Strike continues...

New School part-time faculty have until today to vote to accept or reject the university administration's latest contract offer; their union is encouraging them to reject it, and they probably will... [image]

Halls decked

On a little stroll with a visiting friend through a Midtown alarmingly full of holiday cheer, found tentacular greenery at St. Patrick's and some spotted lanternflies in one of the Bergdorf Goodman windows

Strike-torn

Returning to school but not quite... The part-time faculty union continues its strike, as its members consider the "last, best and final" offer peremptorily made by the administration last week, and most of us full-time faculty are withholding our labor too in solidarity. The union is advising its members to vote against the offer, so classes may be suspended for a while. Not that we have a while: the fall semester ends two weeks from tomorrow! There are frenzied online discussions of how to ensure students finish the semester without "crossing the picket line," punctuated every so often by someone observing that this kind of chaos and uncertainty is precisely the intended consequence of a strike. Mitigating it through workarounds would lessen the strike's pressure - and so likely make it longer. The university leadership has been incommunicado but, finally realizing it's a crisis, is descending from the ether, the president assuring us that he is confident we can make it through any challenge so long as we stick together and avoid divisiveness. The less platitudinous provost acknowledges "We have faced a period of tumult and discord that feels to me like the fabric of our university has been torn apart, but hopefully not irreparably."

Leave time

These Freemont Cottonwood leaves from near where we stayed - the largest as big as my hand - couldn't come home with us. They're hard enough that they rattle in the wind, but bowed and brittle enough that flattening them between the pages of a book would break them.

长城

We stayed for our mini-vacation a short dramatic drive from Rocky Mountain National Park (above), just on the other side of "Devil's Backbone" (below), one, we read, of many such "hogbacks" across Colorado... The state is full of geological layers pushed skyward! 

Colorado trees

Missing shades of blue

 Vigil

One fewer tree

As we left our Airbnb for the day, our hostess came up and apologized. The arborists she'd been waiting for for a long time had shown up - they were going to take down a big tree, which she was worried might topple over in a windstorm. When we came back their work was done.

Geologic

Early winter views of Garden of the Gods. These pictures make it look a little grander and more other-worldly than it in fact was, with the paths blocked by bloated families and selfies and group shots of all kinds. Not that these sheets of stone, pushed vertical by tectonic forces, paid us any heed! 

Heading for the hills

After AAR it's the open road - a mini-holiday in Colorado. But aren't there classes this week? Usually sessions the days before Thanksgiving are so poorly attended everything needs to be repeated after, so I've got in the habit of scheduling things fun but tangential to my courses. This year, the fun tangential things were also going to be online... But as you may have heard, nothing's happening at the moment coursewise: the part-time faculty strike continues, along with solidarity work stoppages from full-time faculty like me. The contract negotiations have apparently been acrimonious and unsatisfying, and it may be a while before agreement is reached. I'll be back at school next week; whether it will be teaching or picketing isn't clear.

AAR cameos

Today was a good AAR day, perhaps because I took advanage of a recently permitted session format. There are still many panels with 20-minute presentations, respondents and Q&A (mine yesterday was one) but there are also freer form ones with a larger number of presenters, each given just five minutes or so. Since 20 minutes isn't really enough time for an in-depth account of interesting new research anyway, this seems a better use of conference time - and it's definitely more fun! I started the day with a panel which was supposed to have ten presenters, on top of the presider and respondent! Two were unable to attend but it was still a problem for a room set up for four presenters. Next came the one above, with eight presenters. Both were fireworks displays of different approaches and styles of presentation, which also left time for much more audience participation in the ensuing conversation. Intead of hearing six or eight voices, I heard more like thirty-six. Isn't that why one wants to be at a conference like AAR anyway?

Present

Gave my first presentation at the American Academy of Religion since 2016. I attended the past two virtually, but it's been years since anything I could imagine presenting on fit the topics in the year's Call for Papers. Even this year was a long shot, for the "Human Enhancement and Transhumanism" unit, who nibbled when I proposed a talk on "Human Enhancement in the Service of 'Making Kin': Donna Haraway's 'Camille Stories' and Posthuman Religious Futures." I thought it was probably because they didn't get many other proposals but it turns out Haraway is an interest of several of them. They even hosted her at the AAR held in San Francisco in 2011! The panel went well, but discussion defaulted to the group's usual concern - humans doing variously human things in service of variously strange human-transcending ideals. The older Haraway of cyborgs was right up their alley, but the new Haraway's suggestion that humans might dissolve the human in service of a broader kinship with animals didn't tempt.

For me it was a fun chance to think about "The Camille Stories," which have figured prominently in all my classes on the anthropocene, whether in connection with religion or humanities, but this time with an audience I knew would "get" religion. But this setting also helped me be more critical of the stories, which seem to me now to be shaped in quite religious - specifically Christian - ways. I'd articulated misgivings about the strange way in which humans in the stories helped themselves to the genes of other species for the syms (who are then fated to lead a life of shamanic service), even as the other species remain untouched. A strangely conservative reticence, coming from a champion of hybridity, but it becomes more troubling still when we learn that many of these species then, despite the best efforts of the syms and the movements they lead, go extinct. The only vestiges of these lost species are the syms themselves! It points toward a future in which nobody is human - but nobody is not human either, a strange return to the anthropocentrism it was trying to escape! And meanwhile, isn't this all disturbingly like a world in which settlers preserve the cultures of indigenous peoples they have driven to extinction?

The discussion helped me see that the Camilles, and indeed all the "syms," are sacrificial offerings to atone for human sins against other species. Nobody chooses to be one, so the syms' experience is more like that of Jesus (in his human form). But there is also a kind of divination going on: the non-human species are given a kind of immortality - surviving their own extinction - through absorption into the syms. All more than a little white savior complex, huh...

The "Human Enhancement and Transhumanism" crew were unfazed by this, being accustomed to encountering these kinds of religious resonances and reenactments in transhumanist projects all the time - and even perhap embracing them.

Vistas

Amazing view down the Hudson from my flight out of La Guardia today. You can see almost the whole 13.4 miles of Manhattan, the harbor, the Atlantic in the distance... and waves somehow translated all the way up opposite Bloomer Beach! And destination Denver was snow dusted.

WWJBD

No class today, because the part-time faculty union called its members to strike, starting at 8:30 this morning, and I joined most of the full-time faculty I know in cancelling class in support. The students in my class seemed supportive when we discussed it last week, but didn't show up at the picket line until after the time I was there. I marched in the ever growing loop around the corner entrance to The New School's signature building at midday, enjoying reunions with part- and full-time faculty I hadn't seen in a while, as also my research assistant, hoarse from shouting slogans but transported by the collective energy. Hope they can keep it up as long as they need to! This evening I gather the picket line was enhanced by some canny slogans projected on the face of the building (in our signature font)! I have to smile at this one, since Baldwin was barely here but has become central to our identity; our president is a Baldwin scholar!

Is the iron hot enough?

A strike has not been officially called but could be announced for as soon as tomorrow morning. Nobody knows quite what to expect, so we twist in the wind with conversations by turns anxious and impatient. The sense of many of my students and colleagues: a strike would be disruptive but if it's going to happen, let's get it started already!

Each leaf has a tale to tell

Gesticulating Sweetgum

Brief reprieve

Negotiations continue for another day, so I was able to spend a bit more time with students and check in with some tree friends... 

No more C

There was a run on tenors in our church choir today. The professional lead resigned last week, and the promised pinch hitter never arrived. so it was just me, helped out by the bass lead in solo parts. One of our anthems was Elgar's setting of the "Ave verum corpus," but the more fun and demanding was Malcolm Archer's 2002 setting of "And I saw a new heaven" from the always trippy Book of Revelation. Five flats?! 

I guess John's vision is supposed to be full of amazement and joy, and this version is chipper indeed, soaring over a dancing rhythm. We tenors - well, bass lead and me - got to sing the famous words "And God shall wipe away avery tear" at the tippy tops of our registers, unable to manage a mp on a dizzying high F. But the words that gave me pause came two pages earlier. In the new world, SATB sang, "there was nooo more sea, and there was nooo more sea." Why not?

Wolken auf einer Brücke

Went to MoMA today and was entranced by the decades-long brilliance of Meret Oppenheim. A non-representative sample: 

The Night, Its Volume, and What Endangers It (La Nuit, son volume et ce qui lui est dangereux), 1934

War and Peace (Krieg und Frieden), 1943

Forest Interior with Dryads (Waldinneres mt Dryaden), 1967

Six Clouds on a Bridge (Sechs Wolken auf einer Brücke), 1975

Dark Mountains, Red and Yellow Clouds at Right (Dunkle Berge, rechts gelb-rote Wolken), 1977-79

Goldengrove unleaving

Our school may be heading toward a strike next week, so I may not get to see these trees again before all the leaves have fallen.

Salad days are over

I was shocked at the price of organic lettuce only to discover... 

Apocalypse not yet

Midterm election results aren't all in yet, but it seems the worst didn't happen. My fingers remain crossed.

O Tannenbaum

As part of a group presentation on pine trees, a student read us a story on Monday, which started thus:

Those of you that have hiked or driven through the great Ontario Provincial Park that forms most of the Sibley Peninsula and have gazed in wonderment at the magnificent 'White Pines that literally cover the area right up to the Sleeping Giant, may be interested to know that, according to legend, these did not get there by accident. About two thousand years ago, a tribe of Ojibway Indians lived on the shore of Thunder Bay in the vicinity of Sibley Peninsula and had for their Chief a very wise and much traveled Indian, of great birth.

The language of this tale was archaic, and as it went on, it seemed to me more and more suspect. "Two thousand years" was just the first of several clues that this was very particular kind of story. We heard that said venerable chief, on his deathbed, bade his son plant a seed (from a bag he'd filled on distant travels) every time a "papoose" was born, which the son did, raising a forest. Until... 

One night, while he lay asleep in his tepee, he was suddenly awakened by a strange sound, his tepee seemed to glow with a bright light and there, at the foot of his bed of furs, stood the Spirits of his father and two other Great Chiefs. The Spirit of Golden Eagle spoke very softly. "My son, you have kept your promise well and we are well pleased. We have come to give you a great duty to perform. Tonight, the greatest Child the world has ever known will be born. Pick the finest seed that you have and go to the highest place and plant it at once. All men will see the tree that springs from it, and wonder…"

If it wasn't obvious by now what was going on, we learned that the seed produced the fastest-growing and tallest tree ever seen, one admired by humans and animals alike, until

This great and magnificent tree lived for thirty years and then one Friday, it was struck down during one of the terrible storms for which Thunder Bay is noted. Now, nothing remains of this beautiful White Pine, but the memory of it is kept alive each year as we place the little gifts for our children under the starlit fragrant bough of our own.

I asked the class today if they'd noticed anything curious about the story, and one said she did find it odd that it seemed to end with a Christmas tree. Bingo, said I, and repeated the story, emphasizing two thousand years, greatest Child, thirty years, Friday... and, for most of the rest in the class, it clicked. Could it be that this wasn't ancient "Indian" lore? On an internet search only slightly less cursory than the student's, I wasn't able to find the story's origin - but we were able to speculate. Who would be interested in telling a story in which "Ojibway Indians" have for two millennia been Christians without realizing it? What would it mean for the very trees and animals of the New World to be witnesses to the Christ event? What happens when European settlers tell their descendants this story?

A teachable moment - and we didn't even get into the comparable cooptation of prechristian European trees on which this built! Aware (aghast!) at the power a story has to order or disorder a world, we were ready to start appreciating how differently Turtle Island might be known if one started with the story of Skywoman Falling.

Rooted in entanglement

The New York Times today threatened to burst the bubble of those who are persuaded that forests are caring circles of mutual aid, a "wood wide web" - but wimped out of it, giving the last word to tree wonder: lest you worry that a less webby woods could feel a tad drab, the researchers maintain that there’s plenty of intrigue even if it turns out that trees aren’t whispering secrets to each other via subterranean fungal channels. A missed opportunity.

I suppose it's useful to rein in those of us so relieved to learn about symbiosis that we talk as if the competition that animates natural selection is passé, but it could have been a little subtler. Of course, as Merlin Sheldrake (briefly cited in the article) lays out in Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, symbiosis is a spectrum from parasitism to true mutuality - and no species does things that aren't ultimately in its own interest. For this reason, Sheldrake contests the "Wood Wide Web" moniker coined by editors at Nature for Suzanne Simard's work. Fungi are not hapless and guileless conduits for the communication of plants, like fiberoptic cables. (For that matter, the World Wide Web isn't a guileless vessel either, as we have learned to our peril!) 

Yet that isn't the end of it but the start of it. Competition vs. symbiosis reproduces a naive view where species aren't already all tangled up with each other to begin with. Communication happens all the time, not much of it friendly. As Kathryn Flinn, one of the people cited in the Times article, notes in an opinion piece for Scientific American, 

Do trees really talk? Sure. Plants emit hormones and defense signals. Other plants detect these signals and alter their physiology accordingly. But not all the talk is kind; plants also produce allelochemicals, which poison their neighbors. ... 

Reciprocity among trees is possible, but many interactions are likely asymmetric, such as between mature trees and tiny seedlings. ... 

Interestingly, when mycorrhizae transfer resources from a native grass to an invasive weed, this is interpreted as evidence of parasitism, not cooperation. 

Overemphasizing cooperation is misleading. The forest floor is a forum of fierce competition. A mature maple tree produces millions of seeds, and on average only one will grow to reach the canopy. The rest will die, with or without help from mom. 

Amid this struggle, trees can sometimes facilitate each other’s growth. But this does not mean that a forest functions like one organism. An ecosystem comprises an ever-changing diversity of organisms having an ever-changing variety of interactions, positive and negative.

It's good to be reminded of the allelochemicals and the millions of fruitless maple seeds, a reality I particularly find obscured in the feel-good tracts of Peter Wohlleben, and sentimental appropriations of Simard's' "mother trees." But Flinn goes on to argue that any symbiotic relationship would have to be the result of "group selection," a rarity always trumped in the struggle for survival by individual selection, and something that would take more time than the reality of the "ever-changing diversity of organisms" in a forest would allow. And yet collaboration is the name of the game: no being can survive without engaging in it pretty much all the time, at least at the wheeling-dealing level of the mycorrhizae. If "group selection" can't account for it where it happens, perhaps we need an appreciation of "emergence," or of "self-organizing systems."

I resonate with Flinn's anti-anthropomorphic conclusion: 

[L]et’s seek to understand plants on their own terms. Plants are fundamentally unlike us: mute, rooted and inscrutable. We need to meet the challenge of cultivating respect for organisms that are different from us—in their separate and complex bodies, in their sophisticated interactions, in their unfathomable lives.

But I think that learning about plants might help us understand ourselves as fundamentally unlike the way we imagine we are. We may not be "mute, rooted and inscrutable" but that doesn't make us articulate, free and transparent, or unentangled with the rest of life. 

Preparing to fall

What a difference four days makes!

And where will be in four more? I'm jittery with anxiety over what tomorrow's elections will bring. It can well take a few days for results to be confirmed in a normal year, but normal years seem to be over. I expect trial runs for the mini-me version of the Big Lie, drawn out at every scale of government. There will also be cases where someone gets the most votes, but not everyone who could or should have voted in that election was able to - or so some will think. Grievance and accusations of stolen results from both sides, and no arbiter in sight.

For all the saints

At church today we were doing so many things we forgot we were observing the day we usually celebrate our Patronal Feast. 

The veritable Dagwood sandwich of a service began with an atonal "Alleluia for All Saints" by one of our past music directors, and, in procession, the hymn which is our unofficial anthem, "For all the saints." But we also had the third of four lay stewardship homilies ("pledge!"), which came after a sermon for All Saints (which we were observing although it fell on Tuesday), and before the reading of the Necrology - the list of names of the blessed departed - for All Soul's Day (which fell on Monday). After the service, the space was rapidly transformed into a dining hall to host our monthly Sunday Supper. 

It was true to the three ring circus that we are, I suppose, but a bit much, really. There was no space for the rest we wished for the departed - except when the choir sang "In Paradisum" from the Fauré "Requiem" (after communion, but before the Necrology). I hope the congregation was nourished by it. I've been steeping in recordings of it all week, so I hear its strange and sublime cadences in my head still (not least because today was the day I officially switched to trying to sing tenor). Were we too busy to provide welcome for the saints?

I hope they were happy for their memory to be wrapped up in the whirl of activity. Perhaps they remember the patronal feast for us.

Croton Reservoir vision