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.