Process

A Palm Sunday without palms - unless you count our palms as we pray with hands open before our zoom screens. This was our third week making do without our sanctuary at Holy Apostles. The morning prayer format adopted the first two weeks (our rector decided that it didn't make sense to stream a full service, consecrating a sacrament the congregation could not take) was supplemented with the readings for Palm Sunday, including the long narrative of the Passion according to Saint Matthew, vocalized by our three clergy members from their homes. Like many congregations, we usually process at the start of Palm Sunday, the gateway to Holy Week and a service I've often described to students as the most wrenching of the liturgical year. More muted today, sitting at our consoles, to say the least. The homilist, who last week suggested we were like the "house churches" of early Christian history, today told of us the earliest evidence of Christian pilgrimage and of Holy Week liturgy and meditated on the possibility we were being called this year to an "inner pilgrimage," a "pilgrimage of the heart."

This seems a moment to observe that, as all our social interactions move to zoom, formal and informal, there are some new possibilities emerging. There is an equality to the "gallery view" of an assembled group (though when there are more than twenty-five screens you need to scroll to see them all) and, however awkward and voyeuristic it can be, it offers something we almost never get in real life: a view of many people looking at us with care. It's partly an illusion - most people are looking at the person who's speaking at any given time, and it may be that each person sees a different constellation of others - but I dare say more true than false. We are, if ambiently, aware of each other, of being together with each other, in a distinctive way. I like it, though I also like the moments when we can seem to interact with each other, across the lines of the grid, as when people wave hello and goodbye. I think we could capture some of the overflow of care of the exchange of peace if people sent namaste bows to their left and right and center, all of us knowing that the intention was to engage each and all of us.

The sweetest form of communion I've experienced so far, though, and one we didn't engage in today, builds on that sense of mutual presence in a different way. (We did it last week, and my class visitor to "Religion and Ecology" did it Thursday.) When the leader invites us to close our eyes, in silent prayer or meditation - an act of vulnerability and trust under any circumstances - something wonderful happens. Everyone's still there for each other but we realize we don't need to see each other to know it. We can picture the familiar grid, but each person in it is trusting the others, turning inward but in community. Such an experience of trust and being held in care...

The image of the arrival of Christ in Jerusalem, by Pietro Lorenzeti 
(1320, a quarter century before bubonic plague hit Europe), was posted on
FaceBook by a colleague in lieu of processing at her church...

While Trump fiddled

One thousand deaths due to covid-19 were reported in the US yesterday, 300 of them here in New York City. And infections are reaching into every part of the land and city, though not at the same rates. Inadequate testing means we're far from knowing how many people are affected but it's clear that, while people of every age and class are dying, the toll will be highest in the most vulnerable populations.

Old Testament Indian

A new book on Job came in the mail today, and what a book! Poet Diane Glancy's Island of the Innocent: A Consideration of the Book of Job is a book-length engagement with Job, refracted through Glancy's experience as a Cherokee and the Job-like history of Native Americans. She gave a "craft talk" on Job and the Cherokee ballad tradition for Poets House just last night - or would have, had technical difficulties not intervened.

But students in my class had already heard Glancy talking about the book. In the alternate reality in which everything were not shut down, she would in fact have visited our class last week! Instead she kindly agreed to a recorded zoom conversation last Friday, which was immensely enjoyable. An edited set of excerpts from the conversation, expertly stitched together by one of my teaching assistants, was one of the course materials assigned to our students this week, along with a selection of poems from the book chosen for us by the author.

And in lieu of taking attendance, I asked students to select some lines from Island of the Innocent that affected them and tell us why on a google.doc. So many insights! Doubtless many of the students also delighted in seeing Glancy's language refracted in so many ways.

What about the book itself? Above are its two prefaces, explanations of the project - one which, we learned, extends back years, even decades - and of the title. She told us she often drives long distances listening to audiobooks, including the Bible, across the prairie, the Book of Job from early on a favorite. (William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job, too, have accompanied her for decades - the text assigned to students along with Glancy's.) As ideas come to her - like wind turbines on a hill in the distance - she jots them down, and some end up in poems. Also from early on she felt compelled to bring Jobs wife's view to speech, giving her a remarkable voice, and a name: Jehora (which spellcheck corrects to Jehova!). Here are two of the shorter poems.

It's a magnificent effort, moving through many genres and moods. The "fissures" Glancy finds in the Book of Job as she reads (listens) and considers it open up exquisite worlds of loss and care, speechlessness and song, lament and, also, faith. So grateful to have been able to share it with my class, and to see them, too, respond to it.

Expanded New School forest

In "Religion & Ecology" today we had a visitor, an alumna involved with an organization called the Church of the Woods. To welcome her, and also to acknowledge that we are now spread out all across the United States, I asked students to take (or find) a picture of a tree or other plant near where they are. Whether it made us feel more connected or disconnected I can't say - a bit of both, I suppose - but seeing and hearing about plant people in California, Colorado, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington DC, Utah as well as New York was somehow quite lovely. All the photos were taken in the last days, except the blooming buckeye (from the student in Ohio, of course), and near where our fellow class members are now staying. That magnificent cedar at upper left, by the way, is behind the house in Washington State where our visitor visited us from. I've tried to put the pictures in something vaguely like geographical location above. It's not very artfully jumbled, but it didn't make sense to tilt photos of trees and I had to do something to break the homogenizing grid of zoom.

Pandemic

Simply speechless at the latest projected numbers of infections and deaths from covid-19 in the US. Even naming them seems unlucky but it's much much too late for denial. One hundred thousand souls lost if all our belated and disorganized mitigation efforts somehow succeed: that's the best case scenario! Nearly two and half times that if they don't.

Ghost town

Went out for some groceries this early evening, finding the trees along Broadway in bloom but hardly a person to see them. Unnerving stillness.

76,000:1

John J. Thatamanil, a professor of theology and world religions at Union, has written an important essay on the moral damage the Trump presidency is doing - unfortunately hidden from American eyes on an Australian page. Aside from material harm, he argues, the president's vileness (on daily display in the daily coronavirus misinformation sessions) is a spiritual threat.

Daily exposure to such debasement, whether by tweet or by briefing, raises dispiriting questions: Is this the best our nation’s leader can do? Is there in him any redeemable character trait that can serve as a beacon of light in an otherwise dark and deadly situation? Under the cumulative barrage of lies and life-threatening misinformation, the questions morph and become broader. Rather than ask about just about one man’s peculiar degradation, we begin to wonder about human nature itself. Are some human beings irredeemable, incapable of learning and growth? Are we naïve, even foolish, to expect human beings to set aside self-interest and rise to responsibilities thrust upon them by extraordinary times? Under the relentless of assault of his pettiness, we are rendered vulnerable to rage, cynicism and a subtle, pervasive lowering of moral expectations for ourselves and others.

Breathing in spiritual pollution is akin to the breathing in air pollution in New Delhi. Just as air pollutants harm lung capacities, so too our spiritual capacities, love, resilience, trust and confidence in human goodness are diminished by constant exposure to such spiritual toxins as hubris, venality and hate.

I'm surely not the only one to have felt this for a long time, and grateful for Thataminil's finding such powerful words for it. But what's even better in his essay is the source of hope he finds in the covid-19 inspired goodness we don't hear enough about.

[C]all to mind the number 76,000 — that is the number of volunteers who have answered Governor Cuomo’s call to join the frontlines in the struggle against COVID-19. Many have come out of retirement and so are in the age bracket most vulnerable to this disease; nevertheless, they have stepped forward bravely.

We are inclined to believe that heroic goodness is found only in a handful of extraordinary people like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mother Teresa, but it seems that New York State alone has 76,000 Mother Teresas. Truth be told, that is a vast undercount. After all, those of us who are sheltering at home do so because we too want our neighbours to be safe and healthy. This too is a form of quotidian kindness, an unheralded and humble heroism.

Good bests evil, if only we have the eyes to see it.

And yet, as I used to point out when I was writing on "the problem of evil" - really, I argued, the lifeless half of the problems of evil and good - evil gets all the attention. Even if it's the focus only because of the damage it causes to goods, evil can seem more real to us than good. It's a genuine problem, since it isn't in the nature of good to try to commandeer us, to make us forget the world, to eat our brains. Evil will always win as clickbait. Something like that happened even with this essay, which some well-intentioned editor gave the title "Why Donald Trump is a threat to the United States' spiritual well-being." A better title might have been "76,000 Mother Teresas"!

Going live

Back for the rest of the semester, on our temporary campus: zoom!

Unreal

Today makes fourteen days we've been in quasi quarantine, but days don't feel like days when you're confronting exponentially growing infections. The shape of the graph - which you can see - doesn't change. It's the scale - which you can't see - that changes. The bar at the right is always the height of the chart, even in this morning's update from the

city government, where the final bar shows only part of a day's reported cases. Together with the striking absence of detailed information about who's affected in the US, this strangely stable chart makes covid-19 feel abstract for those of us fortunate enough to be uninfected and able to continue our lives remotely. Still, 222 more died in NYC yesterday. RIP.

Wave of the hand

A most wondrous book has found its way into my hands. Not yet published in the US, I've got the original Australian edition. It's called Sand Talk and invites readers to join a member of the Apalech Clan as he "yarns" with all manner of Aboriginal elders in profound and perfectly plotted ruminations on what "sustainability" can be. It's a sharing of the "how" as much as the "what" of indigenous knowledge, enacting the embodied nature of knowledge in social relations, in the land, and in non-linguistic forms like sand drawings and ritual objects. I've read two chapters so far; each is revelatory. Here, along the route of sharing "non-linear" ways of understanding, which also takes on kinship and Aristotle and cities and the first and second laws of thermodynamics among other things, he opens our eyes to the rainbow [serpent]:

When us-two see that arc in the sky, that Rainbow Serpent, we are seeing only one part of it, and it is subjective: just for us. If we move, the rainbow also moves, only appearing in relation to our standpoint. If you go to the next hill you will see it in a different position from where I am seeing it. The moon sisters were trapped by a similar phenomenon, chasing the reflected moon on the surface of the night sky, thinking it was a fish they could spear. But like the rainbow that image moves in relation to where you are sitting, so they could never catch it. Now you can see their shadows in the moon where they remain trapped to this day, a warning to all about the illusion of chasing fixed viewpoints. 

The Serpent loves the water because that is what allows us to see him, and he communicates with each of us this way, but he is not just an entity of water. He is an entity of light. The part we are seeing there in the wet sky, or in the fine spray coming off the front of a speeding dinghy, is just a line across the edge of a sphere. The line moves across multiple spheres that are infinitely overlapping, spiraling inwards and outwards, extending everywhere that light can go (or has gone or will go), and the Rainbow Serpent moves through this photo-fabric of creation. He goes under the ground too, because light has been there in the past and he is not limited by linear time. 

Ah, but is he a wave or a particle? I guess that depends on how you’re looking at him, but we could see him as a wave, a snake, because he is constantly in motion across systems that are constantly in motion and interwoven throughout everything that is, was and will be. (54-55)

Our spider plant's working hard to protect us from Spring FOMO

#ClapBecauseWeCare

Went out for the once-in-three-days grocery run this afternoon, and found these beauties. How I miss crowds! So I was especially excited for the 7pm "clap for essential workers," when all of us were to open our windows and applaud the front-line workers who make life possible. Not too many people up here, but we heard someome clap from somewhere across the subway tracks and that was enough - and then made out, in the distance, a wave of clapping and cheering. I hope we do this every night that the City is under siege, and that it grows and grows.

Pestilential

Tom Toles, brilliant as ever. But as people sicken and die - many here in New York - I'm losing my relish for criticism. The damage done is already so much greater than these ignorant people's cravenness and pettiness. (We're #1 in the world now, in covid-19 cases.) The disproportion between the smallness of evil and the vastness of its harm addles thought. With Camus' Dr. Rieux one wants just to say: "There are sick people and they need curing." Sick societies too. But how?

X

Day ten of our quasi-quarantine!

Spent part of it strategizing with the teaching assistants for my ULEC about how to proceed with our course in online mode, knowing that not all students will even be able to join zoomed classes. The online environment is new to us, requiring quite different kinds of teaching and different structures for eliciting student participation, and even when everything's worked out we've been told to expect glitches.

Case in point: I attended a webinar yesterday called Pivoting from In-Person to Online Teaching: Tips and Discussion, featuring the director of the HarvardX online programs... but it broke down fifteen minutes in for technical problems they weren't able to resolve! The speaker's last words before we were cut off:  

Have some empathy for what your students are experiencing in a very complicated environment--

Ha! I felt more Schadenfreude than empathy at that moment, but it was a gift nonetheless: I'm definitely not expecting to avoid stumbles now! I'm grateful to be part of a team working on an ongoing project with a defined goal, reassuring at a time when many other structures are stalled or worse. And at New School the students are part of the team, too. Already much of the way on our journey together, I trust we'll be better able to deal with glitches with humor and understanding.

Calm at the epicenter

Fielding concerned calls from around the world is exhausting: are we alright?!?! What else can we say than that the situation is indeed dire, and frightening, that we don't even really know the extent of it... that it's going to get worse as hospitals reach capacity in a few days... that government at various levels did not get its act together fast enough (and at the highest level is undermining the rest)... but that New York is fighting back... that we're working from home, have plenty of food, have ingredients to make our own sanitizer (but no masks), have gone out only twice in six days (once today, where I found these azaleas), grateful for New York's wide sidewalks... that sequestered in familiar digs and not yet knowing anyone who is infected it feels eerily abstract... what else? Of course we're worried, spooked every time one of us coughs. Reports of anti-Asian attacks frighten us, as does almost everything the White House and its boosters say... But Spring is happening too, and work goes on.

So?

Well, what do you know. Since I first became entranced by H. T. Tsiang a year and a half ago, procuring Kaya Press's Books' 2013 edition of his 1935 Hanging on Union Square (which reworked the original work's provocative design; the back cover was filled with the single word SO), he's made the big time. Hanging in Union Square has been published, and as a Penguin Classic, no less! A copy is speeding my way... but I'm
already anxious at how it will feel to see his strange words in that familiar typeface and format, on pages with that familiar texture and smell. What I really want to know: does Penguin (as Kaya didn't) include the several pages of publishers' rejections with which Tsiang prefaced his self-published opus? It's not that Tsiang didn't want to be published. And this authoritative appearance has generated at least one really insightful - if deferential - review!

Hotspot

New York City is suddenly a very scary place to be. Another day spent in the apartment and in the stairwell gym: nineteen stories guarantee a cardio workout, but can't really prepare for the heartbreak ahead.

Uphill

The Spring weather was irresistibly inviting today, so we went out for a walk around Grant's Tomb, moving out of the way of other strollers like magnets as we walked. With time I started smiling at people as I did this, to make clear it was a gesture of care, not fear... though, to be honest, there's fear in the background too.

Decided to post this picture to my WeChat account - haven't posted anything in a while. We've been receiving increasingly concerned messages from people in China, so I thought a general update was in order. (And I wanted matter-of-factly to use "covid-19," not the xenophobic moniker of our viral President.) I'm not sure I can say explicitly that official messaging on both sides is not to be trusted, as both governments are scrambling to distract from their failures.

Care of plants

Our philodendron, inherited from the previous renters in the Brooklyn apartment and now happily ensconced in Manhattan, has chosen this time to put forth a new leaf! Perhaps it noticed a change in the air; I've been home all but a few hours these last five days - didn't leave the apartment at all yesterday or today. Doing our bit to flatten the curve.

Floating

Spent the whole day at home, like much of New York City, indeed like many around the world. If we're told to "shelter in place," it won't change much for many people I know. One can get a little twitchy, like these floating gerberas...

The news in NYC is not good: over a thousand new cases reported since yesterday, almost doubling our total. (Several cases in the New School community were confirmed too, apparently.) It's cold comfort to realize that these are probably not new infections, but people who couldn't be tested before. As we are able to test even more we'll find even more. It might in fact still be growing exponentially, despite the shutting down of so many big institutions and small interactions, but it's too soon to know.

I spent the day reading about H. T. Tsiang, a wildly eccentric Chinese writer whose path intersected with the New School's in some interesting ways seventy years ago - topic for a Public Seminar piece in the works. (The show must go on!) It feels meaningful to be looking at what Hua Hsu calls a "transpacific" life at a time when so many openings, especially between the US and China, seem to be slamming shut.