In the news

We're in the news! The Chronicle swiftly published an article reporting on a university announcement that just went out this morning, and it got one thing wrong: while The New School has a staff of 3,100, more than half of those are part-time faculty, whose positions should be unaffected. That's little consolation to the rest of us, c. 400 full-time faculty and a little over 1000 staff. (It also doesn't mention that 7% of full-time faculty and staff have already accepted buyouts, so the total will be more like 20%.) Official notifications go out June 1st.

Tusk tusk

As part of my slightly rejiggered "After Religion," I got to bring together three particularly fun things in this final session before Spring Break, called "The Promise of Pluralism." We explored the world of the COEXIST bumper sticker and other efforts to use symbols of religions as an alphabet or pattern, and Rev. angel Kyodo williams' call for liberating new stories for a time which has seen through the limitations of nation-like religions and binary identities. At the center was John Thatamanil's brilliant retrieval of the old story of the blind men and the elephant, which goes beyond the smug inclusivism of the story and the cynicism of the most common critique to finding, in a more fully embodied imagining of the scene, an evocation of the adventure of exploring the unknown in the company of others. 

I was having visual fun, too, deliberately spinning and inverting images of the cover of Thatamanil's book Circling the Elephant. I know the picture's reversed, I said, having just rehearsed Thatamanil's Vedanta-mystic suggestion that we may in fact find ourselves inside the "elephant" of ultimate reality: it's the view from inside the book! And I paired it with an image of what's quaintly known as the "elephant tusk nebula" - quaint because this resemblance is a really just a fact about us, not the nebula. 

I think this subtly complemented Thatamanil's exploding of the elephant story. In the story, people mistake parts of an elephant for other things (fans, walls, ropes, etc.). Maybe the "elephant" is itself a mistaken description of part of something greater, an instance, even, of what angel Kyodo williams described when she said "truths are going to keep coming into solidity and then fall away over and over again."

March weather

Weird skies when I got up this morning, purple and orange! The day brought squalls, hail and snow, among other wild weather swings.

Bud yet

Meanwhile, in yesterday's afternoon and today's morning's light... 

Touchdown

In these trying times, I take joy where I find it, and I found many kinds of joy in reading a brilliant article about Bad Bunny's Espectáculo de Medio Tiempo del Súper Tazón (= Superbowl halftime show) as a many-level religious ritual. Super illuminating, it's also by one of our alums!

We often think of ritual as an acting-out of or reinforcement of belief, but Bad Bunny’s performance shows us in real time that ritual can also be a tool to create change and shift or expand belief. His ritual intends, in no uncertain terms, to help viewers shift and expand their understandings of who and what Americans can be. 

Caught in the act

Today marked the one-year anniversary of the Multifaith Mondays prayer vigils at Columbus Circle. I haven't been able to attend that many (especially last semester, when I was teaching Monday evenings), but I go when I can. It's never been that big in numbers but is inspiring in many ways, not least through its persistence, through dark and cold. 

We had a good turnout today, and someone posed the several dozen of us for a picture (the way they did regularly the first months). But when I tried to find if someone had posted a picture online I found an article with this picture from last month instead. I assure you there were more than five of us there that frigid day, if not that many more... 

Epic

The editors of the new online journal Equator (a "magazine of politics culture and art" which strives to be "an antidote to global unraveling") bring Simone Weil's great essay "The Iliad, and the Poem of Force" to bear on the current calamity, finding a prediction worthy of Greek tragedy in the undeclared war's hubristic nickname "Epic Fury":

And yet, as Weil observed, ancient civilizations (until the Roman) knew that such intoxication by violence leads inevitably to nemesis (which she thought perhaps a source of the idea of karma).

American exceptionalism

This from the latest Pew report saddens me.

I know there are all kinds of apples and oranges being compared here (what comes to mind as the goodness or badness of a fellow citizen?), but that's presumably the case in all the countries sampled, not just in the U. S., the only country where a majority of people think their fellow citizens bad. 

The surveys were conducted in March and April of last year, which might help explain the American anomaly a little. In general, those politically out of power are apparentlu more likely to distrust their fellow citizens.

[In the U S.] Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to rate fellow Americans as morally and ethically bad (60% vs. 46%). And previous research has shown that rising numbers of both Republicans and Democrats say people in the other party are immoral.

Isn't the United States supposed to be a leader in trust and respect for your fellow citizens? I think I might have answered "somewhat good" if asked this question, even if the reelection of DT had been top of mind. Some confidence in the intentions of your fellow citizens seems to me a precondition for living in a democracy. Part of why this saddens me so...

Death dealers

I've read in the annals of dictatorship about how leaders with unbridled power develop a taste for death. This bloodlust is on horrifying display in the Secretary of War Crimes, not just in his rhetoric but in the appalling torpedoing of an unarmed Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean, leaving survivors to drown - and sharing footage of the attack so others might be drawn into his sadistic orgasm. He's been salivating at delivering death at sea since the U. S. government started targeting smaller boats in the Caribbean last September. His sociopathic boss is indifferent to life or death but is developing an appetite for "decapitating" other leaders. They're murderers all of them.

CDMX

Can I make a confession? Most of this last week, while the United States proved itself an ever more monstrous threat to international peace, I was abroad. Ciudad de México, in fact: the friends I visited with last year are there again and had a vacancy in their guest room. So off we went! (I set off right after my Thursday morning lecture, returned the night before the next one.) A year ago, the horror unfolding in the US was just becoming clear. Now the mind balks at not just a year of steadily greater outrages but the grim reality that we have been unable to stop it. A highlight this time was the Museo Nacional de Historia in the Castillo de Chapultepec, an inspiring if sobering reminder that history is no walk in the park. At least Mexicans don't pretend otherwise.

 

 

Remedios Varo, "Roulotte (Carricoche)," 1955, Museo de Arte Moderno

Juan O'Gorman, "Retablo de la Independencia," 1961, Museo Nacional de Historia

Splitting

I noticed last week that the snow had taken down a branch of a callery pear tree near The New School. 

 

(Callery pears' v-forks make them particularly vulnerable to splitting like this, one reason they're no longer planted as much as they once were).  

Then, as I walked past it and found more limbs in the snow, I realized it wasn't just one but two branches the tree had lost. In fact: three! 

 

A week later, all the fallen branches, big and small, have been removed, along with the snow, leaving just the wounded tree torso.

War crime

He did it. Why? So many possible reasons being bruited by the pundits, none probably the actual reason, none offered to the people or our representatives, or the international community - and not one of these candidate reasons legitimate. (I'm remembering from my problem of evil days that the search for motives of evil usually reveals a disappointing void, the noble and profound casually destroyed by the shallow and mediocre.) The chaos president, emboldened by past crimes, rains catastrophe around the world. Ours is now a rogue state.

I know what I know, if you know what I mean

At an intimate workshop sharing the "Theorizing Religion" class activities around definitions of religion and the religions of unexpected things like capitalism, academia and fashion, I gave folks a few definitions of religion to chew over. Three were serious, the fourth not so much. 

If you don't recognize it, that last one is from the song which VH1 listed as No. 23 of the "100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders of the 80s," Edie Brickell's "What I am" - and was inspired by irritation at a college world religons class! (I used it once before, almost twenty years ago (!).) I told the assembled people I'd included the smile on a dog to keep things light-hearted but after a while noted that it was in the list also as a corrective to the potentially merely anthropological claims of the other three (Tillich, Suzuki, Durkheim). Religion might be a fact not just about human beings muddling along but about the solicitation of the more-than-human world in which we find ourselves.

The event was my contribution to a suite of events around the "Fashion - Faith: Rituals and Dialogues" exhibition, and the conversation my prompts fostered among these fashion-focused students quickly left me behind: wearing something that "just feels wrong," the fate-like power of "trends," the rage for reusing other' clothing, the "transcendent" feeling when wearing and being recognized in the work of a famous designer who just died, the daily "ritual" of dressing, death... 

I guess that, contrary to my pious pedagogical protestations, "the religion of fashion" is to me really not (yet) more than a conceit... But the enthusiastic reception of this, along with all the other components of the exhibition, suggest I may have opportunity to learn more. Shouldn't we turn this into a team-taught course, the BFA Fashion colleague who'd had the transcendent experience wondered?

Cotton candy snow