Change of season

Tag team

So this is where I've been playing hooky this past week: the 20th anniversary conference of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, held in la Serenissima, Venezia! 

The conference theme was "foundations and fluidity," and it took me a while to think of a way of bringing my tree work to it. Trees are foundational for us, of course. But increasingly, as climate change pushes temperate forests toward the poles, they are in flux. Aha! 

So I proposed to move from an account of how the fixedness of trees has oriented human life to an overview of the unnerving movement of forests in the Anthropocene. I'd follow this with discussion of two ways of responding to a world where trees are unmoored, the idea of "tree migration" and my pash David George Haskell's inversion of the parable of the fool who built his house on sand. The former I'd caution against, as there's a reassuring cylicality in the migrations of animals which might provide false hope, in favor of the latter, which keys into the way all trees (indeed all plants) are on the move from generation to generation. Haskell's illustration is the sabal palm which, he quips, surfs on the sand dunes. They stand as long as they can, then help shape future dunes with their fallen trunk, rootball and stiff leaves, while their seeds are carried far away by birds and tides.

But I also like participatory presentations, and, especially when it became clear mine was to be the first paper on one of the morning panels on the conference's final day, I decided we'd start with movement.

Some of you can probably do vrksasana [the yoga "tree pose"]. I can’t. But we can all pretend to be a tree, so let’s try. 

 

You decide whether your roots begin at your waist or your ankles, and what kind of tree you are, whether your branches—woefully underrepresented by just two arms—go up or out or down or all of the above. Picture growing a little, moving in a wind, a gentle one and one not so gentle. Feel the pressure of ice or rain or snow; it might snap one of your branches.

 

And feel yourself full of life, as animals and fungi and other plants, too, skitter up and down and through your branches and leaves and roots. You are their world. There might even be human people in your branches or below them.

People played along pleasingly, then I changed course:

Now… take a step to the side. Move somewhere else...

 

Except you can’t, can you? 

 

Don’t! We humans count on you not to.

 

We count on you to be there when we need your shade, or a place to climb or hide, and when we come back to do it again. We know that even the so-called walking trees don’t really walk. We count on you to connect us to our ancestors, to our histories, to our treaties, to our anguish, to our own childhoods, and to futures yet unlived. You anchor time.

 

We count on you to reach up to the sky and down the underworld, or perhaps to keep them apart, keep them from squashing us. For you define the place, the critical zone within the critical zone, in which our life has unfolded. 

 

And yet now, with increasing frequency, when we come back for you, you are gone. And even if you are still here, we half expect you to be gone, and know in our gut that there may well be a time when you are gone—not just you, replaced by one of your kin, but your whole species, no longer at home on this land, in this shared world you had anchored and defined for us.

This seemed a little gimmicky at first, but in the end worked out rather nicely, I think, because my ode to the way trees anchor human life made use of my favorite Robert Frost poem, which encourages us to think of both trees and ourselves as potentially moving but sometimes deciding to stay.

The poet, I said, is able to set forth for somewhere, to go - but also to return - because the trees, growing wiser and older, mean to stay. 

This was all intro, of course! I sped through my understanding of trees as cosmogonic (making worlds), forest range shift, the way forests' spreading and receding in tandem with glaciations isn't like animal migration (especially now that the glacial-interglacial cycle of the past 100,000 years is over), and how the sabal palm's dance with sand and water offered ways of responding to the anthropogenic unmooring of familiar cycles that faces all of us. If moving is part of how trees stay, perhaps we need to be less reckless in our setting forth, more aware of our capacity to make as well as unmake place. Our assistance may be needed, for instance, in helping trees to adapt, or forests to migrate. 

In the Anthropocene, I ended, we should make common cause with trees, accepting that terrain is ever changing - and more quickly and chaotically now - and that we can stand tall and make worlds with and for others more safely if we don't pretend, as Haskell puts it, "that sand is stone," that permanence is an option. We need foundations, but also need to accept their contingency.

I’ve suggested that there’s a sense in which every tree is a migrant, but our awareness of cyclical migrations makes thinking of arboreal flux in terms of migration problematic. There’s no assurance that forests pushed out of a place by climate weirding will ever return there. We need to be able to dwell with this reality without subsiding in longing for a larger narrative.

 

So next time you stand tall and still like a tree, let it be a surfing tree. Know that it will not stand forever. But also that you can, for a time, be like Frost’s trees. 

 

In the dance of the Anthropocene, we must tag-team the work of staying and going, of staying so that the other might go, maybe even one day return, of anchoring each other, and knowing how to lift anchor.

It was a bit much, I confess, and pointed farther than I realized until I got going. I didn't plan for Frost's poem to suggest ways in which trees and humans might "tag team." But I'm glad I let myself get carried away.

Speaking of getting carried away, "Foundations and Fluidity" was not just a way of celebrating continuity and development in the fields ISSRNC channels but an oblique reference to the glory and plight of our host city. There wasn't much explicit engagement with Venice in the presentations I heard, but I paid my respects. Did you know that Venice has been anchored by wooden staves and logs for a millennium and a half, representing perhaps as many as ten million trees? I found a pretext to mention this, and described Venice as a tree house city!

Crime against humanness

Arundhati Roy names some of the issues regarding AI keeping us up nights.

While there is so much debate about what AI can and cannot do for humans, there is too little talk about what it’s doing to humans. Studies have warned of a relationship between AI and cognitive decline in human beings. Human intelligence looks set to plunge in proportion with the rise of artificial intelligence. Perhaps our unused brains will atrophy, our heads will shrink and our fingers will turn into undulating prompt tentacles. 

Those of us who have already lived our lives in a different kind of world know what we are losing. But what of the generation that is about to come of age? Will it have its own language, its own thoughts, its own grief? Will it have the right to strive? To fall? To fail? To be imperfect? Will it experience the impossible pain and ecstatic pleasure of solving a math equation or creating art or literature or music of its own – however flawed? 

The triumph of AI will be a crime against humanness. It will bottle our brains in formaldehyde. It will destroy the world as we know it. The men who promote it and profit from it are cognisant of this, and have already made arrangements to exit into another realm.

The middle paragraph especially speaks to my worries.

Republic of letters

My colleagues know I'm at a conference but not where it's being held...

San Marco

Inspired by my patron saint's style

Fall's creeping up on us

Hail Mary pass

We sang two pieces by Francis Poulenc in church today. One of them, "Salve Regina," I remembered from the first time I encountered Poulenc's sacred music (in a Nacht der Musik performance in a neogothic church in Braunschweig years ago!), and its weird loveliness floored me again. 

But singing it today I was overwhelmed in a different way, too. Many of us have been seeking ways to challenge the demonic machismo of white Christian nationalism. This isn't the God of the Bible, we cry, not how Jesus lived. Having moved from the Roman Catholic to the Episcopal Church, however it hadn't occurred to me that what we needed - who we need - is Mary. Protestantism's discomfort with the feminine (including the femininity of God and Jesus) is part of the problem... 

Fun fact: The motet is dated "Noizay mai 1941," the very time at which Poulenc helped found the anti-fascist Front National des Musiciens.

Early autumn bouquet

Drawing ritual

What have we been up to this week? Can you guess?

Down

Sometimes I really don't know which team we're playing on any more, or even what game...

Morning shadow play

Storm-tossed

Nor'easter!

Having fun yet?

Hooked!

Can't really show you a picture of it, but "Religion of Trees" became a carpentry workshop today! My friend and colleague O, a Swedish design provocateur, led us in in a whittling workshop that ended up producing a piece of usable furniture - a coat rack, just in time for the colder weather. O had scouted a freshly fallen branch from Prospect Park and cut it into small enough pieces that each students was charged with whittling down one "hook." All of them were ultimately power-screwed to a stand assembled (also in class) of pieces of leftover wood from the wood shop. Here it is as you'll never see it, posed in an empty hallway without any coats or bags hanging from it. 

It was a deeply satisfying community activity. I'm hoping our hands-on work cutting the flesh of a tree (nice that it was from a fallen branch rather than a cut one) in making something of human use will also deepen our discussions of trees as what Roland Ennos calls "partners in life."

Weapon of mass destruction

Threatening genocide in the house of peace. A desecration. 

In another setting today (someone's discussion of international students' willingness to study in the US) someone said the damage done by this administration will last a generation, even if we kick the bums out. Kick them out we must, but the shame of their violation of every norm of decency, national or international, will endure for a long time.

Wounded/healed

The "Religion of Trees" class returned to the storm-damaged callery pear on 12th Street today. While I was the only person who'd been back to check on it since last week's class (...), I'd noticed that it had, in fact, grown back pretty valiantly. If they hadn't noticed its scars, that's because it wasn't just a wounded but a healed tree! 

Perhaps I was too focused on the scars. Our reading had faulted citified people for exaggerating the negative consequences of felling trees.

Historians ... have for the most part ignored the role of wood. ... The foresters and carpenters who were the real experts were generally humble folk who left few written records, while the few people who did write about wood, such as Pliny the Elder and John Evelyn, were aristocrats and gentlemen with no real hands-on experience. These writers were apt to be swayed by their personal experience of seeing trees being felled, a highly dramatic process that is far more memorable than the almost imperceptible growth of the trees around us that occurs throughout our whole lifetime.  

Roland Ennos, The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization (Scribner, 2020), 245

I confessed that I had never paid attention to that particular tree before the storm, giving them (generous!) cover for not having paid it much heed when drawing last week. This week's prompt was Wounded/healed tree. Compared to last week's drawings, you can really see the tree now.

God of all the nations

Decided to to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine this morning, and the whole world was there. In many senses! I'd known that artist Luke Jerram's "Gaia" was suspended in its cavernous nave, but not that the Cathedral celebrates the opening of the United Nations General Assembly - and this was the day!

Jerram's illuminated globe is designed to make accessible the "Overview Effect" reported by the tiny number of human beings who've seen the earth from space. So beautiful, so integrated (no borders!), so small, so precious... The 7m wide sphere turns gently - one rotation every two and a half minutes. We found ourselves seated beneath it. How big Antarctica is! The other continents were mere ciphers: I noticed the southern edge of Australia, and the southern tips of Latin America and Africa sweeping by on the margins. At a greater distance, when the globe is seen from the side rather than below, the true size of Africa and South America are clear - and of course the vast Pacific Ocean! Those northern hemisphere countries which ruled the roost in the Mercator projection maps just replaced by the UN General Assembly? Hard to see from any angle in this configuration. A skullcap at best!

"Let us pray that we may not steal futures from generations to come," Dean Winnie Varghese said in a sermon on the invaluable work of the UN and of all committed to the right of every human to a life free of poverty, hunger or fear - including fear of climate disruption or genocide. You can find it here.

The music was suitably pleasing (the UN Orchestra was there, making a jolly ruckus), but I was brought to tears by one of the hymns, a setting from Sibelius' Finlandia called "This is my song," written by an American in 1934. It starts

This is my song, Oh God of all the nations, 

A song of peace for lands afar and mine. 

This is my home, the country where my heart is; 

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine. 

But other hearts in other lands are beating, 

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

Word on the street

True that.

Teachable moment?

I tried an experiment in "Religion of Trees" today and it failed. Or maybe it succeeded. 

One of our readings for the day focused on images of trees, especially in art and religion; the other recommended we learn "tree thinking" from actual trees, and in their terms. After exploring the articles, I handed out a sheet with our first sixty class sketches (above). We marveled in the variety of styles and approaches. There's a lot of fancy in them!

After that, I announced we were going to do some "drawing from life," and told them to head out the door of our building and down the street; "draw the last tree on the left, the one just before o Cafe." After ten minutes we were to gather in the Lang courtyard and share what we came up with.

Well and good. The fifteen drawings were spirited and delightful. "We all saw a different tree," I quipped. There was only one problem. I'd selected that tree for drawing because it was one seriously wounded by a blizzard in February; three of its main branches are just splintered stumps now. Would all the students notice in their drawing or only some? In the end it was none of them! (The sketch at bottom right is my own.)

So much for drawing from life! It's not that hard to see the tree's wounds, or its asymmetry, if you're looking but the students were seeing something else: a flourishing, unblemished tree in all its splendor. I guess they were happy to be drawing an actual tree, not just sketching in a classroom. Except... were they drawing the actual tree?

I was initially discouraged that not even one student had noticed. Should I have told them to look out for wounds? Maybe they had never thought that trees could be injured? Or is it better this way: learning through experience that we don't really see trees even when we think we are seeing them, projecting all sorts of expectations and patterns instead. I could have told them this happens, but this shared experience makes the point far more convincingly.

When we gather again next Tuesday we're going back to the callery pear near o Cafe to draw. What will we see then?