Sibling rivalry

Well, the Anthropocene ruined a Lenten retreat for me... though that might not be a failure. It wasn't through climate, though Spring is apparently a little later than some years, but rather through the subject, the famous parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15).

We were a just manageable twenty-seven people, including a triad of facilitators, hailing from three different Manhattan Episcopal congregations. Different approaches to the story - interpretive, existential, spiritual - were interwoven with smaller and larger group discussions, some skits and one extended guided meditation. It became clear pretty quickly that most of us (the vocal ones, at least) identify with, or at least sympathize with, the younger son, the one who asked for his inheritance, only to squander it in a distant land, hit rock bottom, and return home with a contrite heart. Jesus doesn't tell us why he chose to leave but all assumed he had compelling reason to. The parable was addressed to the grumbling Pharisees, after all, who, like the prodigal's older brother, needed to get off their high horses and open their hearts. It's time for the holier-than-thou to learn a thing or two! Who's really the sinner here?

One of our facilitators, who hails from Puerto Rico, encouraged us to consider the cultural assumptions we bring to our interpretation. These include American individualist ideas about the value of finding yourself, property as a zero-sum thing, and the importance of second chances, as well as a broader biblical presumption in favor of younger brothers. I felt the parable inclining toward supersessionism - the older brother might have done all he should, but clearly the spotlight is on the younger, the one who goes through the hero's quest (yes, we went there); the older's pinched failure to understand what's going on suggests he should get with the program or get out. No wonder he's nonplussed at the turn of events.

As you can divine, I was feeling for the older brother - and not just because I'm an older brother myself! The father in the parable does after all say to the older brother, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we tend not to dwell on those words, just on the implied reproach as he continues, But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found. I remember an earlier discussion of this parable years ago - at church, not a retreat - where everyone admitted they had trouble with the parable because in their own lives they were the older brother, responsible and unappreciated, taken for granted, invisible. It occurred to me this time round that everyone comes from some particular family place or other (complicated, as, for instance, many an elder sibling is the prodigal), and that each has its inherent envies. The father's, the church's, our work is to overcome them with a love which dissolves boundaries. (A prodigal love!) I don't know how the younger son will be reintegrated, but only love can show a way!

But what about the Anthropocene? Early in the retreat,  I was musing in a sort of Chinese vein on how unfilial the younger son was, effectively killing his parents in claiming his inheritance while his father was still alive, not to mention rejecting his responsibilities to his family more generally ("my inheritance"?). Not that I'm a fan of the centrality of hierarchy to most systems of filial piety! This seemed like the sort of story told to younger siblings to keep them in line. Yes, it seems unfair that you'll never be the eldest, will always have a secondary part to play (and a smaller inheritance), but what alternative is there? Leave the bosom of the family and everything will fall apart, starting with you! How different from the American myth where each child starts his own family, eldest all...

Still, the younger child takes a portion of the family's wealth - perhaps a third - and squanders it. It's gone forever. It's not a foregone conclusion that the family is going to be able to recover, especially with him back, even if it wishes to. Somehow I got to thinking civilizationally. The younger son was the West, maybe the modern West, maybe the US. You can fill in the rest. ...

Our group's champions of the younger son, justifying his years of "dissolute living" as valuable steps on the way to a deeper sense of self or whatever, bypassing the sense that any sin was committed or real harm done (only one person spoke of restitution), suddenly sounded to me like the impenitent West in the Anthropocene. Whoops, we went and used up what was ours (sic) in meaningless consumption, but you can't blame us for needing to go our own way; in any case you should love us as the father does. Even if the father's superabundant love challenges the "scarcity mindset" of the older brother, the story doesn't tell us how to heal. Like the Book of Job, in its way, it imagines real loss only to suggest all can effectively be restored - a Holocene assumption.

Our reflections were probably very helpful for people at a personal and even interpersonal level. I guess I'm reporting I found them helpful too, if more confronting than comforting. But I am troubled at how questions of justice (including questions of power) were left by the wayside. This is what's going on in those parables in Luke, of course, love is not justice in the human understanding. (The very next parable is the confounding parable of the unjust steward!) In its way, the parable of the prodigal son leaves us with a broken world, which we don't know how to fix. A suitable Lenten reflection after all.

Lent?

When at a Lenten retreat in the mountains (near West Cornwall, CT) 

it's hard not to sense the imminent arrival of Easter, if not yet of Spring!

Midpoint

Here's where we're at in Religion & the Anthropocen's

This is a synthesis of student reflections, and our map for going forward.

Sprung

Hudson Valley light

Catskills in a window at St. John's Episcopal Church, Kingston.

The wrong crime

Barr's summary of the Mueller report has been delivered. The grifter king is celebrating. Perhaps all all along it was just Russia doing everything it could to weaken our system, and his team doing everything it could think of to secure victory (and profit). No coordination desired or required. The many skeletons in other closets made him nervous as the investigation proceeded, guilty coverups of some things appearing as guilty coverups of others, but as long as it could be defined as about one thing he didn't have to do, he might squeak through, and perhaps he has. Do we owe him an apology? Perhaps. But he owes the nation many. We know enough from what he's done since assuming office to know he constitutes a threat to the rule of law and the institutions of democracy. Nothing matters to him but his own survival and he remains willing to attack and undermine the system in any way he thinks necessary to assure that end. That he undermines it for his own reasons, not because he's doing the bidding of some foreign power, hardly makes the situation better! If there's an upside, the system works: impartial investigations go where the evidence leads. Let's see that evidence, and what else can be found in investigations of ongoing corruption. The threat is real - damage continues to be done to American values and reputation - and there's much we don't yet understand about it.

Over the top

Hudson Valley view from site of Frederic Edwin Church's studio at Olana

Stabilizing

 

Taking a weekend getaway to the Hudson Valley. We found a stables someone converted into a cottage near Kingston. While the aesthetic is very Ralph Lauren, it's cosy and quiet. City life seems miles away...

Zhuangzi say

The Zhuangzi course is finished. We had our final meeting on Friday, and the papers (all but one) have been turned in. We got somewhere in our eight weeks, though I'm not sure if it's a sign of success or even greater success that each student found something different. We went in with the promise that this was a text which philosophers construed in widely varied and apparently incompatible ways - mystical, agnostic, perspectivalist, relativist, fatalist, nihilist, existentialist! Most of the students got that, whatever the Zhuangzi is saying, it says it by not saying only that.

For my part, I have a sense of it... lucky I didn't have to write a final essay, too! I'm partial to the view that the Zhuangzi is a playful pranksterish text, which works by the pitch perfect way it presents all sorts of different views and by the impossibility of saying just when they turn to parody.

There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something. (ch 2, trans Watson)

I like Ziporyn's idea that the Zhuangzi works as a sort of "wild card" allowing one to participate fully in social life without taking it so seriously as to be damaged by it, what some other recent interpreters call "genuine pretending." But it's more than that, a cacophony of sounds from the Great Clump coursing through the hollows in things, an initiation into a world of ongoing transformation.

If I teach it again - and I'm thinking I'd like to - it will be a somewhat different format, but that may be for the best. Instead of seven meetings there will be ten. This should help me address the one big problem we had this time. Despite everything I know about the problems with reading texts as Great Books, presumed accessible without knowing anything about their context of emergence or reception, and about the red herring of a "philosophical Daoism" distinct from the rituals and myths of Daoist "religion," we wound up understanding it as a book, if an ironic and shifty one.

Next time, students will get that this is more then a general shiftiness and irony. They'll know that the "Confucius" of the Zhuangzi isn't the Confucius of tradition, for instance! Or that this text isn't just about the paradoxes of language and consciousness, but is about life bobbing in streams of 氣 qi. But I also don't want to present it as a culturally inaccessible text, one one could not hope to understand without years of specialist training or insider knowledge. Context and reception will come in installments. So here's how I'm thinking I might proceed, building around the current structure.

Week 1: Welcome, with an activity - perhaps calligraphy

Week 2: Inner Chapters 1-3

Week 3: Inner Chapters 4-7, film about Daoist ritual

Week 4: Some Daodejing and Analects, with an activity

Week 5: Presentation on a passage from Inner Chapters, using commentaries and Laozi or Confucius, as relevant; Outer Chapters 8-10

Week 6: Remaining Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters in Ziporyn

Week 7: Introduction to the cosmology of Yijing, with an activity

Week 8: Reread Inner Chapters; choose text for final presentation

Week 9: Zhuangzi beyond words; in class read together Chapter 20

Week 10: Presentations of process and outcome of final papers

Morning glory

Haven't shown our northward view in a while. The Manhattan skyline's mostly gone but these budding trees were ablaze in early morning light.

Unteachable moment

In the New School Archives today I found the one and only brochure of the New School College, our current college's long forgotten forebear in offering seminar-style classes to traditional age students. It was published in 1969, three years in to the experiment - and a year before the plug was pulled. New School College disappeared without the fanfare with which it was introduced. The paper trail at the Archives suggests it may have collapsed under the weight of its own self-critique.

But there was also a New School College before there was a New School College! The idea to offer courses to traditional age students and during the day was first bruited in 1957, I learned. President Hans Simons got the blessing of the Board of Trustees to explore the possibilities, and the Archives still has the generally ambivalent responses of the trustees to his proposal. Most are concerned (as Trustees are wont) about financial matters but questions are also raised about adding younger people to the mix of America's first university for adults. One response - the draft in the Archives is unsigned - likes the idea of a 4-year college but for adults, indeed for pretty much anyone but the "college-age"!

Looking over the span of years preceding adulthood, it is probable that the college years are generally the least accessible to outside influences. The young man or woman, leaving home, is conscious of his independence and equality in the body politic, of the superiority that in this country belongs to the rising generation, and the corollary that anything worth listening to comes only from his peers. His teachers like his parents, with few exceptions, are taken on sufferance. The difficulties of this situation are intensified by “going steady” and early marriage. ...

One of the most gifted of contemporary mathematicians, the late Edward Kasner, discovered in his charmingly relaxed visits to nursery schools that it was by far easier to teach the pre-school child some of the concepts of higher mathematics than the graduate student…. Herbert Zipper, mentioned in Dr. Simons’ report, has introduced symphony concerts into the primary schools of the Chicago suburbs. The audience he seeks, ranges from four years to twelve; beyond that, he finds that understanding and taste have already been spoiled. ...

Might we as adult educators conceivably have a mission toward all of education? Namely to try to keep our native endowment in tact [sic], rather than the much more arduous and less rewarding assignment of trying to undo educational harm during the period of life, perhaps least receptive to the knowledge and experience of others. 

  

“Memorandum to President Simons in re Day College,"
Allen Austill Records NS.02.01.03, Box 1 folder 1.20: "New initiatives, 1957-1989.

New School College, 1957-1958, 1963-1970: Early history 1957-1958, 1962-1965"

Red!

Sympoeitic earth

On Saturday afternoon, we went to the Church of the Ascension to see the NYC premiere of a documentary about late biologist Lynn Margulis. It was in fact something of a coincidence that it was shown in a church but this didn't stop folks from trying to make a connection. Well, I did.

What are the spiritual consequences of giving Margulis' view of nature the place currently occupied by what she called the Neo-Darwinian capitalistic Zeitgeist? The most obvious takeaway is that we misunderstand evolution and our place in it if we think the bottom line is always competition, the war of all against all, nature red in tooth and claw, winners and losers, survival of the fittest. Margulis is for symbiosis - though she use the term in a more narrow way than many ecologists.

Margulis would have us look at the history of life not as a long series of races within and among species, though that's still happening at the micro scale, but as shaped decisively by game-changing bridgings and melding of species. Natural selection favors not (or not only) the one who's best at the current game but rather the one who contributes to the emergence of new collaborations and coalitions. What with the fusion of different kinds of life and lateral DNA transfers, the family tree of life isn't a tree or even a bush but a network, a web. We're connected to all of life, but not only through lineage - and not only through sexual reproduction. The implications for our understanding of kinship could be considerable.

Anthropocentrism gets a satisfying series of wallops. The story of life is definitely not a sort of bracket, with us as the culmination of a line of winners going all the way back. Bacteria govern the planet. They worked out all the important tricks that make the newer chapters in the story like ourselves happen, starting with producing an oxygen-rich atmosphere. They are governing it still if the Gaia hypothesis is right. And they keep doing their thing, as they have been since long before eukaryotic life emerged, the building blocks of more complex lifeforms. We latecomers are coalitions of coalitions. 90% of our bodies has DNA that is not human. Perhaps kinmaking had better start with recognizing who we are. The film-maker quips, "we think therefore I am."

The image of the working of nature as collaborative and coordinated and composed of emergent coalitions composed in their turn of of emergent coalitions (and so on!), the components still chugging along doing what they've always done but networked, is indeed something to behold, and our carelessness of and cruelty toward it something of which to repent. But spiritual? The film-maker asks one of Margulis' friends something along these lines and she says that her friend had certainly had a sense of awe. (This was what put me in mind of Johnson on Darwin.) Can one go further?

The film informed us that Margulis' ideas had been criticized by Neo-Darwinists as giving comfort to creationists, especially in their challenge to the idea that randomness and selfishness are what it's all about. (They're still a big part of what it's all about.) I certainly feel a kind of comfort, like that I felt when reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's response to the unnecessary "species loneliness" of human beings who think we're the only people around. Humility before - and a sense of indebtedness to - the rest of life seem like good things, not just for our relationship to the planet but to ourselves too. The big story isn't crass casualty and constant competition, epic waste and ultimate extinction, but something more like being with - being by being with - others. Diversity wrapped into alliances which cross the greatest of differences and produce yet new possibilities for sympoeisis - creating together.

Is there anything for religion, for the religions, here? A first thought is that the Trinity is a kind of coalition. Not to say that Christian theology somehow anticipated the cosmology Margulis has helped bring into existence, though it may well have built on experiences of sympoiesis in human and more-than-human life which capitalism has taught us to unsee. The coalitional relationships of many indigenous peoples with the non human communities that sustain them and which they help sustain resonate, too. I sense affinities also in the combinatory cosmology of the Yijing, and the sense in many ancient traditions that what we do as humans, with other humans, isn't qualitatively different from what the world does as it worlds - though it'll take some work for me to reclaim a sense that we may have a special part to play in this ongoing worlding. (Perhaps surprisingly - I'm surprised - I'm not feeling it with Buddhism. There might be a resonance with the idea of metempsychosis figuring kinship across species but abhidharma exposes coalitions rather than building them, and Buddhist ideas of interdependence and emptiness seem too abstract. Wisdom and compassion as symbionts?)

Much to ponder.

Forest of life

A facebooker who shares pictures of beautiful artwork from ages past posted this image of the Tree of Life in an amazing 16th century CE screen from the Sidi Saiyyid mosque in Ahmedabad. It's one of several works of Islamic art he's posted since the massacre in Christchurch, NZ, which took the lives of forty-nine Muslims of all ages at prayer in their mosques, and seriously wounded as many more. This Tree of Life is in a landscape of many kinds of blooming, happily entwined trees - you can almost hear the music of their different leaves rustling together in the gentle cooling breeze. A visual prayer for those killed and for a more peaceful pluralistic future - we've done it before. It's a remembrance also of the other children of Abraham, Christians and Jews, martyred by nihilistic white supremacists in their houses of worship.

不知周

Some gleanings from the Zhuangzi in our final session:

The seeds of things have mysterious workings. (ch18)

Let yourself be carried along by things so that the mind wanders freely. (4:16)

This human form is merely a circumstance that has been met with, just something stumbled into, but those who have become humans take delight in it nonetheless. (6:28)

When it came time to arrive, the master did just what the time required. When it came time to go, he followed along with the flow. Resting content in the time and finding his place in the flow, joy and sorrow had no way to seep in. (3:7)

Shun said, "If my body is not my own possession, whose is it?"
Cheng said, "It is just a form lent by heaven and earth. Life is not your own possession; it is just a harmony lent by heaven and earth." (ch22, p87)

Hui Shi's talents were fruitlessly dissipated running after things and never returning to himself. He was like a man trying to silence an echo with shouts or to outrun his own shadow. How sad! (ch33, p125)

So neither you nor I nor any third party can ever know how it is - shall we wait for yet some "other"? (2:43)

When the smaller is hidden within the larger, there remains someplace into which it can escape. But if you hide the world in the world, so there is nowhere for anything to escape to, this is an arrangement ... that can sustain all things. (6:27)

Go as far as whatever you happen to get to, and leave it at that. (2:22)

Fools imagine they are already awake. (2:42)

The blackboard image above works the characters 不知周 into a butterfly. I'd asked students to try writing these character a few times and then write them on the board, maybe like butterflies, but only later disclosed the meaning of the characters and the reason for the exercise. The text is full of frustrating claims that sages and the "genuine men of old" got things right by not trying to, not aiming to, perhaps not even knowing they were. Can one learn from such a book?

Once Zhou [Zhuangzi] dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about joyfully just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Zhou 不知周. (2:48)

Site of struggle

The latest installment of our newer, truer history of the New School is out - and the first one likely ro raise hackles. It treats the "mobe,"

a near-meltdown of the school in the late 1990s that even involved a student hunger strike. It's recent enough to be seared in the memories of people who were there, and undigested enough that there's no settled account of it. It doesn't make an edifying story so it has no place in the stories the institution tells of itself. For many more recent arrivals, this may be the first they hear of it. If history is written by the victors - in academia it's the ones who stay - this is a counter-history from below, a reminder that other understandings of those events, and of the school which made them necessary, live on.

Our essay is written not by a historian but by Lang's first director of Civic Engagement and Social Justice, and recounts how she was initiated in a more troubled history of the New School her very first day on the job precisely through learning about the "mobilization." Her account thus introduces the "mobe" but also makes us aware of other histories that course through our school - she goes on to initiate new students in this history as well - and of communities of resistance which push the New School to live up to ideals of inclusion it persistently betrays. The painful story of the Mobilization becomes empowering, even inspiring:  

knowing the history of struggle at The New School empowers

a sense of solidarity with those who participated in the work

before us – and with those yet to come.

Out of this world

Failed experiment?

I'm having a blast learning more about the great disappearing college - the New School College that started with much fanfare in 1966 had vanished pretty much without a trace within five years. This has something to do with a deliberately countercultural ethos: incoming students in 1967 participated in a sort of altar call where each had to come front and center in an auditorium and receive a copy of anarchist philosopher Paul Goodman's Drawing the Line! Some of the students took it even further, as you'll perhaps recall, and as attested by these screencaps from work by an alum who became a "no budget" filmmaker.

Sainted memory

The Dancing Saints of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco are the perfect companions for Lent Madness, something I've heard about for years but never got on board in time before. We did this year!

Signs of the times

I think I'm starting to figure out twitter. Two retweets! Baby steps!

Great belch

Stunning work by one of the students in the Zhuangzi class. Ch. 2's piping of the earth resulting when the Great Clump belches forth its vital breath (Ziporyn, 9), sending the wind through the endlessly varied orifices of the world, is evoked exquisitely by film randomly sprinkled with water or ink, with altered sounds of the artist whistling.

Pour your own

Went to the New School Archives yesterday with a student: what fun to be there as a future historian has their first archives experience! True to form, we didn't find what we were hoping to. But we found other things, including this awkward episode around the 1947 Spring Student Tea.

Invites like these were sent out to many female faculty members, including Berenice Abbott, Frieda Wunderlich, Mary Henle, Julie Mayer and Karen Horney. Professor Horney's response is included in the files.

Roundtable

The Spring LREL Roundtable "Queer Religion and Activism" took place in a different space than roundtables past (we actually had a ring of tables!) but the fare was characteristically rich and inspiring. As has happened before, the student contributor more than held their own!

Muted tones

At one point in tonight's concert by New School's newish Studio Orchestra (= big band!) the trumpets walked over from their place at the top of the band stand and whispered something into the piano. Such fun to be at a university where old forms are getting cool new lives.

In the papers

A Journalism + Design colleague told me recently that I was the most quoted faculty member in our school newspaper, the New School Free Press. Really? I turn down many interview requests! But when given a chance to sound off on the New School centennial and religion how could I say no?

Snow Day!

It's an official snow day - schools are closed, including ours. (The snow looked nicer as it was falling last night, almost Currier and Ives.) It's miserable for Monday classes, though, already short-changed by holidays. Not sure when or how we're going to be able to make them up!

Vertigo

Walked a bit of the High Line, discovering swank new buildings I didn't recall having seen before, with yet more going up on all sides. Soon it will feel less like a skywalk through nature and history than a trail along a narrow valley floor of glass and concrete, history and nature just a gardened memory.

Sticky snow