Ordinary miracles

On a bit of a lark, went with my friend L to see "Infinite Variety," the exhibition of 651 red and white American quilts from three centuries, which is up for just one week in the vastness of the Park Avenue Armory. So glad I did: it's a revelation. The artistry, the variety, and all the while knowing these were consummate women's work, made lovingly, creatively and often collectively. In an almost religious way, the exhibition's "tornadoes of quilts" brought hundreds of ordinary artists, and homesteads of thousands of cozy sleepers, back into sweet memory.

Tainted?

In this second half of the semester, I'm going to be pushing the students in "Aboriginal Australia and the Idea of Religion" to get beyond simple and static ideas of "authenticity" - a word which keeps coming up. They seem to have come to terms with the first challenge to "authenticity" - the role of Western observers and media in most of what we can learn of Aboriginal cultures (at least in a classroom in New York City). But a second challenge will, I think, bother them more, and yield richer fruit: Aboriginal Christianity (or: appropriations of Christianity). As one student asked on Thursday, are not the narratives of David Mowaljarlai "tainted" by Christianity? We were discussing one of my favorites, a moiety-system refraction of Cain and Abel (Yorro Yorro 49-52):
What are they going to make of the art of Linda Syddick, then, who often paints Christian motifs like the images at the top of this post in the Australian Museum in Sydney. Apparently the scene at left shows the nativity with the magi, though it's hard not also to see the Trinity revealed to Abraham, too. (Syddick's series on Steven Spielberg's ET may trouble the students less; we'll see!)

Hill of beans

Three pounds of roasted green beans, kabocha and red onions for tonight's Religious Studies party.

Dreaming spires

Waiting in front of the too popular ramen shop Ippudon (we ended up going elsewhere, the wait was too long), caught this lovely glimpse of Grace Church's near Salisburian fineness in dialogue with an old water tower (or is it a Shaun Tanian Lost Thing?), in the last sun of the day.

Bandaiyan

Perhaps Australia really looks like this - an animal floating on its back in the ocean. As drawn and explained by David Banggal Mowaljarlai:
The squares are the areas where the communities are represented, and their symbols and the languages of the different tribes in this country from long-long time ago. The lines are the way the history stories travelled along these trade routes. They are all interconnected. It's the pattern of the Sharing system.
In history, the Flood started up north and went all through the country. We call this land wurri malai - stooped, because it's sloping down, bent. ...
The whole of Australia is Bandaiyan. The front we call wadi, the belly-section, because the continent is lying down flat on its back. it is just sticking out from the surface of the ocean. ...
Inside the body is Wunggud, the Snake. She grows all of nature on the outside of her body. The sides are unggnu djullu, rib-section. This rib-section goes right across the country, above the navel. Uluru is the navel, the center, wangigit. The part below the navel is wambut, the pubic section. There is a woman's section, njambut; and a man's section, ambut....
On sundown side and in the east the connection extends out to the islands, because it was a bigger continent before the Flood.

David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic, Yorro Yorro: everything standing up alive. Spirit of the Kimberley (Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 1993), 190-91, picture 205.

In the numbers

Two hundred years ago today, the Grid which was to define the character of civic life in Manhattan was planned. Not just the right angles! Already in 1811 someone decided that certain streets should be wider than others - 100 rather than 60 feet:

155th
125th
116th
110th
96th
86th
72nd
57th
42nd
34th
23rd
14th

What were they thinking? They couldn't have imagined what was to come!
Here's our neighborhood.

The view over Prospect Place at dusk.

Stop mucking around!

Meanwhile, back in Exploring Religious Ethics land, some friendly thoughts from Santideva at the charnel-ground:

Although it does not move, you are terrified of a skeleton when it is seen like this. Why have you no fear of it when it moves as if animated by a vampire?
They produce both spit and shit from the single source of food. You do not want the shit from it. Why are you so fond of drinking spit?

If you have no passion for what is foul, why do you embrace another, a cage of bones bound by sinew, smeared with slime and flesh?
You have plenty of filth of your own! Satisfy yourself with that! Glutton for crap! Forget her, that other pouch of filth!

Aside from the delicate lotus, born in muck, opening up in the rays of a cloudless sun, what is the pleasure in a cage of crap for a mind addicted to filth?

Apparently you were horrified when you saw a few corpses in the charnel ground. Yet you delight in your village, which is a charnel-ground thronging with moving corpses.

Bodhicaryavatara 8:48-49, 52-53, 70
trans. Kate Crosby & Andrew Skilton (OUP, 2008), 92-93

Image from a Kusozu scroll

BBG

Spring sceptics, just come take a walk in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden!

Found/lost in translation

Remember that rather surreal conference experience I had in Taipei in 2006, the one where everything was in untranslated Chinese, except me? (My hosts didn't so much as translate the titles of my fellow symposiasts' presentations!) Well, with a characteristic academic time lag, the publication suddenly appeared in the mail yesterday four years later, complete with a stack of offprints. Consistent with the original symposium's utter incomprehensibility, the publication is all in Chinese (including my piece), the cover letter too. The cherry on top is that now I can't read the title even of my own contribution!

Boom

My friend G has posted a link to a map of earthquake activity in Japan. Here are the 566 quakes of the last week. 317 are 5 or higher on the Richter scale. You can watch them happen over time here - make sure to click "Sticky Dots." It starts slowly, then: boomboomboomboomboom.

Over here

I should stop obsessing about the situation in Japan - I've been flipping back and forth between Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Guardian, Australian, NHK, 朝日新聞 (Asahi Shimbun), BBC and even al-Jazeera since Friday. I guess I've been trying to bear some sort of witness to suffering I'm powerless to respond to (something I've used this blog for before, most acutely when b(r)ushfires threatened to destroy where my parents and sister live), and to express solidarity with Japanese people in suspended animation, waiting for the final shoe to drop on the nuclear plants (whatever it turns out to be). You won't think I'm forgetting if I spend a little time on the activities of this week here in New York - it's our Spring Break (though Spring has yet to arrive).

I went yesterday to the American Museum of Natural History, ostensibly for its rather meager collection of Aboriginal Australian artifacts, which are quite upstaged by the other objects in the Hall of Pacific Peoples,

but there's so much else there,

and so many people to watch (though this one may have been watching Japan). And those rhinos standing stock still in the glass case above - if mama even turned her head there would be shards everywhere! - from Sumatra.

Today it was the turn of the New Museum - my first visit - a bit of a disappointment, though Lynda Benglis' gorgeous "wax paintings" really appealed to me; they reminded me of the fusion of human craft and nature's randomness of, yes, Japanese pottery.

But the highlight of the week has been the great pleasure and privilege of seeing the Signature Theatre Company revival of Angels in America - Part I on Tuesday from the second row, and Part II last night from the first. It's a great play, and magnificently theatrical. What a treat.
In the scene where Prior goes up to heaven to return the book, the angels are gathered around an old radio listening to a BBC radio broadcast about a nuclear disaster four months in the future. It's Chernobyl, of course, but I'm sure every one in that theater heard Fukushima.

Always on our minds. Prayers.

The next layer

And now, while the world watches the nuclear plants in anxiety and terror, cold as from the depths of winter is descending on the Tohoku region. White snow blankets the remains of towns toppled by the black tsunami. Survivors without shelter or warm clothes are struggling to protect themselves against frigid temperatures. (Asahi Shimbun; pic below Guardian/Reuters)

Nightmare of nightmares

Thankfully none of my friends in Japan were hurt by the earthquake, tsunami and aftershocks, though everyone is in shock and everyday life is disrupted by power outages, food shortages, and consumed by worry. But many will be affected by the radiation leaking from the stricken nuclear plants. (Graphic from The Australian) And in the earthquake and tsunami-ravaged areas, snow is expected. When will it end?

Apocalyptic

Trying to grasp the enormity of the cataclysmic series of horrors striking Japan - earthquake then tsunami then fire then shortages and outages and radiation leaks and economic calamity, with worries that these latter might get much worse - and to resist the false solace of sensationalist headlines worst in recorded history! - worst since WW2! - worst since Chernobyl! I'm boning up on my never very strong newspaper Japanese. Headlines especially are in a kind of telegraphic shorthand that reminds me I can barely scratch the surface. (The photo caption from the online Asahi Shimbun is different: why...welling up tears.) That keeps it real.

Red tide

From 「いざ！というときのためのサバイバル・マニュアル」,
the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Earthquake Survival Manual.

津波

Eastern Japan earthquake-triggered tsunami washing ashore near Sendai (before the water became black with churned up soil, thick with debris of shredded houses and bobbing cars); seeing the speed of it - much faster than a person could run - we have a visual, too, belatedly, for the Indian Ocean tsunami. As new threats from tsunami to fires to failure at a nuclear plant occupy attention, I imagine we haven't begun to see the damage from the earthquake itself - and this in the land probably better prepared than any other for such calamity, from long experience with earthquakes. Mercifully the shock of a 20 foot drop across a 500 mile stretch of sea floor dispersed with less damage across the Pacific.(Source NOAA; check out this this eerily beautiful animation too.)

Religion and film I

Watched two amazing movies today, each of which resonated with one of the courses whose midpoint we've just reached. (Next week is Spring Break.) This post is about the one I showed in "Aboriginal Australia," the next about a new film which exemplified something we discussed in "Exploring Religious Ethics." Today's film was Warwick Thornton's "Samson & Delilah," the first Aboriginal-made film to win prizes from Australia to Cannes. It's not an easy movie, but powerful. (And great cinema too, especially in its use of music.)

"Sampson & Delilah" balances, or perhaps balances out, the idealized image of a whole Aboriginal world of the film with which the course began, "Ten Canoes" (which is also Aboriginal-made, though the director was Balanda). Thornton's world is very decidedly not whole - he says the film was a wake-up call to Aboriginals to tend to a generation of youth which was getting lost (Sampson, above, is a glue-sniffing addict), and I understand that the sort-of happy end was tacked on so as not to be too depressing.

In the context of our course, it marked a turning point in several ways. From images of the Aboriginal past, whether Aboriginal or scholarly-white, we turn now to the difficult present. And from the Dreaming in putatively timeless rituals we'll turn to contemporary ethnography, art and politics. What about religion? It's still there, complicated by the changes in ritual resulting from dislocations, stolen generations and sedentarization. "Sampson & Delilah" also introduces another important factor in contemporary Aboriginal life: Christianity.

Religion and film 2

The second film was Xavier Beauvois' "Of Gods and Men" ("Des Hommes es des Dieux"), the true story of a community of French Trappists in Algeria who were victims of the violent unrest there in the 1990s - although they knew they are in danger, they chose to stay. It's a beautiful if not always easy film, certainly deserving of its accolades.
I went to see it with my sometimes excitable friend M, who was incensed by A. O. Scott's enthusiastic review in the Times which described this as one of a handful of powerful religion films in recent years - but his highest praise was this: [M]artyrdom is not part of the Cistercian creed, Scott notes; What motivates [Brother] Christian and the others is rather an almost fanatical humanism. Maybe. But the film is suffused (as "Into Great Silence," for instance, is not) by the rhythms of monastic communal life - we spend perhaps half the film with the monks in their daily office - and an explicitly Christian spirituality.

[T]hough [Beauvois'] sympathy for the Trappists is evident, the film does not treat them as saints, or as mouthpieces for any particular theology, Scott also remarks. Rather, "Of Gods and Men” works to balance the two terms of its title and treats the relationship between them as a grave and complex mystery." That's better, a little. Except that saints aren't mouthpieces for theology - which is where this film dovetailed with "Exploring Religious Ethics." Just this morning we discussed a reflection on sainthood by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, focusing on the way he began:

"All it takes to make a man a saint is Grace. Anyone who doubts this knows neither what makes a saint nor a man," Pascal observes in Pensées with his characteristic trenchant style. I start with this observation to point out the dual perspective of these reflections: in the saint the celebration of God (indeed, of his Grace) combines with the celebration of man, with his potential and his limitations, his aspirations and his achievements.

(grace completes nature - it doesn't have to overthrow it!) and culminated in this observation:

In an age of the collapse of collective utopias, in an age of indifference and the lack of appetite for all that is theoretical and ideological, new attention is being paid to the saints, unique figures in whom is found not a theory nor even merely a moral, but a plan of life to be recounted, to be discovered through study, to be loved with devotion, to be put into practice with imitation.

"Of Gods and Men" seems to Scott an apotheosis of humanism precisely because it is true hagiography. The seven Trappists aren't superhuman - each is a fully realized individual - but they are able to show a dazzling human potential because of their life together, and its anchoring in the redemptive suffering of Christ. Their humanity is never left behind or even eclipsed by their heroism. The human is exalted.

I can't resist citing one of my favorite lines from William James (which I'm surprised I haven't yet quoted in this blog):

the human charity which we find in all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, [are] a genuinely creative social force ... The saints are authors, auctores, increasers, of goodness.... The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous. And yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another; and without that over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy.

(Varieties, 1902 edition, 357-58)

Misfortune cookie

Rainy day

Tanguy Pine

Wow! My father's managed to get a bunch of Torrey Pine seeds to germinate. Curiously, the first set of needles in each case was 13 strong.

Shadow of the rising sun

This is proving a bit of a woozy semester. That might be because being ready to go at 8 o'clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays means out the door at 7 (here the view), which means up at 6, which means in bed by 11. Meanwhile, back to back 8 and 10 o'clock classes means desperate attempt to recall and record what happened in class at 12 followed by a few hours of zombie blur.

Time space warp

Here's an amazing thing: triptropnyc will make you a map which shows how close places are in time, not just space, from anywhere in the four boroughs of New York. Above's the city from where I live in Prospect Heights. And below is from where I work in Greenwich Village. Red = 10 minutes, orange = 15, darker yellow = 20, and from there on each color represents 10 more minutes until you get to light blue = 60, after which come 75, 90 and 120 minutes. Not perfect but suggestive!

Said that

Have you ever noticed how a new or rare turn of phrase suddenly becomes ubiquitous - and then you find yourself unable to live without it yourself? I remember that happening with the verb "segue," which I thought pretentious and ugly - and then one day couldn't finish a sentence without it. Had my thinking changed too? This is a more interesting example than the similarly irresistible "and he was like..." for "and then he said...." Other recent ones include "Been there, done that," the intensely annoying "It is what it is," and the whole "walk the talk" thing. I guess this is what memetics describes, though I recall a passage in Milan Kundera about a history of gestures which would fit as well, and more literarily.

I mention this today because a stack of papers for one of my courses has made me aware of the latest such phrase - one I realize I just used in an e-mail a few days ago: "that said." It pops up in five of six papers! Even more than "segue" it suggests a broader rearrangement of discourse, as it allows a disavowing u-turn in your line of argument (or the line where an argument should be).