Strife over

I used to think there were Triduum people and Easter Sunday people (long one of the latter, I only dedicated to the former when I moved to NYC) and felt a little sorry for the clergy and others who had to be there for all of them. But this year choir duty makes me one of those people, so I was there bright and early today for the fifth leg of the Holy Week pentathlon. Glad I went! Yes, it it sort of a victory lap, the strife over and the battle won already at last night's vigil. And yes, today's church was full of unfamiliar faces - but also full, as we never usually are. (Why don't they join us more often? We have room!) Do they know we turned the church inside-out, clergy washing lay feet, the altar stripped, lights extinguished, and then celebrated the return  of the light with candles? I didn't, before I became a Triduumite. But somehow none of this mattered, or maybe it even contributed to the giddy joy of the morning. The work was done, we'd been there for it, we were there together, the world has no idea. The point of Easter is just to say "Alleluia" as many times and ways as you can anyway, isn't it? The musical selections helped, too, including old chestnuts like "Jeusus Christ is Ris'n Today," "Good Christians All, Rejoice and Sing" and, yes, "The Strife is Over" and the Easter hat of the organ repertory, the toccata from Widor's 5th symphony for organ but also some Bach and the spiraling euphoria of some modern gospel - with probably the first guest saxophonist in our church's history. What a nifty place! Maybe some of the fair-weather Christians got the vibe?

This is the night

Resurrection from the Chora in Istanbul

Good Friday

That day again, that causes us to trem-ble, trem-ble, tremble.

Lifelong?

Had a fun little event relaunching the New School Histories website today. Well, mostly fun - it's a history of losses as well as gains. This is one of the five splash pages, and we're no longer committed to "Adult Education," and so perhaps also not to "lifelong" learning. Hanging over our heads was the imminent dissolution of the the founding division, home of all that lifelong learning (currently called Schools of Public Engagement, fifth in that list under "The New School is"), its various components, faculty and staff to be "rehomed" in other division. How do we tell the story now?

Since SPE was the trunk from which the others branched (it's more complicated than that of course, since our history involves some crucially important grafts), I quipped that we were like a banyan tree which, having sent out aerial roots which became secondary trunks, eventually loses its original trunk. The banyan lives on, but you can only understand why it has the shape it does by knowing about the now empty center. 

A lot of our storytelling about The New School's histories has inevitably been about ruptures and interruptions, but this still feels different. So it was a salve to spend some time with folks committed to the continuing interest of that history. In fact, we were soon happily lost in the website's thicket of historical research, documentation and reflection. So much good stuff there!!

雪だるま

At a lovely show of Zen paintings at Japan Society today I had a melting experience. It came with this painting by Nakahara Nantenbo (1839-1925) called "Snow Daruma," a play on how the Japanese word for snowman, 

雪だるま yukidaruma, evokes Bodhidharma, the legendary founder of Zen. The text: 

A Daruma is made of piled-up snow -

as the days pass, he disappears, but where did he go?

Somehow it didn't seem frivolous to notice my shadow and then pose, since we'd just been through a room of paintings of monks snoozing, laughing, jesting, juggling and spinning a bowl. The text of another (by Hakuin Ekaku): 

Mr. Monk! How unusual! Today you are actually doing zazen... Yeah, so what?

The friend I went with thought this one by Sengai Gibon (1750-1837)

"What a pleasant nap! I dreamt I was the Duke of Zhou!

(a jab at Confucius) looked like a cat stretching.

White knuckles

The Met's London plane trees 

have been freshly pollarded!

Tree of extinction

As I'm trying to wrangle the many many contexts in which one reads of a "tree of life" into one argument, I decided, on a whim, to search for "tree of extinction." (Part of my argument, as you know, is that Charles Darwin was drawn to the tree as a model for the history of species precisely because trees naturally lose many branches.) 

Something came up! The article, just half a year old, is "Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera," and it argues that we are already well into the sixth extinction. Whole genera of animals have gone extinct in recent centuries, at a far swifter rate than before and much too quickly for evolution to fill the gaps. And many more are at risk. It's a powerful, urgent argument, but the accompanying illustration undermines it. 

With images of extinct genera on the withered branches, it sort of corresponds to Darwin's tree of life, which includes extinct as well as living species. But their point is not that this is business as usual. We're supposed to imagine that the same fate may await the genera represented in the green canopy above. Where the image undermines their argument is that the tree in the picture looks perfectly healthy. We expect the lower part of the trunk of a tree to be branchless. And if higher branches die off, too, we expect that that's just part of the tree's growing higher still, generating a new canopy.

Blueskying spring

Shortcuts

Part of a cluster of article on AI in the newest Scientific American is an article called "Shortcuts to God" concerned with the 

large language models on religious texts ... flooding the internet, claiming to offer instanteous spiritual insights. What could go wrong? 

The author quotes religious leaders concerned that the work of study and reflection is undermined; his own main worry seems to be that users might be misled by the "hallucinations" of all generative AI. But he doesn't ask whether these models are mining the right data. That they might not be is revealed in a telling quotation from the director of a non-profit called AI and Faith. 

Nothing new in theology since Thomas Aquinas? I posted this on the Facebook page of our religious studies alums, and one was good enough to put into words exactly how problematic this is. 

Theologians and other theoreticians of the world’s religions will be very surprised to hear Mr. Graves’ news that their religions of study all froze in time 800 years ago. The fact that he thinks new theology must come from AI—as opposed to, say, all the people who have been kept out of the academy forever and are now clawing their way in—or, say, the lived experiences of the billions of religious practitioners—is so outrageous that it’s kind of blowing my mind. I can’t imagine making such a bold claim about something I know nothing about. 

Thank you, Helena!

Forest succession

The replanting of the courtyard has commenced, and it's beautiful. Here the view down from my office window two weeks ago and today.

The exposed soil will be planted with green ground cover (as when the courtyard was first laid out), making for a quite different feel. (Vines have been promised, too!) Also: the courtyard we knew was a space of monocultures - red maples here, a stand of bamboo opposite, later replaced by one and then another kind of tree. The new look is mixed. You can't quite see from above but among the evergreen shrub with fragrant yellow flowers (Japanese mahonia, I think) are some new young trees. They appear to be the same kind as some new ones planted across the courtyard, which still bore ID as American hophornbeam, together with two other kinds of trees. Diversity on both ends, and some commonality of trees - a whole new concept!

Non SPE

This is my first academic leave where I didn't leave town. (I also kept on some administrative responsibilities.) So it's no surprise that I haven't felt as distanced from the university. Indeed, I've been popping over many Fridays - a day the campus is virtually empty - to commune with the courtyard maples as the replacement of dead trees approached. But I was perhaps naive to suppose that it would be out of sight, out of mind the rest of the time. 

First, there was a strike by academic student workers at the start of this month. It wound up lasting only a few days but this came after weeks of increasingly tense negotiations and full-time faculty angsting about how not to "cross the virtual picket line" in support if a strike were called; word was some of the organizers, recalling the camraderie and sense of shared purpose during last year's much longer strike for the part-time faculty contract, were looking forward to a return to the barricades.

Now we receive word that our interrim president (stepping in for the last president, whose moral authority was extinguished by his comportment during the part-time faculty strike) has done what her predecessors were rumored to have been considering for years: announced that the founding division of the school, currently known as the Schools of Public Engagement (SPE, before that New School for General Studies, The Adult Division, The New School and of course New School for Social Research) is to be dissolved, its parts absorbed by the colleges of design, liberal arts, performing arts and graduate social research. (This afternoon's public notice only speaks of embarking on a route to reducing the number of colleges, but the Board of Trustees has apparently already signed off on giving SPE the ax.)

This will have significant impact for the little self-design liberal arts program I direct at Lang, since SPE has a much larger self-design program and several faculty committed entirely to it. My friends there and I have suggested aligning the two programs for a while; now we have six weeks to make a proposal, and a year tro enact it. The logistics will be complicated but the results might well be best for all involved, including students. Finding new homes for all the rest of SPE's broad range of programs won't be as easy.

But my main reaction to this news has been as a historian of The New School. How will we tell the story without our matriarch?

Turtle islands

An errand took me to the South Slope today. The spiky Brooklyn skyline, visible when the F train briefly curves overland, was barely recognizable. And then in the 7th Ave station I happened on one of the newest additions to the MTA station mosaic series, David Rios Ferreira's "Landscapes Adrift - cosmically woven and earthy bonded."

Inspired by the turtles in Prospect Park, it brings together all manner of images with turtle creation myths from many cultures, including those which see the world carried on the back of a turtle.

Building upon this narrative and drawing from his own Taíno heritage (the Indigenous people of the Caribbean), Ferreira's artwork seeks to bridge present-day concepts of home with a shared cultural connection to the planet across time.

The rainbow-filled mosaics swirl along the white walls of the under-ground passageway leading to the station. Once past the turnstile, images in blue and white play against iridescent backgrounds. Cool!

Barnstorm

Last week I shared with you a precursor, Mrs. J. H. Philpot. I've learned a little more about her since then. "J. H." stands for John Henry, MD, whom one Mary Isaline, née Needham (1852-1925) married in 1877. They lived in London, had a daughter, and a 20-year friendship with South African freethinker and feminist Olive Schreiner (whose letters have been digitized); both Isaline and Olive worked toward's women's suffrage in Britain, but Olive thought Isaline a gossip. I know this from the inquiries of a Canadian lesbian poet blogger, who learned of Philpot's book from the enthusiastic recommendation of radical feminist Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology:

If the Searcher can find it, she should look at Mrs. J.H. Philpot, The Sacred Tree, or The Tree in Religion and Myth (London and New York: Macmillan, 1897). It is saddening to read in the author's preface: 'The reader is requested to bear in mind that this volume lays no claim to scholarship, independent research, or originality of view.... In so dealing with one of the many modes of primitive religion, it is perhaps inevitable that the writer should seem to exaggerate its import...' A Hag [a term of approbation for Daly] who peruses this book will see that it displays extraordinary scholarship, independent research, and originality of view. She will also find that it takes no great effort of imagination to grasp the circumstances under which this devoted author labored — conditions which drove her to apologize for seeming to exaggerate the importance of the Sacred Tree and of her Self. Since she does not tell us her own name, we are left with the quaint label, 'Mrs. J.H. Philpot,' signifying the burial of this courageous foresister. Her book contains many important illustrations of Tree Goddesses. She discusses christian 'adaptations' of the May Tree and of what came to be known as the 'Christmas Tree.' She causes the reader to reflect upon gynocentric origins of such biblical images as that of Yahweh speaking to Moses from the burning bush, pointing out that the sacred sycamores of Egypt were believed to be inhabited by such Goddesses as Hāthor and Nuit.

I'm not sure there's much more we can find out about the author of The Sacred Tree, and what led her to publish this (and only this) book when she did. If I have a chance I might ask a librarian about reviews. But the book clearly has legs.

One reader was a Thomas Barns, an Anglican vicar who was entrusted with the article "Trees and Plants" for the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, published in 1908. He has different axes to grind than Philpot. His trees are more abstract, not objects of any sort of sympathy. He certainly doesn't consider inviting them into his house. 

Philpot didn't take sides on debates over whether ancestor cults or animistic experiences are the source of tree veneration, owning that it was likely that the primitive worship of trees had more than one root (23). Barns is a partisan for the latter view, but in a particular way. The anthropologists arguing for animism saw it as an early form of a scientific engagement with the forces of nature, the first stage in an evolution which would lead to religion and beyond it. Not so Barns, whose view is thoroughly theological. 

 (454)

It's a grim story that he tells, although his account began in wonder:

(448)

Barns' narrative begins with this animistic principle of the unity of the divine spirit of life but early humans progressively move away from the divine into anthropomorphism. The start is positively Edenic: In the earliest stage the sacred tree is more than a symbol. It is instinct with divine life, aglow with divine light. It is at once the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (448) But it moves towards symbolism as the sacred groves planted by devotés come to seem the abodes of different gods. Barns' discussion of this putative stage, Trees many and lords many, evokes Paul's account of the history of idolatry (1 Cor 8:5-6).

Like Philpot's, Barns' account is full of the names of different kinds of trees but where for her they are weightless, for him their specificity is part of the problem. With the differentiation of the deity into the gods of the nations there came the differentiation of the tree into the trees sacred to the several gods (449), he writes, only a little later to assert that As the tree varied in species, the god varied in name (451). Once particular kinds of trees are associated with the deities of particular nations and these nations fight and expand, they come into conflict with each other, giving rise to the tree-demons. 

(452)

Barns goes on to discuss the tree of life and the tree of knowledge but all along trees are but material witnesses to human folly. He ends with a flourish of quotations from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, ending in silent adoration before the Tree of Life who is no tree but divine wisdom sprung from the root of Jesse. (457)

It all makes Isaline Philpot's account seem positively celebratory of trees! All the particularities of tree cults and celebrations are for Barns detritus as humanity moves painfully from the prelapsarian presence of the divine back to the divine. This doleful history involves particular trees and the particular peoples relating to them but ultimate truth allows of no such material particulars. Philpot's book's title refers to a single Sacred Tree but his "Trees and Plants" all point beyond themselves to the blinding Sun of Righteousness.

Anyway, Barns makes liberal use of Philpot - except for her discussion of the "universe tree," to which he gives only a cursory glance. While trees seem to him radiant with divine light, this light is not theirs - something our first parents knew, or should have - and it is fatal frailty to dwell on the trees rather than the light. Compared to this, Philpot, open to the "spirit of vegetation," is a pagan tree-hugger, as Daly discerned!

Gifts of vocation

We're a few months from the fiftieth anniversary of the first ordinations of women priests in the Episcopal Church. They were "irregular" because the ordination of women was not approved by General Convention until 1976. (But would that have happened without this act of civil disobedience?) The Jesus who called them was decidedly irregular, too.

This weekend I finally got to see a documentary about the "Philadelphia Eleven" that's been years in the making, and got to see it in the best possible setting - at a church led by a friend, a female priest, and followed by a panel discussion with five priests, one ordained each decade since 1974. That was yesterday. Then we had a discussion of the movie at my church, a church with a woman rector and associate rector, today. Just how momentous the change ushered in by the Philadelpha Eleven is is hard to describe. One might start with some statistics from the film's end: almost 7000 women have nowbeen ordained, and 30% of bishops and 40% of priests in the Episcopal Church today are women. But that gives you no sense of what it was and is like to be one of those women at different stages of this unfolding, or to have been ministered to by them. 

The two discussions helped fill that out for me. This change has not been easy, although it has become easier. Each of the voices I heard, each soulful in her own profound way, made clear what a gift the inclusion of these remarkable people in the priesthood represents - and how bereft the church before that was (and, in many churches, still is). Fifty years is a change within the span of a single lifetime but in the history of the church, it's a moment. Yet, my friend suggested, the true opening of the priesthood to all is really as epochal as the Reformation. We are only just beginning to understand where the Holy Spirit is taking us through it. These discussions have made clear that this sea change is already bringing about transformed understandings of vocation, gender, family, church - and God. How wonderful to be living in such a time!

I can give a sense of the sea change of these fifty years with two phrases used by priests who spoke in these discussions, one ordained in the 1980s and one a quarter century later. The former grew up Episcopal but of course knew as a girl she couldn't be a priest. Yet at some point - a few years after the Philadelphia Eleven - she realized that "the things I wanted to do are things that priests do." The latter, deciding after an earlier career to go to seminary and become a hospital chaplain, was asked by someone "why aren't you a priest?"

Breeding lilacs out of the dead land

April used to be the cruellest month, but (one of our alums writes) now plants bud an average of 18 days earlier than in the 1950s.

Precursor

Meet my predecessor Mrs. J. H. Philpot. I wish I knew more about her, such as her Christian name, but haven't been able to find out. I've found a J. H. Philpot, apparently a strict Baptist dissenter, but don't know if and how they're connected.

In any case, Mrs. Philpot published The Sacred Tree: Or, The Tree in Religion and Myth in London in 1897. It is pretty much the book on the subject for most of the next century, at least in English, which say as much about the topic as about her treatment of it. (Nathaniel Altman's Sacred Trees will appear in 1994.) It is in fact an impressive work of synthesis, bringing together research from archaeology, folklore, classic literature and "contemporary anthropology" in multiple European languages. Important emergent theories of the evolution of religion are mentioned too: Tylor, Spencer and Frazer.

Philpot says she’s writing her book because 

no other form of pagan ritual has been so widely distributed, has left behind such persistent traces, or appeals so closely to modern sympathies as the worship of the tree (vii)

Just what "modern sympathies" she has in mind is not, alas, made clear, nor whether the enduring appeal of the “worship of tree” is a source of hope or fear. 

The Sacred Tree sets the stage with Chaldean images of pairs of worshipping figures—often real or mythical animals—facing a central stylized tree, an image to be found even in the cathedral of St. Mark’s in Venice. There are traces everywhere of these ancient practices. Philpot then touches quickly on Canaan and ancient Israel, contemporary Africa, ancient Egypt and Persia, India and Southeast Asia ancient and contemporary, Japan and the western hemisphere from Mexico to the Great Lakes to Patagonia. She returns to Europe, moving from the Germanic forests to Poland, Russia, Finland and France before alighting in May tree celebrations in England. Everywhere she finds illustrations of 

the primitive idea that there was a spiritual essence embodied in vegetation, that trees, like men had spirits, passing in and out amongst them, which possessed a mysterious and potent influence over human affairs, and which it was therefore wise and necessary to propitiate (3).  

In the following we encounter the coffin of Osiris found in a tree, Indian tree veneration remarked already in Alexander’s time, oaks of the Druids and at Dodona, the trees of the several Buddhas, customs of hanging gifts and trophies on trees going back to the Golden Fleece, use of wreaths and branches in religious as well as domestic ceremonies, practices of placing sick childen in the clefts of trees, trees which bleed and others which produce intoxicating potions, a cavalcade of wild men, elves, djinn, fauns, nymphs, dryads, fairies, pixies and moss-women, spring festivities and, inevitably, Christmas trees. 

This teeming multiplicity manifests in various forms, which Philpot deftly organizes under several headings. She devotes a chapter each to "tree gods" friendly to humans – really gods who make their abode in trees - and indifferent or hostile "wood-demons and tree-spirits,” parrying on the question if one developed from the other. What is clear is that these tree-connected spirits 

preceded the gods and outlasted them (53)

just as ancient tree shrines outlasted the temples built next to them. Next she adduces examples of practices which connect trees with human life - its origin, its key transitions, its end, etc. - and cases where trees serve as oracles. She mentions as a possible source of tree veneration the use of intoxicants from tree substances used by seers. 

She turns next to what she calls the “universe tree,” a variant of what will become known as the axis Mundi, the pillar separating - and connecting - sky and earth. Primitive folks will have wondered why celestial objects aren't subject to gravity like everything else, she quips, but acknowledges that not all peoples imagine a tree pillar. Sacred mountains serve for many, but flatlanders prefer trees. The universe tree shades into the tree of life, and that leads to ideas of paradise, whether as a home of gods or the beginning or end of human life. 

[O]riginally the mystical tree was the essential feature of paradise, and the garden was merely its precinct or setting—one of the many conceptions which grew up around the central idea of the cosmic tree. Each nation, according to its stage of culture or its prevailing habit of thought, emphasized one feature of it. The monster tree which, according to primitive cosmogony, was believed to support the universe by material branches, became in the minds of more cultivated races the central tree of a dimly-realised paradise, and eventually the symbol of an abstract idea. The intellectual Buddhist saw in it the emblem of knowledge; the Persian thought of it as the tree of immortality; the Hebrew, filled with the idea of man’s frailty and with the longing to explain it, made it the tree of temptation. 

But in all these various conceptions we find a central idea, derived no doubt from an antecedent and universal tree-worship, an idea which places a tree at the root of all philosophy, refers all phenomena to the existence of a central tree, serviceable to man here and hereafter, and concentrating upon itself the reverent devotion which had outgrown its earthly counterpart. (142) 

From these lofty heights the book's final sections turn to practices in her own British Isles. She describes the boisterous celebrations at the arrival of spring, and folk practices to commemorate it, notably involving May trees. These have a dark edge, she notes – it seems the May King was once sacrificed – but Philpot is not James Frazer, and she move on. May day practices largely lost their religious meaning since the Puritans banned them, she notes. Yet as pagan May revels subsided Christmas has given trees a new meaning, this time on the side of spirituality rather than paganism. 

Modern as it is in its present form, the Christmas-tree epitomizes many most ancient ideas; is the point to which many streams converge whose source is hidden in a far-distant antiquity. It is the meeting-point of the old pagan belief in the virtues vested in the tree and of the quaint fancies of the Middle Ages, which loved to see spiritual truths embodied in material forms. Christ, the Tree of Life, blossoming on Christmas-eve in Mary’s bosom; the fatal tree of paradise whence sprang the cross, the instrument of man’s salvation …; the miracle of nature, so stirred by the wonder of the event as to break forth into blossom in the midst of winter—all these ideas, so characteristic of mediaeval thought, became grafted together with observances derived from solstitial worship, upon the stock of the sacred tree, laden with offerings and decked with fillets. Indeed, the Christmas-tree may be said to recapitulate the whole story of tree-worship,—the May tree, the harvest-tree, the Greek eriesione, the tree as the symbol and embodiment of deity, and last but not least, the universe tree, bearing the lights of heaven for its fruit and covering the world with its branches. (172-73) 

Grafting all of the varieties she has gathered onto the rootstock of the “sacred tree,” this yuletide denouement comes as something of a surprise. (These are the last words of the book.) Frazer’s Golden Bough found Christianity to be no more than a particularly long-lived example of the human sacrifice at the heart of the worship of trees. Philpot has domesticated and converted the whole history. And if her theology isn’t one to allow intimations of immortality in “paganism,” a properly civilized paganism can yet perhaps play a part in true religion. It's all very… Victorian.

But where are the trees? As Philpot assembles examples from (she avers) across time and place, we encounter practices and myths engaging cedar, palm, sycamore, cotton-tree, acacia, myrrh-tree, pine, cypress, myrtle, plane, bamboo, ficus religiosa, sakaki, cypress, oak, birch, mountain-ash, pear-tree, alder ... But their differences matter not. Her tree worshippers' relationships were never with the trees themselves, but with the gods or spirits which made their home there. That particular trees or tree species might have had something to do with all this is inconceivable to her, because actual relationships with actual trees have already been effaced by her "civilization."

Covid knocking at the door

On this fourth anniversary of the day when covid was declared a national emergency in 2020, noticed this in a show of works by by Bobbi Beck at our local library. Not sure at what point she stitched it, but it's important to remember that covid had the key to many a door.

Graft the gap

I didn't post about it last September when the "Sycamore Gap" tree - a tree growing in a sheltered dip along Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland - was cut down by vandals, or about the outpouring of grief and call for a reset in Britain's relationship to the natural world it provoked. (It was in fact a non-native tree* planted not that long ago in a landscape that had long been deforested.) But I can't resist posting now as efforts to give it a second life proceed.

Material from the Sycamore Gap tree was cultivated using a variety of techniques, according to the National Trust. Experts at the center used “budding,” in which a single bud from the original tree is attached to a rootstock of the same species, and two forms of grafting, which involves a cutting from the tree and a rootstock being joined. These techniques are designed to create genetically identical replicas of the original tree, the organization said. 

Meanwhile, the center’s team is also working on growing seeds harvested from the tree — several dozen of which are now sprouting, the trust said.

There's hope also that the tree stump itself will regrow, although it will take two to three years to see if that happens. It's interesting to consider the various kinds of afterlife the tree might experience, though "afterlife" may be the wrong word. Back when I was in college philosopher Derek Parfit wrote a book called Reasons and Persons that, through thought experiments like my brain being placed in someone else's body, challenged the idea of "personal identity" used in metaphysics and moral philosophy. Identity is always gappy!

*Note that this article uses an AI image!

Snowy mountains

Short but sweet quest for snow in the Adirondacks! Au revoir!

Courtyard kin

Not to be maudlin but the courtyard trees today reminded me of this

More miracle

At this week's Crossan and Friends, the special guest was recovered evangelical Brian McLaren, who started us off with a poem (he called it a sort of haiku) that he'd just written. Not Szymborska but lovely.

I do not walk on water

Except in winter,

When ice makes the miracle more natural.

To me, these days, natural miracles are better,

Signifying lessons to live rather than shortcuts to take,

A more subtle yet more real magic.

For me, nature is already as supernatural

As it needs to be.

The simplest, humblest things —

Green moss on grey rock,

Spotted turtle basking in a shaft of sunlight —

They are true signs and wonders,

Holy, significant, wonderful.

I used to crave miracles to prove something

(most especially, myself, my faith, my tribe’s exceptionalism).

Now, instead of the miracle,

I try to keep my eyes open for the meaningful.

That these sounds in air or these marks on paper

Could bear my heart to yours,

Or bring what you see to my eyes … what

Could be more miracle?

Shake on it

Since last week the buds of the courtyard maples have burst open! 

Well, not all the maples. I counted eleven without buds.

Next week some or all of these will be taken out, so I felt I should greet them while I could. After placing my hand on each of the trunks, I found myself shaking one. The dead trees have hula'd when shaken for a while, rattling and snapping, and did again today. I went around letting each shimmy and shake once more against the sky.

That didn't age well

So that's that? Has the Anthropocene party ended? It's not so simple... 

to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term.

That's right and proper; I've felt for a while that there was a translation problem between geological and humanist categories. We've never had to bring them in converation with each other before - part of the challenge of the Anthropocene, some might say! - which doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Stratigraphers' debates if there was an anthropogenic Holocene-ending "era" or "epoch" or "age" or "event" definable in their term, what to call it and and where to locate its "golden spike," have made for interesting watching. They've also clarified that the work of humanists, policy makers and others (even religionists!) is distinct from this, and appropriately so. When the Anthropocene Working Group made its final recommendation for a "golden spike" last year I found myself ready for this phase to finish so we could move onward to a multi-pronged multidisciplinary engagement with the challenges of living in these times. 

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.

Today's article makes clear that many of the geologists share that sense that the stratigraphical question doesn't and should be taken to settle the broader historical and moral questions, whose urgency none of them denies.

Behold the tree II

Once you start noticing them, trees are everywhere. Like in the so-called Reidersche Tafel, a c. 400 Italian ivory carving (housed now in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum) which represents one of the first extant representations of the resurrection and ascension of Christ.

I've seen it before, but just reencountered it in John Dominic Crossan and Sarah Sexton Crossan's Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision, part of my Lenten reading. The Crossans' story is that it took Christian iconography a long time to find ways of representing the resurrection, which, after all, isn't directly described in any of the canonical gospels. (The Gospel of Peter obliges.) The Reidersche Tafel is shown as they work their way from symbolic depictions through a series of images in which Jesus awakens, steps out of and finally hovers above the tomb. But that happens centuries later than this carving, which leads to a detour on how the discovery of the tomb and the erection of a church above it (perhaps shown here) ushered in a period where representing the tomb took the place of the event. But this isn't just the tomb yet.

This is again a symbolic depiction of the actual moment of resurrection. Here the solution is the olive tree growing luxuriantly out of the very top of the tomb with birds feeding on its fruit ... This is the resurrection as the Tree of Life for the world; and this olive tree visually links the Resurrection, on the left, to the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, on the right (Acts 1:12). ([HarperOne, 2018], 49)

It is an exquisite tree, a marvel of art and technique. But is it really also a representation of the resurrection? That would be grand! The other accounts of the iconography of the tree I've found (on a rather cursory search) present it as representing the church, the two birds its Jewish and Gentile members. And the Tree of Life isn't usually depicted as an olive. But this carved wonder is definitely doing more than just filling out the space as beardless Jesus gets a hand on his way into the sky, and clearly growing out of the tomb. Fascinating!