Tree wonder

I started today's meeting of "Religion of Trees" with these images overhead. They're from the Instagram account of a group called "Tree Wonder" who gather on Sunday mornings, 11-12, in Washington Square Park and observe and draw trees. Religion of Trees, anyone?

On Monday we walked to Washington Square Park to see the ancient English Elm at its northwest corner - subject of most of these drawings. At over 330 years, it's known as the oldest tree in Manhattan, though the heart sorrows at the thought of all the trees which predated it. (It's not a native tree, of course.) Students weren't sure how to respond to it, and it didn't help when I said we'd be drawing - precisely to go places words may not be able to. 

Tree Wonder's sketches relieved the pressure, both with the variety of skill levels, and with the reassuring reminder that everyone notices different things. (The children's drawings are especially fetching!) Perfect companion to an essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer calling us to overcome "plant blindness" and "plant deafness." 

"People knew the trees were story tellers. But then we forgot. Or were made to forget by the ones who chased divinity out of the forest and forced it into the sky." Religion of Trees, anyone?

Robin Wall Kimmerer, "White Pine," in The Mind of Trees, 423-31, 425

Cheese mad

In my Chinese text book, which dates from a different era (lots of reform and opening), I found an old phonetic rendering of the English word cheese 

我在美国吃过最臭的“气死”（干酪），洋人大多闻到就要掩着鼻子，不过对我来说其实没有什么，比臭豆腐差远了。

Perhaps the author is purposely using characters which have their own extreme meaning - above is what my Pleco dictionary says. 

This appears at the end of an account of the "five tastes" of Chinese food, wondering if there isn't perhaps a sixth, "stinky." The example is the "stinky tofu" whose aroma befouls many a Shanghai alley, and the author finds it similarly repellant, but is also proud of having managed to eat some.  I have eaten the smelliest "quisi" (cheese) in America. Western people cover their noses when they smell it but to me it was nothing - it doesn't come close to "stinky tofu." I have to agree!

Interrupted flow

Cristina Iglesias' site specific installation "Landscape and Memory" in Madison Square Park endeavors to do for the creek that flows deep below that park (Cedar Creek) what I've tried in classes to do for Minetta Creek. “Can you sense it down there deep beneath us?” She crafted five bronze water sculptures, linked by a skein of grasses, to give the impression that the creek is still near the surface. Mirrors make them seem portals to an underground world but I don't think the're actually connected. (I assume not; I think as an art work it would make more sense if they weren't.) Parkgoers seem as oblivious as last year's. I can't make up my mind whether I like this one or not.

First impression

Just in time - we start at noon tomorrow! - here it is: the preliminary syllabus for "Religion of Trees"! The images (all of which you know) tell a story students might understand and even appreciate in retrospect.

Rolling river

Learned to think of the Hudson as a tidal river in a whole new way

today, exploring the west of the river just opposite the City

Into the woods!

Met most of the students in my first year seminar yesterday. We met first as a group in a sixth-floor classroom I've never been in before, which boasted this view of the school tree-filled courtyard and environs, and then in pairs in my office. The class is "Religion and the Anthropocene" and it emerged that most had chosen up it because of the first word (under-stood in lots of different ways) while overlooking or misreading the latter. Our work's cut out for us!

Wooden words

I was charmed by the idea of Katie Holten's "Tree Alphabet." However using it - while beautiful in its way - just seems silly to me. 

Trees are not speaking our language, I think, nor trying to.

Aurora newjerseyalis

Baking

European rivers aren't the only ones drying up. Last summer the reality confirming that the Anthropocene is upon us for my Chinese students was the record-breaking flooding in Zhengzhou. This year a far larger area (also including Zhengzhou) is suffering the longest and strongest heat wave on record - anywhere. This map shows high heat days over the last 2.5 months - and it's not over.

Autumnal

It's only been four days since I was last down there, but returning to school today for new student orientation felt like a different season. 

Those leaves on West 12th Street have been munched for a while, I suspect, but the flashes of gold of the Lang courtyard maples are new!

Five hundred dozens

Here it is: 

my blog post number

6

0

0

0

- who knew there'd be so much to tell!

Up, down and all around

One of the big inflection points of my upcoming "Religion of Trees" course will be the encounter with the banyan. A kind of fig tree which starts as a vine on some other tree and eventually drops branches which become rooted trunks of their own, in endlessly expandable number, it explodes the idea that a tree has a single trunk, and basically moves upward. The largest banyans are like forests, and in their enveloping proliferating upward- and downward spatiality offer a wonderful alternative to the stacked hierarchy of axis mundi-like "world trees." I've used them for years to challenge artificial family-tree like histories of religions, and am excited to explore with the class what it would be to conceive of divinity this way...

So imagine my delight at discovering not only that someone published a book about them, Michael Shanahan's Gods, Wasps, and Stranglers: The Secret History and Redemptive Future of Fig Trees (the original English edition was called Ladders to Heaven!), but that this work inspired a banyan-like art project which, during the pandemic, inspired interconnected work by 900 artists in 72 countries! The Seattle-based project, which welcomed work in genres from poetry to sculpture to dance to film - was called Telephone, like the game, where people whisper a message to someone who whispers what they heard to a third person and on and on until the message emerges as something completely different. The original message was taken from an article Shanahan wrote about his book - though he only learned about this once the ideas had already, banyan-like, spread! 

This

 was the first Telephone painting. The rather fantastic print is from Shanahan's article.

It depends

Full moon from the International Space Station. Magnificent! And an image upsetting in the best way. The unnervingly non-horizontal horizon makes one feel the gratuitousness of the gravity which stops everything from sliding or floating or falling away - which this picture makes it seem it otherwise surely would do. The famous "blue marble" images make our planetary home look delicate and fragile but self-contained. Not so this precarious view, which took me back to a wonderful passage in G. K. Chesterton's St. Francis of Assisi which I haven't thought about in years, but long loved.

If a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging. It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged the world upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of his strange dreams, the town of Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round. But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and more in peril. ... St. Francis might love his little town as much as before, or more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling stars.

Tree logo

I can't very 

well not use 

this for the 

syllabus of 

the "Religion of 

Trees" class!

Blooming

Can you believe it - I'm four posts away from my 6000th blogpost!

Rub

To my great shame, I breezed through the Lang courtyard Friday without noticing that some of the red maples - specifically a group of young ones back against the wall whom I usually greet - have dried up. (They were doing fine in June.) I only noticed today when I went down with my sketch book to experiment with pencil rubbings of the tree trunks and fallen leaves.

Tree syllabus

It's adding-the-final-touches time for syllabi - or will be soon - so I've started wrangling the "Religion of Trees" course into some sort of shape. As any of you who've put courses together know, it's not enough to gather relevant and exciting materials and activities. Deciding in what sequence and rhythm to assemble them is key. Most useful for this process is defining the sequence of assignments, which in turn correlate to the "learning outcomes" of the course. Somehow the architects' symbols for different kinds of tree and shrub plantings above are helping me - not least because a sequence of drawing will definitely be part of the course's unfolding.

10 Questions

I don't generally read the pieces in the Times by Tish Harrison Warren, a member of the breakaway Anglican Communion in America who somehow scored a column as a voice for Christianity. But today's gospel was about the divisions that might happen on the way to salvation, and our priest used it as a frame to tell us how the Lambeth Convention managed to dodge the division over sexuality the Archbishop of Canterbury had invited. (A week before the convenion he'd circulated a series of statements he named "Lambeth Calls," and asked all attending to vote either to approve each one or to say they needed further work, one a pronouncement tucked within a larger disquisition on "Human Dignity" that same-sex marriage was unacceptable. The assembled bishops, most from provinces which don't recognize same-sex marriage, nevertheless decided that voting was divisive and refused to.) Recounting from the daily reports our diocesan priests have been receiving from one of our bishops, the Most Reverend Mary Glasspool, we heard about the transformative power of being in conversation and prayer with those with whom we disagree - the importance, one might add, of having a place at the table. (Bishop Glasspool isn't only one of the relatively few women bishops, but gay and in a blessed union with another woman.)

Anyway, I decided to read Warren's piece today. Entitled "The God I Know Is Not A Culture Warrior," it's a sensible enough piece, grounded, like most of her pieces I've read, in the experiences of the congregation she leads, and rightly deplores the politicization of faith by the American right. She doesn't think "God" has no place in public life since Faith touches all areas of life, and issues such as abortion, religious liberty and the relationship between church and state - all conservative Christian talking points, I might add - are important. But she worries that believers’ actual experience of God, worship and faith — not to mention spiritual virtues like humility, gratitude and kindness — often gets lost. That much is, I think, true, and recognizing that most religious people's faith is neither strident nor political, whatever their leaders claim for them, is surely important.

What interested me was Warren's way of - sort of - extending this recognition beyond her own community.

But how do we repair the damage done? What would truthful, humble and robust public religious discourse look like? For starters, we must speak proactively and vulnerably about our faith, instead of only in reaction to the latest hot-button issue. There are questions that haunt every human life: [1] How does one know what is true and false, right or wrong? [2] Is there a God? [3] If there is, can we interact with him, her or it? [4] If so, how? [5] Can God speak to us? [6] Can God say no to us? [7] What are our obligations to God and to other human beings? [8] How can we have joy? [9] How can we live well? [10] How can we be wise?

I found this list of questions - I've numbered them - fascinating. These are all questions I ask, too, but never all at once, and in the same voice. These are those I ask in a universal way:

[1] How does one know what is true and false, right or wrong? [2] Is there a God? [8] How can we have joy? [9] How can we live well? [10] How can we be wise?

And these are those I ask as a Christian:

[3] If there is, can we interact with him, her or it? [4] If so, how? [5] Can God speak to us? [6] Can God say no to us? [7] What are our obligations to God and to other human beings? 

No, that's not quite right: the Christian in me is also asking the other questions. For the Christian, all ten questions fit together. But what about someone who dismisses question [2] Is there a God? with a negative or, more likely, incomprehension? Are they left with only [1] How does one know what is true and false, right or wrong? [8] How can we have joy? [9] How can we live well? [10] How can we be wise?

The easy point is that Warren's set of questions leaves no space for non-theistic religion, even as she claims the same questions ... haunt every human life. But in this she's not really very different from all those religion surveys which default to God language. And would the damage done be repaired by replacing "God" with, say, Tillich's "ultimate concern"? That wouldn't force ultimate reality into a theistic either/or - and, perhaps more importantly, would seek out and honor the non-theistic ways in which people (most? all?) are religiously serious (including some "secular" ones). Tillich's template remains theistic, of course, but Warren's bundle of questions doesn't allow even this. Questions 3-7 treat question 2 not as a question which haunts as but as one obviously answered in the affirmative.

But I didn't want to dump on Warren, for all the disengenuousness of her claim. However misplaced it is in the Times, I felt a kind of envy at her comfort with her Christian voice. Happily rooted in her faith, she experiences no shift between questions 2 and 3, and back from 7 to 8. After all, God (not the "a God" of question 2) is the answer to all the questions 1-10 - which is why she assserts that "Faith" can't be excluded from people's participation the public sphere. Yes - but: what about people for whom the asnwer to all ten questions is the Dao, or a different understanding of divinity, or the community of beings - or the absurd serendipity of the emergence of consciousness in this vast universe?

In my practice as a religious studies professor I sometimes feel that I default to the superficially secular framing questions 1, 2, 8, 9, 10 - and, in so doing, instrumentalize "God" (or the Dao, or differing undersandings of divinity, or the community of beings, or the absurd serendipity of the emergence of consciousness in this vast universe?) as an answer to non-religious questions. Because of the justified suspicions of "crypto-theology" in Tillichian and other accounts I am reluctant to call all 10 questions "religious." As a committed pluralist (for all pluralism's problems!) I think it important to define questions that do in fact "haunt" all people. Indeed, my kind of Christian thinks being able to parse one's most important questions in non-Christian terms is spiritually vital.

If Warren and I were seated at a table, like the assembled bishops of the Anglican Communion, I imagine we'd agree in more and different places than I can alone imagine. But I'd hope that the witness of my questions - as a Christian - would mean something to her, too.

Late summer colors

 

Colors of late summer at Queens Botanical Garden

But are those leaves really purple? I've started reading Ed Yong's An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us and am losing confidence that anything is just as it appears to us. His discussion of vision is amazing. He lets us feel more connected than the many animals whose eyes only have two cones ("dichromats") where we have three ("trichromats") - although before that we've learned about how much more they get from the sense of smell than we can even imagine. But then he laconically observes that there are many other animals - such as birds - who see colors we cannot on the UV part of the lght spectrum. Some even have four cones.

[Birds] don't just have human vision plus ultraviolet, or bee violet plus red. Tetrachromacy doesn't just widen the visible spectrum at its margins. It unlocks an entirely new dimension of colors. Remember that dichromats can make out roughly 2 percent of the colors that trichromats see—tens of thousands, compared to millions. If the same gulf exists between trichromats and teatrchromats then we might be able to see just 1 percent of the hundreds of millions of colors that a bird can discriminate. Picture trichromatic human vision as a triangle, with the three corners representing our red, green, and blue cones. Every color we can see is a mix of those three, and can be plotted as a point within that triangular space. By comparison, a bird’s color vision is a pyramid, with four corners representing each of its four cones. Our entire color space is just one face of that pyramid, whose spacious interior represents colors inaccessible to most of us. 

If our red and blue cones are stimulated together, we see purple—a color that doesn’t exist in the rainbow and that can’t be represented by a single wavelength of light. These kinds of cocktail colors are called non-sectral. Hummingbirds, with their four cones, can see a lot more of them, including UV-red, UV-green, UC-yellow (which is red + green + UV), and probably UV-purple (which is red + blue + UV). At my wife’s suggestion, and to [hummingbird researcher Mary Caswell “Cassie”] Stoddard’s delight, I’m going to call these rurple, grurple, yurple and ultrapurple. Stoddard found that these non-spectral colors and their various shades account for roughly a third of those found on plants and feathers. To a broad-taled hummingbird, the bright magenta feathers of the male’s bib are actually ultra-purple.

(Random House, 2022), 97

By your leave

Caught up with some friends at school ... 

Preventing the Eremocene

Just in time for my First Year Seminar on "Religion and the Anthropocene," the ecological magazing Orion's fortieth anniversary issue is offering "forty origin stories for the Anthropocene," solicited together with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It kicks off with an epigraph from E. O. Wilson:

Planet Earth will enter a new era of its history,

cheerfully called by some the Anthropocene, a time

for and all about our one species alone. I prefer to

call it the Eremocene, the Age of Loneliness.

Perhaps better names can open our eyes, the Orion editor writes.

As we await the announcement of the "golden spike" - the site on Earth whose sediment reveals the geologic pivot from the Holocene to the Anthropocene - we couldn't imagine a more capable thought partner. Our era will be defined by a single material marker whose levels spiked drastically in recent history, and whether it's CO2 emissions in the air, plutonium in the soil, or microplastics in the blood of our offspring, we look to NRDC to move us toward a sustainable future. (4) 

Appalled at the prospect of being defined by a "single material marker," Orion wants a fuller accounting of what might be lost - and yet saved. All the energy of environmental science and policy are needed! But, the NSRC director adds,

Ultimately, a society's laws and policies change, because the hears and values of people change/ And art, in all its forms, provides a direct route to people's hearts, regardless of culture of background. [¶] The environmental movement needs artists and writers of every strip just as much as it needs lawyers, scientists, and activists. (5) 

And so forty writers and poets were invited to create their own holisitic stories for the Anthropocene, and as many artists were commissioned to provide accompanying illustrations. As much future- and present- as origin-oriented, the resulting collection is a sumptuous feast, offering, among others, 

The Age of Plutonium, The Age of Tree Rings, The Age of Fingerprints, The Age of Reflection, The Age of Gratitude, The Age of Eating,The Age of Avoidance, The Age of Enclosure, The Age of Noise, The Ignocene, The Age of Acceleration, The Age of the Entangled Self, The Age the Island Decides to Disappear, The Age of Language Going & Gained, The Age of Invisible Stones, The Age of the Orange, The Age of Paradise, The Age of Stolen Salt, The Age of Timelessness, The Age of Accelerated Extinctions, The Age of Not Knowing, The Omnicene, The Age of Storage, The Age of Invisible Fire, The Era of Turbulent Geometry, The Age of Bear and Raven The Age of Dominion, The Patrescene, The Age of the Possible, Age of the Inhumane, The Age of Anxiety, The Grounded Age, The Urbicene, Age of Convergence, The Age of Writing, The Age of Apricot, The Age of Stories, The Age of Maples

Fun, personal, full of urgency, wisdom, fear and desperate hope. But my course is on religion and the Anthropocene, and religion is largely absent here, as from most other works of Anthropocene humanities. Not a problem: an opportunity! As a final assignment I think I'll have the class craft its own "origin stories for the Anthropocene" - but with religion in view, too. With a semester's lead-time and first-year derring-do, who knows what we will come up with?!

The whole wraparound cover, by an artist named Decur, is lovely.

Concretions

Fell in love with some sculptures at an exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery dedicated to work by Asian American and African American artists who worked in abstraction 1950-1980. As they're sculptures, a static photo can give only a hint but here are Taiwan-born Leo Amino's 1950 "Jungle," 

Hawaii-born Joseph Goto's spectacular and impossible to photograph "Landscape III" (c. 1956-69; it has a sibling at Fallingwater) with San Francisco-born Win Ng's 1959 "Directions" in the background, and Seoul-born John Pai's "The Way" (1985). The exhibition challenges the standard narrative of American abstraction and raises fascinating questions about how abstraction might appeal differently and for different reasons to artists from racialized communities marked by visibility and invisibility, displacement, disposs-ession, race and kinship.

华人同志天主教徒故事

Proofreading a steady stream of translations doesn't quite made me an editor of the just published English edition of this lovely book, but since I was one of the people who got editor Eros Shaw to assemble the 2018 Chinese original, it makes a vague sort of sense. I'm happy to have contributed in any way I could to this important collection of LGBT Catholic narratives from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and "Overseas" (South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, Canada). The editor, whom became a friend during my year in Shanghai, has since been involved with the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics - who will, we hope, ensure wide circulation of these tales from inspiring communities most have surely never imagined exist. 

(Why did the title change? Eros tells me the publisher, in Malaysia, thought the former too explicit for the English edition, since few would recognize it as a quotation from the Song of Songs. Instead the publisher suggested "Love is Love." Eros insisted on a biblical title, and so found Blessed Are Those Who Mourn, with the full line at the top for those unfamiliar: "for they will be comforted.")

SAN --> JFK

And back home again... 

Weather

You'd never guess it, but it was about to rain (from the east): .1 inch!

Cliff crumble

I salvaged a small piece of the Torrey Pines State Beach sea cliff fall from the encroaching waves. Colorfully striped it seems to include the pale purple stripe just beneath the golden Torrey Sandstone. Yet it seems determined to finish what it started, crumbling to the touch.

Cliff fall

The conversion of Torrey Pines State Nature Reserve into Torrey Pines State Beach proceeds apace. A large chunk of this stretch of sheer cliff (it housed an arch once) fell at the end of June, revealing stripes  of a remarkable range of colors - even a pale purple! Once upon a time - before the arch - its top was as Gaudí-ly gnarled and wrinkled as the bit in the distance - which had its own recent bluff fall, too.

Vampire Figaro

Did you know that Mozart wrote an opera at eighteen that prefigures much of the later "Marriage of Figaro"? Called "La Finta Giardiniera," it's rarely performed, but we got to see the American premiere of a newish version tonight. The opera was written for Carnival (useful context) and performed only three times, though Mozart adapted a concert version of it later. In 1796, an unknown hand revised it for a larger orchestra in tones consonant with Mozart's later operas, and it was this version, originally spurned by purists (and revived by René Jacobs just a decade ago), that we heard. The music is indeed marvelous, our cast talented as singers as well as buffa actors. 

But the story, the story! An assistant conductor explained before the performance that the director (from the Hungarian State Opera, in collaboration with San Diego-based Opera NEO) had decided the story, "convoluted even by baroque opera standards," needed some updating, starting with the main premise: the original tells of the reconcilation of an impetuous count and the lover he stabbed in a fit of jealous pique. He ran away, thinking her dead, and it takes many shocks and misunderstandings and a double mad scene for the two (she is the "pretend gardener" of the title) to come together again. So our production added... vampires! (We got two queer characters, too, including a trouser role who changed from trousers to skirts and back again with they/them pronouns in the supertitles, to make it a story of "transformation.") In our version the lady's servant saw her murder and turns her into a vampire (that's them above), and she eventually does the same for the count, whom she hates and loves. 

Does it make for a more satisfying story than the redemption of an abuser? I'm not sure - I don't get vampires. (To be fair, I don't "get" Figaro either.) The production's conceit of characters painting each other's originally white costumes in various colors to represent projected passions got old pretty quickly, too. But I was titillated at the thought that this outrageous production had been performed in Budapest, where the singers - half Hungarian, half American - had a six week residency. I was disappointed to learn that the vampires were added only for the San Diego run, but am happy to have been able to see it, fangs and all.

Destijidas

At the recently reopened Timken, the little jewel of a western art museum in Balboa Park, I was delighted to learn about a Mexican painter who works here in San Diego named Marianela de la Hoz. Entitled "Destijidas (Unwoven)," the exhibition takes Homer's Penelope as its muse, who weaves and unweaves to maintain her freedom. De la Hoz completed this painting, "The Hands of Penelope," while in a residency here. The show's small egg tempera works celebrate women of myth and history, allowing each to "unweave" herself from patriarchal stories. You can see the works (with a little more context than was provided in the show itself) here!