Stick 'em up

This blog is about more than sharing cool things that cross my path, but this is so cool I need to share it. It is not, as I first thought, an exhibit of pottery. Or are these netsuke, or spice jars, or perfume vessels, or beads, or even miniature sculptures. Human hands didn't make them at all! They're the eggs of stick insects (phasmids), already masters of looking like something they aren't, magnified well beyond their under 1mm size. You can see them even closer up on photographer' Levon Biss' website. I'm dazed with wonder.

Interview with the vampire

Robin Wall Kimmerer got to headline the New York Times Magazine this weekend. Unfortunately it was a conversation with someone who channeled the dumbest forms of skepticism, but I suppose it does surface what Kimmerer's approach is up against. The interviewer David Marchese seems to have thought it is job to offer her offramps back to mainstream Western views of a hostile natural world. 

There’s a certain kind of writing about ecology and balance that can make the natural world seem like this placid place of beauty and harmony, he begins disingenuously. But the natural world is also full of suffering and death.1 Do you think your work, which is so much about the beauty and harmony side of things, romanticizes nature?

[Even sleazier, he adds a "footnote" to his question, quoting "visionary" Werner Herzog, which the reader will assume Kimmerer didn't see, but accept as "apt."]

Kimmerer's answer to the obnoxious question is modest and grounded. Her home place, Maple Nation, is generous as others may not be, she says. And she offers a third way beyond his forced choices. It is a mistake to romanticize the living world, but it is also a mistake to think of the living world as adversarial. 

The interviewer's having none of this:

Undeterred, he suggests that her work can be misread as a critique of capitalism (although if he'd been listening he might have heard echoes of capitalist "creative destruction" in what she just said). Hasn't capitalism lifted millions out of poverty? She doesn't take the bait. 

Unquestionably the contemporary economic systems have brought great benefit in terms of human longevity, health care, education and liberation to chart one’s own path as a sovereign being. But the costs that we pay for that? It goes back to human exceptionalism, because these benefits are not distributed among all species.

She punts gamely in this way on all his stupid questions, and I suppose some people might be inspired by her answers to learn more about her work. Surely 1.4 million readers of Braiding Sweetgrass can't be wrong! But the coherence of her views, their roots in both indigenous and botanical wisdom, and her celebration of the love-ful "democracy of species," never really have a chance to show themselves. A shame.

Sylvan ruminations

Long quiet walk through Tackamac North and Blauveld State Park, not far from the city (visible int he distance from a viewpoint), with narry a bud or flower to distract from the woods' de/recomposing work. 

Police brutality

A photograph by Tyre Nichols, beaten to death by police in Memphis.

Gifts of trees

I've made my way through another diverting tree book, Jonathan Drori's Around the World in 80 Trees (London: Laurence King, 2018). There are a lot of tree books around, and I stumbled on this one while searching for a used copy of something else, an Around the World in 80 Trains my sister told me about. (There are, as you may imagine, many many Around the World in 80... books; merci, Jules Verne.) Drori proceeds roughly south and then east from the UK, providing portraits of trees, their environments, and their place in human societies, accompanied by drawings by Lucille Clere. Along the way all sorts of key tree concepts are effortlessly introduced too.

Drori doesn't get hung up on matters of definition: With a few provisos, the broad definition of a tree is a plant that has a tall, woody stem; it can support itself and lasts from year to year. Botanists debate about how tall such a plant must be. I've decided not to be too precious about this. The most important fact about them is shared with other plants: The world's trees are astonishingly diverse - we now know that there are at least 60,000 distinct species. Unable to run away from animals that would love to eat them, they manufacture unpleasant chemicals as a deterrant. They exude gum, resin and latex in order to swamp, poison and immobilize insects and other attackers, and to exclude fungi and bacteria. (9) 

Eventually we learn that trees, like all other forms of life, in fact have symbiotic relationships with many other species (mycorrhiza are introduced with the fifth tree, the Silver Birch), but this isn't Drori's starting point. Trees are agents, as we learn, protective, manipulative and sometimes even aggressive. But as interesting to Drori is the way that trees' gums, resins, latex and other defensive traits are put to all manner of unintended uses by us humans.

Serendipity is important in Drori's framing. His first two trees - London Plane and Leyland Cypress - are both hybrids, and hybrids of recent vintage. Both seem to have happened accidentally in British gardens, which brought together trees from widely different places. (It's not part of Drori's brief to foreground the Columbian exchange or empire.) In the first case it's the American sycamore and Oriental plane, hybridizing perhaps three centuries ago. In the second, it's two North American trees - yellow cedar from Oregon and Monterrey cypress from California - meeting as expats in Wales. This happened not much more than three decades ago, but they're already the most widely ordered plant for British gardens. (They're perfect for privacy-protecting hedges.)

There's plenty to wonder at in the trees we learn about, but Drori nowhere muses, as strangler fig prophet Mike Shanahan did, that trees elicit experiences of awe, gratitude and reverence. That people develop "superstitions" around trees is a curiosity. Instead, there's always stuff going on. Trees are used by human beings for food and shelter and medicine, for nets and clothes and ship's masts, teas and tonics and poisons, canoes and charcoal and violins. In all these cases (except perhaps eating), we're putting trees' tricks to our own uses. 

If there's a moral to Drori's story, it's about the meeting of arboreal and human ingenuity, just that we are liable to make too much of a good thing, felling vast forests without a thought for the morrow. That human beings didn't use to do that - and may have learned it through the omnicidal ethos of colonialism and the scale-destroying logic of capitalism - isn't part of the story but needs to be! (I suppose the thought of going around the world in 80 whatevers may be part of the problem.) For most of human history, humans beings lived with trees - Kimmerer would say human people lived with tree people - caring and being cared for. 

In a time where our indebtedness to trees is obscure and abstract (in part because that derivate tree product plastic has replaced so much), we need to be reminded that our relationships with them are material, not just spiritual, involving giving and taking, not just beholding. This book might help me get this across to students in "Religion of Trees." We have always been involved with trees, not just surrounded by them. But I'd want to go one step further, suggesting that relationship is in a deep way preceded by symbiosis. Trees, most of them vastly older than we are (unlike those hybrids), developed in all their astonishing diversity always bundled with symbiotic species of other kinds, eventually welcoming us to join the feast.

Bühnenweihspiel

The stars aligned, and we scored cheapie orchestra seats at the Met, 14th row far left! The opera was Poulenc's "Dialogue des Carmélites" and it was worth sacrificing the fullness of sound we're used to from the Family Circle for a closer view of the singers, who were, of course, all wearing the same costume. I've not seen this opera performed before and it's a curious confection. This production, originally from 1977 (today's was the 64th performance), does wonders with an abstract black and white set, capturing the austerity of Carmelite life and its challenge to the busy colorful world they renounce. In the vast dark cave of the Met's stage, their "dialogues" about faith and pride, calling and ultimately martyrdom seem at once intimate and cosmic. It is a very 20th century French Catholic opera, almost decadent in its renunciations and provocations. The last scene, one of opera's great coups de théâtre, embodies that extravagant asceticism, daring us to believe that the nuns of Compiègne, now dressed colorfully like characters in any historical opera, transcend even art as their voices are cut off by the guillotine. We're left abandoned and yet exalted, having caught a glimpse of the terrifying and glorious reality they inhabit. (Or would be, did not the gaiety of the curtain call follow minutes later. Oh well. Just an opera after all.)

Ever After

In a lecture hall again - first time since Spring 2020! To celebrate I placed our class in a lineage of classes and events from 1920, 1951, 1963, 1968, 1983, 2012.

生日

Yesterday was my birthday... they're piling up!

Heavenly banquet

In church today the choir sang an anthem of Henry Purcell's which I have always loved and always wanted to sing. Wonderful! The occasion, which also elicited "In Paradiso" from Fauré's Requieum and Parratt's setting of the Russian Contakion for the Departed, was a memorial service for Father Rand Frew, Rector in the 1980s and founder of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen. During the service, the big ladle which is the Soup Kitchen's emblem was placed on the altar.

Inhabiting ideals

Today the Event Cafe at The New School's University Center, the hub of the One New School occupation which has just recon-vened, was festooned with quotations from the 1918/19 "Proposal for an Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women," a document which inspires an anachronistic originalism in many readers. They'd selected passages I often focus on, and others I'd forgotten about. 

My New School history partner J and I were part of the restart, tasked with describing "New School History and Values" in thirty minutes. We focused on earlier crises, the unintended consequences of heady ideals, and what unexpected things their resolutions brought about. 

The first was 1922, when, just three years in, The New School realized it couldn't make do without an administration after all. The second was Parsons' 1970 bankrupty crisis, solved by a merger with The New School which fatefully changed the trajectories of both. And then there was the 2008-9 faculty vote of no confidence in the mercurial president who had set out to unite the disparate parts of the university. (He didn't leave until the end of his term, though.) 

I'm not sure this was quite what the organizers - committed among other things to bringing about an administration-less New School through no confidence votes in senior leadership - had in mind. But people are always happy to learn anything complicated and contingent about New School history, and to know they're not the first to be wrestling with the messy legacies of a mess of glorious ideals.

The rest of the morning was also devoted to "education." Over zoom a professor at a university in Argentina which has, for three years, attempted a kind of participatory decision-making, shared their experience. Two seniors in the Fine Arts Department shared an eloquent proposal for a revisioning of their program to free them from individualizing and careerist structures of thought and relationship - and invited every department and school to do the same. And a draft of a blueprint for carving out a fundamentally new New School, building on discussions during December's occupation, was read.

I didn't stay for the afternoon, dedicated to working through and honing the blueprint. I'll be interested to see if the Event Cafe and the incredibly generative and galvanizing discussions it's played host to through the Occupation, will change the university's center of gravity as we enter the uncharted waters of a new semester. Humpty TNS Dumpty is in pieces, and needs all the help he can get.

Double takes

Two glimpses from exhibitions: an anonymous trompe-l'oeuil at the Met (not an engraving, not paper, not wood); 7000-year-old female figurines from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.  

Pollards

A visit to the Met today provided a chance to check in with its 

pollarded London Planes, gnarly knobs fingering future foliage

Precipitation

.. but New York City has yet to see winter white this season

Visions

A visit to the Morgan Library for a lunchtime concert provided a pretext to check out their current exhibitions. "She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400–2000 B.C." is a marvel, building around the figure of priestess and poet Enheduanna, the first surviving author in history, a treasure chamber of images of Sumerian and Akkadian women. The goddesses are familiar but these images of 

women - some of whom the exhibition argues are portraits of individuals - are something different. Consider the woman seated 

with a cuneiform text on her lap (c. 2112-2004 BCE) above, or these scenes of weavers (c. 3300-3000 BCE), an all-female sacrificial scene (c. 2334-2154 BCE) or an all-female banquet (c. 2500 BCE). Even some of the images of goddesses - like this one from c. 2400 BCE - seem like real women!

Had less time for the other exhibits, but enjoyed the drawings of Georg Baselitz, most of which, starting in 1969, he deliberately painted upside-down, allowing him (and viewers) to focus on painting itself without abandoning the figurative; this is Waldweg (1976).

And, keeping with the (inevitable!) theme of trees, here's one of the early drafts of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince, entitled "The little prince on a planet invaded by a baobab" (1942).