Farewell '22

Seemed a dreary day to see out the old year, and then (briefly) this!

Family book club

For Christmas, I got copies of a book for my sister in Australia, my parents in California, and us in New York. Billy Griffiths' Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia, not published in the US yet (or perhaps ever), is a book I learned about because my enterprising nephew was doing tech for the first Mountain Writers Festival last month, and Griffiths was one of the speakers. Deep Time Dreaming is a sort of history of Australian archaeology. On the book jacket it promises to investigate a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century, and the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia. It explores what it means to live in a place of great antiquity, with its complex questions of ownership and belonging... 

When [John] Mulvaney began his fieldwork on Australian soil in January 1956 ... it was widely believed that the first Australians had arrived on this continent only a few thousand years earlier. They were regarded as 'primitive' - a fossilized stage in human evolution - but not necessarily as ancient. ... In the decades since, Australian history has been pushed back into the dizzying expanse of deep time. The human presence here has been revealed to be more ancient than that of Europe, which was colonized by Homo sapens some 40,000 years ago, and the Australian landscape, far from being terra nullius, is now recognized to be cultural as much as natural, imprinted with stories and law and shaped by the hands and firesticks of thousands of generations of Indigenous men and women. The New World has become the Old. (2)

I was inititally discomfited by the settler framing: "widely believed" by whom? "regarded" by whom? and just who "pushed back" "Australian history," whataver that is? But Griffiths uses these terms knowingly. The story he tells is that of settler Australians (whom he just calls "Australians") learning that they are on sacred land, maintained by an ancient civilization, slowly developing a "deep time" consciousness anchored in new relationship with the ancestral custodians of the land. 

A few chapters in, Griffiths describes a conversation with Daryl Pappin, a Mutthi Mutthi man who's showing him the area near where some major discoveries were made in the late 1960s.

I talk about how the discoveries at Mungo pushed the human history of Australia to the limits of radiocarbon dating and presented, for a time, the oldest evidence for modern humans outside of Africa. 'It's amazing how the dating of Aboriginal occupation in Australia went from a few thousand years in the 1950s to 25,000 years in the 1960s, then 40,000 years, and now maybe even 60,000 years.'

'And it's a lot more than that,' Daryl smiles at me. 'It goes up and up and up until forever.'

'Isn't 60,000 years pretty much forever?'' I reply. 'I find it hard to even fathom that number.' 

Daryl drives silently, as if to say, 'Well, no, 60,000 years isn't forever.' (112)

I'm about a third of the way in, and can feel voices like Pappin's - entirely absent as the story begins - becoming more and more central. The book looks to be an education in fathoming, or recognizing one's settler mind can't fathom, the deep time history of the land one inhabits, allowing, perhaps, a truer, deeper kind of inhabitation deferring to those who know it best. I sense it might offer lessons for living respectfully for this family of settlers; 'America' is another New World which turns out to be unfathomably older. 

California fusion

流芳園, the Huntington's Chinese garden, is a wonder. Crafted only in the last two decades, it already captures the delight of wandering through the scholars' gardens of Suzhou which are its inspiration. 

Lovely vistas, intimate and distant, around corners and through openwork windows and oddly shaped doors... I was impressed also at the ways it works in its Southern California setting - that cloud-covered hill in the distance, for instance. (The land around Suzhou is flat so all its mountains are fanciful.) And the dark green tree at left is a venerable Coastal Live Oak! Also venerable were the splendid 盆景 penjing (Chinese antecedents to Japanese bonsai) which give the thrill of Suzhou's play with scale.

The nearby Japanese garden (started in 1912) and its 盆栽 bonsai collection (started in 1968) are going strong too, also melding distant and near. The bald cypress and California juniper below are trees from this continent.

And here are some coastal live oaks, their California hosts.

Calm before the storm

By the way, that Poussin at the Getty is part of a pair. Its pendant, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, depicts a storm - as a break in the clouds shines eerie light on a town in the distance, a huge branch on a tree in the foreground crashes down on terrified travelers.

Getty gems

Two insanely detailed small paintings at the Getty, Gerrit Dou's "Astronomer by Candlelight" (1651), 32x21cm, and Jan Brueghel the Elder's "Sermon on the Mount" (1598), 27x37cm. Like in a Persian miniature painting my eye couldn't make out the brushwork.

Getty high

"Un Tem[p]s calme et serein" is the name of a c. 1650 landscape by Nicolas Poussin recently arrived (1997) at the Getty Center, but also not a bad description of the experience of the Getty itself, hovering serenely above the automative fray of LA. (Also fittingly, Poussin's canvas includes a barely visible fire on the mountain in the distance.)

Master strokes

An "atmospheric river" brought rain to California today, including the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, where we're starting a short Los Angeles trip which looks to be heavy on European Old Masters. Moved by Jan Davidzoon de Heem's perfectly poised "Vase of Flowers" (mid-1670s), Van Gogh's exploding "Mulberry Tree" (1889), and Jusepe de Ribera's tender "The Sense of Touch" (1615-16).

Earthshine

The blue isn't quite true but the pink and green are.

Feliz navidad

It all came together again! Succulents amplified with sequoia cones.

Festival of Lights

Season's greetings!

Otherworldly ascents

Not two hours' drive from where I grew up is Palomar Obervatory, home to the Hale telescope which was, for four decades, the world's largest. I was there once as a child but haven't been back since.

After ascending to almost 6000 feet in tight switchbacks, through dense woods of huge live oak, manzanita and pines, you come to the three telescopes, as white as the snow along the side of the trail.

Visitors can look inside the largest, a great cavern dominated by the massive Hale telescope, with which astrono-mers made discoveries beyond imagining. Like quasars! One revealed that most galaxies - including our own - have a black hole at their center. Those wavy lines at lower right in this illustraion show where scientists trained Hale's eye. The illustration is in the little museum nearby, which is overshadowed by 

a more terrestrial wonder, a perfect cone of a tree which turned out to be a juvenile giant sequoia! I didn't know these other symbols of transcendance could grow anywhere but the flanks of the Sierra Nevada, certainly not in our southern California neighborhood. Wormholes in space and time...! The local wildlife saw an unexpected opportunity: the far side of another sequoia, on the other side of the museum, turned out to be a woodpeckers vault, embedded with acorns. Worlds within worlds!

Saintly trees

The final week of a semester, after final projects have been submitted, is usually a time for synthesis - individual and collective. I invite students to look back over their work for the class and bring it together into whatever form seems appropriate. "This is for you," I say, "for future you, to hold on to what you want to make sure not to forget from this class." We get essays, powerpoints, poetry, art... and share them in the class session. So many sets of connections, each different. It's like closing the class with a gorgeous starburst of subjectivities, a kaleidoscope of recharged content.

I often do a final synthesis too - especially for new courses - though I don't always share it. I didn't this time around, since the process of gathering and synthesizing, which usually starts the week before the Thanksgiving break, never had a chance to get going. To tell the truth, I didn't finish the courses either, didn't finish thinking through what our collective work amounted to. I really do let courses take on their own momentum, and this time our momentum died out short of the goal. 

So I don't know what I would have done for "Religion of Trees." A guess? I suppose I might have brought in the words from Thomas Merton that might, in retrospect, have been the seed for this course.

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree.

These words from New Seeds of Contemplation, which I first heard at a Sunday night Service of Meditation and Sacrament at the Church of the Ascension in 2016, might have come as a shock to some of the students, since the course was structured to begin with "religion" and then move its attention to the "teachings of trees" beyond human uses and projections. What if we had been moving all along away from "religion" and, in the company of arboreal companions, toward - God?

I could have amplified this with Elizabeth Johnson's suggestion that "At a time when prayer does not come easily to postmodern humans, becoming aware of nature’s praise may actually allow these other creatures to help us pray. … The more we attend to them, the more they can lift our hearts to God, borne on their praise." (Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love [Bloomsbury, 2014], 278) A student's presentation on trees in the Q'uran had already introduced us to the idea that all creation worships its creator, and East Asian materials planned for our final weeks would have made the idea that trees model the Dao or possess the Buddha nature available too. 

But Merton would have been useful also for complicating some of the facile treeloving conclusions some students were moving toward. He didn't think we should worship God by being treelike. We need to be, as God made us, human. But a step into this mystery is offered by the particular glory of each particular tree. 

This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do. Do you imagine that the individual created things in the world are imperfect attempts at reproducing an ideal type which the Creator never quite succeeded in actualizing on earth? If that is so they do not give Him glory but proclaim that He is not a perfect Creator. 

Every particular thing is thus a "saint," from the littlest flower to the vast ocean. At this point I might have observed that Merton found deep resonances between his Christian faith and Zen Buddhism, and gone on to describe the forms of shared practice in which Merton engaged. None of them practices with trees, but we could ask ourselves if our tree drawing was proving itself a congruent practice.

Still, Merton pushes us to face the particular challenge of being created human:

But what about you? What about me? Unlike the animals and the trees, it is not enough for us to be what our nature intends. It is not enough for us to be individual men. For us, holiness is more than humanity. If we are never anything but men, never anything but people, we will not be saints and we will not be able to offer to God the worship of our imitation, which is sanctity. ... 

At this point I might have brough in Pope Francis' idea of an "integral ecology" in Laudato Sí. To recognize our interconnectedness with the rest of creation doesn't mean there isn't a special vocation for human beings, which is tied up with the free will we alone appear to have. This was Merton's point, too. But one could turn here toward indigenous ideas like those we'd encountered in Robin Wall Kimmerer: trees are persons, people, but so are we, and what it means to be persons is to be in mutual relation with other persons. 

One lesson of our tree teachers is that it's our job to work out, or remember, or discover how to be human. And one lesson of "Religion of Trees" might be that human people have been learning better and worse way of being human from better and worse understandings of the glory of tree people for a long time, people with whom we share more and different things than most of us moderns can even imagine.

(The swan-neck agave pictured at top is in Del Mar)

Wintergreen

Recent rains put to good use along the Guy Fleming trail

Facing oblivion

While we titter about inflation and FIFA and the January 6th commission and no confidence votes, China is facing a tsunami of covid-19. Three years of draconian lock-downs ended abruptly last week, and huge numbers of people are falling ill. Chinese vaccines aren't as effective as the mRNA we've all had, and many people haven't received boosters, including 40% of the elderly. Vast resources went into increasingly fanatical efforts at testing and containment rather than vaccinations and hospital capacity so Chinese society is unprepared as the floodgates open.

We can't expect anything like accurate numbers on hospitalizations and deaths in the three waves of infections predicted for the next months. (Social media notice increased traffic at funeral homes, as well as a surge in online searches for same, but officially only two people have died of covid in the whole country.) State controlled media in China have apparently whitewashed out the very name of the abandoned "zero covid" campaign, and deleted references to the "long covid" said to be haunting less cautious countries. 

So I find myself deeply grateful that the South China Morning Post chose this moment to publish a story on a photographer who's been giving free funerary portraits to rural folk too poor to get their own. In the part of China the documentarian visited, people start planning their own funerals at 60, and part of a funeral is a portrait. We learn that these old folks, often living alone - presumably many of their children are among the hundreds of millions of migrant workers in China's cities - are less afraid of dying than of being forgotten.

This would be a touching story at any time, but at this moment, when untold numbers of mostly elderly people have been placed in harm's way, it's especially poignant. Hopefully these old folks won't be affected but many others like them may well lose their lives to covid-19. Will their deaths be mourned - or even acknowledged? 

The galleries the photographer sets up when distributing the finished photos, framed for funeral use, remind me of the efforts to mark and name our covid dead in the last years, with photos and biographies and the memories of bereft loved ones. (Remember Lima's cathedral full of photographs of the dead?) Soon the numbers overwhelmed what photos could do and it was names, then little white flags, which soon spilled, despite the best intentions, into abstraction. We've long since started forgetting... even as we find ourselves beset by a new wave. People are still dying every day.

In the People's Republic of China, however, as these old folks will know well, there's a history of organized forgetting, especially of calamities resulting from failed government policies. The editors at SCMP know this too. Thank you.

Advent IV

One week to go

Breaking

Haven't been on the Broken Hill trail at Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve in a while (I think it was closed for a time), and it didn't disappoint. I think it must be called Broken Hill because, from a distance, it looks like a chunk's been knocked out of a ridge. But look to the north and you see it's also breaking in real time, the chunky orange has all recently fallen on the sinuous yellow sandstone.

TPSNR Extension

Aftershocks

As a terribly trying semester ends, plans are afoot for change on many levels - though not by our top leadership, which remains mum, unwilling to concede any mistakes were made. The One New School coalition, anchored by students and forged in support for the part-time faculty striking for a fair contract, is wrapping up this stage of an occupation of our signature building with the inauguration of a prophetic new identity for the university. (Their graphic designer seems to understand what a tall order unifying this fractured and fractious community is!) The recently-founded Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence has produced a visionary critique of the university's entrenched white supremacist culture. And my college may be the first faculty body with the guts to join the One New School in voting no confidence in the leadership and board of trustees (faculty have until tomorrow night to vote). As Bette Davis' character says in "All about Eve," Fasten your seat belts. it's going to be a bumpy ride.

JFK --> SAN

Made our way through some serious weather on our way back to California for the end of the year.

Trunk-ated

Our semester is over, and I'm heeding the call not to penalize students for learning losses they were not responsible for in grading. But I also don't want to pretend that all is well, that they weren't deprived of the valuable capstones and syntheses that happen at the end of a seminar class. So I've sent my two classes a version of this message:

Our class is ended but not over. Not just because we didn't get to do all we were planning to do, but because no class ever really ends if the subject matters to you - and if the relationships you formed in it last. Folks in my classes often turn up the next semester or year (or even later!) to bring me up to date on what they're thinking and doing, often with work which grew from seeds planted in the class we experienced together. And I'm always hearing about friendships that started in classes. I think we planted enough seeds that that'll happen for us too. 

If there's any work or reflection you'd like to share with me now, I'd love to see it. But I'd love to see it later, too, whenever the time is right. (Ours isn't a subject that's going away.) None is required for completion of the course, or for a good grade in it. 

This is the version for the students in the first year seminar "Religion and the Anthropocene," who'll have to wait until next semester to learn how satisfying an end of semester full of final presentations and performances and reflections can be. I dropped "Ours isn't a subject that's going away" from the message to the students in "Religion of Trees," who instead got a photo (which you've seen before).

I'm pasting in a picture that could be a hopeful representation of what this semester might turn out to have been. It's a redwood I saw on a walk up Volcan Mountain in San Diego a few years ago.

Both ended:

Hope to see you in the new year. Don't be strangers!

Lady bug

So why do I love The New School so much? Because of things like this senior project by a student I know well. It describes itself as a performance seeking to explore the idea that religion, science, magic, and technology are all terms for the same thing—each their own language explaining the same phenomenon. I wasn't able to attend but was happy to bump into another student (at the Occupation of the University Center) who was, and they told me all about it excitedly. It apparently involved a large yellow-green blob giving a sort of lecture with powerpoint slides on the subject of parthenogenesis from the Virgin Mary to Ada Lovelace to ladybugs. I've asked for a video!

Just beginning

An agreement was reached late last night, and the university leadership is urging everyone to resume where we left off. But it's going to be a bit longer and rather harder than that. For one thing, a group of students who had been supporting the part-time faculty throughout the bargaining occupied our main building on Thursday, and have no intention of leaving. "This is just the beginning!" They have demands of their own, concerning immediate matters like grading (As for all this semester) and tuition (refund for part of this semester, freeze going forward) as well as larger structural reforms. They don't just demand that current leadership be removed (as many faculty also demand); they've heard The New School started without an administration and are calling for us to become a participatory community without one again, the "non-administrative NEW School"!