An amazing picture - the kind of picture we've still not seen in this country, despite one hundred sixteen thousand twenty-nine souls lost to covid-19. It's from Peru, where the death toll is over 6,400. Here images of five thousand souls are blessed by the Archbishop of Lima, Carlos Castillo, in an otherwise empty - or full? - cathedral. In the homily, which was apparently broadcast, Castillo criticized a health system “based on egotism and on business and not on mercy and solidarity with the people." Lord, hear our prayer.I used this image for a "peer teaching" assignment for the TESOL Methods Intensive this morning, with two fellow students standing in for an imagined class of native speakers of other languages. The assignment was to use TESOL pedagogy but in service also of our own subject. I framed my 20-minute mini-class around the adage a picture is worth a thousand words, discussing what this advertising jingle with pretensions to hoary wisdom might mean (are pictures just more efficient or are there things they convey that words can't?), then focusing on this picture. Students had two minutes to spend with the picture, then a few more to write down what they saw. ("If you don't know the name of something, describe it - the thing the man in front is holding, etc.; for this exercise that's even better.") Then they were to add some of their words to the zoom chat, and work with a partner to draft a few sentences about what they thought was going on. ("If you see it differently, so much the better; find a way to report this.")
We didn't have time for the last part, but my two "students" - one from the MFA Writing program, the other an instructor in Parsons' first year Studio-Seminars - were eager to talk about the picture. I hadn't even thought of how this image resonated with the word thousand: here were thousands of pictures, worth how many words!?! For my part I was happy to push their responses in the direction of some religious studies insights. The cathedral with its every seat full/empty was powerfully resonant. But centrally, once we'd decided that this was the scene of a blessing of covid-19 victims, who was the blessing for? Besides the archbishop and an acolyte (whose affect caught our eye, too) we know only of one other living person in the cathedral, the photographer, though through her/his image many others could know of it. The "students" thought what they saw was a powerfully symbolic act. But still: was it mainly symbolic? wasn't it ultimately for the dead? and weren't they, in fact, blessed? Given our thoughts about the powers of pictures, what did it mean to incense photographs (even printouts of photographs)? Religious ritual is worth a thousand words, too.
What might we hope for in our own, still covid-19-beset, land?
