Farewell, 2016

Refuge from the dark forest

I'm neck deep in the final volume of Liu Cixin's sci-fi trilogy, which started with the brilliant Three Body Problem. I've been reading it as translations appeared: the first volume in Shanghai in Spring 2015, the second (The Dark Forest) traveling in China at the start of this year, and now the third. Well-written sci-fi with an unfamiliar historical horizon is not a bad way to stay sane at this time where the imagination can't keep up with immanent future possibilities.

Back in winter

Back in Brooklyn, where a gloomy day of rain lit up just as it ended!

Au revoir, San Diego!

Out the window of the JetBlue flight back to New York, we were afforded a last view of places of delight: Del Mar, at upper left of the photo on the right, with the glorious Pacific, and Borrego Springs, at upper right of the photo below, the start of the desert Southwest. You can find snow in both pictures, too!

Borrego Palm Canyon

bighorn sheep, chuparosa, California's only native palm, and ocotillo!

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by

We're spending a day in Borrego Springs before heading back to New York. Anza-Borrego was our friendly local desert when I was growing up - just two hours away across the Santa Ysabel mountains. It's there that I learned that deserts aren't desolate wastelands but laced with ecosystems of ingenious animals and plants, building usually nocturnal lives through expert use of every drop of moisture they could find. I learned to see every twig, every burrow hole, every track as a little triumph of survival. You may have heard about the miracle of Spring flowers, unrolled like carpets after rains. But the triumphant symbols of the desert community's savoir vivre are the ocotillo, whose spiny branches (twice as tall as a human being) will shimmer with delicate lobes of green if there's any water - we saw a little of that today - and glorious torches of red blossoms at top. I saw one set of buds today; perhaps there'll be more tomorrow!

Ricardo Breceda's oversize rusty sculptures of animals have arrived in Borrego since we were children, and are pleasing in their way - photogenic, certainly! But I include the picture above so you notice the sky, the last sun of day climbing over the hills in the distance. A few hours later the clouds will have sidled away, leaving a near perfect hemisphere of stars overhead. How to describe it? Malouf and Saariaho's "L'Amour de Loin," a lovesong to the sea, has this exchange:

Jaufré

(qui continue à s'agiter, et se penche au-dessus de l'eau) 

Pèlerin, sais-tu pourqoui la mer est bleue? 

Le Pèlerin 

Parce qu'elle est le miroir du ciel. 

Jaufré 

Et le ciel, pourquoi est-il bleu? 

Le Pèlerin 

Parce qu'il est le miroir de la mer!

It's a little pat, but I like it. And it's a little like what the night sky in the desert feels like, enveloping and not distant at all, stark and grand but somehow kind, and containing multitudes. Explaining the joy of living in New Mexico I used to quote a line from Willa Cather's Death comes for the archbishop - "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky" - but I'm feeling something more symmetrical, reciprocal.

How easy it is to forget the one house of being in which we all live, what a privilege (alas) to have the chance to be reminded of it.

Rocky

Venite adoremus

This year's Del Mar nativity (you've seen the set before), among surf-tossed shell survivors retrieved over the years along Torrey Pines beach - one a delicate sand dollar.

Worlds within worlds

Distances

Completed my season of Saariaho by inviting my parents to the encore screening of the Metropolitan Opera's new "L'Amour de Loin" in HD.

It was their forty-second Met in HD opera! I've been only a few times, and still don't know what I think about it. I mean, I'm delighted that many more people have a chance to see opera, including a taste of the excitement of live performance, and it's fun to go behind the scenes to hear the performers in interviews during the intermissions, etc. During the opera itself the busy camera also lets you see things not usually part of the opera experience (especially if you're up in the Family Circle with the hoi polloi), from details of sets and costumes to close-ups of faces straining to make those glorious sounds.

I was happy to have a chance to see the parts of "L'Amour de Loin" you could only guess at from the Met's Family Circle - where I was for the premiere three weeks ago, dazzled by the shimmering set and the music welling up from the pit (the sound is best in the Family Circle, I'm told), but from that distance the three performers were tiny and their few movements made for a defiantly static scene. I also wanted to see if the story and libretto seemed less, well, facile. So?

The HD production couldn't convey the beauty of the sea of constantly shifting LED lights or the stately movement of the singers across it in small and larger craft. In exchange we got to see the singers up close and personal, squirming with perhaps too much effort at emotional realism in their constricting spaces on the abstracted set - and the choruses parked uncomfortably beneath the waves. The music, however, familiar on second hearing but still new, was enveloping and lovely. And I came to see how the Kahlil Gibran-like words by Aamin Malouf, full of tidy paradoxes and inversions, fit with the way Saariaho's music works. Even the final scene, when the riddles stretch toward transcendence (God, as love, goodness, pardon, passion, becomes heartbroken beauty Clemence's "amour de loin"), makes a kind of sense riding the ripples and surges of sound on which the characters and their not-quite-human yearnings have been floating all along.

It's not quite my kind of spirituality but the opera beautifully conveys the life-distancing purity which is its theme. Does it do that better in the jewel box stillness of the Met, where the music and lights are the sun around which the singers orbit like little planets, or in the more personable format of HD, with billboard-size close-ups? In the former, Clemence ascends into, well, the firmament of grand opera. At Edwards Mira Mesa Stadium 18, Susanna Phillips' radiant face came home with us.

What they say about the iPhone camera appears to be true...

Fallen

Back in Southern California nothing seems to change - but it does. If the light seemed different as I walked down to the coffee shop this morning, it's because a huge Torrey Pine has just been cut down. (You can see the last slice of trunk in this picture; by afternoon it too was gone.) With it went the amazing cactus which was scaling its heights. Remember?

Sea to shining sea

On my way to San Diego via Boston, I spotted a fellow east to west traveler reflected in Long Island Sound and deathstar-like Indianapolis.

Certes!

I just received word that some of the papers at this Spring's colloquium on the work of Michel de Certeau will appear as a book next March, mine among them! All contributions have been translated, and the
colloque's curious geographical-linguistic panels have been replaced by a new editorial structure. No longer a voice in the wilderness of the "non-indoeuropéen," I'm now part of "L'inspiration chrétienne." Pas mal!

Existential

Had a lovely brunch today with some old friends, including my erstwhile Mexican housemate V, who became a mother just a few weeks ago.

V's husband was surprised that we spent nearly three hours without ever discussing the president-elect. Me too. But talking about him is precisely what fuels the Trompe. And yet, how can one not? All bets for the future are off, and history of the most dramatic deadly sort seems about to come rushing in. I've started each class since the election by writing NO BUSINESS AS USUAL on the board, but even that has started to seem an acquiescence, a normalization. What to do? How to be?

For a while now people have been describing DDT as an "existential threat." That's a way of saying that he is qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different from any crooked leader we've had before, that his brazen disdain for the principles and processes of our democracy represents an unprecedented danger to it. That he will knock out years of progress in becoming a more perfect union. He's the free rider problem pur. It's existential for democrats (not just Democrats) because the ways we understand citizenship - upholding the principles and processes, most impressively in ensuring "smooth transitions" between regimes - seems to play into his hands. And yet what else can we do? Join him in trashing the common good? He loves our distress, feeds on chaos and acts of desperation.

I was sleepless last night at the breath-taking bad faith of his claimed mandate, and his using it to assemble a cabinet of hired assassins. Even had his win been as big as he claims (should there be any doubt that it wasn't, see the Times article from which this diagram is taken),

he wouldn't be entitled to take a wrecking ball to the whole system. As though it didn't matter who people actually voted for, or would have had they been able. As though it's not about being for, by and of the whole people. (I know, it's not just him; as demonstrated most conspicuously in North Carolina, the Republican party has been playing foul for years, content and confirmed as a minority ruling party.)

The phrase that came to me, a refrain, a plaint, a plea, was this: "It's not yours." America's not yours to play with, not yours to squander, not yours to upend.

This grew to encompass more than the shameless claim of a mandate in this election. To him and those happy to join his administration of thugs: it's not yours. The achievements of past governments (for instance in working out an international order, citizen protections and environmental responsibility) aren't yours to mock, mangle and monetize.

It kept growing. To those who supported him hoping he would restore a white America: it's not yours. America's never been white - though those who profited from the expropriation of land, the genocide, and formal and informal enslavement of peoples, were. Whitewashing that history is the surest guarantee of further injustice.

And more, thinking of those who will die because of feckless resistance to climate science, not only human but other-than-human: it's not yours. This land (and this planet) belong to all its denizens, we late-arriving balance-destroying last of all.

And finally, thinking again of the impunity of the wealthy, the dismal feeling that DT and his cronies and fellow travelers will get away with it: it's not yours. Nothing can be yours or mine, not in the exploitative winner-take-all way you understand. As the anarchist Proudhon said, all property is theft! Or as Pope Francis reminds us Christians are supposed to believe, everything is but a trust given us by God for the common good - a good not restricted to the powerful, the "smart," even the human.

It adds up to an existential crisis for me not just because of the tawdry timeliness of our trickster tyrant but because, of course, I'm addressed by many of these it's not yours accusations too. Prosperous and privileged enough not to be losing sleep every night over the widening horror, I have a special responsibility to live out the decency our leader-to-be lacks.

If the desperate, the duped and the cunning think responsibility for and to the common good is for losers, then lose I must. And I must learn from this how many others have lost so much more and for so much longer. And I must do what I can to restore and rebuild the trust and truthfulness, the fair play and generosity and humility, the celebration of our unprecedented plurality without which our ideals are meaningless.

Perhaps by the time V's daughter is old enough to make sense of things, we'll be on our way to living more fully, more consciously, more responsibly and joyfully into it's ours.

Final syntheses

Here are some more of the "final syntheses" from this year's "Theorizing Religion." The one above may or may not be a reference to a series of post-Copernican metaphors we followed, starting with Feuerbach's "each planet has its own sun." You can find more of the exquisite collages by Ines Gurovich - the ones she produced for us (below) move from imposed prefab religions to the lessons of introspection and nature - here. The watercolor beneath chronicles the student's progress - if progress it was! - from "what is the definition of religion?" to "what is a definition?"

Not all syntheses were visual, of course. One student managed wittily to capture all the major elements of our theorists and discussions in terms of "breaks." One described how the class had provided tools for making sense of the situation in Syria. Another described how the course had taught her, an atheist, how to respect religious people. Another copied out quotations from the notebook in which she jots down lines from the readings which she didn't notice until they came up in discussion, a lovely concretization of this seminar thing we're doing. We learned lots!

Wohin, wohin?

Met Friday nights have more adventure now! One can start at the Met Breuer (erstwhile Whitney) on 75th Street, where one might enjoy the Berggruen collection of works by Paul Klee (this is "Wandbild aus dem Tempel der Sehnsucht ↖dorthin↗" (1922, which somehow spoke to my discombobulation as the DT nightmare fractals demonically out) and then walk a few blocks to the main building, now known as the Met Fifth

Avenue, where one might find the huge Neapolitan nativity scene under the big Christmas tree (note the Putti running down the steps toward a ledge like hang gliders, presumably to bring the glad tidings to all).

From our house to yours

View out our holiday-festooned window of a chilly winter morning.

Cathedral mounts

Veronica della Dora's Mountain: Nature and Culture (Reaktion, 2016) is a gem. While perhaps too Europe-focused for my class, it's a wonderful account of changing western understandings of mountains. I'd known that the Alps had been seen as chaotic and ugly before their reclamation as sublime in the 18th century, but it hadn't occurred to me that it was only with the advent of geology - and the opening up of "geological time" - that they came to be seen as historical, changing, eroding, ruins. In fact I hadn't realized that I appreciate mountains as ruins in much this way! della Dora includes images and quotations from all manner of fascinating engagements, some of which strike me as things I must have read before, even as I know I haven't. Here's one:

[Mountains] are the great cathedrals of the earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of cloud, choirs of stream and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of purple traversed by the continual stars. They seem to have been built for the human race, as at once their schools and cathedrals; full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in holiness for the worshipper ... 

That's John Ruskin in 1856. Who knew that his Modern Painters devoted a whole book (book V) to mountains? della Dora writes:

For Ruskin, mountains were the highest and most tangible expression of divine love: first, mountains served to purify the air; second, they sustained the flowing of rivers; third, and most significantly for Ruskin, they had been created to delight humans, to awaken their poetic and religious consciousness. ... As for geologists, for the art critic mountains were magnificent and insistently material objects, but they were also frail and perishable. Like a building, they deteriorated over time. Their histories were ones of endurance and destruction, of eternal decay. ... However, the difference between human architecture and the divine architecture of mountains was that while with the former 'the designer did not calculate upon ruin', with the latter, ruin was part of God's purpose 'and the builder of the temple forever stands beside His work, appointing the stone that is to fall, and the pillar that is to be abased, and guiding all the seeming wildness of chance and change into ordained splendors and unforeseen harmonies'. 

I feel a little found out by these ideas, found out because - although I couldn't have articulated them in this way - they correspond in some deep way to the way I respond to mountains. Ruskin's view has the startling truth of phenomenology, even as it is clearly culturally and historically specific: not the way all people apprehend mountains, but the way some of us do. Including me. How did those ideas get inside me?

Mountain, 197-98, quoting Modern Painters IV. 349-50, 142; illustrations from Ruskin, 195

You can read the Ruskin passages in full here: 359 (the culmination of a great ode to the superior beauty of mountains), 144-45 (where the final harmonies are, however, foreseen); her pics are at 183, 187, but this one below, at 306, celebrating an image of Ruskin's pash J. M. W. Turner of Mount Pilatus, conveys the divine artistry view rather nicely, too:

Plentiful

 With my partner back in our Brooklyn kitchen with me,

it was just a matter of time before our pal Yotam joined us!