Tree growth!

Very pleased to discover, in the NYBG bookshop, that that tree-formed "History of Existing Life" we critically analyzed in "Religion of Trees" has been updated! No longer is the highest point a monkey, hanging from a branch but seemingly pointing upward - continuing the vertical thrust of the whole tree- beyond the rings representing historical epochs, surely towards us. Now there's an additional ring, and within it, from our own branch, a flying lemur and, highest of all, from a neighboring branch, an anteater! Kudos, science!

Fall wallpapers

 

Autumn colors at NYBG

Spectral tree

Checked out that London Plane with no northerly branches we learned from the New School Forest archive was "holding the memory of its dead neighbor." It is indeed without branches or branch scars on that side, testimony to the larger and older neighbor. And the neighbor's stump is indeed still there, just beyond the wrought iron fence, a little hard to make out beneath a bird bath in some shrubbery. From across the street you can almost sense the shape of the missing giant - a hole in the canopy of the New School forest!

Stumped by the Archives

Took the Religion of Trees students to the University Archives today, to learn about "New School Forest," the census of 340 trees growing on blocks with New School buildings conducted by photography faculty Matthew Lopez Jensen for an art project for the 2019 centennial. Each of these trees has a card on which someone's drawn a picture, sketched the tree's shape, noted the environs, signs of damage and custodianship, and general observations. The street numbers nearest them are recorded too, but since there's no clear sequence to the archive, we were unable to find most of the trees we'd gone in looking for. (Last class, students were tasked with choosing two trees on our block, sketching them, and noting down the nearest house number.) Even when we did, students registered no epiphanies. "That doesn't look like my tree" was at best a surprise, not a research question.

This was a little disappointing, especially as I was having an epiphany of my own - and also one triggered by not finding what I was looking for. The archivists had brought out most of the tree-related items they'd offered me when I was assembling my "New School Trees" zine last year, including the large plan for a garden behind The New School's main building from September, 1950 (above). The archivist who was our host pointed out that the plan was by one "J. J. Levison M. F." which she presumed meant Master Forester. (It does.) 

I'd wondered last year whether this garden had ever been built; if so it would have been a casualty of the 1956 extension which created the courtyard we now know. This time we had a likely way to find out: a folder of correspondence with J. J. Levison from 1948-1960. Progress on the garden would surely be documented here!

None was, so this was likely a proposal never enacted. (For what it's worth, though, the three "existing trees" marked in the plan were real.) But when the archives close a door they invariably open a window. From the correspondence folder it became clear that Jacob Joshua Levison was not only a Master Forester (trained at Yale) but the instructor of a beloved course which had been running at The New School since 1941.

 

In the Spring 1950 catalog, it was the very last course listed:

There's correspondence about a 1951 iteration - maybe one longer field trip instead of three? - but the course seems not to have run again. The garden sketch was in effect a parting gift after a decade's teaching at The New School. The course was evidently fondly remembered, and in November, 1959, our long-time president Alvin Johnson said a few words when Levison received an award for City College alumni; the next day he penned a letter of thanks and appreciation, apologizing for not having said all he wished to:

You are a tree, Jack Levison. A tree is always beautiful, in its spring leafage and in its full summer foliage, in its autumn color and its bareness after frost, revealing the consummate design of its branching and the noble strength of its trunk.

The tree is the only living thing that keeps its beauty in old age; indeed reaches its highest beauty then. The tree, and some few mortals like Jack Levison.

Perhaps it was too much to expect these students, barely halfway through their second month of college, to delight in the way evidence can disconfirm our expectations and invite us to discover things we hadn't imagined! Into such gaps questions and research can grow!

But perhaps one of the New School Forest cards I lingered over with them - 7 West 11th Street, next to the churchyard of First Presbyterian - may have left a trace, opened a space... 

Amazing example of a L[ondon] P[lane] holding the memory of its dead neighbor, an oak in the churchyard that was cut down; no branches on north side because of the oak which is now a stump.

We'll go check on that tree when I see them next, and on its unforgotten neighbor.

Roundtable!

Religious Studies Roundtables are back! Join us a week from today for a chance to hear the faculty teaching our courses in Hebrew Bible, Catholic Saints and Islam discuss their own exciting research!

Never logged

Charmed hike in the horizonless Pigeon Lake Wilderness.

Dacks

 

Wonders high and low

Suddenly fall

Way back when we were making plans for the fall, we were able to book the place in the Adirondacks we last saw in May. It seemed a long time off, and even hitting the road for it yesterday it seemed much too early. Fall? Leaves? New York City's trees are drying out a bit, but it's felt like a protracted late summer. Once we crossed the Hudson and started driving up the Palisades, the reality of autumn started to hit. Honey locusts flushing yellow, vines reaching for magenta, and maples golden and orange and even red. The show continued through the Catskills, but further wonders awaited. The New York Foliage Report predicting the 'Dacks would be at peak but, while many trees are still flush with green, it feels like we might even be a little past peak, at least higher up.

If I wasn't ready for the leaves, I also wasn't ready for fall. Heading north in this season always fast-forwards the season in a jarring way, allowing a wanted or wanted sneak peak of what is to come, soon corrected when we head back, but this time I felt almost affronted. I wasn't ready for this! I didn't need (or deserve) a holiday yet - we're just six weeks into the semester. And the terrifying debacle of the election, surely it's not just a month away?! Eventually, though, the lyricism of the changing colors got to me. 

The spectacle of fall foliage continues to confound me with feelings I can't parse - though I'm getting there! It's odd, as I remarked last year, for humans to trek out to these forests only to see the end of something, as though this were the goal, not the byproduct of winding up. But I've had the chance to spend more time with deciduous forests this year than ever before (though the fate of the forest I saw dance into spring in North Carolina is unclear...), including up here. With a few exceptions, every leaf I was seeing will have been new to me, new since last year. 

 Didn't Simon and Garfunkel sing about this? 

Hello, hello, hello, hello

Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye

That's all there is

And the leaves that are green turn to brown ...

 

But that's not quite what I'm feeling (though I wonder now about the residues left by hearing this song in my Southern California childhood!). I feel I know these trees a little better. Yes, these leaves are being released to their next mission, as have countless generations of leaves past. Their work is not done, or maybe their work but not their contribution. In a new piece, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of fallen cedars but what she says applies to everything in the forest: 

As inert as the logs seem, there is a ferment of activity inside, like dreams moving inside the head of a sleeper. … When the tree was alive, most all of the cells in the trunk of the tree were dead. They were just empty tubes designed to hold up the tree and to transport water. But now that the tree is dead, it is more alive than ever before.

The very soil beneath our feet is sublimed leaf litter. Since last fall I've got a deeper sense that the forest is a circle, nothing lost or squandered. We see only some of it, and value even less.

Natural history of religion

Invited my Theorizing Religion students to join me at the American Museum of Natural History to marvel at just how much religion is on show in their galleries of non-western cultures. In a natural history museum?! 

The absence of galleries on, um, white people is damning. (In fact it would be hard to find a better illustration of the things we've been reading about in Tomoko Masuzawa and Sylvia Wynter, the racialization of non-western cultures as "natural" phenomena whose pith is religion.) But Christianity sneaks in, in the little vitrine in the "Asian Peoples" gallery devoted to Georgians, a minority tradition barely worthy of description.