Not beholden to beauty

In a first discussion of Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si' in the "Religion and Ecology" class, I struck out by drawing the classes' attention to the repeated references to beauty (¶¶11, 12, 34, 45, 53, 79, 97, 103, 112, 150, 215, 235, 238, 241, 243) throughout a work whose main concerns are the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor (¶49). Here's the place where its significance is made most clear.

How could one object to calls to ensure all people have opportunities to experience beauty in their lives, an escape from waste, pollution and uniformity? But it turns out "beauty" is a loaded term for at least those students who spoke up. One thought that the natural response to beauty is to try to own it, like a private beach - which of course the rest of us would thus never get to see, not to mention the poor. Others thought it would be swiftly turned into a brand, that a person who thought something beautiful would try to sell others on it. Another complained about the banal clichés of beautiful this and beautiful that, sunsets and the like. Others felt that judgments of beauty are all subjective anyway, varying from person to person. It started to seem like none thought they might happen on a beauty that wasn't a trap someone had set for them.

I'm not sure what to make of this, except that it makes me very sad somehow. The consumer economy and new media have ruined something very precious. One need not buy into the Kantian understanding of the beautiful to feel that robbing a generation of trust in their experiences of beauty excludes them (or perhaps results from their exclusion from) from communities of shared judgment, appreciation, admiration. Laudato Si' worries that that "ecological conversion" our world needs ust be based on experiences of interdependence, community, local culture, creative work and mutual care which the "practical relativism" (¶122) of the technoscientific utilitarian order devalues and undermines. Too true, even for people yearning for more.

Job disruption

The lecture course on Job and the arts met today after a two week hiatus (Presidents' Day) and in the first day of the campus-wide Climate Injustice Disruption - not that many of the students knew about the campaign, or about climate injustice for that matter. The "disruption" idea is that if every class across the university sets aside its usual concerns to address a shared topic, we might accomplish some big interdisciplinary breakthroughs, and certainly the climate crisis and its differential toll on different communities is a "wicked problem" which could use whatever resources we can muster.

My resources are the Book of Job and its interpreters - not the obvious place to begin thinking about these issues - but I think we made a contribution of sorts. The week's readings were two texts, one ancient and one modern, which add to the text - hearing the voices which the authorized edition doesn't let speak. Our focus was Job's wife, reduced to a walk-on role in the version canonical for Jews and Western Christians, but given more voice in every effort to illustrate or dramatize the story. Well, maybe not every effort: we started by noticing her absence in this crowded coloring book image I found online

- or is that her with the (other) servants at the left? (That the artist forgot her, and nobody noticed, is rather shocking!) I suggested that the usual image is of her shrewishly enjoining Job to give up, but that there's always been a countertradition in which she suffers with him,

clear in Blake's Illustrations. (The other is from the Lego Bible.) I told the class that filling in the story was not doing violence to but part of making a home in it, and that they should feel free to do so. In fact, why doesn't each of you take a piece of paper and spend a few minutes adding a speech to the story, for any character whose voice you'd like to hear - Job's wife, children, servants, animals...

I was planning to repeat this for the context of climate injustice, but had time only to point to the value of doing so. Because people's responses to this invitation were amazing. I heard from a Job heartbroken at his wife's turning on him, from servants chagrined to see Job's wealth doubled in the restoration, from his wife rejecting the new life offered after their trial, and another who let on that she was the narrator of the story, from a Job explaining his life on his deathbed, and another who went mad trying to understand how to live, even from a ha-satan who promises to continue tormenting Job. I invited the rest of the class to send me theirs... a remarkable lode of quite stunningly deep responses. Will it help them see in Job, in wrestling with his story, a resource for thinking about wicked problems?

Incidentally, as in other cases where I ask students to do something in class, I did the assignment, too, as ever ("I could beat myself in chess," I quipped) surprising myself with that I came up with.

I'm one of Job's second generation of children, the third son. I am confused about how to understand my heritage. I am haunted by the children Job and his first wife lost, and feel unsafe all the time. Job's equanimity then, and his very ability to move on to have a new life with us now freaks me out, to be honest. We kids don't talk about it, mostly, although I sometimes almost talk about it with my twin sister, the oldest of the girls… it comes up when we're taking care of the younger children, like when one of them wondered why Job is so much older than our mother and we had to tell her that she's Job's second wife. I wouldn't dare talk about it with my mother, or with Job, though I sometimes think I see something in his eyes that is looking past us to the family he lost, especially at times of what is otherwise great family happiness. Of course people come from far and wide to admire the virtue of our household and I want to be part of that, but I'm not sure how to… so I mainly don't think about it. When I'm older I might find the grave of the first children and take my own children there, though I don't know what I'll say to them.

Age of humans

Should you find yourself in Bloomington, Indiana three months from now, come here me talk about the Book of Job and the Anthropocene! I'm not alone! Excited at this chance to meet other scholars of religion trying to get our disciplinary bearings in this "age of humans."

Maternal thinking

It's harder than it used to be to tell the story of Job without thinking about his wife. She suffered all he did, after all, and gets no thanks for it. (We'll be hearing her voice in class week, in "Testament of Job" and Robert Frost's Masque of Reason.) But what about Job's mother?

Who?

You know, the one he mentions at 1:21:

Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither. (KJV)

And again, in searing chapter 3:

Let the day perish wherein I was born, ... 
Because it shut not up the doors of my mother's womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes. (3:3,10)

These lines, which I confess I haven't lingered over, and certainly never thought to read together (one's part of the "frame story," the other of the "poem of Job"), turn out to be central to the ecotheological reading of the Book of Job of the "Earth Bible." (The image above is their logo, the work of Australian Aboriginal artist Jasmine Corowa. It shows a Bible read from below, from the Earth and Earth Community.*) Because, of course, Job's mother is (also) Earth. And it is to the womb of the Earth that this man, his mortal life in ruins around him, dreams of returning, a place of comfort and rest, where human travails are none:

There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest. 
There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor. 
The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master. (3:17-19)

Job looks forward to escaping from God's blind and cruel scrutiny there:

The eye of him that hath seen me shall see me no more: thine eyes are upon me, and I am not. (7:8)

Norman C. Habel, whose reading of Job this is, makes a compelling case that Job's view of the world is, or once afflicted becomes, an "inverse cosmology, a radical reversal of the traditional worldview of his day." During his brief hour between coming out of and returning to the sheltering earth, man is the plaything of a capricious God. Indeed, in this reframing, God's injunction to the satan to torment Job all he wants but not to let him die (he is in thine hand; but save his life [2:6]) seems not like mercy but torture. For Job, Habel argues "The oppressive presence of heaven is like hell, and the imaginary world of the dead within Earth is like an abode of heavenly rest."**

This is still an "imaginary world" to Job (one of three "fantasies" Habel thinks Job indulges in in his distress), and Habel's God will later invite Job to discern the wisdom in the Earth and everywhere else, but it is still a place where we can hear the "voice of Earth" in the Bible. Indeed once you start listening for the voice of Earth in the text, buried though it usually is beneath anthropocentric concerns, it seems that God, too, found Wisdom in the Earth (see chapter 28***).

I've known of Habel's ecotheological work for some time but it's taken thinking about Job in the Anthropocene to get me to finally read it. It's fascinating! Through Habel's eyes one can see Earth's Wisdom as a central character in the story of Job. It's not just another of God's projects - were you there, puny man? - drawing our attention away from our lives to this overwhelming power, but a guide and companion to God in creation, pointing us back to the Earth Community and our life as part of it.

*Norman C. Habel, "Editorial Preface," The Earth Story in Wisdom Traditions, ed. Norman C. Habel and Shirley Wurst (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 10
**Norman C. Habel, "Earth First: Inverse Cosmology in Job," in The Earth Story in Wisdom Traditions, 65-77, 69
***Norman Habel, "Where Can Wisdom be Found? Re-discovering Wisdom in God's Creation," in The Nature of Things: Rediscovering the Spiritual in God's Creation, ed. Graham Buxton and Norman Habel
 (Wipf and Stock, 2016), 139-56

Varieties XI-XV: Self-immolation of the saints

Well, if the discussion of conversion in James' Varieties is confounding, the lectures on "Saintliness" and "The Value of Saintliness" are even more so. Maybe that's why, although they represent fully a fourth of the whole Varities, they are rarely referred to. I've always rather liked them, though, and use the "Value of Saintliness" chapters in the section on saints of my religious ethics class; I even taught a whole course once called "Preposterous Saints," inspired by these singing words of his:

The world is not yet with them [saints], so they often seem in the midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous. And yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. (1902 edition, rept Penguin, 358)

I was all set for our discussion this morning to center on this wonderful if not unparadoxical claim (saints make what's natural no longer possible?), but it took most of two hours of brush clearing before we could get there. Encountered in the their place in the sequence of Varieties, the five lectures/chapters on saints are disconcerting. The lives recounted, which are supposed to offer the composite photograph-like representation of a religiously celebrated life shared by all religions (271), are by and large not inspiring, and although James' question is the "fruits for life" of religion, these saints seem often to lead lives stripped fruitless by extravagances of self-mortification. And yet James claims by the end of the section to have answered the question of the value of religion decisively in the affirmative.

Wait, was that the question? James opened his lectures claiming to be putting aside not only everything ecclesiastic and theological (31), but also all "spiritual judgments" assaying the value of religion (4). His approach was to be strictly scientific; his "empiricist criterion" attended to "fruits" rather than "roots" (20) because these are observable. And yet here he's judging fruits - and judging religion on the basis of these fruits - using as his standard a slippery, unexplained thing called "common sense." He thinks this same common sense bids us discard the ecclesiastic, with its spirits of corporate and dogmatic dominion, as the enemy of true religion, too (337-38).

The students were confused in part because James seems to have dismissed everything - "theopathic" individuals and religion-smothering institutions - leaving, well, what? I know where (I think) this leads but it's evidently not clear to a first time reader, who doesn't know what's yet to come. Everything hangs on that "common sense," with a science of religion helping us appreciate the indispensable contributions religion makes. To benefit from religion we're better off not understanding it on the terms of its corporate and dogmatic devotés. I would have thought that would have some appeal for my organized religion-leery students, but James' evident antipathy for most of the saints canceled that out.

James' singing words may not sing for them for another reason, too, connected to the apparent paradox in saints' rendering us incapable of being as mean as we naturally are. James loves using words taken to have a fixed meaning - indeed to guarantee the fixity of meaning - in dynamic ways; it's all part of what he'll later call the "pragmatist view of truth." "Facts," for instance, are what seem to us determined, but that's not the end of the story. Recall James' insistence in "Will to Believe" that in certain not unimportant cases faith in a fact can help create the fact!

Create the fact? Through their very "over-trust" in human nature, saints create a human nature worthy of that trust.

The saints ... may, with their extravagances of human tenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have proved themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past, in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to be worthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant example and by the challenge of their expectation. (357) 

This makes them a genuinely creative social force. Are they altering human nature, then? Yes and no, since their inspiration changes what we know human nature to be, what we think it capable of. The saints are so important for James' assessment of religion because they are the agents of religious change - of its changing human nature. Change is too neutral a word; better would be evolution. Riffing off a remark of Herbert Spencer's, James explains that saints are prophetic because they are adapted to a world that is not yet there - but a world which they bring closer. Preposterous, indeed!

Isn't it exciting? Our story isn't over, the final judgment on the human adventure hasn't been felled. One student owned that this was the most optimistic part of the Varieties - too optimistic for her. But others were put off by what they described as James' pessimism in the same chapters. Asked to explain they pointed to the distaste with which he describes most of the saints, and recalled the combination of envy and contempt with which he he spoke of "healthy-minded" and "twice-born" earlier in the series.

But they may be picking up on something else, too. The first half of the book, like "Will to Believe" before it, articulated the "fruits" of religion for those fortunate enough to have it. The "fruits" of saintliness, however, accrue not to the poor maladapted saints themselves, but to humanity as a whole. Their misshapen lives are consumed by the evolving spirituality of humanity. The intersection of "saintliness" and the earlier discussion of the "twice-born" lies precisely in the sacrifice of "asceticism,' as James makes clear in another term-mangling passage:

In these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind's common instinct for reality, which in point of fact has always held the world be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden. … The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he who feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and excellently, and meets best the secret demands of the universe, is the truth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion. (364)

It is not the saints but we who are out of touch with the reality of the universe in thinking that this is all there is - what we take to be human nature is all humans can be. What the universe demands is that we feed on its pain, and in so doing feed it - with our lives. The saints' lives don't make the kind of sense the earlier subjects of James' Varieties do - unification, centering, etc. - because they are matter out of place, prophets unaccepted in their own country. The unfinished story of human redemption makes the closure, the coherence of the convert seem immature. There's no rest in a universe which demands heroism, which makes our current human lot unbearable but gestures to a future fueled by the self-immolation of the saints for redemption.

Island hopping

Today's session of "Religion & Ecology' was one of those charmed times when everyone is present, and everything we've been through together converges. We were revisiting claims about the importance of stories - for knowing who we are, for motivating ecological engagement - which e encountered already in our first week. This time, we were reading Whitney Bauman's reflections on the limitation of one particular story often told in the religion and ecology world, Lynn White's "Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis," and indeed of any single story. But to get there we revisited the otther stories we've been telling and retelling, including stories about stories and storytelling, and so we reviewed Journey of the Universe and Robin Wall Kimmerer's rendering of the story of SkyWoman and the creation of Turtle Island, and then read through the always eye-popping first two chapters of Genesis (with its two creation narratives!), before turning to White (whose claim isn't that Genesis is at fault, but is often thus caricatured) and finally to Bauman's queer, post-colonial Indonesia-informed suggestion that we might be better off with an archipelago of stories. Everything bumped up against everything else: exciting, illuminating!

Season confusion

This profoundly confused vegetal display on 12 Street - is this supposed to be Fall, Winter or Spring?! - seemed somehow just right for this day of unseasonable, perhaps, record heat. Seventies, in February?

Patron saint of ecology

We read the founding document of the field of religion and ecology today, Lynn White's 51-year-old essay in Science which does, and doesn't, blame "our environmental crisis" on the unprecedented anthropocentrism of Christianity. It was that caricature that made the essay so influential, provoking secularist ecologists to paint Christianity as Public Enemy Number One and theologians to defend or pledge to reform it. But White's actual argument is rather more nuanced.
In particular, he thinks those scientists and others who think they're post-Christian still have all the vices of a certain Christianity - an anthropocentric sense of distance from and mastery over nature - and need, as much as anthropocentric Christians (alas still abundant today), to find a more ecological answer to the existential questions posed by religion.

Because White can't imagine Zen or Eastern Orthodoxy (both of which he praises) effecting the necessary culture shift in the West, he famously proposes Francis of Assisi as patron saint of ecology, for a humble "pan-psychism" which recognizes the "democracy of all God's creatures." Next week we'll read the best effort at thus reorienting of western Christianity, the encyclical on the environment by a pope who didn't just take its title - Laudato si' - from a poem of Francis'; he took his name from Francis too.

Biblical times

The Book of Job makes an uncredited appearance in Jeremy Davies' extremely helpful The Birth of the Anthropocene. It comes at the very end of the chapter describing the dramatic sorts of climate-related changes which will be gathered up in the idea of the Anthropocene:

      Some of the trans- formations now taking place are, precisely, biblical in scale. Over a quarter of Hong Kong's urban land ... has been reclaimed from the sea. China's South-North Water Transfer Project will, if completed, carry forty-five billion cubic meters of water a year across a vast stretch of the country ... The first hurricane ever recorded above the warming waters of the South Atlantic made landfall in Brazil in 2004. Above the most inaccessible land on earth, East Antarctica, snowfall is increasing in the context of a general poleward shift in precipitation patterns.

     And God said: who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way fr the lightning of thunder; To cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man?

     And Man said: I did, actually.

(University of California Press, 2016), 40

citing the King James Version's Job 38:8, 25-26

たびたび

Frog's making new friends as he travels... 

Job against nihilism

Well, not surprisingly, I'm not the first person to think about the Book of Job and the Anthropocene. On the very first page of his Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Duke, 2017), where he names our as a time in which some old myths now feel revelatory and several official narratives lurch closer to nightmares, political philosopher William E. Connolly turns to Job. Specifically, he turns to Stephen Mitchell's poetic translation-adaptation - the one Bryan Doerries, who uses it for Outside the Wire's readings, calls "Buddhist." Connolly likes the way Mitchell's version floats free of the multiple religious traditions he imagines it's crossed, from Job's world (in which Connolly strangely thinks Job was a "minority") through Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, in the introduction to his version of Job Mitchell aligns the theophany with Shiva's words to Arjuna (and Oppenheimer at Alamagordo) in the Bhagavad Gita, interlacing his interpretation with words from texts of other traditions:

When the great Tao is forgotten,

goodness and piety appear. 

TAO TE CHING

If you bring forth what is inside you, 

what you bring forth will save you.

THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS 

To men some things are good and some are bad.

But to God, all things are good and beautiful and just. 
HERACLITUS 

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, 
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will. 
YEATS

What the Book of Job shows us, Connolly argues, is how, in response to crisis, most people become ever more shrill in denouncing their opponents, who are in fact minor voices in themselves. Job, however, rebels against this logic of intensification, albeit with ambivalence (3), and Connolly isn't convinced he buys the faith in mystery of the complex moral story proffered by the irenic "thoughtful friend," as Mitchell dubs Elihu. This religious version of "it's complicated," which Connolly thinks dominates Job interpretation, is reaffirmed in the epilogue. But does that not miss the true "conversion" Job goes through?

"The Nameless One" (Mitchellese for God; Connolly notes that it might be a subdued voice in [Job] that was clamoring for attention) confronts Job, through questions, with all he doesn't know of creation; oceans and storms, the patterns of heaven and the edge of the universe, ostrich, hawk and vulture.

Job becomes spellbound as the questions accumulate. You might too, as you wonder how so many diverse beings, forces, and energies could coexist in the same world and how they could possibly either mesh neatly with us or be predisposed to our deployment. It is a grand, volatile world of multiple forces, perhaps worthy of our admiration even if we now construe ourselves as minor agents in it. (5)

The Nameless One isn't finished, of course, but eventually Job relents. I know you can do all things, and nothing you wish is impossible. . . . I had heard of you with my ears but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust. Patriarchy seems assumed here, Connolly notes, but it nowhere says that obedience to mystery will ensure protection of favorites - that's all in the epilogue, surely a later appendage designed to to tame the wonder of the poem (8):

Perhaps the poem, and the diverse energies bursting through it, points to human entanglements in a dissonant world of multiple forces that do not carry special entitlements or guarantees for any beings. We inhabit a majestic world with implacable powers that exceed ours. Its energies solicit our embrace in part because we and it are made of the same stuff. Perhaps the freedom of Job consists in his creative rebellion against the punitive stories of his friends, an appreciation of implacable forces, and an emerging attachment to a multiplicitous world that exceeds the stories he and his friends shared and contested. (8)

It's a nice reading of Job, offered to secularists as well as religious people, all who pursue affinities of spirituality across difference in creed during a dangerous time (8), in a spirit of conversation.  Connolly finds in Job a diagnosis of the shrillness of climate denialism, immunization against the hubris both of those who think humanity the end of creation and those who think we are called to become so through our technological mastery. But Job's finding comfort in the words of the Nameless One matters too. It's an antidote to what Connolly calls passive nihilism: the formal acceptance of the fact of rapid climate change accompanied by a residual, nagging sense that the world ought not to be organized so that capitalism is a destructive geologic force. The “ought not to be” represents the lingering effects of theological and secular doctrines against the idea of culture shaping nature in such a massive way. (9) 

How do I feel about this rather Nietzschean retrieval of Job? I guess I'm happy that someone else sees Job's promise in these dangerous times, maybe even a little reassured. Job is part of "Holocene religion," too, after all, fruit of an unusually harmonious time in human-Earth relations. But I've just read Jeremy Davies' impassioned argument (in The Birth of the Anthropocene) that the Holocene was far from a stable Eden from which the Anthropocene vaults us (and civilization far from a good thing for most humans, let alone getting ever better), so perhaps we shouldn't presume that the world religions are by definition unprepared for the adventure of geological time. And if Connolly accepts the modern view that the poem of Job is primary, he at least pays a little attention to the dialogue, and takes on the challenge of understanding what Job understood after the theophany, honoring it as an understanding and not just a capitulation.

Do I have anything to add to it, beyond the idea, already suggested, that what Connolly calls "Jobian" insights have been part of those traditions Connolly seeks to skirt - and valued, at least by some, as part of the "complex moral story" of our existence? In my thoughts about future retrievals of Job I've found myself retrieving the part of the story so many moderns deplore, Job's restoration. Not as the replacement of what was lost: like all those species we have already pushed into extinction, Job's first family are irreplaceable, gone forever but not forgotten. Rather the story tells of something more like the mysterious acceptance of newness in the face of unthinkable loss that led Kierkegaard to devote his Repetition to Job. Making kin - new kin - is also a response to passive nihilism. (I'm sure Connolly would agree.) Perhaps it's well to consider our capacity to do this a gift of the Nameless One.

Exhibitions in three museums in three days!

 Gego at MoMA Thursday

 Two renderings of the Purkinje neuron at NYU yesterday

Judy Chicago at the Brooklyn Museum this afternoon

Varieties VIII-X: Variations on conversion

In our James' Varieties course today we grappled with the confused and confounding lectures on "The divided self and the process of its unification" and "Conversion." Each of us, for different reasons, felt we'd lost the thread. What did James mean by "conversion" anyway, and what did he think its fruits? Why did he mention "gradual" conversions if he was only going to talk about the "instantaneous" ones, and why did his quotations from others' lives seem to be getting longer and longer? How powerful was "suggestion" in shaping, or even triggering, conversion? Was converts' experience truly unified or still tense with the contradictions of life, like or unlike healthy-minded happiness? And did James think conversion a possibility for all people or not?

The very enterprise of understanding conversion in general is a conflicted one, for reasons we were clearer about after two hours of vigorous interrogation. The second birth of conversion seems a consummation devoutly to be wished for every sick soul, but James doesn't speak as a convert, and takes pains to suggest that people can convert to all sorts of things, including things of which people in his audience would surely disapprove. The testimonies he reads tell of a few people surprised by conversion but many more who find it - are found by it - only at the end of exhausting processes of seeking. In all cases something flows into conscious experience from our subconscious life, into the center of our experience from the margins, but Neither an outside observer nor the Subject who undergoes the process can explain fully... (196) Yet can anyone be as dispassionate as James tries to be about so momentous a subject, as diffident as his suggestion that though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy .. most of us may at least feel as if it might be better for us if we could (186).

As we wrapped up for the week I wondered if conversion was something anyone could describe except in retrospect, shaping what was a shape-defying experience into a narrative of finding and being found. The Subject is in control of a narrative about a transformative experience of not being in control, of what James calls "surrender," and often notes how incredulous the pre-conversion Subject would have been to know that she might in short order be doing and saying what she's now doing and saying. To the unconverted, conversion may be a general possibility but a personal hope beyond hope. There are elements of the paradoxes of "ineffability" which James will stumble over in the lectures to come on mysticism, in the convert's self-narration, not to mention the refined, rationalized accounts the sympathetic outsider then seeks to synthesize into his science of religion. The convert is, and is not, the same person who was converted. How can that tale be told?

I returned to my office and, inspired by I know not what agency, decided I wanted to listen to some music, perhaps, why not, Rachmaninov's Variations on a Theme of Paganini. I've no idea why this particular piece demanded to be heard; I haven't listened to it in a long time. So, as one does, I typed it into YouTube. A BBC proms performance from 2013 seemed promising so I clicked. The broadcast started with a brief analysis of the piece by the piano soloist Stephen Hough, from which I learned that the ravishingly romantic theme in the famous 18th variation is the result of a common trick: Rachmaninov

takes the Paganini theme, turns it upside down,

puts it in the major, puts it in D-flat major, slows it down,

and suddenly it becomes this exquisite, beautiful melody.

The performance was lovely, and when the inverted slowed-down theme comes on (at 20:22, but don't jump right to it) I felt like I knew something more, somehow, about why it was so moving. It's just the piano at first, but then (at 21:04) the orchestra swoops in and carries the theme away, the piano stammering out chords of enraptured support, freed from the need to play the melody itself as the whole room sings it, the chords multiplying in exaltation before the theme returns to the piano, trembling quietly with its pure simplicity. Is it more than testimony to the power of suggestion that this seemed to me precisely what conversion experiences seek to describe, the theme flipped into major but still the same, afloat in a newly embracing world?

This happened.

Reflections of love

At our local coffee shop, love is in the air.

Ashes

First chives of Spring!

旅かえる

I wonder if the lower arousal happiness supposedly more valued in East Asian cultures can be found an online game? Specifically this one, "旅かえる/Tabi Kaeru," a Japanese game which is apparently taking China by storm. By storm is the wrong term. You are something like the housekeeper for a frog who likes to travel - that's him, falling asleep as he reads. By collecting clover leaves you can get things to give him for his next trip: various kinds of food for his bento, protective charms, and travel supplies like tents and lanterns. These will affect how far he can travel and how quickly he'll return. But you don't travel with him, and once he's decided to depart on an excursion, all you can do is wait - it can be hours or apparently even days. You can harvest new clover leaves as they appear in his front yard, and check the occasional mail (online advertisements). His friend the snail might come by for a visit, too, perhaps with some gifts. Frog might send home

a photo, like this one, and when he returns he might bring some souvenirs. He'll eat, write in his diary, go to bed with a book, and then, when the time seems right, hit the road again. And that, apparently, is it. The pleasure of the game lies in packing his lunch, and waiting.

Moderately arousing

I heard a talk recently that argued that living in the Anthropocene will require new ideals of happiness - slow, communal, or collective - to wean us from the unsustainable culture of peak experience-seeking capitalist individualism. Sounds right to me. I was interested to learn about work in cultural psychology according to which East Asian societies already inculcate different, more sustainable conceptions of happiness than the American one (though young people the world over are exposed to the American version). Where American tend to aspire to "high arousal" forms of happiness like excitement and euphoria, East Asians apparently aspire rather to "low arousal" satisfaction, contentedness and stability.

The above "two-dimentional [sic] map" of high and low arousal states (not initially devised for comparative study) is from a survey of this kind of literature by a professor at Stanford, which also links the different conceptions of happiness to the difference between "independent" and "interdependent" cultures. Rings true, again, but can it all be so simple?

Varieties IV-VII: Cracking nuts

Our adventure with, and through, James Varieties of Religious Experience continues, and continues to be revelatory. The lectures we read for today were those on "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness" and "The Sick Soul," lectures often read together as a sort of set, representing optimistic and pessimistic religious types or temperaments. But is that how James' original audience encountered them? How did he introduce them? What roadsigns did he give of where he was going with and from them?

It's true healthy-minded and sick souled are developed contrastively. One ignores the evil in experience, the other the good. But they're not really parallel, as reading them as if for the firsts time makes clear. The "sanguine" "once-born" "healthy-minded" are doing just fine with their "practical" response to life's challenges, "relaxing" "expansively" into an unruffled flourishing. The "melancholy" "morbid-minded" "contractive" sick souls, unsurprisingly, are not fine. At one stage paralyzed by vast "philosophical" questions, debilitating "anhedonia," self-loathing and "panic fear," most of them don't stay in that state - at least not most of the ones we encounter in James' lectures. Through conversion, James lets on, they will later come to arrive at a deeper kind of flourishing. "Twice-born," their faith will be like a "two-story house," recognizing the reality of evil - of a universe that doesn't fit comfortably into any meaningful system - without being undone by it. That's in later lectures, but James lets us know it's coming. There's another act to the stories of Leo Tolstoy, John Bunyan and the eloquent Nova Scotia evangelical Henry Alline: stay tuned!

We found a lot to say about all this. I insisted on going lecture by lecture asking what James' listeners will have expected going into each one, and what they might expect would come after them. The Varieties' first three lectures, which we read last week, set up James' psychological (rather than theological), individual (rather than institutional), fruits (rather than roots)-related enquiry into religion. He explains why more pathological cases show us more about human religious proclivities, but assures us that the same thing is going on in all cases - a person's total reaction upon life, the somber joy in responding to whatever people hold to be divine. It's only with the lectures on healthy-mindedness (IV and V) that we encounter the variety of religious experience, and it will have been something of a shock for at least some in James' Edinburgh audience to hear case after case of people whose lives were happy because they found joy everywhere, put negativity out of mind, realized illness wasn't real, learned they were one with God, etc., etc.

Was this American professor really arguing that these happy-go-lucky "New Thought" healings (ancestors to today's New Age) should be taken seriously? Indeed he was. James argues that "mind cure" works, and that this is a "fact" not just religion but science needs to make way for. What's more, he suggests that this isn't new: it's to be found in Wesley, in Luther, and, perhaps, in Jesus too, who never dwelt on illness or blame but performed healing left and right and proclaimed that the Kingdom of God had arrived. What happened to the "somber," "solemn," and not a little uncanny religion of Lecture III's "Reality of the Unseen"? James doesn't quite spell it out, but in insisting that "healthy mindedness" was a religious phenomenon he indicated that it was an individual's total response to life, a true "surrender." If not very "complex" it is nevertheless a "complete" response. It has more than a little in common with the monistic sense of peace afforded the mystics, whom he will come to many lectures hence, but for now he eschews familiar cases in safely established old traditions, perhaps playing up their cloyingly credulous Americanness.

Instead, moving into Lectures VI and VII, James turns to the melancholy "sick souls" of , who are - as James intimates most in his audience must be - appalled at how easily the healthy-mindedness claim to dispense with the tragic realities of life. He swiftly reassures us (its "we" here, where the earlier lectures were about "they"), that the melancholy brooding on the fact of evil and suffering is deeper. By the end of these lectures we're back with somber religion, though not just that of the Presbyterian divines. "The completest religions would seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed" he observes, "Buddhism, of course, and Christianity" (165). Yet, without the as yet unexplained rebirth of these sad cases, the picture seems pretty grim. The "sick soul" look the pain, waste and meaningless of human existence in the eye, and are laid low by it, as we all will be laid low by death. James has assured us that most of the cases he mentions will come out the other end as "twice-born" but not how. And he hasn't assured us that they all will. There was no indication that James' final example of the sick soul, who supposedly evidenced the "worst kind of melancholy," was saved.

At this point I broke my rule of bringing nothing into our discussions besides the text. I had to, as one of the students who took "Theorizing Religion" last semester remembered my mentioning it there. It turns it that this final case, a person haunted by having seen a catatonic epileptic patient and being leveled by the awareness that "That shape am I, potentially," was James himself. It wasn't advertised as such - it was revealed some years later, and not publicly - but for an enterprise as focused on individuals as the one James is initiating us into, it's impossible not to jump at this revelation. It's certainly guided my understanding of James' project for years: a sick soul who appreciates what a comfort religion brings to others' lives because he knows our powerlessness without it - but has not, at least not yet, found the variety that will work for himself. The original hearers, and most readers, of the Varieties, though, didn't know this. The James they were coming to know was a kind of Anna Deavere Smith of the world of religious types, able, in his own voice and proposed system, to channel the religious discoveries of all kinds. And the poor fellow who had the panic attack? Though we learn that the crisis passed, not to return, it's lear he remains haunted by it, quivering still. In the unfolding adventure of the Varieties this was the nut that might never crack. It offered a different reason to keep listening/reading. Was there hope for every sick soul or only for some?

Discussing these today with six millennials was illuminating, too. One, impressed by the results of the healthy-minded, couldn't figure out what James meant by the sick soul. (Why was one a soul, the other minded?) Another, who found the sick soul so painfully true to read it brought tears to their eyes, couldn't fathom the healthy-minded. Another observed that today's mindfulness craze sounds just like mind-cure - a telling indication of how Buddhism's place in the popular American imagination as changed since the days when it was thought to epitomize pessimism. As we wrapped up our discussion with the question "if you'd left James' lectures at this point, what would it have given you?" I was struck that our religious landscape is pretty much exhausted by these two. What's coming next in James' lectures, a few hints dropped but not more, is "The Divided Self and the Process of its Unification" and the famous discussion of "Conversion," where the second story of the twice-born's house is built - but our sense of the variety of religions and religious appetites seems mostly bungalows. Let's see what we make, next week, of the epic fact of conversion - the towering mountain in James' landscape but no longer, I think, in ours, where people convert, and convert, and convert on their personal journeys, never finally at rest.

Cored

Took my "Religion & Ecology" class to the first exhibition of the Climate Museum, a small but compelling show about the 2 miles of ice cores scientists have drawn from the Greenland ice sheet. These record 110,000 years of history, more than even the most ambitious human histories. It's somewhat cryptically called "In Human Time."

The centerpiece is an artist's 4.5 hour film of eighty-eight such cores slowly scrolling by, with a looping, ever-descending soundtrack. A curator had us watch it in silence for five short minutes, before the gallery was inundated with students from another class (whence my little video above), but it's hard to watch either way. What feelings or insights is this dive into deep time supposed to evoke? One of my students found it caused a sense of insignificance, powerlessness, despair (my feelings were similar), but one of the curators told me she thought people would be energized by it - how remarkable what science can show us, what art can do with these findings!

Part of the exhibition text: We have caused this new climate instability through technological progress. Now we must mobilize the same ingenuity and resolve to make as profound a transformation as moving from agrarian to industrial society: the clean energy transition.

It seems a sleight of hand to me somehow, but I suppose all of this involves in some way exaggerating the significance, and the purchase, of the scale of our living... It's the only one we can act in, even as it reverberates across bigger ones.

Slushie

Winter continues...

Ecologies and cosmologies

The enrollment in "Religion & Ecology has stabilized - we're back to twelve - so it was a chance to get to know each other better. The assigned reading was from John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker's Ecology and Religion, two of whose main terms of art are "religious ecologies" and "religious cosmologies." After discussing what they were, and why

Tucker and Grim assert they "can be distinguished but not separated," I asked students to introduce themselves with an eye to religious ecologies and cosmologies. It was a fascinating and revealing exercise. We learned of the natural landscapes in which students, or in some cases their parents, had grown up. We learned of religious and not so religious upbringings (six of us in a row were "raised Catholic"!), drifting away and into other spiritual traditions, experience with farming and forests, small towns, suburbs and the diversity of the city.

I introduced myself as from a coastal desert, greened by water from a distant river which, elsewhere, nurtured fertile agricultural land; the cycles of plants in season and farming are wondrous and strange to me - my experience of nature is ocean and sandstone. Is that religious ecology or cosmology?

Ecology and Religion, 3rd ed. (Island Press, 2014), 35

Fluid

It's not often that one gets to say "God has the flu," but perhaps teaching a course on the Book of Job makes it more likely. A group of students from the Drama school were slated to do a "table read" in class today of the version of the Book of Job used by Outside the Wire in its community performances for communities recovering from disasters. The student who was going to read Accuser/Eliphaz/God called in sick at the last minute but two others had been located who were willing to step in. However they had not read the script even once! What to do?

As long as they were willing, I was happy to let them do it... And the bet paid off. (Besides, what alternative was there - short of my doing it?) The actor reading Job had rehearsed, and his anguish flashed out beyond the text, shocking in its immediacy. The unstudied reading of God's words made them compelling in a different way: the overflowing beauty in the evocation of nature and divine care for its wildest creatures confirmed Raymond Scheindlin's view (which I'd mentioned in the lead-up) that "poetry does not state the book's message .. it is the message." But then the reading continued to the unnerving strangeness of the military parade-like accounts of the "Beast" and the "Serpent' (Behemoth and Leviathan in Stephen Mitchell's poetic adaptation), where you lose all sense of what's going on. No wonder Job says, in a sort of daze,

I know you can do all things 

and nothing you wish is impossible. 

I have spoken the unspeakable 

and tried to grasp the infinite.

I think the larger purpose of having the reading was served, too. It was important to me that the class experience the Book of Job - which they've only just read for the first time - not just as a text on the page but also as a work of theater, the words spoken by one character to another. I also wanted them to get a sense of how Outside the Wire presents their somewhat trimmed version of Mitchell's already streamlined text. (It's a powerful thirty minutes.) But I wanted the class to hear the text in the voices of people their own age, too, better still: classmates. Job and his friends are you and me. God? An immensity shining through weird words.

Upstream

Spent the weekend exploring the lower Hudson River Valley. Friends in Ossining took us to the Rockefeller Reserve, whence these two views.

Then we headed to the village of Haverstraw, on the other (western) side of the river, to a bed and breakfast on the waterfront - here's the view this morning, back towards Ossining. Yesterday's blue skies were no more, pewters and platinums in their place, and snow on its way.

After breakfast we drove north a bit, around the base of Bear Mountain, and across the river toward Peekskill, on the way to which a turnoff offered the vista below.... notice the broken ice in the foreground, and the very long freight train, both making their way northward!

Ice breaker

Varieties I-III: Voices off

James' Varieties of Religious Experience is awesome! For our first session (of six) going through the twenty lectures of the book, we read I-III, stage-setting. The first defines and defends an "empiricist" approach to religion, which seeks material everywhere but finds most illuminating extreme cases psychologists might deem neurotic if not pathological. He distinguishes "spiritual' "judgments of value" from the observable data he will concern himself with, and (not quite consistently) defers these value questions. The second lecture delimits his inquiry to "personal" as opposed to "institutional" religion, and (not quite consistently) argues that religion has no single essence. Varieties are to come, but here it seems preeminently one thing, the somberly joyful acceptance of the universe. The third lecture brings us to experience, a "sense of reality" that goes beyond the senses that sometimes, for some people, produces an entirely convincing encounter with the "reality of the unseen."

We spent a lot of time on questions of voice: how James brings the voices of others into his lectures (starting in  earnest in the third), something I've stressed in classes before, and how he establishes his own voice, a new question for me. The first few pages - corresponding to the first few minutes of his first lecture - are a bravura performance. He flatters is Scots hosts then owns his American voice as a harbinger of a transatlantic future, announces that he has not training in theology or anthropology but will show psychology to have valuable contributions to make. That I'd noticed and remembered. I'd forgotten that, buy the fifth page, he has dismissed the Bible as a historically flawed text and reclaimed it as a testimonial of personal religion. And by page 7 he's dismissed the whole history of the English Church and then unleashed a testimonial by the Quaker George Fox - introduced as someone of undoubted "spiritual sagacity and capacity" who is as incontrovertibly "a psychopath or détraqué of the deepest style."

And that testimonial is long. It would take several minutes to read. Later in the lectures (starting in III) there will be many such cameos, but this is the first, and it will have come to its audience out of the blue. I imagine they were taken aback that this cheeky psychologist from across the seas was giving voice to a religious nut who felt the blood of Christian martyrs flowing over his feet in an British market (he later learned they had died under the Emperor Diocletian) and loudly told the people there so... and then giving more voice, on and on. As for many of his quotations, this is long enough that you can get lost in it.

How did James deliver George Fox's words, or the words of so many others in later lectures? How did he mark their start and end? In the book version they're inset, but in delivering the lectures James must have signaled the shift in some other way. For that matter, what tone did he use - passionate, detached, sympathetic? It would undermine James' intent to seem in any way critical or ironic, even as he repeatedly insisted every case he was considering was in its way excessive. But he mustn't sound credulous either... I really don't know how he did it, but doing it effectively will have been crucial to the success of the lectures.

And for us as readers of these published lectures (I leave aside the fact that all the passages he read aloud were originally written), allowing ourselves to get drawn into each of these testimonies, even at the price of losing sight of James' argument, seems necessary. When you're hurrying through the book, you (well, I) skim these long inset passages, never dwelling long enough in them for James' voice to be eclipsed by another's - and, so, not long enough to feel James allowing his voice to be so eclipsed: giving these people voice, his voice. I'm very glad to have a chance to hear it all anew - not just Fox and all the other inspired crazies, but James, who manages the circus of religious experience without (most of the time) harming the animals. 

Up close and personal

I'm feeling a guilty pleasure at reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience as if for the first time. My unmarked new copy lets me encounter anew James' language, his playful wit, his willingness to challenge pieties. The copy I've used forever, by contrast, announces what's important with underlinings in multiple colors, comments and symbols in the margin, dog-eared pages ... allowing me, indeed forcing me, to skim the rest. But I'm reading it now as if in the original audience in Edinburgh, not knowing where it is leading, open to surprise at James' skilful oratory and provocative argumentation, savoring every word.

The pleasure is guilty because I am rediscovering things I've overlooked so long I've forgotten they were there. My students in Theorizing Religion each year read James as I am now, seeing more than their teacher did in prepping for class! Oh well, that I've forgotten chunks of it is helping me achieve a "beginner's mind" about it which is quite delectable. And will make this Fall's Varieties discussions fresher, too!