Coexist!!

The National Finalist of the 2016 Google Doodle competition takes the

eponymous multifaith bumper sticker COEXIST and expands it. Sweet!

Subaltern

An interesting work of art on display at Lang. An artist who spent time at a seed bank devoted to understanding the ways in which plants adapt to human-caused climate change and dislocation asked 200 people to name objects and living creatures that didn't go together, then represented them together on used Metro Cards, stitched together in the colors of the subway lines. I'm not sure how it all fits together (that may be the point) but it makes for an engaging work!

Perfect containers

Delayed a fortnight because of Snow Day and Spring Break, we've arrived finally at Xunzi, who's wonderful! To remind students that he was still working within the framework of Kongzi (Confucius), our discussion traversed two Odes, each referred to twice in the text, and ended with a more general reference to the importance of the Odes. Somehow it makes most sense to describe our trajectory in reverse. We ended here:

Music is joy, an unavoidable human disposition. So, people cannot be without music; if they feel joy, they must express it in sound and give it shape in movement. The way of human beings is that changes in the motions of their nature are completely contained in those sounds and movements. So, people cannot be without joy, and their joy cannot be without shape, but if it takes she and does not accord with the Way, then there will inevitably be chaos. (284)

This chaos the ancient Sage Kings forestalled by assembling the Odes, whose fully embodied performance perfectly expresses joy. For while it is a thing to be welcomed, joy can distract us from the Way. The Odes ritualize the expression, and even the experience of joy. In every case, ritual begins in that which must be released, reaches full development in giving it proper form, and finishes in providing it satisfaction. (276)

The Xunzi's discussion of joy comes after the chapter on ritual, whose focus is not joy but grief. Grief, too, is an "unavoidable human disposition." It too is to be welcomed and ritualized. Xunzi eloquently and quite movingly describes sacrificial funeral rites as the refined expression of remembrance and longing (284). They operate primarily (if not necessarily exclusively) for the benefit of the living, whose haphazard expressions of grief would otherwise leave all unsatisfied.

They are the utmost in loyalty, trustworthiness, love, and respect. They are the fullest manifestation of ritual, proper regulation, good form, and proper appearance. If one is not a sage, then one will not be able to understand them. The sage clearly understands them. The well-bred man and the gentleman are at ease in carrying them out. The officials take them as things to be preserved. The common people take them as their set customs. The gentleman regards them as the way to be a proper human being. The common people regard them as serving the ghosts… (284)

Much to discuss there! The second of the Odes we read was #209, which describes the arc of a sacrificial rite; the line Xunzi twice cites refers to the appropriateness of even the laughter and words during ceremonial feasting. Ritualized joy even as part of mourning! It's fascinating, and surprisingly persuasive, as ritual theory - and as psychology. But if it's the way to be a proper human more than it is part of a relationship with the dead, that doesn't mean it's only about currently living human beings. For Xunzi sees human beings living out the Way as providing the true pattern and indeed the refined expression of all the ten thousand things. The first Ode we read, #241, described Heaven's pleasure at an early King who cleared the dead wood out of forests, etc. This isn't just a metaphor for the work one must do on oneself, but an indication that nature is incomplete until cultivated by human beings. It's a shocking idea for Americans raised to think of nature as opposed to human use or at least independent of it.

But the human's place isn't above nature, as is arguably the case in the Genesis narratives. There's a deep kinship between human beings and the ten thousand things. You find it, for instance, in the dispositions whose perfected expression makes human culture. Like mourning!

Among all the living things between Heaven and earth, those that have blood and qi are sure to have awareness, and of those that have awareness, none does not love its own kind. Now if one of the great birds or beasts loses its group of companions, then after a month or a season has passed, it is sure to retrace its former path and go by its old home. When it does, it is sure to pace back and forth, cry out, stomp the ground, pause hesitatingly, and only then is it able to leave the place. Even among smaller creatures such as swallows and sparrows, they will still screech for a moment before being able to leave. (283)

It's all quite beautiful, I think, profound. Even as I'm still a little sorry to see Mencius left behind, I can see why Xunzi seems to speak more to us today. He's every bit as committed to ritual and the classics as the other Confucians, but, perhaps because he offers a theory of why they work, he allows one to imagine new containers beyond those of ancient China which might also do the precious work he describes.

"Xunzi," trans. Eric L. Hutton, in Philip J, Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden, eds., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 2nd. ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2001)

Conference tutorial

An experiment...

Sign of age

Daniel Dennett is profiled in current The New Yorker. I liked his response to the young philosophers of mind who think there must be something more than - well, than everything we experience:

You shouldn't trust your intuitions. Conceivability or inconceivability is a life's work - it's not something where you just screw up your head for a second! (55)

12th and Sixth Ave, Monday morning

Not unbeautiful... 

Good thinking

I'm reading the new book by the wonderful Elizabeth Minnich, a vindication and updating of her teacher Hannah Arendt's arguments about the "banality of evil" for our times. I think she's probably right that Arendt would have spared herself lots of controversy if she's spoken instead of the "evil of banality," which Minnich unpacks as our own dumbest, densest, out-of-touch, compartmentalized, autopilot, clichéd, conventional, inattentive, greedy, careerist, and, enabling all that, thoughtless selves (122).

I'll have more to say about the book when I've finished reading it, but for now let me express my delight that Minnich includes a whole section on Goodness. The central distinction of the book is between the "intensive evil" of spectacular individuals and the "extensive evil" engaged in by great numbers for extended periods of time which is what really enables and enacts the greatest evils. Good comes in both sorts, too, Minnich argues, and imagining good only in its supererogatory saintly heroic "intensive" forms obscures the value of "extensive good." (The points on 126, below, are key.)



[E]ducating more of us to be prepared to martyr ourselves sadly means only that we will continue to need martyrs. (140)

She cites the work of Philip Hallie (who was at the center of one of my very first classes at The New School), but favors a less awestruck understanding of the "banality of good." It doesn't just seem ordinary and natural to those practiced in it. The work of good is itself banal. Resisting the blandishments of "extensive evil" is a demanding, even exhausting practice, requiring a complicated mix of attention, effort, collaboration and persistence.

To be and do good is more work than to be bad, even evil: you have to stay awake, and you have to practice both independence of mind and cooperative action, both open attentiveness and active reflection, direct simplicity and understanding of complex, changing contexts. (160)

I haven't thought about my own unfinished work on what I was calling "the problem of good," then "the problem with good," for a long time, but it's coming back to me as I read Minnich. I'd part ways with her at some point, because, while both feminist thinkers, she's less interested than I am in the ethics of care, which seems to me central to the theoretical elusiveness of good. But I haven't finished her book yet!

Elizabeth Minnich, The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death

Importance of Thinking (NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016)

American care

The rich white pseudo-Christians in Washington are gathering their forces to undo the belated act of civic decency which was the Affordable Care Act. That the cruel and feckless replacement is called the American Health Care Act tells you all you need to know about their view of "care" - and of "America." Exclusion and exploitation are their apple pie. I hope it will be sooner rather than later that we look back at the Obama years as the start of the more perfect union which eventually emerges, and the current racist frenzy to erase all trace of them as the last gasp of an exhausted narrowness, a failure to see that American democracy is all about care for all.

(F-R-O-G, incidentally, just means fig, raspberry, orange peel and ginger, nothing like feckless Republican overlord gridlock.)

SJ at TNS

My New School co-historian J and I gave a talk at Staff Development Day last year called "What Does it Mean to be a Progressive University?" We did the usual historian's thing - finding the past unfamiliar, at once disconcerting and inspiring, allowing distance, humility and a new vantage on the present - and it was a great hit. Staff, we concluded, have a greater investment in the school than students, passing through, or faculty, with communities and loyalties beyond the particular institution. We've never had as interested an audience! (And the video of the talk circulated well beyond the day.)

Today was Staff Development Day 2017, and they invited us back, this time to share the stage with the university's dynamic Vice President for Social Justice, the theme "Social Justice at The New School, Then and Now." Our impulse was to do for "social justice" what we'd done for "progressive" - it didn't mean then what it means now - but isn't "social justice" a term of our new century? J checked the digitized course catalogs and found the story was more complicated. "The Idea of Social Justice" shows up as a topic in a course already in Fall 1925! By 1936 a course was touching on "changing concepts of social justice" - but not before social justice cropped up in a lecture on Götterdämmerung!

Always so much (more) to learn!

For instance about Wagner teacher Adele T. Katz, an intriguing figure. Born in California and studying in her forties at Mannes, the conservatory now part of New School; in 1935 she published the first English language article on Schenkerian analysis, the theoretical base of Mannes' pedagogy. She wrote the music and staged the plays for the Schools Settlement Association for several years. She taught at New School but more at our shadow, the Rand School of Social Science. Yet it was at TNS she taught about theories of social reform in Wagner in Spring 1934 - affected, perhaps, by the atmosphere of the place:

David Carson Berry, "The Role of Adele T. Katz in the Early Expansion of the

New York 'Schenker School,'" Current Musicology 74 (Fall 2002): 103-151, 116

Stripes

This picture will have to stand in for (it can't do justice to) the landscapes we drove through on our little trip up to Saratoga Springs, across to Bennington, and back to Brooklyn. Early or late on a bright cloudless day, these wooded hills blanketed smooth in clean snow offer contrasts of white and near-black lines of a dazzling beauty and precision. Beholding them I felt I had seen such loveliness in art. But where? Grandma Moses? Currier and Ives? Brueghel? Hiroshige? Nope... It's like the clarity of a print with the fulness of oils.

Chance encounter

Had the great pleasure today of visiting my friend L's class at Bennington College. The course is called "Chance" and populated mostly by students studying economics (L, too, is an economist), but my assignment was to talk about chance (a) and John Cage, (b) and religion. It worked better than I thought it might... curious students and an enthusiastic host make all the difference!

I won't tire you with the details but we went from Cage's challenge to the distinction between sound (or music) and noise to the discovery that we can make sound of noise through attention (as we do when attending a concert with the right attitude) to the potential for unprecedented creativity in seeking out what we would otherwise dismiss as noise through "chance operations" to... religion? What is it not just to recognize chance, uncertainty, chaos, contingency as in their own way significant or true (even as every effort to articulate it traduces it) but to find (and give yourself to) God, Buddha nature or the Dao in it?

This is all quite different from the overall aim of L's class, which is to survey the way probability can (to the extent it can) compass chance events, but everyone seemed engaged, busily making sense of what we'd billed as a chance - or chancy - inter-disciplinary encounter. Part of a lovely sojourn in Bennington!

Together we prosper

Manifesto on the wall of one of the few establishment in Bennington (town) that seems to be on the way in rather than on its way out.

Visitor views

Saratoga Springs is one of America's oldest tourist destinations - natural mineral springs and horse racing, proximity to the site of an important battle early in the war of independence, early connected to NYC by train. The cracking paint in this now illegible map, in the century-old station now converted into a visitors center, gives a sense of hoary age.
The view from Saratoga National Historical Park's visitor center.

Off the grid

We're heading to our friend's place in Bennington for the start of Spring Break. North of NYC there's no sign of Spring! But there were these amazing inverted icicle cities in the carpark of a service station of I-87.

Jeanne d'Arc crocus

Longue durée

To commemorate Women's History Month, The New School today screened a documentary about Gerda Lerner (1920-2013), the historian who studied here - and, while still studying, taught the first course in women's history at this or any other university. (It was anthropologist May Edel, one of her teachers at The New School, who pointed Lerner toward history, a field she went on to reshape in significant ways.) A most inspiring story, and sobering. Nobody gave us anything, she insisted. Women worked hard for all their rights. Seventy-two years for suffrage in the US. Seventy-two years! What kept them going?

It's always good to be reminded how very recent it is that young women now grow up with women role models, heroes and models in history as well as the present. (Young men, too!) Not much longer than my lifetime, in fact... though, Lerner would point out, women have in fact been making history all along, even without the aid of histories, which used to focus only on (and exaggerate) the history-making of men.

During the three days of interviews in 2012 that form the center of the documentary, film maker Renata Keller got to be the one to tell Lerner that one of her heroes, Hildegard of Bingen, had just been canonized by Benedict XVI. Nine hundred years it took, Lerner said. Thirty-nine abbesses, thirty-nine generations of nuns!

March

Ply visible

Another marvel from Nan Shepherd...

The freezing of running water is another mystery. The strong white stuff, whose power I have felt in swollen streams, which I have watched pour over ledges in endless ease, is itself held and punished. But the struggle between frost and the force in running water is not quickly over. The battle fluctuates, and at the point of fluctuation between the motion of water and the immobility of frost, strange and beautiful forms are evolved. Until I spent a whole midwinter day wandering from one burn to another watching them, I had no idea how many fantastic shapes the freezing of running water took. In each whorl and spike one catches the moment of equilibrium between two elemental forces. (29)

...an avid reader, I've learned, of Daoist and Buddhist texts!

Since then I have watched many burns in the process of freezing, but I do not know if description can describe these delicate manifestations. Each is an interplay between two movements in simultaneous action, the freezing of frost and the running of water. Sometimes a third force, the blowing of wind, complicates the forms still further. The ice may be crystal clear, but more probably is translucent; crimpled, crackled or bubbled; green throughout or at the edges. Where the water comes wreathing over stones the ice is opaque, in broken circular structure. Where the water runs thinly over a line of stones right across the bed and freezes in crinkled green cascades of ice, then a dam forms further up of half frozen slush, green, though colourless if lifted out, solid at its margins, foliated, with the edges all separate, like untrimmed hand-made paper, and each edge a vivid green. Where water drips steadily from an overhang, undeflected by wind, almost perfect sphere of clear transparent ice result. They look unreal, in this world of wayward undulations, too regular, as though man had made them. Spray splashing off a stone cuts into the slowly freezing snow on the bank and flutes it with crystal, or drenches a sprig of heather that hardens to a tree of purest glass, like an ingenious toy. Water running over a rock face freezes in ropes, with the ply visible. Where the water fell clear of the rock, icicles hang, thick as a thigh, many feet in length, and sometimes when the wind blows the falling water askew as it freezes, the icicles are squint. I have seen icicles like a scimitar blade in shape, firm and solid in their place. For once, even the wind has been fixed. Sometimes a smooth portion of stream is covered with a thin coat of ice that, not quite meeting in the middle, shows the level of the water several inches below; since the freezing began, the water upstream has frozen and less water is flowing. When a level surface has frozen hard from bank to bank, one may hear at times a loud knocking, as the stream, rushing below the ice, flings a stone up against its roof. In boggy parts by the burnside one treads on what seems solid frozen snow, to find only a thin crisp crust that gives way to reveal massed thousands of needle crystals of ice, fluted columns four or five inches deep. And if one can look below the covering ice on a frozen burn, a lovely pattern of fluted indentations is found, arched and chiselled, the obverse of the water's surface, with the subtle shift of emphasis and superimposed design that occurs between a painting and the landscape that it represents. In short, there is no end to the lovely things that frost and the running of water can create between them. (31-32)

Copying this out word for word was my own act of attention; the congealing of her words is as mysterious as the processes she describes.

After the snow

Because of the snow day, the Religious Studies roundtable has had to be rescheduled (probably to April 27th). But tomorrow's opening of the art exhibit curated by one of my Kailash fellow yatris is still happening!

You'll notice a second event in the poster, too. On March 30th, the New School participants in last year's Kailash kora will be getting together to share reflections on our experiences together. The event will include photo highlights of the expedition.