CCP aesthetics

This image, reproduced without caption here, leaves me speechless.

All the time of the world

To convey the promise and adventerousness of a humanities open to the demands of the Anthropocene I recommended to my Renmin students an imaginative project on our relationship to coal developed as part of the Deep Time Chicago project. It may have been a bridge too far - it takes the form of a "guided meditation connecting your beath to deep time," surely a genre unfamiliar to most of them - but it's still there if they choose to cross it! It's called "Inheritance 2.0":

We have inherited a world shaped by the extraction of coal, along with all the costs and benefits that the life-style of extraction produces: climate chaos, acidifying oceans, loss of biodiversity, and the accumulating toxins in our air, water, soil, and bodies. But this fossil fuel was once a thriving ecosystem. Drawn from interviews with coal miners and paleobotanists, this is an archive of the earth’s past that lies in trust for the present. A guided meditation connects the sensations of our bodies to the temporal topologies beneath our feet. Through listening, we invite you to journey deep into the earth and back in time to the Carboniferous period, when the coal seam was an ancient forest.

And it does indeed invite us to imagine ourselves into the past. (If you have 20 minutes to spare you should really try it rather than let me tell you about it.) Building on a grounding in awareness of your breath common to many kinds of meditation, it invites you to go back in your imagination one year, ten, fifteen, thirty - the time of human lives - and beyond... Now your every breath is a million years ... and now it's three hundred million years and you are a tree - gloriously green inside and out, a lycopod - in a forest of fellows, breathing together. 

the oxygen you exhale is filling the atmosphere

At some point waters begin to rise around you, and silt, filling all your crevices. Slowly 

you can give up your commitment to the vertical

and gently settle, with other trees, sinking into the earth, compressing together, and eventually crystalizing, fossilizing... 

you are still and shiny and hard

And then, after some time appreciating the weight of time above you,

you share this space underground with agents of extraction

(human beings?!) and before you know it

your body is fracturing, it is in pieces... the others are leaving, one by one

After some reflections on the wonder that is coal, woven together with the stories of coal miners, their work and danger and sickness, you slowly reemerge, gently letting the light in.

start to pull yourself up from the ground, stacking your vertebrae, one on top of another. 

This can happen slowly, the guide says:

you have all the time of the world

It's a very strange enterprise, very. As I told the students, I had never, never considered what it's like to be coal, though I knew that it was the product of ancient forests - and I love forests. My view was that the burning of fossil fuels is a destructive thing we learn to stop doing; like other fossil fuels, coal would be better left out of sight, out of mind. But what if we extended our mind into it?

This project takes to another level the injunction to learn to "think with the community of life." Who knew one could do it - expand one's awareness in this way? Access deep time, even if just in imagination? It also lives out in an extraordinary way one of the definition I've been using of the humanities: disciplines of memory and imagination, telling us where we have been and helping us envision where we are going. "Inheritance 2.0" suggests whole new ways of understanding what such disciplines might be, and how far they might take us.

I think this material will be more accessible to my American students in the fall, but I hope my breathless enthusing about it can pique the curiosity of the Chinese ones, too.

Ostpolitik

In the context of discussions about anti-Asian hate at the end of last semester, one of my colleagues and I decided to write something about the predicament of Chinese students at The New School - which published today. She's a specialist in Chinese cities who also teaches our university's largest course on contemporary China; we know each other through India China Institute. She works closely with some of our university's many students from PRC, and has shared with me their particular anxieties and disappointments as US-Chinese relations have soured in recent years, and it seemed it might be valuable to share these more broadly in this moment - it was indeed helpful, if more complicated and challenging than I imagined, to give voice to them. 

The key concepts in the piece come from my colleague's diagnosis of the traumas these students face. My contribution was to insist that The New School's legacies, as well as the reality of its significantly international student body, position it to address such pressures more fully than we currently do. These students are caught in the cross-fire of often ignorant and belligerent forces on both sides, but as the larger world slides into a new kind of "cold war" it seems more important than ever to support these students as a space of safety, recognition and encounter. Isn't that what we were meant to be?

Learning by doing

Started my Renmin University of China International Summer School course today - Monday morning 8am for the students, Sunday 5pm for me in California. There are 50 students in the class, too many to see or engage through a zoom/voov gallery, so after introducing my 

Deweyan pedagogy, we divided them into six groups my teaching assistant had set up. I'll be meeting with each group twice in later sessions, but for today I wanted to make a personal connection to them - and for them to connect to each other. Learning by doing!

The results were grand. I'd told them that Deweyan teaching offers not rote answers but problems which provide occasions for thinking, and each group's answers to the prompts were indeed thoughtful - and different enough from the others that I shared all with the class.

(This is a digest I'll bring up at the start of the next class in two days.) Aren't we lucky to have each other, I mused, to think together about the challenges we face... We went on to consider definitions of the humanities, ecological/environmental humanities and - our topic - 

"Anthropocene Humanities," but I hope the pluralizing opener, engaging their words and ideas before introducing authoritative ones, made the issues real to them, as well as my commitment to our shared endeavor. Online isn't great, but we're off to a good start.

Pride

In a dry dry year the scarlet larkspur stands out even more.

California coral?

Instead of grousing about the traffic as we returned from our foray to the California central coast, here's a picture of something I found in a 

tide pool at Montaña de Oro. Don't ask me what it is (though I suppose I'm asking you): I don't even know if it's animal, vegetable or mineral!

Land art

Surf-cracked miguelito shale at Montaña de Oro State Park

Like stumbling on the remains of a giant stone library

On Indian land

We're staying a few days at an Airbnb in Lompoc, not a place I've been before or know anything about. Our host, a retired local high school teacher, filled us in on some its history, and directed us to a mute memorial to the destruction of most of its first peoples, the Chumash. The Franciscan Purisima Concepcion mission was built here in the 1780s, rebuilt after an earthquake in 1812. Secularized in the 1830s and gradually abandoned, it was reconstructed by  

the CCC in the 1930s. It's now run as a State Park, and its museum tells a truer tale of the colonial destruction of indigenous worlds in "Old California" than most of the missions. It still struggles against the romantic myth of the missions, though; if you didn't read to the end of the interpretive panels, like these below, you might not notice how everything ended in death for Chumash culture - and people.

I grew up - in San Diego, site of the first of the 21 Alta California missions - with a sanitized version of the story, Junipero Serra an at once gentle and heroic precursor to to my own presence as a European settler in this land. It is heart-rending to confront the reality... especially on a day when hundreds more First Peoples graves have been found near a residential school in Canada, all part of the same genocidal program to "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." 

The town of Lompoc has sponsored many public murals, one of which celebrated the old story, conjuring up the 1787 original mission with converts, heads bowed, around a cross. On the empty lot in front of it, someone, perhaps Chumash, has erected a statue, mourning.

Central California coast

Taking a little trip before returning to teaching...

Rush of color

   Green wave

Points of light

Plenty going on despite the drought ...

Breaking the fourth wall

At the end of the exchange of the peace today, the congregation assembled for a second week at the Church of the Holy Apostles turned back to greet those of us watching the livestream. (The camera's in the old choir loft.) It's something I'd recommended, but it still moved me more than I expected. Absurdly, perhaps, I felt seen!

Happy Juneteenth!

Intrepid lanceleaf dudleyas stand out among the dry scrub

Blazing

Several heat records have been broken this week, and this in an American West by all indications suffering a thousand-year mega drought. And it's only mid-June!

Global pandemic

Astronomical numbers (probably underreported) but this isn't over.

Time warp

Returning to my childhood home Del Mar not after the usual half year but after a year and a half - including a year when time in many ways seemed to stand still - is a little uncanny.

Add that today is California's official reopening - even as the nation crosses the threshold of six hundred thousand souls lost to covid - and nobody's wearing a mask.

Cyclical and linear time tangle and knot.

In the clouds

I flew in a plane today - the first time in 515 days! It was the familiar route from JFK to San Diego, though we flew farther south than in this map... and it wasn't as clear.

After marveling at New York's ever spikier skyline I was excited to see the land, especially in the West, but was treated instead to clouds of every shape. (We flew the southerly route because of storm systems we could see out the northerly window.) These time lapse videos 

(make sure to click the little box at lower right to get full-screen) make the ride seem a little bumpier than it was, but capture some of the Dr. Seuss-like wonders over West Virginia, and the almost sci-fi landscapes over New Mexico, where clouds - some tinted brown 

and even baby blue by heat and smoke - masked the land baking in a heat wave below. At times it felt more like Jupiter than Earth! We were following the sun all day, and got to see it reflected in the Pacific from behind the clouds on final approach to San Diego.

Grand prospect

Nobody imagined it would be fifteen months, but here we were, our congregation gathered again for socially distanced but in person worship. Even the hydrangeas in the church garden were celebrating. 

Like other "returns to normal" there were more feelings than one could keep track of, but the event kept one too busy to worry about that. Who knew that singing in a mask fogs your glasses - though my glasses would have fogged anyway from the emotion of hearing voices all around once again, and in four part harmony no less! But I have to tell you about the sermon by our indispensable rector - she who prepared us so wisely for the sacrifices ahead at our last service together, March 15th of last year, and at more zoom gatherings than anyone anticipated in the meantime.

She had recently traveled to see her son who lives in Arizona, and she'd been to see the Grand Canyon for the first time. Some had counseled against going - it's just a view you can see in pictures, they said - but she's glad she went. Words failed, of course. Some say they feel eternity there, she told us, something vastly older than we are which will be the same long long after we have passed on, and it is indeed very old. There are layers going back billions of years, sometimes with unexplained gaps. But it's also always changing and always has been. A sublime experience, quickened when she noticed words someone had written on the stand of a defunct viewing scope: you are loved. She didn't know who wrote them or why but in the face of the vastness of deep time and change, these words resonated.

The sermon worked through some other things, including the day's gospel - Mark 4:26-34, the famous parable of the mustard seed and the parable preceding it: The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.... The kingdom isn't a destination but the present, ever transforming and grace-filled, as the Colorado River carves the Grand Canyon. But, she said (I'm mangling her fluent narrative), here we are. And standing in the pulpit looking out at our reunited congregation was, she said, like beholding the Grand Canyon.

I haven't done the sermon justice [you can listen to it here, starting about 22 minutes in], but I hope to to have conveyed some of the wow of that moment, as we experienced sharing a grand 3-dimensional space again, after an epic-seeming period of nameless change and loss, a yawning gulf of time, everything now familiar and yet, we at some profound level know, nothing the same. Amen.

豆腐図書館

A visit to our local H-Mart today reminded me of my delight at a particularly felicitous turn of phrase in a recent Times article on Asian supermarkets like this one. (In fact the article starts in this very branch on W. 110th St.) 

The phrase: 

library

of tofu