What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

 

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,

The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,

The similitudes of the past and those of the future,

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river,

The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,

The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,

The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, 

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide. 

It's the two hundredth birthday of Walt Whitman - did you recognize him in that engraving, before he had the John Muir beard? You should really take this occasion - as I did - to reread "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." You'll find yourself there, as I did, his arm around your shoulder, with all of nature and humanity ebbing and flowing in glory around you.

Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water!

Kulilaya

Lovely linkage of heartbreaks from down under, these two canvases were painted by Pitjantjatjara women in the community of Amata (near Uluru) who heard about the massacre of Muslims in Christchurch. One was given to an Islamic community in Adelaide, the other sent to New Zealand. This is Nyunmiti Burton, whose idea it was. "For us when we lose someone, we go to the families and we go to the communities and we grieve, and we grieve and we grieve," Ms Burton told the ABC through an interpreter." Many Aboriginal paintings live in the strange habitat of the international art market, but these seem connected to original life of these motifs in the ritual lives of anangu communities.

Post-post-truth

Summer means time to read more widely! Top of my pile, Jill Lepore's political history of the US. Nobody's dared to write a large scale history like this in decades, but now seems the time, since different Americans seem to inhabit such different understandings of the nation and its past. (I haven't done American history since high school!) To study the past, she promises, is to unlock the prison of the present (xvi).

Desert painters

Aboriginal Australian art is hard to find in New York, so it was a special pleasure to spend time with a baker's dozen of impressive works from the Kluge-Ruhe Collection and the Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield at Gagosian Gallery this morning. More than a pleasure, I was overwhelmed by turns with with joy, with grief, with wonder. Photos were permitted, so here are glimpses of works by Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri (Rockholes and Country Near the Olgas, 2007), Willy Tjungurrayi (Untitled, 2001), and Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Hungry Emus, 1990 and Kame Yam Awelye, 1996).

Fruit season

Strawberries are unusually early this year. A friend celebrated by making a delectable strawberry rhubarb crisp for us!

 

Personal history

A day of podcast interviews with folks who have intimate investments in New School history in different ways veritably overflowed with insights. We asked them to reflect on who tells the history of the New School (and which stories they tell), when, where and to whom...  but our conversations gravitated to the deeper question of why.

Nobody thinks there is or can be a single story, but that's all for the good. Deweyan progressivism, university in exile, arts and design, adult education, creativity, protest? Each of us sees the same things differently because of who we are, said an archivist. The gap between the New School ideal which brings a person here and the more complicated reality they encounter (the neoliberal university, for instance) is what makes creative responses possible, said a recently minted Phd in political science. The histories of the New School are lived, an artist alumnus reminded us, in the contingent but indispensable networks of support and struggle which allow each embodied individual to make the place their own; New School becomes part of their story, and they part of its.

Our questions may have sounded academic but the answers were anything but. New School history is existential! It is part of who people are. We tell the stories to name the ancestors. We hold on to the history to remember scenes of protest and progress, and to reground ourselves in the identities the school willy nilly helped us discover. We try to preserve the stuff of these life-affirming stories because the future terrifies us.

(Images from the Archives)

再说一下

Hey, I'm back at studying Mandarin! After a shockingly long time of just fiddling with Mandarin language apps (which, however, seem to have been effective in what they do, but only kept my passive skills in shape) I'm back to more active learning! Two or three times a week I chat for a full hour with a teacher from Datong, a city in Shanxi I visited a few years ago! She's not actually in Datong - but she's not here either. 她住在奥斯陆 She lives in Oslo! We talk via Skype, through a service called iTalki. I was delighted (and more than a little astonished) to discover that after years of avoiding speaking I can still talk about all sorts of things - admittedly with a skilled and patient teacher who knows what learners are likely to know and understand. After we finish, I've taken to summarizing our discussions in written Chinese, at which point I avail myself of another online language helper - Google translate. When my intended meaning doesn't come through, I tweak until it does. 加油！

In contract

When we turned the page in our Metropolitan Museum of Art engagement calendar of New York in art two Sundays ago to find a detail of this picture by Rackstraw Downes, our hearts skipped a beat. This unbeautiful neighborhood is the one in which we'd found a beautiful apartment we wanted to bid on! Was it a sign? Had anyone else noticed? Fifteen days later, we're in contract! More news as it happens; it'll take months even if all goes well and smoothly.

Hyphen-nation!

Had a blast today looking through some of the things left when Horace Kallen gave his papers to other archives. Nobody's quite sure where these were found, but they include random correspond-ence, articles he read (meticulously underlined), reviews and prefaces he wrote, notes for some of his lecture courses ... and some very old things, like the notes above from his undergraduate years at Harvard! I was excited to find drafts from the earliest version of his The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy, as well as a 1959 new edition - and the script from a version of his "Euripidean" arrangement of Job performed at a Synagogue House in 1926.

But what I was there for was the context of a talk he gave in 1950, "Are there limits to toleration in a free society?" at a symposium dedicated to Alvin Johnson entitled "One Globe - Two Worlds." The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal is publishing the talk as part of its centennial commemoration and I've promised to write an introduction for it. The talk in itself is not
that interesting - the tolerant must tolerate the intolerance of the intolerant - but will have meant more interesting things coming from someone who had dedicated a career to understanding the "American idea" in terms of cultural pluralism. Here's something which, judging from its placement in the files, might have been the introduction of Kallen at that symposium.

Liberal education, Kallen points out, cannot be truly liberal unless it is intercultural. It must assume the parity of every people's culture in dignity and worth and seek untrammeled communication between them on equal terms. ... Education, says Dr. Kallen, is hyphenation and hyphenation is civilisation. All totalitarianisms, whether political, religious, economic, or cultural, are anti-hyphen and therefore anti-education.

Villainy!

Newest installment of our newer truer history of the New School is out!

Turns out the New School plays a part in far right conspiracy theories about the destruction of Western Civilization by insidious "cultural Marxism"! Theirs is laughably bad history - for the nth time, we had no relationship with the Frankfurt School of Social Research! - but in a time when conspiracy theories are the order of the day a debunking seemed worth printing. Besides, the conspiracist's view is not that different from the delusions of world-historical grandeur of some of our fans...!

Verclemmt

Clematis in the garden at the Church of the Holy Apostles

Say cheese?

One of these is not like the others, but I blew the reveal when my friends said "I've never had a cheese that tastes like this" and "this doesn't taste like any cheese I've had before" and I blurted out "that's because it's not cheese!" But who's to say vegan cheese isn't cheese? I picked this concoction of cashew, coconut and other ingredients at Riverdel, a local shop I was surprised to read about in the Guardian.

Looking out looking in

Graduation!

We've outgrown two churches now - today's Lang graduation took place in Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, on 55th Street! It's quite a lovely space, lots of embracing curves, including a big tent-like ceiling, and wood enough to fit the retro ethos of an American college commencement, with all dressed up as if we were a medieval university!

The faculty speaker, a Turkish theater director, started with a concept she finds English lacks - muditā, a Sanskrit word for bliss at the joy of another - and ended by describing a ritual for parting which she recently learned about from Papua New Guinea. A bowl of water is set out when guests are leaving to absorb their complicated emotions. It's kept for three days after their departure and then sprinkled over nearby trees. She told us she'd put a bowl in our college cafe after the last day of classes and would be sprinkling it on some tulips at the school entrance tomorrow. Lovely!

Back at school I found the bowl.

But I have to admit that in another way it was like years past - for me as well as for many other faculty I asked. We recognized hardly any of the students processing by! Who are all these beautiful young people, and what thirty-two courses did they take if none were mine or those of my colleagues in history, literature, chemistry, politics? I felt the absence of students I have known who are not graduating, or not graduating here, with no bowl of water to capture the complicated feelings.

Fight for life

It isn't easy trying to explain the efforts of Republican state legislatures to outdo each other in cruel "pro-life" legislation they know will be struck down to someone not raised in this godforsaken land. One can say that they are giving a simple answer to a tough question - "human life" begins at "conception," they say, end of story. Biologically ignorant, to say the least! But the posturing, most visible in refusing exceptions for incest and rape but present also in fantasies of little six-week old humans with "heartbeats" being murdered by their mothers, reveals a deeper refusal to recognize moral reality.

Human reproduction is a messy business in all the times and ways it happens (and doesn't), often forcing tragic choices. Sexual violence against women is widespread, causing lifelong harm. Women live these complexities and vulnerabilities in ways men never have to. I imagine every woman who has had to contemplate having an abortion has thought about it more deeply - with body, mind and spirit - than any man juggling definitions and Bible quotes. (Remember the real story of the white supremacist Religious Right; their love for the unborn is of recent vintage, though their hatred of women goes way back.)

The laws passed in Georgia and Alabama, with more to come, do not protect life, but protect their supporters from the moral challenges of being human. The struggle against them is the true "pro-life" position.

New School meadow

Figure this!

Newest installment in our New School Histories Public Seminar vertical!

The academic year is ending, but we're just getting started.

New Stand

Palmistry

"Religion and the Anthropocene" is finished. And somewhat to my surprise, the students seem to have really appreciated it. It seems to have been a course everyone's been talking to people about all semester. And while it's about something that applies to everyone, it's not, a Culture & Media senior noted, like the many courses whose materials you could just have found through a google search. ("Unshazammable music!" someone offered as an analog.) Rare to have a course about the present - and the future - and the past, one enthused. Two students who are leaving for other schools said the course has shaped what they want to do - one studying "hard sciences" and the other history. More surprisingly still several reported that no other course they took this semester made them happy in the same way, a happiness we decided came from acknowledging "the elephant in the room." And the special camaraderie which arises in my classes thanks to the sorts of students who find their way into them.

I had them fill in a blank syllabus is if they were teaching a course on this field - a little sneaky but a useful final exercise which will help me next time, too. But we didn't talk about the endosymbiosis model

I'd drawn on the board. Overall, the religious studies minors noted, this course was less about religion than they expected. (For the other students, any religion is evidently new and exciting - and enough.) I admitted that when looking back on the class I too had found the religious texts to have melted away - an unwittingly and unnervingly apt

term! So is religion something which will become a mere organelle in the larger cell of anthropocene awareness, helping people cope with ecological grief, huddle together with other endangered species, etc.?

In preparation for this last class I had been trying to formulate the alternative - where anthropocene awareness lives on as a symbiotic constituent in religion - and coming up short. That would have to be the sort of unironically theological claim I have a hard time making. But then, as the last students parted, I stumbled on it! As we stood in the classroom doorway I didn't want to say "have a nice life" so I recalled the Irish Blessing - didn't remember all the words, I said, but the one that ends "May God hold you in the palm of His hand." Everyone knew what I was referring to and the Culture & Media student, suddenly animated, gestured toward the board and said: "So that's what that's about!

Peonies vs tulips

From the Decolonial Atlas

Coming to the endo

"Religion & Anthropocene" is winding down. Students presented final projects this week, and next week we try to pull things together. To help with the synthesis I gave them an activity reflecting on religious responses to assorted anthropocene affects but the pièce de résistance is for Monday's class.

Coming to a garden near you

Spring is firing on all cylinders at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Down in the world

Possibly my penultimate Faculty Senate meeting (we have one more, next week). Not sure if I'll stand for reelection... I took this picture for an unrelated reason - we were meeting in what was once the Benton Room. With colorless art and drab folding tables, what a dreary change!

The religion major

Uh oh - Religion majors are tanking almost as badly as the History majors at the very bottom! But then there are "Religion and Theology"
majors in the middle of the table who went up a bit, doing better than all the humanities - and Business, too. Many apples here, and oranges.

Spring whiplash

A little too much too soon: cherries and peonies and bluebells?!

100 Years

You can use a centennial lots of ways! I wasn't part of the walkout, but indirectly had a role. This poster reuses the cover of an old Lang zine which students found in the Archives! The zine is before my time but it was part of a stack of things from a senior colleague which found its way to the Archives through me!

One more round

The Sacred Himalayas Initiative had something like an official end today. Ostensibly we were celebrating the publication of Kevin Bubriski and Abhimanyu Pandey's Kailash Yatra (with an Afterword by yours truly) and the multi-lingual Folk Gods series (publishing tales gathered in the field in English, Nepali, Hindi, Tibetan and Chinese). Photographer Bubriski showed slides from the gorgeous book, including the one above, of pilgrims coming down from Drolma La, the highest point of the kora, and, below, of our party at Rakshas Tal, the demonic lake sharing Kailas with holy Manasarovar (186, 136), and all sorts of memories came rushing in. Was I truly in that extraordinary place?

At the mini-reunion of yatris, time came rushing in, too. On a happy note, the long-time graduate assistant to the program defended his dissertation on Tuesday. Less happily I learned that one of my fellow New School faculty yatris is leaving, and that Bubruski, too, is without a job - his college just suddenly went belly up. Ambivalent was news that several motorable roads and bridges we saw being built on the Nepali part of our trek have been completed; Humla is isolated no more. And Mount Kailas? Someone had heard that permits are no longer available for western visitors, though that may just be a rumor. Did I really...?!

I'll tumbl for you

As "Religion and the Anthropocene" winds down, we devoted one more class to our class blog, neglected these past many weeks. Everyone was tasked with adding two items, introducing some news story or artwork found online, and then trying to articulate what it made them feel. I did, too. (The titles of my posts were hyperlinked to two articles which made me feel, respectively, practically hopeful and disablingly crazy.)

 

Next week I'll cull from the class' articles a list of affects and propose ways in which religion, in the various forms in which we've encountered it, might offer ways of naming, framing, defusing or engaging them.