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.

Standing

At the newish Musée Huron-Wendat in a tribal enclave in northern Québec City ("Huron" was the French name for the Wendake First Nation), a reconstructed longhouse in a sapling palisade offers a glimpse of the rich social worlds of Iroquois and Algonquian peoples. I've only ever seen pictures of these impressive structures, of which there were many in these parts (in Manahata too!). A young Wendake guide brought it to life for us, translating freely from Québecois. 

The museum itself is beautifully put together, telling with precision and poetry - Des paysages réels et imaginaires nous habite/ real and imaginary landscapes inhabit us - the difficult history of the Wendake people, who were driven here by intertribal conflicts from a homeland near Detroit as European-borne disease and French traders and missionaries arrived in these parts. (Another community of Wendak are now in Oklahoma.) The Wendake were "sold" this land by French Jesuits in 1760 in a contract only rediscovered in the 1990s. 

In a special exhibition space we got to see the eeries images of "Mémoires Ennoyées," created by Ludovic Boney for the Québec Biennial earlier this year. Based on data from a sonic bathymetric echo sounder, its video and stills show the forest still standing in two reservoirs built in 1969 in the remains of the Manicouagan meteorite crater, their tops swaying in the current as once they did in the wind.

Père de l'Amérique Française

It's been a while since I last visited Québec - 17 years! - and I was disappointed to learn that the place I found most diverting then - the Musée de l'Amérique Française, now known as the Musée de l'Amérique Francophone - is only open on weekends. No matter. The chapel to François de Laval (1623-1708), designed in 1993 for Québec's Basilica-Cathedral of Notre Dame, reproduces most of the map I found so délirant on the floor of the Musée. (Laval was beatified in 1980, canonized in 2014, but the map takes you back to late 17th century.) Here is a continent designated Nou[vell]e FRANCE. The only discordant note is a little corner in the northeast, Nouvelle Bretagne. 

Québec seems all about the subjunctive contained here, a North America which need not have become anglophone, with just a little pocket of francophones in a northeastern corner! Tongue-in-cheek inversion of what actually happened? I was wittier in 2005, noting crisply in my diary that Québec was the "tip of the long since melted iceberg of Amérique Française." Of course the continent need not have been invaded by European saints and sinners at all. Tomorrow we learn more about the First Peoples of this area.

Forest for the trees

A Québec street tree left to its own devices dreams a forest... 

Hors-pays

We're going on a long-planned road trip to Québec City - our first interna-tional travel in two and a half years! But heading to Canada at this point feels like fleeing the chronically unjust United States, as we wait for the rest of the weaponized Supreme Court's rulings undermining rule of law to fall. These trees, barely recognizable under monstrous vines which may well end up killing them, lined the road as we set forth.

Chamber of horrors

 image

They did it. Read the dissent and weep.

The American people’s belief in the rule of law would be shaken if they lost respect for this Court as an institution that decides important cases based on principle, not ‘social and political pressures.’ There is a special danger that the public will perceive a decision as having been made for unprincipled reasons when the court overrules a controversial ‘watershed’ decision, such as Roe. A decision overruling Roe would be perceived as having been made ‘under fire’ and as a ‘surrender to political pressure.’

These words are their summary of Casey, which in 1992 considered abortion too divisive an issue for the Court to challenge precedent. 

Just as we did here, Casey explained the importance of stare decisis; the inappositeness of West Coast Hotel and Brown; the absence of any “changed circumstances” (or other reason) justifying the reversal of precedent. “[T]he court,” Casey explained, “could not pretend” that overruling Roe had any “justification beyond a present doctrinal disposition to come out differently from the court of 1973.” And to overrule for that reason? Quoting Justice Stewart, Casey explained that to do so – to reverse prior law “upon a ground no firmer than a change in [the court’s] membership” – would invite the view that “this institution is little different from the two political branches of the Government.” No view, Casey thought, could do “more lasting injury to this court and to the system of law which it is our abiding mission to serve.” For overruling Roe, Casey concluded, the court would pay a “terrible price”.

Even as the House Select Committee has shown us how close Donald Trump came to destroying the legitimacy of the executive and legislative branches of the US government, it's clear he succeeded in the case of the judicial. 

Justice Jackson once called a decision he dissented from a “loaded weapon,” ready to hand for improper uses. We fear that today’s decision, departing from stare decisis for no legitimate reason, is its own loaded weapon. Weakening stare decisis threatens to upend bedrock legal doctrines, far beyond any single decision. Weakening stare decisis creates profound legal instability. And as Casey recognized, weakening stare decisis in a hotly contested case like this one calls into question this court’s commitment to legal principle. It makes the court appear not restrained but aggressive, not modest but grasping. In all those ways, today’s decision takes aim, we fear, at the rule of law.

The attempts to undermine the presidential election found many willing coconspirators in the desperately undemocratic right's efforts to make us a minority-ruled state (male, white, conservative 'Christian'). The Trump-appointed justices willing to support the long-standing malevolence of Thomas and Alito here were co-conspirators, too. Willing to accept appointment to the Court despite the vile shenanigans of Mitch and Don, their abandonment of stare decisis on the most polarizing issue in this polarized land shows an acceptance, even a celebration, of the fact that, as the dissenters put it,

"Power, not reason, is the new currency of this court’s decision-making." 

This is, to borrow a phrase from the Communist Party of China, rule by law, not rule of law. Without stare decisis, nothing is settled law... in which case, nothing is "law" in the sense required for civil life.

Woe woe woe, what horrors the enemies of our democracy have wrought - with more to come. Is there anything which can be done? The only thing that might salvage the credibility of SCOTUS would be a rebalancing. I wish Gorsuch or Barrett would step down, given the sleaziness of the conditions of their appointments, and Thomas' possible collusion with his seditious wife suggests he should, but these people are willing accomplices of the ruin of our democracy. Expect no noble acts from them. (They probably think God put them where they are precisely to perform this mischief.) Perhaps the president might add new justices chosen by a genuinely bipartisan process (the last chance proof that that is possible - if it is possible), maybe four? To show that this is a crisis requiring such drastic response, how about the Chief Justice, sidelined by the reactionaries and surely queasy at being coopted as they undermine his work to maintain the credibility of a right-leaning court, resign?

Gundamentalism

I learned a new term a few weeks ago, "gundamentalism," coined by Presbyterian pastor James Atwood a decade ago. An excerpt, quoted by Diana Butler Bass:

Many modern-day shamans and religious gun enthusiasts proclaim God wants all citizens well armed so they can protect our values, even our faith. . . These religious cults have become an integral part of the religion of the Gun Empire that give the idols of power and deadly force what they most need: a divine status. For these men and women the command to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbor as yourself, is placed right alongside their new commandment to be ready at all times to defend yourself against your neighbor. . . (They) built an idolatrous religious framework around guns and have worked feverishly to justify biblically their unwarranted fascination with guns. . . Millions worship at this shrine. 

Atwood, America and Its Guns: A Theological Expose, 82-83; qtd The Cottage

Bass and Atwood were responding to the American subculture which brandishes Bibles and guns together with no sense of contradiction, something which has been, frankly, incomprehensible to me. An opinion piece by Peter Manseau in this morning's Times, provoked by the explicitly Christian identity of the company which manufactured the assault weapon used to such lethal effect in that elementary school in Texas, argued that many gun owners believe in their guns, and that American gun culture is explicitly Christian. This is part of white Evangelical religion specifically. Most other Christian denominations discourage gun ownership and there seems in fact to be a negative correlation between religious participation and gun ownership. Even among Evangelicals: those most gun-idolizing are those who don't regularly attend worship. But, Manseau argues, the disagreement is at root a religious one. Referencing Paul Tillich's idea of "ultimate concern," it's about the most basic ideas about the way the world is and what matters. To many gun nuts, the world is a battlefield, with Jesus calling us to join his battalion. Manseau concludes

Mass shootings are, in a way, assaults on the idea of community itself. They occur where there are people gathered — for entertainment, for learning, for shopping, for worship — in the spaces we create together. Some believe that such attacks are the fault of armed individuals alone and can be addressed only through armed individual response. Others believe they occur within the framework of what we collectively allow and must have communal solutions.

My view is closer to Abbott's fury. Those who believe in guns - who believe that individuals have the right to wield lethal force - seem to to me in thrall not of a religion but of something different and worse, idolotry, even something demonic. Tillich's concept of religion includes a demonic (and he'd agree that much of Christian history is demonic) but Manseau isn't spelling it out, concerned as he is with defending good religion against this bad one. Usually I err in his irenic direction.

But then we get today's latest attack on the common good from the conservative justices of the Supreme Court (all six!), subscribers to another kind of gundamentalism. Their dogmatic interpretation of the Second Amendment is absurd, as clear a case of reading an "unelaborated" right into the Constitution as you can ask for. ("Well regulated militia" - hello?!) It's a sign of the craven soullessness of originalism, kin to the self-righteous dishonesty of biblical fundamentalism. 

I have not read the ruling, but it doesn't seem that it allows for any countervailing right not to be shot, let alone to feel safe. How many of these constitutional gundamentalists are also religious gundamentalists? And, yes, in thrall to the demonic?

聊天

I'm making the most of my unscripted summer time (soon to run out, as holidays and my summer course approach) by devoting the mornings to Mandarin. With the help of an intrepid teacher I've known for several years, I've rehashed and refreshed what I learned when I studied with a textbook, but we spend most of each session talking about stuff. Stuff? Like? Well, like walking in woods full of new green. Like what a long time it's been since we traveled to a foreign country. Like what fun it was to go to a big library again for the first time in a while. Like her enormous cats Pessoa and Spartacus. Like new art exhibitions and museums in New York and Oslo. Like why students prefer to meet on zoom than in person. Like how our floor threw a farewell party for a neighbor who had to move out. Like my trip 7 years ago to Datong, her hometown. Like how she cooked a French dinner from a cookbook she found at a free exchange table at her local library. Like how I wound up with so many books I can hardly remember on my office walls. But also like how I'm planning a course on religion and trees. And like what Juneteenth is and isn't. And like how Americans see Buddhism. I don't nearly have the words to discuss all these things, but somehow, with her help, we somehow manage.

Don't inhale?

Various things conspired today to make me wonder if I'm being too diffident with trees. I got together with a friend at a coffee shop today and told her about my evolving views about trees and how to structure a course around them. She's an artist in her spare time and understood my wish to incorporate drawing into the class but was also unsurprised when I reported that my efforts at tree sketching show it to be far from easy - and that's before getting to the more aspirational drawings of trees from below, with symbionts, in rooted communion, etc.! 

Still, we need something in the class that allows us to go beyond words, something that engages trees directly, and something that has the structure of a ritual... I told her that some of the folks writing in the huge anthology The Mind of Plants, which I've been making my way through, would probably suggest ingesting the plants. Not to mention the many Lang students into psychedelics! I recounted my relief at the essay where a student whose PhD advisor prescribes her a dieta to open herself to communication with a passionflower has her visitation before getting around to drinking the tea made of passionflower roots - but when I just returned to it, I found I'd missed the point. Kristi Onzik had indeed 

learned from my previous encounters with passionflower [that] ... the plant need not be ingested to affect and make a different kind of sense out of me (284)

but the bodily crisis she goes through after her week of preparation needs the tea to subside, and take her, through sleep, to the next stage: 

I awoke into a bursting portal of vibrant pinks and purples, a deepening concentric swirl into and through the famously ethereal inflorescence, and doused in the perfume of an overwhelming, euphoric sensation that I was, at once, being birthed by and giving birth to the passionflower. There was no origin or end, no finish line or boundary between us. 

Thereafter, my body was not mine, but something of a conduit, then a coalescence. Roots sprouted from my sacrum, gently coaing my spine back down into earthly grounds. As my body sak heavier into ground, spirng coiled tendrils and broad palmate leaves lifted and suspended all thoughts away from perception, though it was no longer clear where perception was, nor whom. As the dieta unfolded, my all-too-familiar concept of time as a linar ordering of experience into past, present, and future, became confused, and in its deepest passionflower-"ness," seemingly irrelevant., hardly interesting, and only vaguely conceivable. In this timeless dimension of communing, there were no verbs, no endpoints, or destinations. Such distinctions couldn't be. I was passionflower and passionflower me. (285)

Bizarre - and not dangerous? This is what I was referring to last week when I mentioned finding some of the humanists who write about plants "goofy," but it's more than that. I find it alarming and confusing. How can these folks think that plants, which have been around much much longer than we have, have anything to say to us, want to be in relation with us? Their chemistry has evolved for relationships with other symbionts; how could one think that we could or should connect to plants by ingesting them?

This was the point at which I was ambushed by something I'd read in a completely different connnection, this morning's Chinese lesson. The dialogue, "头痛医脚 the head hurts, treat the leg," was about traditional Chinese medicine. Over thousands of years, I read, Chinese doctors have observed the interconnections of various parts of the human body, and treated them with a panoply of thousands of natural substances. 人们在长期的劳动和生活中，发现很多植物，动物和矿物能治病 Through years of working and living, people discovered that many plants, animals and minerals can cure [human] illnesses. I'm usually just bowled over at the thought of how these affinities were discovered - a process of trial and error involving, surely, fatal errors - but today I realized, as we sipped our coffee, that ingesting plants because of their effect on us is of course something we do all the time. (The Minds of Plants essay on coffee by Joseph Dumit celebrates coffee as a giver of so many gifts we fearfully imagine downsides and dangers when there are in fact none.) 

To suppose we could, or should, distance ourselves from trees enough to draw them is in its own way unnatural, and untrue to our intimate and interpenetrating relationships with them. I'm uninitiated in the psychedelic and content not to be, so we'll keep sketching ... but I might bring the class some linden blossom tea and talk about some of this... Plant features developed in tandem with entirely other species and ecosystems may nevertheless interact with our bodies in ways worth thinking about.

And maybe bring in Ella singing the Duke's paean to passionflowers...

Passion flower

Sent from the blue above

You're a flower of love

Passion flower

Free as a star in flight

Laughing through the night

Your lips keep taunting me

Not wanting me

Yet haunting me

Each day

Stay with me

My passion flower

You are all I'm dreaming of

Passion flower of love

Passion flower of love

"Not wanting me / Yet haunting me" - I can go with that! 

(Image by José Maria Pout from The Minds of Plants)

A fragile handful dangles gently

Just as the Duolingo dialogues with characters who just happen to be queer (most recently Bea mistakes someone she sees in the store for an ex-girlfriend, and Bruno and Héctor disagree about a song which played on their first date thirty years ago) delight me with their normality, I'm loving Queer Nature, an anthology of poems by 200 poets past and present. My first foray introduced me to Judith Barrington's "The Dyke with No Name Thinks about Landscape," whose last stanza, after love, terror and other experiences with people in natural settings, goes like this:

6

Now she is lying on a blanket, the sand below

moulded to the shape of her body. 

 

Sudden swells lap the shore beyond her feet:

a barge has passed by.

 

trudging down river with its load

like a good-natured shire horse

 

its throbbing lost now behind the breaking

of that great wave which seems to rise from the deeps.

 

The turbulence is quick: a lashing of the sand

followed by September’s lazy calm

 

as the river moves unseen again,

cows from another world low on the far shore

 

and the seagull’s body, a fragile handful,

dangles gently between its two tremendous wings.

 

The trouble is not nature, she thinks

But the people who say I’m not part of it.

 

They’re trying to paint me out of the landscape

says the dyke with no name

 

but her thighs in hot sand remember a horse’s warm back

as the wind makes a great wave from Oregon to Beachy Head.

Hydrangea pride

Coup attempts past and present

It seems obtuse not to post something about the House January 6th Special Committee hearings so I'll say this. Things are being confirmed that we knew were happening as they happened, indeed even before they happened. And if we knew about them, so must have all the members of the ex-president's party who were willing to assist, or stand aside, as he took his attack on American democracy to the next level, members at national, state and local levels. How can their faith in institutions, in democracy, even in truth, have been so thoroughly eroded? Co-conspirators so many were, and still are. 

The warning from retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, who sees that the ex-president was a symptom of a deeper rot, is chilling. Let's pray some answer his call: “only the party that instigated this war over our democracy can bring an end to that war."

多儿鼓励我们从不放弃学习

I'm back to daily conversations in Mandarin (with my teacher in Oslo (go figure!). This past year, with too many classes and too much back and forth between in-person and virtual life, it was on the back burner. I tried to give it the occasional stir with apps, including - inspired by a friend who had recovered his German with it - Duolingo. I raced through its Mandarin only to reach the limit: only four levels. 

Most frustrating, especially as I paid for a year's subscription. 怎么办？ I decided to try out the Spanish, just for fun. I've never properly studied that language, so it's a better test of the Duolingo method, too. So far so good, but I'm also envious. Not only are there, surely, many levels, but Duolingo Español is full of clever dialogues; Chinese has none.... And even if it did, would they be as worldly and witty?

This appears in "La Luna de Miel," in one of the first sets of stories.

Shimmer

Davidia involucrata

As I showed a random page of a very large book I've recently received on Interlibrary Loan, The Architecture of Trees, to my Chinese tutor in Oslo (!), she said: "左边的是不是handkerchief tree!" Indeed it is! Not for nothing did she recently complete a virtual course in botanical illustration from a Botanical Garden in Scotland. The tree, rarely seen in European gardens, originated in China. The rather gorgeous book, with 1:100 pen drawings by Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi of over 500 trees, was originally published in 1982 but newly reedited for the English translation. A few more spreads (with my pencil for scale): 

And two glimpses of the larger apparatus - a representation of the shadows cast by a tree in Rome at different times of the year, and one of the relative sizes and colors of trees across the four seasons. 

This seems to be a book for landscape architects, offering yet another way to think about trees in time and space and combination... 

Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi, The Architecture of Trees, trans. Natalie Danford (Princeton Architectural Press, 2019)