a conversation about whether he was free to play pingpong tomorrow afternoon... And then we got distracted by the pretzel a methodical classmate rendered as You seek I have thing?
In fact, of course, David (Dawei 大卫) called Yamamoto (Shanben 山本)'s dorm this afternoon, and he wasn't there since he was out playing soccer. My classmates got that, but seemed unconvinced. Surely there must have been some grammatical clue we'd missed indicating that they were talking about past rather than future! We looked for one in vain, because there isn't one. It's all in the context. And the pretzel line just means what did you want? or why did you call?
My classmates were thrown but I was thrilled by this encounter with linguistic difference. It was just last week that I got the sense that I was getting somewhere with this language, feeling some momentum in the semi-fluency of my few hundred words. Of course Chinese will work differently than English. Isn't that the point? Perhaps foolhardily I find I trust myself to be able to figure things out. 在学习汉语呢！
大卫：下午你在哪儿？我给你打电话，你不在宿舍。
山本：我在操场踢球呢。你找我有事吗？
The grammatical construction we're learning is for an action in progress, 在 and/or 呢, but the text doesn't bother pointing out that this form, unlike the apparently corresponding English be ... -ing, is the same whether you're talking past (was ... -ing), present (is ... -ing) or future (will be ... -ing). We had to figure that out ourselves.
Having missed Tuesday's class I'd prepared this lesson and figured out from the context that the dialogue was about the past (presumably Dawei calls Shanben in the evening) but my classmates were reading it for the first time and were confused just as I had been. Dawei asks Shanben Afternoon you be where? and all assumed he was asking about the future. The following line I call you on the telephone, you not be in dorm sounded a little odd but Shanben's answer, I be kicking ball in sports ground, seemed to fit a conversation about whether he was free to play pingpong tomorrow afternoon... And then we got distracted by the pretzel a methodical classmate rendered as You seek I have thing?
In fact, of course, David (Dawei 大卫) called Yamamoto (Shanben 山本)'s dorm this afternoon, and he wasn't there since he was out playing soccer. My classmates got that, but seemed unconvinced. Surely there must have been some grammatical clue we'd missed indicating that they were talking about past rather than future! We looked for one in vain, because there isn't one. It's all in the context. And the pretzel line just means what did you want? or why did you call?
My classmates were thrown but I was thrilled by this encounter with linguistic difference. It was just last week that I got the sense that I was getting somewhere with this language, feeling some momentum in the semi-fluency of my few hundred words. Of course Chinese will work differently than English. Isn't that the point? Perhaps foolhardily I find I trust myself to be able to figure things out. 在学习汉语呢！
Tuesday, May 06, 2014
New view
The eastern horizon as seen from the new Faculty and Staff Lounge in 
the University Center. You can't go out on the green, though...
the University Center. You can't go out on the green, though...
Monday, May 05, 2014
Nothing much
Well, were we ever experimental in "Buddhism and Modern Thought" today. Could it be that we were "Zen" too? Our focus was John Cage. (Actually I first gave the promised summary of the dāna conference. In Western theories, I recounted, the minute a gift succeeds in being a gift - freely given and accepted as a gift - it ceases to be a gift because it establishes or continues a quite unfree relationship of reciprocity. Buddhist traditions can outwit this, I proposed. When a liberating gift succeeds it evaporates into pure freedom: it reveals that nothing has changed hands, as there was never a distinction between giver and receiver to begin with: no giver, no receiver, pure gift! Say what? I meant for this to be opaque and to seem unrelated to the topic of the day, and I think I succeeded. A good start for the discussion!)
We took a roundabout way in. Already before class began I called up this image on our screen, some of the "White Paintings" by Rauschenberg which Cage said opened the way to the (in)famous "silent piece," 4' 33". As planned, nobody had realized it was an image of something. Check!
In any case it was time for a change of pace so I distributed the translation of the Heart Sutra Kay Larsen appends to her book Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists (our other main reading). It's the most compact of sutras (see image above) so we read it aloud, everyone taking a few lines. The Heart Sutra famously negates everything, including everything you knew about Buddhism, like the Four Noble Truths:
Despite a noble struggle we failed, of course, to have a satisfying discussion of the Heart's Sutra's nestled negations - what could one ultimately say? - so it was time for another intoning, the first page of Cage's 1951 (?) Lecture on Something. It's scored like a piece of music.
Piece of music, you may ask? The talk is ostensibly about composer Morton Feldman (though Feldman said it was not his but "John's"), who, inspired by Cage, invented the "graphic score" as a way of creating musical events. (I called up an image of his very first such score.) See it?
Dazed at the words we had uttered without being able to follow their meaning - we had just channeled Cage saying (and not saying)
we were ready for our discussion of what on earth Cage was up to, and what in heaven it could be said to have to do with Zen.
As photos of Cage's legendary course on "Experimental Composition" at The New School looked down at us (how exciting to think he taught here, I enthused) we faced the provocation which is 4' 33". It's hard to approach for us today, as it's known as a monument of contemporary art: we project a something into what has to be experienced as a nothing. (Larsen recounts that when Cage presented his Thoreau piece at Naropa Institute the rowdy followers of Chögyam Trungpa booed and hissed and mocked and catcalled so energetically - for over two hours! - that Trungpa offered Cage a job the next morning). We didn't watch one of the many videos of performances of the 4' 33"; instead I had someone read aloud a reaction to the first performance: "sound pompous," I exhorted. (Next time, I think I'll have us all declaim it together!)
We took a roundabout way in. Already before class began I called up this image on our screen, some of the "White Paintings" by Rauschenberg which Cage said opened the way to the (in)famous "silent piece," 4' 33". As planned, nobody had realized it was an image of something. Check!
Students discussed our texts on their own as I made some photocopies, perhaps galvanized by Cage's "Ten rules for teachers and students," which I shared with them before leaving the room. I returned to find D. T. Suzuki's blithe claim (in the opening chapter of Zen and Japanese Culture) that Zen outwits words provoking strong verbal reactions: the possibility of going beyond words is tantalizing but wasn't Suzuki using words, too? Borrowing one of his images I opined that we should regard words as like the clouds that are generated by the peaks of really high mountains (mountains again!): they're not the mountain, but to wish them gone or even to wish they wouldn't obscure the mountain peak is to misundertand both their nature and that of the mountain. It is because it is a mountain that its peak is shrouded in cloud; it is because it is a mountain that the clouds are clouds. To wish there were no clouds is really to wish there were no mountains. Wordclouds indeed!
... no ignorance
and no end to ignorance,
no old age and death
and no end to old age and death,
no suffering, no cause of suffering,
no extinguishing, no path,
no wisdom and no gain.
No gain and thus the bodhisattva
lives Prajna Paramita ...
it is of the
utmost importance not
to make a thing but
rather to make
nothing. And
how is this done?
Done by making
something
which then goes
in and reminds us of
nothing.
we were ready for our discussion of what on earth Cage was up to, and what in heaven it could be said to have to do with Zen.
This form of phony musical Dadaism, built up by sensational publicity,
frightens audiences away from the real music of our times. The arrogance of its
nihilistic sophistries might be just amusing to most people. But there is a war
of nerves against common sense today particularly in all fields of art. And if
we don't check these insipid fungus growths that eat into the common sense of
our people, their destructive influence will grow and gradually undermine the
health and vitality of our civilization. (Larsen, 274-5)
Two plucky students dared to agree. One invoked the common experience in a modern art gallery that "I could have done that, though I didn't." I suggested Cage wanted you to think that, indeed he wanted you to go do it yourself, maybe even realize you already were doing it. Still: is this art? Is Cage an artist or a con man? Are we supposed to thank him? Surely something's wrong when someone gets celebrated for doing nothing!! (When I asked the other scoffer at the end of class "are you indignant or are you jealous?" he replied, after a rather brief pause, "both...!") Our time was running out. We had just enough time for each of us to read - one by one now, not in a group as with the other - four lines (sixteen bars) of Cage's Lecture on Nothing (1950?). You try, too!
Saturday, May 03, 2014
Essais sur le dāna
Today's symposium of the Princeton Buddhist Studies Workshop on dāna was lots of fun. A roomful of interesting Buddhologists, from all manner of disciplines and working on every era and region of Buddhist history - and me! You might not have thought one could have a single conversation about such different civilizations and periods but we did, though the ground was starting to crumble under our feet by the end of the final discussion. A good crumbling, though! The continuities of Buddhisms (and the nature of "Buddhism") are good questions to face.
We seemed able to bring together phenomena from so many contexts because of the seductive power of important modern theorists (all French!) on "the gift": Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida.
But while dāna is etymologically linked to le don, the various things we discussed turned out to be more loosely related, if related at all. Are lay offerings supporting monastics (what Maria Heim calls "gifts of esteem") really the same kind of thing as bodhisattvas helping suffering beings, perhaps by sacrificing their bodies for them (Heim calls these "gifts of compassion"? By the end of the day I had a long list of terms with question marks next to them: gift? offering? giving? generosity? merit? donation? charity? endurance? sacrifice? It may be that these all (except the last two) exhibit the paradoxical "logic of the gift" (in short: it's impossible) but even these are not always and obviously dāna. Were we associating them because they are all (supposedly) unreciprocated transfers of things?
In my two interventions - respondent to the second panel, and then, with the other two respondents, offering some summary observations at symposium's end - I ranged all over the place, but expressed the hope that Buddhist traditions offer a way beyond the impasse of the logic of the gift. This was just a hope (and is neither a rationalization nor an excuse for the way in which dāna culture routes charity to the socially privileged) but I grounded it in a few discussions which had shown the almost infinitely fruitful way in which dāna has been thought to operate. Even poorly chosen dāna poorly given to a barely appropriate recipient is thought to have the potential to transform everyone involved. And if you transfer the merit of a good action to someone - your parents, say - you get merit for that, which you can then in turn transfer, and on it goes.
More profoundly, I suggested, Buddhist traditions are more up-front about the existence of disparities in human relations, and might be able to give us correctives or alternatives to modern western ethics premised on egalitarianisms posited only in the abstract. That was poorly formulated - needs more thought. (Better words in the first ¶ here.) But it seemed a well-received gift to the Buddhological proceedings!
We seemed able to bring together phenomena from so many contexts because of the seductive power of important modern theorists (all French!) on "the gift": Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida.
But while dāna is etymologically linked to le don, the various things we discussed turned out to be more loosely related, if related at all. Are lay offerings supporting monastics (what Maria Heim calls "gifts of esteem") really the same kind of thing as bodhisattvas helping suffering beings, perhaps by sacrificing their bodies for them (Heim calls these "gifts of compassion"? By the end of the day I had a long list of terms with question marks next to them: gift? offering? giving? generosity? merit? donation? charity? endurance? sacrifice? It may be that these all (except the last two) exhibit the paradoxical "logic of the gift" (in short: it's impossible) but even these are not always and obviously dāna. Were we associating them because they are all (supposedly) unreciprocated transfers of things?
In my two interventions - respondent to the second panel, and then, with the other two respondents, offering some summary observations at symposium's end - I ranged all over the place, but expressed the hope that Buddhist traditions offer a way beyond the impasse of the logic of the gift. This was just a hope (and is neither a rationalization nor an excuse for the way in which dāna culture routes charity to the socially privileged) but I grounded it in a few discussions which had shown the almost infinitely fruitful way in which dāna has been thought to operate. Even poorly chosen dāna poorly given to a barely appropriate recipient is thought to have the potential to transform everyone involved. And if you transfer the merit of a good action to someone - your parents, say - you get merit for that, which you can then in turn transfer, and on it goes.
More profoundly, I suggested, Buddhist traditions are more up-front about the existence of disparities in human relations, and might be able to give us correctives or alternatives to modern western ethics premised on egalitarianisms posited only in the abstract. That was poorly formulated - needs more thought. (Better words in the first ¶ here.) But it seemed a well-received gift to the Buddhological proceedings!
Friday, May 02, 2014
Generalist
Oh, the pleasures (and stretches) of the generalist! I'm going up to Princeton this afternoon to participate in a day-long symposium tomorrow on dāna, rendered in its title as "Buddhist charity." I'm just a respondent, and a sub to boot, but am thinking of making that central to my remarks. Buddhist giving goes "upward" - it's more meritorious the purer the recipient of your giving - so I may derive the most merit from my contributions to the august company's discussion. (Indeed, if nothing I say is of use to anyone, so much the better, as in the best dāna nothing is really received, as the perfected being has no need of anything.) But as a troglodytic "Buddhological sympathizer" or "nightstand Buddhologist" (the terms I'm using for myself, tweaking Thomas Tweed's "Buddhist sympathizer" and "nighstand Buddhist") I'll also be in a position to wonder how Buddhist discourses of pure giving obscure actual need - or leave it out of the picture by consigning its treatment to the laity, the state, and miracle working supernatural beings. Those weeks we've spent in "Buddhism and Modern Thought" on the critiques of engaged Buddhism have got to me!
Tulip heaven
Tuning into enlightenment
Don't think that I have abandoned the effort to provide an accompaniment to "Buddhism and Modern Thought" of musical works. To energize the students as they pull together the research projects I sent them these two youtube links. The first is a karoake breathing song (!),
giddily performed by followers of Thich Nhat Hanh. It's entirely disarming: once you realize that it comes not from musical expertise but from overflowing happiness, it produces titters of giggly joy. If you don't sing, there are hand gestures to follow. And of course the breath.
The other is a 1967 song by Donovan whose refrain takes the famous Zen sokuhi 即非 line about mountains that aren't mountains and turns it into a dangerously catchy refrain - listen at your own risk, for it's a skipping little jig you'll find yourself whistling for days.
Take your pick! If you're up for it, there's also a film of Donovan performing live on television in 1972 in full psychedelic color, a change in whose lyrics suggests an intervening encounter with Chogyam Trungpa:
First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is ...
Take your pick! If you're up for it, there's also a film of Donovan performing live on television in 1972 in full psychedelic color, a change in whose lyrics suggests an intervening encounter with Chogyam Trungpa:
First there is a hang-up then there is no hang-up then there is ...
Thursday, May 01, 2014
Breakfast at Tiffany's
The courtyard trees really are dancing into summer through the same colors they'll go through on their way out. Red; yellow; green.
Across two thousand years
It's been a little while since anyone's mentioned my poor little Job biography. (It feels like more - attention is addictive, and/but its thrills are short-lived!) So these reviews I just learned about are nice, one from the Church Times (Church of England), the other from the Association of Jewish Libraries (US). It seems I succeeded in writing a crossover book! 
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Mountain ranges
As we near the end of Buddhism and Modern Thought, we finally have a syllabus! Well, we've reached the point where no further updatings are necessary, because no more are possible. More than any other course I've taught, this class really has reshaped the course in its own image, with all the riddles about rivers and riverbeds applying.Our program of readings ends with a bunch of readings on Zen, a little ironic since there is no tradition in Buddhism as suspicious of words. But it's (sorry Vajrayana) the Buddhist tradition to have engaged most interestingly with the unfolding of modern sensibilities and cultural production. That's why it was at the heart of our very first reading, which explored an elective affinity between modernity's claim to transcend history and similar aspirations in "Buddhism," both as western construct and as Asian tradition. Words beyond words: I'm hoping this will help us come to some useful insights about acts, contemplative as well as ethical as well as aesthetic: our readings are about the nexus of Zen (through the charismatic D. T. Suzuki) and modern arts: John Cage, and improvisational dance.
By way of preparation, we read some Suzuki today, too, along with part of David Loy's The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory, and building on Monday's discussion of Keiji Nishitani's "What is Religion?" It's a discussion of what he calls "Affirmation-in-Negation" (a translation of 即非, sokuhi) and argues is the central logic of Zen Buddhism - and what makes Zen masters sound so irrational. Drawing on examples from the Diamond Sutra Suzuki identifies the structure
For A to be affirmed as A, A has to be non-A; therefore it is A
and argues that this is the central insight of Zen and of Japanese spirituality and also - as these turn out to be in his generation's understanding of world history - of human nature at its truest.
In effort to shed light on this I conjured up all sorts of mountains, from the mythical Mount Meru, so tall you cannot see it, to the Ochtruper Berg, the little bump celebrated as the closest thing to a mountain in the town where my mother grew up, from the ancient Alabama Hills subsiding near Mount Whitney to the perfect Mount Fuji I saw emerging one day on twenty student easels set up on the shore of Lake Hakone facing where, on a less foggy day, Fuji would have been seen. But I was really thinking of a line I fell in love with the year I studied phenomenological geography in Paris, and another I found once in a book of literary aphorisms. (I'm amazed neither has found its way into this blog before today.)
A l’esprit qui contemple la montagne pendant la durée des âges, elle apparait flottante, aussi incertaine que l’onde de la mer chassée par la tempète: c’est un flot, une vapeur; quand elle aura disparu, ce ne sera plus qu’un rève.
Élisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne (1875-6)
All stones are broken stones.
James Richardson, Vectors: 47 Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (2004)
Students were better on the negation than the affirmation part - better at seeing how words come between us and the things whose nature they are thought to disclose, how they substitute abstractions and memories and projects for the thing there facing us - but that's par for the course. If there is anything to this form of non-thinking, it involves actual experiences of the irreducible thisness of every this, irreducible even though evanescent, suspended like Saint Francis' inverted Assisi but as real as real can be.
I'm not sure it helped when I suggested that a mountain, a contingent aggregation of stuff which rose and fell as all things do, was like our supposed "selves," too. When I asked, rhetorically, "Can you get from the acceptance of thisness to ethics? Isn't Buddhism supposed to be about compassion?" I had to answer myself, rhetorically, "Didn't you hear the compassion
in my description of the arising and subsiding of the mountain?"Perhaps this will put us in the right frame of mind to sit through Cage's 4' 33". It certainly puts me right in the zone of my Wider Moral Communities project. Agency is blown wide beyond the human, decoupled from the toxic fantasy of a self. But there are still things you have to be human to do, or to be engaging another person.
Inset quote from Suzuki Daisetz, "The Loic of Affirmation-in-Negation" (1940),
trans. in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, ed. James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis
and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012), 214-18, 217
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Popomo face
A student I've gotten to know quite well over several courses is a Dance major, and a work she choreographed was shown at the recent showing of seniors' work. In the midst of generally serious and opaque pieces, hers was startlingly accessible. Her piece last year was among the most serious and opaque, but this time we were treated to five hula hoops (one of them with rippling lights) and four dancers, all of them smiling infectiously. Hula hoops on a postmodern dance stage?
Just bringing them would have been shocking enough, she told me today - their very presence clearly made several people in our so sophisticated Dance program uneasy. This just made her smile even more broadly. She'd danced with hoops while in high school; they're apparently very common in music festivals, too. Decidedly not "high art." But that's what made a hula hoop dance so interesting in this context. Transgressive!
The smiles, too. I asked her about them, and she confirmed that the broad smiles were - while spontaneous - part of the choreography. Most dancers are supposed to have blank faces ("neutral" since it's a fiction to believe in "natural" expression) which they sometimes refer to as "pomo face." She thinks that's as contrived and elitist as the "modernism" the postmodernists are trying to call in question. ;)
Just bringing them would have been shocking enough, she told me today - their very presence clearly made several people in our so sophisticated Dance program uneasy. This just made her smile even more broadly. She'd danced with hoops while in high school; they're apparently very common in music festivals, too. Decidedly not "high art." But that's what made a hula hoop dance so interesting in this context. Transgressive!
The smiles, too. I asked her about them, and she confirmed that the broad smiles were - while spontaneous - part of the choreography. Most dancers are supposed to have blank faces ("neutral" since it's a fiction to believe in "natural" expression) which they sometimes refer to as "pomo face." She thinks that's as contrived and elitist as the "modernism" the postmodernists are trying to call in question. ;)
Queer Christianities: The Book!
The cover art for our forthcoming book is lovely, wouldn't you agree?
Someone at NYU Press designed it, but all three of us co-editors love it.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Philosophers' network
A most wondrous mapping of the networks of philosophers, as presented through their Wikipedia pages. Go to the interactive page and you can trace out the connections around each philosopher.. though you can't yet search for one. Finding them isn't that easy!
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Diversity in unity
At dinner with two friends from graduate school, both now at Yale Divinity School, I learned about the results
of the latest study by the Pew Center. The US thinks itself very religiously pluralistic and diverse - it's a big part of arguments about the distinctive, even prophetic, nature of American religion. But this supposed diversity melts away almost entirely if we treat all Christians as belonging to the same religion (as, by and large, folks do with every other religious tradition in surveys). We come in 68th out of 232 countries and territories studied. One can quibble with the methodology (why separate Judaism out from under "Other Religions," for instance?) but the result is in any case instructive. As I've heard folks from Netherlands (rated 
high) and India (rated moderate) say, the US hasn't really had to grapple with deep religious diversity. Pew is quick to point out that religious diversity and religious freedom are different things and on latter we do OK. Still!Earlier in the day I was delighted by a Sol LeWitt wall at the Yale University Art Gallery, filling a wall with the spontaneous-seeming "All two-part combinations of arcs from corners and sides."
Friday, April 25, 2014
Life after DOMA?
I was invited up to Yale for an interesting symposium of historians and queer theorists. It seems to have been planned in a moment somewhat like the one in which we concocted Queer Christianities (the reason I was invited): same-sex marriage having, with almost unthinkable speed, become a legal reality (in New York, or nationally), one wanted to make sure other concerns and commitments, including ones which did not foreground marriage, weren't left behind. Somehow ours managed to be much more upbeat, though. I'm trying to figure out way. Where ours featured talks by and about people who were queer and Christian and whose lived experience offered resources for imagining better futures (look! look!), this one offered talks by folks many of whom were queer and married and uneasy if not conflicted about it (keep moving, folks, nothing to see here!).This connected in more poignant ways with questions of the future than ours did. It's not just that our folks wanted to be members of the church (often more than the church wanted them as members) while today's folks didn't really want to be recognized by the state. Participation in the church is compatible with a continued sense of oppositional, even prophetic identity (call it "queer" if you wish!) in ways in which involvement with the state can't be - certainly not the neoliberal state which, one presenter argued, promotes marriage as a way of reducing its commitment to care for its citizens in other ways. Only one panelist (a theological ethicist) even mentioned that queer folks might affect the institution of marriage in positive ways. Does that go without saying, or are we afraid to say it - afraid it might not be true?
The question haunting the whole discussion: can gay and lesbian couples, now able to enjoy the comforts of state-supported domesticity, be counted on to continue being on the vanguard of vigilance and care for the still marginalized? That's the question, for queer Christians, too.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Hu's on First
What does non-self looks like? Today we learned it looks like this:
Hsiao-Lan Hu brought "Buddhism and Modern Thought" to this profound insight. Hu's This-Worldly Nibbana offers a compelling alternative to the common Four Noble Truth-centered depiction of Buddhism. Together with her new project on Avalokitesvara (above), it gave us an exciting new vision of what Buddhism offers - and demands.
I called our session "Hu's on First" for more reasons than the irresistibility of the pun. In their famous baseball routine Abbott and Costello may prove to have been bodhisattvas - a lesson in anattā and social kamma! But it was also only with Hu's description of the persistent failure of Buddhism to combat gender and class hierarchy in Asian history (in the reading for Monday's class) that we really faced the First Noble Truth, the truth of dukkha. Doctor, heal thyself?!
Can it really have taken us until our twenty-second class to arrive at square one? Most presentations of Buddhism start with the First Noble Truth! We encountered the Four Noble Truths early on, too (though our first Buddhist category was upāya). But you'll recall that I ensured they came with a wobble. Walpola Rahula recommends that those new to Buddhism start with the Fourth Noble Truth (Noble Eightfold Path) and proceed to discussions of meditation and engaged lay practice, before looping back (as needed and if necessary) to the first three Noble Truths and the puzzles of anattā. You don't start with suffering but with practice. Hu puts the point plainly: the Buddha may have shared the Four Noble Truths in his first speech, but it was to seasoned ascetics. Most people aren't ready. They'll misunderstand it or be laid low by it.
(As I suggested when we read Rahula, Perhaps we aren't able to face the overwhelming reality of dukkha before we know from experience, however elementary, that there is something we can do about it, however difficult. Likewise the doctrine of anattā, which is not only paradoxical but paralyzing if we don't already know from experience, however limited, that and why and how we cling to the idea of a perduring soul - and that we don't have to.)
In Hu's account, the central concept is pratītya samutpāda, which she translates as "interdependent co-arising." This is something you might begin to understand through meditation - or through reflection on ways in which your subjectivity and sense of self have been shaped by your culture, things well observed in reflection on what we actually do. She deftly braids classic Buddhist analysis of the "five aggregates" with constructivist feminist accounts of the non-naturalness of gender. What had seemed given, even predestined, is now revealed as the performed artifact of a culture and of your socialization in it - a socialization which, you realize in seeing it, leaves you some options in contributing to or disrupting the "sedimentation" (a concept from Judith Butler) which gives things the appearance of a perduring identity (self).
There isn't always much space for agency, but there is always some space - and this is enough to turn kamma from fate into freedom. Tracing the ways things you had taken for your "self" in fact reside in contingent cultural practices, discourses and structures beyond you, you are at once dislodged from them and brought to the realization that they are shared with others, who may suffer from them just as you do. Your participation in norms and patterns such as gender strengthens their seeming solidity not only in your life but in that of others; refusing to participate weakens their hold not only on you but on others. "The twin central teachings of Buddhism, non-Self and interdependent co-arising, are actually the same concept stated from two different angles" (65). Your freedom from a fated "self" and your responsibility in compassion for others are experienced together.
It's a truly wonderful interpretation - I hope many more people discover it! And I can't wait for Hu's new project to come to fruition. In it she explores the story of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Guanyin in Chinese, Kannon in Japanese), whose boundless compassion leads him (her in China and India) to assume whatever form is needed to get through to a suffering being. Thirty-three such forms are enumerated in chapter 24 of the Lotus Sutra, that important locus of upāya. Scholars have analyzed the gender switch as Akvalokitesvara moves from the Indian to the East Asian cultural sphere - another fascinating story. But Hu's analysis takes us a crucial step farther, finding in Avalokitesvara's facility with appearing in whatever form or gender is required a model for all of us.
When I first heard Hu present this material at AAR two years ago, it seemed ingenious, a revelation. Today I appreciated that it provides an answer to a crucial question arising from the understanding of pratītya samutpāda, anattā and kamma. If I have no "self" to be true to, how shall I decide which of my available selves to perform in any given situation? A queer theorist might speak of the exploration of new pleasures here; Hu speaks of ethics. Like the bodhisattva many a Buddhist vows to become, Hu suggests we allow compassion to guide us. Not who am I? but whom does the other need me to be?
Beautiful! And a strong enough sense of agency, and responsibility, in the concrete situations of our lives that we might be able to contemplate the First Noble Truth without looking away. As Rahula suggested, you can get there - when you are ready for it - only if you first enter the Noble Eightfold Path, which comprises not just wisdom but ethics, and thirst-weakening and compassion-strengthening meditation. We can't take down the system of dukkha (or leave it, and all other sufferers, behind) but, once started in responding in our own engaged way, we might as well continue!
Costello: Well then who's on first?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: I mean the fellow's name.
Abbott: Hu.
Costello: The guy on first.
Abbott: Hu.
Costello: The first baseman.
Abbott: Hu.
Costello: The guy playing...
Abbott: Hu is on first!
Costello: I'm asking YOU who's on first.
Abbott: That's the man's name.
Costello: That's who's name?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: Well go ahead and tell me.
Abbott: That's it.
Costello: That's Hu?
Abbott: Yes.
Hsiao-Lan Hu brought "Buddhism and Modern Thought" to this profound insight. Hu's This-Worldly Nibbana offers a compelling alternative to the common Four Noble Truth-centered depiction of Buddhism. Together with her new project on Avalokitesvara (above), it gave us an exciting new vision of what Buddhism offers - and demands.I called our session "Hu's on First" for more reasons than the irresistibility of the pun. In their famous baseball routine Abbott and Costello may prove to have been bodhisattvas - a lesson in anattā and social kamma! But it was also only with Hu's description of the persistent failure of Buddhism to combat gender and class hierarchy in Asian history (in the reading for Monday's class) that we really faced the First Noble Truth, the truth of dukkha. Doctor, heal thyself?!
Can it really have taken us until our twenty-second class to arrive at square one? Most presentations of Buddhism start with the First Noble Truth! We encountered the Four Noble Truths early on, too (though our first Buddhist category was upāya). But you'll recall that I ensured they came with a wobble. Walpola Rahula recommends that those new to Buddhism start with the Fourth Noble Truth (Noble Eightfold Path) and proceed to discussions of meditation and engaged lay practice, before looping back (as needed and if necessary) to the first three Noble Truths and the puzzles of anattā. You don't start with suffering but with practice. Hu puts the point plainly: the Buddha may have shared the Four Noble Truths in his first speech, but it was to seasoned ascetics. Most people aren't ready. They'll misunderstand it or be laid low by it.
(As I suggested when we read Rahula, Perhaps we aren't able to face the overwhelming reality of dukkha before we know from experience, however elementary, that there is something we can do about it, however difficult. Likewise the doctrine of anattā, which is not only paradoxical but paralyzing if we don't already know from experience, however limited, that and why and how we cling to the idea of a perduring soul - and that we don't have to.)
In Hu's account, the central concept is pratītya samutpāda, which she translates as "interdependent co-arising." This is something you might begin to understand through meditation - or through reflection on ways in which your subjectivity and sense of self have been shaped by your culture, things well observed in reflection on what we actually do. She deftly braids classic Buddhist analysis of the "five aggregates" with constructivist feminist accounts of the non-naturalness of gender. What had seemed given, even predestined, is now revealed as the performed artifact of a culture and of your socialization in it - a socialization which, you realize in seeing it, leaves you some options in contributing to or disrupting the "sedimentation" (a concept from Judith Butler) which gives things the appearance of a perduring identity (self).
There isn't always much space for agency, but there is always some space - and this is enough to turn kamma from fate into freedom. Tracing the ways things you had taken for your "self" in fact reside in contingent cultural practices, discourses and structures beyond you, you are at once dislodged from them and brought to the realization that they are shared with others, who may suffer from them just as you do. Your participation in norms and patterns such as gender strengthens their seeming solidity not only in your life but in that of others; refusing to participate weakens their hold not only on you but on others. "The twin central teachings of Buddhism, non-Self and interdependent co-arising, are actually the same concept stated from two different angles" (65). Your freedom from a fated "self" and your responsibility in compassion for others are experienced together.
It's a truly wonderful interpretation - I hope many more people discover it! And I can't wait for Hu's new project to come to fruition. In it she explores the story of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Guanyin in Chinese, Kannon in Japanese), whose boundless compassion leads him (her in China and India) to assume whatever form is needed to get through to a suffering being. Thirty-three such forms are enumerated in chapter 24 of the Lotus Sutra, that important locus of upāya. Scholars have analyzed the gender switch as Akvalokitesvara moves from the Indian to the East Asian cultural sphere - another fascinating story. But Hu's analysis takes us a crucial step farther, finding in Avalokitesvara's facility with appearing in whatever form or gender is required a model for all of us.
When I first heard Hu present this material at AAR two years ago, it seemed ingenious, a revelation. Today I appreciated that it provides an answer to a crucial question arising from the understanding of pratītya samutpāda, anattā and kamma. If I have no "self" to be true to, how shall I decide which of my available selves to perform in any given situation? A queer theorist might speak of the exploration of new pleasures here; Hu speaks of ethics. Like the bodhisattva many a Buddhist vows to become, Hu suggests we allow compassion to guide us. Not who am I? but whom does the other need me to be?
Beautiful! And a strong enough sense of agency, and responsibility, in the concrete situations of our lives that we might be able to contemplate the First Noble Truth without looking away. As Rahula suggested, you can get there - when you are ready for it - only if you first enter the Noble Eightfold Path, which comprises not just wisdom but ethics, and thirst-weakening and compassion-strengthening meditation. We can't take down the system of dukkha (or leave it, and all other sufferers, behind) but, once started in responding in our own engaged way, we might as well continue!
Costello: Well then who's on first?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: I mean the fellow's name.
Abbott: Hu.
Costello: The guy on first.
Abbott: Hu.
Costello: The first baseman.
Abbott: Hu.
Costello: The guy playing...
Abbott: Hu is on first!
Costello: I'm asking YOU who's on first.
Abbott: That's the man's name.
Costello: That's who's name?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: Well go ahead and tell me.
Abbott: That's it.
Costello: That's Hu?
Abbott: Yes.
(watch the whole abhidhammic exchange here)
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Offense and Dissent
My big project at The New School before I head off for China is an exhibition my New School history co-conspirator J, the university gallery's curator R and I are pulling together around "image, conflict and belonging" over our history. The heart of the exhibition will be displays on three episodes J and I discussed in our course last semester - the 1950s curtaining of part of the Orozco mural, an anti-war show Parsons seniors produced instead of their senior shows in 1970, and controversy around a racist image in a 1989 showing of the work of Japanese graphic designer Shin Matsunaga and the reaction of an offended African American faculty member. Several dozen current university citizens will be contributing brief essays on art or design elements of the school which they find confronting, too.
I've been encouraging students to think about academic work as analogous to curating an exhibition for a few years now, but I had no idea! To my astonished delight I'm finding that putting on an exhibit like this involves an immense labor, and a lot of people doing a lot of very creative and rigorous thinking. A research assistant has been helping us fill in the gaps of our stories, working closely with the University Archives. To make what would otherwise be a visually dull exhibit of old memos and articles vibrant, R has commissioned new work from two artists, an illustrator to do a graphic novel-like rendition of the Orozco story and an animator to play with the Matsunaga episode - each of them gets a whole big wall to fill if they choose.
And today R and I met the actual exhibition designer, whose job it will be not just to plan and build the displays, etc., but to find ways to make things cohere in clear and memorable ways. What fun to watch his mind working as we described the project and its aims...
I have no idea how all these moving pieces will come together, but it's going to be grand!
I've been encouraging students to think about academic work as analogous to curating an exhibition for a few years now, but I had no idea! To my astonished delight I'm finding that putting on an exhibit like this involves an immense labor, and a lot of people doing a lot of very creative and rigorous thinking. A research assistant has been helping us fill in the gaps of our stories, working closely with the University Archives. To make what would otherwise be a visually dull exhibit of old memos and articles vibrant, R has commissioned new work from two artists, an illustrator to do a graphic novel-like rendition of the Orozco story and an animator to play with the Matsunaga episode - each of them gets a whole big wall to fill if they choose.
And today R and I met the actual exhibition designer, whose job it will be not just to plan and build the displays, etc., but to find ways to make things cohere in clear and memorable ways. What fun to watch his mind working as we described the project and its aims...
I have no idea how all these moving pieces will come together, but it's going to be grand!
Monday, April 21, 2014
Around the block
"Buddhism and Modern Thought" began with a walk today. More specifically a group walking meditation, inspired by those led by Thich Nhat Hanh. (He extols the "healing energy" of group meditation practices.) I'd proposed it as a fancy but students wanted it. It fell to me to be the leader, setting the slow pace. I led us around the block framed by 11th and 10th Streets, Fifth and Sixth Avenues, moving clockwise. It took 20 minutes. At first the pace was hard to maintain, then it glid on by itself. The first encounters with other people I was self-conscious, but this soon passed. I was grateful to be in New York, where strange things are met with a bemused shrug, and found myself pleased at the spectacle we must have presented - pleased to look like its insouciant leader. But on noisier Sixth Avenue, my arches ached. 
The Church of the Ascension's magnolias danced above our heads in stately arcs as we passed. A crowd of miniature daffodils smiled cheerily at us, as if knowing we were a few steps from seeing others already wilting, stiff and awkward with perplexity. (All the photos you're seeing were taken hours later; the daffodils had been in shadow.) But a chain saw we heard screeching from an approaching doorway soon after that was a distant echo before I noticed we'd passed it. I'm making all this sound very significant; it wasn't. I tried to think of a walker in the Thich Nhat Hanh film who said "I slow down for my mother, who never had the chance," but mine was a Jane Jacobs idyll; landmarked gentrified Greenwich Village is already a fantasy enclave of a slower world.
When we returned to class, it was predictably difficult to get back into discussion mode. Once we did, though, it wasn't about the beauty of the world but it's abysses. We'd read some of Hsiao-Lan Hu's This-Worldly Nibbana, which describes the disproportionate vulnerability of women to every kind of social suffering, and the way Buddhism for most of its history has thought this karmically justified. Greed, hatred and delusion produce vast suffering, but it seems not to happen to those responsible for it. My old friend the problem of evil rearing its ugly head! Could it be that even Buddhism was part of the problem, a problem deeper than any proposed solution? The discussion was very intense, even raw. I wonder if our silent and almost too beautiful walk together against the grain of the harried city made this intensity possible, even necessary.
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