Take nothing for granted

Since we can see it from our window it stands to reason you can see

our place from Grant's Tomb! The tomb's grand inside but snaking

around its sides are crazy community-made mosaics from the 1970s.

Changing colors

Change of season at Fort Tryon Park

Unhand

I found it nearly impossible to wish people "Happy Thanksgiving" this year. This wasn't because I don't believe in giving thanks for the blessings in one's life (tho' I've always experienced Thanksgiving as a bit of a "God bless the child that's got his own" day), but rather because the mythical episode conjured up this particular holiday makes it seem a thanksgiving for very particular and unearned blessings and privileges: the blessings of European victory in the settler colonization of Turtle Island, and the privilege of supposing oneself and one's nation innocent. The stories now circulating about what was really happening between

the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims in the 1620s, as well as about how this holiday was created and reshaped in the 19th and 20th centuries, change the game. Comity, such as it was, soon gave way to conquest. So what can one do? To a student I was corresponding with about a recommendation I wrote "happy let's-not-take-settler-colonialism-for-granted day," but that's barely even a gesture. How not to take it for granted, as a settler colonial? With Kyle White in mind I feel I must at least acknowledge that my ancestors' dream was the displacement and death of the people they found on this land; the conquest was

neither incidental nor regretted. The nightmare wrought for Native America (not all of it intentional but no less devastating for that) looked to the settlers like a paradise. Thanksgiving feels to me like joining them in thanking God for that paradise - and do I not, in fact, benefit from it every day? I can't really imagine myself without it, let alone going "back where I came from." To atone for my forebears' blindness and to honor the survival of the worlds they nearly destroyed, I have to learn to do what they couldn't imagine: let this land's people (like Robin Wall Kimmerer) teach me how to become indigenous to this place.

(The images evoking childhood Thanksgiving, as well - unwittingly - as the fleeting conjuring and erasing of American Indians from white American consciousness, from here)

Slack water

That river we see out our window is a tidal river, its downstream flow reversed twice a day by the rising tide. When the gears shift, as it were, between flowing down and up and back down, it's called "slack water," the water still enough to reflect what's on the other side.

Adult community

Classes that meet just before the Thanksgiving break, when many students have already decamped, are always a little subdued. I remember feeling a bit forlorn at Thanksgiving myself while in graduate school as the campus emptied out. My family (which never really did Thanksgiving anyway) abroad, I celebrated it with international students who had nowhere to go. It was nice in a somewhat countercultural way, perhaps a little like Jewish folk doing Chinese and a movie on Christmas.

So it wasn't that surprising, I suppose, that when we asked students if there were things from the histories we'd been exploring that stuck with them - useful for imagining better futures and more effective ways of achieving them - all they talked about was our vaunted "lack of community." Not to make light of that: it's a persistent complaint, pointing to a structural problem. Part of it is New York, of course, and part is how busy people keep in New York, whether engaging it or working long hours so as not to go under in it. Lacking a campus we're effectively a commuter school for many students, and the sorts of students who come here tend to march to their own drummers anyway. Enterprising students start clubs but they rarely last long, and have a hard time getting people to keep coming to their meetings.

So it's a lonely experience for many. This reality makes an interest contrast, or perhaps complement, to the adult education character of the place for its first many decades. People weren't at the New School full-time (students or faculty); they came as a supplement to lives already lived - even if this was the part that kept them engaged, learning, sane. And they came in large part for each other, others drawn beyond their day jobs and families to make new connections and discoveries. I picture it a very social place, a place for meeting new and interesting people as much as new ideas. Isn't it that still?

Much has changed since we've become a full-time place, a degree-granting university with mostly traditional age undergraduate students, and rightly so. We have responsibilities to them which we didn't to adult education students, a world of instruction and support. But... we're the day job now! What to do if that's not fulfilling, if the relationships don't extend beyond the classroom or studio? Ironically the best I could offer the students yearning for connection was the vestige of the New School of old - the many public programs that still happen here every night, drawing motley audiences largely not of our students and faculty, where you might get in conversation with people with whom you already know you share an extracurricular interest in common.

When I led the First Year Workshops at Lang years ago, we tried and tried to get students in the habit of going to events. Every week there are amazing speakers, films, performances from across the city and around the world - and you have a standing invitation to all of them! I didn't realize we were showing them not only how to get the most out of The New School but also how to access to its community, at once evanescent and enduring, of adults.

 

 That's about it for this year...

I do wonder

The Met's new show "Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe" is about the Kunstkammern of central European worthies as places where early modern science and ingenuity - and luxury - met. The intention seems to be replicating the effect of one of these rooms: we're to marvel at the fascinating objects and, beyond them, the opulent resources and connections of our hosts. All manner of interesting stories might be told about how understandings of "science" changed over this time, or about how these technologies were part of international networks, but mostly we were just supposed to go "Wow!"
Wows there were, of course, like the writing/reading box (1570) above. But I was more intrigued by the bezoar - a kind of ruminant's gallstone, thought to be proof against any poisons, known to Europe through the Silk Roads. A reminder of other sciences, especially when you learn its an Ersatz one, likely composed of a paste of bezoar, clay, silt, crushed shell, amber, musk, resin, narwhal tusk and crushed gemstones. The artificial bezoars were known as Goa stones, after the place they were made (by Jesuits, no less), and thought to be just as effective as their natural counterparts. Tell me more!! Maybe it's just my professional deformation but I sensed religion - also other and different than we conceive of it now - coursing in the background throughout. Marvels, magic, miracles? It surfaced in one of the final objects, in a room of early androids: a model of a Franciscan monk which
walked, beat its breast, turned its head and mouthed blessings, from Spain, c. 1550. It was commissioned by Philip II when one of his sons was healed by a relic of Diego de Alcalá (namesake of San Diego); in gratitude his father vowed "a miracle for a miracle." The machinery of marvels beyond marvels!

Learn something new

Latest installment in our newer truer account of New School history,

by the mind behind the ad extravaganza in Union Square last month!

Tut tut

Saw Glass' "Akhnaten" at the Met on Tuesday. I'm only starting to like it now that the memory of the silly production fades; the melody (sic?) lingers on!

The final word

Maybe he's finally cracking.

Existential crises

In today's New School history lecture, we told together two stories we usually tell separately - the Matsunaga Affair and the Mobe. (Actually, we've never really tried to tell the latter.) Funny things emerge when you have to link things.

The "Matsunaga Affair," you'll recall, was the convulsion of the university in 1989 when Sekou Sundiata, a Lang faculty member of color, x'd out a racist image in a Parsons exhibition of logos by the Japanese graphic designer Shin Matsunaga. The New School had only just affirmed its commitments both to an environment free from intolerance and to freedom of artistic expression, and was just beginning to bring the various divisions of the university together, so Sekou's act of "resistance" plunged the university into an existential crisis. I had a lot of fun telling the story in our "Offense & Dissent" exhibition, locating an unpublished account of Sekou's as well as an untranslated account by Matsunaga. It was heartening also to document the many efforts undertaken in response, by students and faculty and administration, to address the New School's failure to be a truly diverse and inclusive place.

Artwork commissioned for the exhibition reprises the layout of Matsunaga's display 

But today we had to go on to talk about an even greater crisis around some of the same questions, which happened less than a decade later, the "Mobilization for real diversity, democracy, and economic justice" known as the Mobe. The Mobe was a many-headed beast, calling out the university for being a bastion of white male privilege in its hiring and teaching, the more outrageous for an institution that prided itself for being progressive; the very traditions and institutions which defined the New School were challenged as a "New University in Exile" disclosed exclusion and hierarchy at the school's heart. The Mobe pitted faculty and divisions against each other, and culminated in a a student hunger strike in April 1997 which was called off only when a student had to be hospitalized. Students gained a voice in some committees and security guards' exploitative contracts were improved, but the Mobe's broader demands were not met, and the whole episode left the campus community scarred. New School was still reeling from this trauma (the wounds so deep they were not discussed) when I arrived in 2002.

It's a tough story to tell, especially when you notice that it led to the departure of forward-thinking faculty members, the Chief Diversity Officer, the Provost, and (probably for this reason) President Fanton - and the closure of the hard-fought MA in Gender Studies and Feminist Theory. But it gets harder still if you're coming at it from the hopeful responses to the Matsunaga Affair. What went wrong? The responses were insufficient; in particular, efforts to diversify the faculty by bringing in faculty of color on initial 3-year-contracts became no more than a revolving door, confirming - the Mobe showed - that the deeper structures of the university were resistant to meaningful change.

A long article on the Mobe in Lingua Franca - but it happened on Fifth Ave.

Eyal Press, whose article "Nightmare on Twelfth Street" we assigned, criticizes the Mobe protestors for their "disturbing ... tendency to focus on what's happening on campus to the exclusion of the more egregious injustices committed outside its walls" when "much of what these critics abhor about the university ... is rooted in broader social and educational inequities that will not easily change." (Press studied political science for two years at The New School.) But can and should not the New School, of all schools, do better? Dimitry Tetin's commissioned work for "Offense & Dissent" (above) thematizes the challenges of working in a society permeated by white supremacy. Maybe we take these failures as reminders that the struggle will be hard, and long.

But I'm remembering also something Jonathan Fanton once said, similar to a point anti-racist educator Tim Wise made at a Festival of New discussion. When conditions improve, expectations are lifted even further; if improvements seem inadequate it may be because they have succeeded in creating hope for more significant change. Under his watch, Fanton said, New School was actually doing better than many institutions despite its limited resources, though much remains to be done. One could suggest (I did in lecture) that the Graduate Faculty's dismissal of the proposal "Rethinking Europe in a Global Context: A Proposal for Diversifying the Graduate Faculty Within an Intellectual Program of Study” in Fall 1996 seemed so noxious because of the success of Lang's 1990-95 "Program to Create Diversity throughout the College Community" - one of the responses to the Matsunaga Affair. Indeed, without the Lang program's articulation of an antiracist New School ethos the GF proposal might never have been ventured.

Longer, more connected stories show entrenched injustices - it requires constant struggle to resist what Ann Snitow called default patriarchy and the culture of white supremacy - but such storie also show the complicated reverberations of failures - and successes. The work goes on, and telling it like it was is part of it. Even the painful story of the Mobe, we'll tell students next week, planted seeds for a more just future.

 Two more views of the Lang courtyard trees, aglow on a dark day

Singularities

A fascinating Op-Ed on the early Quakers shows what a difference an awareness of history - and religion - can make. Its topic is pronouns, an issue in our time of belated recognition that the gender  binary does violence to some people - perhaps all people!- and that one of the ways it does this is through language. In my classes, like many others, I start by inviting students to introduce themselves, including PGP (preferred gender pronouns) if they wish, though this on its own can cause more problems than it addresses. Maybe it would be best for all of us to refer to each other as they/them?

The article recounts the early Quakers' refusal of respect language.

The Quakers ... declared themselves to be, like God, “no respecter of persons.” So they thee-ed and thou-ed their fellow human beings without distinction as a form of egalitarian social protest.

The force of this protest is hard to feel as English has lost the distinction between thee/thou and you. More than lost, we have inverted it! Because of their survival in Shakespeare and King James Bible-based ceremony ("with this ring I thee wed"), thee and thou sound more special than you. But while thee/thou was familiar, you used to be the special pronoun, required for addressing one's social betters. The Quakers' refusal to use it was heard as disrespect. I suppose a contemporary analog would be calling everyone "hey you."

The article taught me some more about how much English has changed. You was plural, so the person so addressed responded in the plural, too. What we call the royal we ("we are not amused") was not an appurtenance of royalty (like the imperial 吾輩 in Japanese) but a privilege of everyone of privilege, at least in addressing their inferiors. Fascinating! I'm tempted to imagine that referring to oneself as we in such a situation must have felt like the rest of one's class had one's back: it's not just me speaking. (In fact, I suppose it was the whole Great Chain of Being.) Maybe that's how privilege works now, too.

The article contrasts the leveling of Quaker pronouns with today's push for new pronouns, an effort rather to show respect. (No attention is paid in this discussion to the differences between first, second and third person pronouns.) Noting that some hims and hers feel left out by the proliferation of new and repurposed pronouns as they don't get to choose their pronouns (can't they?), it looks to a future when everyone is they.

If the rules of grammar are indeed an obstacle to social justice, then the singular “they” represents a path of least resistance for activists and opponents alike. It may not be the victory that activists want. Still, it goes with the flow of the increasing indifference with which modern English distinguishes subjects on the basis of their social position. More fittingly, if applied to everyone, “they” would complete the leveling-up progress of equal dignity that “you” started centuries ago.

Now everyone can be plural! This is more a grammatical than a meta-physical thing, but what if it did come to seem more than grammatical? What if they came to refer not just to each person's unclassifiable multiplicity (I'm not thinking about the teeming hordes of the microbiome, though perhaps I should be) but indirectly to the communities of care that help each of us maintain a stable identity?

I'm not even sure that's a good idea. The current efflorescence of pronouns is also a recognition of the breadth and wealth of different human experiences, something that would be lost in an all-encompassing they. But it's fun to be freed to imagine different pronomial systems, and the different systems of sociality they might enable. We thank you all, history!

Almost cubed

 

Is it because of the violin-like inner curves of these six-cut mushrooms or the 60˚ angles that they put me in mind of a cubist painting?

Bounty

Union Square Green Market!

Monotask

 

At a presentation on the learning styles of "Generation Z" today we were told to let our students know that multitasking is a myth. Nobody can do several things at once well; the mind just does one thing, then the other thing, neither of then thoughtfully or well. People generally switch tasks every three minutes but it takes twenty-three minutes to get back in the groove. And meanwhile, since so much energy goes to catching up, it tires the brain out: you know how your iPhone battery runs out faster when you have many open applications? We were encouraged to make our students aware of all this, let them learn how better to learn.

Of course we might need to learn some of these lessons too. As an experiment, the presentation leader said, why doesn't everyone here take out their cellphones (everyone had one, though one professor protested he usually doesn't, being a luddite) and turn them off (some of us looked confounded - you can do that? - but I think we all did). I did. How does that feel, she asked? I knew how it was supposed to feel - free, off-line! But as the presentation went on I realized it didn't really feel turned off so much as about to be on again; I knew it would be on again in forty, thirty, twenty-five minutes, unless I decided to turn it on sooner, which I wasn't going to do, heroically resisting the temptation...

When she said that the worst part of multitasking, what makes it so wearying, is the constant decisions involved - whether and when to switch from one thing to another - I realized that was what it actually felt like. Deciding whether and when to decide to turn it back on.

Nearly constantly.

Can I call that a wake-up call?

Shake on it

In "Theorizing Religion" today I projected this picture of my hand grasping the proffered bronze replica of the hand of Genesis P-Orridge in her "Touching of Hands" (2016). That work is part of the current iteration of Shrine Room Projects (all brilliant) at the Rubin Museum of Art. I'd asked students to go to the museum in lieu of class Monday (thinking I might be late because of a doctor's appointment, though that turned out not to be an issue). The photo was a test of their attendance - I didn't see that many when I went - and I was gratified that most students recognized it; some even grasped it. I'd unwittingly taken my picture from an angle which allowed people to imagine its caption making diametrically opposed claims:  

Wisdom can [...] passed on by the touching of hands

Can only be? Can not be? The actual text is the former, but of course the hand in question isn't actually a human hand; the only human hands you come into contact with are the others which have touched the bronze and will eventually, P-Orridge hopes, polish parts of it shiny. Tricky! It turned out to be a great way to consider the religious work that statues can perform, as well as the somewhat forlorn experience of religious statuary in an art museum - even the quasi-devotional Rubin.

银杏的叶子都掉了

Overnight, the city's gingko trees lost all their leaves, even green ones.

Make love not war

In our New School history course today, we talked about the moment when Parsons joined the New School, 1970. What may have been the first real Parsons presence at the New School was the exhibition "My God, we're losing a great country!" which Parsons students had chosen to put up in lieu of their senior shows, in solidarity with the National Student Strike after the bombing of Cambodia and the National Guard shootings at Kent State. The New School Art Center invited them to bring it down to 65 Fifth Avenue, new home of the Graduate Faculty.

That building, in its first year as a New School property (it had been a department store), had been site for it own dramatic National Student Strike related events - not just a strike, supported by faculty and president, but what became an occupation by New School students and hundreds of high school antiwar organizers, who made a home in the lobby of the building and outstayed their welcome. In the end, the administration called the police, and nineteen students were arrested! 
The highlight of our lecture was a presentation by one of the university archivists, who's been tracking down student activists for oral histories. She played us excerpts from two with student demonstrators, whose names she knew because they appeared in a court document from the time. Two of them met during the occupation and are still together! Another was a bit freer in making love not war. From the transcript:

Drugs and rock 'n roll were present too, by other accounts. I'm not sure we convinced today's students that their forebears' activities were as revolutionary as participants may have thought at the the time - making love in the "profs'" offices may have been understood as its own kind of sanitary act! The building where all this happened was torn down to make way for one in whose basement our class is held, but it was fun to suggest that all we were hearing about was part of the site's "karma."

Fall confetti

LREL Spring 2020

I'm repeating the course on William James' Varieties next semester.

Southward

The sun's made it way south of the MSM dorm and Riverside Church!

Emptied

Went to a talk on "emptiness and social action" by a giant of Buddhist studies today only to learn that we need to abolish the Electoral College, and shareholder-focused corporations too. Not that we don't, but I was hoping for something a little, well, more dhammic, a vision of selfless political action or even leadership. Still, it makes the need for structural political and economic change seem that much more urgent if even one who spends his days with the Pali canon thinks it necessary.

Living large

The "lived religion" segment of "Theorizing Religion" has become quite exciting. My old stalwart, Meredith McGuire's Lived Religion (ch. 2) starts us off. Last year's discovery, Elizabeth Pérez's Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (chs. 1, 4, 5) builds on it, the last chapter paired today with this year's crush, Tracy Fessendon's Religion around Billie Holiday (intro, ch. 5). We'll continue next week with a visit to the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room and an exhibition about arts and activism at the Rubin Museum of Art, and wrap up with William Connolly's "Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine." There's a little serendipity in there - I'd originally planned something else for Monday but will be late for class because of a doctor's appointment - but it all comes together to a much more complicated picture than I've been able to convey before.

Not that McGuire on its own isn't good stuff. She lays out powerfully the ways in which accepting modern understandings of religion means ratifying the victory of a "Long Reformation" battle against the lived religion of pre-Reformation Europe. But on its own, it can play into spiritual but not religious students' anarchist tendencies. McGuire is not saying that everyone has their own religion, everyone doing and believing just what they choose to, but students think she is. So it's good to turn to Pérez, who not only stresses the work in community of becoming "seasoned" (which happens in places like kitchens), learning new ways of narrating one's own life story in relation to sources of power, but reminds us that devotés invariably insist they did not choose their role but were hunted down by the orisha they now serve and are protected by. Neither individual nor freely chosen.

Fessendon's evocative account of the religion in the "ambient feelings and moods, energies, pressures, frequencies, powers" in the midst of which jazz singer Billie Holiday made her life and work takes the "lived religion" approach into a whole new dimension. If McGuire makes us aware that each person makes use in distinctive ways of a local repertoire of motifs and practices and relationships, Fessendon gets us thinking about where that largely unchosen repertoire comes from, and how, through it, religious sensibilities may affect people on the margins or even beyond the boundaries of a given community. Billie Holiday may have been Catholic mainly by process of elimination, but considered in tandem with the religiously (and racially) inflected images and institutions she found a way to make her own may yet have lived in a kind of communion with the saints. Her famous "My Man," which she performed for the residents of the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls (where she'd spent formative time between the ages of 9 and 11) sounds like a love song to - or by! - an all too human saint.

Peace literacy

View over Washington Square Park from the ninth floor of NYU's Kimmel Center, where I attended a talk on religious literacy and chaplaincy - subjects new to me but interesting. (Who knew that NYU has seventy chaplains?!) The speaker was Diane Moore, the coordinator of the HDS "World Religions" MOOCs I've been using in "Theorizing Religion,"

and she basically laid out that project's understanding of religions as internally diverse, evolving and changing, and embedded in all dimensions of human experience. Religious literacy, she argued, is more than knowing the 4 noble truths, 5 pillars, 10 commandments but is rather a method of seeing religion's involvement in life and culture at every scale. (The idea that religion is or should be private was laughed off as unserious.) It's an ambitious project: approaching religion in this way, as scholar, religious person or interfaith chaplain, means resisting understanding faith traditions (including one's own) as monoliths and also becoming aware of how faith traditions (including one's own) support cultural peace or cultural violence. Retreat into one's own spiritual bubble isn't an option!

Moore's call is in a to me unfamiliar place between a scholar's agnosticism (it's not my business to judge who is and who is not X) and the theological and perhaps democratic commitment to listening to all voices within one's own tradition, especially those most challenging to you (which I take from Rowan Williams). Perhaps I'm less comfortable accepting (is that the word?) internal diversity than I think I am.

Time change

While NYC still has many trees in green, upstate it's the final act of Fall.

Kingstonward

 Just a few miles north of the City, seasonal wonders await!

Communion

 Grateful for the intercession of city trees on All Saints Day