Hurricane season

Summer days

Erroneous

My friend M and I are a little obsessed with ChatGPT, so when I stumbled on an article online that seemed ChatGPT-written (but it's from October 2022) I had to share it with him. Hilarity ensued!

A generous take

I like to think of the trees leaning out to greet us. There isn't a cell in my brain that believes this to be true, but it means I remember to look for the pattern, which gives me a warm feeling each time I see it. Try it.

Tristan Gooley, How to Read a Tree (NY: The Experience, 2023), 108

Here's a question: Are trees generous?

I've been feeling that my response to Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking - where he argues for the "unconditional generosity" of plants - was a little ungenerous. I get no sustenance from claims like "in Heideggerese, trees are ontically vertical and ontologically horizontal" (Grafts, 136), but his effort to make us less dismissive of our vegetal - and other - kin is surely a worthy one. And if his move into "ontophytology" seems to me to lose the embodied relational reality of plants, he's right to challenge the unexamined ontology at work in views of plants as merely struggling for existence. 

A nice example is his response to the Canadian philosopher Jean Grondin, who finds in plants a surd "aspiration de la vie à a vie":

The non-conscious and unwilled “aspiration of life to life” Grondin has in mind is a contemporary replica of Spinozan conatus and Nietzschean will to power. This ostensibly objective and all-inclusive meaning of life is a projection onto all living beings of a historically conditioned human desire for self-preservation, a desire born from the political and economic systems that make survival ever more precarious and uncertain. Given that capitalist patterns of production and consumption prompt human subjects above all to value their own self-preservation, the plants, too, seem to partake of this desire, not the least because their survival is becoming less and less assured in the era of genetic modification and because these political-economic patterns have proven to be tremendously detrimental for the environment. The meaning of life is, on this view, one and the same for all living creatures, and plants merely supply a convenient example of the overarching logic of self-preservation. (Plant-Thinking, 131) 

How very helpful to be reminded that the view of nature as the site of a war of all against all, each striving only for its own preservation, is an artifact of western capitalist modernity. I'm reminded of Frans de Waal's campaign to demonstrate that animals - including us! - are not selfish in the ways Neodarwinians claim, and of Lynn Margulis' argument that symbiosis is as important as competition in the history of life. And of indigenous wisdom like that in Robin Wall Kimmerer, Zoe Todd, Yuria Celidwen and Tyson Yunkaporta. 

All of these, however, seem to me to be about relation - the signal omission in Marder's plant-thinking. From Margulis and Ed Yong and Merlin Sheldrake and Donna Haraway I get the sense that the world was already teeming with life before any of our familiars, animal or vegetable or human, got off the ground - and this emergence was possible only through ongoing collaboration with (some of) it. 

The mistake is supposing a being - any earthly being - exists before and outside all this complexity, rather than being one of its manifestations, one of its projects. (And once you conceptually sever it like this, there's no way in thought back to full interbeing.) I scoffed at Marder's observation

Despite their undeniable embeddedness in the environment, plants embody the kind of detachment human beings dream of in their own transcendent aspirations to the other, Beauty, or divinity. (Plant-Thinking, 12) 

Detachment?! For such obviously embedded creatures? But as I tried stumblingly to articulate, I think, at least with trees, he's on to something phenomenologically. Trees seem to us in some appealing way autonomous and self-sufficient. We know they need sustenance but still they seem to pull themselves out of a hat (out of thin air!), something from practically nothing. Where before was, presumably, just an empty space, now there is an ordered, fruitful world!

But this world, if self-contained, is not closed to us. Rather, trees seem welcoming, inviting - generous. As if they don't have to have anything to do with us, and yet do. Of course they couldn't turn away or run if they wanted to, but in some way they seem turned toward us. Come! Enjoy my shade, my coolness, my scents, my leaves, my fruit, my nuts, my peace. However strange the story, Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree names this experience of ungrudging availability. 

So, are trees generous? Is saying so an anthropomorphism, or a self-serving projection? Yes, surely. Plants don't give but animals do take, non-negotiably. But avoiding anthropomorphism entirely has its own problems; as my colleague K told us when she visited my class last year, it is to deny the reality that we share an enormous amount of genetic material with the rest of the living world. And while it's certainly convenient to suppose that what we freely take is freely given, some things like fruit are there precisely for the eating - so long as we disperse the seeds! Beyond that, trees are aware of us but do not, I'm convinced, have anything to say to us, no desire to be connected to us in particular.

But what I want to say, to find a way to say, is that it still makes sense that we should experience them as generous, and respond with feelings of gratitude. In trees we can knowingly enter the space of interconnection which in fact surrounds and constitutes all of life, including our own, but is hard for us otherwise to grasp or experience.

Does this make any sense? It's my first stab at articulating what trees do for me.

Beat the heat

How many languages do you recognize?

Holes in the canopy

All is definitely not well among the Lang courtyard maples.

The God for the trees

I went to the Church of the Woods as part of exploring religion and trees, and certainly found confirmed my sense that trees in a wood are a completely different animal from the mute solitaries we encounter on city streets. Isolating a single tree here is as pointless as it is impossible. But when we went out, in the middle of the service, I find I looked right past them. Rev. Blackmer had suggested we ask "where is God and what is God up to?" as we roamed. I attended first to the breezes rustling overhead, then to the light floating on reefs of leaves at mid-height, then to one of the few visible outcroppings of rock, supporting us all... all inorganic! My thoughts (following my feet) went then to the bouncy loam of a hillside we walked down, aware of the organic world that made and sustained it, alighting finally on some lichen making a 

miniature forest, visible only on bending down for a closer look. Well and good, but... the actual trees? Is God not in them, are they not something God is up to? They're the source of the leaves the wind caressed overhead, which the sunlight danced on in the distance, and the many generations of which cushioned my steps. Indeed my image of rapture is something like the first photo I posted Sunday. Divine?

Liturgical return to nature

I had the good fortune yesterday to attend the Church of the Woods, a piece of recovering New Hampshire woodland which the Reverent Stephen Blackmer has made a site for prayer and contemplation with nature, on what all described as the most beautiful day of the year. The humid heat and rain of recent weeks were nowhere to be seen, mild temperatures under a clear nearly cloudless blue sky with occasional breezes rustling almost silently through some the trees' leaves. (I’d never noticed how local, how small, a breeze can be, moving from one specific tree to another and then lifting.) There were mushrooms of all kinds popping up all over, fruit of the recent rains which proved so destructive in neighboring Vermont.

The 106 acres are open at all times for visitors but a weekly service starts Sundays at 9:30, proceeding from a small parking clearing up to a place referred to as “the knoll,” a small clearing with an oval of tree stump stools around a cluster of three stumps, on which a ceramic chalice (decorated with a mountain pattern), a wooden plate and flowers from someone's garden await. (When it’s too cold or wet, the community meet in a barn.) As we began, the area of this altar shimmered in dappled light whenever a breeze tickled a small birch to one side. At either end of the oval, youngish white pines towered, surprisingly tall for a woods which, when Blackmer acquired it a decade and a half ago, had been messily logged of most larger trees. 

The service is a traditional liturgy of Holy Communion but over the years it has congealed into a specific set of words and actions which cohere beautifully and beautifully with the woods. That this is a liturgy with a difference is clearest in the heart of the service, offertory and communion. Building in the experiences which had sustained forest conservationist Blackmer long before he was called to priesthood, the congregation disperses into the woods for 20 minutes after the lectionary readings and a brief homily. All are invited to bring back and share what they find. This is the offertory, and it came together like the most exquisite piece of flower arrangement, weaving together the life of the forest and each of the subjectivities gathered. 

Each had been placed there with a few words, some connected to the readings. Besides flowers and leaves, ferns and firs, many of the offerings this time were mushrooms in various unusual colors and shapes, red and creamy and caramel and purple and tangerine orange, as well as ghostly white Indian pipes - how God loves diversity, one enthused! One woman had found a small maple leaf red anidst all the green, a reminder of the irresistible cycles of change. Another had been struck by nature's “groaning” mentioned in the reading from Romans (8:22), and realized that trees are groaning all the time, if you only listen. Another had gone out in search of scents, and found them in a tree bough. A man held up a single needle from one of the five-needle bushels of a white pine, reflecting that God was in all things: "Hello, Jesus!"

The liturgy of the Eucharist followed, on an altar now overflowing with the gifts of the woods and of reflection. But I’ve been writing as if the congregation comprised only the human beings gathered, even if we channeled the joy (and the groans) of nature. For Rev. Blackmer, every being in the woods is a full member of the congregation. The surrounds had been acknowledged in an opening prayer, accompanied by movements, inspired by “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”: Christ within me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, … The earth is Theotokos, the God bearer, and Christ’s sacrifice was for the whole world. 

And so, when the words of consecration came – accompanied, I couldn’t help noticing, by the most sustained, if still gentle, shimmering rustle of leaves above – the bread, wine and water, “what earth has given and human hands have made,” were from all of us - and for all of us. After the breaking of the bread, the first piece was offered to the earth, placed among the gathered offerings on the makeshift altar. (Because there was such bounty, two pieces were left this time.) The next piece went to someone’s dog, standing in for the rest of living creation and clearly familiar with the proceeding! Unorthdox, to say the least, but I’d read about the offering to the earth, and this made sense as an extension of that, making it more than a metaphor. 

After communion, the plate and cup having passed from hand to hand around the circle, Rev. Blackmer left the remaining bread on the plate on the stumps, and poured the remaining consecrated wine over the earth next to them. Rev. Blackmer was pleased when I told him, later, that this had shocked me - and then, seemed the most natural thing to do. He told me it was actually liturgically quite proper; leftover communion wine must either be consumed, or disposed of in a special sink, called a Piscina, which leads directly to the ground. But it was a jolt. If this isn't sacrilege, I immediately saw, what theological refusal of our earthbound existence as part of the community of life would make it seem so? Does not God love God's whole creation, and is not all of it redeemed by Christ's death and resurrection?

I wasn't expecting something so theologically challenging. I'd imagined something like a standard church service, just without the walls, the bread on the stump still on an altar elevated above the ground... but I also came because I sensed that reading about it wasn't enough to know its meaning. Witnessing and participating in these liturgical movements made me realize I'd still brought church walls with me, until I was shocked into understanding that I didn't need them, any more than it was a problem that ants and were plying their trade on the ground around the altar as we worshipped. "Sacred" means something like set apart, but why set one's religion apart from the created world of which we are a part? Maybe what's needed, if religion is not to distance us from the world and inure us to its groaning, is taking the walls down - even when in a church. Perhaps taking them down, setting the service apart from the world of merely human meaning and interaction, is what is demanded.

I hope I can find a way to return to the Church of the Woods. A less than perfect day might be perfect in other ways - the light and air and offerings all different yet from the same source - and a taste of the liturgical power in repetition. The best I could do was return for a quick visit before we left this morning. Our offerings, from and to the woods and the woods' God, were still there in the warm morning light, a vision of human life and striving as part of nature rather than built on its mindless destruction. 

I also walked the Chartres labyrinth, which an ex-student (my connection to Church of the Woods) helped lay out some years ago.

What earth has given

I'll tell you more soon, but today we worshipped with the Church of the Woods, in Canterbury, New Hampshire, on a perfect day.

Heavenly orchard

Being in Canterbury, NH for the Church of the Woods, we couldn't not take a look at Canterbury Shaker Village. Still it felt a little odd to celebrate the now silent community which cleared the forest to make 

their busy, joyful life here for almost two centuries. It's all silent now. The Shakers having been celibate, there are no descendants. Canterbury's last member "passed to the Summer Land" in 1992, where they all may now be in the presence of mystical trees. 

Hannah Cohoon, "The Tree of Life" (1854), Polly Collins, "An Emblem of the Heavenly Sphere" (1854), Polly Collins, "A Tree of Love, A Tree of Life" (1857), in Sharon Duane Koomler, Seen and Received: The Shakers' Private Art (Hancock Shaker Village, 2000)

Plantblinded

Despite their undeniable embeddedness in the environment, plants embody the kind of detachment human beings dream of in their own transcendent aspirations to the other, Beauty, or divinity. (12) 

I'm reading one of the scriptures of the emerging field of critical plant studies, Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. It's an odd and ambitious work which argues that since the western metaphysical tradition was built on various belittlings of plants, attending to the lives of plants in an open, positive way can thus aid in the Destruktion (or deconstruction) of metaphysics which has been the task of philosophy since Heidegger, and offer us ways of being and thinking needed for this time of ecological and political peril. 

[A]lthough in denying to vegetal life the core values of autonomy, individualization, self-identity, originality, and essentiality, traditional philosophy marginalizes plants, it also inadvertently confers on them a crucial role in the ongoing transvaluation of metaphysical value systems. It is neither necessary nor helpful to insist, as certain contemporary commentators do, on the need to attribute to vegetal beings those features, like autonomy or even personhood, philosophers have traditionally considered as respect-worthy. To do so would be to render more refined the violence human thought has never ceased unleashing against these beings, for instance by forcing plants into the mold of appropriative subjectivity. (55)

If you didn't realize that all the big philosophers had views on plants, this book will open your eyes: Aristotle, Pseudo-Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida and many more. But you may wind up rubbing your eyes when you realize that this book is still all about those philosophies. 

What Marder establishes is certainly interesting. Not only does every western thinker you've ever heard of say something about plants, but time and again these asides turn out to reveal the deeper problems and potentials of their thought. Plants, we learn through Marder's masterful manipulations, turn out to embody the profoundest ideals of the very thinkers who disparage them. Such inversion is what one expects from deconstruction, but it's still fun. And so we learn that plants - often on these philosophers' own careless accounts! - exhibit the indifference of Kantian ethics, but also the absolute openness to alterity of Levinas'. They daily live out the wish for eternal recurrence enjoined by Nietzsche's Zarathustra. As for Marder's pash, Heidegger:

the plant materially articulates and expresses the beings that surround it; it lets beings be and, from the middle place of growth, performs the kind of dis-closure of the world in all its interconnectedness that Heidegger attributes to human Dasein. (66)

How "plant thinking" is obscurely at work in the thinking of the philosophers is exemplified by the way Heidegger misses the wood for the trees. Marder continues

The tree is already a "clearing of being," [Lichtung] even if it grows in the thickest of forests, for in its openness to the earth and the sky, to the closed and to the open simultaneously, it brings these elements into their own and puts them in touch with each other, for the first time, as that which lies below and that which stretches above. (66-67) 

Plants and trees, which these thinkers thought needed to be put aside in order for human beings to be open to reality, in fact live out that very reality in ways we can (thanks to postmetaphysical philosophy) dimly appreciate - and must urgently emulate. 

And yet it's hard to see any real trees in Marder's philosophical forests. He wouldn't disagree: his project is ontological (or, as he puts it, "ontophytological"), carefully avoiding "objective" description to ensure that plants maintain the "alterity" which might permit us really to "encounter" them as subjectivities of their own. As Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala write in their Foreword, "his ontology is not of the plant but for the plant" (xv). Where does Marder's understanding of plants' distinctive existential "time," "freedom" and "wisdom" come from, then? He very occasionally references scientific work on plant sentience, memory and communication, but these evaporate in a discourse in which only philosophical ideas persist. And when they don't fit his larger point, they're dismissed as just "ontic"! A telling example:

The plant does not stand under the injunction, ostensibly relevant to all other types of subjectivity, to cordon itself off from its surroundings, to negate its connection to a place, so that it can fully become itself as a consequence of this oppositional stance. If vegetal being is to be at all, it must remain an integral part of the milieu wherein it grows. (69) 

This is nonsense, of course, and he immediately - sort of - admits it.

Of course, this hyperbolic attribution of passivity to vegetation ought to be tempered by recent findings that shed light on the way plants defend themselves from predators (for instance, by bathing the larvae of insects deposited on their leaves in toxic chemicals) and actively adapt to changes in their environment. It would be more accurate to describe plants as neither passive nor active, seeing that these behavioral attitudes are merely human projections onto the world around us. (69) 

But don't suppose this will stop him from working with hoary ideas about the passivity of plants. No, they need to be taken further than the metaphysical tradition was capable of imagining!

In the context of the post-metaphysical rethinking of ethics in the writings of Levinas and Derrida, such radical passivity in excess of the opposition between the active and the passive, such exposure to the other, typical of plants, which is affirmed well in advance of our conscious ability to utter a decisive “yes” or “no,” denotes the ethical mode of subjective being. Opening themselves up to the other, ethical subjects prompt the plant in them to flourish. While plant existence is ethical, post-metaphysical ethics is vegetal. (69)

Plant-Thinking is really about the "plant in us," not about plants. I don't object to the idea that human beings need to recognize that we belong in a milieu, that the meaning of our existence involves letting other beings be, and that the call of ethics (and religion) takes us beyond the world of human projects and rationalizations. But has this really anything to do with plants?

Plants are not about "unconditional generosity" (74) except when mismeasured in terms of human conditions. Plants know (in whatever sense you want to take that) that they must interact with their surroundings. Constituted by what they draw from sun and air and soil, they are indeed embedded in an environment, and so for good. But they do this precisely by absorbing what they need and not what they don't, and not just once but continually. They don't "cordon" themselves off but manage complicated flows at every level, from the cell to the forest and its floor. (That they do this always together with other beings is never even mentioned in Plant-Thinking.)

[Elsewhere, Marder does sort of get symbiosis: "Plants are wonderfully collaborative creatures. They collaborate with each other, with microbes and fungi belowground, with insects and other animals, with the elements, such as the wind that carries their pollen, or the solar blaze from which they draw energy." ("In conversation with Michael Marder," LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture (2022): 28-35, 29.) But it doesn't root deep in his thinking, which abstracts to the point of erasing these relationships: "plants are singular universals, that is, singular living beings who point toward and, to some extent, encapsulate the universality of life." (30).]

How could Marder, even in ontophytological mode, imagine that plants are purely receptive, passive, generous, paragons of an unconditional availability? To be fair, he's not alone in this. Unable to perceive plant time, we experience plants as somehow beyond time - they don't move but let us move around them. Focused on what we can see, we encounter something apparently coming from nothing, filling what had been empty space with their being, a miraculous transsubstantiation of the shapeless inorganic into the shapeful organic. (That the process repeats when seeds germinate, or when a cutting takes root on its own, only makes it more wonderful.) But the paradox of an embedded, embodied detachment is a weird hullicination, indeed the hallucination of a human being encountering a plant with whom she has no more than an aesthetic relationship. 

I think this is ultimately my problem with Plant-Thinking. It seeks to combat the deadening instrumentalization of plants effected by capitalist agri-business - a worthy aim - by inviting us to "encounter" plants in all their obscure fecundity and open-ended availability entirely non-transactionally, in an ethical way which allows them to be what they are in all their alterity. But this is still in the terms, though very rarified, of what humans think we are - fundamentally unconnected from others but called somehow to forge relationships with them. The closest Marder comes to what this might look like in practice is in his proffered answer to those who think the upshot of his book is that we should stop eating plants.

[P]lant-thinking does not condemn the consumption of plants and their parts, unless in utilizing them we dim down and disrespect the other facets of ontophytology. ... instead of “What can I eat?” we should inquire, “How am I to eat ethically?” To put it succinctly, if you wish to eat ethically, eat like a plant! Eating like a plant does not entail consuming only inorganic minerals but welcoming the other, forming a rhizome with it, and turning oneself into the passage for the other without violating or dominating it, without endeavoring to swallow up its very otherness in one’s corporeal and psychic interiority. (185)

I'm not sure what that means - I'm put in mind somehow of slow cooking of seasonal and culturally valued plants - or why plants would care how we consume them. Except how this is part of a broader relationship of cultivation and care? Eating them is the only relationship with plants Marder even mentions; he left aside the distractions of agriculture at the very start of the book. 

Plants are constituted by relationships, dependent on them - and so are we. From this book, you'd never guess. It's helpful for diagnosing the depth of distorted philosophical ideas about plants - including the mystique that might lead us to see(k) spiritual transcendence in trees. But it offers no way to accept our fundamental dependence on plants, to imagine ways of consciously coexisting with them, nurturing and being nurtured, branching and grafting, sharing a precious and precarious world that they established long before we arrived.

Look again at the quote I started with, at top. Suppose we replaced "Despite" with "Through," even "By the grace of"?

Treefall

I've noticed leafless trees in the courtyard for some time but hadn't counted them in a while. Today I counted eight entirely leafless ones, most keeling slowly over, and two more with leafless crowns and just a few leafy branches far below. I'm trying to find out who's in charge here so that, if an arborist has to come cull, I'll be forewarned.

Leafy

At some point I suppose I should tarry with Goethe's view that the life of a plant is understood best through leaves. (These little Bodhi trees are the undersides of a fuzzy plant on our balcony, which I only noticed because, for the first time in ages, it was cool enough today to stretch out on the balcony and read...)

Bodhi tree #26

Lo, the tree beneath which the Buddha attained enlightenment! But it's not the one you think. This is one of five similar scenes depicted on the outer railing of Bhargut Great Stupa in Madhya Pradesh, ca. 150-100 BCE. 

What gives? This Indian fig tree isn't the one beneath which our present Buddha achieved Enlightenment but the one where Koṇāgamana, one of his predecessors, did. You can see the scene (in this early stage of Buddhist art, Buddhas were represented as absences) in a new exhibition on the origins of Buddhist art just opening at the Met. 

For the record, Koṇāgamana was the twenty-sixth of twenty-nine known Buddhas. He's the second of the five in the current kalpa. Our Gautama is the fourth. So stay tuned: when Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, achieves awakening, it'll be under a tree like this too!

[Correction: Maitreya will seek out a different tree, a mesua ferrea.]

Time for the zinnias

Mediterranean burns

Olive trees aflame in Lagonisi, Greece (Yannis Kolesidis/EPA, Guardian)

Sower troubled

It's been a week for the parable of the sower! Thanks to someone's not being able to use their tickets, I managed to see Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon's "community opera" of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower at Lincoln Center on Thursday - a thumping revival-like gathering weaving every kind of African American traditional music into the story of Butler's prescient novel, 30 years old this year and never more relevant.

And in church today, the lectionary gave us the parable which gave Butler her title, in Matthew's version - with a significant omission.

The parable appears in all the synoptic gospels, and in the Gospel of Thomas, so it was clearly thought important by the early church. As our rector explained, that's perhaps because this is a "meta" parable - a parable about parables, a teaching about teachings. The same message can be shared with all, but only a few will get it or keep it. 

In one sense, the parable is straightforward and surely true, as anyone who's ever tried to communicate anything knows. But it seems at odds with the messages of at least some of Jesus' other parables, like the one about the good shepherd who loses no sheep from his flock. Shouldn't the sower know the ground and work, till and weed it to make all of it receptive, instead of wasting his seed and blaming the earth? 

Meta-parables from another tradition - from the Buddhist Lotus Sutra - go where this doesn't, with one telling of a Dharma rain which falls everywhere and allows all plants to grow, each in its own way, and with others claiming that a wise teacher, engaging upaya, will successfully tailor the teachings to students' varying receptivity even to the point of illusion. The parables may seem at odds but can be reconciled if the Dharma rain is thought to be the unchanging intention to save, which drives the virtuosity of upaya, the "all" of "may all sentient beings be saved." 

The Jesus of the Parable of the Sower seems, by contrast, reconciled to not saving all. And it gets even harder when you read the section from the middle which the lectionary omitted, here its first lines: 

Then the disciples came and asked him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ (13:10-13, NRSV)

They're not supposed to get it! It sounds like the hardening of Pharoah's heart. You can see why the editors of the lectionary left this out! Where the Buddha's parables and meta-parables in the Lotus Sutra are crafted so that all may perceive and understand, the very use of parables described in the meta-parable of the sower seems designed to exclude. Not the meta-parable we want! Without that middle section one could at least take the message to be that we should cultivate our own gardens, work to make ourselves receptive; perhaps the careless sower will be back again next year. (Really, we need - and get - more parables, but it's not clear how to trust the parable-teller after this.)

Why Octavia Butler chose "Parable of the Sower" as the title for her book has never been entirely clear to me. The book tells the terrible story of a world collapsing, and the escape of a group of refugees into a utopian alternative community they call Acorn, inspired by the emerging teaching of "Earthseed" channeled by their leader, the "hyperempathic" teenager Lauren Olamina. Not everyone she meets is receptive to her teaching, or receptive right away; some follow despite the teaching. But many never have a chance. Acorn's ritual life is built on mourning.

"Earthseed," which you've read about before in this blog, is a compelling alternative religion, too. Its most famous line is "God is change"; the context in which it appears makes clear that it's offering another approach to the problem of the clueless sower.

Why is the universe?
To shape God. 

Why is God?
To shape the universe. 

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change. 

(72-73)

There's another Christian parable in the book, one which Lauren Olamina uses before she leaves Christianity behind. (It features in the opera, too.) It's that of the importunate widow who pesters a lazy and immoral judge until he gives in, getting the justice she deserves - and making him the just judge he ought to be. 

Life is too precious and too hard for us to count only on the sower's wisdom. But when the seed is able to take root, it bears fruit a hundred times. Among its fruits might be a more enlightened sower. Certainly included are those who learn that we work, till, weed the ground around us, together. 

The Reagons' opera doesn't really tell the story of Butler's book; if I hadn't read it before I would have been completely lost, and certainly wouldn't have known to sing along with Don't let your baby go, don't let your baby go to O-li-var. Instead it highlights key moments of feeling along the way. More than an opera, I realized, it's like what the emerging liturgy of Acorn must have been like, reminder and recommitment to a story everyone knows but needs to hear again and again. There's grief at so much loss, and there's joy at the world we can yet make with and for each other, if we keep faith.

Battalion

Not a sight you want to see: a gaggle of spotted lanternfly nymphs. (These are chomping down on an ailanthus branch, their favorite from way back.) We're instructed to "squish" them when we see them, but on a branch they're unsquishable. Even on the ground it might take several tries, as they're nimble hoppers, and built like little tanks.

Heat exhaustion

It's hard to get the full picture of the climate anomalies happening across the planet. A few days ago, video of frightening flash floods from North India jostled with others from Turkey, Japan, England and New England. Terrifying maps of oceans whose surface water is as warm as a hot tub bespeak a global phenomenon. Meanwhile, killer heatwaves beset places that don't always report each other's calamities. Aljazeera, thanks.

Anomalies is a technical term but in its everyday sense it's the wrong word. The Anthropocene means the "nomos" is no more. As for the records being broken daily, we're only getting started. As the New Yorker's Jia Tolentino put it in article on climate emotions, And this, today, is as good as it will ever get within our lifetimes: every day that we step out into the uncanny weather, we experience a better and more stable climate than any we will ever experience again.

Why mention it in this blog, then? I'm not sure. The thought that at some point we'll look back at now with envy curdles the blood.

Roots in the air

Not appearing in my "Religion of Trees" class will be Pamela Rosenkranz's curious "Old Tree," a commission for the High Line. Not because it isn't striking - how could it not be, in orangeish pink? - but because it doesn't seem to me to say anything very interesting. The photographic negative of green, maybe it'll be profound in winter?

The High Line is all about trees growing in mid-air; does anyone need reminding of its artifice? Perhaps we don't think about tree roots much, but that point was made more compellingly in another commission last year, the upended "Roots" of American sweetgums, the Times Square part of Charles Gaines' "American Manifest."

End of an era

The Anthropocene Working Group has made its recommendation for a "golden spike," the geological site which provides clearest evidence of a geological shift. It's a deep lake in Ontario called Crawford which, meromictic but not anoxic, sediments everything that falls into it, making clear annual bands as calcites precipitate out of summer algal blooms. The bands, widening because of human fertilizer use, mark the c. 1950 turning point the AWG was seeking to anchor, and the captured sediment also contains fly ash pollution with traces of plutonium from atmospheric nuclear tests, burning of fossil fuels and other geologically discernible effects of human activities.

The local fertilizer aside, none of these were the result of human activities nearby, helping cement the claim that these mud bands mark changes of planetary significance. A dozen candidates were considered; it took several votes. The other finalists, a glacial lake in China and a seabed off Japan, offered similar traces but less clearly. Now the proposal goes to other bodies for approval, which is not a given.

Discussions over the last 14 years within the AWG, originally collegial, apparently became less so as they moved from recommending that we recognize an anthropohenic cause to the end of the Holocene to pinpointing a precise marker. As the majority moved from focusing on the industrial revolution to the mid-20th century, when the "Great Acceleration" began, two advocates of earlier datings resigned. Today a third did. In his letter of resignation ecologist Erle Ellis writes

To define the Anthropocene as a shallow band of sediment in a single lake is an esoteric academic matter. But dividing Earth’s human transformation into two parts, pre- and post- 1950, does real damage by denying the deeper history and the ultimate causes of Earth’s unfolding social-environmental crisis. Are the planetary changes wrought by industrial and colonial nations before 1950 not significant enough to transform the planet? The political ramifications of such a misleading and scientifically inaccurate portrayal are clearly profound and regressive. ... 

I have many fond memories and I retain my respect and admiration for all my colleagues in AWG. I remain hopeful that the Anthropocene as a concept will continue to inspire efforts to understand and more effectively guide societal interactions with our only planet. I no longer believe that the AWG is helping to achieve this and is increasingly actively accomplishing the opposite.

These concerns about the ramifications of tying the Anthropocene to particular times and processes, which I've explored in my classes, will doubtless persist. No geological term has ever had implications for "guiding societal interactions within our only planet" - human history is too recent to have registered before. Now that we have, it's unlike that public policy discussions will be bound by the political implications of the stratigraphers' definition of evidence, not to mention artists and religionists.

But, if approved, this does mark the end of a chapter in the story of the Anthropocene. Maybe we leave behind the pretense that the meaning of the Anthropocene for us and our kin is determined by the specificity of the golden spike, a methodological contrivance, if a valuable one. And/or maybe we learn to learn from Crawford Lake, which preserves evidence not just of the last few decades but of the coming and going of First People villages, the Little Ice Age, the arrival of European settlers. As the AWG itself notes

The sediments show how local, historical anthropogenic impacts can be differentiated from those that mark the proposed geological time interval of the Anthropocene, which is concerned with a globally synchronous, broad-scale transformation in Earth’s history.

Earlier research in Crawford's sediment found evidence of a 15th century CE village which has since been rebuilt - a decolonial opportunity which the other finalists would not have afforded.

Up and down

Following up on the "inverted tree" Eliade quotes from the Bhagavad Gita it is, of course, a fig tree - a tree which does, indeed, grow downward rather than upward. Its multiple trunks, which begin as aerial roots, make it hard to compass. Here's a newer translation:

      "The Blessed Lord said, 

‘They speak of an eternal fig tree 

with root above and branch below, 

of which the leaves are Vedic chants; 

he who knows this knows the Vedas. 

‘Fed by qualities, its branches spread out 

above and below, its shoots are sense objects, 

with roots stretched out extensively beneath it, 

which, in the world of men, give rise to action. 

‘Here in the world, its form is imperceptible, 

neither its end, duration, nor beginning; 

with the firm axe of non-attachment, 

having chopped down this holy strong-footed fig tree, 

‘only then is that place to be sought after 

from which none may return of those who reach it ....

(15:1-4; Norton Critical Edition, trans. Gavin Flood [2014], 72-73)

I found these two images of the inverted ashvatta (sacred fig) online. The one at the top is a flip appropriation of an 1836 engraving of a peepal, posted on someone's Facebook page. The one at at right is a devotional image from a Hindu magazine. The ashvatta is clearly known to grow in both directions, paradoxical and profound - like Krishna: 

'Of trees, I am the sacred fig ....(10:24)

Inverted trees

It's been a while since I read Mircea Eliade - what a trip! I used to assign The Sacred and the Profane regularly (with critiques), and The Myth of the Eternal Return long before that, but haven't spent time with Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949) in ages. The reason now? There is a section called "Vegetation: Rites and Symbols of Regeneration," which brings together many accounts of trees and other plants in traditions from around the world, especially ancient and folkloric ones. (It's summarized in Sacred and Profane 147-51.) We learn of Yggdrasil and tree marriages and rituals and celebrations around May Trees, how trees facilitate shamanic ascents and the birth of the Buddha and the connection of the wood of the Cross to Eden. Sacred trees are the consolidation of the most ancient sacred sites, which brought together a stone, a tree and water. 

 

[T]he tree represents - whether ritually and conceretely, or in mythology and cosmology, or simply symbolically - the living cosmos, endlessly renewing itself. 

(trans. Rosemary Sheed [London: Sheed and Ward, 1958], 267)

Patterns offers the pleasure of the encyclopedic polymath, moving weightlessly across time and space to surface unexpected commonalities. While protesting that it’s all really bafflingly complicated, Eliade regularly reassures us that it's actually all quite simple. Helpfully he provides a summary of the main "grouping" of "vegetation cults": 

(a)   the pattern of stone-tree-altar, which constitutes an effective microcosm in the most ancient stages of religious life (Australia; China; Indochina and India; Phoenicia and the Aegean);

(b)  the tree as image of the cosmos (India; Mesopotamia; etc.,);

(c)   the tree as a cosmic theophany (Mesopotania; India; the Aegean)

(d)  the tree as symbol of life, of inexhaustible fertility, of absolute reality; as related to the Great Goddess or symbolism of water (Yaksa, for instance); as identified with the fount of immortality (“The Tree of Life”), etc.; 

(e)   the tree as centre of the world and support of the universe (among the Altaics, Scandinavians, etc.); 

(f)    mystical bonds between trees and men (trees giving birth to men; the tree as the repository of the souls of man’s ancestors; the marriage of trees; the presence of trees in initiation ceremonies, etc.);

(g)   the tree as symbol of the resurrection of vegetation, of spring and of the “rebirth” of the year (the “May” procession for instance, etc.) (266-67)

Each of these is divided into several sections, which overflow with examples and bleed into each other. A type is introduced and immediately needs to be reasserted as the assembled examples don't quite dovetail. Is this scholarly candor on Eliade's part or gaslighting? He claims to have followed the evidence - and on an unprecedented scale - rather than working with an a priori definition of religion. Eliade writes from the position of one who has discerned the "patterns" modern scholars, whose impoverishing historicism occludes the experience of the sacred, don't even realize are there. His method, I suppose, tries to teach us how to see the wood for the trees - or at least to see as he sees. 

Vegetation cults, above all, must be interpreted in the light of the original bio-cosmological conception that gave rise to them. That they appear so various is often [/] merely an illusion of modern vision; basically they flow from one primitive ontological intuition (that the real is not only what is indefinitely the same, but also what becomes in organic but cyclic forms), and converge towards one object – that of assuring the regeneration of the powers of nature by one means or another. (314-15)

That move to unity, wiping out all the historical specificity it claims to honor, is part of what's knocked Eliade out of syllabi. In a recent reflection on Patterns in a series of articles on "Undead Texts," Laurie L. Patton summarizes the critique nicely: 

[F]or the more historically minded scholars, Eliade’s transhistorical treatment of the modality of the moon eclipsed all particular references to the moon, at particular moments in history by particular people. The symbolic moon erased the real moon occurring in real contexts. (Public Culture 23:2 [2020]: 385-96, 391)

These methodological criticisms were given further urgency as we learned of Eliade's early fascist sympathies. His pseudo-theological paeans to the sacred and its contrast with the disenchanting imperatives of "Semitic" thought now appeared not just wrong but dangerously so. (The last few years I taught Eliade in "Theorizing Religion" it was to wonder what made his fascist simplifications so appealing to the US of the Cold War but also of the counterculture - and, if you let it, to anomic today, too.) Still, Patton thinks Eliade - especially the Eliade of Patterns - endures in the shadows, recalling

the long conversations I have had with colleagues who whisper in small confessions that they still read it or that they still like it even though they do not cite it. This alone is fascinating to me—the way in which one has to both own and disown an intellectual legacy. (392) 

Patton is conflicted, or intrigued, too, musing that the search for universals (she calls it "comparative" and "form") might have potential to be as radical and moral an act of social responsibility and justice as a turn away from it (390). She winds up commending Patterns for the ways it is more like Eliade's literary works than the theoretical works, an enjoyable experience of artifice (393). 

Patton may be thinking precisely of the way the detailed cases Eliade enumerates in Patterns don't quite congeal, revealing the pathos of his perhaps unscholarly quest for an underlying order beyond the painful illusions of history. (His novels' protagonists are all on this quest.) This hide-and-seek method can be quite seductive. 

"In the midst" of Paradise stood the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and God forbade Adam to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: "...for in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death." [Gen 2:9, 17] Yet God makes no mention of the Tree of Life. Is this last simply the same as the Tree of Knowledge, or - as some scholars believe - was the Tree of Life "hidden" only to become identifiable and therefore accessible at the moment when Adam should snatch at the knowledge of good and evil, or, in other words, wisdom? I am inclined to this second hypothesis. (287) 

Eliade explains that he's inclined to this hypothesis because "immortality is not easy of attainment" but I think he's inclined also because his understanding of the phenomenology of religion is all about hidden and lost things. Eliadian "hierophanies" (manifestations of the sacred) are always "camouflaged" in the profane. Nothing we experience in this world of evanescence is ultimately real - but sometimes it can express or signify or imply it. 

This goes for all the trees conjured up in Patterns, too, which are as eclipsed by Eliade's account of them as the actual moon is by his symbolic moon.

No tree or plant is ever sacred simply as a tree or plant; they become so because they share in a transcendent reality, they become so because they signify that transcendent reality. (324)

For Eliade, trees are venerated when and were they are because of the "power" they express - but this is not an arboreal power. In their verticality and the way they grow new leaves each year (his symbolic trees are all deciduous), they "represent ... the living cosmos" but this cosmos is somehow beyond the world of actual life! 

None of the emblems attached to trees can be interpreted in a naturist sense for the simple reason that nature itself was something quite different in Mesopotamian thought from what it is in modern thought and experience. We need only remind ourselves that to the Mesopotamians, as to primitve man in general, no being, no action that means anything has any effectiveness exceptin so far as the being has a heavenly prototype, or the action reproduces a primeval cosmological one. (273)

"Primitive" and "primeval" for Eliade aren't terms of derision but of purity. Unlike "historical man," the primitive man (a k a homo religiosus) wanted to live in the real, and knew it to be something requiring constant regeneration through rituals which abolish inevitably corrosive time. 

This makes trees (well, "trees") especially signficant, for in them, more than anything else in our experience, we witness that what is truly "real," what is "indefinitely the same," needs to be cyclically recreated over and over, "endlessly renewing itself." This "living cosmos" has no growth - only regrowth. The trees Eliade likes are already fully grown, "world trees" linking - vertically of course - all the levels of reality. But the one who truly understands them religiously also knows that they are not ultimately real either. His discussion of May Tree rituals, involving cutting and burning of trees (and people too), is extensive, but most revealing here is his commending of the "Indic" views which describe a world tree - and the need to uproot it. He quotes approvingly from the Bhagavad Gita [xv. 1-3] one of several places in Indian tradition where the non-ultimacy of the trees we know is implied by the "world tree"'s being "inverted." "

"It is said that there is an indestructible tree, its roots above, its branches below, its leaves the hymns of the Veda; whoever knows it knows the Veda also. Its branches increase in height and depth, growing on the gunas; its buds are the objects of sense; its roots spread out from below, bound to actions in the world of men. In this world one cannot perceive the shape, nor the end, nor the beginning, nor the expanse of it. With the strong weapon of renunciation, one must first cut down this asvattha with its powerful roots, and then seek the place from which one never returns..." (273-74)

The sage and mystic know that this tree isn't "indestructible" after all, and learn to "cut the tree at its roots" and leave the "cosmos" altogether. While his evidence points in many directions, Eliade darkly suggests that only "Semites" think to seek immortality in this world rather than to transcend it. (He thinks Christianity is, or ought to be, cyclical and sacrificial, about incarnation and resurrection.)

I'm not sure what to make of Eliade's strangely ambivalent celebration of the sacredness of trees, but I'm tempted to let students wrestle with it. Seeing the ways in which arboreal life ultimately remains hidden from Eliade might challenge us to ask ourselves whether we can really engage them as persons rather than symbols...