A silver tree

Our weekly Lenten "Poetry & Prayer" gatherings wrapped up this morning with Mary Oliver again, having spent time also with Joy Harjo, Rumi and Christina Rossetti. Today's poem, suitable for Holy Week, was entitled "Gethsemane" (2007).

The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.

Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.

The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.

Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did,
maybe the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move, maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.

Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.

It led to a lovely sharing or reactions, punctuated by sweet silences. We wept with the disciples, and took some wan comfort in the compassion of "dear bodies," "utterly human." Nature doesn't slumber, someone noted, so maybe Jesus wasn't alone in the garden at all. 

I was caught on the three "maybes" of the penultimate stanza, which is more fanciful than declarative and speaks the language not of nature but of miracle (not that those are necessarily opposed). If wind can stand still (in the form of a tree no less!) or a lake be still and solid as a "blue pavement," then is there hope yet for "the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut"? What hope? Is it in the nature of water or wind sometimes to stop flowing and blowing, "wild awake"? Did we know that? Do we know it now? 

We know how the Holy Week story ends, but those assembled in the garden didn't. And what is the part of slumping, weeping, poetizing humanity in the story exactly?

Isaiah 1:15

No kings III

 

Spent the afternoon with eight million of my closest friends...!

Possibly the biggest protest ever in the US?

 

The joy of the No King protests is in the handmade signs:

this is what democracy looks like!

Dioecious

 

Some red maple antics you won't see in the Lang courtyard

Worth a thousand words

How are things at The New School, folks ask (and we ask ourselves)? We're all trying to understand what's happening, who's deciding or will decide what and when, and how. When everything is being "reorganized" at once, there are no fixed points to hold on to. Administration has announced faculty, staff and space usage must shrink by 20% but it feels like everything and everyone is at risk. 

So I was grateful and proud to find in the spring hard copy issue of the school newspaper, The New School Free Press, not only well-researched and written articles about our predicament but illustrations that perfectly capture how it feels to be caught in it.

Thank you Dove Williams, Jordan Fong and Zora Edelstein for expressing how much our attempts to figure out what's gone wrong and who's behind it are like something from a police procedural. And thank you Cecilia Yang for capturing how existential proposed and feared changes feel!

Curvaceous

First blush

And yet

Ice age

The ice spectacles of the splashing end of winter took my breath away! 

But I swooned when I found lacy contour line-like patterns in the thin sheet atop a marshy pool gently rising and falling in the freezing and thawing. I sent the pic to a friend, querying "Is this map or territory?"

His wise reply: "Both?" These Catskills, I've learned, aren't really mountains fot he usual sort but a "mature dissected plateau" of miles-deep runoff from a vanished mountain range as high as the Himalayas, carved by meandering waterways as it was raised, and much later, as it moved north from below the Equator, scoured by glaciers.

Water ford crystal

It's spring break so we're taking a few days in the mountains (Catskills this time), where winter is still receding. Seasonal chandeliers sparkle.

Democratic backpushing

M. Gessen warned us of this. As we get distracted by never-ending scandals and outrages and take comfort in isolated victories against the storm, the juggernaut of what Gothenberg University's Varieties of Democracy Institute calls "autocratisation" continues. 

Gessen has also suggested that they may be taking it too fast, dispensing with the step of manufacturing consent from the public (indeed, squandering the little support they came in with). Let's hope the upcoming third No Kings March - next Saturday! - proves the charm.

Poetry and prayer everywhere

One fruit of our congregation's CCD team discussions is a series of online "Poetry and Prayer" gatherings. We met during Advent, 8:30-9:00 on four Monday mornings, and have resumed it for the Mondays of Lent. The organizer chooses a poem for each session, which, after a little silence, is read by two different people, one or both of whom then offer reflections. Other participants then share thoughts and reactions, before we close. Usually with about a dozen people, it's a lovely space, surprisingly profound for its small size.  

Today's was a short poem by Mary Oliver, suitably entitled "Praying."   

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

The first reader/commenter pronounced this was the "New York City poem" she'd been looking for! She'd thought she was the only person who paid attention to vacant lots. Others appreciated "just / pay attention" and "this isn't a contest" and "a doorway / into thanks" and the quiet miracle of "another voice." I reflected on how "a few / small stones" prefigure the push to "patch // a few words together." (I tend to be the animist in this group, seeing our human feelings and noticings and doings anticipated in the more-than-human world.) But all of us found ourselves thinking about the poetry of overlooked, perhaps unbeautiful city scenes as "silence[s] in which / another voice may speak."

What about those ugly piles of dirty snow, someone mentioned, and I had to share that I find them beautiful, have a phoneful of images of them - and shared two you've seen (the second and third from here). The unexpected multimedia turn was warmly appreciated. "One of those could be something a gallery in Chelsea," the organizer enthused. As I tried to articulate how hard it was not to sense design and intention in the way seeds and twigs and grit were lined up as the snow melted, the initial reader/commenter had an epiphany: all the things that wind up in the snow are distributed on the ground in a new way as it melts.    

patch // a few stones together and don't try / to make them elaborate !

Explosions

Ready for spring? How dare we be, when our country has set the world on fire?

In the news

We're in the news! The Chronicle swiftly published an article reporting on a university announcement that just went out this morning, and it got one thing wrong: while The New School has a staff of 3,100, more than half of those are part-time faculty, whose positions should be unaffected. That's little consolation to the rest of us, c. 400 full-time faculty and a little over 1000 staff. (It also doesn't mention that 7% of full-time faculty and staff have already accepted buyouts, so the total will be more like 20%.) Official notifications go out June 1st.

Tusk tusk

As part of my slightly rejiggered "After Religion," I got to bring together three particularly fun things in this final session before Spring Break, called "The Promise of Pluralism." We explored the world of the COEXIST bumper sticker and other efforts to use symbols of religions as an alphabet or pattern, and Rev. angel Kyodo williams' call for liberating new stories for a time which has seen through the limitations of nation-like religions and binary identities. At the center was John Thatamanil's brilliant retrieval of the old story of the blind men and the elephant, which goes beyond the smug inclusivism of the story and the cynicism of the most common critique, finding in a more fully embodied imagining of the scene an invitation to the adventure of exploring the unknown in the company of other traditions. 

I was having visual fun, too, deliberately spinning and inverting images of the cover of Thatamanil's book Circling the Elephant. I know the picture's reversed, I said, having just rehearsed Thatamanil's Vedanta-mystic suggestion that we may in fact find ourselves inside the "elephant" of ultimate reality: it's the view from inside the book! And I paired it with an image of what's quaintly known as the "elephant tusk nebula" - quaint because this resemblance is really just a report about us, who share a planet with elephants, not the nebula. 

I think this subtly complemented Thatamanil's exploding of the elephant story. In the story, people mistake parts of an elephant for other things (fans, walls, ropes, etc.). But perhaps the "elephant" is itself a mistaken description of part of something greater, an instance, even, of what angel Kyodo williams described when she said "truths are going to keep coming into solidity and then fall away over and over again."

March weather

Weird skies when I got up this morning, purple and orange! The day brought squalls, hail and snow, among other wild weather swings.

Bud yet

Meanwhile, in yesterday's afternoon and today's morning's light... 

Touchdown

In these trying times, I take joy where I find it, and I found many kinds of joy in reading a brilliant article about Bad Bunny's Espectáculo de Medio Tiempo del Súper Tazón (= Superbowl halftime show) as a many-level religious ritual. Super illuminating, it's also by one of our alums!

We often think of ritual as an acting-out of or reinforcement of belief, but Bad Bunny’s performance shows us in real time that ritual can also be a tool to create change and shift or expand belief. His ritual intends, in no uncertain terms, to help viewers shift and expand their understandings of who and what Americans can be. 

Caught in the act

Today marked the one-year anniversary of the Multifaith Mondays prayer vigils at Columbus Circle. I haven't been able to attend that many (especially last semester, when I was teaching Monday evenings), but I go when I can. It's never been that big in numbers but is inspiring in many ways, not least through its persistence, through dark and cold. 

We had a good turnout today, and someone posed the several dozen of us for a picture (the way they did regularly the first months). But when I tried to find if someone had posted a picture online I found an article with this picture from last month instead. I assure you there were more than five of us there that frigid day, if not that many more... 

Epic

The editors of the new online journal Equator (a "magazine of politics culture and art" which strives to be "an antidote to global unraveling") bring Simone Weil's great essay "The Iliad, and the Poem of Force" to bear on the current calamity, finding a prediction worthy of Greek tragedy in the undeclared war's hubristic nickname "Epic Fury":

And yet, as Weil observed, ancient civilizations (until the Roman) knew that such intoxication by violence leads inevitably to nemesis (which she thought perhaps a source of the idea of karma).

American exceptionalism

This from the latest Pew report saddens me.

I know there are all kinds of apples and oranges being compared here (what comes to mind as the goodness or badness of a fellow citizen?), but that's presumably the case in all the countries sampled, not just in the U. S., the only country where a majority of people think their fellow citizens bad. 

The surveys were conducted in March and April of last year, which might help explain the American anomaly a little. In general, those politically out of power are apparentlu more likely to distrust their fellow citizens.

[In the U S.] Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to rate fellow Americans as morally and ethically bad (60% vs. 46%). And previous research has shown that rising numbers of both Republicans and Democrats say people in the other party are immoral.

Isn't the United States supposed to be a leader in trust and respect for your fellow citizens? I think I might have answered "somewhat good" if asked this question, even if the reelection of DT had been top of mind. Some confidence in the intentions of your fellow citizens seems to me a precondition for living in a democracy. Part of why this saddens me so...

Death dealers

I've read in the annals of dictatorship about how leaders with unbridled power develop a taste for death. This bloodlust is on horrifying display in the Secretary of War Crimes, not just in his rhetoric but in the appalling torpedoing of an unarmed Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean, leaving survivors to drown - and sharing footage of the attack so others might be drawn into his sadistic orgasm. He's been salivating at delivering death at sea since the U. S. government started targeting smaller boats in the Caribbean last September. His sociopathic boss is indifferent to life or death but is developing an appetite for "decapitating" other leaders. They're murderers all of them.

CDMX

Can I make a confession? Most of this last week, while the United States proved itself an ever more monstrous threat to international peace, I was abroad. Ciudad de México, in fact: the friends I visited with last year are there again and had a vacancy in their guest room. So off we went! (I set off right after my Thursday morning lecture, returned the night before the next one.) A year ago, the horror unfolding in the US was just becoming clear. Now the mind balks at not just a year of steadily greater outrages but the grim reality that we have been unable to stop it. A highlight this time was the Museo Nacional de Historia in the Castillo de Chapultepec, an inspiring if sobering reminder that history is no walk in the park. At least Mexicans don't pretend otherwise.

 

 

Remedios Varo, "Roulotte (Carricoche)," 1955, Museo de Arte Moderno

Juan O'Gorman, "Retablo de la Independencia," 1961, Museo Nacional de Historia

Splitting

I noticed last week that the snow had taken down a branch of a callery pear tree near The New School. 

 

(Callery pears' v-forks make them particularly vulnerable to splitting like this, one reason they're no longer planted as much as they once were).  

Then, as I walked past it and found more limbs in the snow, I realized it wasn't just one but two branches the tree had lost. In fact: three! 

 

A week later, all the fallen branches, big and small, have been removed, along with the snow, leaving just the wounded tree torso.

War crime

He did it. Why? So many possible reasons being bruited by the pundits, none probably the actual reason, none offered to the people or our representatives, or the international community - and not one of these candidate reasons legitimate. (I'm remembering from my problem of evil days that the search for motives of evil usually reveals a disappointing void, the noble and profound casually destroyed by the shallow and mediocre.) The chaos president, emboldened by past crimes, rains catastrophe around the world. Ours is now a rogue state.

I know what I know, if you know what I mean

At an intimate workshop sharing the "Theorizing Religion" class activities around definitions of religion and the religions of unexpected things like capitalism, academia and fashion, I gave folks a few definitions of religion to chew over. Three were serious, the fourth not so much. 

If you don't recognize it, that last one is from the song which VH1 listed as No. 23 of the "100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders of the 80s," Edie Brickell's "What I am" - and was inspired by irritation at a college world religons class! (I used it once before, almost twenty years ago (!).) I told the assembled people I'd included the smile on a dog to keep things light-hearted but after a while noted that it was in the list also as a corrective to the potentially merely anthropological claims of the other three (Tillich, Suzuki, Durkheim). Religion might be a fact not just about human beings muddling along but about the solicitation of the more-than-human world in which we find ourselves.

The event was my contribution to a suite of events around the "Fashion - Faith: Rituals and Dialogues" exhibition, and the conversation my prompts fostered among these fashion-focused students quickly left me behind: wearing something that "just feels wrong," the fate-like power of "trends," the rage for reusing other' clothing, the "transcendent" feeling when wearing and being recognized in the work of a famous designer who just died, the daily "ritual" of dressing, death... 

I guess that, contrary to my pious pedagogical protestations, "the religion of fashion" is to me really not (yet) more than a conceit... But the enthusiastic reception of this, along with all the other components of the exhibition, suggest I may have opportunity to learn more. Shouldn't we turn this into a team-taught course, the BFA Fashion colleague who'd had the transcendent experience wondered?

Cotton candy snow

Blizzard of 2026

After nineten inches of snow finished falling, NYC was a sight to see!