Thursday, March 28, 2024

Lifelong?

Had a fun little event relaunching the New School Histories website today. Well, mostly fun - it's a history of losses as well as gains. This is one of the five splash pages, and we're no longer committed to "Adult Education," and so perhaps also not to "lifelong" learning. Hanging over our heads was the imminent dissolution of the the founding division, home of all that lifelong learning (currently called Schools of Public Engagement, fifth in that list under "The New School is"), its various components, faculty and staff to be "rehomed" in other division. How do we tell the story now?

Since SPE was the trunk from which the others branched (it's more complicated than that of course, since our history involves some crucially important grafts), I quipped that we were like a banyan tree which, having sent out aerial roots which became secondary trunks, eventually loses its original trunk. The banyan lives on, but you can only understand why it has the shape it does by knowing about the now empty center. 

A lot of our storytelling about The New School's histories has inevitably been about ruptures and interruptions, but this still feels different. So it was a salve to spend some time with folks committed to the continuing interest of that history. In fact, we were soon happily lost in the website's thicket of historical research, documentation and reflection. So much good stuff there!!

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

雪だるま

At a lovely show of Zen paintings at Japan Society today I had a melting experience. It came with this painting by Nakahara Nantenbo (1839-1925) called "Snow Daruma," a play on how the Japanese word for snowman, 
雪だるま yukidaruma, evokes Bodhidharma, the legendary founder of Zen. The text: 
A Daruma is made of piled-up snow -
as the days pass, he disappears, but where did he go?

Somehow it didn't seem frivolous to notice my shadow and then pose, since we'd just been through a room of paintings of monks snoozing, laughing, jesting, juggling and spinning a bowl. The text of another (by Hakuin Ekaku): 

Mr. Monk! How unusual! Today you are actually doing zazen... Yeah, so what?

The friend I went with thought this one by Sengai Gibon (1750-1837)

"What a pleasant nap! I dreamt I was the Duke of Zhou!

(a jab at Confucius) looked like a cat stretching.

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

White knuckles

The Met's London plane trees 
have been freshly pollarded!

Monday, March 25, 2024

Tree of extinction


As I'm trying to wrangle the many many contexts in which one reads of a "tree of life" into one argument, I decided, on a whim, to search for "tree of extinction." (Part of my argument, as you know, is that Charles Darwin was drawn to the tree as a model for the history of species precisely because trees naturally lose many branches.) 

Something came up! The article, just half a year old, is "Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera," and it argues that we are already well into the sixth extinction. Whole genera of animals have gone extinct in recent centuries, at a far swifter rate than before and much too quickly for evolution to fill the gaps. And many more are at risk. It's a powerful, urgent argument, but the accompanying illustration undermines it. 

With images of extinct genera on the withered branches, it sort of corresponds to Darwin's tree of life, which includes extinct as well as living species. But their point is not that this is business as usual. We're supposed to imagine that the same fate may await the genera represented in the green canopy above. Where the image undermines their argument is that the tree in the picture looks perfectly healthy. We expect the lower part of the trunk of a tree to be branchless. And if higher branches die off, too, we expect that that's just part of the tree's growing higher still, generating a new canopy.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Blueskying spring


Saturday, March 23, 2024

Shortcuts

Part of a cluster of article on AI in the newest Scientific American is an article called "Shortcuts to God" concerned with the 

large language models on religious texts ... flooding the internet, claiming to offer instanteous spiritual insights. What could go wrong? 

The author quotes religious leaders concerned that the work of study and reflection is undermined; his own main worry seems to be that users might be misled by the "hallucinations" of all generative AI. But he doesn't ask whether these models are mining the right data. That they might not be is revealed in a telling quotation from the director of a non-profit called AI and Faith. 


Nothing new in theology since Thomas Aquinas? I posted this on the Facebook page of our religious studies alums, and one was good enough to put into words exactly how problematic this is. 

Theologians and other theoreticians of the world’s religions will be very surprised to hear Mr. Graves’ news that their religions of study all froze in time 800 years ago. The fact that he thinks new theology must come from AI—as opposed to, say, all the people who have been kept out of the academy forever and are now clawing their way in—or, say, the lived experiences of the billions of religious practitioners—is so outrageous that it’s kind of blowing my mind. I can’t imagine making such a bold claim about something I know nothing about. 

Thank you, Helena!

Friday, March 22, 2024

Forest succession

The replanting of the courtyard has commenced, and it's beautiful. Here the view down from my office window two weeks ago and today.

The exposed soil will be planted with green ground cover (as when the courtyard was first laid out), making for a quite different feel. (Vines have been promised, too!) Also: the courtyard we knew was a space of monocultures - red maples here, a stand of bamboo opposite, later replaced by one and then another kind of tree. The new look is mixed. You can't quite see from above but among the evergreen shrub with fragrant yellow flowers (Japanese mahonia, I think) are some new young trees. They appear to be the same kind as some new ones planted across the courtyard, which still bore ID as American hophornbeam, together with two other kinds of trees. Diversity on both ends, and some commonality of trees - a whole new concept!


Thursday, March 21, 2024

Non SPE

This is my first academic leave where I didn't leave town. (I also kept on some administrative responsibilities.) So it's no surprise that I haven't felt as distanced from the university. Indeed, I've been popping over many Fridays - a day the campus is virtually empty - to commune with the courtyard maples as the replacement of dead trees approached. But I was perhaps naive to suppose that it would be out of sight, out of mind the rest of the time. 

First, there was a strike by academic student workers at the start of this month. It wound up lasting only a few days but this came after weeks of increasingly tense negotiations and full-time faculty angsting about how not to "cross the virtual picket line" in support if a strike were called; word was some of the organizers, recalling the camraderie and sense of shared purpose during last year's much longer strike for the part-time faculty contract, were looking forward to a return to the barricades.

Now we receive word that our interrim president (stepping in for the last president, whose moral authority was extinguished by his comportment during the part-time faculty strike) has done what her predecessors were rumored to have been considering for years: announced that the founding division of the school, currently known as the Schools of Public Engagement (SPE, before that New School for General Studies, The Adult Division, The New School and of course New School for Social Research) is to be dissolved, its parts absorbed by the colleges of design, liberal arts, performing arts and graduate social research. (This afternoon's public notice only speaks of embarking on a route to reducing the number of colleges, but the Board of Trustees has apparently already signed off on giving SPE the ax.)

This will have significant impact for the little self-design liberal arts program I direct at Lang, since SPE has a much larger self-design program and several faculty committed entirely to it. My friends there and I have suggested aligning the two programs for a while; now we have six weeks to make a proposal, and a year tro enact it. The logistics will be complicated but the results might well be best for all involved, including students. Finding new homes for all the rest of SPE's broad range of programs won't be as easy.

But my main reaction to this news has been as a historian of The New School. How will we tell the story without our matriarch?

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Turtle islands

An errand took me to the South Slope today. The spiky Brooklyn skyline, visible when the F train briefly curves overland, was barely recognizable. And then in the 7th Ave station I happened on one of the newest additions to the MTA station mosaic series, David Rios Ferreira's "Landscapes Adrift - cosmically woven and earthy bonded."

Inspired by the turtles in Prospect Park, it brings together all manner of images with turtle creation myths from many cultures, including those which see the world carried on the back of a turtle.

Building upon this narrative and drawing from his own Taíno heritage (the Indigenous people of the Caribbean), Ferreira's artwork seeks to bridge present-day concepts of home with a shared cultural connection to the planet across time.

The rainbow-filled mosaics swirl along the white walls of the under-ground passageway leading to the station. Once past the turnstile, images in blue and white play against iridescent backgrounds. Cool!

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Barnstorm

Last week I shared with you a precursor, Mrs. J. H. Philpot. I've learned a little more about her since then. "J. H." stands for John Henry, MD, whom one Mary Isaline, née Needham (1852-1925) married in 1877. They lived in London, had a daughter, and a 20-year friendship with South African freethinker and feminist Olive Schreiner (whose letters have been digitized); both Isaline and Olive worked toward's women's suffrage in Britain, but Olive thought Isaline a gossip. I know this from the inquiries of a Canadian lesbian poet blogger, who learned of Philpot's book from the enthusiastic recommendation of radical feminist Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology:

If the Searcher can find it, she should look at Mrs. J.H. Philpot, The Sacred Tree, or The Tree in Religion and Myth (London and New York: Macmillan, 1897). It is saddening to read in the author's preface: 'The reader is requested to bear in mind that this volume lays no claim to scholarship, independent research, or originality of view.... In so dealing with one of the many modes of primitive religion, it is perhaps inevitable that the writer should seem to exaggerate its import...' A Hag [a term of approbation for Daly] who peruses this book will see that it displays extraordinary scholarship, independent research, and originality of view. She will also find that it takes no great effort of imagination to grasp the circumstances under which this devoted author labored — conditions which drove her to apologize for seeming to exaggerate the importance of the Sacred Tree and of her Self. Since she does not tell us her own name, we are left with the quaint label, 'Mrs. J.H. Philpot,' signifying the burial of this courageous foresister. Her book contains many important illustrations of Tree Goddesses. She discusses christian 'adaptations' of the May Tree and of what came to be known as the 'Christmas Tree.' She causes the reader to reflect upon gynocentric origins of such biblical images as that of Yahweh speaking to Moses from the burning bush, pointing out that the sacred sycamores of Egypt were believed to be inhabited by such Goddesses as Hāthor and Nuit.

I'm not sure there's much more we can find out about the author of The Sacred Tree, and what led her to publish this (and only this) book when she did. If I have a chance I might ask a librarian about reviews. But the book clearly has legs.

One reader was a Thomas Barns, an Anglican vicar who was entrusted with the article "Trees and Plants" for the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, published in 1908. He has different axes to grind than Philpot. His trees are more abstract, not objects of any sort of sympathy. He certainly doesn't consider inviting them into his house. 

Philpot didn't take sides on debates over whether ancestor cults or animistic experiences are the source of tree veneration, owning that it was likely that the primitive worship of trees had more than one root (23). Barns is a partisan for the latter view, but in a particular way. The anthropologists arguing for animism saw it as an early form of a scientific engagement with the forces of nature, the first stage in an evolution which would lead to religion and beyond it. Not so Barns, whose view is thoroughly theological. 
 (454)
It's a grim story that he tells, although his account began in wonder:
(448)
Barns' narrative begins with this animistic principle of the unity of the divine spirit of life but early humans progressively move away from the divine into anthropomorphism. The start is positively Edenic: In the earliest stage the sacred tree is more than a symbol. It is instinct with divine life, aglow with divine light. It is at once the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (448) But it moves towards symbolism as the sacred groves planted by devotés come to seem the abodes of different gods. Barns' discussion of this putative stage, Trees many and lords many, evokes Paul's account of the history of idolatry (1 Cor 8:5-6).

Like Philpot's, Barns' account is full of the names of different kinds of trees but where for her they are weightless, for him their specificity is part of the problem. With the differentiation of the deity into the gods of the nations there came the differentiation of the tree into the trees sacred to the several gods (449), he writes, only a little later to assert that As the tree varied in species, the god varied in name (451). Once particular kinds of trees are associated with the deities of particular nations and these nations fight and expand, they come into conflict with each other, giving rise to the tree-demons. 
(452)
Barns goes on to discuss the tree of life and the tree of knowledge but all along trees are but material witnesses to human folly. He ends with a flourish of quotations from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, ending in silent adoration before the Tree of Life who is no tree but divine wisdom sprung from the root of Jesse. (457)

It all makes Isaline Philpot's account seem positively celebratory of trees! All the particularities of tree cults and celebrations are for Barns detritus as humanity moves painfully from the prelapsarian presence of the divine back to the divine. This doleful history involves particular trees and the particular peoples relating to them but ultimate truth allows of no such material particulars. Philpot's book's title refers to a single Sacred Tree but his "Trees and Plants" all point beyond themselves to the blinding Sun of Righteousness.

Anyway, Barns makes liberal use of Philpot - except for her discussion of the "universe tree," to which he gives only a cursory glance. While trees seem to him radiant with divine light, this light is not theirs - something our first parents knew, or should have - and it is fatal frailty to dwell on the trees rather than the light. Compared to this, Philpot, open to the "spirit of vegetation," is a pagan tree-hugger, as Daly discerned!