Full

My Wednedays are often a stretch - I teach one course in the morning ("After Religion") and another (the second meeting of "Religion & Ecology" for the week) in the late afternoon. Today everything worked. It helped, I'm sure, that a graduate teaching assistant took on part of the former and that the latter built on our passionate discussions Monday. It might also have something to do with the weather brightening (and my taking advantage of it to go to Trader Joe between the two classes). Anyway, some neat connections were made in each. 

In "After Religion" I argued that the American world religions discourse codes Buddhism as "religion at its best" and Islam as "religion at its worst," so that if students wanted to free themselves of the baggage of these assumptions they needed to learn something about theese traditions, especially Islam. It wasn't enough to note that Buddhists can also "go bad," that Islam - in Sufism, for instance - can also charm; this leaves the spectrum in place, and the default judgments. Really what was needed was to get a rich enough understanding of the complexity and variety of traditions, practices and ideas involved to see the fatuity of understanding them as all part of a single "world religion" - but we didn't have time for that! (The grad student's talk on her research on Russian Islam opened some eyes, though.) Instead I planted some seeds. Last week we'd considered some Buddhist ways of looking at - past, through - "religion" and "world religions," and this week it was the turn of some Islamic ideas. 

This enabled me to underscore that, since our interest is broader than those things classified (and perhaps distorted) as "religions" and "spirituality," these takes might provide new understandings of other things - such as science and art. We'll see if anyone follows up...

In "Religion and Ecology," four hours later, we were wrapping up a discussion of the "honorable harvest" in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass and discussing an essay on "African American Religious Naturalism" by Carol Wayne White. They're not part of the same conversation but we made them so with the help of Donna Haraway, quoted by White revelling in the fact that 90% of what she considerers her body has non-human DNA. The human is part of constellations of coexistence, consortia of consortia of symbiotic beings. Life requires the taking of life, but, to be sustainable, is part of broader reciporcal agreements between species: if we care those who feed us, the Native traditions Kimmerer shares tell us, they will count on our care and continue to feed us. Unlike consumption, "harvest" can be "honoarable" - part of a relationship of mutual care. 

By the same token, refusal of the fact that we are unthinkable without the species we depend on and which depend on us - as if living with, on and for others is contingent, questionable, best abstracted from - is one of the sources of the nature/culture binary that has led to the othering and exploitation of women, people of color, and the non-human world. But, with Kimmerer, White and Haraway together, it's clear this can't be overcome through mere argument or attitude. Our lives must be rebuilt in terms of relationships. And this is something human beings might be able to do because (as White argues) we seek a purpose in each of our lives (something African Americans have had to assert even against floods of dehumanizing commodifying structures and ideas), and so can trace and maintain these interconnections as a way of fulfilling our destiny as what she calls a "sacred humanity" which revels in its inseparability from all life. 

Do we settler descendants feel either that interdependence or that need to find cosmic purpose as keenly as do Kimmerer and White - or, for that matter, the beauty of Allah's or the Buddhas' world?

Starry-eyed

Beautiful cover by Mark Ulriksen on the new issue of The New Yorker

Event horizon

Some fun weather today as temps dive again. That pink blur is snow!

Requited

Sharing Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants with yet another group of students is such a pleasure, such a privilege. In "Religion and Ecology" the book is again braided through the syllabus. In weeks 2, 5, 9, 11 and 14 we encounter the sections called 

"Planting Sweetgrass"

"Tending Sweetgrass"

"Picking Sweetgrass"

"Braiding Sweetgrass"

"Burning Sweetgrass"

This being week 9 I had the class divide up in groups to discuss each of the "Picking Sweetgrass" section's first five chapters, and then form groups with someone in charge of each chapter, to think about how the argument flows. The chapters - each of which could be a free-standing essay - take the reader from experiencing the love of a garden as it feeds us to an appreciation of the synergy of the "Three Sisters" (corn, beans and squash - and a fourth, the gardener), to the work of the Pigeon family weavers of black ash baskets to a study finding that sweetgrass is healthiest near human communities who use it and eventually to to a chapter on living as a human citizen of the "Maple Nation."

What I hoped students would see is the way Kimmerer moves outward from thinking about gardens as the exception in human relationships with other species to something more like the norm - though embattled. In gardening human beings can feel a reciprocity of care with the plants they tend. In planting and caring for the Three Sisters, all species are nourished - and all are needed, as, without human beings, these domesticated species would perish. In members of a Potawatomi family of basket weavers finding black ash trees willing to become baskets, asking their permission to fell and then laboring to make them into a thing of beauty (all these images are from their FaceBook page), we learn of the responsibility one should feel toward the materials we use. In that and the sweetgrass chapter we learn of plant populations which thrive over generations because

of wise human use - and how the loss of those human partners devastates their plant partners too. And learning that maples populations are being driven northward out of their traditional regions by climate change we are called to recognize our responsibility for them, who give us so much, and to use our gifts to protect them. 

It is - or should be - gardens everywhere, humans sharing our gifts in reciprocal relations with other peoples, from the apparently local and private sphere of a vegetable garden to the planet threatened by climate calamity.

Kimmerer's stories are each so compelling, so full of anecdote and insight and song, that on a first reading you don't really notice the deft way her moral claim on us deepens and broadens. So I wasn't that surprised that students were caught on the details of the particular chapters. I didn't discern just how skilfully the book is assembled until my first rereading.

What did surprise me - though it probably shouldn't have - was that student accounts of their discussions and analyses were still caught in the language of the earlier sections of the book. Human people, they expounded, are able to learn from and even communicate with other species (plants as teachers!), to observe and respect them in a spirit of gratitude and reciprocity. Yes, yes and yes. But this section of the book is about picking sweetgrass. The basket chapter starts with the chopping down of a tree! As students read, this section of the book culminates in a discussion of the "Honorable Harvest."

Just about everything we use is the result of another's life, but that simple reality is rarely acknowledged in our society. (148) 

Our appreciations were still from the stance of a species separate from the rest of nature: we observe, we thank, we even care for. But the basic fact that we use, that we take life to further our own, remains too difficult a thought. Committed to reducing, reusing and recycling we wish we could find a way to have no ecological footprint at all. The burden of "Picking Sweetgrass" is that wise use is not only possible but necessary. The community which Kimmerer calls the "democracy of species" (173) demands that we give but also desires that we take. It wants and needs us to be part of it.

Kimmerer wouldn't be surprised at our inability to imagine use as anything but parasitic. Early in Braiding Sweetgrass she mentions a class for environmental protection majors where students were flummoxed when asked to describe "positive interactions between people and land" (6). In this section, she has something more like our class in view, telling of a similarly stymied "graduate writing workshop on relationships to the land." 

The students all demonstrated a deep respect and affection for nature. They said that nature was the place where they experienced the greatest sense of belonging and well-being. They professed without reservation that they loved the earth. And then I asked them, "Do you think the earth loves you back?" No one was willing to answer that. ... Here was a room full of writers, passionately wallowing in unrequited love of nature. (124)

Sixteenth century, hello!

Spent part of this week unexpectedly in the sixteenth century. 

Letting Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies guide a course of reading is delicious. Students are preparing presentations on three areas she touches on in her chapter on "Matter" this week and I'm prepping too. Fun to return to the Preoscratics and Lucretius, nice to have a reason finally to read the essay where A. Irving Hallowell coins the phrase "other-than-human 'persons'," but the greatest delight was having a chance to read Giordano Bruno's dialogue On Cause, Principle, and Unity, 1584, which is both more intellectually radical and more enjoyable as a piece of writing than I could have imagined. Who knew that the "new animism" has this European precedent?!

But an earlier 16th century text was the star of another occasion, a short series of lectures on "Philosophy in an Age of Imperial Decline" by the always compelling Cornel West. Here he is being introduced by our university president, Dwight McBride, in the 12th Street Auditorium in what may be The New School's first big public event

in two years! The 16th century text Cornel commended was Erasmus' Praise of Folly. Published in 1511, not twenty years into what he calls the Age of Europe (1492-1945), Cornel read this text as foreseeing the catastrophes which colonial expansion would bring to peoples around the world, and the intellectual bankrupty it will produce in the colonial metrople. Cornel used this to provide a tradition for philosophers trying not to accommodate themselves to the ideologies of empire - religious or secular, professional or commercial. Its "holy folly" is consonant with the "tragicomic" stance of Chekhov and the Blues, which define a way to keep striving for justice and joy even while recognizing calamity will never end.

Heady, and historic themes!

Budding confusion

Three views of the same trees out my office window... 

look closely and see black and red giving way to green!

Spring throng

These daffodils seem to be looking for Ukrainian blue

Primary colors

I-80

Rather a more pleasant drive home than our way over last week.

Skewed perceptions

This is fascinating and disturbing: "Americans overestimate the size of minority groups and underestimate the size of most majority groups." Not that I would have done that much better. (Red is the actual proportion.) Happy to learn that actual gun ownership is 32%; I would have guessed closer to the average 54% (though I also remember it being about only 25% not too long ago). But how could people (even in aggregate) think the US population 27% Native American, 27% Muslim, 29% Asian, 30% Jewish, 39% Hispanic, 41% Black, 64% White? Also 70% Christian, 30% gay or lesbian, 21% transgender, 30% New Yorkers and 32% Californians, 36% union members and 40% military veterans?

Provenance

Cleveland is one of the great cultural centers of the United States - its orchestra has for a long time been known as the best in the country, and its art museum is world class - but I've never had occasion to go there, or, really, to form any sort of idea of the place. Casting about for somewhere we might combine with our spring break trip to Columbus, I finally had the chance. We stayed within walking distance of the Cleveland Art Museum, and having arrived last night, easily spent most of today there. Our journey began with a CMA icon, the over 4000-year old Anatolian statuette, "The Stargazer." There were few other patrons, so we mostly had the galleries to 

ourselves, but as I was marveling at a 3rd c. CE statue of Jonah spit out by a not-quite-whale, part of the collection known as the Jonah Marbles, a museum guard with a French accent came over. These are among the most famous objects in the museum, he told me, but nobody really knows how or even whether all the objects in the collection belong together. Part of what is great about this museum, he added, was that it doesn't pretend to know more about the provenance of its works than it does. This proved true, and added to the pleasure of encountering works none of which I had seen before. My usual museum misgivings - how did this wind up 

here? - were somewhat muted by their honesty about the vagaries of the movements of objects across time and space. This stunning and rare Byzantine Egyptian tapestry icon was acquired from a Mrs. Paul Mallon in 1967, the online collection explains, but how she got it is unknown. Mrs. Mallon was the source also of a pair of 13th c. angels, 

whose caption was wonderfully tentative: Surviving in fragmentary condition, this pair of angels lacks lower arms, hands, wings, and attributes. Their original paint and gilding, now almost entirely lost, once rendered their garments a rich brocade and their hair a luxuriant gold. Nonetheless, in their graceful poses and sublime 

faces - which may portray tragic interest, anguish, or deep concern - thei original delicacy and power are still evident.... Sublime in another way was this large early 14th century German carving of Christ and his beloved disciple, which put me in mid of the queer mystical idea I encountered a decade ago that they may have been betrothed at Cana. The caption here somewhat disappointingly mentions only John's resting his head on Jesus' "shoulder" (usually it's the "breast"), with no reference to the incredibly tenderness of the hands, but no matter. The work, like everything in this museum, was displayed in such a way as to allow 

the viewer to truly engage it. 

I could go on and on about other discoveries in this stunning collection, but I'll finish with just two more, one from the famous Asian collections. This 6th c. CE marble stele of Shakyamuni (with Maitreya on the back) is the focal point of their China gallery and deservedly so. (It arrived here in 1993, provenance otherwise unclear.) With hand gestures of "fearlessness and gift giving" and a beatific entourage this Buddha radiates calm and care. Quite the opposite of what I found in the one work I knew - and didn't know was here - which I stumbled on in a final sprint through galleries we'd not had time for, Zurbarán's  "Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth," c. 1640. I encountered this haunting work in a book in Paris twenty years ago and was devastated by it. If you look closely at this imagined scene of Jesus' childhood, you'll notice a pinprick of blood on his fingertip and, just as small but just as cosmic in power, tears on Mary's cheeks.

I don't know how this stunning collection (not all the art was religious by the way, despite my selections!) was assembled here, where the Cuyahoga river flows from Indian-despoiled land into Lake Erie, but it involves complicated legacies of history and wealth of which I'd heretofore been unaware. Grateful to have spent some time here.

Cultural Garden

A Cleveland oddity is the century-old "Cultural Gardens" celebrating ethnic communities ,which stretch along a road in a streambed connecting the city's cultural center and the shore of Lake Erie. In this season there's nothing much to see, except the Ukrainian garden.

Shche ne vmerla Ukrainas

Right about when we were passing these stones on the Ridges Trail in Cuyahoga Valley National Park my phone rang. It was my mother, in a movie theater in California, at the start of the Met in HD encore of Saturday's "Ariadne auf Naxos." They're singing the Ukrainian national anthem! she whispered.

Ohio nature

Our Columbus-based friends continue to show us that the image of Ohio as flat and grey is wrong. Hocking Hills State Park begs to differ.

Yellow and blue

At Trinity Episcopal Church in Columbus, OH, sunflowers for Ukraine.

Cold snap

Spring break, did you say?

Spring breaks through

Spring Break is upon us! The red maples in the Lang courtyard are showing their color. When I return a week from Monday I expect to find yellow and bright green filligree to have joined the reds. And uptown, the sun, which has set behind buildings all winter, just today peaked around one on its way north. 

Spinoza?

Spinoza was a guest star in one of my classes today, the first time in decades. The long maligned and now endlessly celebrated Dutch Jewish philosopher is central to the modern history of "pantheism," and so plays an important part in Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies, focus of one of my classes this semester. Students are required to trace some of Rubenstein's important sources, and so we had two back-to-back presentations on Spinoza today, one on the Ethics and one on the Theological-Political Tractatus. One presentation started with this image, which was new to me, and which I took for something recent and second rate. Rediscovered less than a decade ago, it turns out it may be the only portrait for which Spinoza sat, though the evidence for it is circumstantial. It's dated to 1666 and probably by one Barend Graat, known to have known people Spinoza knew, but the pagan Roman background is improbable. Still, it looks like a graduate student in philosophy and that was enough for my students. 

I've long resisted Spinoza's charms, since he was he has so often been contrasted (always favorably!) with Leibniz, my dissertation subject, but there is a nerdy "charisma" to him, as one student presenter put it today. Pantheologies gives pride of place to Spinoza, too. In what she calls a "faithful betrayal," Rubenstein argues that the pantheistic view Spinoza lays out is more pluralistic than he could imagine, given 17th century science. I'm (so far) resisting the temptation to say that if you want a pluralist Spinoza you need look no farther than Leibniz. 

But isn't Leibniz in the American philosophical canon in part because William James - another star of Pantheologies - thought he offered a pluralistic alternative to the Spinozan monism of Josiah Royce? (That claim, made in an essay by Bruce Kuklick called "Seven thinkers and how they grew," was the basis of the last class I taught in which Spinoza came up, "Spinoza, Leibniz, Royce and James," in a different life long ago.) I'm not quite ready to trot out the "Monadology," but Leibniz' - quite Spinozan - theory of the "striving possibles" seems like something Rubenstein's "hypothetical pluralist pantheist" might like.

Not for show

Accidents of scheduling took me to two exhibitions today which seek to challenge the ethos of exhibition. "What is the use of Buddhist art?" at the Wallach Art Gallery tries valiantly to let its magnificent works from Columbia's collection of Buddhist art be encountered not as aesthetic or historic objects but as figures of devotion. The other, "Lenapoehoking" at the Brooklyn Public Library's Greenpoint branch, tries to conjure the genocide of our region's indigenous population and seed a kind of return. 

For all its meritorious efforts, the former wasn't really successful. Captions explained why objects were made but the exhibit still isolated them from the rhythms of Buddhist practice, which we'd learned just enough about to know was incredibly specific, local to a particular time, donor and setting. (The Wallach Gallery, which had two other shows on in the same large space, has a unifying aesthetic so the curators' hands were tied.) The displays invited a kind of intimate looking but this will have been fundamentally different from the stance of those "using" these figures and texts. I didn't feel any of them as objects of salvific power except in the (perhaps intentional) reflections of two cases containing medieval Japanese figures above. Not that I can imagine a non-cheesy way of letting exhibition guests get a taste of the prostration, chanting, incensing, gifting with fruit and flowers or other interactions through which practitioners will have engaged these works (the Rubin Museum has thought all this through more comprehensively) but the airy silence, white walls and glass cases of the gallery encouraged only the usual quasi-religious devotion which art museums encourage.

Quite different was "Lenapehoking," which quite deliberately chose a library rather than a museum or gallery setting for the first Lenape-curated experience in the city. Above a bustling local library full of children and people using the free wi-fi, a darkened room presented five glass-beaded bandoliers, a turkey feather gown, and, against the darkened windows, three "tapestries" of dried vines of three native bean species recently "rematriated" to the area. Some local fruit trees will be planted in the roof garden of the library starting next week, too. Two of the bandoliers, including the one at left in the photo (from here), are from the early 19th century, after the Lenape had already been driven from their homeland, but pose in a suspended dance with new ones commissioned for this show. And yet the mannequins make clear that bandoliers are for wearing, and as one circles around them one starts to feel the absence/presence of the shoulders and hips they embraced, and is increasingly astonished at their durability and survival. The bean tapestries, meanwhile, full of pods full of seeds, conjure the upward and downward motion of vines and beans, death and future life. After a while what had seemed a small and straightforward exhibition proves instead to be a space of looping time of absence and promise, the scene of a crime and an opening to hope.

Both exhibitions were good to think with.

Come labor on

Surprise: the students in this year's "Religion and Ecology" class are charmed by Pope Francis' Laudato Si - though they're even more surprised than I am by this. One thing that especially caught their interest was the critique of capitalism, notably the section entitled "The need to protext employment" (§§124-29). Most welcome and unexpected! 

If we reflect on the proper relationship between human beings and the world around us, we see the need for a correct understanding of work; if we talk about the relationship between human beings and things, the question arises as to the meaning and purpose of all human activity. This has to do not only with manual or agricultural labour but with any activity involving a modification of existing reality, from producing a social report to the design of a technological development. Underlying every form of work is a concept of the relationship which we can and must have with what is other than ourselves. Together with the awe-filled contemplation of creation which we find in Saint Francis of Assisi, the Christian spiritual tradition has also developed a rich and balanced understanding of the meaning of work, as, for example, in the life of Blessed Charles de Foucauld and his followers. (§125)

Teasing out what is going on here we realized that Francis' "integral ecology" knows that human beings need to mix our labor with the world to lead a full life. Labor is the way we maintain the relationships with "what is other than ourselves" without which we are incomplete. Neither contemplation nor - God forbid - consumption can achieve this. Like the ideas we've otherwise mainly found in indigenous thinkers like Robin Wall Kimmerer, Laudato Si´ sees us as inescapably part of the world, if only we can discern the right ways to do it. A revelation in a Christian text: you can get there from here?!

Six million lost

Meanwhile, covid-19 has now claimed the lives of six million souls.

Ecology is an act of devotion

Lest it seem I'm not also teaching, here's some of the whiteboard from "Religion & Ecology" today. We had a terrific discussion of arguments made in student papers, which I put up without identifying their source. Discussion was rather lively when we turned to the assigned work of biblical scholarship, though it may be that half the class allowed themselves to be engaged instead with a robin perched on a branch of one of the red maples in the courtyard out our window. Even an animist-inspired rereading of the Hebrew Bible, which discerned agency and divinely assigned responsibilities for sun, earth, oceans, forests, etc. hidden in plain sight in familiar biblical narratives proved too theistic for my students: they don't get to choose their involvement, one said, and can't change their minds. Oh.

Speechless horror

It seems churlish to write of anything but the unfolding horror in Ukraine, an ugly reminder of the brute power of powerful brutes. One prays that humanity's better angels can stave off the worse, or at least push them to stop each other, but the scenes of deliberate destruction, designed to terrify, confront us with the reality some of us needed to learn from Elaine Scarry that war, whatever its mythology, is about attrition in the destruction of human bodies and the worlds that human bodies need to live. How to stop war once it's been unleashed, how to stop it from spreading?

These outcroppings of Hartland Schist in Pelham Bay Park have nothing to say on the question.

The cruelest month, early this year

Oblivious to the distress of humans confronting the terrors of war in catapulting acceleration, the Lang courtyard trees are budding.

Five-generation book

I come from a family of writers, did you know? My sister edits a prize-winning community newspaper, our paternal grandmother worked in publishing, and her father was a celebrated journalist for the New York Herald named Don Martin. Filling in the generational gap, my father edited a cache of letters he found between his mother, still a girl. and the grandfather he never met, in the months Martin spent covering WW1 in France (at the end of which he died of the Spanish flu). He shared them through the centenary of the Great War in a blog, and has now put them lovingly together into a beautiful book with the cover designed by his grandson! If you come over, ask me to show it to you: it's a thing of beauty. Or buy your own copy: everyone who's looked at it has found it compelling!