Ablaze

Saw four fires on my way from Albuquerque over LAX to Seattle,

from Palm Spring to Sequoia. (Last part of the trip was cloudy.)

Gilded!

On my last morning - a little earlier so I could catch the 7am bus back to ABQ - back again to the little rise where I went Saturday morning.

4000

Since the 100 of us who showed up in 1982 were the first class of what was then known as the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West (now just UWC-USA), we're the first class to celebrate a fortieth graduation anniversary, as we were the twentieth, the tenth, the fifth... Our anniversaries are the school's! Yet while we're happy to think of ourselves as pioneers, it remains puzzling that the school took class photos in black and white for its first three classes, making us look as old as the 19th century railroad hotel which is the anchor of the campus. We're not that old!

The thirty-seven classes which have graduated since then now fill the walls of a long and windy underground corridor, with nice big glossy images of proud graduates in formal or national dress. Forty classes makes four thousand graduates, as many as the years of living our class has accumulated since graduating. Or would have, if we had not lost four of our number (three to cancer, one to leukemia), some of the several dozen ex-students we named at a very moving gathering of memory this afternoon. Quite a community we started, not just international and intergenerational but including the dead as well as the living...

This reunion was for the classes of 1984 and 1985, 1994 and 1995 and 2004 and 2005; there wasn't room to host the class which graduated a decade ago. And we met few of the current students during this. What would we have said to them, the class which had nobody ahead of us to guide or constrain us way back then? But I was delighted to find this quilt portrait of them, enough color to balance our sepia!

Piñon

Started the first day of this 2-day reunion taking a friend for a familiar early morning walk. The walk goes up behind the school to a little chapel, left over from when the campus was a Catholic seminary, then up a ridge to a view in three directions - plains to the east, mountains to the west, our school in the middle. 

The friend is in Norway(originally from Jamaica), so all was mediated by WhatsApp. I paused over flowers, abundant after what's been an unusually wet summer (so wet we were told we might be evacuated because of flash flooding), a few round mushrooms, the sun breaking out over a ridge, and of course trees, all conifers. On attaining the little viewpoint I sat down, still with the camera away from me, and we found we were looking at this Hiroshige-worthy window of piñon pine. You could see the school below, but the scene's truth was here.

New Mexico skies!

Arrived in New Mexico, land of enchanting skies! As Willa Cather wrote, Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. A shuttle bus took a small group of us from the Albuquerque airport to our school in Las Vegas (NM!), just as the sun set and the colors and shades of the sky arranged and rearranged

themselves, fading by a remarkable array to stages to black. I was in rapture, remembering many school field trips which ended in a van (simpler than this one) making its mute way beneath the glorious wonders of a sky both stretched so far that it's always bigger than any one effect and so close that you can breathe it and it breathes you.

 

Uncharted territory

Sunday was the hottest day on the surface of the earth in recorded history - possibly since the start of the last ice age 100,000 years ago! But records exist now only to be broken; that one lasted just a day.

Abssyrian arboretum

The Assyrian sacred tree came in many forms, some even (to my eyes) arboreal! But is it, as some eager dendrolators assert, a tree of life, like the one we encounter in Genesis? In the absence of any textual evidence, all that's clear is that it's a symbolically charged date palm, though later versions add fruit, including pomegranates.

 

 

Images: Simo Parpola, "The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 52/3 (July 1993): 161-208, 200-201

Clear cut

What do you see here? The image at right is an example of a "Porphyrian tree," a representation of Porphyry's illustration of the scale of being described in Aristotle's categories, and widely cited as the earliest European tree diagram. I've seen versions of it in many histories but only today paused long enough over it to realize it's barely a tree at all. The account starts at the top, with "Substance," which divides into two, "corporeal" and "incorporeal." But then the one at left shifts to the center, "bodies" (= "corporeal substance") - in some versions this move is labeled "constitutes" - before splitting again. The next branch at left, "animate," again shifts to the center and splits again. Eventually you arrive at "homo" (= "mortal rational animal") which splits into individuals, "Socrates" and "Plato," before erupting in a tangle of roots.

What absurdity is this? If anything it's an object lesson in self-serving nested hierarchical binaries, more like a spider plant than a tree. Yet the people who feature this particular image in their histories don't remark on how utterly untreelike it is. For starters, trees grow from the roots below, not from the (literal!) crown, not to mention the way branches zigzag to become trunk... But then they don't notice that the figure standing next to this contorted bonsai is about to cut it down, either! 

It's a bit of a tangent - all I need for my argument is the claim that early "tree diagrams" have only a notional connection with biological growth - but I'd like to know more about it. It's the frontispiece of a book published in Bologna in 1503 called Destructio sive eradicatio totius arboris Porphirii: magni philosophi ac sacrae theologiae doctoris eximii Augustini Anchonitani ordinis fratrum Heremitarum Sancti Augustini.

Biden his time

Excuse the iPhone reflection in the window, but this burst of sun through what had been dark clouds demands to be posted! For this is the day Joe Biden proved himself truly presidential by bowing out of the 2024 race. While he mulled the decision, the future seemed pretty bleak. I could imagine his dudgeon - one of the most effective presidents in a very long time, aided by a remarkably stable and competent cabinet, receiving no thanks from anyone, including members of his own party. And did I mention that he came into a country in economic and medical free-fall, with no help in the transition from his coup-coveting predecessor, who has spent the intervening years persuading a significant proportion of the electorate that the 2020 election was stolen? "I get no respect!" I pictured Biden thinking, and then, because he's capable of thinking beyond that, making the difficult but right choice. Americans, used to the endless campaign, may think 100 days too little to build a campaign, but most countries conduct their elections in this shorter time-frame. Perils remain in plenty from the coup plotters' side but the sun's out again. Thank you, Joe. Keep up the good work, and may we see it continue.

Saturday, July 20, 2024

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, a work of prescient speculative fiction, was published in 1993. Recognition of its significance just keeps growing: it hit the New York Times bestseller list in 2020! You might remember I've used it in several classes,

and have learned that not a few of my colleagues do, too! (I'm the only one paying attention to the novel's creation of a new religion, though.) Last year I got to hear a folk opera based on it. I mention it today because Saturday, July 20, 2024 is the date the story begins.

Rockets' red glare

 

 

I'm not sure what the artist who made these patriotic figurines, spied in a shop window on Amsterdam near the Natural History Museum, had in mind. Not US presidential politics ca. 2024?

Forty!

A week from today I'm flying to New Mexico for my 40th high school reunion! This defies sense on so many levels that I don't even know what to expect to expect - but I guess that's part of why one goes to reunions. I was back for the 10th, back in the twentieth century, and again for the 20th, back when the new millennium was new, but haven't been back to one since, though I was aware of the 30th. "We're not young anymore," one of my classmates (who's not coming) observed wryly. I've suspected that for a while now: we'll see!

Off the heat island

 This summer's been oppressive, the only respite is treeshade,

I bind unto myself today

Some people brought a blind man to [Jesus] and begged him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village; and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, ‘Can you see anything?’ And the man looked up and said, ‘I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.’ Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he looked intently and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. (Mark 5:22-5, NRSV)

The "religion" part of "Religion of trees" finally clicked today, or clicked into place, as I was mapping out the final chapter. My interest really hasn't been in what is usually celebrated or deplored as "worship of trees," though I devote a chapter to the construct of "the sacred tree," and offer novel takes on the Bodhi tree, the Tree of Life in the Heavenly Jerusalem and Christmas trees. I try to suggest that it's entirely unsurprising that trees in their prodigious variety provided material and metaphorical material for human religious traditions, since they provided such material for every part of human life and culture. But to see that one needs to get beyond monolithic western ideas of trees, and of our relationships with them, especially in the age of fossil fuels. We're a lot less like trees than facile romantic ideas about our kinship as vertically oriented beings reaching from the earth toward the sky might suggest, and a lot more dependent on them than we may care to admit. The relationships are all of them asymmetrical, and yet in many cases symbiotic.

And so: religion? I remembered one of the folk etymologies of religion as tracing to re-ligare, to re-bind. I used, long ago, to teach Wilfred Cantwell Smith's The Meaning and End of Religion, which argued that the Latin religio was long an obscure and unimportant word, only in modern times and unhelpfully applied to faith traditions. He mentions this along with a competing ancient etymology, re-legere (to re-read), but his point is that there's no clear source and even if there were the term is ultimately unilluminating. My generation of religious studies scholars takes the limitations of the term "religion" for granted.

But this hasn't stopped theologians from claiming one or other of these etymologies as revealing the true meaning of religion, and, while they are wrong to claim a clear etymology, they often make interesting points. I feel like joining them - though of course I'll mention that the history is obscure. Good pragmatist, I'll suggest that etymology can't settle the question, but thinking of religion as re-ligare may be helpful for thinking about humans and trees.

So: helpful - why? Because human life, like every form of life, emerged in ecosystems of tangled interdependence with myriad symbiotic species. Trees were among these symbionts, and, if they had hundreds of millions of years without us, they're stuck in relationship with us for the foreseeable future, and we with them. Pretending otherwise is historically wrong and politically and spiritually unhelpful. We must reduce our carbon and other footprints but a world from which human beings could discreetly withdraw is a dangerous fantasy. What's needed is rediscovering, reviving, re-imagining our relationships with trees. And not from a distance, but in embodied relationships of giving and taking.

Okay, so undoing the "severing of relations," which Heather Davis and Zoe Todd have convinced me is the fatal colonial heart of the Anthropocene, could be linked to re-binding, religare. (I stumbled on this thought once before.) But why not just talk about relationships? Because most of our modern ideas of relationships are premised on ideas of reciprocity, mutuality, balance which are thwarted by the assymmetries of our relationships with trees: for starters they're so much slower and bigger and older than we, and we take so much more from them than we could ever give back. 

But that's maybe where we need "religion." One needn't go all the way to Schleiermacher's "feeling of absolute dependence" or Otto's "wholly other" to see religion (or practices and ideas we gather under that name) as allowing us to name relationships in which reciprocity doesn't even make sense. It's a little like Aldo Leopold's learning to "think like a mountain," where the predation of wolves is discovered to be necessary to keep deer populations from ravaging forests, but more like Skywoman's cosmogonic dance of gratitude at the sacrifice of muskrat, who, at the cost of his life, brought the little pawful of mud from which our world was made, along with the gratuitous generosity of our fellow nonhuman kin. The dance matters.

Men are not like trees, walking (or not walking). But we live - we are able to live as humans, to dance - with and because of them. Ethics and economics can't begin to frame so profound a relationship.

Web design

This little spider was so translucent it seemed made of glass.

 

What befell Skywoman

Found my way today to two fascinating articles about the Skywoman story. The most commonly recounted version, like that which frames Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, starts in mid-air. 

She fell like a maple seed, pirouetting on an autumn breeze. A column of light streamed from a hole in the Skyworld, marking her path where only darkness had been before. ...

Wondering how she came to be falling is less urgent than finding out what happens to her next, and the ensuing collaboration of animals and their mutual founding of Turtle Island as good as never refers back the the Skyworld, beyond the bundle of leaves and branches she grasped on her way down.

I've made a point in teaching Braiding Sweetgrass of stressing the irrelevance of the Skyworld: we don't live there, nor should we. The miracle is the world we inherit, co-created by all its peoples, a world we also inherit a role in sustaining, down here below.

But it seems there are stories about how this woman came to be falling, and they may contain valuable teachings, too. I'd had the impression (from Kimmerer) that the hole in the sky was opened when a storm toppled the Tree of Life (what? tell me more!), and that the woman who would become Skywoman fell into it by accident. In her new introduction to Braiding Sweetgrass, on its tenth anniversary, Kimmerer has suggested that our current moment might be better served by a new telling.

The detail that varies from one telling to another is just how Skywoman finds herself falling from one world to the next. The common version is that she slips, the earth giving way at the edge of the hole in the sky where the great Tree of Life had fallen. It is an accident, with mythic consequences—and so it begins. 

But in other tellings, this was no accident. In one version, she was pushed. In another she was thrown—not from malice but because she was needed for the sacred task and needed “help” in leaving her beloved home for the next. In every version I’ve ever heard, Skywoman was an accidental and possibly an unwilling traveler to the next world, like a seed on the wind.

As I look around at the strong women I know, Indigenous and newcomer, survivors and thrivers, teachers, artists, farmers, singers, healers, mothers, nokos, aunties, daughters, sisters holding together families and communities and leading the way to a new world, I have a hard time seeing our Skywoman as an unknowing and passive emissary. No. I see her standing at the edge of the hole in the sky, her belly planted with new life, looking down into the darkness. Guided by the shaft of dazzling light shining through, she catches a glimpse of the world that waits for the seeds she carries, plucked from the Tree of Life. With all humility and respect for the teachings of this sacred story, I cannot help my imagining forward to this moment on the circle of time. What if, with full agency, she spreads her arms, looks over her shoulder, feels her child stir within and then—what if she jumps?

In the earliest recorded versions of the story, the woman - the wife (or perhaps daughter) of the Guardian of the tree - was pushed. By whom? By the Guardian, who had had a strange dream and was angered by her curiosity, which tipped over the tree, or, more commonly, sickened by jealousy, perhaps of their child, which she carried. In some versions he gives her gifts for the journey, so she knows what is going to happen. Here's an Onondaga version, recorded in 1903. 

Surely it had come to pass; the people had uprooted the standing tree called It-Tooth, and lay the chief He-holds-the-earth down beside the hole left in the earth. Each person came along and looked into the abyss at which time the chief said to his wife “Now, let us too look into the abyss. You must carry It-winds-go-plurally (Gusts of Wind) on your back. You must wrap yourself with care.” At this time the chief gave her three ears of corn, dried meat of the spotted fawn and said to her “This shall be the provisions for you both.” At this time [he] broke three pieces of wood which he also gave to her. She placed all these gifts under her garment near her bosom. Then they went to the hole left in the earth, and she sat down on the edge of it. She hung both legs out into the abyss. Now as far as he was concerned, he was looking into the abyss, at this time he raised himself up and said “You look here into the abyss.” Then she did as he requested, but first she held in her teeth her robe which contained her gifts from him, and she also seized the edge of the abyss when she bent over to look where he told her to look. He said “Do bend over and look here.” Which she did as she was asked. As she did this, bent forward, the chief seized her by the neck and pushed her into the abyss and she fell into the abyss.   

Kevin J. White, "Rousing a Curiosity in Hewitt's Iroquois Cosmologies," Wicazo Sa Review 28/2 (Fall 2013): 87-111, 104

This is only one of several accounts which Mohawk scholar Kevin J. White analyzes, emphasizing their subtle differences. There may be as many as three dozen recorded versions, but a single streamlined account by (white) ethnographer William Fenton from 1962 has been accepted as authoritative. Other versions, if they're even noticed, are dismissed as distorted by the fancies of their tellers or interpreters. White analyzes versions collected by Tuscarora scholar J. N. B. Hewitt (1859-1937) from Holders of Tradition from different Haudenosaunee nations. These versions are ignored by later scholars as tediously repetitive, any divergences dismissed as insignificant idiosyncracies of their tellers. 

But oral traditions never come in definitive form. To appreciate them as oral, one needs to do what White argues Hewitt tried to do: to acknowledge them as narrations for a particular place and time: we need to know who was speaking, from what nation, in what language, to whom, when and in what context - and who was the "gatherer." It should be clear, White says, that all these recorded (= written down) versions were intended for non-Haudenosaunee readers, making the differences from telling to telling that much more significant. And a reminder that a living tradition is a changing one. 

Each narrative can be considered a fragmentary piece of a larger philosophical worldview articulated from the ancient humans that illuminates how and why cultures may change over time. (108)

The Holders of Tradition are those who know how narratives need to be told and retold in changing times, and to different audiences. White likens it to the Haudenosaunee metaphor of "extending the rafters" - the way a longhouse is expanded. 

In the metaphorical construct of extending the rafters between the generations as it pertains to the cosmologies, there is an implied meaning that each generation must hold the narrative and then imprint on the obligations or instructions contained in these meta-narratives. As each generation answers the questions that evolve during its life-time, stories may have been modified or tweaked, in preparation to be “passed down” to the coming generations. ... The original intent of narrative remains the same: to use our best thinking for those generations yet unborn in our present decision-making process reached through consensus. (109)

In his article, White cites just three of Hewitt's accounts of Skywoman's fall (the one above is the first), but these are enough to suggest that important information was being conveyed in each Holder of Tradition's rendering in that time and place. In a more recent, collaboratively written article, White shares an even older version. There is no tree in this one, translated a little awkwardly from 18th century French, but there is a push. 

It started that the sky that was populated by people and under the sky it was a large estendue [body] of water inhabited by many fish. —the master of life, named Tarum-ia-Ouagon [Tharonhiawakon, “Holder of the sky/heavens,” a word for the Creator in the Mohawk language] malcontent of his wife resolved to punish her and she was sleeping near the door-of-the-sky, that was near the place which is presently filled by the sphere of the sun, given to his wife by him to take and eat. He put her between himself and this door as she was there, he arranged his foot and pushed her in a manner that she fell as rain by this hole. —the water creatures [literally translated as “fish”], that saw her fall, came together to deliberate if they should burn her or if they should give her life, and did resolve to give her grace, they gave to a turtle [tortoise] the commission to receive her. During these deliberations, the woman finished falling was rescued on this turtle, upon which many others had joined her, and, left her at no point supported that this floating plank [platform], wishing [hoping] that the earth was made, and she made it. 

Il n’y avoit au commencement que le ciel qui fust peuplé d’hommes, et sous le ciel il n’y avoit qu’une grande estendue d’eau habitée de plusieurs poissons. —Le maistre de la vie, nommé Tarum-ia-Ouagon, mescontent de sa femme, résolut de la punir, et s’estant couché près de la porte du ciel, qui estoit à l’endroit qui est présentement remply par le globe du soleil, ordonna à sa femme de luy apporter à manger. Il la fit mettre entre luy et cette porte, et comme elle estoit là, il allongea son pied et la poussa de manière qu’elle tomba et fut précipitée par ce trou. —Les poissons, qui la virent tomber, s’assemblèrent pour délibérer s’ils la brusleroient ou s’ils luy donneroient la vie, et ayant résolu de luy faire grâce, ils donnèrent à la tortue la commission de la recevoir. Durant ces délibérations la femme acheva de tomber, fut receue sur cette tortue, à laquelle plusieurs autres se joignirent, et, se lassant de n’avoir point d’autre appuy que ce plancher flottant, souhaita que la Terre se fist, et elle fut faite.

Kevin J. White, Michael Galban and Eugene R. T. Tesdahl, "LaSalle on Seneca Creation, 1678," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 40/4 (2016): 49-69, 65-67

In all of these subtly different narrations, White hears differently inflected warnings about threats to the consensual decision-making central to Haudenosaunee tradition - even as different accounts of what pushed the pusher are offered. 

What if we begin to look at entire narratives of creation, in all their variations among the nations, as models of social protocol demonstrating consequences for acting outside of normal acceptable human behavior in responsibility to the group, rather than the desires of the individual? ("Rousing a Curiosity," 108)

If there are teachings about how to share the world to be gained from knowing it created by the animals who decided together to stay Skywoman's fall, there were others, surely, in the various accounts of how she came to be falling - at least in those moments of telling Hewitt and others recorded. For instance, White thinks the tellings of Skywoman's push underscored the importance of the ritual practice of "dream guessing" in the civilization the Holders of Tradition shared with Hewitt and others - for the Guardian of the Tree had had a dream before all this happens (107).

White's larger point is that the Skywoman narration communicated sophisticated Haudenosaunee cosmogonies, shared if varied among the nations of the confederacy, in a manner always plural. Open to new contexts but also, if only we could know more about the tellings, used by different specialists within each society.

[A]s is often the case when studying indigenous cultures, those distinctive peoples and traits are viewed as inherently interchangeable within the culture, especially by Western scholars. If one were to bracket a literary scholar, historian, anthropologist, ethnographer, and psychologist in the academic world as an inherently interchangeable professor, one has to wonder what might happen. While certainly they are all educators, each branch of knowledge jealousy guards its disciplinary ranks and boundaries. Why would indigenous cultures be any different in terms of selecting individuals to be Holders of Traditions, orators, diplomats, or storytellers? (109)

All this doesn't tell how the narrative demands to be told today, but does suggest that one size cannot fit all. (Here's another contemporary retelling.) While I can't judge Kimmerer's right to suggest that our time needs a Skywoman who jumps, one moral of the story of the Tree Keeper's jealousy of his child might have been the warning that Holders of Tradition (not to mention the rest of us) not become jealous of new narratives.

Image by Shelley Niro

Kingmaking

I completely blanked on Bastille Day, July 14th, the day Francophiles in New York celebrate the French revolution! I plead distracted. Republican-appointed judges, high and low, seem busy building up a monarchy; it's the republic that's heading for the scaffold.

Exposed

Our split mediaverses are spinning out conspiracy theories about the attempted assassination yesterday. It's beyond depressing to consider that they will likely never converge. The breach, the disproportion between the obscure shooter and the implications of his (always his) act, is always too great. (Back in my Problem of Evil days I argued the same even about great miscreants, never worthy of the harm they caused.) For my part I've been aware all day of the space behind the nape of my neck, as if something's rustling there, something I imagine DJT may be feeling too. How exposed our heads are, how vulnerable. And to think someone 400 feet away could acquire a device to aim so precisely that a casual move of one's head, talking or gesturing or just leaning back or forward, could make the difference between life and death...

Tree-fecta of museums

Went on a little museum-hopping spree these last three days. Images of trees weren't my main object (except in the third) but were of course there in abundance. I started at MoMA, to see the Käthe Kollwitz show, but in the vast atrium found recent paintings of trees across the four seasons by nonagenarian Alex Katz. (Kollwitz' prints are largely treeless.)

Yesterday I popped over to the Brooklyn Museum, which is showing its splendid set of Hiroshige's 100 Famous Views of Edo, amplified by copies on various scales by Takashi Murakami. Hiroshige's scenes area all about what's in the foregound, which often made trees secondary (though billows of blooming sakura abound).

 

But the whole world of 19th century Edo was made of wood (the structure behind the fabrics and willows above is one of many fire towers in the Views), something indirectly shown in this scene, ostensibly of a ferry crossing at Zenkoji temple. Hiroshige's supposed objects are almost always obscured; the temple here is behind the title box! For its part the ferry has barely made it into the frame and will have to dodge a series of lumber boats.

The fabulously gnarled branches of plum trees get to be foreground and obstructed background here. This was one scene Murakami reproduced on a huge canvas, adding some fun little snibbets of color, perhaps a subtle nod to Von Gogh's copy of this same image, which also got Murakami's grand treatment.

And today, finally, we drove up to Hartford to see the Wadsworth Atheneum, the oldest public museum in the US (opened 180 years ago!), and a place I've wanted to visit for a long time. I was blown away by its European collection, especially a Caravaggio and a Poussin, but for the tree lover I was pleased to find a rendering of gawky Eastern white pines in Thomas Cole's "View on Lake Winnipiseogee" (1928).

I was joined by a young family admiring Rockwell Kent's "Vermont" (1923-7), the mother trying to steer her kids to appreciate that sometimes realism wasn't a painter's only concern. (I was entranced by the ghostly dead tree on the right.) As for the painting I'd gone in hopes of seeing, my old pash Georgia O'Keeffe's "The Lawrence Tree," I learned it was on loan to another exhibition! But, I was told, I could get a poster in the gift shop. I was tempted: O'Keeffe apparently said the painting could be hung any way the viewer wished.

Trees of religion

This is the most elaborate "tree of religions" I have found. The work of an obscure foundation based in Vienna, it traces all manner of contemporary religious groups (including a solar flare of Shinto in yellow at left) to a common trunk of coiling "Early Vedic Period" (brown), "Shramanic Traditions [Non-Vedic]" (purple), "Ancient Israelite Religion" (magenta), "Chinese Folk Taoism" (green) and "Japanese Mythology" (grey). Monotheisms fill out about two-thirds of the tree on the right, with Judaisms at the center. A little different and both more pluralistic and less inclusive than an earlier "evolutionary tree of religions" we've seen, which traces everything to animisms, but similar claiming a kinship of all traditions - all but a few of which are derivative.

Pre-eminent trees

It's only just hit me. Mircea Eliade says nice things about trees: "the tree came to express everything that religious man regards as pre-eminently real and sacred.” But I hadn't connected this, which comes in the third chapter of The Sacred and the Profane (149), the chapter summarizing Patterns in Comparative Religion, to the thematics of the more influential preceding two chapters on "sacred space" and "sacred time." 

In the former, "Sacred Space," Eliade argues for humans' existential need for "orientation," something furnished only by an "irruption of the sacred" which creates a "center of the world." Without a center (or centers: there can be many), there's nothing but the "chaos of relativity" - as modern man adrift in a "desacralized" world knows. Preeminent among centers are the "axes mundi" of sacred mountains and "cosmic trees," the models for all the smaller-scale centers of temples and dwellings. The Sacred and the Profane famously tells of an Aboriginal tribe whose sacred pole, carved from a gum tree, broke and, unable to continue living, lie down to die (33) - a story as famously debunked in Jonathan Z. Smith classic "The Wobbling Pivot."

The second chapter, "Sacred Time," summarizes the argument of The Myth of the Eternal Return. Its upshot is that time is a corrosive force, something all but modern people know. "History is suffering," he writes in Myth. Accordingly the ritual systems and myths of almost all religions know the world must be regularly refreshed, indeed recreated.

Well, who offers an axis mundi and also recreates the world every year? Only trees do! Uniting the upper and lower worlds Yggdrasil-style, "the tree represents – whether ritually and concretely, or in mythology and cosmology, or simply symbolically – the living cosmos, endlessly renewing itself" (Patterns, 267). (Well, trees are just trees, just as stones and mountains are just stones and mountains, but when they present themselves as "sacred" are loci of experience of the really "real"; the "sacred" is always "camouflaged" in the "profane." But still, sacred space and sacred time together?!

Eliade's thought is passé, at least among scholars of religion. We distrust his universalizing "comparative" method and hear fascist echoes in his criticisms of modern life and thought and whispers about "the pre-eminently real and sacred." But beyond the academy his ideas continue to appeal. How much oxygen should I give them in my book? I don't believe in the sort of universal religiosity he peddles, and am at pains to argue that different species of trees are widely different and have accordingly meant widely different things to people through their relationships with them. 

But the idea of the cosmic tree, triangulating sacred space and sacred time, seems to point to something worth pondering. If not a fact about trees, this frisson of "sacred time" and "orientation" might register a fact about some of us, a frisson worth cultivating or overcoming.

Heat wave

Sorry, two scorched London Plane leaves in a row! This one beckoned to me as I was taking a brief break in Bryant Park on my way to the NYPL today, relishing a breeze before deciding that it still wasn't enough. The leaf's colors look like those on maps of temperature and air quality, both glowing in this latest wave of heat. But I also have London Planes on my mind, as I'm trying to find a way to sneak them into my book as the ultimate colonial trees, not only part of the streetscapes of 19th century cities on several continents (their peeling bark makes them resilient even along very polluted streets) but because they themselves already a product of the age of empire, a hybrid of a European and a North American tree: Platanus × acerifolia.

Searing

Melting point

A greeter in a chilly box store I popped into to escape the excessive heat advisory this afternoon said it was like a refrigerator; what was it like outside? Speaking whereof I know not I said that it was like an air fryer. I don't even really know what an air fryer is or does, though I know it's been a thing for a few years now, but I imagine it's something like what the pavement contributes to the heat index. (Cartoon)

When dangers fierce your path assail

Today's hymn from Lift Every Voice and Sing struck some of our fussier parishioners as "like Sunday school." It is certainly musically and theologically pretty uncomplicated. I went from finding it a little silly, its start like something from a merry-go-round, to getting into its simplicity - especially because of the fermata in the second to last measure, which I realized (we've had a few such hymns) is a moment for high emotion. And wouldn't we love for God to take care of us right now.

Let the journey begin

I didn't realize the lush Old Masters-inspired ads for real estate search site Street Easy which I've been enjoying in the subway in recent weeks, tell a story. Full of witty NYC details it's designed by a company called Mother's, with artistic consultant Buck.

There's actually more to each than these landscape-cut versions show, like significant New York birds (including Flaco!) above the second, and a serpent and other nimble subway denizens in the third. 

You can find these and much more, including a fun process video, here.

Refracted rainbows

 

Some fun things from the Whitney Biennial, part of our July 4th NYC staycation: Kiyan Williams' "Statue of Freedom (Marsha P. Johnson)" (2024) and Eamon Ore-Giron's "Talking Shit with Viracocha's Rainbow (Iteration 1)" (2023).