Woman-hating land

A terrifying article in the Guardian shows just what a dangerous place much of the US seems to be on the way to becoming as the Trump-tainted Supreme Court takes up abortion. Without the cover of Roe v. Wade, women would in a majority of states not only be unable to make decisions about their own pregnancies, but liable to criminal prosecution in a horrifying number of ways if their pregnancies don't come to term. An observation of Ellen Willis', quoted in Michelle Goldberg's column in the NYTimes, rings grimly truer than ever: "the central question in the abortion debate is not whether a fetus is a person, but whether a woman is."

Holidaze

Advent caught me unprepared this year, coming so early - just after the Thanksgiving and "Black Friday" and even before "Cyber Monday" and "Giving Tuesday"- though each of those has been announcing its arrival for a long time. It's hard to believe there was ever a time when Christmas shopping didn't jostle with Thanksgiving and even Hallowe'en for attention. Go figure: in this year of disjointed time and strange eclipses, Advent interrupts the jangling bells of commercial Christmas!

Losing all measure of pace

Among the other things we're juggling at the moment, next academic year's curriculum is being put together. I'm toying with the idea of teaching a religion and ecology course focused on trees - "The religion of trees," perhaps? Modeled in some ways on 2017's "Not to scale: on sacred mountains," it would give me a chance to dive deep into the growing literature on the sentience of trees, which readers of this blog know I find irresistably compelling. This goes way way back, Robert Frost's "The Sound of Trees" fascinated me already as a child:

I wonder about the trees.

Why do we wish to bear

Forever the noise of these

More than another noise

So close to our dwelling place?

We suffer them by the day

Till we lose all measure of pace,

And fixity in our joys,

And acquire a listening air.

They are that that talks of going

But never gets away;

And that talks no less for knowing,

As it grows wiser and older,

That now it means to stay. ...

Cumulative

The Time Lapse function on my smartphone is making me fall in love all over again with the vistas out our west-facing window. This filmlet was shot on a whim as clouds scudded in and out of blue, and, besides providing glimpses of the deep blue sky above (with its own cloud formations), confirms what this exercise has helped me appreciate: clouds are not just always on the move but ever changing shape.

Leaf shower

Wind after rain makes for a cascade of fall color...

... and each leaf has a story to tell, if we but knew how to hear it.

Wei to go

Complementing Monday's medieval Christian marvel in the daily calendar of the Metropolitan Museum is today's Buddhist treasure, a gilt bronze altar to Maitreya, dated 524 CE. This, at left, isn't the image shown but a picture of a detail I found online, a supporting bodhisattva below the central figure on an angle. I've been besotted by the grace (and beatific smiles) of Wei Dynasty Buddhist art since encountering it in Korean-inspired statues in the temples of Japan's ancient capital Nara.

Pie

Thanksgiving at Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen. Helping the usual

volunteers, parishioners portioned several dozen pumpkin pies...

Because of covid, meals for the last year and a half have been assembled by small teams inside and offered to hundreds of guests a day in to-go boxes from the church steps. (This is in addition to the food pantry program which offers hundreds of families bags of food three days a week.) On holidays this is supplemented by a dessert, distributed a few meters farther down. Costs of food, you'll have heard, are going up, so demand for both soup kitchen and food pantry keep rising, and costs too. Worth a donation!

Real presence

Our daily calender from the Metropolitan Museum of Art had this image of the 800-year old "Tabernacle of Cherves" a few days ago. If I'm not mistaken, it's prominently displayed but in a place I'm always passing through on my way elsewhere (the Gubbio Studiolo or the American Court), so this is the first time I've really spent with it. An artistic marvel it's also full of the kind of intricate theological symbolism that makes me especially fond of Romanesque art. As a tabernacle from before it was obligatory to have a special space to store the consecrated Host, I learned from the somewhat brief decsription online, its imagery is focused on the physical presence. 

of Christ after the Resurrection. The central image is the deposition of the cross, which one can imagine moving right into the communion wafers stored below. The roundels in the door are apparently subtly paired: the left begins with Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and proceeds with the women in the empty tomb as Christ rescues the blessed from Hell. At right, noli me tangere yields to Christ's insistence that "doubting" Thomas" touch his wounds. continuing with the breaking of bread at Emmaus and ... something, not described. Can't wait to be in its presence again soon! But in the meantime I'm enjoying what I wouldn't be able to see there, this image of its parts opened up, which are also all the parts surrounding the Host when closed.

Vaccine-proof

I haven't posted about covid for a while, because I'm living in a place rendered effectively safe by widespread vaccination and mask-wearing. (Indeed, we were able to get our vaccine boosters on Sunday.) But the virus continues to sicken and kill. The Times reports 

As of Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had recorded 386,233 deaths involving Covid-19 in 2021, compared with 385,343 in 2020.

These are staggering numbers, both of them. And of course 2021 isn't over yet; Thanksgiving and the winter holiday season are just around the corner. For one reason or another only 60% of Americans have at least one shot, so many more will needlessly die. Shame and sorrow...

Traffic pattern

Make sure to click the full screen button at bottom right to catch all the people, bikes, motorbikes, cars, buses, trains and cloud systems!

AAR 2021

I attended this year's annual meeting of the AAR virtually again this year. The convention was in person, but it was in Texas, and many of us opted not to go, first for covid safety reasons and then in protest at the state Republicans' brazenly barbaric laws on voting and reproductive rights. Enough, in fact, that most of the sessions were over zoom. While I miss the camraderie of being together with people, it'll have to wait another year. Meanwhile, I was able to attend plenty of interesting panels. For the first year in a while, my eye was caught by many panels sponsored by the Philosophy of Religion section, though I'm not sure if this year's range of themes bespeaks a transformation of the field as younger scholars reach beyond the tired old canon to urgent new questions and interlocutors - or its dissolution. Someone mentioned that the number of job searches in "Philosophy of Religion" had fallen eightfold in recent years, and wondered if there was still a space in the academic study of religion for "normative" rather than "descriptive" study. I'm not comfortable with either of those terms: every description is normative, and every normative view involved in various, often unarticulated, descriptive assertions. And don't we all see the normative (!) blindness of the claim that one can and should be "normative" without specifying context, community, commitments?

Particularly fruitful discussions for me were a celebration of the collection Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion, which "stag[es] a conversation with Black, Indigenous, and decolonial studies" by engaging scholars in these fields who are (also) doing philosophy of religion, and a round robin of participants in a project called Global Critical Philosophy of Religion, which has been exploring ways of reimagining the field of comparative philosophy beyond western assumptions about what philosophy is. Normative, all of them, but committed to particularity, history, plurality, justice.

Whether or not the philosophy of religion will get the second act which these openings point to is another question but it was exciting to learn of people's efforts to get there. Both "religion" and "philosophy" are terms which exclude and distort. The old philosophy of religion's abstracted Christian questions misrepresent the life even of Christianity! But a new philosophy of religion which is decentered and reflexive seems possible - and valuable.

Foliage

The eleventh and final "2021 I LOVE NY Fall Foliage Report" promised VIBRANT PEAK FOLIAGE REACHING FINAL DESTINATIONS ON LONG ISLAND AND NEW YORK CITY. Central Park got the memo!

Guns kill people

A woeful verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. Like many I'm put in mind of another seventeen-year-old American involved in gun vigilantism, though this one was killed: Trayvon Martin. The arguments of Kelly Brown Douglas' Stand Your Ground is as necessary now as it was then. And the desperate wish, spotted on Facebook, resounds: that this land might care as much about innocent black boys as it does about guilty white ones.

I can't stop thinking that, before Rittenhouse entered the scene, the protests and unrest in Kenosha and elsewhere were charged but never lethal. In a summer of protest, nobody was killed. Openly carrying a gun with him, he brought the possibility of lethal force to the scene. And yet somehow the jury was persuaded that he was right to imagine his life was threatened. By the possibility someone else might use the gun he brought against him! It's absurd. He brought an assault weapon to a scene and, to prevent others from using it to kill him, claimed to have killed them in "self-defense." They died so he wouldn't be harmed by the danger he brought to the scene - and the jury (and the Wisconsin law) bought it. It's unreal.

Not unreal: Joseph Rosenbaum is dead. Anthony Huber is dead. Gaige Grosskreutz was seriously injured. 

And the man responsible, with a gun he wasn't entitled to carry and wasn't trained to use in a state he didn't even live in, walks out scott-free - and is lionized by violence-loving white men itching for a piece of the action themselves. If the conviction of Derek Chauvin showed what justice would look like if our system worked, this verdict is a reminder that the system remains unjust. Before it's fixed, if ever it can be, we'll have more Rittenhouses, and more Rosenbaums, Hubers and Grosskreutzes. Weep for this death-dealing land.

Eclipsed

I didn't see the longest-in-centuries lunar eclipse - it was mostly overcast in NYC, and it was the middle of the night! But I enjoyed this view of the celestial event over uncharacteristically clear Shanghai.

Fast cash

It isn't everyday you can make a pile of money for a good cause by doing nothing, but today was such a day! Simply by fasting I was able to contribute to the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen. And like many participants, my supporters even helped me exceed my target! (The overall target of $100,000 was surpassed by more than 12%.) My sponsors were few but select, generous and intercontinental, representing Asia, Australia, Europe and the both coasts of the US. Hungry New Yorkers thank you!

Fall semester

The semester's 12th week is drawing to a close and everyone's exhausted. There are three and a half more to go (thanks to turkey day) but everyone's eyes are beginning to lose their focus. Time to ask: great as it has been to be in person (mostly), how much has this semester, too, been a covid casualty?

Hope of a tree

How didn't I know that Marc Chagall had designed a huge tapestry about Job? It was commissioned by the Rehabilitation Center of Chicago; dated 1985, it's one of his last works. Familiar characters from Job's story are on the right and bottom but the upper left is filled by a crowd of people. What's happening? Its inspiration is apparently one of my favorite lines of the text, intriguing and even inspiring in this context:

For there is hope of a tree if it be cut down, that it will sprout again. And that the tender branch thereof will not cease. (14:7)

Some see the gathering of people as taking the form of a tree! 

[Actually, as I learned from a talk by Sebastian Spivey at AAR, the work is anticipated by an oil painting from 1975, now at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Yet there's power in the labor-intensive form of the hope-themed tapestry co-created with weaver Yvette Cauqil-Prince, especially as the Hebrew word for hope is the same as that for thread.

もみじ

Thanks to Daylight Savings Time, the sun now greets me as I make my way from the subway eastward on West 12th Street for my 8am class. The highlight: a Japanese maple ablaze in the near horizontal rays! (And more coming: the first leaves on the top are starting to turn red, too...)

Against brain chauvinism

In a text just published by the always wonderful Robin Wall Kimmerer, a wondrous rethinking of thinking from beneath a white pine:

Where is intelligence situated? Our conceptions of intelligence are based on animal models and a kind of “brain chauvinism.” Every animal, from the flatworm to the black bear, has a brain, central meeting place of sensation, and coordinated response. Because animals are mobile autonomous beings who must pursue their food, the brain must itself be compact and portable. 

But a centralized brain is not needed for plant intelligence. Rapid movement is not necessary when the food comes to you. For an autotrophic, sessile being, bathed in the needed resources, networked in intimate relationships with myriad others above and below ground, a very different system of sensation and response might well evolve, which looks nothing like the animal model. 

If food becomes abundant, no animal can grow more legs to chase after it or a new mouth to eat more. In times of shortage, most cannot cast off a limb that it has no energy to sustain. The whole organism is static in form and flourishes or suffers within those constraints. Not so for plants, who can adaptively alter their circumstances by growing additional parts or losing unneeded ones. Decision-making at tree pace looks like passivity to us herky-jerky animals, accustomed to our own short lifespan. But pine behavior is a slow-motion pursuit of adaptive solutions. Plant intelligence or “adaptively flexible behavior” may be manifest in their extraordinary capacity to change form in real time by altering their allocation of carbon to different functions in response to changing needs. 

This slow dance of parts emerging and disappearing is the tree-paced equivalent of movement. Branches expand into light-filled gaps and retreat from dense shade, adjusting their architecture to optimize light capture. Roots are deployed in new directions to follow changing gradients of water and minerals, not randomly but with purpose. They are hunting light and grazing for phosphorous by differential deployment of apical meristems. 

Plasticity is possible because trees have myriad growing points, or meristems, a reservoir of adaptation poised to respond to changed circumstances. Tissues that animals never dreamed of, meristems—like totipotent stem cells—can be modified into the new tissues that best suit the conditions. Trees like white pine also have a lateral meristem, the vascular cambium, which gives rise to the cells that increase the diameter of the stem. It is an entire body stocking of meristematic tissue, perpetually embryonic. This nexus of nutrients and hormones and sensory chemicals, and creative cell making, is perhaps a fertile location to search for the decentralized seat of pine intelligence.

Myopic animals mistaking our herky-jerkiness for intelligence!

(Yes, the picture of the white pine above leaves out most of the tree's brain...!)

Corsage

Espalier

Hudson River foliage views from the Cloisters!

Rain writing

Rain today took down more of the Lang Courtyard leaves but produced this intriguing tapestry on the wall as it did so...

Saecula saeculorum

My old friend and colleague C came to the "Job and the Arts" class yesterday to help us think about Shakespeare's King Lear - a story sufficently like and unlike Job's to raise lots of interesting questions. She showed clips from two very different productions, and we had students break out and compare them and reflect on what actors and directors bring to this or other plays concerned with human suffering. Lots of issues came up, but I was floored by an aside in C's response to a group which had pointed to the questions of aging posed by Lear. In affirming the importance of that theme she said getting old before we are wise was only more relevant a concern today and for them, considering that many of you will live into your hundreds.

I'm not sure why but this aside took my breath away. I guess I've accepted that changes in lifestyle and environment mean that human lifespans have topped out... but when you consider that there are people living into their hundreds right now, there are surely young people I know now who will do the same. One folks I know will certainly see the twenty-second century. This is obvious when you think about it but somehow I had not thought about it. This seems a massive sort of failing given that I work with young people - and supposedly think about the Anthropocene. What's so unthinkable about this? C has college age children; I felt exposed as a part of the "childless left." (But when I told two students about C's remark today and asked if they expected to live into their hundreds they balked too.) 

As it happens, thinking in terms of 100 year Liberian lifespans is encouraged also by a passage in Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses, which I am reading with gusto. In a section reprinted in the Guardian Solnit writes

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about 100 years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish civil war or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. 

Solnit mentions this in the context of reflecting on the different ways of experiencing time which trees afford us - and the ways they also connect us to to people who lived before or will live after us. Someone may have planted the tree under which we find shelter today - and someone may find solace under a tree whose seed we plant today. Solnit's rhapsodizing on an observation of Orwell's in a similar register: every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.

But today I was thinking about the human acorns all around me and the blighted world they will be inhabiting long after I am gone. (Long?) Those whose lives will be rendered precarious by global heating, ecological collapse and the rest aren't strangers in the future - not that strangers in the future should have less claim on our concern. For that matter, just like those already centenarian today, this precarity isn't just a thing of the future but a present reality for many. These are all things I know, or thought I knew. Anthropocene apocalypses are not just notional events in the future but present and, indeed, have happened already manu times to the people of indigenous worlds. C's comment made me realize I haven't really taken in the enormity of it. 

FOOL: 

            Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise. 

King Lear Act 1, Scene 5

Foliage report

The colors of fall have arrived!

Anthropocene fishing

I took the "Anthropocene Humanities" class to Minetta Triangle today, a walk I've taken past classes on where we try to sense the Minetta Creek flowing beneath the surface of the city. It takes imagination to feel anything (or a dowsing stick, a student proposed), but in this tiny park there's an effort to recreate the stream with outlines of fish disporting themselves inscribed in the stones of the meandering walkway. 

I'd wanted to take the class here for a while but today, our first daylight savings time class and a bright warm day, seemed cut out for it. Last week we'd looked at work pointing toward indigenous ways of understanding land, of caring for country, so a walking acknowledgment of the original denizens of the island of Mannahatta seemed appropriate, even if in the rueful form of Minetta Triangle's stone epitaphs. Fish there may no longer be here but the creek flows still and might appreciate a visit. This gently complicated memorial resonated also, I thought, with the wistful mood of today's readings - selections from John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed. (We read the introduction and postscript and eight chapters which give a sense of his omnivorous curiosity: “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” Humanity’s Temporal Range, Lascaux Cave Paintings, Scratch ‘n’ Sniff Stickers, Canada Geese, Sunsets, Piggly Wiggly, Kentucky Bluegrass, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. The essays connect anecdotes and suprising histories with reflections on living in a time when we're "so powerful that we have escaped our planet's atmosphere" but "not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering.") 

As it turned out the little park's gate was locked, however, so we had to make do with peering over the fence (where the unseasonal seeming azalea above caught my eye). A locked park is totally John Green material too, a student ventured gamely. I'm not sure I know what he was referring to but I appreciated the gesture. Before our little stroll I'd had students analyze our selections from Green's book - what's the project? how do the individual chapters contribute to it? - ending with the prompt to draft a chapter on a topic of their own which they might add to the book's project as they understood it. I thought the Minetta Triangle fish would suit; their proposals were less recherché and perhaps closer in spirit to Green!

Discussing the book with them had disclosed what a curious enterprise his book is. It didn't even start out as a book but as a series of podcasts, and we talked about how it has some of the laconic aesthetic of podcasts - quite different from the hyperactive nerdiness of the educational videos through which they all encountered Green. But it's also his first autobiographical writing, framed by his wife's wry observation that in the Anthropcene there are no detached observers, only participants. And each chapter ends with a score of 1 to 5, a wink to the internet culture which made Green famous but also to the ways our lives are enriched or impoverished by various things... though he makes clear the scores are just his scorings, which we can heed or ignore as we please. It's a charming and engaging book and the students who hadn't already encountered it loved it.

Reading it in the context of our course (I learned of it, of course, from some of the students) confirmed my sense that it's in a different space than the academic and journalistic things we've been reading. It's not really about how we got here, or how we should respond, or how little time we have, or whose responsibility all this is, and in this way it feels a little irresponsible. Green's introduction recounts how he only belatedly came to love the world, and in this book tries to share that love - but the world he serenades (in different keys, for things rated 1 or 2 rather than 4 or 5, of course) is the Anthropocene world, not the worlds it destroyed and keeps destroying. Is it wrong to try to find a way to feel at home on a damaged planet? My students, to my surprise, didn't think so - though I didn't pose the question this baldly.

Off the shelf

Reuniting with a friend and colleague I haven't seen in almost two years, we compared notes on what has and has not returned to pre-pandemic patterns at school. He told me his students described our strangely depopulated campus as a "sad hospital." Too true. Everyone's too accustomed to doing their business on a computer in some private space, so our public space remains unused. My friend and I ruminated on what our students have forgotten, or never learned, about being on campus... It's the serendipity that happens in what we used to call unstructured time. The friend you met because they knew someone you knew, the person sitting near you in the garden reading one of your favorite books, the classmate reading a crazy book you've never heard of.

I found an analogy from my own experience suffering from two years without libraries. What's lost when you can't browse in libraries isn't finding the books you know about on the shelf - though I'll be happy to be able to do that again; it's faster than waiting for them to be delivered to your school, not to mention, before that was possible, the expense of buying your own copies to be delivered to your house. What's gone is the surprise discovery of books you didn't know about, on subjects you didn't know to be interested in - or maybe didn't even know existed. Not just the books next to the one you came looking for, but others which wink at you as you make your way through the stacks, or make eyes at you from library carts of books for reshelving or next to the photocopiers. It's how we get a handle on the unknown unknowns!

Tar sands

Meanwhile on Torrey Pines State Beach, folks are apparently finding tar blobs from the recent Huntington Beach oil spill. Safety advice: don't touch.

New book by Rebecca Solnit!

Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses, 5

Mexican meeting of worlds

Swung by the Met this afternoon, and was captivated by two Mexican works from different centuries in different parts of the museum, each revealing worlds beyond worlds. This Anglo-Dutch desk-on-stand by José Manuel de la Cerda (c. 1760) is inspired by laquerware works from China and Japan which came to colonial Mexico through the Philippines. It appears in a pop-up of works showing global cultural flows in the Asian wing. From two centuries later, Spanish-born Remedios Varo's trippy painting "Bordando el manto terrestre (Embroidering the Earth's Mantle)" (1961) appears in the "Surrealism Beyond Borders" exhibition.

Burning bright

Visited one of the discussion sections of "Book of Job and the Arts" today, where the discussion leader led into Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job through this perhaps most famous of Blake's poems.

The poem was familiar to several students, but all could enjoy its canny combination of simple rhythm and the fearful power it can barely contain. The discussion leader related this to the divine speeches in Job, especially about Behemoth, where God seems moved by His own language. Was Blake here reflecting also on his own own poetry, we were asked? In the background lay the particular sublimity thought to reside in unanswerable rhetorical questions...

Roundtable!

The Lang Religious Studies Fall 2021 Roundtable was fantastic. I'd been inspired by an article written by two graduate students in clinical psychology for Public Seminar, which responded to the passing of Texas's lawless "Heartbeat Act" by calling out the Christian assumptions of its supporters. Noting how differently Jewish traditions have approached issues of reproductive choice, the authors asked:

What might abortion laws look like if they were informed by Jewish principles? Alternatively: What might abortion laws look like if they were not informed by a Christian understanding of personhood?

This would be a timely and valuable question for us to offer our Roundtable to explore, I thought, and wrote to the authors. Delighted at my interest, they told me about the research project they were building on, which talks to Jewish women making decisions about whether and how to avail themselves of new technologies which might let them determine if a fetus was likely to be born with a debilitating disease which disproportionately affects Ashkenazi Jews. Their deliberations bespoke a rich set of questions and reference points as "biblical" as anything the Texan Evangelicals proffered. More people need to hear such religious arguments around - and sometimes for - abortion, I said, and the profound traditions they draw from. Before long we'd inveigled one of our long-time instructors on the Hebrew Bible into joining us to provide such background: the event was on! 

The actual discussion was even more relevant and satisfying than I dared hope. And I think we did something important in bringing together the painful deliberations of women making difficult decisions and the traditions which have been helping make such decisions over centuries. In Jewish tradition, my faculty colleague quipped, abortion is neither banned nor on demand. A source she quoted said the view might be described as "abortion is not OK unless..." with a remarkable world of cases and considerations available for challenges old and new. Rabbinics could be understood, she said, as knowing G-d as the source of the ground rules, even as the ground keeps changing. Would that our holier than thou "pro life" politicians had even a smidgen of the seriousness and humility, the spiritual depth or the compassionate humanity of the ancient rabbis and the traditions they established.

Reach

Not Babel, just the impressive skyscraper rising from the campus of Union Theological Seminary, which seems finally to have "topped out." This is the view of the summit from immediately north in nearby Sakura Park; we see it from a somewhat different angle, about 90˚ to the left.