My third class was my longest-standing course, once again in a new form as a weekly "seminar-plus" format. But it was also in an old format - zoom, since continued disruptions of public transit after Ida made an in-person gathering unfeasible. Turns out zoom is an excellent thing to have ready as a fallback! An exercise I devised for the first session of last year's online version and hadn't planned to use again came in handy, and indeed kicked things off brilliantly. Can you believe the sixteen students and I spent an hour and a half discussing just ten pictures, and still had to cut the conversation short?
But I have to say, it worked because it's a damn good selection of images I made, and because of how I arranged them, from the mountaintops of queer kippot and Ulura at top to the Brujeria altar at bottom center, just where one would approach, the smoke from its candles perhaps joining that in the picture of the blessing of images of parishioners in the cathedral of Lima at top center. Demogagic worries are corralled in the lower corners, though the triangular shape of the Kumbh Mela crowd (surely only a tiny subset!) also echoes the altar and points upward, joining sacred rivers and mountains. (It also mirrors the sign in front of the church Donald Trump is desecrating with his upside-down Bible.) The Mayan calendar and a George Floyd canonized as an ancestor (notice the hands holding the figure at a protest, by the way) connect us to the transformative power of time in a horizontal whose uneven rhythm of repeated disks and faces breaks the frame formed by the rows above and below. Pema Chödrön and the cover art from Radical Dharma, incorporating Yijing trigrams as well as a Black Power fist (and the seed of the whole project as part of the ESL Methods course I took last summer), frame the reality and challenge of new populations inhabiting ancient populations. And at the center, Islamic calligraphy (the affirmation of religious plurality of the Quran, as it happens), a challenge to figuration - is it text or image? - which manages not to be an image like the others: unframed, is it not part of the space behind the other pictures? The mystery of pictures is at the heart of the Lima image, too, for the incense doesn't just connect an invisible God to absent people through photographs of them. For these images (which also resonate with our whole gallery of images except for the center) are of people who died of COVID. Whew! What a complex thing religion is, morphing, pulsing, cycling, echoing and foregrounding and backgrounding, linking us to worlds beyond. And best conveyed, yes, by letting pictures do the talking!
