Ornamental cabbage

Today felt like the first real day of fall - crisp, "sweater weather"! But some folks on West 12th Street are already gearing up for winter.

Exit left

The sun's setting has been moving steadily southward, and the point where it slips beyond the horizon (it moves downward from upper left to lower right) has withdrawn behind buildings again until spring...

42:6

In the Job class today I spent a fair - but not inordinate - amount of time enthusing about one element in the brilliant way Carol Newsom represents her understanding of the Book of Job as if it were a piece of theater. We've been thinking about stagings for a while, a very effective way to get students to try to make sense of the book as a whole, and Newsom's take is the gold standard. It involves two separate teams of actors in different costume and manner, as well as disembodied voices from above and even the intrusion of an audience member - very avant garde! But at its heart is the moment highlit above, where Job, having heard the two speeches from the whirlwind, says ... something.  

The final words uttered before this so very vocal person subsides into silence are, I gather, among the most difficult to translate in a text full of opaque and unparalleled formulations. The King James Version's penitential translation is familiar 

I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. 

but there is as much textual warrant for something quite different, like Stephen Mitchell's blissed out

I will be quiet, comforted that I am but dust.

and maybe even also for Ed Greenstein's iconoclastic rendering (which we'll come to at the end of the class) 

I am fed up; I take pity on dust and ashes.

Newsom makes the indeterminacy of this a feature, not a bug - though the audience may not know it. Consistent with her understanding of the Book of Job as a "dialogic" text whose last word is never spoken - passing the mic to us, whether we want it or not - the audience has to guess what Job said. What they guess will be shaped by the things they were able to hear and see, but the multiple voices they heard make it uncertain. It's frustrating, and generative. 

Newsom's stage direction is also, I found myself rhapsodizing, deeply respectful of the privacy of Job, the intimacy of his experience. The words are not addressed to us, and the experience they report isn't one we can have just by hearing about it. My students may have heard that as the familar comforting platitude that "everything's subjective" but in this case perhaps it is, whether one understand the encounter Job had to have been deeply and unfathomably personal, or the opposite. He's earned that insight; we haven't.

Writing on the wall

The wall where the blackboard used to be is now one enormous whiteboard. Students like writing on it, too.

Huge, creaturely hajj

Another gleaning from Kinship, a piece by eco-phenomenologist David Abram, based on a longer earlier piece ruminating on the wonder that is migration: "Wild Ethics and Participatory Science: Thinking between the Body and the Breathing Earth." How cranes, monarch butterflies and salmon manage their long migrations (over five generations each time, in the case of the monarchs!), is beyond our understanding. In efforts to make sense of it, we suppose they must have analogs to our navigation tools - internal calendars and compasses and clocks of some sort. Abram won't have it:

Clocks, compasses, and calendars … are by definition external contrivances, ingeniously built tools that we deploy at will. Metaphorically attributing such instrumentation to other animals has confounding implications, suggesting a curious doubleness in the other creatures – a separated sentience or self that regularly steps back, within its body or brain, to consult the map or the calendar. [¶] It seems unlikely, however, that organisms interact with an internal representation of the land in any manner resembling our own engagement with maps…. 

What's going on, then? Abram dares us to think differently: 

Instead of hypothesizing more metaphorical gadgets, adding further accessories to a crane’s or a salmon’s interior array of tools, what if we were to allow that the animal’s migratory skill arises from a felt rapport between its body and the breathing Earth? That a crane’s two-thousand-mile journey across the span of a continent is propelled by the felt unison between its flexing muscles and the sensitive flesh of this planet (this huge curved expanse, roiling with air currents and rippling with electromagnetic pulses), and so is enacted as much by Earth’s vitality as by the bird that flies within it? ...

By adding new gadgets to an animal’s neurological and genetic endowment, we tacitly induce ourselves to focus on relationships interior to the organism (how, for example, does the animal bring its biological clock and it internal map to bear on its compass readings), deflecting our curiosity and attention from the more mysterious relationship that calls such interactions into being. 

What is this dynamic alliance between an animal and the animate orb that gives it breath? What seasonal tensions and relaxations in the atmosphere, what subtle torsions in the geosphere help to draw half a million cranes so precisely across the continent? What rolling sequence or succession of blossomings helps summon these millions of butterflies across the belly of the land? What alterations in the olfactory medium, what bursts of solar exuberance through the magnetosphere, what attractions and repulsions, and on and on? … 

[P]erhaps it would be useful now and then to consider the large, collective migrations of various creatures as active expressions of the Earth itself. To consider them as slow gestures of a living geology, improvisational experiments that gradually stabilized into habits now necessary to the ongoing metabolism of the sphere. For truly, are not these cyclical pilgrimages – each a huge, creaturely hajj – also pulsations within the broad body of Earth? Are they not ways that divergent places or ecosystems communicate with one another, trading vital qualities essential to their continued flourishing?

While there's something intoxicating in this Gaian vision - and I certainly have no other insight into the marvel of migrations, a marvel Abram makes even more marvelous in his appreciation! - I'm not sure I can quite go there. At least not from an urban modernized living in which connection to place and the community of life is always attenuated by thought and, well, a cosmos of place-unmaking gadgets. But - in thought, at least - I can trace the outline of an understanding, as I consider distant forebears who themselves migrated, or circulated among places, reading wind and sun, the movements of other animals and the dispositions of plants and soils to know where they needed to be. 

Or maybe not so distant. As I notice days or nights lengthening and the sun setting farther and farther along a horizon - and especially when skeins of geese fly overhead, or I spot a whale spout far out at sea - I wonder why it is we should stay put when everything else cycles and swirls. Knowing that the delicate monarchs who seem contentedly absorbed in the plants here and now when I spot them should be part of such an epic story cracks everything open.

"Becoming Earthlings," in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations (Libertyville, IL: Center for Humans and Nature Press, 2021) , 5 vols, vol 1, Planet, 50-62

Maps from here, here and here.

Budding fall

As these scraggly echinaceas will tell you, Autumn's in the air. But the garden next to Grant's Tomb is a reminder that the last flowers of the year have yet to bloom. Quite the feast of pinks and purples!

On the move

One of my favorite writers, the trenchant and eloquent Rebecca Solnit, gave a talk as part of Cooper Union's contribution to New York Climate Week. It was delivered (virtually of course) on Monday, and is now available on youtube! The talk was called "Climate Momentum: The Things That Keep Me Cheerful In the Face of the Worst Problem Ever" and it offers ten reasons to remain motivated and hopeful at a time when climate doomsayers counsel resignation, despair or desperate measures. Her brother later summarized it in this graphic but you really should watch the talk. It's genuinely uplifting.

Engendering religion

Tried something new in "Theorizing Religion" today, giving the students a breathless 2016 Pew study called "The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World." It seemed a good way to introduce quantitative surveys on religion and their problems, as well as to start thinking about how religion is gendered in theory and in practice. To my surprise, most students reported enjoying; it resonated with their experience. Pew's American Protestant metrics of religiosity (affiliation, importance of religion, attendance at weekly worship, daily prayer, belief in heaven/hell) and participation in the

fantasy of monolithic world religions didn't bother them as much as the assumption that everyone is either a man or a woman. And only one noticed that the discovered "gender gap" is in fact pretty small, especially outside the US, and that the writer of the report seems a little disappointed not to have found something bigger. 

There's work to do! Next we tackle "world religions," Eurocentrism and American exceptionalism... and eventually we'll be able to loop back to how gender is formed (differently) by religious traditions, and how different experiences of gender identity/fluidity might express themselves religiously. But I'll be able to be a better guide on the journey knowing that thinking of religiosity and gender in terms of "nature vs. nurture," as the Pew study does, is interesting to them.

Animate, industrious and constantly communicating

First delectable gleaning from Kinship, geologist Marcia Bjornerud on what she tries to get across to student who arrive in her classes seeing "Nature as at most a passive backdrop" to human history:

Compounding the problem is the perception that geology is about old, inert objects rather than processes, activity, and change. So the first step is to dispel the notion that minerals, rocks, and landscapes simply are and instead get to seeing them as records of becoming. Once one grasps this, it is obvious that the world is animate, industrious, and constantly communicating with us - if we could jut learn how to listen. ...

[I]t strikes me as strange that the same public that finds the idea of geological time so alienating perceives the cold and formidable emptiness of space as somehow inviting. ... A combination of vainglory over our own accomplishments and deep-seated fear of our insignificance makes it difficult to embrace our mundaneness, our Earth-rooted nature. ... The rock record makes obvious how our bodies are part of a continuum from raw earth matter to endlessly ramifying life, an unbroken chain of living organisms that stretches back to the early days of the planet. How marvelous to know that our bones - minerals made of calcium and phosphorus, themselves derived from rocks - can be mapped one-to-one onto those of almost every other vertebrate, from amphibians to zebras. How amazing to realize that our blood is a distant memory of seawater. How good to feel in our marrow that we are Earthlings, fully native to this ancient, verdant, resilient earth. ...

I prescribe becoming an Earthling as a cure for a wide range of social ills, including angst, anomie, bigotry, boredom, consumerism, delusions of grandeur, hubris, impatience, neurosis, pettiness, self-absorption and other unspecified varieties of spiritual malaise. 

Despite my longstanding enchantment with patterns of sand and sea, I think I'm only just learning to appreciate geology as not only intertwined with the history of life, but as itself dynamic in a way the editors of this series would have us call animate.

"Becoming Earthlings," in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations (Libertyville, IL: Center for Humans and Nature Press, 2021) , 5 vols, vol 1, Planet, 13-20

Everybody's a director

As part of today's lecture on "Job and the Arts" I had students break out into groups of 3 and spend 10 minutes thinking about how they might stage the Book of Job. This is an activity I planned last time I taught the class but, running short on time, dropped. I nearly dropped it again this year, as it was planned for the end of last week's class (about Theatre of War's Book of Job project), and time again ran out. But I'm glad to have tried it today - and not just because it's the perfect set-up for Carol Newsom's dramatization of her interpretation of Job as a piece of avant garde theater.

Here are some of the ideas the students came up with. Who knew many of them see Job as some kind of dark comedy?

Experimental theater, modern clothing, Job is constantly bathed in red light

Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired, casting job as a fairy, God as head spirit of the forest

New York Jewish community setting; big rotating lazy susan, each friend has section of circle; set rotates between city (reality) and nature/mystical

Job as a woman, God played by multiple people/a collective of voices speaking to Job 

One man show: Job has to make the sets himself, do all the costume changes, suffering through having to change all the scenes himself; especially funny that he is asking “why me! What has happened!” after he sets it all up himself; have the friends of Job in the crowd, give the script to the entire audience 

God speaks to himself as God/Satan

Live improv sketch; actors should bring in their own grievances to the sketch to make it their own 

Set in a suburban high school; friends are all stoners skipping class getting very existential; God is cast as very cartoonish principal with walkie talkie and dangling keys 

Musical comedy set in an office; watercooler talk every week, Job complains about life and fear of being fired; boss is Elihu 

Each friend is in a different room

Brechtian or “epic” theatre style. Very artificial feels almost sit-com like… alienating the audience from Job asking the audience to think objectively about the material rather than empathetically

Comedy of Q Anon believers, suffer and experience horrible situations all the while blaming the world for their issues not aware of their own absurdity (believing obama is a satan worshiper)

Over-the-top debate style; all of the actors sitting at a table in “Job’s home”; God is the “moderator” 

We would put the audience in Job's position and have them play Job. Somehow puts the audience through pain and suffering. Hire actors that are good at improvising. Interact with the audience and make them feel as though they've had something taken from them. Give the audience an experience of loss and replace their loss with something “better” at the end

Elihu as an actual child

I'm not sure how all of these would work but many seem to me quite inspired! The prevalence of comedy may have something to do with the fact that the class began with one of the TA's giving a mini-lecture of comedy as a performance of the problem of suffering, linking "A Serious Man" and Job, but I also suspect that being thrown together with strangers in a zoom breakout room may have made comic settings easier to propose. I told the class I thought these were terrific but that if, in the impossible task of agreeing on something with people they didn't know they found themselves thinking of different stagings of their own - so much the better. 

After a short lecture on interpretations which take Job apart and those which put it back together again, I sent them on their way with the imaginary staging of Carol Newsom (some of whose work was assigned this week). Newsom thinks every component of Job plays its part, not in producing a seamless production but rather in ensuring a jarringly "polyphonic" experience which "shifts to the audience much of the work" of grappling with the problems being explored. 

We have work to do... but the work has commenced!

In the picture

The students in "Anthropocene Humanities" went to see Maya Lin's "Ghost Forest" installation at Madison Square Park today. 

One theme for the day was public art and the conversations and communities it sparks, and we'd read articles by Emily Raboteau and Mik Awake, two writers who became friends over another work of public art, Justin Guariglia's Climate Museum-sponsored work "Climate Signals." Raboteau is a subtle multi-media artist, weaving together text and photographic images, and under her tutelage Awake becomes one too. In their articles they include thoughtfully, even artfully constructed photographs of the public art pieces with their fellow traveler - and reflect on what the images say, what's intentionally and accidentally shown in them, etc. Raboteau writes that a picture she took of Awake at Rockaway Beach:

looks uncannily like the Andrew Wyeth painting, Christina’s World. The resemblance lies in the nuance of shadows and light, the waving grass, my subject’s backward-facing posture, and the property on the horizon line (in this case, a Mitchell Lama housing complex rather than a farmhouse) that appears imperiled by a looming, unseen force. 

Inspired, Awake rhapsodizes about a picture taken in the Bronx:

The light in this photo is a chiaroscuro broken apart by the branches of the giant tree to your left. That’s one of the things I do now, as a result of the time I’ve spent with you: pay attention to the light in my photos. A streak of shadow on the hill behind you merges with your hair, creating the illusion of motion or a trail of smoke wafting towards the sign’s message (INEQUIDAD DE ENERGIA FOSIL), held in tension with your glance, lit with interest at two passersby, strangers to us, as we once were to each other.

Awake and Raboteau are gifted writers, and got to know each other over many weeks, but I thought we could try a mini version of their process. I asked the students to walk in pairs to the park to experience Lin's "Ghost Forest," and, like the two writers, to take thoughtfully composed pictures of each other. It was a bit much to ask of students not a month into college, but worth a try. They had a ball, even though access to Lin's copse was closed to allow the lawn to rest, and some of the photos were lovely. A student explains the one above:

I edited the picture to make [name] and I look ghostly, like we are fading away. Like much climate art that reminds us of what will not be in the future, the anthropocene reminds us we might not be.

Belonging

Hot off the press, the final destination of my "Anthropocene Humanities" class, the five sweet volumes of Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations... let's hope it's as good as it looks!

Vanitas

I think these glass sculptures - yes, it's Murano glass! - are amazing.

Milanese biologist/designer Lilla Tabasso does nature less morte too.

Deep times

Catching up with my friend J at the end of a busy week, I had a chance to articulate something wonderful that happened in "Anthropocene Humanities." Our reading for the week was Strata and Three Stories, a work co-written by a geologist and a historian in service of what they call "Anthropocene stories" - stories that face the realities without succumbing to fatalism.

From Aboriginal land stewardship practices to Pacific coast potlaches, from the asceticism practiced in religious communities to communitarian visions of shared sufficiency, many human stories can serve as counterpoints to the dominant narrative in which human activities push ever more forcefully against planetary boundaries, or behave as if those boundaries did not exist. These counterpoints suggest that our arrival at this new epoch in human and planetary history was not foreordained, and further, they provide political and cultural resources for reshaping our societies to mitigate the Anthropocene’s harshest affects. If human activities are the equivalent of that ten-kilometer-wide rock hurtling through space, re-narrating our human stories may be one means of deflecting or softening the impact. In other words, Anthropocene stories are not just about how we got here, but also about how things might have been otherwise; a way of reading the past against the grain of the present in order to open up new possibilities for realigning our values, politics, and social practices to live within planetary constraints. (8)

We read Jan Zalasiewics' survey of the many anthropogenic transformations of the earth system which might leave traces future geologists could measure for Tuesday, Julie Adeney Thomas' plea for responsible but plural stories for Thursday. In the middle came the guided meditation "Our Inheritance," which I told you about when I tried it out on the students in China. I'd originally planned for us to do it together at the end of the Tuesday class but we needed all our time to attend to the staggering scale and speed of anthropogenic mayhem, so I told students to do it on their own time, and that we'd discuss it together first thing on Thursday before turning to Thomas. 

That's almost what we did. I've been asking students to contribute to an online discussion at the end of each class with some of their "Takeaways" and those at the end of Tuesday's class demanded acknowledgment. Representative:

The reality of the Anthropocene is almost absurd in a way. From the amount of chicken corpses we’ve produced to the amount of biomass lost, and the comically little amount of time we have left to fix it all… it just feels a bit surreal and insane. It’s difficult to not feel an overwhelming amount of fear. 

Do we have time to create a common multidisciplinary understanding of the Anthropocene? Do we have time to disagree? There are so many complexities in the scientific, political, and cultural world that I often feel we are hopeless in unwinding what needs to be done. ...

I'm feeling very overwhelmed after the discussions in this class. On the one hand I really like what you said at the end about how we must believe in the goodness of human nature and not just that our only purpose is to consume, consume, consume. … but I find it hard to believe that we really do deserve to be here, that we deserve this beautiful world.

So I started Thursday's class reading aloud all the Tuesday "Takeaways" (without names) and opened the floor. Students described feeling overwhelmed and discouraged, misanthropic and hopeless - but the Thursday materials had helped. Thomas starts where Zalasiewics ends, with patterns of unsustainable human culture, and gives us back freedom to act. She emphasizes a humanist’s point: reality does not dictate the stories we tell ourselves (44) and proceeds to reclaim most of the human past: cumulative history necessarily ignores all the things that people did that never contributed to the forcings on the Earth System (61). It's easier to imagine a future where humanity stops despoiling the earth when reminded that most people across most of time lived harmoniously with the earth. It's not our nature to be at odds with the rest of life.

When we turned to the guided meditation, it became clear that it had helped, too, a lot. Some students were familiar with meditation, others reported nodding off, but it turned out to be a medium we could relate to. And this particular meditation, leading us to align our "breath with deep time," going back 300 million years to become part of a lycopod forest and then slowly to become coal before being rudely reacquainted with human time through miners, was just what we needed. (Doing it for a fifth time in preparation for this class I really was living that encounter from the vantage of the coal seam.) 

Students reported being reassured by the experienced alignment with time spans beyond the human. One recalled the words Coal is a unique phenomenon of time and life. It may never happen again and added - so are we! Others discussed the line you have all the time of the world with which the meditation begins and ends, jarringly wrong at a time of climate emergency and yet in some other way right: ours is a part of the world's breathing. We are inheritors, and trustees, of all the time in the world. We're not in this on our own.

And yet of course we are not coal, not lycopods, not able to travel in time and across species! What on earth was the guided meditation doing to us? What on earth indeed! I played up its absurdity, then turned our conversation to how it is that guided meditations work. The "guide" speaks gently, suggesting rather than commanding. but doesn't ask our assent; their tone of voice and timing tell us what to do and we just do it. We don't ask if it's possible or if we can do it - we do it. Feel the ground through the floor? Done. Imagine a light moving up your spinal column and out through the top of your head? Done. Each of your breaths is a million years? Done! 

If we allow it to, a guided meditation takes us places we wouldn't, in other contexts, think we could go or even really imagine. And even if we don't in fact become ancient forests of the carboniferous, something happens. We feel - we know ourselves to be - connected to the world beyond ourselves in ways we couldn't think our way into being. It's not delusion but discovery. The arts do this, too. Discussions of literature often refer to Coleridge's call for a willing "suspension of disbelief" but it's at work in guided meditation too. If its first gift is the discovery that we are able to suspend disbelief, another surely is that in that suspension we find ourselves alive and connected in deeper, more mysterious ways than we can quite ken. 

I happened on this guided meditation while looking for someting else but am so grateful it found me. I hadn't had occasion to think of guided meditation as a genre of the humanities, or of the work of the humanities as like guided meditation. I started making the connection when relating this to the working definition of humanities I used for the Renmin course: disciplines of memory and imagination. But this time, with these students, responding not to a definition but to the vertigo of the Anthropocene, I really got it. Deep! And just in time.

11th St lounge

I love the way the street trees seem to have entered the building...

September blooms in the city

The way we live now

I got a covid test again today. This wasn't the fortnightly test required for access to campus, but in addition: a student in yesterday's class got a positive result this morning for a test he took after our class. The student let me know right away, and I later got an official notification confirming that, since I'm fully vaccinated and without symptoms, I need not isolate. However I should monitor possible symptoms for a fortnight and, 3-5 days after the potential exposure, get tested. That means it's too soon for me to test positive for anything that happened yesterday but I decided it wouldn't hurt to make sure I haven't been infected in some other way. I'll do another test Friday for yesterday's contact.

That's not the first positive test among my students, by the way, though the first one (submitted during orientation week) turned out to be a false positive. And once you think of everyone's movements within and beyond class and figure in the inescapable delays in testing results, it's hard not to get a little spooked. Results take time to be processed (usually less than 48 hours though not always), by which time the tested person could have been exposed anew or again! But really maddening is the sneakiness of contagiousness. We're told that infected people seem to be at their most contagious a few days before they develop symptoms! Since infection and transmission are possible even for the fully vaccinated (not that often but often enough to be concerned), regular testing of everyone is needed.

Yet in the absence of immediate real-time results, you never know you're fully in the clear. Even with our school's multiprong approach of near-universal vaccination, frequent testing, contant masking and extra hygiene it takes a dogged faith to feel safe. Someone's likened the situation to Swiss cheese: each slice has holes, but stack enough slices and you're covered. I get it, but when I learn of someone I've been in contact with having tested positive a day or two after the contact and days before I can know if I was affected, all I can see is the holes.

Update, Saturday: both Wednesday's and Friday's tests had negative results.

A new school

Haven't been thinking much about New School history recently, dramatic as our present and recent past have been, but today I had two chances to exercise that muscle again - helping first year fellows prepare a class with their first year charges on "What is (this) college for?" and helping the Politics Department welcome new graduate students and faculty visitors. For the former I offered a simple timeline of the milestones our official story (working from Marketing and Communication's history of steady-seeming growth and diversification), then turned it upside down, making each juncture seem messier and more serendipitous. For the latter I spoke of how New School had fallen into being a university, though conceived as an alternative to universities, but since we did this backwards, Trickster-style, the connections between the different parts are less obvious than elsewhere, and perhaps more open to reimagining. Perhaps a boon at a time when "the university" is (again) in crisis? But really it was nice to have a school to be telling tales about, something not guaranteed a year ago. I realized I'm excited to see the next chapter.

Great chicken acceleration

Anthropocene writers sometimes mention that the bones of the broiler chicken might be a candidate for the geological marker of the new epoch. Here's why. The red junglefowl Gallus gallus, a small long-lived bird from Southeast Asia, was brought to Europe already in Roman times. But it's only the results of the competition launched by the Texaco-sponsored Chicken of Tomorrow film of 1948 that gave us the chicken we know today, the combined mass of whose c. 23 billion specimens at any given time exceeds that of all other birds on the planet combined. The new ones grow much bigger much more quickly, reaching a full size unimaginable to their forebears within 6 weeks. (They couldn't survive much longer if they tried; Gallus gallus can live happily for ten years.) Mass produced and mass consumed, their bones are mass discarded, without time to decompose - optimally fossilizeable: their bones even have a special signature from the chemically-fertilized crops they're fed. A chicken in every pot turns out to be a recipe for disaster.

(Image and details from Strata and Three Stories, 29)

Solastalgia for summer

There’s a dark joke about this year’s extreme temperatures that has been haunting me for weeks, this article begins: This is the coldest summer of the rest of our lives. Soumya Karlamangla, who covers California issues for the New York Times, reports that the asked som climate scientists “Is every upcoming summer going to be even hotter than this one?” The short answer was: Yes, generally. One puts it particularly compellingly:

“The climate that your children are going to experience is different than any climate that you have experienced,” Paul Ullrich, a U.C. Davis professor of regional and global climate modeling. “There was no possibility in your life span for the types of temperature that your children are going to be experiencing on average.”

We've been staggering breathlessly from one new record to the next record, each effacing from the record books the apparent finality of the last. This dark joke offers some unwelcome perspective. "Hottest" is different from "hottest yet," and offers a false promise that things might return to some earlier normal. It shifts the perspective to the future we need to plan for, from whose vantage these times, which seem unbelievably hot to us, will instead look cool. This shift in perspective is upsetting, but in a good way...

Definitely getting

an

autumnal vibe...

Our help in ages past

A member of our church recently suffered a stroke, which has left him with aphasia. He's physically recovered but is, for now, barely able to speak. Speech therapy is helping but it's gruelling, and slow.

I heard today that, while he can speak only a few words, he can sing hymns. Hymns have always been important to him: he tells of growing up in a Methodist church where congregational singing was central, and he seems to know the words to all verses of all the works in the hymnal. The hymns, with their words, are at his fingertips still. The first he sang, having heard it at an online service, was a very old one: "O God, our help in ages past."

Another parishioner reported that the same thing had happened to his grandmother: most confusingly to her grandchildren she could only sing. Apparently different parts of the brain are used in language use and music, and in cases such as these the words are remembered as an integral part of the melody. 

We pray our friend soon recovers full power of speech. But in the meantime it's a strange and wonderful comfort to think that hymns, so dear to him, will support him on the way.

Summer melt

This is what the melting of glaciers and icesheets looks like - in this case, Austfonna ice cap in Svalbard; a little hard to grasp the scale.

Campus safety

Covid testing and masking at The New School, as site-specific artworks by Kara Walker and Camilo Egas look on. (Tests and masks are free.)

These questions that are bothering you, Larry

We're still on the approach in the Job course - the Book of Job is assigned for next (third) week. Today's assigned materials were the Coen Brothers' "A Serious Man" and the text of a talk-meditation given by Alice Walker at a meeting of African American Buddhists. I used these already last time, but that was in person. Today, on zoom, I decided to forgo screening clips from the movie and instead read from the screenplay, hoping it would bring back the images of the film. The scene was the end of protagonist Larry Gopnik's conversation with Rabbi Nachtner, the second of the three rabbis he consults, a sort of film within the film which might be called "The Goy's Teeth." Much gets lost without the cinematography, the jagged electric guitar soundtrack, and bravura scenes mixing shuffling voices and faces - but that's all to the good. Next week we confront the Book of Job as a text, and I'd like students to come at it with a sense that there's much that even this superlative piece of writing cannot convey.

Winding the clock

Many of the students in my first year seminar live in a dorm on Stuyvesant Park, which means they pass by Union Square on their way to school, and see the Climate Clock. With maddeningly misplaced precision it counts down the seconds before it's too late for us to reach zero emissions - 6 days, 115 days, 19 hours 13 minutes and 51 seconds when I took this picture early this afternoon. It's got some of the students pretty despondent. We're never going to make it, and then it's all over, we're toast! Humanity sucks!

That sense of urgency is valuable - we are at a turning point - but the dejection flowing from powerlessness to avert disaster isn't. It can make what we can image doing seem like no more than moving the deckchairs on the Titanic. (I speak for myself as much as for them.) So it was nice that today's class featured both science and science fiction. The science was a 2010 TED talk on "planetary boundaries" by Thomas Rockström and an influential 2018 article by Will Steffen, Rockström and others arguing that humanity has knocked earth systems out of the relative stability not just of the Holocene but of the glacial-interglacial cycle of last 100,000 years. There's no going back to the way things were for most of human history; our options are an unlivable "hothouse earth" if we don't change, and a "stabilized earth" if we harness our power to slow things down. Rockström's talk identified the decade of 2010-20 as make or break - ouch. The later piece gave us about a dozen years - make that nine. Falsely precise all of them but kin to the Climate Clock's doomsday countdown.

The science fiction, a piece contributed to an anthology of "science fiction stories from social justice movements" which subsequently blossomed into a book, stares the despair down. Its author, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, describes herself as a "Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist," and works as a kind of oracle. It's wonderful work. "Evidence," the piece we read, imagines articles in the archive compiled by someone in the future, trying to understand how, humanity destroyed the conditions for its existence and nevertheless... survived in a new and transformed way. The "archive" includes a letter the researcher, calculatedly risking the usual time travel dangers, writes to Gumbs in our present. A taste:

The way forward that Gumbs' oracular fiction imagines doesn't avoid the collapse of capitalism or the devastation of the earth's surface. The descendants live underground, in bodies that have been transformed. But frankly the idea of any kind of survival is a gift, and this especially: we can help a future happen by "breaking silence," by recognizing and celebrating what Gumbs in the latere book calls "black feminist metaphysics" tells us: in ways we can today barely imagine everything is connected, is sacred.

Rockström and Steffen see a role for the humanities in changing our "mindset," contributing to a "fundamental reorientation of human values, equity, behavior, institutions, economies and technology," but they don't imagine anything like as fundamental a reorientation as this. It's bracing but vivifying. Where too many other accounts are one or other kind of apocalytpic, seeing only the inescapable end of all we know, Gumbs' imagination goes beyond apocalypse to something glorious. It may take five generations of healing, but there's a way out of the disjointed and dehumanizing ways we now live, a way onward toward fuller, not diminished, humanity.