Mountain air

Another off-season visit to the Adirondacks - well, off-people season.

There isn't a season when these mounts and their people aren't all in.

GPT dreams

The Times a few days ago offered an unusually illuminating account of how the "large language learning" of programs like ChatGPT is able to replicate the style of different writers and genres. They demonstrate how a program, starting from scratch with only the collected works of Jane Austen or Shakespeare, or particular works like the Federalist Papers, the Harry Potter books, Moby Dick or the TV show "Star Trek: The Next Generation," can arrive with remarkable speed at success.

The program begins at the level of letters, generating a random array and then measuring it against its target database, noting which, if any, juxtapositions appear there and with what frequency. (This is the Austen simulator.) Within 250 rounds, it learns to distinguish letters from numbers and punctuation marks, and the approximate length of words - there were no spaces when it started. From a distance it looks like English, although every word is gibberish.

After another 250 rounds, the small words are English words, although the rest remain monstrosities of randomness, like bits of polished glass among the stones on a seashore. It takes ten times longer for the process to get some longer words right, but soon it's looking like this. 

The words are jumbled and monster words remain but even they aren't random any more, but assembled like real English words. And after another 25,000 rounds we arrived at what look like sentences. 

There are still some non-words, but even these look like English. Punctuation and the rhythm of words of different lengths makes it look like natural syntax unfolding. It's confounding to realize that these words, while English, still have nothing to do with each other - confounding because it looks right. As is clearest when you're reading a text aloud, we never read a text word by word (at least in languages we're fluent in) but first take in the Gestalt of sentence and paragraph in order to know where to lay the stress, when to pause. Freakishly, the Gestalt is here. I feel like I could read this aloud. 

I also feel like something is emerging that was always there, struggling to articulate itself. Wrong, wrong, wrong, of course! Kindly, the article leaves it at this. I don't know how many more rounds it would take for "BabyGPT" to be able to give me the grammatically correct and syntactically seamless texts spun by ChatGPT...

When I first read the article I was reminded of the babbling of children, and of a young nephew's expertly mimicking the playing of a piano with dramatically satisfying phrasing as he pounded his little hands on the keyboard, pausing only to turn the page of the score. They get the Gestalt without - before - the meaning, too. As I write this I recall also a fun acting exercise from "Religion and Theater," ages ago, in which student improvised scenes without words but "babbling" - and understood each other well enough to make for compelling interactions!

But last night, perhaps freed by the Adirondack mountain air, my machine learning came home to roost. I had a sequence of dreams, as I sometimes do, taking place in different times and with different people I've known, some silly some less so. One was a gathering at the faculty club of a university I used to teach at, where everyone was unrecognizable in silhouette and I worried with whom I'd sit. But when I woke, the dreams still on the edge of awareness, I saw them in a whole new way. Not garbled memories, not something from my unconscious, struggling to articulate itself, not some privileged glimpse into the matrix. They don't mean anything, I thought. They're Gestalt only, meaningful-seeming arrays of what are really just random snibbets of content.

In this season of AI excitement pundits have wondered how the newest generation of programs will change the way we understand each other and even ourselves. Am I too early an adapter? 

Sylvan collage

We're back in the 'Dacks, just as spring starts to poke through a forerst floor plastered with sodden leaves like old newspaper clippings.

Darsan?

Do the trees remember when we made masks for them? Of course not. But we do.

Gaswéñdah

Attended a fascinating talk and discussion today by Dr. Joe Stahlman, a scholar and researcher of Tuscarora descent currently working as Director of the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum-Onöhsagwë:De' Culture Center. Drawn together by the circulation of two recently commissioned wampum belts, each recording an old treaty, he shared practices of reconciliation and peace making, mused about the erasure of indigenous contributions to American political and intellectual life, contributions still valuable and perhaps more needed than ever. The talk seems to have been one he would have gladly given to the organizers of the upcoming semiquincentennial of the United States, if they had asked him during the planning stages, rather than as a late-invited guest to an already scripted celebration - an invitation he declined. I hadn't realized how close this anniversary is - 2026! - but will accept Stahlman's invitation to think about it in terms of the 1613 Two Row Wampum, explained beautifully here:

The Haudenosaunee explained to the Dutch that they did not use paper to record their history. They would make belts made of white and purple wampum shells. The Haudenosaunee made a belt to record this agreement. The belt has two purple rows running alongside each other representing two boats. One boat is the canoe with the Haudenosaunee way of life, laws, and people. The other is the Dutch ship with their laws, religion, and people in it. The boats will travel side by side down the river of life. Each nation will respect the ways of each other and will not interfere with the other. “Together we will travel in Friendship and in Peace Forever; as long as the grass is green, as long as the water runs downhill, as long as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, and as long as our Mother Earth will last.”

Unfurled

The primeval wonder of ferns

Blue marble

Just in time for Earth Day, a new "earthrise" image from the Moon. This one was taken by the Hakuto-R mission from Japan's commercial company ispace as it orbited the moon, on April 20th. (They're landing today!) The angle is diverting (if not vertical!), the blue dazzling and a little disorienting - may I call it otherworldly?

(The landing appears to have failed, by the way.)

Gilded

Noticed a first golden maple samara dancing in the air today.

'Sup at Emmaus

The gospel reading for today - Easter 3 - was the familiar story of the road to Emmaus. Two disconsolate disciples leave Jerusalem and meet someone on the road, who asks “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” one replies, and tells of the execution of Jesus of Nazareth, whom they had thought was "the one to redeem Israel." Still, some women had claimed that his tomb was empty... The stranger responds “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” He goes on to interpret the scriptures explaining why this should be so. 

As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” 

So they sit down over food, and as he breaks bread they recognize him - and he vanishes. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road," they say to each other, "while he was opening the scriptures to us?” and return to Jerusalem to report whom they had seen, which is why Luke, telling the story, lets us in on it from the start: "Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him." That somewhat spoils the surprise, but presumably that's how they reported it too, "we met Jesus!" rather than "we met someone who turned out to be him."

It's a great story, and has produced remarkable art juggling these points of view, the moment when, in the blessing and breaking of the bread, the disciples see Jesus - just before he vanishes again from their view. (Or perhaps a servant woman recognizes him before they do.) But hearing the story again today I was caught by the words from earlier in the story. “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” Years ago, perhaps even before the fall of the wall, I was in Berlin and was struck by the words inscribed over the door of a Protestant church, words I remember as "verweil mit uns, denn es will dunkel werden." Along the way I must have worked out where these words came from but I don't think I quite worked out that they are addressed to Jesus but unawares. The disciples' hearts are burning and they have heard of the empty tomb, but cannot yet believe. The person they invite to stay with them is, so far as they can at that point imagine, just another person, though one whose reading of the scriptures gives them hope, a solitary traveler they invite into their company. Their words from just before they understood, not Luke's - or Jesus'. Human, profound.

Vanity

My friend M thinks this pic like a Dutch master. The tulips, I suppose!

Greening

Lang courtyard maples in fine fettle on a lovely spring day.

Snitowana

When our beloved colleague Ann Snitow passed away in 2019, my New School history co-consipirator J and I contributed to a collection of memorials collected by the Literary Studies Department, but never heard where and even whether they'd been published. Finally found!

Holding History

We’ve been working on the history of this marvelous and maddening school for close to a decade, and Ann’s been one of our most important muses. We’ve met with her over many years, talking informally and formally. She is this history – she came to Lang in its very early days; she critiques this history – she has been instrumental in telling the comings and goings of Gender Studies; and she keeps this history alive – she has saved documents, flyers, and tales. Ann has helped us appreciate that The New School has always been a site for struggle and has modeled for us – as activist, scholar, colleague – how one might continue to love this imperfect institution. She holds us and our history in a warm, though mindful, embrace.

One of Ann’s projects that has served as a guide for us is the Feminist Memoir Project, a project undertaken with Rachel Blau DuPlessis in response to the discovery – disturbing but perhaps not surprising – that the women’s movement hardly appeared in emerging histories of the Sixties. It’s a wonderful volume, taking you deep into many moments of the women’s movement, its vantages and questions as varied and compelling as the women featured. Now these women’s voices were there for all to hear! But, ten years later, the pattern had barely changed. 

What especially inspires us is what Ann did next. She wrote an essay admitting that Feminist Memoir Project hadn’t changed the prevailing narrative, and owning the anger and disappointment this realization provoked. Then she sought a deeper understanding of the phenomenon and arrived at a way to continue the struggle.

Ann’s deeper understanding took the form of acknowledging that women’s histories – at least the histories of the women’s movement – are structurally hard to remember. She utilizes Bill Hirst’s work on what kinds of memories are “sticky” and establishes that the women’s histories in question simply aren’t. They don’t tell a clear story, with a clear end, a unified voice, a charismatic spokesperson. Charismatic speakers were many, but none wanted to be a spokesperson. And the movement’s messages were many – as many as you would need for a movement whose goal was not some definable end state but the blossoming of as many kinds of lives as empowered liberated women might seek to live. Sticky political movements walk in lockstep, but not movements of liberation.

What to do about this? Ann names the temptation to learn to throw like a boy, and resists it. Something more than superficial would be lost if a movement like the women’s movement disciplined itself into sticky behaviors. The cacophony of voices of the women’s movement doesn’t represent a loss of focus. It’s not just a phase. It’s what liberation looks like. How can this abundance be held for future generations to discover?

This leads to a chastened sense of what historians can do. Many of the stories they want to tell aren’t sticky, and will likely be overlooked, simplified, bowdlerized. The struggle goes on. Our work on New School history tries to capture and convey a kindred cacophony, knowing we’ll always be out-shouted by tall men with catchy slogans. And in our documentary work we seek to produce an archive for those who come new to the struggle, to show them what liberated lives, lives owning the challenges and ambiguities – the uncertainties – look like.

Our approach to New School histories – polyvocal, collaborative, open-ended, and staving off pressure to “write the book” – is nurtured by these ideas and by Ann’s splendid example. 

And every word of this is still true.

Sweet!

The "Indigenous Resurgence" week in "After Religion" was again an inspiration. I had a guest speaker, R, an alum who zoomed in from Boriken (Puerto Rico), speaking about her work as a Taino educator and artist. My laptop moved around the room as students asked questions, each of which led to an enlightening conversation. One student asked about R's work teaching Taino language and why it mattered. In her presentation, R had told us about the importance of cemi, in Taino traditions and practices... but what are cemi? Many accounts render them gods or divinities; R recommended instead translating cemi as "ancesteral spirits," though this was imperfect too. In the discussion she enlarged on something her mentor had said. In Taino, cemi means "sweetness" - the sweetness which manifests in growth and fertility, for instance. This isn't not "ancestral" or "divine" so much as a window to a profoundly different way of understanding the sacred energies at work around and through all life.

Among the things I'd given students to prepare for class were the first three chapters of Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk, whose marvelous account of the rainbow serpent I've shared with you - an account more like "sweetness" than (just) divinity or ancestral energy. I'll be starting next week's class with another passage from his book, whose "totemic entities" seem cemi-kin.

Old Nyoongars and Yorgas in Perth tell stories about a group of three totemic entities that work together in miraculous ways. Certain butterflies always lay their eggs on a particular bush above the nest of a particular species of ant. The ants collect the eggs and take them down into the nest. When the larvae hatch, the ants carry them up to eat the leaves of the bush at night and then carry them back down again. When they grow too heavy to carry, the ants bring the leaves down to them. The larvae grow a jelly on their sides when they eat those particular leaves, and this is the food that the queen ant eats. The larvae then spin cocoons in the nest for the final stage of the process, after which they fly out of the nest as butterflies and begin the cycle all over again. 

This intensely interrelated process within a totemic group of three entities – Bush, Ant and Butterfly – would be impossible for a single human mind to design. How do these symbiotic dances develop, when the cause-and-effect relations are so inter-dependent and complex that there is no way to reverse-engineer the process by which the the system came to be? (82-83)

Part of the way Yunkaporta argues that "indigenous thinking can save the world" is recognition of this kind of (always local) complexity, and how it is obscured and disrupted by the west's "lens of simplicity," which "always seems to make things more complicated, but simultaneously less complex" (4). Fun fun!

Boogie-woogie tree

Can't resist sharing this work by Piet Mondrian, "Avond," aka "The Red Tree," painted in 1908, just before his work started going abstract. What if the energies coursing (like the colors) through his famous "Broadway Boogie-woogie" (1942-3) at MoMA are actually arboreal?!

Tricolor

NYBG

Native wetlands and some gaudy visitors...

Toast

Annnnnd: green! Two weeks ahead of last year! Summery heat too...

Ready to whirl

Saucer magnolia

Solar calendar

Setting sun peeking through Grant's Tomb as cherries gather below.

さくら？ もみじ！

Happy Easter! There've been some peevish messages going around, rebutting the cavil that this is really a Roman spring festival (Ishtar is not Eoster is not Easter), but there's definitely a pagan energy to it. I remember how different - and in its way profoundly right - it was to experience Easter in the Antipodes, where it's an autumnal holiday: a harvest festival. So while I can't resist sharing more cherry ebullience, here's also the scene at a copse of Japanese maples, with their spring anticipation of the reds of fall.

Uplifted

The sermon at tonight's Easter Vigil was about the Keith Haring altar in one of the chapels of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. The preacher's focus was on the lower half of the triptych, which are throngs of familiar Haring figures with their arms in the air. But are they the crowds welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the (same!) crowds crying "crucify him" five days later, people mourning his execution or celebrating his resurrection? Maybe, she said, we can take the easy way out and say a little bit of all of them? 

Her point was that the Easter story is to be experienced in community, something that comes a little hard to me. The stories, and the litugies of Holy Week, are so intimately scaled. Where the crucifixion was, according at least to Luke and Matthew, widely felt - darkness descended, the earth shook, rocks were split, tombs opened, and the bodies of the saints entered the city (yoicks!) - the Easter discovery is as low-key as could be: an empty tomb, discovered by a few women ignored even by the men they knew. My hands are lifted in confusion.

Thorns

Honey locust getting in the mood

Wood Friday

Good Friday. Before the service, a cross waits in the narthex of the church (next to the windows of shattered stained glass recovered from the church after the fire of 1990). Once the service is finished, it rests on the stripped altar of a darkened church for silent veneration. In between we twice sang these words of Venantius Fortunatus (560?-600?), once in English to the melody of "Pange Lingua" and once in the Latin in a setting attributed to John IV of Portugal (1604-56):

Crux fidelis, inter omnes

arbor una nobilis:

nulla silva talem profert,

fronde, flore, germine.

Dulce lignum, dulces clavos,

dulce pondus sustinet.

Faithful cross, above all other,

One and only noble tree:

None in foliage, none in blossom,

None in fruit thy peer may be.

Sweetest wood and sweetest iron,

Sweetest weight is hung on thee!

Pressing my hand to it after the service I felt the life of the particular tree from which it was cut (strange Hans Christian Andersenian fate to wait in a dark closet all year for one solemn moment of celebration as an instrument of and witness to torture) but also somehow that of its forebear, who bore - after being borne by - Jesus. Many an ancient legend told that this was no ordinary tree but descended from a tree in the Garden of Eden (maybe that with the forbidden fruit), hewn perhaps already for Solomon's Temple or a bridge crossed by the Queen of Sheba on her way to Solomon. But, if any of the story is true, it's far more likely to have been a tree quite like many others, and one that had been conscripted for many a crucifixion before. (One thinks of James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree.)

And the tree? In the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Dream of the Rood," the tree (this one new to the task but cut from the edge of an ordinary forest) tells its story. As a lovely recent essay recounts,

They suffer together, the Warrior and the Cross. It’s a profoundly intimate bond. Both are driven through with cruel nails; they are pinned together, and their bodies mingle sap and sweat, water and blood. Christ bears it all without a word, but in this poem the Cross can give voice to the pain of both, the agony, the fear. Unlike Christ, the Cross has not chosen this death, and the pain is almost too much for it to bear; it is, after all, only an ordinary tree. But it holds firm to its position, as its Lord has commanded, and stands fast until the end. 

When the battle is over and the young warrior dead, the Cross feels Christ’s body being lifted from its arms and carried away for burial. It doesn’t see what happens next, because its part in the story is over. We have to fill in those details for ourselves: the garden, the stone rolled away, the empty tomb. The Cross knows none of this. Its knowledge ends on the evening of Christ’s burial, as the grieving disciples depart, singing a song of mourning, their voices dying away. The Cross itself is buried in a deep pit and forgotten, its purpose completed in the eyes of the executioners. Centuries later, though, it tells us, it was rediscovered [by Constantine's mother Helena, not without antisemitism]; like its Lord, it rose from the grave to be exalted and honored across the world.

But on Good Friday, neither of these resurrections has happened.

Billowing

Samara segue

The Lang courtyard maples, sparkling red for two months, now look brownish from a distance but like this up close, as we segue to green.

Unto the seventh paragraph

We're at the point in "After Religion" we we start pluralizing voices. One of the TAs gave a mini-lecture today so thought-provoking that we wound up spending most of the class discussing it. Which isn't to say that I agreed with all he said! Sort of the point, I guess!

Anyway, the topic was how traditions old and new are configured or configure themselves as religions, and his focus was an interview with Leora Batnitzky about how Judaism "became a religion." Appropriate in its way for the first night of Passover, his presentationit was framed by a story about memory.

When Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, saw that the Jewish people were threatened by tragedy, he would go to a particular place in the forest where he lit a fire, recited a particular prayer, and asked for a miracle to save the Jews from the threat. Because of the Holy Fire and faithfulness of the prayer, the miracle was accomplished, averting the tragedy. 

Later, when the Baal Shem Tov’s disciple, the Maggid of Mezrich, had to intervene with heaven for the same reason, he went to the same place in the forest where he told the Master of the Universe that while he did not know how to light the fire, he could still recite the prayer, and again, the miracle was accomplished. 

Later still, Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov, in turn a disciple of the Maggid of Mezrich, went into the forest to save his people. “I do not know how to light the fire,” he pleaded with God, “and I do not know the prayer, but I can find the place and this must be sufficient.” Once again, the miracle was accomplished. 

When it was the turn of Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn, the great grandson of the Maggid of Mezrichwho, who was named after the Baal Shem Tov, to avert the threat, he sat in his armchair, holding his head in his hands, and said to God: “I am unable to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, and I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story. That must be enough.”

It's a great story for a course called "After Religion," not least because it allows of different interpretations. The TA presented the story as an allegory for how Judaism was "protestantized," becoming a religion of "inner feeling" rather than law (something he thought was a good thing). A student who identifies as a Polish Catholic said the story seemed to apply more generally, and made clear that what's most important in religion is intention. 

I asked if intention is the same thing as feeling, and if the story isn't really about something else again, namely storytelling. We talked a little about how well contructed this particular story was, how it seemed to be heading toward a tipping point yet finds there isn't one: intention's enough. Or is it? Not all the students had noticed that there was no miracle at the end of the fourth paragraph, and so the rabbi's last words are really a question. Was it really enough? 

[A brief internet search traces the story to the preface to Elie Wiesel's 1964 The Gates of the Forest, where it ends with the words "And It was sufficient. God made man because he loves stories." I asked my TA where he found this artfully truncated version, and he told me he'd been unable to locate the version he was seeking, in Giorgio Agamben's 2014 The Fire and the Story - which it happens is not truncated - and happened on this trimmed one instead.]

We contemplated what further paragraphs of the story might be, recounting experiences of further generations. They'll keep telling the story, one student said confidently. (ChatGPT when asked said the same.) Another, more attuned to the narrative momentum of the tale, said the story would be lost - but the intention would remain. All good, then? "By the seventh paragraph," another student declared darkly, "even the intention will be forgotten."

What a great discussion! And it let me push gently back at the TA's celebration of a lawless Judaism of individual feeling. What if part of the wisdom of Jewish tradition is knowing that things peter out this way if everything is left to intention and feeling - and stories? 

Perhaps I can start the next iteration of "After Religion" with this...

Heavy

Palm Sunday is always a spiritual-emotional roller coaster. This time, singing in the choir, I got to be part of one of those roller coaster swoops with the diminished harmonies and jarring dissonances of "Solus ad victimam" by Kenneth Leighton (1929-88). Laughter is hard to imagine.

Garden party