Scene of the crime

I'm not going to dwell on the exposure of the grifters with whom our now Grifter in Chief kept company, but had to remark on something striking about this map attending a Times article on one's network of tax avoidance. For the first time I can remember, the United States is not presented horizontally, latitude parallel to the frame. This presentation, the latitude bowed as if you're looking down on a globe, is more accurate to  true dimensions and distances, but it seems highly unusual in this context. The US appears to be pushed into a corner in a choke hold as its pockets are being picked. Coincidence?

Toasted

Not thinking about events in Washington, just making kale chips.

Approaching Hallowe'en

End of an era

After many years, my old Ikea extendable dining table is getting a rest. Numberless the meals it's hosted, for countless dear people over the years. I got it when I first started working two dozen years ago. It's not going anywhere, though! A new table will take over dining, but this one will just set up shop in the room next door.

Hearing things

In the subway this evening I was telling my Chinese partner about a talk I'd heard about folk religion in contemporary Jiangsu. A woman had been suffering from headaches, which neither the western nor the Chinese doctor had been able to treat, so she went to a spirit medium. The medium quickly went into a trance and asked the woman where she lived. When she named a building in a new complex which had recently been built over an ancient village, she said "of course!" as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. A teenaged girl had been killed by the Japanese in the 1930s, she informed the woman, and her grave had been disturbed by the new construction. Upset, she'd possessed the first person she could find, which happened to be the woman with the headaches. The spirit medium would help her exorcise the girl's ghost...

At this point we had to get off the train, but as we were stepping off, a young Chinese American woman who'd evidently been listening to our conversation said something. But what did she say? My partner and I remembered diametrically opposed things! I thought she said "I know it sounds crazy, but I believe it" - meaning the disturbed ghost's possessing a stranger. He heard her say "it's crazy but it really happens" - meaning such episodes of superstitious credulity. What to believe?

The medium, incidentally, arranged to lure the ghost girl from the suffering woman's bedroom with threats and gifts, burning spirit money for her at a crossroads at a river, and set her free. The scholar who'd told us the story, something of an authority on Chinese ghosts, ended his tale there. Did the woman's headaches stop? Need one ask?

Idol speculation

In "Buddhist Modernism" we've finally got to the arrival of Buddhism in the West - about eight weeks later than many of the students probably expected! Part of the story is how late any Asian religious teacher ever had the chance to speak for their traditions - the earliest was the World's Parliament of Religions at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Before that (and it's not so long a history before that either), western folks made do with other westerners' translations and interpretations of Asian texts - as many still quite happily do.

It was an excuse to bring in my catalog from the 1893 Parliament, from whence hails this interesting picture: Buddhist and Aztec Idols! Why not? Idolatry was thought to be the same everywhere - part of why you'd bypass living practitioners for the supposed purity of texts.

New it all

Rather late in the game, the university is convening committees to figure out how to mark the New School's centenary in 2019. The drive is being spearheaded by Marketing & Communications, and by Development, so that somewhat restricts the possibilities for complexity.

Anyway, a faculty committee convened today, and bandied about a few very general ideas. The powers that be have been working with the slogan "100 Years of New," which nobody loves and a few of us really don't like. Some think it's too backward-looking - shouldn't our focus be our next hundred years? I think that over a hundred years the least one could expect would be a grammar check. But if not that, what?

"Still New"

"Always New"

"New Century"

"Yesterday's New and Tomorrow's Too"

"New Again"

"All New, 2.0"

"100 Years New"

At last it begins

Age before beauty

A few blocks away from our place, on the way to the Botanic Garden, is the burned hull of a building. It's been vacant as long as I've been here (a decade now); apparently insurance issues were never resolved. In recent years, the fence around it has been replaced by big boards which local artists are invited to use. A new suite went up this weekend.

Farmer's Market haul

HASK not

During our monthly vestry meetings, there's often an event or a music rehearsal going on in main . church building next door. Today nothing was planned, so everything was prepped for tomorrow's Soup Kitchen.

Hearing voices

Have I told you that, as part of a new curriculum of "one text" courses, I'll be spending half of next semester reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience - just the Varieties - with a small group of students? The model comes (unsurprisingly) from the Philosophy Department, but I'm looking forward to giving some undivided attention to Varieties, which, truth be told, I haven't given a thorough reread since graduate school.

Varieties was on the bill in "Theorizing Religion" today - first of two days, where we're reading two clumps of lectures. As I've been doing for rather longer than I realized (时间都去哪儿了?), today's class was centered on reading aloud some of the many testimonies James includes. He read them aloud when delivering the lectures (although all of them were written texts before he vocalized them...), and hearing these strange words, in his voice, must have been a significant part of the experience of the Varieties. So students chose a half dozen of the long quotations and read them aloud. I had them consider the generosity of James' lending his voice this way  - surely, his reading wasn't mocking or distancing but a demonstration of a will to hear if not to understand others' experiences, he was a sort of spirit medium for others.

Later in the class I performed one of his acts of possession, quite emotionally rendering the famous account of the person overwhelmed by a sense that the gauziest film kept him from the catatonic paralysis of an "Epileptic patient" he'd seen in an asylum, unable to function or even move. It's shattering, heart-breaking. (No small number of students at our school know comparable experiences of anxiety and depression.) We lingered in it for a while, then I let them know that this was in fact James' own experience, though he never says so. Varieties isn't a view from the mountaintop of religious consolation and empowerment, but from farther down, by someone who's never been to the summit and is, indeed, "constitutionally incapable" of getting there. (He doesn't claim legitimacy from a personal experience of the depths, either.) What a feat of generosity the Varieties now seems, acknowledging the value of experiences he himself had not had! The class was awed...

And I was not a little pleased to have done for James, lending my voice to him, what he did for so many others. What a pleasure it will be to give Varieties of Religious Experience even more time!

(And yes, that edition was blurbed by James' student Horace Kallen.)

Inside the block between 12th and 13th Streets, Fifth and Sixth Aves.

Museum mile

Inspired by reports about the soon-to-open Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, and some of its conceptual challenges, I decided to ask the students in "Theorizing Religion" how they might lay out a museum devoted the scriptures they'd just learned about in the MOOCs. For fun (and because I'm part of a committee rethinking the college's uses of spaced) I gave them a cutaway of the original uses of our buildings as a model. So here are Israel: The People's Museum, The Museum of Dharma, The (...) Museum, and the Shakti-Bhakti Museum. It's a fun way to get at people's sense of what's important, how things should be introduced - and what the MOOCs included and weren't able to.

Step by step

Going through some old boxes of files from my Princeton days, I found this quite detailed account of how "Schleiermacher's romantic theology" emerged... not sure if this is a plan for a blackboard graffiti sprawl or a reconstruction of an inspired sprawl that happened. More likely the latter! Fun! Fun in a different way was discovering that these notes were written on the back of an old cover letter applying for a job I didn't get! (I've turned it right-side up for ease of bemused reading.)

Post-religious

Shambling toward an essay on 'Anthropocene' and religious studies - which seems barely to have noticed the discussion - I was delighted today to happen on the interdisciplinary "Anthropocene Curriculum" which has been assembled through the Haus der Kulturen der Welt since 2013. Germans know more about theology than Americans, if less about religious studies, so I was hopeful. But what their cool visual search (the array is different each time) offered on the term "Religion" was just this.

 

It looks like religion is a player but it's not. Most links are circumstantial and there's no line of "relation" with "Anthropocene" at all! Is religion so obviously off the map? Are the religions dismissed without further ado as creatures of the now destabilized holocene (causes of anthropogenic effects but no use in understanding or combatting them), scholarship on religion as the study of sterile where not toxic fantasy? Are they human-all-too-human at a time where we need to rethink everything about what it does and doesn't mean to be human? Give us a chance!

Irreligion

A particularly destructive week, as the dotard of the adult day car center on Pennsylvanias Avenue destroys where we cannot build. The slimy half-measures on the Iran agreement and the Affordable Care Act are part of it, his reneging on a pledge to protect the DACA kids, his winks and nods on Puerto Rico, the gutting of clean power regulations, the ever shriller whining about the power of the free press, the idolatry of the flag. But particularly disturbing is his going all-in with the culture war of the increasingly marginal Evangelical right, with so broad a defense of the "paramount" right of religious freedom as to render all other civil rights conditional. (Indeed, you're able now to discriminate on sincerely held "moral" grounds, too, a shabby and unprecedented legal invention.) Beyond mortification that the worst pseudo-Christians should again have seized the public flag of religion, I sorrow at this further undermining of the moral imperative of our shared life, with its commitment to the work of tolerance and civility, its acceptance if not indeed celebration of a pluralistic society. Pray for us.

Season change

Commodity fetishist in chief

Somewhat unexpected resonance between Marx, our first shared reading after the MOOC adventure in "Theorizing Religion," and something in Forbes magazine. On his way to decrying the "fetishism of commodities," Marx laments the eclipsing of meaningful "use value" by abstract and inhuman "exchange value." This economic shift alienates people from themselves by making their labor, which would otherwise be central to fully human lives interacting creatively and caringly with other humans and nature, an abstraction worth only as much or as little as some stranger is willing to pay for it. It's the economic base for the wan religiosity of modern Protestantism, with its disembodied souls in some sort of relation with an abstractly sublime deity, their religious lives so private they may be unknown even to themselves (I added that part).

Anyway, it reminds me of some interesting observations made by Forbes writer Randall Lane in framing an interview with the president, which help make clear just how his professional deformation as the kind of wheeler-dealer he is makes him incapable of serving the common good, or even imagining it.

Donald Trump didn't get rich building businesses, despite years of brand-burnishing via The Apprentice and millions of votes from people who craved exactly that experience. Instead, his forte lies in transactions—buying and selling and cutting deals that assure him a win regardless of the outcome for others. The nuance is essential. Entrepreneurs and businesspeople create and run entities that have any number of interested parties—shareholders and customers and employees and partners and hometowns—that in theory all share in success. ... Dealmakers rarely seek that kind of win-win-win-win-win. Whether it's a stock trade, a swap of middle relievers or optioning a real estate parcel, a deal tends to involve just two parties and generally results in one coming out ahead of the other (so much so that a "win-win" is considered a noteworthy aberration).

I'm less inclined to suppose business as usual is hunky dory than Forbes, but this helps explain the tormenter-in-chief's cavalier, when not aggressive, destruction of everything multilateral - he'd rather throw out everything collectively crafted and maintained and replace it with opportunistic short-term bilateral strong-armings called "deals." Nothing else is real for him. (I wonder if this sheds light on the spirituality of his Evangelical base in some way, somehow, too - topic for another day.) Our president is the inhumanity of exchange value personified. We are in deep, deep trouble. Lose-lose-lose-lose-lose.

Somatic

We had a visitor in "Buddhist Modernism" today, a writer and poet who's visiting Lang this semester. She saw me copying Ambedkar's The Buddha and his Dhamma in the faculty resource room a few weeks ago and we got to talking. Turns out she's been a practitioner for decades, in a Tibetan tantric lineage. And she's a meditation teacher. Come visit my class? I asked, a little concerned she'd find our syllabus too academic, but she obliged. My course is academic, but I was inviting her as a practitioner.

And as a practitioner she came, gently suggesting that Buddhism is about practice - all the texts are pointing to practices - and about embodiment, not the mind. You can't think your way to enlightenment, and "mindfulness" is a McDonald's rip-off of Buddhism. Dukkha is mental anxiety, but it's found in the body - as the Buddha did, on his cushion under the bodhi tree - as is its cause.

She had the last 40 minutes of class and we'd informally planned for a briefish meditation and discussion of the Buddhist challenges of dealing with the particular suffering of inequality and oppression, but we never got there. Or maybe we did. She led us in a "somatic meditation," gauging the mood in the class, for what wound up being 25 minutes - she was more surprised than we were at how long it took! Sitting in our uncomfortable chairs, in our school clothes with shoes on, wasn't ideal but it mattered not. Feel the earth, she said, through the weight of your feet. And amazingly, with some more direction we did. Then we were directed to breathe in energy from the earth through our feet, breathe out relation of tension, and gradually moved our breath's object through ankle and calves. The it was the turn of our sic bones, whatever was in contact with our chair, and from there outward to hips and upward through the collarbone. Then our hands, which had been resting on our thighs - weight also - and from there up to our upper arms, which we were invited to feel were hollow tubes, filled with the breath of the earth. And then our heads - imagining you have no brain, filling your skull cavity with breath turns out to be remarkable satisfying. We moved to the backs of the eyes, and eventually down the neck, and then into the area inside the spine, where we sent breaths up and down, finally letting our torso breathe itself, all while noticing places of tension which miraculously let the tension drain away as she reminded us that meditation doesn't change anything, it just notices, with curiosity.

It was a very interesting experience for a lot of reasons. We were still together for a long time, and/but, as the students who spoke in the few remaining minutes recounted, had some quite powerful experiences. One spoke of a feeling of transcendence, one said she felt she'd fallen asleep and realized she hadn't, one said he'd been unable to concentrate until he leaned his back against the wall and then suddenly was in it, another said her head felt light - couldn't say more even when pressed. Our visitor responded to each skilfully - she'd been watching us and had noticed, for instance, the student who'd changed his posture, but also seemed able to discern just the right thing to say to that particular student. Good Buddhist teachers seem to have this gift.

I could have said that, though time ran out, that as the exercise ended I'd found a little ball of tension in the very spot, beneath my right shoulder blade, which a physical therapist a few months ago identified (to my great surprise) as the reason why I was suffering from neck aches. On being noticed, it obligingly subsided.

I haven't mentioned, nor did she mention it in class yesterday (though it's a subject she writes and talks about extensively), that our visitor is a transwoman, and that a Buddhist practice focused on embodiment like this one accompanied her through her transition. Who better to guide one to the body's truth?

It's feeling like the plagues of Egypt. Prayers for those in terror of fire.

Shadow world

A poet colleague who taught at our school for three decades before retiring to Mexico came back for a visit today, a year on. A bunch of us veterans gathered in a nearby bar to fête him, trade gossip, but mainly to reminisce. (Actually, like in the old days when we were an endless discussion about pedagogy, each of us who'd taught today also recounted what had happened in our class.) It was a bittersweet thing. From his perspective, living abroad, the school a not-quite but progressively distant memory, the difference between last year, five years ago, fifteen, even twenty-five is less important than it is to us. Especially we know who is still here, and who is here no longer. Some have left to other positions (or to none) but in particular we felt the presence of colleagues who have died, two in the last year. I don't think of myself as part of a generation which has started losing people, nor as so long at this school as to know some of its lamented dead. Think again.

Pearls

Do you have to be from a desert to think the rain a wonder every time?

Ballooning

Pufferfish plant, fresh from the Farmer's Market!

Christian/non-Christian Job

I'm 7/8 of the way through the five tradition MOOCs! The Book of Job has turned up, though not in the Judaism module. (It's mentioned in passing, and to be fair, that module assigns the fewest readings; Job is mentioned in the Islam module, too, also in passing.) It's in the Christianity module, in an omnibus of Biblical texts addressing "existential questions of violence and suffering, justice and love." Yet the recommended excerpts don't include the text central to so much Christian Job interpretation, 19:25-27's knowledge "that my redeemer lives" (though we get Zophar's retort to it in ch. 20!). Curious but not entirely surprising. The course is taught by a distinguished Biblical scholar who surely can't see the translation "redeemer" without wincing.

XXX XXX

In our weekly engagement calendar of New York City-related art from the Metropolitan Museum, this week is devoted to Stuart Davis' 1930 "Jefferson Market, New York." I've long known that the pretty Jefferson Market you see today, housing a library and abutting an opulent community garden, is different from its aspect in the past, when it was a police station and prison, and the current site of the garden was the fearsome Women's House of Detention. And Sixth Avenue was dominated by an elevated trainline! The Women's House of Detention was built a year after Davis' painting, but Jefferson Market already looks part of a much more crowded cityscape. All the pictures I've seen of the "El" are from above or the side; I hadn't considered that Sixth Avenue will have been at least partly covered by metal girders, a twilit tunnel even on a sunny day. And of course the Women's House of Detention wasn't the only new building going up near Jefferson Market in 1930...!

赏月饼

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival, 祝你中秋节快乐!

Evil again

Someone from one of the news sources the president fears contacted me yesterday, wondering if we might have a phone interview about what it means when public figures use the language of "evil." (He'd stumbled on my Problem of Evil anthology!) So today we had a great conversation. Not sure I was soundbitable enough to end up in anything he writes (I'll let you know if so), but it was a gratifyingly, impressively serious discussion. Here's some of what I think I said...

I wasn't surprised that the president described the Las Vegas shooting as "pure evil." Any other president would probably have used the term "evil" too (the meaningless "pure," which might point to the demonic for others in his camp, was just the vacuous hyperbole one expects from this unpresidented one), because so shocking a loss of innocent life demands the strongest terms we can find; using them in time's of national heartbreak is part of the president's job. In most other settings, Republican presidents' talk of "evil" is more than consoling - it's a declaration of war - but here "pure evil" just meant something so unthinkable, so incomprehensible, that all we can do in response is huddle together in sympathy.

Most use of the language of "evil" in public life is problematic - it refuses further thought and brooks no disagreement - but it was worth considering that "evil" appears also in phrases like "the evil of gun violence," where its valences are entirely different, identifying a common problem demanding a common response. (In common only are that the phenomenon transcends the particular case.) "Evil" here isn't something which comes incomprehensibly from beyond the world of human understanding (and so also slips beyond the reach of analysis and policy), but is unnecessary harm on a society-wide scale, harm which can at least be mitigated by analysis and policy.

Of course he also wanted to know if I though the shooter was evil. I did my best to sound uninterested. I didn't expect any satisfaction from whatever was found, I said; no account of his motives would make the destruction of even one of those lives less tragic. Besides, what made it an example of "the evil of gun violence" was that, whatever his motives were, the availability of massive lethal force made it possible for him to destroy the lives of hundreds, not just one or two. Trying to understand his motives is a distraction both from the irreplaceable lives of the victims, and from recognizing this as an instance of the broader "evil of gun violence."

Summarized like this, it all seems pretty obvious (except perhaps the studied lack of interest in the shooter's motive), but it felt like making useful connections, raising interesting questions, in unexpected places. I haven't had a chance to articulate my views about the perils of what I used to deride as "evil-talk" in a while; they've grown. And did I mention that my interlocutor identified as Buddhist? I hope he found it useful, too.

[Update, 10/8: his article just appeared, I get to be "the professor" but most of what I said isn't there, in some cases perhaps because others he spoke to mentioned it (Arendt, privation). He chose not to take up the "evil of gun violence"...]

Brass respirator

The Faculty Senate meetings have been moved to a new room, in the University Center. During one of our sometimes circular discussions, my attention drifted to the mat brass tube along the ceiling, part of what I knew was an art installation created with the building. I looked it up. It's called "Bells and Whistles" and is by Rita McBride, who worked with 530 feet of the building's "egress stair pressurization duct," stretching through six stories of the building, encased in pentagonal brass casing. Bits of it are visible lots of places once you notice it, suggesting a mysterious and fascinating inner life - a breath - for the building.

stets die Stadt meine Träume?

By some coincidence, several people I know, have traveled to Vienna in recent months, and have posted snaps from their trips. Here are three pictures, by a Korean monk, a priest in New York, a Chinese historian in Vancouver, and Melbourne friend whose son is a classical musician. Others might be posted, but these will have to do - and do they do. The 19th century Burgtheater, where I standing roomed so many plays as a student, until Thomas Bernhardt's "Heldenplatz" changed the whole feel of the place for me. The trompe-l'oeuil cupola in the 18th century Universitäts- kirche, which from every angle but this one looks like the inside of a collapsed hot air balloon - not a problem when you're hearing sung masses there of a Sunday. A radial road like many others, with a tramline down the middle. And the Belvedere, built to thank Prince

Eugene of Savoy for saving Vienna from the Turks in 1683 in a style evocative of battlefield tents (and where the Staatsvertrag was signed in 1955, and where the famous Klimts and Schieles live), my favorite place in the city. It's been a while since last I was there, the city where I spent the crucial years of age 10 to 12, and the home base of our family for another 14 years from my second year in college. Vienna was my first city, and the Vienna of the 1970s was sooty and seamy in a conspiratorial mitteleuropäisch way I felt in Orson Welles' "Third Man," as well as in the lamented Bellariakino. It seems to have been scrubbed sparkly clean in recent years, a little off-putting, and I gather many of the Kaffeehäuser I used to frequent have closed. Still, worth a return visit sooner or later, see if it's still one of the Städte meiner Träume...