To trees

We're into the final meetings of classes for this semester. For "Religion of Trees," today was for the final projects students were asked to develop collaboratively with a tree - fascinating, and (rightly) very personal. After presentations, we had time for drawing. They insisted I provide the prompt. "Two trees," I said, and they were off. And in what different directions they took this! Two different trees, old and young trees, trees connected underground or entwined in their canopies, trees making room for others, human as well as arboreal...

Droplets

My "Religion of Trees" students didn't want to sketch outdoors because of the rain. In vain did I say it was fun struggling with an umbrella while drawing...! So instead I suggested we bring leaves inside and draw them. I tried drawing this hophorn-beam leaf, but not before it requested a selfie with my notebook.

Chop chop

After a bit of a hiatus, drawing is back in "Religion of Trees." Today's class was a working our way through representative chapters from Stephanie Kaza's wonderful Buddhist Conversations with Trees. (I might have time later to tell you how this provided the perfect text for approaching a more general first year seminar topic: how to read a book - and why.) 

The last of the chapters I'd selected, "Cutting Wood," narrates her experience stacking and then cutting wood for her fire - with a chainsaw! Kaza's reflection is framed in terms of a koan: "What is my relationship with wood?" I was going to have us take time to write on this ourselves, but the clock ran out. Instead, I made the prompt for our drawing just "wood." Assorted relationships are examined and unexamined here. (The recursive one at top left is by yours truly.)

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.

Five trees

In "Religion of Trees" today, students encountered religious studies for the first time. We've read things about tree veneration, etc., but mostly by botanists of various stripes, and students have formed teams to research the Bodhi tree, the trees in the Garden of Eden, and Yggdrasil. So I thought we were ready for my standby crash-intro to the field, "Religion: What is it, who gets to decide, and why does it matter?” the opening essay in Whitney Bauman et al 's Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology. 

The essay - which is followed by a parallel essay on "ecology: What is it, who gets to decide, and why does it matter? -" offers a nice introduction to religious studies for non-specialists. Before introducing (and complicating) the distinction between insider and outsider perspectives of theology and religious studies, it goes through five punchy definitions of religion, from Paul Tillich, D. T. Suzuki, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Judith Butler. The discussion are inevitably compressed but between them they raise key questions about religion, even before the "who gets to decide and why does it matter?" questions raise questions about authority and the politics of knowledge. It does a lot with a little!

Maybe a bit too much for my first years, just a month into college! I found myself having to explain the separation of church and state and how, despite the Supreme Court's distinction between teaching and studying religion, most Americans learn nothing about religion in school - except maybe that it's a difficult subject to talk about, or maybe something you just can't talk about. The definitions showed that you could, the discussion surfacing a variety of views about whether religion was a good or bad thing for individuals or societies. But what counts as religion and are all religions the same? I got a bit farther by triangulating from the idea that multiple definitions are better than one, each bringing into focus a different aspect of reality and together allowing you access to depths beyond any one view, and the argument that you don't know what language is until you know more than one. Are there things even about one's own religion (if one has one) that one cannot understand without looking beyond it?

I needed to leave time for the research teams to work together (it emerged they had not done any work yet...), but our closing drawing session allowed a kind of coda to the discussion. The prompt: five trees.

Tree diagrams

Gro(o)vin'

New eyes on the Lang courtyard maples and their new friends.

Etudes

The Religion of Trees Instagram is up and running again! It wasn't completely dormant during my leave - I posted the occasional photograph, many of the courtyard. But it was set up for the drawings from classes and a new class is now drawing. We're not quite nine: this includes drawings by our first year fellow, who happened to be visiting class today, and yours truly. The prompt, riffing on the premise of David Haskell's The Songs of Trees: "a tree singing."

Fall blooms

 

Both of my classes are off to a good start, I think. Back in the saddle!

Roof/treetop

The newest iteration of "Religion of Trees" began today, in a classroom with this glorious view. (I think you can just see the window I took this picture from from the much less green views afforded by the last version's classroom.) Our friends, the Lang courtyard maples, are below (and reflected in the windows of Wollman Hall on the 5th floor opposite). They seem to be communicating with the trees on West 11th Street, beyond that hall, perhaps also with the boutique solitaries perched on rooftops into the distance toward downtown!

We're doing it again!

Branché!

A student gave me this lovely example of manganese dendrites "for the bookshelf in your office." With its delicate plant-like forms it fits beautifully with my vegetal relics, though it might feel more at home with the minerals I collected on a lower shelf. Interdisciplinary!

Leavetaking

Last meeting of this year's iteration of "Religion of Trees"! After the last four final projects (a script for an online horror game, a zine, an illustrated essay, and a flip movie about tree climbing) and a final drawing, we moved down to the chilly courtyard. We huddled in this space, sharing final thoughts as our maple kin stood by. The maples' last leaves have succumbed to the leaf blower but a few leaves awaited us from a neighboring spindle tree.

The drawing prompt was - of course - "religion of trees," and the drawings show a nice range of arboreal, anthropomorphic and human interactions. (458 was the number of our classroom.) Final thoughts were mostly expressions of gratitude for new or deepened awareness of these interactions, as well as for the fellowship of the class. I'm confident the relationships forged in the class, with trees and other human tree devotés, will endure (at least some of them). Shared attention to tree kin allows different kinds of human availability too.

The zine!

Here's the zine we collaged last week. It's a labor of love of my student assistant, who provided materials and instructions, and then stitched and copied the individual works into a whole.

Collagin'

Today proved a day of collaging. In "Religion of Trees" it was the "zine workshop" planned by my student assistant, and each of us crafted a page for the final work. (Details soon!) Then in "Theorizing Religion," a group presentation on Universe of Terms had the class collage as a way of replicating the way that book was put together. Not a bad way to get exhausted people engaged at the end of the semester...

Streaming

bSo we managed something quite lovely today after all, but not only because students came pre-pared to be spontaneous! 

Some few had brought things: some soil; a braid of sweetgrass; some sage, palo santo and a piece from one of the trees removed last month, with a shell to place under them as they were ignited with a cigarette lighter; a spell, in a tiny bottle. We huddled around these for a while - flame is irresistibly fascinating - then someone noticed some crepe streamers in yellow, red and bright green ("the colors of the maple leaves"!), and these started to wind themselves around the trees, higher and lower, some looser and and some more tautly, swooping and circling like the birds that make a home in this little forest. Sunlight and little gusts of wind came to dance with them, some streamers looping, others swinging and several vibrating with surprising agitation. 

Before we took them down again (I insisted we not leave that to someone else) we let them play on their own. The shared life of our little woods made visible, the spaces of eddying energy between the trees activated, the delight of our own movements around and among them given ephemeral form ... magic!

(But if I hadn't picked the crepe up at Party City on my way in?)

Happily we also had our now regular ritual of drawing to hand, too.

Zine!

Editing challenges and the grainy distortions from multiple copying, redeemed by skills I dredged up from being editor of my junior high school newspaper "The Tide," made a mere flyer into a zine!

Educated youth

One of the talented students in "Religion of Trees" designed this flyer for something we decided to do this week. We decided last week, but couldn't decide what to call it besides "gathering." ("Giving thanks" was sort of in the air.) I told the class today that we can't count on the same magic happening as happened last time. For one thing, the trees will be leafless and, given the enthusiasm of our resident leafblower, the ground beneath them will likely be bare, too. But they want it to be "spontaneous." No plan, no preparation. And so it will be! Even if it it doesn't measure up to the literally golden experience we had last time, it'll be a learning for us. And the trees? They won't mind.

To complicate things a little, the last assigned reading of the class was Chinese - a 1984 novella about "educated youth" sent to fell an ancient forest during the Cultural Revolution. It's full of Daoist resonances, but I didn't expect the class to pick up on them. I did half-hope some would look up "educated youth," though... 

But it's also the day after the Thanksgiving break, so I thought it better not to count on students having finished the reading, and fashioned a handout of three passages from Zhuangzi relevant to the book but meaningful on their own, too. Their common theme - the gnarled old trees which survive because human beings see them as useless, and, from this, the limits of human concepts of usefulness.

The longest, from Zhuangzi ch 4, is a little novella of its own. Here's the whole section, translated by Brook Ziporyn, but the most telling part for a class called "Religion of Trees" is the final bit. Carpenter Stony and his apprentice have been pondering a big tree around which humans have built a shrine. (Or perhaps it's being "used as the altar for the spirits of the land.") The apprentice thinks it would make good timber, but Stony tells him he can see it's old wood is useless. 

In a dream that night, however, the tree appears to Carpenter Stony, pities the "useful" trees humans work to death, wittily tells him it's been working on being useless for a long time ... I've finally managed it - and it is of great use to me, before challenging the capacity of a worthless man with one foot in the grave [to] know what is or isn't a worthless tree! Carpenter Stony awakens and recounts the dream to his apprentice, but the apprentice is nonplussed. If it's trying to be useless, he asks, what's it doing with a shrine around it?

Carpenter Stony said, "Hush! Don't talk like that! Those people came to it for refuge on their own initiative. In fact, the tree considers it a great disgrace to be surrounded by this uncomprehending crowd. If they hadn't made it a shrine, they could easily have gone the other way and started carving away at it. What it protects, what protects it, is not this crowd, but something totally different. To praise it for fulfilling its responsiblity in the role it happens to play - that would really be missing the point!"

I don't claim to know the point (worthless teacher!). But the image of a tree mortified by human devotions, though tolerating them as they're better than being cut down, may be enough to keep us from being overly sentimental. Full report on Wednesday!

Bow often

In "Religion of Trees" today I decided to pull out the religion of trees poem, Mary Oliver's 2006 "When I am Among the trees."

When I am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It's simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

I decided today was the day in part because the assigned readings had miffed the three students who had submitted responses - and I suspected the other students hadn't had time to read them at all. The poem triangulates from what was interesting in a peevish Slate review of "the currently popular, everything-is-connected school of tree love" by someone who enjoys the difference of trees on daily walks in the woods and doesn't "expect them to teach [her] anything," and Thomas Merton's reflection on how trees give glory to God by being themselves - but it's not so simple for us sinful human beings. 

And we were able to discuss at least some of the issues through the poem. Working almost word by word through it, we noticed lovelinesses like the move from "especially" to "equally" in the second and third lines, and the way the phrases of the final stanza - from the trees - overflow the orderly lines of the poem, cascading like light through a tree's branches. But we spent the most time on the second stanza's account of the life the poet tries to lead, however imperfectly: a life of discerning attention to goodness, anchored in slow walking and frequent bowing (a lovely practice). It's from dejection at her failures to do this consistently that the trees "save" her with their gladness.

This saving seemed deeper than what the peevish Slate reviewer finds on her walks, taken to escape the exasperations of human contact, and less off-putting than Merton's talk of sin. Are Oliver's trees "teaching" her to flee her humanness into some kind of fantasy of arboreal being? It's not that simple. What's simple is the appeal of the repeated invitation to abide with them, not the doing of it.