Harmonized

And so ends another of my courses for the International Summer School of Renmin University of China. I managed to teach there twice in person, and this makes a second time virtually. (The 2020 summer school was canceled because of Covid.) This year's topic, like last year's, was "Anthropocene Humanities," and, like last year, I divided the class into groups to get them thinking together - but also to break up our eight crushing 3.5 hour sessions. For four of the sessions I devoted 1.5 hours to meeting with the groups one by one, as other groups finished a project, which gave each student a chance to introduce themselves and ask me deep and broad questions. 

Levels of English proficiency varied, in a good number of cases because the students were enrolled in what one student revealingly called the "Sino-Franch Institute" in Suzhou. After two years of intensive French, they told me sheepishly (and sometimes with adorable French accents), they'd forgotten much of the English they'd known in high school. Others were nearly fluent, but the most mellifluous pronunciation came from the one student from the school of arts performance, who owned that her English wasn't very good and that she had used translation software on the assigned readings, "and also for this self-introduction." I appreciated her candor!

These slides are taken from the second-to-last group assignment, in a session called "Chinese remedies for the Anthropocene." They had 45 minutes to produce a five-minute presentation suitable for American students who'd read all the same texts they had (perhaps without the benefit of translation software!), and I was pleased that only one (above) explicitly highlit the government's "ecological civilization" prerogative - though most jibed with its claim that there's a single coherent Chinese worldview from time immemorial which somehow incorporates Confucianism and Daoism and finds its consummation in New China. A welcome exception came from one group which offered this creative redefinition of the Anthropocene "from the view of Dao."

Truth's illusion

I watched the video from Joni Mitchell's surprise return to performing, at the Newport Folk Music Festival, and knew that the tears of joy on my cheeks were joining those of millions. Hearing her find her way through the words of "Both Sides Now," I felt I'd never really heard them before.

Tears and fears and feeling proud 

To say "I love you" right out loud 

Dreams and schemes and circus crowds 

I've looked at life that way 

But now old friends are acting strange 

They shake their heads, they say I've changed 

Well something's lost, but something's gained 

In living every day 

I've looked at life from both sides now 

From win and lose and still somehow 

It's life's illusions I recall 

I really don't know life at all

And yet, through this socratic song written when she was 23, we do.

Ten days...

Well, if I had to choose ten days to isolate, these were probably the best ones - in California, where lovely walks beckon, and in a house big enough that I could be provisioned without putting anyone else at risk. Because my symptoms were mild (thank you, vaccinations and boosters!) I was able to keep teaching, too. Lucky.

Fossilization

In my ninth day of isolation, I finished my penultimate class of "Anthropocene Humanities" and looked about for something diverting to watch. Something led me back to "Prehistoric Planet," whose first episode we'd watched when it came out and decided not to pursue. Amazing CGI, yes, and by all accounts more accurate representation of dinosaur appearance and lifeways than what we know from popular culture, and narrated by an always amazed David Attenborough! But that was just the problem. Patterned on the BBC Studios Natural History Unit's gorgeous "Earth" series (which I loved), this journey to the earth 66 million years ago recapitulated every one of its visual and narrative tropes, and wound up making the earlier series seem

fake, too. The templates of courtship, predation, competition, migration and anthropomorphized familial care (with plenty of cute young 'uns, like this li'l triceratops) were so clearly recognizable it was apparent that they'd been employed in the earlier series, too, sifting through actual footage just as they were here in commissioning animators. These cretaceous critters are strikingly strange (strangest for me were the various big-headed flyers who apparently walked on the equivalent of their elbows with wings folded up, like the tethydracos above) and yet comfortingly kin. Even their soundtrack is just as you'd expect.

Watching two more episodes today - "Deserts" and "Forests" - left me dejected, perhaps because I've been in Anthropocene mode, which is always haunted by the idea of a post-human planet, a time when we, "like the dinosaurs," are nothing but fossils. But I suspect the dejection was connected also to having to teach students in China from the US, Anthropocene malefactor and failing state.

Shimmer

It took the wind to show me the layers of miracle here.

Nature at work

I've been leavening my isolation with long early morning walks. In no hurry to return indoors I'm noticing more each day, like the jagged work of a tangle web spider, the joie de vivre of plants who've pushed through cracks in the pavement, the striking inside-out parasol factories of Menzies Goldenbush.

The elephant in the room

Had a chance for the first time to watch the whole flow of one of the public meetings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack. Well, not quite live, since I had my remote Chinese class, but once it finished I keyed up C-SPAN, and watched the whole session, which had just finished. I've been watching clips and highlight analyses of the earlier sessions, and knew that they were put together artfully, and this one did not disappoint. Much of the videotaped testimony was pretty low key on its own, but there was a momentum built and maintained as the two presenting Representatives took us "minute by minute" through the 187 minutes when Donald Trump sat back and let Rome burn. 

The dereliction of duty was really too great for those words (which admittedly mean less to me than to the Representatives, both veterans), and what he did do too outrageous, even 18 months later, to fully grasp: instead of condemning the violence and calling his goons off, ad lib repurposing the Big Lie as a Lost Cause. The presentation made him appear out on a limb on his own, as his staff of lackeys tried in vain to contain the damage, but we don't really know how he felt; my guess is that with FOX on one screen and friendly senators and kooks on the phone he was riding high on what he saw on other screens, intoxicated by twitter waves of those mad with excitement or fear at what was unfolding: chaos, "American carnage," his thing. Coup plans A, B, C, D ... had all failed (I don't think he planned for this particular mayhem to happen) but, hey, the vote count might yet be postponed, a state of emergency declared, his presidency continue. The election wasn't over until he said it was. 

It's all at once too awful and too tawdry to believe (the Trump brand). But once the drama of the unfolding presentation ended, with a series of perfectly pitched calls for accountability and civic responsibility from Kinzinger, Luria and Cheney, it was hard to maintain the hope that any of this truthtelling will be enough to make a difference. As Adam Kinzinger put it, The militant intolerant ideologies, the militias, the alienation and the disaffection, the weird fantasies and disinformation, they're all still out there ready to go. That's the elephant in the room. Indeed! And he didn't mention those many other elephants not in the room, impervious and impenitent, confident that gerrymandering, contrived culture wars and a demoralized populace will soon hand the reins of power back to them.

Starstruck

I've been permitting myself an early morning walk every day, and have been happily communing with Del Mar's world of plants and trees. This morning I spotted these early bloomers in what I then realized was a hedge full of buds. With the Webb Space Telescope on my mind, nebulae everywhere!

Patches of sun

Day 3 of asymptomatic isolation, except for a scratchy throat... 

Mary the Tower

Heard an amazing sermon by Diana Butler Bass, delivered at the end of a gathering called Wild Goose, and burst into tears. It's called "All the Marys," and shares some tradition-redefining new research on the gospel passages where multiple Marys, and two Marthas, appear. 

The research was done by an American MA student named Elizabeth Schrader, inspired by a dream and taking advantage of the latest digitization of ancient manuscripts, who found the earliest extant text of John (Papyrus 66) shows an editor's fudging. A simple emendation can turn a Marya into a Marta, and this seems to have happened here, turning one character into two, perhaps in order to align this household in Bethany with the one mentioning sisters Mary and Martha in Luke 10. One doesn't know what inspired the editorial intervention, but what if Lazarus had only one sister - Mary - and it was she, not an otherwise unremarked and quickly forgotten other Martha, who responded to the raising of her brother from the dead with one of only two christological confessions in scripture (the other being Peter's)? It would make such sense if it was Mary (as Tertullian thought), and she was the very Mary to whom the risen Christ would appear in the garden. But wasn't that Mary Magdalene, you know, the one from Magdala? But there was no town named Magdala at the time, and the word magdala just means "tower" in Aramaic anyway. Might it not be that Jesus, who gave nicknames to his disciples, also gave one to her - "Mary the Tower"?

And so now you get the full picture. In the Synoptics, Jesus and Peter have a discussion. In that discussion, Peter utters the Christological confession. As a result of the Christological confession, Jesus says, "You are Peter the Rock." In the gospel of John, Mary and Jesus have a conversation, and Mary utters the Christological confession. And she comes to be known as Mary the Tower.

 

Between these two confessions, are we looking at an argument in the early church? Peter the Rock or Mary the Tower? 

But the John account was changed. The John story has been hidden from our view. All those years ago, Mary uttered those words, "Yes, Lord, I believe you are the Messiah, the son of God, the one who is coming into the world." 

When Libbie told me of her research, and this story of the confession, we were sitting in a Starbucks in Alexandria, Virginia. I started to cry and I couldn't stop. She had just told me a story that I always intuited existed. When she told me the pieces and how they fit together, and as soon as she said, "Mary the Tower," I said, "I know. I know this to be true. This is the truest thing I have ever heard about the Gospel." Mary is indeed the tower of faith. That our faith is the faith of that woman who would become the first person to announce the resurrection. Mary the Witness, Mary the Tower, Mary the Great, and she has been obscured from us. She has been hidden from us and she been taken away from us for nearly 2,000 years. ...

What if the other story of Mary hadn't been hidden? What if Mary in John 11 hadn't been split into two women? What if we'd known about Mary the Tower all along? What kind of Christianity would we have if the faith hadn’t only been based upon, "Peter, you are the Rock and upon this Rock I will build my church"? But what if we’d always known, “Mary, you are the Tower, and by this Tower we shall all stand?”

It's almost unbearably exciting. Feminist theology vindicated!

Europe on fire

Infected :(

Covid, its newest variant running rampant in California (as elsewhere), has finally caught me. Symptoms so far mild…

Marine mammals

We went out for a 4-hour Whale and Dolphin Watching Adventure from San Diego Bay today. I've only ever been out in the winter, when the humpack migrate, but word was that there are many blue whales making their way south right now! We didn't see any, but several pods of dolphins more than made up for it!

Lettering

Yesterday's flight took a more southerly route than customary, for a good while hugging the Mexico-US border. Somewhere near there, as we were leaving Arizona, I noticed sand dunes thet seemed to be giant letters in an unknown alphabet. I'd love to know more!

JFK --> SAN

Back to California for a spell, sharing a row with two born New Yorkers who moved to San Diego decades ago. New York is great but the weather? And when they first arrived from NYC San Diego seemed slow; now they dream of going to Hawai'i to get away from the hustle.

Interstellar

Wowwowwow, first image from the James Webb Space Telescope, a lens beyond a lens, as (I don't pretend to understand how) a cluster of galaxies apparently allows the otherwise too dim light of galxies beyond them to be seen. All those things are galaxies, some appearing distended by this lensing effect. The scale of what's seen here is unfathomable - so distant it's taken the light more than 13 billion years to get here. And this patch of our sky is itself tiny, "approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length by someone on the ground," a NASA administrator said. Wowwowwow.

It's funny, just yesterday I was finding myself dissatisfied by wording in a modernized Eucharistic Prayer I used to appreciate, which we've been saying in church.

God of all power, Ruler of the Universe, you are worthy of glory and praise. 

[All:] Glory to you for ever and ever. 

At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home. 

By your will they were created and have their being. 

From the primal elements you brought forth the human race, and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You made us the rulers of creation. But we turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one another. 

Have mercy, Lord, for we are sinners in your sight.

...

I still appreciate the poetry of "our island home" but was newly put off by the "ruler" language, both for the "Ruler of the universe," "commanding" things to be, and especially by our being made the "rulers of creation." But, really, in this vastness God seems to me as fragile as our earth.

Live!

Everything in this photo is half true. I was indeed starting my course for the International Summer School at Renmin University of China but not in person - though the teeshirt's real, received the last time I was able to teach on site, in 2019! I was in New York but not in my office. That's a virtual background, though of my actual office a few months ago. (It's not what you would see were I speaking to you from there unless I were standing in the door.) The spots on my arm are the light of the setting sun through the venetian blinds at home. It was morning, but only in Beijing. "Anthropocene Humanities," here we go!

Tree tent

A tree like a mountain, a 100-year old weeping beech, a cave within.

Downpour!

How to talk to trees

An essay by Australian poet and ecotheorist Stuart Cooke, from which I've already quoted twice before, has introduced me to a most wonderful book, Tree Talks: Southern Arizona by Wendy Burk (Delete Press, 2016). This work shares eight interviews Burk conducted with trees, each about 20-25 minutes long. With an assistant, Burk asked them various questions in our language, and she and the assistant recorded all they registered on a pad of paper, later transferring this to print. You should really get your own copy ($8 download here) but to whet your appetite, some tastes. If you give yourself to them - which means giving your lips to reproduce the sounds (and the non-sounds!) - it's transporting.

Here's the start of the first "tree talk", with a Freemont Cottonwood:

Around the tree you encounter a cricket, a moth, an owl and the wind, as well as the footsteps and voices of people, and a car passing by in the distance. And the tree itself, "S:," not quite mutely present.

The next chat is with a Ponderosa Pine; here are the first two pages.;

As a bird hops around you hear the wind blowing through high above, and the tree... creaking? Burk was close to the tree as she engaged it.

Next is the end of Burk's 30-minute comvo with a Goodding Willow at midday July 24th, 2010. You can probably read her notation by now, recognizing birds and cars (a carpenter bee shows up here, too, moving through the field). She's already asked the tree about its life by a creek in a wildlife preserve, and why it's known as a tree of refuge. But, like every good interviewer, she leaves time at the end...

And here's the start of a conversation with a Blue Palo Verde on the campus of the University of Arizona. The sound is punctuated by an air handler but this doesn't prevent a concerto of sounds, a mockingbird the all-engaging soloist.

Cooke's poet's description of Burk's achievement is illuminating:

Burk’s interviews produce a growing absence at the heart of the book, as it becomes increasingly apparent that, indeed, trees don’t talk – at least, not in any way that is familiar to us. 

Crucially, however, rather than nullifying the trees’ presence in an imposed condition of speechlessness, Burk renders the possibility of their talking more likely. Her transcriptions account for all kinds of peripheral noise, human and otherwise, while the trees themselves remain tantalisingly on the edge of written language, their responses ren- dered non-alphabetically with different arrangements of diacritical marks such as slashes, open brackets, commas and colons. Burk’s typographical arrays are extremely open, too, producing a hybrid, audio-visual complex: pages are marked with horizontal and vertical repetitions of different sounds, and with clusters of differently sized fonts. ...

[C]entral to all such cacophony in Tree Talks is the ongoing fact of the trees’ silence but, as we move through the book, slowly this silence starts to acquire an ineluctable density: as Burk continues to ask questions, and as the trees continue to respond (or ignore) with non-semantic gestures, the poems form homes for what these gestures – these commas, open brackets and colons – might mean. That silent ‘void’ in each poem becomes, in the Nietzschean sense, productive: it is the catalyst for a reorientation of understanding. What the poems produce, in other words, is a field in which a conversation with trees becomes possible... 

Stuart Cooke, "Talking (With) Trees: Arboreal Articulation and Poetics," 222

Timber

The year I lived in Paris (it was just winding up twenty years ago) I slept beneath a big reproduction of the famous Turgot map of the city, which showed the city as it appeared in 1734-36. I would wander the streets of contemporary Paris and then, returned home, check to see how much of what I saw was there already 270 years before. Since I was living in the Foubourg Saint-Antoine, more of my neighborhood was recognizable than the areas revamped under Baron Haussman. In this section of the map (it was originally published as twenty 

separate spreads, this was the sixth) you might recognize the Place des Vosges and the Île Saint-Louis, and the pre-revolution (and of course pre-opera house) Bastille. You can just make out where I was living in the upper left corner. But I share it with you today because of what's on the upper right. What are those things? Stacks and stacks, I realized, of wood. Some presumably was for building, but most will have been for heating and cooking. Before the Anthropocene, when it was living trees - not fossilized ones - that we depended on.

Arboreal window

Treescape spotted outside the New York Foundling Hospital.

Happy Fourth

July 4th - the 246th since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. How should one tell the story of this experiment? I'm partial to the way Jill Lepore narrated it in These Truths in 2018. The idea of equal freedom and dignity for all human beings was better and more far-reaching than its originators could imagine. Their failures and hypocrisies need to be recognized as we strive for a more perfect union, but also so that we recognize that the idea might be better and more far-reaching than we can imagine, too. It's a heartbreaking but thrilling story, and an unnerving one. We know of profound historic exclusions and how right it was that they were overcome -n and how difficult their overcoming... 

And the story hasn't finished: the future, if the idea is allowed to realize itself, will be different again than what we can imagine. But of course that's true about democracy all the time, or should be - we entrust the future to a process of which we are just a part: we deliberate, debate, and cast our votes but defer to the articulated wisdom of the majority. What a leap of faith!

It goes without saying that a significant part of the country is no longer willing to make that leap. It looks backward rather than forward, in many cases fetishizing the moment, two and a half centuries ago, when a bunch of propertied English colonists inspired by Enlightenment ideas (and most of them enslavers of Africans) decided to take their story into their own hands. "All men are created equal" was the idea, but they couldn't imagine that this related also to the men whose land they had invaded or the men whom the majority thought they could own, or, for that matter, the men of other continents being colonized by Europeans. Not to mention women: Lepore reminds us that until 1920, the majority of the population had no vote. (When I was growing up, Betsy Ross's sewing of the flag was the beginning and end of women's participation in the story.) The idea was a lot bigger than they knew.

Among those unwilling to make the leap of democratic faith today, many believe the founders where men of Christian virtue whose vision of the world we are bound to, or should be bound to. They don't just ignore the enshrinement of slavery in the Constitution until amendments made possible only by a wrenching civil war, but ignore the exclusion of women's voices in anything articulated by American lawmakers for more than 2/3 of our 246 years. And yet (the Supreme Court's "originalist" decisions on reproductive rights and freedom from fear of being shot tell us) we should defer to historical precedent, the older the better? The farther back you go, the fewer Americans had a chance to contribute to the wisdom of democratic majority - the less, yes, democratic these judgments were. Greater participation doesn't "replace" but completes us.

Unless we are forward looking - unless we dare to be - too easily corruptible American institutions drag us backward. (Arguably, the founders recognized this, initiating a process of constitutional amendment they imagined would continue regularly into the future, keeping the document and its ideals alive in changing circumstances.) Unless we understand the history as one which points beyond the limited vision of any generation, starting with the first and continuing generation after generation, we won't keep alive the ideal we're so privileged to inherit.

O, let America be America again— 

The land that never has been yet— 

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

Langston Hughes

Spillover

This July 4th New Yorker cover by Chris Ware is ominously called "House Divided." But it was designed before the recent Supreme Court decisions and now seems the image of a lost idyll. Now there's a flashing neon Jesus! Guns! Babies! sign straddling the property line.

Downstream

The way back to NYC from Québec takes one through the 'Dacks!

Past subjunctive

It felt positively irresponsible to be enjoying the bucolic charms of the Île d'Orléans - the large island off Québec which was the first area colonized by the French - as my own land reels at the multi-flanked ambush of the trumpified Supreme Court. I suppose watching in mute horror the unfolding karma of racism and patriarchal Christian nationalism south of the border is something Canadians have long experienced... but I'm conscious also that the Handmaid's Tale world, foreseen by a Canadian novelist, is probably not too far from what Québec's theocrats enforced until the 1960s. 

Travel always relativizes one's sense of the normal and necessary, but it's nausea I'm feeling on this first trip abroad in 2.5 years, relearning that sense of distance and subjunctive possibility at this moment, learning of the near-success of one flurry of Republican coup attempts as another triumphs. And of course it is not just Americans who will suffer this putsch, as the (defunct!) policy SCOTUS chose for its shot across the bow of federal government is environmental. Woe.