Contact! Contact!

This mountain has knocked on my door three times in a week. At the very first panel I attended of the ISSRNC Mountains and Sacred Landscapes conference someone mentioned that Henry David Thoreau, otherwise so sanguine about living in harmony with nature, had had a "meltdown" on a mountain in Maine called Katahdin. Six days later, at our Spring Roundtable on "Literary Journalism and Religion," a colleague read passages from writings excerpted in the collection he uses as a text for his class, Jeff Sharlet's Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, and Other Essays on American Belief. One was from Thoreau's account of that encounter in The Maine Woods (1864).

At length I entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed forever drifting over the summit, and yet would never be gone, but was generated out of that pure air as fast as it flowed away; and when, a quarter of a mile farther, I reached the summit of the ridge, which those who have seen in clearer weather say is about five miles long, and contains a thousand acres of table-land, I was deep within the hostile ranks of clouds, and all objects were obscured by them. Now the wind would blow me out a yard of clear sunlight, wherein I stood; then a gray, dawning light was all it could accomplish, the cloud-line ever rising and falling with the wind's intensity. Sometimes it seemed as if the summit would be cleared in a few moments, and smile in sunshine: but what was gained on one side was lost on another. It was like sitting in a chimney and waiting for the smoke to blow away. It was, in fact, a cloud-factory, — these were the cloud-works, and the wind turned them off done from the cool, bare rocks. Occasionally, when the windy columns broke in to me, I caught sight of a dark, damp crag to the right or left; the mist driving ceaselessly between it and me. It reminded me of the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets, of Atlas, Vulcan, the Cyclops, and Prometheus. Such was Caucasus and the rock where Prometheus was bound. Æschylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this. It was vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine. There is less of substantial thought and fair understanding in him, than in the plains where men inhabit. His reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtile, like the air. Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. [5.8]

And then Friday night we went to see "Marsden Hartley's Maine" at the Met Breuer, and found these paintings of the same mountain, which Hartley had apparently decided was to be his Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Like Thoreau, Hartley referred to it as Ktaadn. I don't know if Hartley was familiar with Thoreau's Maine Woods. His Ktaadns are about distance where Thoreau's are about something more intimate:

This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever, — to be the dwelling of man, we say, — so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific, — not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in, — no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there, — the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites, — to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, — that my body might, — but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? [6.1]

Bordering on

A picture - in this case a map - truly is worth a thousand words.

Close encounters

Details from Chuck Close's mosaics in the 2nd Ave. Subway 86 St. station

Crossing over

Our Spring Roundtable was fun and illuminating. The theme was "Literary Journalism and Religion, the subject of a course we've offered twice and will be offering again in the Fall. S, the instructor of that class put together this panel which included a prize-winning writer and a graduating senior in Journalism + Design who took the latest iteration of the course. What is literary journalism? It's a kind of long-form journalism like the oxymoronic "creative non-fiction," research- and interview-based work which employs literary styles and structures in its writing, like "scenes." S thinks literary journalism and religion have a special affinity. Both involve a kind of "crossing over" from a more neutral, naturalistic level to something else, the realm of belief or religious experience. Literary journalism is better able than straight journalism or testimonial to capture the mystery of this crossing.

I'm excited at our program's exploration of affinities with journalism of various sorts, as I have been about past explorations with the creative arts. But I confess to being a little unnerved at literary journalism's arms's length distance from "facts." This evening's fascinating exchanges showed how deeply committed these writers are to their craft as well as to the objects of their writing, but there's none of the self-suspicion now standard in the interpretive human sciences. Or maybe that's taken for granted. J, who writes for the New York Times and has published a book about demon exorcism among veterans haunted by our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said that an "unreliable narrator" was key to her work. Unreliable yet still worthy of trust... it's an interesting approach to the humility which should attend any attempt to tell another's story. A genre which might otherwise seem to be part of our nihilistic post-fact landscape turns out instead to offer an antidote to it.

Floral!

Always remarkable, the Jefferson Market community garden's tulips.

Discover - Create - Inherit

This afternoon was the second annual Dean's Honor Symposium, where seven teams of students each had 45 minutes to share their work. That makes it sound more conventional than it was, however. Students were grouped in interdisciplinary clusters, and shepherded through the process of preparing a presentation by a faculty member from yet another discipline. The adventure of the liberal arts on display!

As part of DHS I've been meeting weekly with a student who wrote a senior thesis in Culture & Media on online and offline communities in the Kenyan diaspora, an Urban Studies major and dancer who interned with a community arts center in her native Brooklyn, and an Architecture and Philosophy BA/BFA student from China who produced a book of photographs and poems exploring changing experiences of home in China's rapidly changing cities. Amazingly rich and different projects! Forty-five minutes would barely be long enough to share all the interesting work of one of them! What to do?

My team put together an interactive presentation, which "mixed things up" by having each student pose questions to the others about shared issues arising from their work. (Hence the title "Discover-Create-Inherit.") At one point the audience is invited to participate in the same "shakedown" with which dance sessions at the Brooklyn community arts center started. And the globe above makes its way through the audience during the course of the presentation: all were encouraged to place stickers on places they consider "home," so the globe, restored to the center of the room at the end, brought audience and presenters together. Nice work! I'll have a picture of us for you soon!

Next year in Kailash-Manasarovar

Today was the last meeting of the Sacred Himalaya Initiative researchers, a final debrief after a conference within the larger ISSRNC conference. We've brought together fascinating material from Tibet, India, Nepal, which adds up to a distinctive portrait of the Kailash Sacred Landscape on several scales. We hope the papers can be brought together in a special focus for a journal. Guess who's to spearhead that editing work?

Over the mountains

The ICI-hosted ISSRNC conference "Mountains and Sacred Geography" was, like every big conference, a doozy. Going in I was frustrated, as at every event with parallel sessions, that there were so many things you'd have to miss, no matter what you chose. On top of that, I was committed to attending half a dozen Sacred Himalaya Initiative-related events. But now that it's over, and having attended pretty much full time starting at 8:30 each of the last three mornings, I'm glad there wasn't more of it! I think I'll be adding ISSRNC to my world in the future, if its meetings aren't too far away.

As for sacred mountains... I think I'm ready for a rest. The final panel I attended this afternoon included a paper refreshingly not about mountains. Indeed, the presenter remarked, her subject of swamps and marshes was something like the antithesis of the supposed clarity and enlightenment associated with mountains. When she argued that the idea of the "slough of despond" (swamps were associated in ancient and medieval Europe with acedia, the slothful vice of those who cannot turn to God) illuminated the paralysis of many regarding climate change, I had an aha moment. Mountains are a temptation, even a danger to ecological thinking, because they're imagined as breaks from - escapes from - the slog of the ordinary flatlands. They seem like self-contained worlds, connected more to the sky (and also perhaps the underworld) than to their surrounds. Marshes were avoided (and drained) for being neither solid land nor flowing water, but we now know how ecologically crucial wetlands are precisely because of that fecund messiness. The clarity of mountain perspectives, especially if they encourage distaste for swampy messiness, might offer false comfort.

That said, it was still loads of fun to be talking to people about Kailash. In my own remarks I bracketed the question of the antiquity of the kora to our Western Himalayan mount, discussing instead the contemporary appeal of the idea of a mountain sacred to many world religions, and proposing ways of deepening and complicating it for the yatris of the future. (My main suggestion: don't go around once, go twice!) Kailas cropped up in lots of other places, too, always mythicized, like in this image from someone's powerpoint, where it has the inverted cone shape of Meru!

Temple mounts

A part of the New School's Orozco mural I'd never really spent much time thinking about came to life for me today. As part of the ISSRNC conference, Ines Talamanez - mother of the field of Native American Religious Studies in the US - and her students presented a fascinating panel called "We Now Speak for Ourselves: Religious Aesthetics for Creating Ceremonial Space, Chanting, Singing, and Dancing in Defense  of Our Sacred Landscapes." At the end, attention turned to the part of the mural with the Yucatan pyramid. Look, said Talamantez, that's us. She had a loop of hair just like that when she was growing up.

Kailas darsan

You could see Kailas from The New School today! As the hosts of the ISSRNC conference on Mountains and Sacred Landscapes, India China Institute got to devote a plenary session to our Kailash project, and so seven of us yatris shared some of our experiences and takeaways from last year's trek/pilgrimage
Also on our panel was the director of the ICIMOD Kailash Sacred Landscape initiative, who dazzled us with this (too) charming map of the area, and then with a visualization of the various components of the initiative in the form of a mandala. It was nice to reconnect with people, remember our times together and learn where their thinking has taken them since. The audience got a nice view of our project, too.

Phafocity

One of the graduate students who led a discussion section for last semester's New School history course was part of a team of philosophy students who met with children recently at the Brookly Public Library. A writer for The New Yorker listened in:

Lemelin attempted to move the discussion forward conceptually. “Do you think I’m the same as I was when I was your age?” he asked. 

“You didn’t do phafosity—whatever it’s called—when you were younger,” a boy said. 

“When you were younger, you didn’t like mushrooms, and now you do,” someone offered. 

“Does liking mushrooms make me who I am?” Lemelin asked. “What makes me me?” 

“Look it up,” one boy replied.

You can find the article here. (Reminds me of that time when....)

Roundtable redux!

Postponed because of snow with a slight change of personnel, still an inspiring first airing of LREL's new exploration of the synergies between religious studies and journalism. Biery is a current student, who did sterling work in the course "Literary Journalism and Religion," taught by Korb, who directs our First Year Writing program, along with being a prolific author of books and articles, many on religion. Percy won the 2017 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for her deeply affecting New York Times Magazine article on survivors of the 2011 tsunami in Japan.

Seed plot

One doesn't often find a record of how a seminar - a real seminar, not a lecture passive-aggressively elicited through socratic questioning - works, but I've happened on one. Abraham Luchins, a fellow professor, attended the seminars of Max Wertheimer, pioneering Gestalt psychologist and leader among the first refugee scholars of the University in Exile, from 1936 until Wertheimer's death in 1943, and reconstructed them from his verbatim notes decades later. I have to take his word for the accuracy of his notes, but what impresses and inspires was that he wrote down everything, from student interjections to what happened in discussions after class officially ended. And he recorded what wasn't said, too. Perhaps it takes a psychologist to notice the classroom dynamics in this way. Here's how he reconstructed the start of Wertheimer's seminar on problem solving and thinking.

Wertheimer soon gets them going - all the participant contributions are transcribed, too - but loses a number again when he pivots from the theoretical discussion about theory and experiment to two puzzles. Here's the first one. (Don't read on until you've tried to solve it.)

Did you figure it out? I confess I didn't, though I imagined her pushing the surface with her already kneaded dough around the tent pole with her hips. Awkward! Nobody in 1936 hazarded a response, either:
Ha! Well, I'm following his urging by passing it on to you. What say you?
But other students were more amenable, wondering, for instance, how children vs. adults would fare in such a predicament, or how results might vary if the story involved a different material than flour. Now we're talking! "These students, incidentally," Luchins observes tartly, "had not been undergraduate major in psychology." (Perhaps flour was important; Luchins frames his own account of what went on with the etymology of seminar as "seed plot." But the Mullah?)

Abraham S. Luchins and Edith H. Luchins, Wertheimer's Seminars Revisited:

Problem Solving and Thinking, vol. 1 (Albany, NY: Faculty Student Association,

State University of New York at Albany, Inc., 1970), 1, 9, 18, 19, iii

New colors (again)

Happy Easter!

Judas tree

Coming conference

Starting a week from today!

Repent

The Sacred Mountains class found itself in this strange place today. It was a bit of a gamble but I think it paid off. The picture is of an old forest cemetery (the hillock at upper left) which is now perched on an island in an Appalachian landscape transformed by mountaintop removal (MTR) mining. (We started by watching this conflicted depiction of the monstrosity of MTR, and then this footage of a "Blesssing of the Mountain," one asserting the value of seeing things from above, the other demonstrating the power of being there on the ground.)

Our reading was from Andrew R. H. Thompson's Sacred Mountains: A Christian Ethical Approach to Mountaintop Removal (University Press of Kentucky, 2015) - our only text explicitly Christian or concerned with ethics - and it's not easy going for people unfamiliar with that field. Predictably and understandably my students were put off by Thompson's assumption that his readers were fellow members of "the church." Most also couldn't fathom his argument for a "theocentric ethics" (based in the ideas of H. Richard Niebuhr), and for how it could prevent the "absolutization" of relative values which bedevils discussions of problems such as MTR. They assumed "theocentric" must mean claiming God for one's own position, rather than the decentering humility of accepting and trusting a God of all whose values one did not claim to understand. It being Holy Week I quite enjoyed laying out the idea that human "imaginations" even of values like justice and inclusion inevitably have blind spots, the pursuit of one's value inevitably bringing "disvalue" to some other; the only alternative is to own one's fallibility (I didn't use the s-word), to repent the disvalues one wittingly and unwittingly does and countenances, ideally in the presence of all affected: church as the matrix for a different kind of sociality. (I didn't get into christology.)

But what about MTR? Thompson gives few concrete suggestions (or rather, he thinks action should arise out of actual engagement in a locality, not reading about it) but it was fun to think with him what "mountain reclamation for God" might look like. We've often argued that mountains should be left alone, or returned to a presumed pristineness, then bellyached over the what and the how, the who and the why. Thompson's argument allows one to think beyond the artificial islands of "sacred mountains," just as it offers a transcendent reframing of relative values. For a moment it seemed like the consequence of setting aside a few special places for preservation, conservation - as sacred heritage - was not qualitatively different from leveling most of the mountains around Kayford, West Virginia but keeping Stover's Cemetery.

Destructive destruction

Tom Toles, always spot-on. It's terrifying to see the chaos candidate turn his fervid attention to foreign relations, and discover - after weeks of frustration in domestic questions - that there are foreign policy buttons he can press with impunity. Pray for Korea. Pray for us all.

Time warp

Five of our alums, from the classes of 2003 through 2013, shared what they've been up to since leaving Lang at our program's annual "Calling, Career, Commitment" event tonight. Over their accumulated thirty-five years as graduates they've done an astonishing number of things, deftly weaving together internships, further study, part- and full-time jobs, and small and large reinventions over periods of hardship, joblessness and triumph. Hard to think I could have mustered such agility!!