Inundation

The unexpected confluence of two smaller storms laid New York's subway system low today. Fortunately for me I was planning to stay home anyway, but many others, including children in schools whose ground floors flooded, weren't as lucky. This wasn't one of the named tropical storm-hurricanes whose progress we watch on the weather map days in advance, like Ida which wrought havoc here two years ago. Just the sort of sudden soaking which is the new norm, the summer news flashing with flood after flood.

Google.doctor, heal thyself!

In my lecture course, "After Religion," I usually have students contribute to a google.doc each class. This is a holdover from when we were meeting online, a silent acknowledgment that many of them are online on their phones or laptops even during lecture - and a way to make the class visible to itself as a learning community. (It's also always fun to watch a google.doc growing; I add to the fun of it by providing starting points for contributors in a bunch of different colors.) Many more students are comfortable contributing in this written form than speaking up, and so we get a wider range of views, valuable for discussion - and for me, as I prepare the next class. 

So today I started with last week's google.doc, whose prompt was Is the United States a secular society? Why? The responses were overhwhelmingly in the negative, but I was able to pull out five often overlapping but distinct claims for discussion, and frame a new question for reflection. This appoach takes a bit of time (I'm silly about formatting powerpoint slides in aesthetically pleasing ways) but it keeps students engaged. They see their own and their classmates' words on the screen (I highlightsome but include all), feel seen and heard, appreciate that their thinking on the issue matters.

It doesn't always work. Sometimes the question is posed poorly, and sometimes students just don't want to play ball. Something like this happened last time I taught this course. In the secularism week I'd asked them Is God dead? If so, why do some people think not? If not, why do some people think so? This generated some interesting responses, but most rejected the question. None really engaged the Nietzschean claim, which is not so much a question about 'God' but about a master narrative. So the following week - corresponding to this week - I tried again, getting wordier still: Is there a direction/ purpose to human history? If so, are some places/times/nations especially important? If not, why would some people think so? This was an effort to get them to consider the religious framing of white nationalism, but, as I shared with you at the time, while lots of other thoughtful things came out, it flopped as a way to get them to say whether history has a larger shape. What would that even mean?

I dutifully wrote out representative responses for the next class (the same ones I'd earlier culled for this blog...), but congratulated the class on foiling me. Perhaps this was a bad question, the need for a meta-narrative something we've happily outgrown. Still, I was a little sorry we hadn't admitted that, no, there's no story, i.e., God is dead. Try again next year? So this year, in conversation with the TAs, I replaced the wordy "Is God dead?..." question with the question about secularism. And for this class, I went big and point-blank. The prompt baldly asked: Where are we going? 

The responses were gratifyingly serious. I wasn't asking them, as the the earlier iteration's had, to critique other people's views, but asking them their thoughts. (I prefaced it with a reminder that their private views were nobody's business unless they cared to share them, while enjoining them to define the "we" as broadly as they wished.) 

But now I find myself in a quandary. What do I do with all these thoughts? Worrying my way through it I've come up with two quite different ways of representing what I read. The one above shows the students' measured responses but it doesn't convey what it feels like to actually read them. For that I tried something less staid... 

It's the intensity of these responses, some hopeful but most fearful we're "going nowhere," soon to reap what we've sown in climatic doom, which leaves me in a quandary. I don't see how I can fold these responses nicely into the class as it's planned and continue merrily on my way. The next segment is on the "world religions" and their travails, but there's no expression of interest or hope in them here. The view of history I've elicited is disenchanted. If this is where we're going to, who cares about the world religions, however construed? Band-aids and pain-killers at best. The implicit promise of world religions discourse - that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any one philosophy - seems idle when the horizon is already closed.

What is my responsibility toward these students? (Too late for the assiduously academic religious studies scruples, which keep personal conviction safely parked outside the classroom; I guess I've really evolved beyond them...!) I'm struggling to find a way to articulate my dilemma. It's like I've planned a splendid vegetarian meal only to find out my guests are meat-eaters, or is it the opposite? I have to continue with the class as planned - a syllabus is a sort of contract, after all. But it can't be as though we this didn't happen. It's not that I didn't expect such views (I may share them...), but the google.doc setup makes public what is otherwise out of sight, grounding the community of our inquiry resolutely in us, here, now. 

Where are we going? What has religious studies to offer now? 

Brooklynbummel

On the first rainless day in a while, enjoyed exploring the Brooklyn Botanical Garden's "Power of Trees" exhibit with (a few) students from "Religion of Trees." Since I first came to see it three months ago, 

they've dissected a pin oak they had to take down and - unrelated to the trees show - installed several shiny metal "lotuses" designed by Jean-Michel Othoniel. Our jury was out on how the golden ones fit 

into the Japanese garden, despite the artist's pablum about the lotus flower "symboliz[ing] spirituality, rebirth, enlightenment, and the sacred." Lotuses rise from murk, not mirrors. But the big chrome ones

in the shallow pools where water lilies are cultivated, managed to achieve a different more mirroring religious point, evoking Indra's Net in their nested reflections of reflections of reflections: cool!

Since I was in the neighborhood I also popped into the Brooklyn Museum and was moved by the new exhibition of work by Santería-inspired María Magdalena Campos-Pons ("Finding Balance," above),

wowed by the spectacular soon-to-close "Africa Fashion," an experience of the effervescent joy of decolonization and embodiment, and wound up in the reopened Asian galleries. Whew!

An easy fast

The New School no longer observes the Jewish holidays, but several students didn't come to class today because of Yom Kippur. Others were out because of the return of covid-19. Seemed best to save the most important topics for another class when all could be present - and to think about ways of sharing what we were doing with those missing class. In "Religion of Trees" our end of class drawing session was given greater resonance for knowing that these other students would see our work (the prompt: "a tree someone worships").

In "Theorizing Religion" we decided to postpone a large group activity and spent the whole class diving deep into the assigned readings - saving time at the end for students to write up what we discussed for the benefit of absent classmates. Time flew as we thought through the results of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project and a literature review calling for more integrated research on gender, sexuality and religion from the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. The latter seemed to offer ways beyond the limitations and implicit agendas of the former, exemplified by the graph above mapping reponses to the rather particular question whether it's "necessary to believe in God to order to be moral and have good values" - which we firmly doubt could be meaningfully translated across religions and languages - with GDP per capita. What the?

Forests seen and unseen

Wise words from David George Haskell on the difficulty of learning from nature. Reflecting on concern that deer populations in American forests are getting out of hand, endangering the flourishing of the many forest plants they literally nip at the bud, he suggests the opposite: 

Our cultural and scientific memories of what a "normal" forest should look like arose at a peculiar moment in history, a moment when deer, for the first time in millennia, had been extirpated from the forest. ... "Overbrowsing" by deer may be returning the forest to its more usual sparse, open condition.

The lush forests of imagination are historical aberrations. Should we then welcome their collapse? Later, ruminating on forest management:

   We are tempted to use nature as a model, but nature provides a Baskin-Robbins of justifications. Which flavor of forest life-cycle would you like: the annihilating force of an ice age; or an ancient, undisturbed mountainside; or the dancing mischief of a summer tornado?

   Nature, as usual, is not providing the answer.

   Rather, we are thrown back to a moral question: what part of nature do we wish to emulate? Do we aspire to the uncompromising, all-controlling weight of an ice sheet, imposing our glacial beauty on the land, retreating every hundredth millennium to free the forests' slow regeneration? Or do we seek to live like fire and wind, cutting swaths with our machines, then moving on for a while, hitting at random intervals, at random locations?  ... 

   In the nineteenth century we stripped more trees from the land than the ice age accomplished in one hundred thousand years. We hacked the forest down with axes and handsaws, hauling it away on mules and railcars. The forest that grew back from this stripping was diminished, robbed of some of its diversity by the scale of the disturbance. This was a windstorm on the scale of an ice age but similar to a tornado in its crude physical messiness. ...

   I believe that the answers, or their beginnings, are found in our quiet windows on the whole. Only by examining the fabric that holds and sustains us can we see our place and, therefore, our responsibilities. A direct experience of the forest gives us the humility to put our life and desires into that bigger context that inspires all the great moral traditions. 

   Can the flowers and the bees asnwer my questions? Not directly, but two intuitions come to mind by contemplation of a multifarious forest whose existence transcends my own. First, to unravel life's cloth is to scorn a gift ... in favor of a self-created world that we know is incoherent and cannot be sustained. Second, the attempt to turn a forest into an industrial process is improvident...

The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature (Viking, 2012), 30-31, 64-66

Come and have some breakfast

We had a vestry retreat today. The facilitator's theme, appropriate for a morning gathering, was "Come and have some breakfast." She read, then distributed, the story of Jesus' final post-resurrection appearance n the Gospel of John, when he shares bread and grilled fish with some of his disciples. But she used a 1971 translation into contemporary language, The Living Bible, that made it unfamiliar - in part by putting it in the first person.

Later Jesus appeared again to the disciples beside the Lake of Galilee. This is how it happened: 

A group of us were there—Simon Peter, Thomas, “The Twin,” Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, my brother James and I and two other disciples. 

Simon Peter said, “I’m going fishing.” “We’ll come too,” we all said. We did, but caught nothing all night. 

At dawn we saw a man standing on the beach but couldn’t see who he was. 

He called, “Any fish, boys?”

“No,” we replied. 

Then he said, “Throw out your net on the right-hand side of the boat, and you’ll get plenty of them!” So we did, and couldn’t draw in the net because of the weight of the fish, there were so many! 

Then I said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” At that, Simon Peter put on his tunic (for he was stripped to the waist) and jumped into the water and swam ashore. 

The rest of us stayed in the boat and pulled the loaded net to the beach, about 300 feet away. 

When we got there, we saw that a fire was kindled and fish were frying over it, and there was bread. 

“Bring some of the fish you’ve just caught,” Jesus said. 

So Simon Peter went out and dragged the net ashore. By his count there were 153 large fish; and yet the net hadn’t torn. 

“Now come and have some breakfast!” Jesus said; and none of us dared ask him if he really was the Lord, for we were quite sure of it. 

Then Jesus went around serving us the bread and fish. 

This was the third time Jesus had appeared to us since his return from the dead.

The first-person switch is justified by identifying (as no scholar would) the author of John's gospel with John, "the disciple Jesus loved," the brother of James, son of Zebedee. For the final story of John, it provides an incredible intimacy. But weirdness, too. Why do the disciples listen to the stranger on the shore? Is it only the unexpected haul of fish that leads one of them - the one Jesus loved - to recognize him? But he doesn't swim to the shore as Simon Peter does, and doesn't address Jesus as Jesus, which, he tells us, none of the others dares to either. Jesus also apparently doesn't speak to them by name (at least until after the breakfast, when he addresses Simon Peter). The intimacy of breakfasting together around a fire at the break of day is wrapped in a kind of stunned formality, or a performance of formality, as if a meeting of strangers. (It's sort of the obverse of Emmaus.) I don't get what's going on - less chatty translations make it no clearer. NRSV: 

Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. (21:12)

But I find I like it. The enormity of resurrection fits better with awed anonymity (even if it's play-acted) than with overfamiliarity... and anchored in the sharing of a meal. 

Tens of millions gone

Occasionally I wish I had a subscription to The Economist. Usually, I'm able to access the article I seek through our library's subscription, but we couldn't find this one - apparently because it's not an article in a print issue. So I'm not sure what the "95% confidence interval is." But the broader story is clear and devastating - the global COVID-19 pandemic has led to far more loss of life than we're told. Attention to excess mortality isn't new, but I haven't seen anything about it recently. 

The US is in the midst of a new spike in infections. I know plenty of people who've tested positive, and several who've had serious symptoms, some lasting well more than a week. But, a few epidemiologists excepted, nobody wants to go there. How thoroughly we remain in denial...

Religion of Trees in 5 minutes

Exciting interdisciplinary feast, huh, even if it means only 5 minutes per speaker! Well, unless you're the very last speaker... Which role I performed, I think, with aplomb. The organizer had asked if we had any slides and I sent just this one, which shimmered above as I spoke.

My five minutes' worth:

When I saw I’d be the last speaker on our second panel I wasn’t sure what to say – would anyone remember anything I said anyway? - so I picked this soothing gif. It's the Lang courtyard maples!

To get your attention I could also say: The courtyard maples are dying! 

It would be true too. I shot this picture last summer. It looks different now.

I’ll say it again at the end, to make sure you remember it. But in the meantime, enjoy the gif!

 

For four minutes until then, I want to invite you into my current research and teaching project which has the resonant and appealing name “Religion of Trees.” I know it’s resonant and appealing because I picked it for the sound of it, and it’s drawn great interest, including from students here. What’s it about? While resonant, it’s a novel enough concatenation of terms that ChatGPT draws a blank. 

 

But trees are, you might have noticed, having a moment. Jill Lepore noticed in The New Yorker, and pronounced trees the new polar bears. Ecocritic Rob Nixon has marveled at how trees, and forests, and fungal networks have been getting incredible attention – not least because of Richard Powers’ book The Overstory – and that this is because new (or newly recovered) knowledge about tree sentience and communication offers an alternative to the neoliberal mindset. The forest, he writes, "seems to offer ways of re-imagining the balance between self-inerest and shared flourishing that in most human socieities is badly out of whack." 

 

Can trees get us out of this fix? Dutch literary scholar Pieter Vermeulen, responding to Nixon, observes that the networks Nixon claims to find among trees and other species sound very like the newer forms of neoliberal thinking, which like nothing better than for people to despair of understanding the whole, but commit instead to the local which they know, while trusting that a greater wisdom will manifest… Trees and representations of trees, clearly, are ideological.

 

Now I’m coming at all this from the very paradise of ideology, religion. Not wisdom of trees or mother trees or plant thinking or wood wide webs but religion of trees, and the strange self-evidence of that phrase to people. What’s going on? Way back in the prehistory of religious studies, Max Müller, musing on the ubiquity of tree worship around the world, suggested it was an intelligible and even appropriate response to the way that trees present to us the infinite in finite form. Phenomenologist of religion Mircea Eliade a century later argued that in trees we experience “the living cosmos, endlessly renewing itself.” 

 

Trees invite reverence, promise care. They create shelter, sustain worlds. They reassure us with their age, their constancy, their – to our ears – silence. Maybe they’re available as allies in struggles for climate justice and understanding the Anthropocene? It was beneath a tree, after all, that the Buddha achieved enlightenment.

 

My current thinking is that, whatever our forebears knew, our intuitive understanding of trees today is not helpful. It’s too distanced, too spectatorial, too – reverent. We like trees because they give us the illusion of seeing a whole, Overstory-style. We don’t see them as fuel, as food, as shelter, as medicine, not to mention as people, as kin who exchange fuel, food, shelter, medicine for our care and thanks. We aren’t aware of living in what Robin Wall Kimmerer would have us recognize as maple nation. 

 

My project takes the appeal of trees especially to those weary of “religion” as a point of departure for seeking a spirituality wise to the realities and challenges of the Anthropocene. I push back at the relation-severing view of trees as commodities, as standing reserve, or as objects of contemplation and awe. Before fossil fuels uncoupled us from cycles of living reciprocity, we lived with trees as other nations with whom we maintained regularly renegotiated relations. Planting, pruning, coppice and grafting were among the gifts we bore in exchange for their care. Our lives were entangled. Tree devotion wasn’t about the infinite and the abstract but about the drama and miracle of sharing, co-creating a world.

 

Surfacing these embodied interpersonal relationships with trees might offer us forms of devotion and engagement which point beyond both the distanced dendrolatry of the fossil fuel age and the neoliberal mysticism of the wood wide web. I’m not sure what forms it will take. I’d love to know what you think.

 

But my time is up. And the Lang courtyard maples are still dying. 

Check them out next time you go through the courtyard. I count at least eight leafless in distress; one, its base munched by mushrooms, toppled just this week. 

Tree witness

I haven't told you more about the drawings we're doing in "Religion of Trees" this time around, so let me! Last time, we sketched for the last 20-30 minutes of every second class. Students loved it but it was a costly use of time. This time I wanted quicker drawings, and more of them, so we spend only the last 5-10 minutes - but of every class - drawing. (We're using the same MUJI notebooks as last time.) Images of the drawings are gathered in a google.drive, and shared on Instagram (where we already have 44 followers, not bad for a class of 18!). None are signed - the idea is to thrill in their number and variety. I tell the class these sketches are like our class' roots, 

of which we need as many as possible going in every direction! I even found an epigraph for the instagram page from David George Haskell: "My pen[cil] scratches on milled wood, another rootlet, minding the forest." (The Songs of Trees, 58) Each session has a prompt, announced only as we take our notebooks out, related to the day's reading. Many are conceptual but last week we went down to draw the courtyard trees. (Above! ) Today's reading included Haskell's discussion of the afterlives of trees, which continue to contribute to the forest long after they have fallen. The prompt: "At least eight of the Lang courtyard trees are dying," I said. "Find one and draw it."

UFO

Tree-borne life

After the storm

My Mondays this semester are a stretch: "Religion of Trees" at noon, as students (and I!) surface from the weekend, three hours of "Theorizing Religion" two hours later, as night falls. Leaves me a little logey!

Gold!

Late blooming sunflower surge at Morningside Park Farmers Market

Bullish

I'm sure many will be sharing this, but it's too good not to: a terrific way of grasping the generative AI bull by the horns!

Tree of the living

That pleasing poster image of the whole history of terrestrial life contained within the form of a tree, which I happened on in the NYBG shop back in May, became a great teaching opportunity today. 

This pleasingly asymmetrical (but still upright) tree artfully arranges a great deal of information about the kinship of all of life, the relative age of different species, and how far back common ancestors of different kin may be found. A family tree! But this pretty image raises questions, too; it helped make salient the worry that tree diagrams "naturalize" a reality much more complex I'd started making Monday. I let the class figure it out on their own. 

The first observation was that trees - actual trees - are but a branch of this "tree of life." Was "life" tree-formed long before there were trees? One student suggested that the trees ought at least to be in the center, rather than Animalia - if not, another mused, the bacterial worlds which vastly exceed ours in number and mass... which led also to the belated realization that the tippy top of this big tree is not just an animal but a primate (a tree-dwelling one!). Is this yet another representation of us as the pinnacle of creation, the apex, the telos?

But these are just cosmetic problems. Eventually someone noticed that this image represents only "existing life." The five great extinctions are acknowledged if you look very closely - pale blue arcs - but it doesn't look like anything important got lost. History is written by the victors! But the history they write usually suggests they deserved or were destined to win, and this image does that too - precisely through its use of the tree as metaphor. Great tall trees famously grow from tiny seeds. The 3.8 billion year old "common ancestor" listed at bottom is like an acorn, which, the tree image suggests, already contained the whole tree before any of it grew, well, everything essential about it. Can it be true: Before trees were trees, we were already destined for the canopy.

Before I knew it, I was telling them about Stephen Jay Gould's book on the Burgess Shale, Wonderful Life, with its vertiginous sense that much more was lost in these extinctions than survived, and that the sheer contingency of which few did survive puts paid to the triumphalism of "survival of the fittest" neodarwinians, and should fill us with a kind of awe-filled humility at the gratuitousness of our own existence. What would a representation of the anything-but-preordained unfolding of life look like? A student obliged.

We'll get into the problems with even Darwin's tree soon. (Lateral gene transfer!) Maybe we can revere trees more truly in a shrubby world. But for today it was enough... we moved on to our reading, the first chapters of Haskell's The Songs of Trees, where no species is ever on its own, any "individual" actually a relationships among species.

Part-time U

It's been a spell since anyone's asked me to talk about New School history, so it was fun in several ways to hang out with this year's first year fellows and chat about history and why it might matter. Preparing for it I realized I've sort of lost the thread - or maybe we all have? Even without the disruptions of covid, covid-related staff layoffs, and last year's part-time faculty union strike, the years since the New School centennial have been largely history-free. A new president, prevented by covid from ever really connecting with the school, made no references to its legacy and traditions, and now he's gone, too. What do the first year fellows know of how we got here? 

The Columbia story is remarkably persistent but I pushed back: "school" not "university," conceived in the office of a magazine (our "New Republic story"), supported by "founding mothers" committed to many other kinds of institutions than universities. Part of nobody's understanding of the history of the place was its dependence in the past and surely into the future on part-time instructors - even as these unusually civic-minded students thought the percentage of part-time intructors is ninety-six percent (!). Time to deepen the New Republic story: dedicated to finding the right people to teach about new things as they happened, the early New School was more like a magazine than a university dedicated to a set curriculum and invested in a stable faculty. How to recognize, cultivate and support the part-timers indispensable to this process is task 1 of our next leadership.

Tree diagrams

Students in Religion of Trees selected images from Manuel Lima's Book of Trees to talk about today, sometimes for quixotic reasons - we learned as much about each other as about the images! So this 8-9th c BCE Egyptian Lotus tree was chosen because it's different from lotus imagery in Asian art - but also because a student liked that the tree and the human were the same height. Others included Hans Sebald Behan's "Fall of Man" (1525-27), because of the skull; Yggdrasil, c. 1680 for its colors; a 19th century painting of the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, because a tree sheltered  

the gods; Konchog Gyaltsen's "Tsongkhapa refuge host field tree" (18th c.) because the central teacher is like the heart of a tree; Gustav Klimt's "Tree of Life" (1901) because of the spirals; Ramon Llull's Porphryian Tree (1512) because of its symmetry; a 16th century map of papal bulls for its order pruned out of disorder; and finally a 1663 image of Llull's "Tree of Science" for its asymmetry and its inclusion of roots.

What became clear was that, contrary to the claims of Lima, these "tree diagrams" really are not all doing the same thing, or even trying to. Maybe knowledge, or the cosmos, or life, or the transmission of teachings are like trees - but which trees, and in what respects?

Manuel Lima, Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014), 18, 20, 22-25, 28, 33, 37

Path less traveled

Downpour

Finally some rain, in the new 2023 version: sudden, torrential.

Eden before Eden

Rebecca Solnit saw the vast Colorado aspen colony known as Pando 

recently. Here's what she wrote and some images she shared on FB.

I love aspens as the only tree that wears eyeliner and for so many other reasons including the music of their leaves in the breeze and the way those leaves shimmer and this particular forest happens to be Pando, the world's largest and oldest known living thing, since it's genetically a single organism that's been cloning itself for ten thousand years until it covers a hundred and eight acres (each tree is really a shoot from the great underground interconnectedness of it all).

And so please apply a forest under a wide sky in a remote place with deep time all around it to whatever might make you feel a tiny bit compressed today ... A forest that was old when the things we call civilization were very young and new, a forest that stood still while we all rushed around and made messes and occasionally cleaned one up, a forest that is still a sort of Eden that was one long before the story of the Garden of Eden. A forest that looked back at me the whole time I was wandering and gazing upon its beauty and magnificence and mystery.

Who's there?

In "Religion of Trees" today we had a long discussion about pronouns. It was in the context of our class "community agreement," but overlapped with Robin Wall Kimmerer's suggestion that to "stop the age of extinction" we should stop using "it" for living things, encountered last week, and the way today's text, David Haberman's People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India, begins:

What is a tree? Or perhaps we could ask: Who is a tree? The difference between these two interrogatives is signicant and—one might add—culturally determined. The first typically signies an inanimate object or a “thing,” whereas the latter signies an animate being or a “person.” The difference between these two, therefore, involves a boundary issue: how or if to demarcate the animate and inanimate, sentient and nonsentient, human and nonhuman, or person and nonperson. Much is at stake in thinking about the nature of these distinctions. (7)

Two in the class use Kimmerer's suggested ki/kin for plants already, but others defended it, which could be used, they insisted, with respect. As various views were voiced, ideas deepened and changed. Using a new word could seem contrived - or signal the need for new ways of thinking and feeling. It objectified trees - or protected the treeness of trees from invidious anthropomorphism. All were committed to finding ways to refer to trees "with respect" but it became clear this couldn't be accomplished just with a word. (I proposed a hand gesture.) Whether referring to ki or it, do we use who or what? (One can imagine both "what is ki?" and "who is it?") And we haven't even begun to wrestle with ways of naming plant sentience and behavior, and the affect we bring to this, yearning for a cure for species loneliness or convinced we are condemned to it.

We decided it best to keep the conversation about how to use human language for trees going, to be mindful of our usage, whatever each of us chose to use. But absent from our conversation were any trees, of course. Next week we'll go down to the Lang courtyard trees. 

When in doubt, ask?

Art Is!

Trudged through the heat to see an exhibition about the School of Visual Arts' subway posters, celebrating their 75th birthday this year. They poster the MTA's 250 stations three times a year, adding 

aspiration, whimsy and - well - art to what, long before "Poetry in Motion, and subway commissions, used to be an artless world. Their most recent motto, which evolved from Art Is... is complete as Art Is! 

(Mis)match

One of the TAs for my lecture course this semester is an MA student who took several courses with me as an undergraduate. She's excited at her first opportunity on the other end, and I'm enjoying our conversations about the craft of teaching. She says she wants to emulate my way of "leaving things open," entertaining several approaches to a problem without ever showing my cards, and the community this promotes the classroom.

But there are other parts of being on the other end which she's experiencing for the first time, too. Barely a week in, one of the students in my lecture and her discussion section wrote to tell us they will be missing class this week because a loved one is in hospice "and it seems like his final days are approaching. ... I will make sure to keep up with the readings and responses and if there's any way to get notes or slides or whatever from the lecture that would be great but no stress. Sorry for the inconvenience."

No stress? Inconvenience? "You're getting an early dose of one of the invisible realities of teaching," I wrote to the TA. "Suddenly you're a bystander to students' lives, where all sorts of things happen. Sometimes they'll tell you, sometimes they won't. Sometimes, as here, there's a weird mismatch between the gravity of what they're describing and the tone of the message. This can make it hard to know how to respond." I forwarded my response to the student as an example of tone.

The TA gets it. "The mismatch in tone of dealing with grief is very human; I understand that and feel deeply for her. If there is anything additional that I can do, then I will." We're barely a part of this student's life, but in the strangely personal/formal role of teacher we can be present and available to them, as a person and as a student. 

End of season

Late summer at Innisfree Garden