CCP aesthetics

This image, reproduced without caption here, leaves me speechless.

All the time of the world

To convey the promise and adventerousness of a humanities open to the demands of the Anthropocene I recommended to my Renmin students an imaginative project on our relationship to coal developed as part of the Deep Time Chicago project. It may have been a bridge too far - it takes the form of a "guided meditation connecting your beath to deep time," surely a genre unfamiliar to most of them - but it's still there if they choose to cross it! It's called "Inheritance 2.0":

We have inherited a world shaped by the extraction of coal, along with all the costs and benefits that the life-style of extraction produces: climate chaos, acidifying oceans, loss of biodiversity, and the accumulating toxins in our air, water, soil, and bodies. But this fossil fuel was once a thriving ecosystem. Drawn from interviews with coal miners and paleobotanists, this is an archive of the earth’s past that lies in trust for the present. A guided meditation connects the sensations of our bodies to the temporal topologies beneath our feet. Through listening, we invite you to journey deep into the earth and back in time to the Carboniferous period, when the coal seam was an ancient forest.

And it does indeed invite us to imagine ourselves into the past. (If you have 20 minutes to spare you should really try it rather than let me tell you about it.) Building on a grounding in awareness of your breath common to many kinds of meditation, it invites you to go back in your imagination one year, ten, fifteen, thirty - the time of human lives - and beyond... Now your every breath is a million years ... and now it's three hundred million years and you are a tree - gloriously green inside and out, a lycopod - in a forest of fellows, breathing together. 

the oxygen you exhale is filling the atmosphere

At some point waters begin to rise around you, and silt, filling all your crevices. Slowly 

you can give up your commitment to the vertical

and gently settle, with other trees, sinking into the earth, compressing together, and eventually crystalizing, fossilizing... 

you are still and shiny and hard

And then, after some time appreciating the weight of time above you,

you share this space underground with agents of extraction

(human beings?!) and before you know it

your body is fracturing, it is in pieces... the others are leaving, one by one

After some reflections on the wonder that is coal, woven together with the stories of coal miners, their work and danger and sickness, you slowly reemerge, gently letting the light in.

start to pull yourself up from the ground, stacking your vertebrae, one on top of another. 

This can happen slowly, the guide says:

you have all the time of the world

It's a very strange enterprise, very. As I told the students, I had never, never considered what it's like to be coal, though I knew that it was the product of ancient forests - and I love forests. My view was that the burning of fossil fuels is a destructive thing we learn to stop doing; like other fossil fuels, coal would be better left out of sight, out of mind. But what if we extended our mind into it?

This project takes to another level the injunction to learn to "think with the community of life." Who knew one could do it - expand one's awareness in this way? Access deep time, even if just in imagination? It also lives out in an extraordinary way one of the definition I've been using of the humanities: disciplines of memory and imagination, telling us where we have been and helping us envision where we are going. "Inheritance 2.0" suggests whole new ways of understanding what such disciplines might be, and how far they might take us.

I think this material will be more accessible to my American students in the fall, but I hope my breathless enthusing about it can pique the curiosity of the Chinese ones, too.

Ostpolitik

In the context of discussions about anti-Asian hate at the end of last semester, one of my colleagues and I decided to write something about the predicament of Chinese students at The New School - which published today. She's a specialist in Chinese cities who also teaches our university's largest course on contemporary China; we know each other through India China Institute. She works closely with some of our university's many students from PRC, and has shared with me their particular anxieties and disappointments as US-Chinese relations have soured in recent years, and it seemed it might be valuable to share these more broadly in this moment - it was indeed helpful, if more complicated and challenging than I imagined, to give voice to them. 

The key concepts in the piece come from my colleague's diagnosis of the traumas these students face. My contribution was to insist that The New School's legacies, as well as the reality of its significantly international student body, position it to address such pressures more fully than we currently do. These students are caught in the cross-fire of often ignorant and belligerent forces on both sides, but as the larger world slides into a new kind of "cold war" it seems more important than ever to support these students as a space of safety, recognition and encounter. Isn't that what we were meant to be?

Learning by doing

Started my Renmin University of China International Summer School course today - Monday morning 8am for the students, Sunday 5pm for me in California. There are 50 students in the class, too many to see or engage through a zoom/voov gallery, so after introducing my 

Deweyan pedagogy, we divided them into six groups my teaching assistant had set up. I'll be meeting with each group twice in later sessions, but for today I wanted to make a personal connection to them - and for them to connect to each other. Learning by doing!

The results were grand. I'd told them that Deweyan teaching offers not rote answers but problems which provide occasions for thinking, and each group's answers to the prompts were indeed thoughtful - and different enough from the others that I shared all with the class.

(This is a digest I'll bring up at the start of the next class in two days.) Aren't we lucky to have each other, I mused, to think together about the challenges we face... We went on to consider definitions of the humanities, ecological/environmental humanities and - our topic - 

"Anthropocene Humanities," but I hope the pluralizing opener, engaging their words and ideas before introducing authoritative ones, made the issues real to them, as well as my commitment to our shared endeavor. Online isn't great, but we're off to a good start.

Pride

In a dry dry year the scarlet larkspur stands out even more.

California coral?

Instead of grousing about the traffic as we returned from our foray to the California central coast, here's a picture of something I found in a 

tide pool at Montaña de Oro. Don't ask me what it is (though I suppose I'm asking you): I don't even know if it's animal, vegetable or mineral!

Land art

Surf-cracked miguelito shale at Montaña de Oro State Park

Like stumbling on the remains of a giant stone library

On Indian land

We're staying a few days at an Airbnb in Lompoc, not a place I've been before or know anything about. Our host, a retired local high school teacher, filled us in on some its history, and directed us to a mute memorial to the destruction of most of its first peoples, the Chumash. The Franciscan Purisima Concepcion mission was built here in the 1780s, rebuilt after an earthquake in 1812. Secularized in the 1830s and gradually abandoned, it was reconstructed by  

the CCC in the 1930s. It's now run as a State Park, and its museum tells a truer tale of the colonial destruction of indigenous worlds in "Old California" than most of the missions. It still struggles against the romantic myth of the missions, though; if you didn't read to the end of the interpretive panels, like these below, you might not notice how everything ended in death for Chumash culture - and people.

I grew up - in San Diego, site of the first of the 21 Alta California missions - with a sanitized version of the story, Junipero Serra an at once gentle and heroic precursor to to my own presence as a European settler in this land. It is heart-rending to confront the reality... especially on a day when hundreds more First Peoples graves have been found near a residential school in Canada, all part of the same genocidal program to "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." 

The town of Lompoc has sponsored many public murals, one of which celebrated the old story, conjuring up the 1787 original mission with converts, heads bowed, around a cross. On the empty lot in front of it, someone, perhaps Chumash, has erected a statue, mourning.

Central California coast

Taking a little trip before returning to teaching...

Rush of color

   Green wave

Points of light

Plenty going on despite the drought ...

Breaking the fourth wall

At the end of the exchange of the peace today, the congregation assembled for a second week at the Church of the Holy Apostles turned back to greet those of us watching the livestream. (The camera's in the old choir loft.) It's something I'd recommended, but it still moved me more than I expected. Absurdly, perhaps, I felt seen!

Happy Juneteenth!

Intrepid lanceleaf dudleyas stand out among the dry scrub

Blazing

Several heat records have been broken this week, and this in an American West by all indications suffering a thousand-year mega drought. And it's only mid-June!

Global pandemic

Astronomical numbers (probably underreported) but this isn't over.

Time warp

Returning to my childhood home Del Mar not after the usual half year but after a year and a half - including a year when time in many ways seemed to stand still - is a little uncanny.

Add that today is California's official reopening - even as the nation crosses the threshold of six hundred thousand souls lost to covid - and nobody's wearing a mask.

Cyclical and linear time tangle and knot.

In the clouds

I flew in a plane today - the first time in 515 days! It was the familiar route from JFK to San Diego, though we flew farther south than in this map... and it wasn't as clear.

After marveling at New York's ever spikier skyline I was excited to see the land, especially in the West, but was treated instead to clouds of every shape. (We flew the southerly route because of storm systems we could see out the northerly window.) These time lapse videos 

(make sure to click the little box at lower right to get full-screen) make the ride seem a little bumpier than it was, but capture some of the Dr. Seuss-like wonders over West Virginia, and the almost sci-fi landscapes over New Mexico, where clouds - some tinted brown 

and even baby blue by heat and smoke - masked the land baking in a heat wave below. At times it felt more like Jupiter than Earth! We were following the sun all day, and got to see it reflected in the Pacific from behind the clouds on final approach to San Diego.

Grand prospect

Nobody imagined it would be fifteen months, but here we were, our congregation gathered again for socially distanced but in person worship. Even the hydrangeas in the church garden were celebrating. 

Like other "returns to normal" there were more feelings than one could keep track of, but the event kept one too busy to worry about that. Who knew that singing in a mask fogs your glasses - though my glasses would have fogged anyway from the emotion of hearing voices all around once again, and in four part harmony no less! But I have to tell you about the sermon by our indispensable rector - she who prepared us so wisely for the sacrifices ahead at our last service together, March 15th of last year, and at more zoom gatherings than anyone anticipated in the meantime.

She had recently traveled to see her son who lives in Arizona, and she'd been to see the Grand Canyon for the first time. Some had counseled against going - it's just a view you can see in pictures, they said - but she's glad she went. Words failed, of course. Some say they feel eternity there, she told us, something vastly older than we are which will be the same long long after we have passed on, and it is indeed very old. There are layers going back billions of years, sometimes with unexplained gaps. But it's also always changing and always has been. A sublime experience, quickened when she noticed words someone had written on the stand of a defunct viewing scope: you are loved. She didn't know who wrote them or why but in the face of the vastness of deep time and change, these words resonated.

The sermon worked through some other things, including the day's gospel - Mark 4:26-34, the famous parable of the mustard seed and the parable preceding it: The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.... The kingdom isn't a destination but the present, ever transforming and grace-filled, as the Colorado River carves the Grand Canyon. But, she said (I'm mangling her fluent narrative), here we are. And standing in the pulpit looking out at our reunited congregation was, she said, like beholding the Grand Canyon.

I haven't done the sermon justice [you can listen to it here, starting about 22 minutes in], but I hope to to have conveyed some of the wow of that moment, as we experienced sharing a grand 3-dimensional space again, after an epic-seeming period of nameless change and loss, a yawning gulf of time, everything now familiar and yet, we at some profound level know, nothing the same. Amen.

豆腐図書館

A visit to our local H-Mart today reminded me of my delight at a particularly felicitous turn of phrase in a recent Times article on Asian supermarkets like this one. (In fact the article starts in this very branch on W. 110th St.) 

The phrase: 

library

of tofu

Not my party

 I've finalized the syllabus for the course I'll be teaching for Renmin's Online International Summer School in a few weeks - a new one. Being online will be a new challenge in this context, too. I will not be lecturing for 3.5 hours each day, I can tell you that! But how to get students working in smaller groups, and to get to know them, remains to be worked out. 

It's a different class than the one I taught there twice before, and I'm realizing it may also involve some awkward questions. This is not just because the Anthropocene, as I understand it, is largely a story of the materialist culture of the anglocene ruining things for everyone, but because the Summer School starts just as the celebrations of the centenary of the Chinese Community Party reach their apex on July 1st. The "our civilization is already dead" epiphany of Roy Scranton, whose essays have put the Anthropocene on the American map, will sound a little different in this setting. 

Of course it's dead, I'm imagining a propaganda-primed student saying, but that's just your civilization. Our 生态文明 ("ecological civilization") will bury you. 

I don't really want to get into the ways Chinese culture has its own patterns of anthropogenic ecological disruption, or the appeal and pitfalls of what folks in the biz call "eco-authoritarianism," so will be focusing on the role of the humanities in any ecological project: pluralizing, historicizing, motivating, humanizing - and, as we recognize our bonds to our other earthling kin, posthumanizing. Renmin is a social sciences and policy-focused place, so talking up humanities is part of my brief, and I'll be happy to stick to it.

I'm hoping the wise perspective of historian Julia Adeney Thomas, which we'll read for the second session, will provide a platform for constructive discussion sans politics. Thomas, who has offered Neoconfucian Tokugawa Japan as a model for an ecological civilization, indicts all the regnant narratives for lacking seriousness about the "diminished hopes" which must inform our thinking about the human prospect, endorsing two others: a galvanizing "singular story" at the global level, informed by science and implemented by a kind of "benevelont totalitarianism," and a "democracy of voices" at the local level, championing local knowledge and ingenuity. A big enough umbrella for us all? Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Go with the flows

Read a fun recent article today by comparative historian Prasenjit Duara called "Oceans as the Paradigm of History." It argues that

Historical processes are not fundamentally tunneled, channeled or directed by national, civilizational or even societal boundaries but are circulatory and global, much like oceanic currents. (2)

Most historical storytelling narrates in linear terms within the logic and ever contested boundaries of nation states, but that's not how human history actually works - or how it participates in the broader history of life. Letting the ocean serve as the paradigm of history (how time flows, how change happens) opens many possibilities - and, of course, isn't just a metaphor. The Gulf Stream and the Monsoon, for instance, have shaped human history in all sorts of ways. Duara argues also that it is in water - especially in the oceans - that humanity has experienced the cycles of time, and how to live within them. 

For the vast span of history, humans have largely avoided interfering with such powerful natural forces as the ocean, which they considered to be beyond their ability to control or manipulate. ... Historically, cosmologies generated modalities of managing such forces, including the idea of maintaining an accord or adapting to natural energy flows, developing and manipulating them rather than the ambition to acquire full mastery over them. Rituals performed on a routine basis or to avert cataclysmic events sought ultimately to appease the forces of nature. The myth of the deluge as a foundational element can be found in almost every ancient culture. These beliefs, ideas and practices should be understood as experientially grasping some fundamental dimension of the human relationship with the natural world that is missing or misunderstood in the modern historiographical vision. (16)

Duara has reflected on these questions and processes for many years, but here is agitated by the way human beings are increasingly affecting the oceans, deliberately and unwittingly, in territorial claims and mining and pollution, etc. To counter this, and vindicate the ocean as a better model for understanding the "human relationshup with the natural world," he invites us to consider how the ocean is different from terrestrial imaginings. Unlike land or even rivers, oceanic currents don't just flow but cycle. Temperature and salinity but also the topography of shore and ocean bed affect them, as do wind and weather - and of course all of these are interdependent relationships. 

But ocean currents occur simultaneously also at multiple dramatically different but interacting levels. Currents include surface eddies (see above), but also deep currents (see below) which complete their slow circuit roughly every thousand years (wow!). Imagine understanding the way events unfold in these terms! (He gives some interesting examples from the circulation of ideas.) But there's more: we're talking a three-dimensional space, not the flattening illusion of terrestrial two dimensions, and everything interpenetrates. There are no boundaries as (apparently) on land, but a vast shared reality. We might be able to learn from cetaceans, who track multiple spaces all the time; sound travels four times as fast in water as in air.

Ancient cultures can't have known all of this but they knew enough to understand cycles, and that you have to learn to accommodate them. This is something Duara thinks moderns and our historians have forgotten, committed as we are to unsustainable linear ideas of growth. But in the Vedas, in Buddhist ideas of "dependent arising" and of course in Daoism there's something like an oceanic understanding of things which we could sorely use to break the hold of the ways of living which produced the Anthropocene. The more reason to protect the oceans from despoliation, not only as a reality - we can't live without them, and their "revenge" at our unsustainable ways is already devastating - but as an idea, too, a paradigm for the way of the world.

Is there still a way to reconcile the creative capacities of humans with the limits of nature? Can we develop collaborative and imaginative ways to identify scalar transformations and potential counter-finalities to move us in a more sustainable direction? The re-direction of historiographical knowledge to accord better with the nature of historical time and the sovereign planet could mark a step towards it. (21)

Two party system

That's Grant's tomb on the left

Out of time

Not sure if it was deliberate, but definitely memorable: just as the illustrious Dipesh Chakrabarty was introducing the difference between human history and the "deep history" of the planet, an alarm went off. He'd told us as he was starting that he was setting his alarm for forty minutes but evidently set it for forty seconds instead.

Breakout room ending in 58 seconds

Yesterday was the last Sunday our congregation met to worship on zoom - well, our rector carefully said, the last time for the foreseeable future. For fifteen months, as we've gotten the hang of this mediated "house church" thing, we've been talking up all the things it's allowed us to do, especially how it has helped us see and be seen by each other, wherever we happen to be, the spaces of our lives linked. Will we remember this special form of communitas, I wonder, once the satisfactions of being embodied in the same space return?

Distant call

Sifting through old photos, I ws surprised that this snap of the farther reaches of Torrey Pines Beach should have been the one to surface all my silenced yearning for the Pacific. Not even particularly pretty,

 

this horizonless and somehow unsettled view from 2016 just grabbed me! I suppose it works like an old painting, its little human figures drawing you into its conjured "distance." So happy I'll be there soon!

Forest life

Fun outing to spend the day with some friends who live in the woods in the Catskills. It was the perfect day for it, clear and not too warm, a respite from what seem like weeks of less clement weather, cold and hot and stormy. As the trees steadily shed new seeds and old needles, pyramidal ferns rose like housing complexes all around. But it was a humble Eastern (Red-Spotted) Newt who stole the show!

Whitewash?

At a dinner with friends, the conversation came around, almost regretfully, to politics - the "craziness," as one friend, a Texan, introduced it. After we commiserated - Republican-led Texas has reecently taken the lead in craziness on reproductive rights, voter suppression, and guns - I waxed purple about the days when American democracy worked, when political parties won elections by hearing the citizenry and so adjusting their platforms that they represented majorities, rather than representing the presumably fixed interests of a given subset of the population and pouring their efforts into suppressing votes from others. With all due respect, another friend, an Italian American, said, that's a very white view. Indeed ... it is. The playbook for what's disengenuously called "electoral integrity" was written during Jim Crow, when white southerners (Democrats) used every lever of power to prevent African Americans from exercising the right to vote guaranteed by the 14th and 15th Amendments. One might bring in Jill Lepore's reminder that, since the franchise was restricted to men until 1920, for most of US history most adult citizens weren't able to vote. Democracy in America has been stumbling from the start - indeed has been tripped up, usually by, yes, folks like me. But the ideals distinguish truly better from worse behaviors, and not every appeal to democratic ideals has really been an effort at usurpation. 

Worth untold thousands of words

Higgledy-piggledy but oh so welcome, my photos are back! I haven't mentioned that my photos library has been marooned on an old backup drive since my old laptop died in January, in part because I didn't know what the outcome would be. Past efforts to retrieve them all failed, and I was starting to fear the worst. A local tech place, laboring several days, was finally able to transfer the 97,000 (!) photo masters to a fresh new disk, though not the labels I'd added over the years. To make sense of them I have to work with date and context, like for this one, from 26.1.2015.

Baidu Anthropocene

 

What do these pictures say to you? (The second seems to be from NYC.) They certainly don't say "Anthropocene" to me, but I found them on the Chinese Wikipedia-analog 百度百科 Baidu Baike article "人类世 [Anthropocene]," which also includes the nearly illegible chart at right and the two further pictures below. The contents of the article are unobjectionable but there's one thing strikingly different from western accounts, and it's mentioned at the start and end of the article. Accounts I'm familiar with describe debates about when the Anthropocene should be said to have begun - with the invention of agriculture, the steam engine, or the "Great Acceleration" after WW2 - and this one does too. But it goes on to observe: 

2010年6月，澳大利亚国立大学微生物学著名教授、人类消灭天花病毒的功臣弗兰克·芬纳称人类可能在100年内灭绝，“人类世”将终结。

Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner, leader in the eradication of smallpox, apparently said in 2010 that humanity might be extinct within 100 years - thus ending the Anthropocene. That's not quite right... we may shuffle off this mortal coil, but the damage we've already done to Earth Systems will endure long after that, evidence of the crime preserved in the geological record long after we're gone.