Semiprecious stones

In "Religion and the Anthropocene" today we mainly discussed Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and some of the interconnected processes synthesized in a recent article (sent me by my father!) on "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene." But we're also finding a way to talk about things of such scale and gravity, circumstances Scranton thinks require that we learn to accept that our civilization is not only doomed but already dead. (In fact, he thinks we're as good as dead, too, in cadences we'll recognize when we read one of the religious texts he quotes, next week, the Bhagavad Gita.) But we're also finding a way to talk about things of such awful scale and gravity, circumstances Scranton thinks require that we learn to accept that our civilization is not only doomed but already dead. (In fact, he thinks we're as good as dead, too, in cadences we'll recognize when we read one of the sacred texts he quotes next week, the Bhagavad Gita.)

As you know, I find his view constrained by a paleological view even of the not yet fossilized, lacking in solidarity with the living earth community of which we are a tiny part, and drew attention to the great toll anthropogenic changes to the earth system are having on other forms of life, such as the collapse of coral reef communities. (That was occasion also for a cautious endorsement of a good or at least reparative anthropocene in genetically modified coral which might survive warmer more acid seas.) On this planet, geology isn't separate from life, a point which made itself eloquently when we watched a clip from the new documentary "Anthropocene: The Human Epoch," with staggering footage of a massive mine which turns out to be Carrera, source of marble for over two thousand years. Where does marble - the stone of eternity - come from? Coral and their ancient marine fellows!

Mayerhaus

Had the pleasure of setting foot in a place with deep New School connections today, the mirculously well preserved house where Clara Mayer lived! The full story of the house and its residents will have to wait until a second visit when we get to see more of its wonders.

Mark my words

My latest contribution to our newer, truer New School histories vertical is out! Some insights from big anniversaries past (including the Parsons centennial in 1996) to leaven the current centennial frothiness. That makes ten: Exiled Knowledge Salvaged for World Use: Or the histories hidden in the New School’s digital archives, The Majority Finds Its School: The lessons of Gerda Lerner, What Does It Mean to Educate Adults? The Case of the New School, Are the Arts a Critical Facet of Social Research? At The New School, artists have shaped the institution’s agenda, The New School’s Paradoxical Archive: How a school focused on the future has learned to love its past, Uncovering the Musical Divide: The tale of two cultures at the Mannes School of Music and The New School, A History of Innovation: The first history of the New School for Social Research recalls its originality, What We Know About Parson School of Design’s Namesake: The story behind Frank Alvah Parsons, the man who made art and design accessible to New Yorkers, All of a Sudden: Reflections from the Classroom of Sekou Sundiata, How to Mark a Centennial: Telling the Story of the New School at 100.

There are many more to come! Coming soon: the Mobilization, urban studies, the University in Exile, Gestalt.

Lingua franca

Chinese trade hieroglyphics from Bing Lee's "Empress Voyage 2/27/1784" in the Canal Street subway station. I'm not sure I get it but I love it.

Confucius say

In the state of Lu there was a man called Wang Tai whose foot had been chopped off as a punishment. Yet somehow he had as many followers as Confucius himself. Chang Ji questioned Confucius about it. "Wang Tai is a one-footed ex-con, and yet his followers divide the state of Lu with you, Master. When he stand he offers no instruction, and when he sits he gives no opinions. And yet, they go to him empty and return filled. Is there really such a thing as wordless instruction, a formless way of bringing the mind to completion? What kind of man is he?"

This was the only part of the Zhuangzi I read to students in our first meeting today. Wang Tai is only the first of the cavalcade of maimed and mangled misfits of the 4th chapter, and this account actually goes on to a quite extensive articulation of what Wang Tai's wordless wisdom might be which I saved for another day. But I did quote the next lines:

Confucius said, "That man, my master, is a sage. Only my procrastination has kept me from going to follow him myself. If he is master even to me, how much more should he be so to you. I shall bring not only the state of Lu but all the world to follow him!"

(trans. Ziporyn, 32-33)

A dark rainy day until -
just in time
for sunset -
it wasn't.

Firsts

And it begins! In the first session of "Religion and the Anthropocene," we read an essay by Buddhist feminist geologist Jill Schneiderman while listening to some of John Bullitt's remastered "Earth Sound," then watched the trailer for a swashbuckling documentary which tries to make of the anthropocene an exciting puzzle: "Is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy? Or is it something more surreal?"

We had a pretty good discussion too, considering this was the first time we were meeting, and for many in the class their first class on religion and/or first engagement with the challenge of the anthropocene, a term unfamiliar to some. (Indeed many are students in their first year!). And of course this class is itself something of a first, and not just for me.

Jill Schneiderman is someone I heard at the conference last May in Bloomington. (I got to see the documentary there, too.) Although Schneiderman's essay "Awake in the Anthropocene" traversed and bridged areas students were unfamiliar with - par for the course in a first class session, and in fact, diagnostically useful for course prep - it proved a good place to start the course. Schneiderman raises some of our central questions in unexpected and interesting ways (and shows up the documentary as the frivolous click bait it is). The anthropocene confronts us with geological time, a time we cannot feel. She links this to Rob Nixon's concept of "slow violence" and Johann Galtung's ideas about "structural violence" - names for conditions that predictably produce harm but in a manner difficult to perceive. How we can respond to processes we can't perceive is one of the big questions.

Here Schneiderman's experience as an earth scientist comes in handy.

In outcrops of rocks, forgotten fossils, and minute mineral fragments, we find evidence of earlier events on earth. And to us, present time mingles intimately with the past and the future. Ours is a cultivated skill that requires patience grown from sitting still or walking slowly in the field, and watching nothing happen. Most other scientists derive understanding by observing processes occur.

But this skill at "watching nothing happen" also has parallels with Buddhist ideas, Schneiderman argues, and these she recommends to those who hope to be "awake in the Anthropocene." Which ideas? She mentions several (too many for our class), including mind-bending ones like Dogen's concept of "time-being" (uji) and of the interpenetration of mountains and waters. But what I'll build out is her commendation of the Noble Eightfold Path, whose constituent "wisdom" (panna) "ethical conduct" (sila) and "mental discipline" (samadhi) she links to head, heart and "the whole body ... eengaged in various contemplative practices."

Most scientific approaches to the Anthropocene are wise but lack heart (there's a heartlessness in the distanced discussions in the documentary, for instance), but geologists can be "kind-minded guides" for us. At least those who have learned from Buddhist practice. (The interplay of the components of the Noble Eightfold Path is something learned only by doing.) Though some of the Buddhist teachers of old thought they were in the kaliyuga, the point in the cosmic cycle "in which humans and society reach the extreme point of disintegration," they weren't aware of the Anthropocene. Yet some of their practices, some of their stories might come to our aid now.

I hadn't quite worked out that this would be our first religion-and-anthropocene conjuncture, but it's a good one, and I'll work with it.

Syllabus!

Do I put something in that square-shaped blank at left or not?

I'm still futzing with the schedule, too. I have four visitors planned - two New School colleagues, one an artist and the other an environmental scholar, and representatives of The Climate Museum and Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. I've mapped out a semester's worth of readings but am open to revising the syllabus as we go on, depending on the interests of students. As it stands, it's full of exciting things but not quite cutting edge - most of the things we're reading are either religious classics or peer-reviewed academic work. They're texts, and we're reading them. At its center is N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season but I'm not going all out on sci/cli-fi, new religions, apocalypticism, experimental art, popular culture or virtual worlds. (I trust my students will know more about many of these than I do.) I'm teaching what I know, what I know to teach. But I'm aware that it may, almost certainly will, fall short. Let's see where and how it does, and what happens next.

Lunar

High in the sky on a frigid Brooklyn night, half an hour into Monday, the "super blood wolf moon" really looked like this. (Pic's from here.) Well, maybe a little smaller. But the color is true: it was well and truly red, if perhaps a little duskier. Creepy!

Signore Bialetti

Do you recognize this man?

On your marks

New School is poised and ready for the new semester! Happy to report that after much dithering (an almost technical term in anthropocene discussions, as used by Kim Stanley Robinson) I've figured out how to structure my Religion and Anthropocene course. It took a while, but I finally found my way back to my mantra that the raison d'être of the field of religious studies is that "it reminds us there is no consensus on the real." I'd been trying to engineer some sort of finale, some sense of completion, but on this topic, surely, that would be misplaced. As for the ethics and ecology classes on which it builds, this decisively isn't a topic one can be done with: submit the final, collect your grade, check the box and move on! So we won't end in consensus but in awareness of the inescapability of choice, rooted in humility in the face of other choices and at the fallibility of our reasons for choosing, and a deeper sense of the communities - human and other than human - to whom we are accountable for our choices. The syllabus puts it this way:

The course proceeds in three stages, with some foreshadowing and flashbacks.

The first explores the ongoing debates across multiple fields about the “Anthropocene” – what it is, when it began, whether there are better names for it, how to respond.

The second amplifies critiques of “Anthropocenologists” with a more complicated historical and political narrative and lots more new names.

The third turns to religious and other narratives and frameworks for making broader sense of our predicament and our prospects.

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Another possibility

We've lost a great one. That she prepared us for losing her makes it only harder. A FaceBook friend wailed, I never signed up for a world without Mary Oliver. How many of us have learned to love the world from her example?

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world

Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

Unmanned

Pulling together the syllabus for my new course on "Religion and the Anthropocene" is turning out to be quite a challenge. This is not just because the literature on religion and anthropocene is sparse (though that on religion and climate change is vast), but because other anthropocene discussions are talking about all sorts of different things. Some focus on threats to human life and civilization present and future, some on the world of symbiont species we're learning about just as it's being destroyed, some on geology, some on history... I don't want this just to be another of those courses where students leave sated but frustrated, "I took a course on X but I still don't know what X is." (Like, year on year, "religion"!) But I'm less persuaded that "Anthropocene" is worth keeping as a moniker, for reasons well - if unwittingly - revealed by this image, designed for the cover of "Nature magazine. The imagined Anthropos of much of the discussion, its protagonist whether hero or antihero, is a white man.

Gasping for air

I can sense that this upcoming semester's classes are going to pull me in different directions. The "Religion and the Anthropocene" class is about learning to look at, and see, climate change and its claims on us, its hard lessons about the far-reaching consequences of our actions and the vast interdependent systems which make possible our living and that of the rest of nature. Zhuangzi, on the other hand...

泉涸，魚相與處於陸，相呴以溼，

相濡以沫，不如相忘於江湖。

When the springs dry up, the fish have to
cluster together on the shore, gasping on
each other to keep damp and spitting on
each other to stay wet. But that is no match
for forgetting all about one another
in the rivers and lakes.  (6:24, trans. Ziporyn)

(No, I can't read the original, though I was able to find it in the text.)

Staying current

At the Service of Meditations and Sacrament at Church of the Ascension tonight, we were encouraged to think about rivers - John was baptizing people in the Jordan, in the day's Gospel. So I did.

I pictured living along one of the great rivers, ever flowing in one direction. I wondered how and why and when it mattered where the rivers came from and went, out of sight. I remembered the Ganga at Varanasi, and the things floating by. I thought of the plants which live clustered in rivers like the Amazon, how quickly they must grow, but also how long they might have. I thought of the meander of rivers which cross flat plains, looping over time, imagining the way fat and lean years might affect the course. I pondered the first rivulet of what would become a river, inching across a flat surface. I remembered discussions about where rivers start, the mythology around Kailas as the home of great rivers, and the way Ganga really is the name of the whole water cycle, the monsoon its main source rather than the Himalaya, its main property soaking rather than flowing. I thought of rivers in deserts, whose water all comes from elsewhere, and a song I still remember singing in choir in high school.


As torrents in summer,
Half dried in their channels,
Suddenly rise, though the
Sky is still cloudless,
For rain has been falling
Far off at their fountains;

So hearts that are fainting
Grow full to o'erflowing,
And they that behold it
Marvel, and know not
That God at their fountains
Far off has been raining! 


(I remembered it as Brahms but it was actually Elgar, to words of Longfellow - in a poem, appropriately enough, about John the Baptist!) I thought of what happens when rivers come together, as at Allahabad, their waters mingling (though I didn't think of the third, invisible river, the Saraswati), and of how the boats that float down a river like the Mississippi got back up it before the age of steamships.

I returned to those living on a river, ever flowing past from somewhere unseen to somewhere else, always in the same direction - though my thoughts were briefly diverted to tidal rivers like our own Hudson, at least a few miles of which flow in different directions each day, and to the tidal bore I once saw hurrying up a dry riverbed in Nova Scotia. And finally I ruminated on how differently one might picture the ways of the world if one was raised on a riverbank rather than, as I was, on the shore of an ocean, where the water comes at you before returning to its own vastness in an endless repetition.

 More root vegetables!

Orific

Planning for my 7-session course on the Zhuangzi this gave me pause

Illustrating the final section of what are known as the Inner Chapters (1-7), this is from Zhuangzi Speaks (trans. Brian Bruya, 152) by Tsai Chih Chung, a cartoonist you've seen before bringing Confucius, Mencius (twice) and Zen to life. This one's even been animated!

Seoul-stirring

 

The Brooklyn Museum is becoming a go-to place for Korean art - and a place to learn that Korean art is worth going to. Doh So Suk's 2003 "The Perfect Home II," a life-size recreation of his New York apartment in translucent fabric, was on my itinerary for a visit yesterday; I might return on a weekend when you can actually go in. (Remember his house precariously perched at UCSD?) But the revelation was another exhibit I stumbled on quite by accident, "Aggregations" by Kwang Young Chun.

Numberless triangular blocks of antique mulberry paper wrapped around wedges of plastic foam (the way medicines used to be wrapped up at pharmacies), brought together in a myriad of ways, these works took my breath away. "Aggregation 17-SEO78" (2017), above, particularly resonates with a part of the exhibit introduction which fascinated me.

Here are views of a few more, though two dimensions don't do them justice; the last is a detail of "Aggregation 17-SEO78."

Centennial!

The New School centennial officially kicked off today because who can resist 1.9.19 when you were started in 1919? Let's call it our birthday!
There's a whole fun website for the occasion, which includes a link to our website. (At our request, they'll link to the Public Seminar Vertical, too.) There's a splashy video, too, in which Lang religious studies has a cameo: in a series of course titles, past and present, the first contemporary one is for a course, conceived for us by an alumna two years ago, and running again this coming semester! "Queering and decolonizing" surely wasn't among the concerns of our "daring professor" founders, though challenging theological legacies arguably was. The blade of the cutting edge: that's what it's like to be "100 YEARS NEW"!

Land sickness

Sea level rise is hard to imagine, given the fixed lines on most of our maps, but this cool website helps give historical depth. As recently 

as 90 million years ago, most familiar outlines were submerged. And continents shift, too: California was still en route from Alaska!

'Twas the season

Rooting for you

 Should someone tell you there's no color in a winter market..

We traverse afar

One more time: Merry Christmas! The liturgical season of Christmas ends today with the arrival of the Magi, here in an Ethiopian depiction (posted by a friend) which renders moot the question if one of the Kings was African. For her part, our new rector gave a lovely sermon on the fact that the Christmas story, far from the "snaposhot" suggested by the eponymous nativity scenes which collapse everything into one scene, is full of drama - and travel of all kinds. Our world is ever changing in way beyond our control. We can try to resist it (like Herod) or learn from the Magi to read the signs and follow them. The overarching message is the one the angel brought the shepherds (calling them, too, to travel): Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy ...

Nothing ventured, nothing gained

Behold the unassuming postcard, found on e-Bay (!), which led one of the intrepid contributors to our newer, truer history of the New School to piece together a missing chapter in the story of the namesake of the Parsons School of Design. It turns out we know remarkably little about the life of Frank Alvah Parsons (quite different from the New School's voluble Alvin Johnson), and much of what we think we do know was a carefully constructed narrative "colored by his dreams and perhaps shaped by what a premier art school needed in its leader." The school took the name of a visionary leader, who apparently had designed the life story - including extensive European travel - which such a school needed in its leader, even if it wasn't strictly true! "Some of this biographical obscurity was intentional," Molly Rottman notes as if in passing, "but the onus is also on The New School and Parsons today to better reckon with the lives of our founders if we are to understand our school’s history." What else is there to reckon with, in the life of Frank Alvah Parsons and in its intentional obscurities? Stay tuned!

Wilde Daoist

The ample Daoism section of the Norton Anthology of World Religions, which I gave a talk about a few years ago, has provided a perfect text for kicking off the single-text course I'll be teaching on the Zhuangzi. It's a review of a first English translation of the text by one Oscar Wilde in 1890, shortly before the appearance of The Picture of Dorian Gray!

He sought to destroy society, as we know it .... Of course it is sad to be told that it is immoral to be consciously good, and that doing anything is the wort kind of idleness. Thousands of excellent and really earnest Philanthropists would be absolutely thrown upon the rates if we adopted the view that nobody should be allowed to meddle in what does not concern them. ... It is clear that Chuang Tsu is a very dangerous writer, and the publication of his book in English, two thousand years after his death, is obviously premature, and may cause a great deal of pain to many thoroughly respectable and industrious persons. (2087, 2090-91)

Wilde likens Zhuangzi to everyone from Plato to Meister Eckhart to Darwin, finding he had summed up in himself every mood in European metaphysical or mystical thought (2087) and transcended them all, along with calling out the vanity of every attempt at economic, political or moral governance. Will we be ready to join him?

Head over heels

At an exhibition in the Princeton Art Museum today I got to see for the first time a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe ("The Lawrence Tree," 1929) which has - on a Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival poster - been my nearly constant companion for thirty years. Mounted on poster board it's even outlasted the dining table it presided over in several apartments. The aura! But smething else was different beyond being able to see the the oil paint shine, feel the brushstrokes - and to realize just how much the poster's colors have faded. The poster had it the other way 'round!

Prospect Park

When I grow up I want to look like this.

On the shore of 2019

The ten sand dollars from our Del Mar beach jackpot a fortnight ago have arrived safely in New York. And they brought enough sand for a toast: Happy new year to all beings on every kind of coast!