Work in progress

It's almost the end of February. My task last month was to develop a working outline for the emerging book (it is feeling like a book!), and February was to start adding flesh to the bones. That's gone fairly well, though some of the flesh wants to be on different bones than expected! Where do we stand?

Introduction

Ch 1 - Under the Bo Tree

Ch 2 - Hope in a Tree

Ch 3 - Trees of Life/Life of Trees

Ch 4 - The World's Oldest Religion?

Ch 5 - Tree Wonder

Conclusion

Chapter titles are provisional, and will perhaps be supplemented by subtitles. But here's what seems to be coalescing under each of them. Each chapter has four sections, should surprise the reader with its juxtapositions, and should offer at least one aha moment redescribing something familiar in religion. The larger project should work that way too. Let's see if I can encapsulate the direction of each section in a single sentence!

Introduction

Trees have been religiously important for a long time but in the Anthropocene we would do well to reacquaint ourselves with the understandings connected to earlier ages' intimate personal relationships with trees, rather than the abstracted views of the capitalocene

Ch 1 - Under the Bo Tree

• Siddhartha Gautama achieving enlightenment seated beneath a tree makes sense to us but it matters what kind of tree it was; as we picture different Bodhi trees we communicate what we think enlightenment is.

• If you check Emojipedia, there's clearly a generic image of a tree - the kind of deciduous lollipop tree that beaned Newton. 

• Buddha achieved enlightenment under a strangler fig, a kind of tree that grows down as well as up, multiplying trunks, often killing its original host; how does the image of enlightenment change if we picture him under - inside - such a tangle?

• In Buddhist tradition, Buddhas all achieve enlightenment beneath a tree, but different kinds; while all of them may have empty heartwood, they suggest we let the variety of trees expand our understanding of religion 

[imagine if the God of Job had talked about trees!...]

Ch 2 - Hope in a Tree

• Theophany of Job's menagerie is the greatest nature poetry of Hebrew scriptures but Job's despair is that he's not like a tree, which grows back even when cut - but then he does

• Job's recovery is like coppice, an ancient practice of tree husbandry which actually prolongs life of trees; did aweful God coppice Job's family?

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, responding to students' inability to think of positive relationships of humans to nature, offers appreciation of ways humans can help the plants we live with flourish, recognition of a world where different peoples help and depend on each other

• Knowing, as Job writers did, about coppice, we might read other texts differently too: perhaps we should picture Adam and Eve in Eden with pruning hooks 

Ch 3 - Trees of Life/Life of Trees

• However the tree of life was pictured before, Darwin changed it, though his careful use of the simile of a tree of life to represent the unity and history of species reminds us that trees grow through discarding branches (self-pruning!), glossed over in many contemporary trees of life

• Tree maps/diagrams are everywhere, because dendritic forms seem to be, but they conceal the realities of tree-like life Darwin still saw, suggesting completeness and balance and naturalizing hierarchy

• Predarwinian tree diagrams are clearly idealizations, achieving their form not through natural growth but through pruning and grafting

• Knowing about the graftability of trees, Christian scriptures look different, not just in the explicit discussions of grafting gentiles onto the rootstock of Israel, but even in Revelation's tree of life, which bears twelve kinds of fruit

Ch 4 - The World's Oldest Religion?

• As seen recently in Richard Powers' The Overstory, veneration of trees seems to be a human universal across cultures; e,g, ideas of a "world tree" are everywhere if you know they're there... but are they really?

• Western scholars claimed this ubiquitous practice as comparative religion came together in 19th century, though they noticed different things; perhaps no coincidence that trees become religious objects pointing beyond themselves as urbanized and colonial people lose the memory of trees as partners

• Baked into theories of ancient tree worship are ideas of the progress of spirit from animism through religion to science, a commitment to the vertical both culturally specific and unhelpfully world-rejecting; Diné trees of the four directions orient us here rather than pointing beyond this world

• What if we allowed the diversity of trees and human relationships with them to bring us back to earth? 

Ch 5 - Tree Wonder

• Contemporary forms of tree religion see trees as timeless and fragile, social and symbiotic, better than us: Wohlleben, Simard-groupies etc

• They are good examples of what's been called the "dark green religion" emerging in our time, in both animist and Gaian forms...

• Danger of neo-primitivist nostalgia for an imagined time when we were merely the admirers and beneficiaries of trees; Anthropocene requires recognizing we can't abstract from nature

• Kimmerer's retelling of the SkyWoman story; world tree has blown over, we need to get to work rebuilding a world

Conclusion

Citizen pruners!

There's a lot here, and a lot not. My range of religious traditions is pretty narrow, for instance - Buddhist, biblical, Indigenous North American. While being comprehensive isn't good (or possible!) I'll try to graft more in as I go. Other open questions - whether to incorporate drawing exercises, whether to include first person experiences... But this feels like a coherent and interesting argument, at least to me! My thinking has really changed and come together in significant ways thanks to this time alone with it... and I'm only 1/3 of the way through the leave!

We're doing it again!

Lent madness

I usually don't do Lent, really, though I've occasionally refrained from something easy and tuned into Lent Madness for a few years. But this year I've happily fallen into a series of "visual lectures" by venerable historical Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan and discussions with preachers in conversation with his work, all hosted by Tripp Fuller, genial host of the intoxicating Homebrewed Christianity podcast. Crossan started us off last week with a powerful preamble on the ubiquitous temptations of antisemitism baked into Christian history,

a topic whose urgency he came to while watching the Passionsspiel in Oberammergau in 1960. (One of the slides.) This week we hit the road with the first of four lectures on the "evolutionary challenge" of Jesus, something only graspable if we can understand the "matrix" in which he and the biblical writers were operating. Today he confronted us with the fact that almost all the honorofics used by Christians for Jesus were already current in his time as terms for Caesar Augustus. What did that mean at the time, and what might it mean for us now? 

Without knowing Jesus' inversion of "imperial Roman theology" we might replicate it. The live discussion was with Brian Zahnd, who leads a non-denominational church in Missouri. He hails from the Jesus Movement of the 1970s, and uses Crossan's ideas about the countercultural vision of Jesus' nonviolent path to peace through justice in his preaching and writing (though an editor once asked him if might quote someone else). He uses it in particular in preaching against Christian nationalism. "America is not the biblical Israel," he told us he says, "it's the biblical Babylon." Good stuff!

History lives!

[rescheduled to March 28th

because of the student academic workers' strike]

Music ministry

Our choir sang today an anthem I've known for decades from a favorite CD of "Music of the English Church," Richard Farrant (1530-80)'s "Lord, For They Tender Mercy's Sake." We didn't sound as good as the Cambridge Singers, but it hardly mattered. What had the congregation all atitter were two of the congregational hymns we've not sung before - "Methodist hymns!" as members of the congregation raised in that tradition delightedly described them. Of one, "Lead Me to Calvary" (below), a fellow lay member of the choir announced with approval: "this is a revival hymn!" 

Both were new to me, as have been other hymns from the collection Lift Every Voice and Sing II: An African American Hymnal which our new music director has been introducing us to. Not all these hymns originated in Black churches, but most are American. It's a musical heritage foreign to me in ways the Anglican choral tradition is not. I'm almost embarrassed to confess that I've recognized a few from movies, including the churches (mainly white) in old westerns! 

But the appearance of these hymns in our shared life has been hugely important to many who grew up with them. My fellow choir member left the churches of her youth because of their conservatism, winding up in an Episcopal church in Kansas City after looking for a church which offered open communion and equal participation for women in all things. This made theological sense to her but their music was strange and unwelcoming; it felt like a "divorce" from the hymnody she had loved. And our return to it makes her and others glad in ways I can hardly imagine. (I grew up in a Vatican II Catholic church so hymnody was not a strong suit.)

All this makes me aware of how fortunate we are in our music director, who understands his work as "music ministry." His broadening of our range of hymns and anthems has resonated with many in the congregation, and led to discussions of the role and meaning of music in our liturgy we've never had. If the language of revival hymns is in turn challenging to some of us, why do we put up with the endless royalty language in the Anglican hymns?

Early adopters

Simian simulations

It's a little pointless to mock AI since, of course, there's nobody there. But sometimes its glitches are revealing of what's out there in the cloud of online images- as the variously peaked and temple-like Kailashes are. Still, when I thought it might be amusing to have Adobe Firefly generate a picture of Charles Darwin sitting under a tree

 for yesterday's blogpost I most certainly didn't expect my get this! Or - a little more formally dressed when placed in the library - this:

I tried adding details to kickstart evolution. Under a tree with a cup of tea was still a baboon. My breakthrough came with a more detailed prompt - though it's still not your usual Darwin.

Darwinian trees

This is all quite interesting, no doubt, but what on earth am I doing in the weeds of phylogenic trees in a book about religion? 

It's cool to suggest that when Charles Darwin acknowledged that the simile of a great tree used to show the affinities of all the beings of the same class ... largely speaks the truth, he had a different truth in mind than many might suppose. Common descent is part of it, but he was more interested in the process of natural selection, which he saw illustrated by the way a tree grows. For Darwin a tree isn't a happy family...

At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have tried to overmaster other species in the great battle for life. (On the Origin of Species [1859], 130)

While this fratricidal scene seems a little exaggerated, competition is the law of Darwinian life. (The second chapter of Origin is called "Struggle for Existence.") While he refers to vigorous and feebler buds, one might add that this refers not to anything about their nature - they're exactly the same plant - nor how hard each "tries." It's the accidents of light and position, wind and other life forms that make the selection, in turn shaping the environment which will determine who makes it in the next generation. Translated to the different beings of a class, there will be more variation among them than among a tree's buds and twigs, but the role of environment in determining who thrives remains central. And extinction. As we've seen, it was in realizing the role of extinction that Darwin sketched the famous "I think" tree/coral/seaweed drawing.

The environment is abstracted away in the sole diagram in On the Origin of Species, but then it's not a tree in the robust biological sense of the simile Darwin will countenance a few pages later. (Diagram and simile don't refer to each other. But the claiming of the tree simile comes as Darwin summarizes the chapter on "Natural Selection," emphasizing that natural selection can, as "the view that each species has been independently created" cannot, account for the "truly wonderful fact" that "all animals and plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group," as shown in the diagram. (129))

Each of the diagram's little starbursts represents a flurry of variation of which at most two variants survive... Only fifteen of the numberless variations make it to the present (fourteen thousand generations, though it could be ten times more), and they trace back to only three of the eleven starting lines! If this is a tree of life it's also a mausoleum. If translated back to an actual tree, each of those twigs that didn't make it is on or in the ground below.

Most references to Darwin's "tree of life" miss all these nuances, but it seems to me that enumerating the differences can be helpful, both for appreciating trees and for appreciating the contingent tangle of life which trees can seem particularly well to represent. But helpful for thinking about religion of trees? Yes - because this unnuanced view is widely held as part of "dark green religion." And because helping themselves to ancient religious notions of "cosmic trees," as such folks do, adds ideas of coherence, harmony, completeness and even progress to a story far more tragic and contingent - and sublime in a different way.

My purpose isn't to debunk but to complicate and enrich, but I find myself sounding a little shrill here. Ever the Weberian I don't see myself taking sides but rather pointing out "inconvenient facts" for all parties so readers can make up their own minds.

So for Darwin, the history of life isn't like a single-trunked tree, its growth all vertical out of a single source, but more like this diagram from an article about the implications of lateral gene transfer called "Uprooting the Tree of Life" - although it still maintains a more tree-like form than the latest representations below. And perhaps there is more cooperation within and among trees than he could imagine. 

Still, I do have sympathies of my own of course! I guess I'm struggling to work out where to put them. Obviously my sympathies shape the kind of story I tell - what I include, what I let complicate and enrich what - but am I working toward a culminating all-encompassing insight? That unplanned use of the word "sublime" three paragraphs ago, for instance, and another word I didn't but was tempted to use: "tragic." And those ideals I've been problematizing - verticality, centrality, fullness, balance. Those are things many a tree-reverer sees in trees (and why fashionable thinkers prefer rhizomes). Am I saying they're not there, or there is some different profounder way?

And by what right do I favor some views over others? I'm no botanist, and spend more time thinking about trees than being with them. Still, my hope is that readers won't take my reflections as ungenerous attacks from a place of superiority but as insights from a place of grateful learning. My hoped response: you've given me ways to see more, to articulate what I've long known.

Back to the Darwin question. If Darwin's "tree of life" isn't what the deep green religionists think it is, and if it's been superseded by no longer tree-like diagrams among scientists anyway, why mention any of it? Because Darwin's tragic tree is truer than The Giving Tree, and Doolittle's swarm mangrove is truer still - truer in the sense that they let you see more of what really goes on among trees, and this is something profound. Like Darwin I'm complicating and enriching: 

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. (130)

And because - here I'm stretching even more - this truer awareness brings us closer to elements of the non-modern religions of trees, too, which are formed and informed by relationships with trees more attuned to contingency and tragedy, to the realities of lateral intervention and to the wonder of their continued treeing forth.

Apples and oranges

I'm trying to think something through. If it were a class, I'd make a handout with these quotes and pictures from Darwin's notebooks:

a tree not good simile—

endless piece of sea weed dividing

The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life,

base of branches dead

Meanwhile I'd write on the board: "After the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, no one would ever look at a tree of life in the same way." (J. David Archibald, Aristotle's Ladder, Darwin's Tree: The Evolution of Visual Metaphors for Biological Order [2014], 80) Discuss!

The point of the exercise would be to denaturalize the familiar "tree of life" image. If Darwin himself was thinking seaweed and coral, then perhaps we too should find ways of thinking about the evolution of different forms of life in a non-vertical way. But isn't the verticality key to what makes the image of the tree of life so compelling? A tree model connotes a unity and kinship in difference but it also suggests a sort of balance, around a central upward directionality, to the history of life. Darwin's sketches and other models suggest a different story, without center, direction or balance (and that his ultimate careful endorsement of the tree of life simile wasn't about those things).

A biological tree model of the history and shared descent of species actually makes no sense. Although there is a process of natural selection in a tree's growth - as Darwin noted in Origin, "buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch" - a tree's newer branches and buds are the same species as older ones. (Most trees also grow in all directions so there's no simple correlation between how high up a branch is and its relative age either.)

Phylogenetic trees, like decision trees, are just a convenient way of representing branching relationships. But they are grafted onto distracting older ideas about trees - ideas involving unity, verticality, centrality, fullness and balance, all of them value-laden categories. 

Of all these, the history of life has just one: unity. This is a biggie, of course! But you could get unity from an image of seaweed or coral, too, and a more accurate sense of the contingency of the history of life and the inaccessibility of the shared past. Indeed, choosing a tree as your model seems a good way to hide from the contingency and the loss. Even if we insist on Darwin's sense that the living branches of a tree are only part of a story which also includes all the branches which have made way for them - a unity which includes everything selected for and against - might the value-laden baggage of tree forms not still make them an unsuitable model?

In terms of the history of life itself, a network makes more sense than a tree (or coral or seaweed), and can give us the unity. Must we give up on the other ideals? We're probably better off without centrality and verticality, temptations to renewed anthropocentrism, but what about fullness and balance? Here trees might provide a usable ideal (seaweed and corals might, too). The thicket of life needs to be understood as a whole, and one to which we can contribute positively or negatively...

These are issues I'm trying to sort through for my third chapter, which will move from Darwin to the wonderful world of tree diagrams to cosmic trees. The missing step is grafting, a practice which does get different species on the same tree (if not, perhaps, apples and oranges!), and which, I think, was presupposed by many pre-Darwinian uses of tree diagrams to show full and balanced relationships. Our forebears knew, as we may not, that the vicissitudes of life don't guarantee fullness, balance, or even continuity. Flourishing is an achievement, not just natural. We need to do our part, the way a family might keep itself going by adopting children, while also perhaps invoking the aid of other agencies.

On either side of the river is the tree of life

with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month,

and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

(Rev. 22:2, NRSV)

Signs of spring

K-AI-lash

Somehow the algorithm that sends uninvited TikTok-aspirant "reels" to my FaceBook account discovered I had an interest in Mount Kailas. It's a very special mountain, no doubt, which means many things to many people, but still the variety of images is a little confounding. The fourth and sixth of the images below show Kailas as I saw it. All the others are, at the least, AI-enhanced, giving the sacred mount different shapes - pointy, symmetrical, crowned with special clouds - and often attended by vast numbers of (mainly Hindu) pilgrims,  

almost none of whom are dressed for the altitude. But how did the AI generate a mountain which - like the first - looks so like a snow-covered temple? In the vast world of images on which AI trains, realistic images of Kailas may be outnumbered by stylized devotional ones, easily rendered "photographic" by AI. But they're not just bunk. As I once suggested, you need to approach Kailas with something already in mind - and maybe that's what you (are) then (able to) see. 

Snow city

Had us some snow last night!

Luminous

The last few days have been dark and even rainy so it was lovely that my day for renting a car and hitting the hills was clear! Indeed the light in Pisgah National Forest, the day's highlight, was so clear that everything was shining. Not just water... Leaves and pine needles 

and smooth branches sparkled too. My iPhone was so dazzled it wasn't able to capture what's most novel to me in this forest: in the many stream and waterfall-filled valleys and on, I think, the east side of hills, the understory isn't the brown of dead leaves but deep green - 

mostly rhododendrons; the best I could do was that picture at the top. (I can't imagine what it'll be like when they all bloom in the summer!) The effect is like one of those medieval tapestries with white trees against a lush verdant background. From a distance, blue prevailed.

たけやぶ

This variegated bamboo, in a brisk breeze, takes me back to Japan... 

Cataract

From above, and below, 120-foot High Falls 

Bumper to bumper

Our vehicle for the day's outing, lent by my friend's generous sister. It's a new car, so the bumper stickers are all fresh and current!

Blue Ridges...

On my way to Asheville, cradle of American forestry - who knew?

Well, that's early!

Phoneless delight!

In lieu of a new year's resolution this year, I took up the Guardian's challenge to "reclaim your brain," a five-week program by Catherine Price, author of How to break up with your phone. It's fantastic - highly recommend! I think its being spaced out is key to its success so I don't want to give anything away. But one bit of brilliance I can't resist sharing. Even if you've weaned yourself from obsessively checking your smartphone for any and every update or message or news, recognizing how the phone trained you to do that whenever you had a spare moment (waiting for the subway or elevator, for instance), the physical reflex may still be there. When an unscripted moment opens up, instead of even wondering what to do with it your hand reaches for the pocket where your cellphone usually resides. 

Catching yourself red-handed has its satisfactions (well, a somewhat mortified satisfaction) but what's really needed, we learned in one of the later weeks, is new habits - including for your hand. Price suggests: "start a 'delight' practice."

This is an idea I got from the poet Ross Gay, who spent a year writing an essay each day about something that delighted him, and then compiled a selection of these pieces into The Book of Delights.

A delight practice is quite simple: you make a point, as you go about your everyday life, to notice things that spark a moment of delight for you.

These could be anything – a beautiful cloud, a pretty flower, or even something funny or absurd. When you encounter it, you raise a finger in the air – and you announce, out loud and enthusiastically, “Delight!” (The out loud part is important, even if you are alone.)

If someone asks you what the heck you are doing, tell them about this practice and invite them to join you.

This works better than I could have dared imagine. Moments otherwise lost - moments where we disconnect from what surrounds us, burrowing mindlessly into the quicksand of social media - are turned instead into momens of discovery, connection, agency! 

第六千五百篇了

Numbers are just, well, numbers. 

But this post is #6500 in this blog,

which is a little, well, numbing!

Historic planet

Returned to "Prehistoric Planet," this time with trees on my mind. The series remains confounding in its uncanny recreation of nature documentary stories and angles in a CGI reconstruction of the late Cretaceous - 66 million years ago. Binge-watching all five episodes of the first season and the first of the new, second season has left me sated and a little sickened at the pervasive anthropomorphism.

But - as is often the case for human historical dramas - the settings are not CGI. There are plenty of trees, many of whose species had evolved to something like their forms today long before the age of dinosaurs. (Angiosperms and palms spread in the early Cretaceous; conifers and tree ferns and ginkgos are even older.) So the forest where the 80-foot-tall Austroposeidon appear above is a real forest, likewise that around the Hatzegopteryx below. Different areas had different climates than now, needless to say but the availability of similar enough climates somewhere on the planet today offers a different uncanniness. Trees have a vastly longer species history than we do.

ChatGPT blues

Since I'm not teaching this semester, the challenge of generative AI for teaching and learning isn't front and center, but when I had a chance to talk to one of my favorite students today I learned that the battle continues. None of the student's classes this semester will have final papers - or, it seems, any papers at all! Blue books - for hand-written in-class exams - only! Papers are evidently too easily compromised by ChatGPT and, one instructor told his class, he wanted to spare them the embarrassment and hassle of getting caught. Another instructor told her class that perfect grammar in a paper was a giveaway that a paper was AI-generated. Sounds punitive and untrusting, I said, but predicted that we spooked professors would find ways to learn from and with this newest challenge, as we did with online teaching, etc. The student is sorry not to get the chance to write papers but says the instructors are right to be alert. He's seen students in a seminar type a professor's question into ChatGPT and raise their hands to participate in discussion. Yoicks!

Cubist camouflage

Don't know if the courtyard maples were glad to see me today.