乌心工作 cont'd

The assault continues, after unexpected stumbles and resistance.

In just a few days the world seems to have rearranged itself, with light blue and yellow flags popping up everywhere. How this all ends is hard to guess - it's only just beginning, really. Significant civilian casualties - deliberately targeted, by inital indications - have already started to be reported. But what had initially been presented as a local event in Russia's neighborhood has proved global in resonance, and seems likely to be global in impacts, too. Globally dangerous, too.

The story of the end of stories

It's always a revelation when students encounter the creation narratives in Genesis for the first time. In years past, I've had students read each other the narrative in Genesis 1-2:4 on one day, and the second account on another, and discussions of the "Lynn White thesis" in between. The schedule of this year's "Religion and Ecology" needed them to be on the same day. More, I threw in Genesis 3, the banishment from Eden, too! But it seems to have worked. 

I read aloud (with the text projected overhead) the first part, then we reacted to it for a bit before looking to Lynn White's "Religious Origins of our Ecological Crisis," the clichéd and abbreviated version of which traces everything to a clichéd abbreviated version of the Genesis narrative focused only on the "dominion clause." Then came the second narrative, whose difference from the first was more palpable and shocking than if done on separate days, and that the only dominion in this one is that implied between the man and his wife. 

Then came Genesis 3, with its eating of tempting fruit, blaming and curses and banishment. We wrapped up with our other reading, an essay written by Chickasaw novelist Linda Hogan for the Humanities for the Environment Project as an alternative to Genesis-based and -formed frameworks for environmental humanities, which builds out the sorts of stories of collective world-building and maintaining involving all species we spent the last two weeks exploring. As the clock wound down I had student read aloud a key passage:

Although they are loved, no other first people in any Indigenous creation story are challenged in such a way as Adam and Eve, tempted to eat of a divine food that will offer them knowledge. Any intelligent god would know that ‘his’ children would consume that fruit, would one day come from innocence into intelligence and knowing. 

Instead of learning their relationship to this world through the words of their creator, instead of the instructions that will keep a world alive, Adam and Eve are simply sent away. They are removed from the natural world, even from the divine by the simple act of seeking knowledge. Most of us know this story. In a way this is the story of the end of stories in this particular culture. After the shunning from the garden, what follows are stories of destruction and war, deception, betrayal and lies. Where are the stories about relationship and great love, or as with our own about how a canoe with singing women came down from the sky and one of the young women fell in love with an earth man who returned the love and their struggle and success in overcoming differences. Where in Christianity is the humour? The creator is not similar to humans who have flaws. It is as if that first sin was the ending. There is no longer a good garden, no forest. The people do not know the story of their land or world, or learn that they are one with the spine, heart and breath of all the rest. They are not a part of it.

We've been strangers in an estranged land for a long, long time.

Linda Hogan (Chicaza), “Backbone: Holding up our future,” in Humanities for the Environment: Integrating knowledge, forging new constellation of practice, ed. Joni Adamson and Michael Davis (Routledge 2017), 27-28 (picture)

Invasive

I started my class this morning asking if anyone had family or people they knew in Ukraine. Nobody did; I don't either. What to say next? I paused a long time, then, gesturing to the side of the room, said we'd leave it there, open. This isn't the first time it's seemed irresponsible to just keep doing in a class what we'd been gathering to do.

What to say, if I had to say something? I was in a room full of people for whom the Russian invasion of Ukraine doesn't resonate with anything, has no echoes. They have no recollection of the Cold War, let alone of hot wars. They have no experience of spheres of influence. They didn't grow up with the continued reverberations of the Prague Spring, or the glory that was Glasnost, the giddy time of the "Peace Dividend," the prosaic satisfactions of the European Union. For all the frictions, civil unrest, overt and covert interventions (many American) that of course continue to happen, they know only a world with fixed borders - borders they know are arbitrary, in too many cases unjust artifacts of European empires, but still somehow a stable part of the landscape. Can they fathom the vertigo that Vladimir Putin's increasingly brazen (and successful) violations of established borders brings to older generations? Perhaps they can't imagine it because we believed military invasions were a thing of the past.

Prayer for peace

 An anti-war gathering in Saint Peterburg this evening (Reuters)

乌心工作

Trending on the Chinese site Weibo, a site where free thought has to play hide-and-seek with censors, often with wordplay, is the phrase 乌心工作, which substitutes the first syllable of the Chinese word for Ukraine 乌克兰 for the similarly pronounced first syllable of 无心工作, an idiom meaning not being in the mood for work. The new phrase means something like "people are so concerned with what is happening in Ukraine, that they cannot focus on work."

Mit-feiern

Today's one of those silly days that creative counting makes a palindrome (22022022) but I'm celebrating something real, the 60th ordination anniversary of the priest in our family, my uncle Diethard Zils OP. In the announcement he sent around, he included this picture by Marek Dialeki, along with these words: 

Aus SEINER Sehnsuch geboren

Mutter Erde anvertraut

sie zu lieben, zu erhalten, zu bewahren

dass sie uns bringe das tägliche Brot und den Wein des Festes

das nur gelingt, wenn alle mit-lieben, mit-feiern, mit-leben dürfen

und Hand in Hand dem Licht entgegengehn

(Roughly: Born of HIS longing, entrusted to Mother Earth to love, preserve and protect her / that she bring us the daily bread and the wine of the feast / which succeeds only when all can love, celebrate and live together / and go hand in hand toward the Light). Gratuliere!

Out of state

Took a little trip eastward to Connecticut for the long weekend...

Panorama

The "Pantheologies" class had a field trip today to look for representations of Pan at the Metropolitan Museum. While satyrs abound, Pan figures are relatively few, and it was fun to seek them out (with the help of the online collection guide). This dynamic 1st century Roman marble statue and the contemporary 

marble mask

are in the main hall and quickly found us. Each seemed a little crazed by the nubile statues they couldn't touch, though the mask, which a student had described as menacing but looks more confounded, especially from the side, reminded us that we can't read the affect of ancient figures.

This late 4th century BCE Greek bronze box mirror, in one of the adjacent galleries, was a little harder to find, and is beautiful in ways mainly found in much later art, from a time when the human form was considered safe from animal transforma-tions. But the real fun came 

with tracking down a blissed out little late 5th-4th century BCE Peloponnesian statuette (which might not even be Pan!). In part this was because the deserted mezzanine gallery it was in proved a vast collection of glass cases overflowing with works of all kinds, and it wasn't with all the other bronze figurines! By the time an intrepid student found it with other archiaic works from Boeotia, Laconia, Euboea, we had been exposed to myriad beings mixing animal, human and divine forms. This terrific entourage reminded us of the porosity of all these categories. Pluralistic pantheism indeed!

Gallopping change

I remember that, back in the day, freaked out conservatives vastly overestimated the number of queer people in the US population, but they may have been on to something. In any case, according to a new poll from Gallup, "LGBT Identification in U.S. Ticks Up to 7.1%." "Ticks" seems the wrong word, though! Because of the dramatically different experiences of Gen Z, 7.1% is twice the rate found when Gallup first started this polling just ten years ago. Something's happening...!

Gnarly

Some lovely twilight tree silhouettes posted by Rebecca Solnit. My favorite time of year on my favorite hill, she writes. Green grass, oaks and buckeyes just leafing out, everything new and growing, but the wonderfully crooked boughs of the oaks still visible before full foliage disguises them... The sky's purple swoops from blue to yellow and on to red add to the splendor!

Budding

Couldn't get my smartphone camera to focus on them (they're farther away from me than it looks), but the trees out my office window are getting ready for Spring, the little knobs at the end of branches have in the last week become clusters of bud. What a privilege to be witness to kin. (What's the possessive of ki/kin?)

More jumpy weather ahead... 

Snowy

Winter isn't over, as this playful sticky fluffy snow attests...

Concatenation of systems

The Pantheologies course was trippy today! It was a first week of "dig deeper," where teams of students had been charged with tracking down some of the sources and inspirations of our class text, Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies. I wasn't sure what they'd have to offer after just a week, since sources are hard to find on short notice and group projects are usually a bridge too far - indeed, this is but wek 3 of a semester whose first two weeks were in the aspic of zoom - but they delivered! Even the group whose assigned book, Grace Jantzen's unjustly neglected Becoming Divine (1999), is nowhere available on short notice, being too old to be digitized and the only local library copy being listed as missing, managed to reconstruct the argument from other sources. The presentations (each group had collaborated on a deck of powerpoint slides) were overwhelmingly rich, especially as I insisted on their being presented back to back without a break. By the time of our well-deserved break, Pantheologies was floating atop a churning sea of American cultural queasiness about pantheism, feminist philosophy of religion, pluralist pragmatism and the impish and unnerving figure of Pan.

But this was just the start. After the break, one of our gifted research librarians was scheduled to show us how to read references. During the break I showed her the powerpoints and she said "I guesss I'm not needed here!" but we decided it was always worth a review. She's prepared by reading our class text and in short order what had to some (not all) seemed familiar research tips became more and more exciting for the worlds of references and discussions and debates to which this book was inviting us. Who knew how much would be turned up by searches of databases, reviews, etc.? Most fun was learning that you need to use asterisks for certain searches, as there may be typos in catalog entries - case in point, the elusive Becoming Divine is listed in one library as Becoming Diving!! Most exciting were the citation indexes, which could show us who else was citing the works Rubenstein was citing - and what other things they tended to cite. I've always tried to introduce students to the idea that scholarship is a conversation, but it's never offered a rush like this.

It all resonates with Pantheologies, too, whose description of a "pluralist pantheist" world - an open, relational and self-exceeding concatenation of systems that are themselves open, relational and self-exceeding (24) - seemed an uncannily apt description also of the worlds of interconnected works the librarian had shown us. More, one group had shared the ideas, from William James' A Pluralistic Universe, undergirding Rubenstein's pluralist pantheism. Unlike the "monistic pantheism" which holds everything connected in a single all-comprehending unity (which we may or may ont one day grasp), "pluralistic pantheism" understands everything to be connected and related, yes, but not everything with everything else. Relations and connections overlap and are still being formed. There may be never be a final all-inclusive collection. In the meantime there is discovery, creativity! Was I the only one to feel that spirit in our classroom?

I believe!

Letting Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies open new worlds for us - we're alternating weeks reading her book and reading sources she cites - is turning out to be a wonderful education. As part of this week's digging into the sources of her project, as outlined in her introducion, I had occasion to return to William James' A Pluralistic Universe, which I don't think I've looked at since graduate school. 

Rubenstein takes the idea of a "pluralist pantheism" from this book, even as, she argues, James isn't ultimately willing to go there. She's right but no matter. James of all people would expect others to see farther, and the vista is splendid. I'll doubtless have occasion to dwell on some of James' pluralist thoughts, with which I resonate deeply. But here's a gem, from the book's last pages, which ties together all his thinking about religion going back to "The Will to Believe." What he calls the "Ladder of Faith" is the way, he proposes, that anyone arrives at believing anything - and why it matters that we do. 

A conception of the world arises in you somehow, no matter how. Is it true or not? you ask. 

It might be true somewhere, you say, for it is not self-contradictory. 

It may be true, you continue, even here and now. 

It is fit to be true, it would be well if it were true, it ought to be true, you presently feel. 

It must be true, something persuasive in you whispers next; and then—as a final result— 

It shall be held for true, you decide; it shall be as if true, for you. 

And your acting thus may in certain special cases be a means of making it securely true in the end.

James, William. A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy [London: Longman, Green, 1909], 328-29

Tangerine

I told this year's "After Religion" class about Thich Nhat Hanh and tangerines, but showed only this, a clay tangerine fashioned for me by a student some years after I'd brought tangerines and Thich Nhat Hanh to a class he was in. Now it has a crack, to let the light in.

Kin

In "Religion and Ecology" today we spoke again about how English closes us to the living world - a somewhat rhetorical exercise given that most everyone in the room is monolingual. I've challenged them to include the trees we see out the window in our class community, and to refer to them, following Kimmerer's suggestion, as ki/kin. It'll feel silly at first, I promised, but at some point things will change. Kin were watching us, with some feathered friends.

Bemaadiziiaaki

Pronouns made an appearance in another class today, "Religion and Ecology" in its first in-person session. We were discussing, among other things, the "Grammar of Animacy" chapter of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which tells us that whereas 70% of English words are nouns, 70% of Anishinaabe are verbs. This is a little hard to grasp, especially for a non-Anishinaabe speaker, though I tried gamely to suggest that every noun could be seen as a gerund (thank you, Donna Haraway), but it was a stretch. I'd tried to start with Kimmerer's wry observation, 

We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. (58)

but only one student admitted to knowing of another language, and she mentioned that "they" in Mandarin isn't gendered as it is in English (the opposite is actually the case). Still, the reminder that English renders humans and a few other animals he and she and everything else it was enough to work with. Kimmerer tells of a field biologist who speaks of someone:

She kneels along the trail to inspect a set of moose tracks, saying, “Someone’s already been this way this morning.” “Someone is in my hat,” she says, shaking out a deerfly. Someone, not something. (56)

After trying that on for size I introduced Kimmerer's proposal (made a few years after the book appeared) that we might overcome the limitations of English by tapping into Anishinaabe understandings and introducing a new pronoun for living things.

Fluent [Anishinaabe] speaker and spiritual teacher Stewart King ... suggested that the proper Anishinaabe word for beings of the living Earth would be Bemaadiziiaaki. I wanted to run through the woods calling it out, so grateful that this word exists. But I also recognized that this beautiful word would not easily find its way to take the place of “it.” We need a simple new English word to carry the meaning offered by the indigenous one. Inspired by the grammar of animacy and with full recognition of its Anishinaabe roots, might we hear the new pronoun at the end of Bemaadiziiaaki, nestled in the part of the word that means land? 

“Ki” to signify a being of the living Earth. Not “he” or “she,” but “ki.” So that when we speak of Sugar Maple, we say, “Ohthat beautiful tree, ki is giving us sap again this spring.” And we’ll need a plural pronoun, too, for those Earth beings. Let’s make that new pronoun “kin.” So we can now refer to birds and trees not as things, but as our earthly relatives. On a crisp October morning we can look up at the geese and say, “Look, kin are flying south for the winter. Come back soon.”

Kimmerer's word magic is dazzling but stays on the page unless put into practice, so I turned to the courtyard trees visible through our classroom's full-length windows. I'd earlier mentioned we'd have the joy of watching even as they watch us all semester. Let's try not to address kin as them, I proposed, and see what that does to us and our relationship with kin. Full in-person class indeed - it could work!

National loss

We've reached nine-hundred thousand souls, lost to covid-19 in the United States. More every minute. The most recent number on the Johns Hopkins dashboard is nine hundred and two thousand, four hundred seventy-eight souls, nearly one-sixth of the global toll of five million, seven hundred and thirty-seven thousand, six hundred and fifty-three souls. Woe. 

In a statement yesterday, President Biden mourned, too. 

Today, our nation marks another tragic milestone — 900,000 American lives have been lost to COVID-19. They were beloved mothers and fathers, grandparents, children, brothers and sisters, neighbors, and friends. Each soul is irreplaceable. We pray for the loved ones they have left behind, and together we keep every family enduring this pain in our hearts.

This is welcome - so much better than his life and death-denying predecessor would have done - but still seemed to me somehow insufficient. (Not that anything could be sufficient!) I realized what was getting to me: the near-exclusive focus on biological family as the locus of "American lives." "Friends" comes after "neighbors," like the outer fringe of moral concern rather than a centerpiece of full lives. Even stranger, "partners" (or at least "wives" and "husbands") don't appear at all. Nor do "fellow citizens." Is it a good or a bad thing that, even in a moment of public mourning, identity is imagined as private? 

Weight of the world

At the Met Cloisters today I was once again captivated by Tilman Riemen-schneider's carving of three helper saints (c. 1500-1504). Likely once part of the left side of an altar, with Eustace and Erasmus looking toward the center, Christopher looks out. Or is that his holy charge has lost his head?

God's work

Two sessions in, I realize I haven't told you anything about the new course I'm teaching this semester. It's a deep dive into a single book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein's recent Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (you might remember my delighted discovery of the book last year) and already taking interesting shape. Students come from a fun variety of academic backgrounds. Last week I asked them to introduce themselves by indicating what in the course description had piqued their interest, underlined here: 

Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (2018), one of the most exciting recent works in the philosophy of religion, queers the history of western religious thought by challenging centuries of anxious rejections of “pantheism”—the identification of world and divinity. Pantheologies explores the liberatory potential of a “pluralist pantheism” blurring long-hallowed distinctions in religion, philosophy and science, exposing the gendered and racialized assumptions structuring canonical views of the world and its meanings. Rubenstein’s investigations bring into spirited conversation Baruch Spinoza and Donna Haraway, Giordano Bruno and William James, Lynn Margulis and Albert Einstein, Amerindian perspectivalism and Paul Tillich, the “new animism” and the prodigiously boundary-transgressing figure of Pan. In this single-text class we work our way through Rubenstein’s rich and multifaceted argument, following up references and extending her insights in our own thought and work.

Today we dove into the book itself, discussing the introductory chapter where Rubenstein maps out her project. Students had written thoughtful responses online beforehand, which gave us much to work with. What's meant by pantheism, how is it different from panentheism and atheism, why has it been so vociferously criticized throughout western intellectual history, and what are the practical implications of Rubenstein's "pluralist" pantheism? These are lofty questions and the chapter we read is just an introduction; we'll get deeper into all of these in the coming weeks. Our modus operandi is to spend a week reading a chapter and another week researching some of its important sources and interlocutors - for this opening section teams will be exploring Grace Jantzen, whose argument for pantheism as a form of feminist theology is one of Rubenstein's inspirations; William James, source of the idea of "pluralist" pantheism; a book about the sinister racial underpinnings of the pantheism of the 19th century "American renaissance"; and the figure of Pan.

Today's most interesting discussion, however, came from a student's surprise that Rubenstein of all people still "capitalizes the word 'God'." Who'd have thought there was so much to be said about God vs god (vs G-d), its connection to divinity or Divinity, sacred or Sacred, Earth or earth? (I reminded the class that this was a very modern English problem; there is no capitalization in many languages, and in English even a few centuries ago all nouns were capitalized, as they still are in German.) Rubenstein prefers the word divinity for the very reasons the student was surprised, but from Jantzen took the lesson that the metaphysical and ethical implications of the notion of a transcendent male God make this a term which needs to be reclaimed and revalued; left alone, as seen in many garden variety atheisms, it lives on, unquestioned as the only possible thing divinity could be. But if it's a bad description of what divinity is, mired in human limitations and cultural biases, pantheistic unpacking may be God's work!

An interesting tangent to this discussion was what pronouns to use for divinity. (In recent years we've all thought a lot about pronouns and their powers and dangers - though in the human context.) I told how I'd at one point started using "His" instead of "his," knowing it to be a kind of theological coming-out. Now, like many do, I use "God's" - human understandings of gender should have no place here - but it feels a little contrived. Better Wil Gafney's gloriously unwieldy she, he, they, One who is three, seven, twelve, many? Rubenstein, not working within biblical tradition, challenges us to stare down all conceptions of “humanoid” divinity. Maybe it would be better to use the plural "their"? ("Their"?) There may be occasions for the impersonal "its," too. But also, depending on your kind of pantheism, "my" and "our." Head spins ahead!

Left behind

Returning to my office once again, I'm overwhelmed by the number of books I haven't read or thought about in years and years. We don't recognize each other! So it seems like a good time to winnow. For my first purge, I chose the suite of rapture-ready Left Behind books I used for a course on "Cultures of the Religious Right" in 2005 and 2008. (Some students still remember how teams took us through all ten sensationalistic volumes.) Will there come a time I wish I had kept them? I doubt it - though there are arguably not fewer folks today whose reality is congruent with Left Behind's amalgam of Book of Revelation and thriller fiction. Not fun anymore.

Teaching teaching

One of the pleasures of what's going to be another teaching-intensive semester is that I'll have many chances to talk about teaching with graduate students! It started already this week, with a lovely conversation with a graduate student who's created a new course for us on "Feminism and the Philosophy of Religion" (we've been meeting regularly about it over the last several months), and another, today, with the two graduate students TAing my lecture course "After Religion." This is like the fun pedagogy conversations that were a big part of this college's life back when we were a lot smaller and faculty hung out together more, but also different in enjoyable ways. It's all very real, since it's happening in real time in courses we both have investments in. Our topics this week were how to build community and establish expectations in the first weeks of a class - especially one starting on zoom - but broader issues came up too, like the place of students' personal experience in class discussions and coursework. 

Discussing these issues this week made me realize how my own thinking about this has changed in my time at Lang. Trained in a particular approach to the academic study of religion I arrived with caveats and suspicions about the first-personal: whatever the intention of its giver, isn't it what Richard Rorty called a conversation-stopper? I still think it can be, but realized I have learned to work with and even welcome it. In most of my courses the first assignment is some kind of self-portrait. This is connected to that workshop I did at Teachers College on the importance of prior learning, but I think I've been learning it also from my students, many of whom are writers and artists whose efforts to define a voice or style are first-personal but in open, curious and even collaborative ways: conversation starters. And we work in seminars, after all, where the prior experience, distinctive susceptibilities and divergent projects of the participants are the recipe for truly generative learning community.

The grad students told me about their own undergradaute experiences, which are quite different! Two had been trained never to use the first-person, and the third studied at St. Johns, whose great books pedagogy discussions prohibit bringing in anything beyond the texts under discussion. Graduate studies are more like that, too. (I should make clear that the actual essays we're demanding of undergraduate students have of course to be properly researched and rigorously reasoned too!) But - with the help of their undergraduate students - I can sense them coming around already to the pedagogical possibilities of more personal ways of teaching and learning.

Off the chart

Omicron's not so dangerous if you're vaccinated and boostered and mask, but that's evidently a bridge too far for the US, despite resources. What's the matter with us? Why are we registering more deaths (two thousand six hundred every day!) than last winter, when we faced a far deadlier variant without the benefit of vaccinations? 

Traffic patterns

Here's another time lapse video of local flows. On this cold morning we're looking northwest and those smears on the Hudson are ice floes. Yes, our tidal river is carrying them north again for a few hours...