What comes in "muted canary, goldenrod, mustard, russet, pumpkin, bronze, copper, merlot, scarlet, and burgundy"? Answer tomorrow!

Smooth landing

After a long hiatus, we residents of the 19th floor have resumed our gatherings for socially distanced drinks. A lifeline during the time of "shelter in place," they fell by the wayside as we were able once again to connect with friends and colleagues across the city. At last week's gathering we found out about the apple tree in the gardens, learned of another family who'd lived in the apartment that is now ours over the past decades (a third one, and like the other two, now in a larger apartment in the same complex), but most importantly we completedthe décor of the landing. (Each floor has its own look.) The old furniture donated by the Englishwoman in unit C and the print (a wedding gift from Pete Seeger) contributed by our neighbor in F needed something to connect them. The dried flowers that perched there all of last year were depressing and dusty. Living plants have been volunteered but withered without natural light. Then I remem-bered I had a bright little bouquet of felt flowers bought years ago in the gift shop of the Rubin Museum and brought them out in triumph.

Vertical

Another view of Maya Lin's "Ghost Forest" in Madison Square Park, this time on a gloomy grey day and approached from the north. The little white splotches you see beneath the dead tree trunks are the undersides of leaves which must have blown over from still living trees. Luxury towers seem impervious.

Floworigami

Dahlia delirium at the incomparable Jefferson Market Garden 

Plein air

I phoned it in today - literally! I arrived at school bright and early (7:30!) only to find my "medical clearance" status prevented me from entering the buillding. I've had a few students each week report hitting the same roadblock because covid tests they'd submitted were misplaced or results delayed; today was my turn. But students were showing up in class! What to do? I found an outside table at the cafe around the corner (they allow no laptops inside), switched on the hotspot on my cellphone and used the signal to zoom into the class from my laptop. I gave students some projects to work on in twos and threes, including a google.doc I was able to monitor, and invited them to swing by and say hello once they were finished. Got to introduce them to a neighborhood coffee shop, too! This picture shows me, bemused, and in zoom's mirror image. 

Canon fodder

My foray into great books today was a blast. It was a lecture for the instructors of Columbia's venerable Literature Humanities first year curriculum, some of whom, I learned, had been teaching this occasionally updated series of great text for decades. It was a new thing for me to think about how Job might fit into a program of "Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy." Here's the semester's trajectory:

Homer, Iliad • Enheduanna,“The Exaltation of Inana” • Enuma Elish • Genesis • Homer, Odyssey • Fragments of Sappho • Song of Songs • Job • Aeschylus, Oresteia • Plato, Symposium; • Virgil, Aeneid • Life of Aesop • Gospels of Luke and John • Apuleius, The Golden Ass

It's a strange amalagam of traditions, but at least Job doesn't have to stand in for all of the Hebrew Scriptures (or biblical monotheism tout court). Still, this is a different company than I'm accustomed to seeing it keep, humanistic rather than biblical or, well, "spiritual" (with Bhagavad Gita, Dao De Jing, etc.). What "literature and philosophy" is it that students are supposed to learn from it?

I decided to wend my way to Job's assault on canons of all kinds. I began with Job's desperate and defiant wish that he had never been born, his fearless attack on the apparent immorality of God, then let God enthuse about his non-human creations, from hailstones to ostriches and wild asses. Each of these has been celebrated as an instance of the literary sublime (Robert Lowth for Job 3, Edmund Burke for the paean to the war horse in Job 39), and none of what either says is assimilable in received canons of knowledge. The former reduces Job's well-intentioned friends to a kind of panic, the latter reduces Job himself to a mumbling acquiescence in "dust and ashes." The depths of individual human experience and the vastness of the cosmos burst the limits of our thought - if not of our language.

Inviting Job into your canon is asking for trouble, I said, as soon as we recognize that his friends represent canonical knowledge - the best that any human (including Job) had been able to do before the events of this vertiginous tale. We miss this point because moderns dismiss the friends out of hand as pompous and insincere. But what if their failure to do right by Job or God came not from an inability or unwillingness on their part so much as from flaws in the forms of thought they held true? Does canonical knowledge disclose the depths of the world to us or shield us from facing it? Job threatens shipwreck not just for the particular pieties of its writers' time but for all views cherished as pieties, especially our own. How thrilling!

The fire this time

 A sequoia, burning

Cored

I've been invited to address the instructors for the Columbia Core on the Book of Job, one of their texts for the semester. (Not the only text from the Bible, I was happy to ascertain; they're also reading Genesis, Song of Songs, and the Gospels of Luke and John.) I've long known that Job often appears in great books curricula, but never had a chance to really think about what it would do to Job to encounter it in this context - or what Job might do to the context.

What I'm thinking of offering is a three part way into Job with a coda. First, I'll encourage them to focus on the most compelling speeches of Job and of God. Let them hear Job's grief and accusation at divine indifference and the surpassing nature poetry of God's response - and the apparent gap between them. Both Job's gut-wrenching vertigo and God's thrilling paean to the non-human world have been celebrated as surpassing examples of the sublime. And beyond that - the gulf between Job's complaint, focused on his own and ultimately all humanity's fate, and a divine response which never mentions humans at all, is as awe-ful now as it ever was. And the resolution in 42:6, is as powerful as it is obscure. I'll suggest that how we understand Job's final words determines the meaning of the whole thing.

Second, we'll zoom out to the larger context, starting with God's words at 42:7 (and 8) that his "servant Job" has "spoken rightly of me," unlike the friends. Is Job's bitter arraignment of God thus given divine imprimatur?! Or perhaps God is praising only Job's words at 42:6, whatever they were? I'll point out that 42:7 appear in the prose epilogue, and then talk a little about the apparent disjunction between the poetic speeches and the folk-tale like frame. I'll mention the temptation among moderns to shear off the frame story as unworthy of the sublime core of the book, and urge folks to resist the temptation. Not only has Job shaped cultures for two and a half millennia in this full form, but, properly understood, each of the components plays a vital part. I might suggest what I ask my students to do: to imagine staging it.

Finally, I'll turn to the question of Job and canonical wisdom. I'll start with the question of what Job is doing in the scriptural canon in the first place, and how it shows biblical traditions to be richer and more complicated than many an enlightenment critique of supposedly blind and unquestioning faith supposes. If God's words in 42:7 vindicate and even authorize Job's unfiltered words, the inclusion of the Book of Job in the canon of scripture does the same. Job shows us how to confront incomprehensible fate - not with docility but with persistent demands for recognition... and perhaps in the company of other questioners.

I'll wrap up with Job's friends, and urge folks not to dismiss them as insincere or hypocritical. They represent the best wisdom known - the very wisdom which has sustained Job up to this point. The experience of reading the Book of Job can't just be the new revelations of the integrity of the human and the sublimity of the divine but must include the collapse of all received knowledge even before these arrive under the weight of human suffering. As a frontal attack on received knowledge, the Book of Job actually fits uneasily into any canon, since it suggests not only that canonical knowledge closes us to some of the profoundest mysteries of existence, but that it can provide a refuge from which we refuse to face these mysteries. Warning word to the wise, canonizers of scripture but also of great books.

And the coda: where, then, should we locate ourselves as readers and interpreters of the text? In the space where Job meets God? Outside the whole thing, with the editors of the tale? Both are presumptuous. We're in line behind Elihu, called to the impossible but necessary task of being friends.

The sorrow continues

Meanwhile, in unvaccinated America the virus rages on. And the global death toll has reached five million souls, these mostly also unvaccinated - though most of these never had the chance to protect themselves which too many Americans continue to reject.

Ornamental cabbage

Today felt like the first real day of fall - crisp, "sweater weather"! But some folks on West 12th Street are already gearing up for winter.

Exit left

The sun's setting has been moving steadily southward, and the point where it slips beyond the horizon (it moves downward from upper left to lower right) has withdrawn behind buildings again until spring...

42:6

In the Job class today I spent a fair - but not inordinate - amount of time enthusing about one element in the brilliant way Carol Newsom represents her understanding of the Book of Job as if it were a piece of theater. We've been thinking about stagings for a while, a very effective way to get students to try to make sense of the book as a whole, and Newsom's take is the gold standard. It involves two separate teams of actors in different costume and manner, as well as disembodied voices from above and even the intrusion of an audience member - very avant garde! But at its heart is the moment highlit above, where Job, having heard the two speeches from the whirlwind, says ... something.  

The final words uttered before this so very vocal person subsides into silence are, I gather, among the most difficult to translate in a text full of opaque and unparalleled formulations. The King James Version's penitential translation is familiar 

I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. 

but there is as much textual warrant for something quite different, like Stephen Mitchell's blissed out

I will be quiet, comforted that I am but dust.

and maybe even also for Ed Greenstein's iconoclastic rendering (which we'll come to at the end of the class) 

I am fed up; I take pity on dust and ashes.

Newsom makes the indeterminacy of this a feature, not a bug - though the audience may not know it. Consistent with her understanding of the Book of Job as a "dialogic" text whose last word is never spoken - passing the mic to us, whether we want it or not - the audience has to guess what Job said. What they guess will be shaped by the things they were able to hear and see, but the multiple voices they heard make it uncertain. It's frustrating, and generative. 

Newsom's stage direction is also, I found myself rhapsodizing, deeply respectful of the privacy of Job, the intimacy of his experience. The words are not addressed to us, and the experience they report isn't one we can have just by hearing about it. My students may have heard that as the familar comforting platitude that "everything's subjective" but in this case perhaps it is, whether one understand the encounter Job had to have been deeply and unfathomably personal, or the opposite. He's earned that insight; we haven't.

Writing on the wall

The wall where the blackboard used to be is now one enormous whiteboard. Students like writing on it, too.

Huge, creaturely hajj

Another gleaning from Kinship, a piece by eco-phenomenologist David Abram, based on a longer earlier piece ruminating on the wonder that is migration: "Wild Ethics and Participatory Science: Thinking between the Body and the Breathing Earth." How cranes, monarch butterflies and salmon manage their long migrations (over five generations each time, in the case of the monarchs!), is beyond our understanding. In efforts to make sense of it, we suppose they must have analogs to our navigation tools - internal calendars and compasses and clocks of some sort. Abram won't have it:

Clocks, compasses, and calendars … are by definition external contrivances, ingeniously built tools that we deploy at will. Metaphorically attributing such instrumentation to other animals has confounding implications, suggesting a curious doubleness in the other creatures – a separated sentience or self that regularly steps back, within its body or brain, to consult the map or the calendar. [¶] It seems unlikely, however, that organisms interact with an internal representation of the land in any manner resembling our own engagement with maps…. 

What's going on, then? Abram dares us to think differently: 

Instead of hypothesizing more metaphorical gadgets, adding further accessories to a crane’s or a salmon’s interior array of tools, what if we were to allow that the animal’s migratory skill arises from a felt rapport between its body and the breathing Earth? That a crane’s two-thousand-mile journey across the span of a continent is propelled by the felt unison between its flexing muscles and the sensitive flesh of this planet (this huge curved expanse, roiling with air currents and rippling with electromagnetic pulses), and so is enacted as much by Earth’s vitality as by the bird that flies within it? ...

By adding new gadgets to an animal’s neurological and genetic endowment, we tacitly induce ourselves to focus on relationships interior to the organism (how, for example, does the animal bring its biological clock and it internal map to bear on its compass readings), deflecting our curiosity and attention from the more mysterious relationship that calls such interactions into being. 

What is this dynamic alliance between an animal and the animate orb that gives it breath? What seasonal tensions and relaxations in the atmosphere, what subtle torsions in the geosphere help to draw half a million cranes so precisely across the continent? What rolling sequence or succession of blossomings helps summon these millions of butterflies across the belly of the land? What alterations in the olfactory medium, what bursts of solar exuberance through the magnetosphere, what attractions and repulsions, and on and on? … 

[P]erhaps it would be useful now and then to consider the large, collective migrations of various creatures as active expressions of the Earth itself. To consider them as slow gestures of a living geology, improvisational experiments that gradually stabilized into habits now necessary to the ongoing metabolism of the sphere. For truly, are not these cyclical pilgrimages – each a huge, creaturely hajj – also pulsations within the broad body of Earth? Are they not ways that divergent places or ecosystems communicate with one another, trading vital qualities essential to their continued flourishing?

While there's something intoxicating in this Gaian vision - and I certainly have no other insight into the marvel of migrations, a marvel Abram makes even more marvelous in his appreciation! - I'm not sure I can quite go there. At least not from an urban modernized living in which connection to place and the community of life is always attenuated by thought and, well, a cosmos of place-unmaking gadgets. But - in thought, at least - I can trace the outline of an understanding, as I consider distant forebears who themselves migrated, or circulated among places, reading wind and sun, the movements of other animals and the dispositions of plants and soils to know where they needed to be. 

Or maybe not so distant. As I notice days or nights lengthening and the sun setting farther and farther along a horizon - and especially when skeins of geese fly overhead, or I spot a whale spout far out at sea - I wonder why it is we should stay put when everything else cycles and swirls. Knowing that the delicate monarchs who seem contentedly absorbed in the plants here and now when I spot them should be part of such an epic story cracks everything open.

"Becoming Earthlings," in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations (Libertyville, IL: Center for Humans and Nature Press, 2021) , 5 vols, vol 1, Planet, 50-62

Maps from here, here and here.

Budding fall

As these scraggly echinaceas will tell you, Autumn's in the air. But the garden next to Grant's Tomb is a reminder that the last flowers of the year have yet to bloom. Quite the feast of pinks and purples!

On the move

One of my favorite writers, the trenchant and eloquent Rebecca Solnit, gave a talk as part of Cooper Union's contribution to New York Climate Week. It was delivered (virtually of course) on Monday, and is now available on youtube! The talk was called "Climate Momentum: The Things That Keep Me Cheerful In the Face of the Worst Problem Ever" and it offers ten reasons to remain motivated and hopeful at a time when climate doomsayers counsel resignation, despair or desperate measures. Her brother later summarized it in this graphic but you really should watch the talk. It's genuinely uplifting.

Engendering religion

Tried something new in "Theorizing Religion" today, giving the students a breathless 2016 Pew study called "The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World." It seemed a good way to introduce quantitative surveys on religion and their problems, as well as to start thinking about how religion is gendered in theory and in practice. To my surprise, most students reported enjoying; it resonated with their experience. Pew's American Protestant metrics of religiosity (affiliation, importance of religion, attendance at weekly worship, daily prayer, belief in heaven/hell) and participation in the

fantasy of monolithic world religions didn't bother them as much as the assumption that everyone is either a man or a woman. And only one noticed that the discovered "gender gap" is in fact pretty small, especially outside the US, and that the writer of the report seems a little disappointed not to have found something bigger. 

There's work to do! Next we tackle "world religions," Eurocentrism and American exceptionalism... and eventually we'll be able to loop back to how gender is formed (differently) by religious traditions, and how different experiences of gender identity/fluidity might express themselves religiously. But I'll be able to be a better guide on the journey knowing that thinking of religiosity and gender in terms of "nature vs. nurture," as the Pew study does, is interesting to them.

Animate, industrious and constantly communicating

First delectable gleaning from Kinship, geologist Marcia Bjornerud on what she tries to get across to student who arrive in her classes seeing "Nature as at most a passive backdrop" to human history:

Compounding the problem is the perception that geology is about old, inert objects rather than processes, activity, and change. So the first step is to dispel the notion that minerals, rocks, and landscapes simply are and instead get to seeing them as records of becoming. Once one grasps this, it is obvious that the world is animate, industrious, and constantly communicating with us - if we could jut learn how to listen. ...

[I]t strikes me as strange that the same public that finds the idea of geological time so alienating perceives the cold and formidable emptiness of space as somehow inviting. ... A combination of vainglory over our own accomplishments and deep-seated fear of our insignificance makes it difficult to embrace our mundaneness, our Earth-rooted nature. ... The rock record makes obvious how our bodies are part of a continuum from raw earth matter to endlessly ramifying life, an unbroken chain of living organisms that stretches back to the early days of the planet. How marvelous to know that our bones - minerals made of calcium and phosphorus, themselves derived from rocks - can be mapped one-to-one onto those of almost every other vertebrate, from amphibians to zebras. How amazing to realize that our blood is a distant memory of seawater. How good to feel in our marrow that we are Earthlings, fully native to this ancient, verdant, resilient earth. ...

I prescribe becoming an Earthling as a cure for a wide range of social ills, including angst, anomie, bigotry, boredom, consumerism, delusions of grandeur, hubris, impatience, neurosis, pettiness, self-absorption and other unspecified varieties of spiritual malaise. 

Despite my longstanding enchantment with patterns of sand and sea, I think I'm only just learning to appreciate geology as not only intertwined with the history of life, but as itself dynamic in a way the editors of this series would have us call animate.

"Becoming Earthlings," in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations (Libertyville, IL: Center for Humans and Nature Press, 2021) , 5 vols, vol 1, Planet, 13-20

Everybody's a director

As part of today's lecture on "Job and the Arts" I had students break out into groups of 3 and spend 10 minutes thinking about how they might stage the Book of Job. This is an activity I planned last time I taught the class but, running short on time, dropped. I nearly dropped it again this year, as it was planned for the end of last week's class (about Theatre of War's Book of Job project), and time again ran out. But I'm glad to have tried it today - and not just because it's the perfect set-up for Carol Newsom's dramatization of her interpretation of Job as a piece of avant garde theater.

Here are some of the ideas the students came up with. Who knew many of them see Job as some kind of dark comedy?

Experimental theater, modern clothing, Job is constantly bathed in red light

Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired, casting job as a fairy, God as head spirit of the forest

New York Jewish community setting; big rotating lazy susan, each friend has section of circle; set rotates between city (reality) and nature/mystical

Job as a woman, God played by multiple people/a collective of voices speaking to Job 

One man show: Job has to make the sets himself, do all the costume changes, suffering through having to change all the scenes himself; especially funny that he is asking “why me! What has happened!” after he sets it all up himself; have the friends of Job in the crowd, give the script to the entire audience 

God speaks to himself as God/Satan

Live improv sketch; actors should bring in their own grievances to the sketch to make it their own 

Set in a suburban high school; friends are all stoners skipping class getting very existential; God is cast as very cartoonish principal with walkie talkie and dangling keys 

Musical comedy set in an office; watercooler talk every week, Job complains about life and fear of being fired; boss is Elihu 

Each friend is in a different room

Brechtian or “epic” theatre style. Very artificial feels almost sit-com like… alienating the audience from Job asking the audience to think objectively about the material rather than empathetically

Comedy of Q Anon believers, suffer and experience horrible situations all the while blaming the world for their issues not aware of their own absurdity (believing obama is a satan worshiper)

Over-the-top debate style; all of the actors sitting at a table in “Job’s home”; God is the “moderator” 

We would put the audience in Job's position and have them play Job. Somehow puts the audience through pain and suffering. Hire actors that are good at improvising. Interact with the audience and make them feel as though they've had something taken from them. Give the audience an experience of loss and replace their loss with something “better” at the end

Elihu as an actual child

I'm not sure how all of these would work but many seem to me quite inspired! The prevalence of comedy may have something to do with the fact that the class began with one of the TA's giving a mini-lecture of comedy as a performance of the problem of suffering, linking "A Serious Man" and Job, but I also suspect that being thrown together with strangers in a zoom breakout room may have made comic settings easier to propose. I told the class I thought these were terrific but that if, in the impossible task of agreeing on something with people they didn't know they found themselves thinking of different stagings of their own - so much the better. 

After a short lecture on interpretations which take Job apart and those which put it back together again, I sent them on their way with the imaginary staging of Carol Newsom (some of whose work was assigned this week). Newsom thinks every component of Job plays its part, not in producing a seamless production but rather in ensuring a jarringly "polyphonic" experience which "shifts to the audience much of the work" of grappling with the problems being explored. 

We have work to do... but the work has commenced!

In the picture

The students in "Anthropocene Humanities" went to see Maya Lin's "Ghost Forest" installation at Madison Square Park today. 

One theme for the day was public art and the conversations and communities it sparks, and we'd read articles by Emily Raboteau and Mik Awake, two writers who became friends over another work of public art, Justin Guariglia's Climate Museum-sponsored work "Climate Signals." Raboteau is a subtle multi-media artist, weaving together text and photographic images, and under her tutelage Awake becomes one too. In their articles they include thoughtfully, even artfully constructed photographs of the public art pieces with their fellow traveler - and reflect on what the images say, what's intentionally and accidentally shown in them, etc. Raboteau writes that a picture she took of Awake at Rockaway Beach:

looks uncannily like the Andrew Wyeth painting, Christina’s World. The resemblance lies in the nuance of shadows and light, the waving grass, my subject’s backward-facing posture, and the property on the horizon line (in this case, a Mitchell Lama housing complex rather than a farmhouse) that appears imperiled by a looming, unseen force. 

Inspired, Awake rhapsodizes about a picture taken in the Bronx:

The light in this photo is a chiaroscuro broken apart by the branches of the giant tree to your left. That’s one of the things I do now, as a result of the time I’ve spent with you: pay attention to the light in my photos. A streak of shadow on the hill behind you merges with your hair, creating the illusion of motion or a trail of smoke wafting towards the sign’s message (INEQUIDAD DE ENERGIA FOSIL), held in tension with your glance, lit with interest at two passersby, strangers to us, as we once were to each other.

Awake and Raboteau are gifted writers, and got to know each other over many weeks, but I thought we could try a mini version of their process. I asked the students to walk in pairs to the park to experience Lin's "Ghost Forest," and, like the two writers, to take thoughtfully composed pictures of each other. It was a bit much to ask of students not a month into college, but worth a try. They had a ball, even though access to Lin's copse was closed to allow the lawn to rest, and some of the photos were lovely. A student explains the one above:

I edited the picture to make [name] and I look ghostly, like we are fading away. Like much climate art that reminds us of what will not be in the future, the anthropocene reminds us we might not be.