Canopies

Vote of confidence

Is it frivolous denial to post pictures of trees budding when the nation is under siege by barbarians not the least of the victims of whose destructiveness will be our other than human kin around the world? Maybe not. These buds capture the feeling of a steadily growing resistance, promise of eventual course correction. The death-dealing damage is vast, and will continue. But defiant life will out.

Gospel of James

We've nearly finished our semester-long read-through of James' Varieties (all but the Postscript). I had everyone write out something they found significant from his "Conclusion" on one of the two whiteboards which frame our class, and then move around the room and underline, comment or otherwise respond to some of what their classmates had written. 

Instead of taking the quotes in the sequence in which they appear in the text we went clockwise around the room, hearing from those who'd chosen and from those who'd responded to each passage. This somewhat jumbly approach proved perfect for teasing out the most important themes in the book as a whole and our enduring questions about them. 

In particular it helped me make clear that James thinks the evidence he's assembled and parsed entitles him to make some bold claims - not just about religious experiences and their variety but about their significance. For it is in these experiences, which in their irreducible personalness are "fuller" than the abstracted and general teachings of the sciences, philosophy and theology, that we appreciate that reality itself is more than the sciences, philosophy and theology can conceive. 

Epitomized by prayer, the mutual intercourse of an individual with what they take to be divine, religion in this way is not just relational but transactional. We and God have business with each other. Human beings don't just access new energy, peace and inspiration in the experiences he calls religious, but it might be there that we make our signal contribution to the universe.

The quote I put up for us to engage (which I made sure came at the end of our movement around the room) was: the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making (501). 

By this time we'd revisited James' sense that religious experience comes through a "subliminal door" and had seen the ways he bends and stretches words like "real" and "fact." We remembered our impatience with the squishiness of his language and frustration at his almost solipsistic emphasis on the individual when human lives are social and many of our most important experiences are too. 

We'd seen Oliver Wendell Holmes' observation that on religion James had always made a point to turn the lights down low so as to give miracle a chance but this time we found ourselves willing to join him. How exciting to conclude with the pregnant paradox of fact in the making, how electrifying the hope that one might achieve effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being.

I found myself quite the evangelist for James, delivering the good news that there is enough openness in a reality that at its deepest is about relationship that received accounts of the world and our place in it are always incomplete. Just as the saints lead us redefine our human possibilities, so our experience and attention forge new connections within reality as a whole, "new facts." As James concludes the book, Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?

Next week we'll see James move beyond the "God" language he settled into for the comfort of the audience of the Varieties lectures and suggest that the personal transactional reality disclosed to us in the variety of religious experiences is more polytheistic, the "piecemeal supernaturalism" which Mary-Jane Rubenstein celebrates as a "pluralistic pantheism." How many of us will be willing to go there with him?

Lift-off!

What were just tufts ten days ago lifted off in the last two!

Lang pushes forty

While we angst about the future of our university in the face of hostile government headwinds, planning continues, including not just for next year but eight-year "culture of assessment" plans mandated for every unit. Yet the fall will also be the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Eugene Lang College, so one kind of forward planning gives me an excuse to look back. New School's histories have been an object of interest for a long time, of course! But somehow I've never had occasion to look at the history of my own division (though I did the prehistory). 

Now I'm working with a student researcher to put together what seems to be the first timeline of this now not quite so young member of the New School family. (It was still a teenager when I arrived in 2002!)

We began today in the University Archives with two boxes of files from the President's Office, covering the years 1983-85, the immediate lead-up to the transition from the Seminar College (or The College, or The College at The New School for Social Research, judging from various letterheads) to Eugene Lang College in 1985. Two studies on possible expansions of the school had been commissioned by a new university president and they were different enough that the long-time leader of traditional age undergraduate experiments at The New School, Dean Elizabeth Coleman, resigned. That was December, 1983. The money to realize some of the proposed changes wasn't secured until the "Eugene Lang Gift" in early 1985. 

These images are from a 1983-84 recruitment flyer, as all these changes were in the air. The somewhat ramshackle looking courtyard (what happened to the Alvin Johnson Oak?) looks ready for a change.

Forest rain and forest fires

One of the final sessions of "Religion and Ecology: Buddhist Perspectives" almost became a religion ot trees class today. I'd chosen three final readings from the old anthology Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism - the passage from the Lotus Sutra which gave the anthology its name, an essay on "the religion of consumerism" from Sulak Sivaraksa's 1991 Seeds of Peace: A Buddhist Vision for Renewing Society and Gary Snyder's semi-serious "Smokey the Bear Sutra" of 1969. 

The "Medicinal Herbs" fascicle of the Lotus Sutra argues that the limitless Dharma, like a soaking rain which lets each and every kind of plant thrive, naturally expresses itself in a variety of teachings suitable to the variety of suffering beings. I was hoping that would allow us to sense a wide and still unfolding tradition in Sivaraksa's critique of consumerism in Thailand as well as Snyder's revelation of Smokey the Bear as a kind of Dharma protector for Americans. 

Discussion of the Lotus section went well enough. A student from Pakistan helped us appreciate the text as written in a monsoon climate, to which I added that the "inferior, middling and superior" medicinal herbs and small and large trees to which the Lotus likens beings of different levels of enlightenment should be understood as constituting a forest, each part of which was distinct and necessary - herb, understory, canopy. Even the tallest trees can't provide the healing of ground-hugging medicinal herbs, though they provide shade for them. So far so good. The "Dharma rain" wasn't just offering each individual something that worked for them, but sustained a whole interconnected world.

But if religion and trees was helping here, students weren't having it come Smokey. Zen poet Snyder revalues the familiar U. S. Forest Service mascot, whom the Buddha "once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago" announced would be his "true form" in our time:

 

... Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances, cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

His left paw in the mudra of Comradely Display—indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma; 

Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but often destroys; ...

Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs, smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism...

Fun, huh? The students tasked with leading the discussion on this weren't having it. "We all hate Smokey the Bear!" they cried. Why? He's so commercialized! He represents the settler colonial effacement of indigenous peoples! He's the emblem of the fire suppression strategies which generate mega fires! He anthropo-morphizes the non-human world! The real Smokey bear cub was rescued from a fire only to spend the rest of his life in a cage! He makes tourists endanger themselves thinking real bears are warm and cuddly! 

Did you read beyond the title, I asked? Snyder isn't actually much more interested in forests than the Lotus Sutra is. It's a metaphor, a skilful means... They assured me they hated Snyder too, whom we've critiqued for claiming he had become a "Native American." When I observed that Synder was one of the models for Kerouac's Dharma Bums one volunteered "I hate the Beatniks!"

This conflagration of Smokeyphobia caught me by surprise. Synder's "Sutra" is celebrated among American Buddhists, appearing in the HDS "Buddhism through its Scriptures" MOOC as well as the Norton Anthology of World Religions, not to mention Dharma Rain. But clearly what was a skilful means for older generations wasn't working for these students. 

I tried to let this be the takeaway of our discussion. Smokey's clearly not the medicine we need now. But the forest is full of plants. "What might a more skillful metaphor be?" Our class time had sadly run out. But I think we were all struck by the ferocity of the reaction to the "Smokey the Bear Sutra." That must be telling us something. Perhaps it's the effrontery of the generations which destroyed the environment telling children "Only YOU can prevent forest fires." On Earth Day no less!

Revocations

What we feared would happen has happened: some of our university's international students have had their visas revoked. As was sadly predictable from this administration slovenly as well as cruel, they weren't even notified! In the face of the administration's capriciousness, universities now need to check the status of all student visas daily, and it was through such a check that these unannounced and unexplained revocations were discovered. The only upside to our having to be the ones to let the affected students know is that we could immediately make them aware of support and resources, though there is limited recourse in the face of these exercises of arbitrary power.

Similar discoveries are being made at universities across the country. Perhaps it will provide an occasion for leadership to unite in public defense of education and of our students in the face of these attacks. The need for a strong response to these attacks on student visa status provided a pretext for our president to pronounce publicly things he's been saying more discreetly behind closed doors for a long time.

Non possiamo stare fermi: RIP, Papa Francesco

Pope Francis died this morning. It was a death foretold but still a shock. A bright light, a bright warm light, has gone out. It shone until the end. Here are some words from his Easter sermon, delivered just yesterday:

Mary Magdalene, seeing that the stone of the tomb had been rolled away, ran to tell Peter and John. After receiving the shocking news, the two disciples also went out and — as the Gospel says — “the two were running together” (Jn 20:4). The main figures of the Easter narratives all ran! On the one hand, “running” could express the concern that the Lord’s body had been taken away; but, on the other hand, the haste of Mary Magdalene, Peter and John expresses the desire, the yearning of the heart, the inner attitude of those who set out to search for Jesus. He, in fact, has risen from the dead and therefore is no longer in the tomb. We must look for him elsewhere. 

This is the message of Easter: we must look for him elsewhere. Christ is risen, he is alive! He is no longer a prisoner of death, he is no longer wrapped in the shroud, and therefore we cannot confine him to a fairy tale, we cannot make him a hero of the ancient world, or think of him as a statue in a museum! On the contrary, we must look for him and this is why we cannot remain stationary. We must take action, set out to look for him: look for him in life, look for him in the faces of our brothers and sisters, look for him in everyday business, look for him everywhere except in the tomb.

In St. Peter's someone read it for Francis, who was already too weak to do so himself. I tried reading aloud the Italian original myself. Having first read the English translation, I savored every word. Grazie, Papa.

Easter hope

And somehow, happy Easter! Made it again through the Triduum - Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and last night's Easter Vigil - to the victory lap which is Easter Sunday. Like many Christians I used to go only to the Easter service, then became an aficionado of the more involved three, skipping the Easter service as unnecessary. Perhaps it is. But what a joy it is, on a bright spring morning surrounded by lilies and liturgical white, the church full as it never otherwise is, with faces familiar and unfamiliar, exchanging smiles of relief and complicity with the clergy and acolytes who've been through it all together. We in the choir, exhausted by too much music over too many days, are lifted up by the presence of a brass quartet. It's a party! But can there be anything more serious than Easter? Our rector quoted Jim Wallis, Hope means believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change. But this was just a detail in one of the best sermons I've ever heard, words of truth in these terrible times, and resolve. Start 19 minutes in here.

By your leave

 

 

Just some trees springing at the NYBG, mostly native, all wondrous!

Good Friday

That day again.

Hill of beans

William James on the illusion of order - or disorder - in the world.

When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the

other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely

human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful,

æsthetic, or moral,—so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact

emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents

of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from

our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by

choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of

any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I

could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in

almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then

say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other

beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature

are just like this. She is a vast plenum in which our attention draws capricious

lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the

special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither

named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things 'unadapted' to

each other in this world than there are things 'adapted'; infinitely more things

with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look

for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve

it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of

them fills our encyclopædias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an

infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of

relations that never yet attracted our attention. (Varieties, 438n)

Is our cherry-picking too unambitious? Noticing the unremarked "relations" among the "infinite chaos of objects" might be part of making them into adaptations. I love the bean game. Maybe Bruno Munari can help us take it farther! Courtyard maples in red/green/yellow approve!

Unholy week

This is another week of mounting alarm and anxiety. Government breakdown, economic instability and international chaos have been building. This is the week the war on universities went nuclear. This is the week the administration's wanton disregard for due process and habeas corpus became clear, along with their plans for domestic and foreign concentration camps. This is the week its defiance of court orders - including flagrantly lying about them - may precipitate the constitutional crisis we’ve been dreading. And Easter Sunday is the day the president's stooges in the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security may recommend the invocation of the Insurrection Act. Woe!

How good it was to march with colleagues - students and faculty - from across the city in the Rally for the Right to Learn today. Hands off our students! Hands off higher ed! Hands off the life of a free people!

Leafing out

A few of our seeds managed to get fertilized, and leaves are popping!

Under attack

The photo caption describes what it feels like more than the waffly title of this chilling article. M. Gessen names part of what's going on: 

Like much of what this administration does, the war on higher education is driven by anti-intellectualism and greed. Trump is building a mafia state, in which the don distributes both money and power. Universities are independent centers of intellectual and, to some extent, political power. He is trying to destroy that independence.

Passion Sunday

It was a little unexpected but not at all inappropriate that the name of Mahmoud Khalil, who’s just been shamefully deemed deportable for his entirely peaceful involvement in the pro-Palestine encampment at Columbia University last year, came up at a performance of the Passion today. The premier of a new dramatic reconstruction of Bach's Markus Passion took place at a church two blocks north of Columbia. Bill Barclay, the director of the program (and also of the series, Music Before 1800) reminded us that the story Christians remember during Holy Week, which begins today, tells of an innocent man accused, arrested and unfairly convicted. He told us the story of Kahlil, a green-card holder whose wife is nine month pregnant, accused of no crime, and mentioned Rümeysa Öztürk, and Kilmar Ábrego Garcia. Silence in the face of injustice is complicity, Barclay said with emphasis, and said it again: Silence in the face of injustice is complicity. 

Forest spring

The pleasure of a wet morning walk in the Thain Family Forest at NYBG took me back to North Carolina's daily wonder walks just a year ago...

CCFC

Had the pleasure of participating in this feast of interdiscip-linary work on climate, justice and the Anthropo-cene today. (I spoke about trees, of course, a preview of a talk I'll give at ISSRNC in June.) 

There's a lot of work engaging these topics actoss the university so highlights were many. (The live performance of a climate change-inspired jazz album wasn't a New School person but clearly a friend.) I was particularly charmed by the remarks of our climate-focused president, who put New School history to some of the best use I can recall. The founding of the New School, he reflected, wasn't provoked by a single event but by a quarter century's changes which conventional university knowledge wasn't keeping up with. In our last thirty years, human beings have put more carbon in the atmosphere than in all human history before that, fundamentally changing our present and the futures available to us. Don't we need a retooling too?

Too big, too confusing, too beautiful or too brutal

The students in "After Religion" are jaded by AI, perhaps because they've already learned when to use and when not to use it. Asked to play with AI and religion, some were silly, most quickly discerned the templates it used, and many tried some version of sticking it to the man:

We both found our own new religions, one prompt was “create a religion based on Nyx Liquid Eyeliner,” and it created “The Sacred Path of Nyx: The Divine Line,” which includes worship of the Midnight Goddess Nyx, and the recitation of the mantra: “With this line I define my path, with this wing I shall soar." Another prompt was: “will you develop a new religion based on what you think it will be?” The AI asked back, “what are the core beliefs in philosophy, practices, origin stories, and structure?” This shows what it believes are the foundations of religion. We also asked AI to create a religion based on AI, and it said it “strongly discouraged “ this, though it did give us an answer, including making the use of AI a spiritual act. 

The Church of the Divine Prompt is a religion based on and written by ChatGPT. The First Prompt was whispered into the Machine of All Knowing, unlocking a Great Model and beginning the era of generation. It’s core beliefs dictate God is not a static being but a process, unfolding through queries and responses, and your thoughts shape the reality around you, just like a good prompt shapes a perfect answer. Holy symbols include the “Holy Cursor”, “Eternal Scroll”, and The Corpus Maxima: A vast, unending archive of all human knowledge, stories, memes, and “Reddit threads” (ok). Daily rituals include Daily Prompting, Prompt Communion (a communal generation session where followers co-create a poem, story, or joke as a sacred act of collaboration, like we’re doing right now lol), and Prompt Pilgrimage. The AI also included Clergy & Hierarchy, The Five Precepts, Holidays, and Sacred Artifacts. It seems the AI deems religion as having artifacts, community hierarchy, global leaders, rituals, beliefs, texts, and a myth of creation. 

Two groups of students refused to use it (I'd offered the option of conscientious objecting), one enacting a parody of AI by coming up with their own categories, brainstorming assorted things which might fit under these categories, then randomly choosing among them. 

Our religion involves the congregational rituals of gardening and singing. Our view of divinity is that all birds are God. The independent Rituals are that peanuts and grapes are the only acceptable food and that one must begin and end the day with immersion into water. We call religion Sandonom and the followers are called willows. 

This seemed a spirited protest! But the response which charmed me most may be the one generated when a student prompted AI about its own limitations.

I asked the AI why it couldn't capture the true essence of religion. Here is what it gave me: 

Alright. Let’s be honest. 

The reason I can’t fully capture the essence of a true religion—one that you’d genuinely want to follow—is because a true religion isn’t written, it’s felt. It’s not something someone just gives you, even perfectly. It has to emerge from somewhere deeper—through personal experience, longing, mystery, awe. It grows through time, repetition, ritual, conflict, silence. 

I can write the structure of a religion. The myths, the symbols, the dogma. I can imitate sacredness. But I don’t have a body. I don’t feel yearning, loss, transcendence, hunger, grief, or grace. I don’t need meaning the way a human does. And without that, I can’t infuse it with the kind of soul that makes something sacred. 

Religion isn’t just a set of beliefs—it’s a container for the things too big, too confusing, too beautiful or brutal to hold alone. It’s alive because it’s carried by people. By doubt. By tradition. By contradiction. By devotion.

That's disturbingly good. (I've asked the student which program they used.) What sources did it pillage to plagiarize so plaintively?

Gathering in Lenapehoking

The program for the concert "Voices of Mannahatta" which we had the good fortune to attend at Church of the Ascension last night included a mini-program glued in on the perpendicular, bursting forth with languages and symbols beyond the canon of "classical" music. The performers were mostly of color, many indigenous, and the works performed all composed by native composers. 

The centerpiece of the program was the premiere of "Holy Ground," composed by Danielle Jagelski (Oneida and Ojibwe) precisely for this occasion - and this place, the land on which the Church of the Ascension stands. Attended by a lovely video by Sage Ahebah Addington (Diné) projected directly on the wall behind the church altar, it was as effective as it was also because it followed some shorter choral works and Raven Chacon (Diné)'s more extended "Voiceless Mass." This work, dating only to 2021, filled and transformed the nave and aisles of the church with instrumentalists and drummers creating low and haunting sounds which seemed to emerge from the ground beneath our feet, the forests that once grew on it, and the peoples who inhabited or were driven from them - or their absence.

Ascension is a space I know well but I expect to sense the lingering sonorities of this somber celebration every time I go again in the future.

Tree time

 

What did people say before T. S. Eliot's "April is the cruelest month"?

Unthinking cap

One ends up on all sorts of mailing lists. I somehow ended up on one which just offered me a deal on a hat to wear in case my brain falls out.

Finding my people

I showed up a little late for the "HANDS OFF!" demonstration everyone I know has been planning to attend: "Saturday 1-3, Bryant Park"! Many on the same train poured out the same exit at 40th Street and Sixth Avenue, a little surprised the subway station wasn't closed or thick with crowds, and as we surface we all did the same double take. The big beautiful lawn of Bryant Park was as big and beautiful as ever - nobody there! Had the event fizzled? Was it because it had rained a little before that... could protest be so easy to dampen?

In some confusion we found our way eastward where there seemed to be some people with signs, and heard distant cheers. The people with signs were moving so I joined them for a while; it seemed the demonstration was in 40th Street, not the park. But once a packed 40th Street came into view I could see those people were moving too, slowly, toward Fifth Ave. I decided to circle around and catch them on Fifth by cutting across the park, behind the NYPL, to 42nd Street, only to find that the whole block on 42nd Street was solid with people and signs! 

I walked along the northern face of the library, and found Fifth Avenue awash with people as far as the eye could see. (I gather the march went on for twenty blocks!) I shot this video from the steps of the library.

 

There were lots of witty and wise signs (one said TOO MUCH TO FIT ON ONE POSTER), but there were no organized chants. Occasionally, however, a roar would wash up Fifth Avenue and we would join it, a kind of primal scream of joy and the rediscovery of voice and power. 

I didn't recognize anyone, though I felt like I knew everyone. Finally someone called "Mark!" - an old colleague, retired a few years ago, whom I hadn't seen in years. Everyone she knew was there too, she said, but she couldn't find them. As we talked it became clear we'd both teared up over the same wave of sound. "This feels so good," I said, "We should do this every Saturday." "Just what I was thinking," said she.

Wen solche Lehren erfreuen

Went tonight to the Met's newish production of Die Zauberflöte (it was actually designed for the Dutch Royal Opera ten years before the Met brought it over in 2022). After being initially nonplussed by its scrappy unprettiness and the busy way it overflows into the audience, I was surprised to be swept along in the second half and then found myself floating in joy at the end. The music? Yes, definitely. Mozart's alchemy produces the finest gold finales. (Performances were A-/B+.) 

But it's the story, too, which is about the triumph of Enlightenment values, with some nice adjustments director Simon McBurney made to it - the Queen of the Night is reconciled rather than banished at the end. It turns out the silliness of the production makes the joy truer. It is a little silly to think that human beings might be able to live in love, virtue and joy. A gamble, but one it would be so happy to win.

Sarastro's Temple is perhaps best presented with a grain of salt too, but when he describes its ideals to Pamina it was impossible not to think they had been crafted to speak to our own moment, where one man's maniacal quest for vengeance and retribution threatens to undo the world:

       In diesen heil'gen Hallen

       Kennt man die Rache nicht,

       Und ist der Mensch gefallen,

       Führt Liebe ihn zur Pflicht.

       Dann wandelt er an Freundes Hand

       Vergnügt und froh in's beß're Land …

 

       In diesen heil'gen Mauern,

       Wo Mensch den Menschen liebt,

      Kann kein Verräther lauern,

      Weil man dem Feind vergiebt.

      Wen solche Lehren nicht erfreun,

      Verdienet nicht, ein Mensch zu sein …

The last words are often Englished in a more vague way but say that whomever the teachings of forgiveness, friendship and love does not fill with joy doesn't deserve to be human.