Ghost town

Went out for some groceries this early evening, finding the trees along Broadway in bloom but hardly a person to see them. Unnerving stillness.

76,000:1

John J. Thatamanil, a professor of theology and world religions at Union, has written an important essay on the moral damage the Trump presidency is doing - unfortunately hidden from American eyes on an Australian page. Aside from material harm, he argues, the president's vileness (on daily display in the daily coronavirus misinformation sessions) is a spiritual threat.

Daily exposure to such debasement, whether by tweet or by briefing, raises dispiriting questions: Is this the best our nation’s leader can do? Is there in him any redeemable character trait that can serve as a beacon of light in an otherwise dark and deadly situation? Under the cumulative barrage of lies and life-threatening misinformation, the questions morph and become broader. Rather than ask about just about one man’s peculiar degradation, we begin to wonder about human nature itself. Are some human beings irredeemable, incapable of learning and growth? Are we naïve, even foolish, to expect human beings to set aside self-interest and rise to responsibilities thrust upon them by extraordinary times? Under the relentless of assault of his pettiness, we are rendered vulnerable to rage, cynicism and a subtle, pervasive lowering of moral expectations for ourselves and others.

Breathing in spiritual pollution is akin to the breathing in air pollution in New Delhi. Just as air pollutants harm lung capacities, so too our spiritual capacities, love, resilience, trust and confidence in human goodness are diminished by constant exposure to such spiritual toxins as hubris, venality and hate.

I'm surely not the only one to have felt this for a long time, and grateful for Thataminil's finding such powerful words for it. But what's even better in his essay is the source of hope he finds in the covid-19 inspired goodness we don't hear enough about.

[C]all to mind the number 76,000 — that is the number of volunteers who have answered Governor Cuomo’s call to join the frontlines in the struggle against COVID-19. Many have come out of retirement and so are in the age bracket most vulnerable to this disease; nevertheless, they have stepped forward bravely.

We are inclined to believe that heroic goodness is found only in a handful of extraordinary people like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mother Teresa, but it seems that New York State alone has 76,000 Mother Teresas. Truth be told, that is a vast undercount. After all, those of us who are sheltering at home do so because we too want our neighbours to be safe and healthy. This too is a form of quotidian kindness, an unheralded and humble heroism.

Good bests evil, if only we have the eyes to see it.

And yet, as I used to point out when I was writing on "the problem of evil" - really, I argued, the lifeless half of the problems of evil and good - evil gets all the attention. Even if it's the focus only because of the damage it causes to goods, evil can seem more real to us than good. It's a genuine problem, since it isn't in the nature of good to try to commandeer us, to make us forget the world, to eat our brains. Evil will always win as clickbait. Something like that happened even with this essay, which some well-intentioned editor gave the title "Why Donald Trump is a threat to the United States' spiritual well-being." A better title might have been "76,000 Mother Teresas"!

Going live

Back for the rest of the semester, on our temporary campus: zoom!

Unreal

Today makes fourteen days we've been in quasi quarantine, but days don't feel like days when you're confronting exponentially growing infections. The shape of the graph - which you can see - doesn't change. It's the scale - which you can't see - that changes. The bar at the right is always the height of the chart, even in this morning's update from the

city government, where the final bar shows only part of a day's reported cases. Together with the striking absence of detailed information about who's affected in the US, this strangely stable chart makes covid-19 feel abstract for those of us fortunate enough to be uninfected and able to continue our lives remotely. Still, 222 more died in NYC yesterday. RIP.

Wave of the hand

A most wondrous book has found its way into my hands. Not yet published in the US, I've got the original Australian edition. It's called Sand Talk and invites readers to join a member of the Apalech Clan as he "yarns" with all manner of Aboriginal elders in profound and perfectly plotted ruminations on what "sustainability" can be. It's a sharing of the "how" as much as the "what" of indigenous knowledge, enacting the embodied nature of knowledge in social relations, in the land, and in non-linguistic forms like sand drawings and ritual objects. I've read two chapters so far; each is revelatory. Here, along the route of sharing "non-linear" ways of understanding, which also takes on kinship and Aristotle and cities and the first and second laws of thermodynamics among other things, he opens our eyes to the rainbow [serpent]:

When us-two see that arc in the sky, that Rainbow Serpent, we are seeing only one part of it, and it is subjective: just for us. If we move, the rainbow also moves, only appearing in relation to our standpoint. If you go to the next hill you will see it in a different position from where I am seeing it. The moon sisters were trapped by a similar phenomenon, chasing the reflected moon on the surface of the night sky, thinking it was a fish they could spear. But like the rainbow that image moves in relation to where you are sitting, so they could never catch it. Now you can see their shadows in the moon where they remain trapped to this day, a warning to all about the illusion of chasing fixed viewpoints. 

The Serpent loves the water because that is what allows us to see him, and he communicates with each of us this way, but he is not just an entity of water. He is an entity of light. The part we are seeing there in the wet sky, or in the fine spray coming off the front of a speeding dinghy, is just a line across the edge of a sphere. The line moves across multiple spheres that are infinitely overlapping, spiraling inwards and outwards, extending everywhere that light can go (or has gone or will go), and the Rainbow Serpent moves through this photo-fabric of creation. He goes under the ground too, because light has been there in the past and he is not limited by linear time. 

Ah, but is he a wave or a particle? I guess that depends on how you’re looking at him, but we could see him as a wave, a snake, because he is constantly in motion across systems that are constantly in motion and interwoven throughout everything that is, was and will be. (54-55)

Our spider plant's working hard to protect us from Spring FOMO

#ClapBecauseWeCare

Went out for the once-in-three-days grocery run this afternoon, and found these beauties. How I miss crowds! So I was especially excited for the 7pm "clap for essential workers," when all of us were to open our windows and applaud the front-line workers who make life possible. Not too many people up here, but we heard someome clap from somewhere across the subway tracks and that was enough - and then made out, in the distance, a wave of clapping and cheering. I hope we do this every night that the City is under siege, and that it grows and grows.

Pestilential

Tom Toles, brilliant as ever. But as people sicken and die - many here in New York - I'm losing my relish for criticism. The damage done is already so much greater than these ignorant people's cravenness and pettiness. (We're #1 in the world now, in covid-19 cases.) The disproportion between the smallness of evil and the vastness of its harm addles thought. With Camus' Dr. Rieux one wants just to say: "There are sick people and they need curing." Sick societies too. But how?

X

Day ten of our quasi-quarantine!

Spent part of it strategizing with the teaching assistants for my ULEC about how to proceed with our course in online mode, knowing that not all students will even be able to join zoomed classes. The online environment is new to us, requiring quite different kinds of teaching and different structures for eliciting student participation, and even when everything's worked out we've been told to expect glitches.

Case in point: I attended a webinar yesterday called Pivoting from In-Person to Online Teaching: Tips and Discussion, featuring the director of the HarvardX online programs... but it broke down fifteen minutes in for technical problems they weren't able to resolve! The speaker's last words before we were cut off:  

Have some empathy for what your students are experiencing in a very complicated environment--

Ha! I felt more Schadenfreude than empathy at that moment, but it was a gift nonetheless: I'm definitely not expecting to avoid stumbles now! I'm grateful to be part of a team working on an ongoing project with a defined goal, reassuring at a time when many other structures are stalled or worse. And at New School the students are part of the team, too. Already much of the way on our journey together, I trust we'll be better able to deal with glitches with humor and understanding.

Calm at the epicenter

Fielding concerned calls from around the world is exhausting: are we alright?!?! What else can we say than that the situation is indeed dire, and frightening, that we don't even really know the extent of it... that it's going to get worse as hospitals reach capacity in a few days... that government at various levels did not get its act together fast enough (and at the highest level is undermining the rest)... but that New York is fighting back... that we're working from home, have plenty of food, have ingredients to make our own sanitizer (but no masks), have gone out only twice in six days (once today, where I found these azaleas), grateful for New York's wide sidewalks... that sequestered in familiar digs and not yet knowing anyone who is infected it feels eerily abstract... what else? Of course we're worried, spooked every time one of us coughs. Reports of anti-Asian attacks frighten us, as does almost everything the White House and its boosters say... But Spring is happening too, and work goes on.

So?

Well, what do you know. Since I first became entranced by H. T. Tsiang a year and a half ago, procuring Kaya Press's Books' 2013 edition of his 1935 Hanging on Union Square (which reworked the original work's provocative design; the back cover was filled with the single word SO), he's made the big time. Hanging in Union Square has been published, and as a Penguin Classic, no less! A copy is speeding my way... but I'm
already anxious at how it will feel to see his strange words in that familiar typeface and format, on pages with that familiar texture and smell. What I really want to know: does Penguin (as Kaya didn't) include the several pages of publishers' rejections with which Tsiang prefaced his self-published opus? It's not that Tsiang didn't want to be published. And this authoritative appearance has generated at least one really insightful - if deferential - review!

Hotspot

New York City is suddenly a very scary place to be. Another day spent in the apartment and in the stairwell gym: nineteen stories guarantee a cardio workout, but can't really prepare for the heartbreak ahead.

Uphill

The Spring weather was irresistibly inviting today, so we went out for a walk around Grant's Tomb, moving out of the way of other strollers like magnets as we walked. With time I started smiling at people as I did this, to make clear it was a gesture of care, not fear... though, to be honest, there's fear in the background too.

Decided to post this picture to my WeChat account - haven't posted anything in a while. We've been receiving increasingly concerned messages from people in China, so I thought a general update was in order. (And I wanted matter-of-factly to use "covid-19," not the xenophobic moniker of our viral President.) I'm not sure I can say explicitly that official messaging on both sides is not to be trusted, as both governments are scrambling to distract from their failures.

Care of plants

Our philodendron, inherited from the previous renters in the Brooklyn apartment and now happily ensconced in Manhattan, has chosen this time to put forth a new leaf! Perhaps it noticed a change in the air; I've been home all but a few hours these last five days - didn't leave the apartment at all yesterday or today. Doing our bit to flatten the curve.

Floating

Spent the whole day at home, like much of New York City, indeed like many around the world. If we're told to "shelter in place," it won't change much for many people I know. One can get a little twitchy, like these floating gerberas...

The news in NYC is not good: over a thousand new cases reported since yesterday, almost doubling our total. (Several cases in the New School community were confirmed too, apparently.) It's cold comfort to realize that these are probably not new infections, but people who couldn't be tested before. As we are able to test even more we'll find even more. It might in fact still be growing exponentially, despite the shutting down of so many big institutions and small interactions, but it's too soon to know.

I spent the day reading about H. T. Tsiang, a wildly eccentric Chinese writer whose path intersected with the New School's in some interesting ways seventy years ago - topic for a Public Seminar piece in the works. (The show must go on!) It feels meaningful to be looking at what Hua Hsu calls a "transpacific" life at a time when so many openings, especially between the US and China, seem to be slamming shut.

Satyagraha

Went down to Lang today to pick up some books - the university buildings are closing soon, indefinitely, and we've been enjoined to retrieve anything we'll need for the rest of the semester's classes. I'll tell you another day which books I grabbed (I might also take another tour down before shelter-in-place arrives), but what struck me was a stab of sadness that I won't be seeing the courtyard maples putting forth

their leaves. Some comfort was afforded by the day's beautiful weather, and by the first magnolias cracking open at Union Square. A pigeon photobombed my photo of the Gandhi statue beneath magnolias with a flight of grace: thank you! The civilization-wide crisis we're heading into may need comfort and inspiration from every kind of source, human and other-than-human, earth and sky, love-force, soul-force, satyagraha.

Coronavirus'd New York state of mind (also a mango!)

Deck of chairs

Chairs and Directors meeting on Zoom, a reassuring gathering of concern even during Spring Break! (Indeed there were another twenty; people's images moved into view if they spoke.) Along with the fascination of what's in the background behind each person, there were moments of levity as one very little girl showed up on someone's lap (she's there at top right, no longer on the lap), and and then a tiny baby jiggled on another's knee... and then someone's cat processed by just as she was speaking, managing - as cats will - to turn of the mic in the process!

It was so good just to be with people, even in this remote way... for, of course, what we were discussing wasn't fun at all: what to tell our faculty about how to finish the current semester, all of it now definitely online. The pedagogical challenge of working online can be sort of exciting (at least for those of us whose classes are seminars, not labs or studios or performances), but thinking about grading, about students who have and will have various degrees of access, etc., is not.

That far, we could discuss as if we were in familiar territory, but that we in fact have no idea of the territory ahead became clear when the apparently mundane subject of registration for Fall courses came up. Currently that's supposed to happen as scheduled, a week after Spring Break. But will any of our students be in the right frame of mind to think about next semester? Will some of our classes still be online, and should some hard-to-do-online classes be postponed until Spring? How many students will be be able to return in the Fall anyway - we're not an inexpensive school - and how many new students are we likely to get? "Illness" was mentioned too, if only once, "trauma" several times.

It's often said, and surely true, that there's enormous energy and creativity already going into adapting to our rapidly changing circumstances: what new discoveries and synergies await! But the rapidly changing circumstances are changing altogether too rapidly to know what we should be adapting to.

Limbo

Spent the day in quasi-quarantine at home. The City updates the case count daily (with a major caveat), but weirdly no information is provided about where these cases are, or who the seven people who have already died were. I've yet to see a picture with medics in sci-fi scary hazmat suits, just lots of shots of otherwise crowded places vacant. My guess is that nobody knows how many people in the City are really infected, and there's neither time nor test kits for finding out. (Thank you, Donald Trump.) The operating assumption seems to be that everyone might be infected, and we should all behave as if we are: stay at home if possible so as not to be unwitting spreaders of the virus. It's a strange limbo. I guess we'll see what's happening when we have to.

Blue day

Leon Bibel's slightly surreal 1938 serigraph "Brooklyn Bridge" greeted us this morning in the Metropolitan Museum's engagement calendar of New York in art. Weirdly appropriate for a day when things got really twisted out of their familiar shapes. (But our clear blue sky was cloudless!) The day began at the Church of the Holy Apostles - I was upstairs for choir practice as chairs in the church were set some distance apart. As it was, not many folks came, older parishioners largely staying home. The Rector, aware that this would be the last service here until Easter at the earliest, gave a moving, thoughtful sermon. Things are changing around us and will likely never go back to the way they were before, she said. The Church will have to reimagine what it is to be Church in difficult times - but the Church has been doing that since the first centuries of its history.

"Social distancing" will be an enormous sacrifice, she said, but where there is sacrifice there is love, and where Love is, God is. We felt the difficulty already at the exchange of peace, elbow bumping and sending "namaste" bows across the room, and even more talking to friends after the service, a meter or more from each other. It's caring distance, loving distance, what Rebecca Solnit calls being "separated by love," but painful sacrifice too. It will be harder still with our beloved space shuttered. (The Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, too, is suspending most operations, will be offering bag lunches from a tent outside.)

The next stop in what has become our Sunday routine was Variety Coffee. Nearly empty when we arrived, it filled up a little while we sat, but by the end of the day the news was out that it, together with all the city's bars, restaurants and cafes, will have to close indefinitely. Weeks, possibly months without these spaces and their nourishment! The transition to online interaction we've been planning for college classes now faces us in the rest of our lives - but how can you replace the animal warmth of a bustling coffee shop, or a worship community in prayer or song? Love will win, but separation by love will hurt so.

Bloom

The winter honeysuckle on the western edge of Morningside Park was in splendid form again today, welcome distraction as we await information about just how dire a predicament we're in, and reel in anticipatory horror at discovering just how bad the danger our information-phobic government has put us all in is. I wish ill to no person, but it would be poetic justice, at least, were some of these enemies of the people (to coin a phrase) to experience that danger in their own lives.

Common purpose

Classes were cancelled today so, for a second day, I stayed home. Plenty to do anyway, much of it getting a handle on the logistical challenges ahead: even if we are able to reconvene on campus in a month, not all of our students - especially international students - will return. In the meantime, we're realizing that online classes are not equally accessible to all. Some students won't have WiFi back home, others won't have a "room of their own" for participating, and, of course, some may be in time zones where our usual class meeting times fall in the middle of the night. Ensuring that all achieve the course goals will take a lot of work. Lucky for us, New School is giving us the week after Spring Break to work these things out; lots of other schools are demanding their faculties convert their classes with next to no notice at all. I was able to brainstorm these challenges over Zoom today; 70 of my faculty colleagues tuned into a Zoom conversation led by our dean, an experience of common purpose I confess I haven't had in a long time!

Our apartment's a nice enough place to work from remotely but by the end of working hours I started to feel a little cabin fever. One doesn't want to overreact, doesn't want to isolate oneself too completely from the world... and the rainy weather of the morning had made way for a nearly cloudless sky, scrubbed clean by a brisk wind. Spring, it seemed, was in the air! So we went out to one of our nearby parks (how lucky we are to have parks nearby) as the sun was wending its way toward the western horizon, where this burst of crocuses (croci?) awaited, its own celebration of the joys of common purpose. We'll get through this.

Dear life

The "Religion and Ecology" class met online today, just a little ahead of the curve. It was easier than I expected - because Zoom is designed to feel like a conversation, I think, but in part no doubt also because my students are more comfortable online than I am. Still, it was weird to be talking again about Braiding Sweetgrass, the course text most grounded in actual lived experience of place, of bodily interaction with an environment. The section we read today talked about vegetable gardens, how people were domesticated by plants even as we domesticated them, how our participation in "honorable harvest" gives us a role in the flourishing of the other-than-human persons of our world. (Black ash thrives around communities who cut trees for

baskets.) But even as we discussed it, media (which we'd seen David Abram excoriate as the toxic fantasy that we can live without the air that links and literally inspires us) was making our human interlocutors seem less real! Weird... but I'm not going down that road. This seems a moment for surfacing and celebrating all the connections and relationships we have, and for turning that awareness and gratitude toward finding ways of maintaining these connections even in a time of "social distancing" and panicked fantasies that we could live outside webs of connection, vulnerability and care. Yes, that means counting on "virtual" encounters to be "real," an irony which we'll just have to work with. I know I feel like I'm holding on for dear life.

In other news

(why does it seem sinister today?)

Common cause

Overheard on the subway, a white elementary school student reporting on his day to his mother (I didn't get the context, but he was evidently repeating something he'd heard someone had said): "... coronavirus is a call from God that we don't deserve America."

That's the first theological account of COVID-19 I've heard (of), but not the first recherché one. One of my students confidently told our class yesterday that coronavirus was a fabrication, covering up the damage done to the human body by the particular frequency of 5G broadband (apparently a story circulating widely as we speak, originally propagated by an anti-5G site). Whatever understanding of causality we have, I parried, it'll be mobilized as people try to make sense of this still unfathomable threat, especially trying to make it someone's fault - whether it's bioweapons laboratories, the CIA, multinational corporations, presidential perfidy, pangolins, immigration, "karma," whatever; we should be vigilant about rumors, knowing that they proliferate in the times that try men's souls, and not let them distract us from measures which might slow the spread.

But really this was a reminder that for large sectors of our undeserved, underserved America, what may prove an existential threat is being denied as a hoax. (This student likely comes from an uninsured family who need to believe they can ride this out without medical care.) Of course those who've been told it's no worse than the common flu are as susceptible to catch it as anyone else, and indeed more likely to catch it if they don't take precautions. And so all of us are more likely to wind up infected - a communicable disease doesn't stay within one or other media/political bubble, the ultimate riposte to the fantasy of "alternative facts." Viruses must like nothing better than a society which doesn't have the capacity to understand public health. Terrifying.

Being caught between bubbles must bring its own painful difficulties. For instance everyone with family or friends in China has recently been hearing that the situation in the US is far graver than our authorities are letting on, and that the government response is dangerously inadequate: perhaps they'd be safer coming back to China for a while? There's much truth to this account of our federal government's response, alas, though it's clear also that the Chinese government is happy to distract its people from its own failures, and eager to argue that its draconion response was worth its enormous costs. Still, it leaves our university's Chinese students, for instance, in cognitive dissonant distress.

Consider the different recommendations of Chinese and US authorities regarding the wearing of respiratory masks. In China everyone has been required to do so, for their own as well as the public good. Here (and not just because we have insufficient supply) it is recommended only for those who are infected. If Chinese folks do what's right by their lights - for the common good, not just their own - here, they are treated like monsters. So to avoid racist reactions (also magnified for self-serving reasons by Chinese government media) they go without masks, feeling unnecessarily vulnerable as well as irresponsible as they do so. (It was partly with these students in mind that I decided to hold my classes online already this week.)

Even without rumors, even without defensive ignorant and self-serving distortions, there's so much we don't know. The more reason to cleave to what we do know - whatever comes will be better dealt with if we get it to come later rather than sooner. Wash your hands. Don't touch your face. Minimize group activities and try to keep "social distance" when you do go out. And be compassionate towards the people you interact with. Whatever bubble they're in, they're anxious too.

Amnesty for Job

My lecture course on the Book of Job and the Arts transitioned online today, and I think we did alright. More than alright: our guest speaker Brian Phillips, the founder of the Journal of Human Rights Practice, was at once mesmerizing and accessible - and wonderfully good-humored about the changed format, too. The thirty-nine students tuned remotely biz Zoom in may well have had a more direct experience with his passion and generosity than they could have in a lecture hall.

And what amazing ideas he introduced us to! I can't summarize all he did, but can highlight two particularly powerful insights. Brian was speaking about ways the Book of Job articulates things he encountered during a decade's work for Amnesty International in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Job is just like so many people he met who obsessively tell their story of loss and injustice to anyone who will listen, and have indeed in some way become their story. He cited for us Job 19:23-24:

“O that my words were written down!
    O that they were inscribed in a book!

O that with an iron pen and with lead

    they were engraved on a rock forever!"

As a human rights worker one is like a "porter" for such stories, he told us, taking them to governmental and intergovernmental bodies. (One has delicately to lower witnesses' expectations of what the human rights workers themselves can do, though, and must resist the temptation to become like Job's friends, seeking salvation in theology - in their case that of the international human rights regime.) But Brian's also seen that these witnesses, whose identities have become so closely associated with their stories, can be exploited. Others might help fix you as that story. He described a meeting with a Croatian government official hoping Amnesty might take their side, bringing out a series of women to tell of lost or missing fathers, husbands, sons; "you see," the official said, "they are crying." (I thought of the reality TV show of the State of the Union Address.)

From Brian's description I learned to hear Job's words in a new way - but also those of Job's friends. While it won't work to tell someone who has identity has fused with a story of misfortune and injustice to snap out of it, one can see why a friend might be tempted to try. Perhaps the friends, in their better moments, were trying to remind Job that he was, and could be, more than the story of the loss of all his world which he had become.

The second set of insights involved the mystery of someone like Job's continued life, in conversation with the several ways Elie Wiesel had made sense of it over decades. (Brian found me because he read my book, particularly appreciating the chapter on Wiesel.) Somehow, in their own time, some of the Jobs a human rights practitioner encounters do manage to live on. Brian told us about the Bosnian Muslim Kemal Pervanic, a survivor of the ethnic cleansing camp at Omarska, whom he got to know over several years, and whom he helped publish a book about his experience, The Killing Days: My Journey through the Bosnian War (1999). Brian read to us from his preface to the book (xiii):

He added another anecdote, describing a dinner with Kemal one beautiful summer night some years later, on a deck overlooking a river in Bosnia. Kemal recognized a woman a few tables away: she'd been the public face of the Omarska camp, brazenly denying its atrocities to international authorities. Like most people involved in the genocide she had never been, and was not likely ever to be, punished. Kemal thought of going over to her, just to say "I know who you are." But then he thought better of it. In Brian's telling, which invoked Wiesel's idea that Job in the end of his book had not capitulated but rather engaged in a "revolutionary silence," this was a moment of freedom, of healing. He didn't explain how Kemal had arrived at this freedom - he didn't pretend to know. But Kemal's journey resonated with Job's, even in its ending.

Brian thinks the Book of Job is inexhaustible, a remarkable resource for people suffering some of the most traumatizing kinds of experiences, and is writing up an account of it to share with other human rights practitioners. We were so fortunate to hear it!

Fly by

It's official: like many other universities in the City and beyond, we're taking our classes online for the next few weeks. (This week is up to us but, in consultation with students, I've decided to go online starting tomorrow.) I expect I'll be at school off and on anyway, but here are some things that caught my eye on an already half-empty campus today.

 

Vectors

Things are moving fast. While stock markets are taking a nosedive and Italy becomes the Hubei of Europe, New York's mayor has recommended that workers who can should work from home to ease crowding on the subways, and that those who have to commute during rush hour explore other ways of getting to work such as cycling. Meanwhile some American universities have moved classes online, including several in New York. Ours diplomatically promised an "Alternative Teaching and Learning Week" when we return from our Spring Break in two weeks, but the campus - and the city - already felt emptier today. I'll ask my class tomorrow if they'd like to go online for Thursday's class, and am close to deciding to go online for the Wednesday lecture class too.

The coronavirus is in the background of every conversation. I could vent at the way political dysfunction - structural as well as more recent - has put my fellow citizens at risk or the evident difficulty of thinking about public health in a neoliberal society but instead let me worry about the inevitable scapegoating and ostracism, by politicians and, to some extent, everyone else which are swirling around our feet as we speak.

Everything I read plays into the already already dangerous tendency to blame victims and indeed to render them enemies. It maddens me that we have no better way of talking about the spread of the virus than to make an infected person the agent of others’ infections: one patient infected X others. No, she didn't. But how else can we describe it without pretending there's no danger of contagion? X people were infected by one patient… is just the same thing again, just hidden in the passive. What if we said instead: The virus was able to spread to six others through a single patient? I suppose that makes our relative powerlessness palpable, but wouldn't that lead to more compassionate, cooperative, civic-minded responses?

Maria Melero

J, a fellow parishioner gave me this rock today. It was painted by a neighbor of his, a Spanish painter named Maria Melero, who recently passed away. J remembered that I knew Maria - she offered Spanish conversation classes which I participated in for a year when I lived in Chelsea, though I haven't been in touch with her since - and when her neighbors were invited to take some of the artworks she had left, he picked this up for me. Looking online I found many images of her paintings. The one below - I can't find its title or when she painted it, but that is her face - is lovely in so many ways. Descansa en paz, Maria.

A fragrant whiff of Spring - winter honeysuckle!

Naturally mean?

In the James' Varieties reading course today it was time for "The Value of Saintliness," one of my favorite sections. This is where you find the words (possibly the most frequently quoted in this blog!):

the human charity which we find in all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, [are] a genuinely creative social force ... The saints are authors, auctores, increasers, of goodness.... The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous. And yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another; and without that over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy. (Varieties, 1902 edition, 357-58)

These aren't the only kinds of saints James discusses, and it's not clear that the indispensable contribution to human progress here represented is also made by the saints who go to extremes of "devotion," "purity" or even "asceticism" (which appears - ugh - as a "manly" complement to the charming "mystery of gentleness in beauty" which the saints of charity share with "woman"!). It's these saints who seem responsible for the moral progress observable in James' history of religion, a history he thrillingly imagines as ongoing. Thank goodness for the saints who can't or won't play by the religious rules of their time and so nudge or draw all of us to live into greater "potentialities of goodness"! Saints are unlike us in having fewer inhibitions to the "yes, yes!" inclinations which embrace the world. Their "over-trust" inspires our own capacity to trust in human goodness (and doesn't all trust involve "over-trust" to some degree?). Risk believing in the potential goodness of human nature, including your own!

I've often dwelt with students on the seeming paradox in the claim that

It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are,

when they have passed before us.

What's "natural" and what's "possible" for us shift in a suitably "preposterous" way within that very sentence. How mean are we by nature? The lives of the saints change the answer to that question by the way their example changes our sense of our own possibilities. The saints, as James says, seem excessive, even maladapted to human life today, but are perfectly adapted to a society not yet achieved - and through the power of their example make that society to which they are adapted more likely as they go.

It's quite an optimistic view, really - that human nature is changeable in a good direction, and liable to continue moving in that good direction given half a chance. (Institutional religion doesn't help much, in his view, but science and democracy will.) Despite James' commitment to individuals and varieties. students often balk at the moral realism of this. Isn't "good" an unfounded value judgment, subjective, relative, different for each person or era? But rereading these words in 2020 I was struck by another question. Can there be saints of evil?

impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities

of [evil] which but for them would lie forever dormant.

It is not possible to be quite as [good] as we naturally are,

when they have passed before us...

I'm thinking of course of the culture of moral cynicism and tribalism which animates the "populisms" of our day, and of our president, in particular. He and his followers think goodness is usually just "virtue signalling": only losers don't see through that, don't see that human goodness is a con. We'll all be better off accepting greed, selfishness, partiality, cruelty, even cheating as human nature: you know what you're dealing with. Don't trust anyone - including yourself! - to be so capable of goodness as people say. Lose the inhibitions when you're inclined to be mean. It's terrifying...

In the beginnings

As we weigh the "Lynn White thesis" that the "dominion clause" (Genesis 1:26, 28) has made Christianity uniquely anthropocentric and so uniquely destructive of the living environment in "Religion and Ecology," I usually have students read through the creation accounts in the first two chapters of Genesis. This is inevitably exciting since everyone's heard about these texts but few have read them in all their strange glory; for most students it's news even that there are two accounts!

This year I split them up. We read the first (Genesis 1:1-2:3) on Tuesday, with Lynn White's eponymous essay and Mari Joerstad's account of personalistic forces in Genesis 1. Today we read the second (2:4-25), with a retrieval of Genesis 1-2 by Mmapula Diana Kebaneilwe, an ecowomanist theologian from Botswana, and a queer reckoning with the narrative exclusions of Lynn White's argument. Taking time over them this way led to many more discoveries - for me, too. Everyone knows (well...) that in Genesis 1 God creates humanity in his image, "male and female" (1:27), whereas in the better known rendering of Genesis 2 the LORD God creates the man first, and the woman later as a helper - from his rib. But somehow I'd forgotten that the woman is created only after the man is offered every sort of animal companion, created for this purpose out of the same ground.

¹⁸ Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” ¹⁹ So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. ²⁰ The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. (NRSV)

In the account of Genesis 1 the animals are of course created before humans. For that matter, in the Genesis 2 account, even the trees are created after the man is (2:8-9)! The second account is not just patriarchal but profoundly anthropocentric. None of the animist moments Joerstad identifies in Genesis 1 has a correlate in Genesis 2. The patriarchal dominionist view White critiques helps itself to bits of both accounts - those which maximize the distance between man and everything else, beginning with woman. Man is created to rule the rest of creation - a creation in need of rule. Forgotten are all the parts which suggest that humanity was part of an ecosystem, a tiller of soil, a steward of creation.

What other stories might one tell if one paid attention to the other parts? Kebaneilwe's essay does this, focusing on Genesis 1's insistence that each of God's creations was good, indeed very good. Nothing is deemed good in Genesis 2's account, but there is "It is not good that the man should be alone" (2:18). From Genesis 1 we should have learned that no one human being alone can be the image of God (the image was plural!), certainly not one kind of human in contrast to another! Thinking this through, Kebaneilwe arrives at a dazzling hope.

I believe that we should concern ourselves with the questions of “what does goodness mean?” What does it imply and what is its significance with regard to the relationship between the creator himself and all of his creation? Further still, what is the significance of the said goodness with regard to the relationship between human beings themselves, as male and female as well as between human beings and the rest of creation: animals, plants, land and seas, birds and everything that exists? There is something that needs attention in the idea of an overall good creation. That is, there will be liberation for all of creation if human beings could ponder the view that in “all things” there is divine goodness as suggested by the creator at the end of every creative activity as suggested by Gen 1-2. (Mmapala Diana Kebaneilwe, "The good creation: An ecowomanist reading of Genesis 1-2," Old testam. essays 28/3 (2015): 694-703, 701)

Students had not noticed the absence of the good in Genesis 2 but some spotted what seemed to them a suspicious absence of evil in Genesis 1. Zeroing in on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (2:9), the one the eating from which would introduce death into the world (2:17), they theorized that God got bored while resting on the seventh day, introducing evil, death, knowledge, gender hierarchy. But this was all for the best, one student suggested, because you can't have good without evil.

This idea, as you may know, is one of my all-time pet peeves and I let loose. One of the most baneful and consequential mistakes of western thought has been the idea that you can't have good without evil, or even know it! Genesis 1 is all about the obvious goodness of good, and it's in that joyous discovery that Kebaneilwe finds the hope for an end to oppression. You don't need contrast of that sort; goods complement each other, as when humans are "created in God's image, male and female"! Our problem is that we don't trust our experiences of goodness; we lose track of our natural attunement to the world, we make evil necessary! And once that idea is in place, complementary relations like those of the male and female human, or the human and the other creations, become unrecognizable, distorted into hierarchical, even qualitative oppositions!!

I think I got a little carried away; the class seemed a little stunned! I'm sure we'll return to this, perhaps when we wander into Daoism in a few weeks...

Provisions

I got them because they were on sale, I swear! I mean, who doesn't need a fortnight's supply of lentils, dried chickpeas, pasta and canned tomatoes in their larder? But seriously: it's hard to know what to do. Tomorrow it's arborio, onions, cheese, peanut butter, pumpernickel and oranges!

Not ready to dish

Some of the things we didn't get at an antique market in Rhinebeck...