M. Gessen warned us of this. As we get distracted by never-ending scandals and outrages and take comfort in isolated victories against the storm, the juggernaut of what Gothenberg University's Varieties of Democracy Institute calls "autocratisation" continues.
Today's was a short poem by Mary Oliver, suitably entitled "Praying."
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
The first reader/commenter pronounced this was the "New York City poem" she'd been looking for! She'd thought she was the only person who paid attention to vacant lots. Others appreciated "just / pay attention" and "this isn't a contest" and "a doorway / into thanks" and the quiet miracle of "another voice." I reflected on how "a few / small stones" prefigure the push to "patch // a few words together." (I tend to be the animist in this group, seeing our human feelings and noticings and doings anticipated in the more-than-human world.) But all of us found ourselves thinking about the poetry of overlooked, perhaps unbeautiful city scenes as "silence[s] in which / another voice may speak."
What about those ugly piles of dirty snow, someone mentioned, and I had to share that I find them beautiful, have a phoneful of images of them - and shared two you've seen (the second and third from here). The unexpected multimedia turn was warmly appreciated. "One of those could be something a gallery in Chelsea," the organizer enthused. As I tried to articulate how hard it was not to sense design and intention in the way seeds and twigs and grit were lined up as the snow melted, the initial reader/commenter had an epiphany: all the things that wind up in the snow are distributed on the ground in a new way as it melts.
patch // a few stones together and don't try / to make them elaborate !
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.
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, finding in a more fully embodied imagining of the scene an invitation to the adventure of exploring the unknown in the company of other traditions.
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 really just a report about us, who share a planet with elephants, 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.). But perhaps 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."
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.
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...
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).
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...
