Of Toasters, Perhaps Flying

Yes, here they are

I once took an Anthropology of Metaphor class in which the professor spoke repeatedly of the connection between "emergence" and "emergency" in relation to metaphor. This little word dance of human need has ever since made (the emergence of) metaphors urgent, responsive, and present. The light of knowledge. The dawn of civilization. The shipwreck of human existence. At times it's made metaphor so present as to almost (so close) be literal - not far to reach to see the two disparate things that make up the metaphor together. The tree of life. Most car names (but especially the Lamborghini named after a fighting bull that Ian Bogost put on the table - metaphorically). The flow of thought. The Ecologies of the Inhuman symposium at GW-MEMSI this past Friday jumped into the fray of things and the sense they make or unmake, the lives they lead or hide.  Steve Mentz's excellent summary highlights that Ian Bogost had us thinking about the "reality of (all?) metaphors." The metaphor as an idea is real, is a thing. The metaphor as emerging in the face of an emergency is a thing that comes into being in times of crisis.  This symposium had both: the aesthetics of well-crafted ideas in language and the ethics of being in the presence of multiple crises in the world. I've never been to a gathering where the language was so beautiful and the struggling was so immediate.  Where there was this much honesty and "shared vulnerability" (to quote from Carolyn Dinshaw's paper) about the repercussions and applications of ideas and words and things. Jeffrey Cohen's brilliant means of introducing the speakers by reading two or three sentences from our writings set the stage for just this combination of beauty and struggle. He read us in our fervor and desire to convince and connect. And his own care in choosing those sentences established a trust and a vulnerability: our words are out there, to be taken and shared.

And so. With James Smith we considered Fluid and the flow of medieval moral anguish, maybe even the setting for its ebb and flow. With Alf Siewers, the reach of Trees, their housings for ideas, their shade. With Alan Montroso, the viral quality of Music's use of the human body, the tool being of said body. With Valerie Allen the stakes of the "proper measure," the will to measure Matter, the possibilities of a "ninhuman system." With Eileen Joy, the poignancy of articulating moments soon to be lost to Post/Apocalyptic disasters, the expressivity of aesthetics. With Steve Mentz, the possibilities of "living inside the Shipwreck," of coming to know the sea's the thing. With me, the life of Hewn things in the Arma Christi, the voice of the hewn Cross.  With Lowell Duckert, the creatures of Recreation, the life in and of parks and other spaces of recreation. With Carolyn Dinshaw, the co-existence of lush Green and drab grey, of art up high and reality right here. And with Ian Bogost, encounters between the Inhuman as objects (in and out of metaphors), and the violence that's there, and where our attention is drawn.

These are all my takes. Every person there would have a different take, a different list of things to keep thinking about. But we all joined in to the struggle in the absorbing discussion after talks: the cut that we feel prompted by ethics to make in considering (noticing, describing, championing) the inhuman. How do you make the cut? How do you decide? These two quotes from Alien Phenomenology resonate with the discussion.

Thanks to feminist studies, postcolonial studies, animal studies, environmental studies and other accounts of human relationships with nonhuman entities, we tend to doubt that some things ought to thrive at others' expense.  Today, most would accept that British men are no more intrinsically worthy of preservation and prosperity than women, Congalese, horses, and redwoods. But few would accept that fried chicken buckets, Pontiac Firebirds, and plastic picnicware deserve similar consideration (unless their existence or use might disturb people, animals or nature). When we form these theories, we mount accounts of why and how humans ought to behave in and toward the universe, but not about how other objects ought to behave in relation to it. --- 74

And, to me, a vital question:

When we speak of things, are we prepared to equate their forces with their ethics? Is what a thing tends to do the same as what it considers noble or right? --- 76-77

We will share bits and pieces of our human exceptionalism (especially as they pertain to us and our continued welfare) with certain elements deemed non-human (animals, the environment). But not with things. Why not? Why not, Ian Bogost pushed us when considering violence, consider the caramelization of bread inside the toaster? Why not consider the toaster? What would be the repercussions? (And no one is saying that struggling for the ethical consideration of things means abandoning the struggle for the ethical considerations of humans. Far from it - the two are more and more inter-related.) A quick response, an honest one, worries about the cut (a word of hewn terminology I found myself paying close attention to) that "sooner or later" / "push comes to shove" / "something's got to give" we have to make between ourselves and things. I cannot weep for the toast. What would it mean for me to weep for the toast? Ok, fine, ethics driven by compassion seem surreal. Ethics of affinity? Can we consider the toast and the toaster as they frame our human quotidian? As they set the pace of the human day? Maybe maybe. Where we started to land in the discussion thrills me no end: and what of the ethics of aesthetics? What of the aesthetics of description? Of the crackle of electricity and the sugars hissing their release? (See page 61 of Alien Phenomenology for gripping descriptions). What of the act of describing as an ethical act? What of the act of describing (noticing, noting, paying extremely close attention to, observing, sharing, proclaiming) things as an ethical act? What of (and this should be another post soon), what of the ethical exercise of ekphrasis in the Middle Ages? The ultimate aesthetic description! Always showing up at the ultimate ethical moment! (Alexander's shield, Darius's tomb, the Rose's garden).

What might happen when we notice some thing enough to de-scribe it from the invisibility of our use and make it present through language? Still a human act towards the ever-receding thing. But what if you really did consider the toaster?  Someone has done this very thing, you know. Right now, if you can, right this minute, instantly, if you haven't already, soon then, really really soon, please read The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites. While you're waiting impatiently, you can go to its website.  Can you get over the image? Thwaites deconstructs a toaster and makes it present through his act of trying to build one on his own. From scratch. In his process of describing and making a toaster, Thwaites engages in (endures!) multiple ethical acts and realizations: about the environment, industrial production, mining, labor. It's aesthetics as activism is what it is. The book is incredible (he mines mica for goodness's sake!) - it's the Thing equivalent of Jan Zalasiewicz's Planet in a Pebble which also begins with an object, recedes into its origins and re-emerges with knowledge and awe.  That's where I am in my thinking, I think - between a pebble and a toaster; grateful - deeply grateful - for the human actors and thinkers and writers in between. And for how objects defy us, for how toasters fly.

Natural Beauty/Acheiropoieta

Agate from Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones

Natural beauty is harder to define than you'd think. And I should read Kant and find out if he provides some transcendental loophole, and I should pull out Umberto Eco and see what he has to say. But here it is another Saturday morning, already later than I want it to be due to household tasks, and little time to think but a lot of desire to write. SO. This particular beauty, this category we have called natural beauty.  It emerged because of two student comments, one presenting the "inherent and inherently shared" beauty of something like a sunset; and the other offering the marvelous phrase "it seems that nature's agency is in its appeal to our senses." For good measure, I put the medieval concept of "acheiropoieta" on the table: the idea of images "not made by human hands," an idea that I can now discuss as an aesthetic concept of non-human agency (thanks to Bennett and Bogost and object oriented ontology).

Pointe du Raz, Finistère, Brittany, France

First to speak of "inherent and shared." Nobody doesn't like a sunset. You can say you don't, that you find them stupid and trite, but so what? It's there and it's gorgeous and it's expansive and it doesn't care if you like it or not, in fact it has no consciousness of you and that, claimed a student, is part of its beauty.  So we tried to articulate the appeal of natural beauty, to identify what it is that calls out - that makes students gasp when they see one of Caillois's rocks in class, the slide flooding the classroom with a reddish hue; or makes them ecstatic when we walk together on the cliffs of Brittany and the sun comes out for the first time in six days halfway through a four hour hike. All this, by the way, needed to be folded into an understanding of medieval portable altars' use of porphyry - why these expanses of visual abstraction in the midst of ritual framework? why this "rougher, less manipulated (than the wood and metal surrounding it)" stone element? More on that in a minute. The art students in the class quickly identified aesthetic principles at work: moments of symmetry, apt color, "composition even." And here, the science students came in with the idea of "madeness" as something that appeals about natural beauty. As in: natural beauty are those moments when you are presented with something that looks like it was made by "some other" agency than human.  I loved the student hesitate for a fleeting second before saying "some other" - broader than God or Nature, but still specifically not human.  Now. You could say that it is the human gaze that makes the image, that without our perception, the particular framing of that moment, you would lose composition, symmetry, and any sense of madeness.  This is where the lack of consciousness of a human audience comes in. As much as we delight in finding madeness (symmetry, composition, color, etc.) in rocks, flora, stones, water, and other things without voices (which would otherwise express intent), we also delight in being ignored by those things. You can call it the Sublime, or a kind of eco-voyeurism (ha! I saw beauty, but it didn't/can't see me!), but unmistakeably, there is a thrill in being on the edges of an expanse (rock slide or cliff hike), witnessing it, possessing it with sight, but - despite the physical intimacy of shared space and multiple other conditions - knowing that when our gaze drops the ocean will still churn, the rock will remain fervent, and the sun will continue on its trajectory.

Anglo-Saxon Portable Altar, Cluny Museum

Critique: a student (and I think Tim Morton (and I!) would agree) worried about any process of aestheticization (even the phrase and exploration of "natural beauty") and its effects on environmentalist efforts because of the distance it creates, because one day we will drop our gaze and the ocean will rise up and churn on land. So how to collapse that distance, but still acknowledge natural beauty? Enter acheiropoieta, a principle that explores the "madeness" of things not made by human hands.  One of the satisfactions of natural beauty is recognition, both figurative (and this can stretch from people recognizing things in clouds to Caillois's landscapes and other figurative forms recognized in rocks), and abstract (fantastic crystalizations, juts of colors, shapes and forms that stretch or seem placed, even without figurative purpose).  This porphyry had both for my students: they saw constellations of a night sky, and they saw a vast abstract expanse.  The classic medieval acheiropoieta is figurative: the icon of the face of Christ pressed, not painted, onto a linen surface (think Mandylion or the veil of Veronica). But (calling Meyer Schapiro), what of an abstract acheiropoieta? What of a thing that manifests madeness but does not represent anything? Do we call it an aesthetic of ontology? Images that resist iconographic breakdown? Images whose priority is to be instead of signify? I am letting myself be swayed by Marbod of Rennes (author of a lapidary that poetically presents stones' agency, its being in action) more than, say, William Durandus (who saw representational symbolism in the stone pillars of churches).  I am wondering if the stone's ability to manifest madeness (to appear to have been fashioned but not by human hands) could not also be a glimpse of the body of Christ as it becomes manifest above the altar in the midst of the ritual of the Eucharist: an absolute presence, a natural beauty.

The Caddisfly Larvae art of Hubert Duprat

Of course with ritual, the question of agency becomes very troubling indeed.  Rituals are frameworks created by humans, and enacted by them, but for the purpose of being in the presence of non-human agency (God, love, power, etc.).  And so I'll close with a natural beauty orchestrated, but not made, by human hands: the slips that caddisfly larvae make when artist Hubert Duprat gives them gold, corral, pearls, turquoise, and lapis lazuli instead of the usual twigs, leaves, and broken shells they find in the rivers of southern France. What stuns is the patterning, the band of pearls and turquoise, and the composition and the structure. It's lovely. And the problems -- of consciousness (theirs/ours), of use (can they live there? does he sell what they made?), of setting (given the choice between gold and leaves, which would they choose?) -- are fantastic.

Chi Rho Page as Electrical Grid

The ChiRho page from the Book of Kells

I hope that Jane Bennett and Alfred Siewers have met because their ideas have much to say to each other. I combined chapter two of Bennett's Vibrant Matter, "The Agency of Assemblages" with Siewer's chapter from Strange Beauty, "The Cosmic Imaginarium," for our consideration of the idea of landscape in the Middle Ages.  This consideration was also nurtured by ideas of how art historians might reconceptualize medieval landscape (as something other than a lack, or Renaissance landscapes-in-waiting) that reside in a piece I really love by Walter Cahn titled "Medieval Landscape and the Encyclopedic Tradition" in Yale French Studies 1991 (geez, just grabbing the link reminds me of how rich that particular issue is).  I'm going to have time to highlight just two observations that emerged.  The first was applying Bennett's articulated assemblage of the electric grid to Siewer's choice image of the Chi Rho page.  In discussing the massive power outage of 2003, Bennett characterizes the electric grid as "a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood" (25).  And so, with Spinoza's affective bodies in mind, and with Siewer's idea of "the transfer of aesthetic responsibility from the artist to the viewer" (126), we began to wander the landscape of the Chi Rho page. Eyes, butterflies, skin, loneliness, hope, blood, cold, stone, quill, plant, orthodoxy, colonialism, Christ, perpetuity, power, sacrifice, pigment, otter, letter, curve, triumph, fear, voice.  There was more. I appreciated, in a total breakdown of the certitude of the outlook on the world/landscape of Vitruvian man (who, I admit, I have made a bit of our straw man), construction through accretion, rather than through design or implementation.  I had to let go of the art historical impulse to account for everything in the image, to explain all of the iconography, and instead be witness to what emerged in associations and connections. I had to move (ever-inspired by Bennett) from epistemology to ontology. I had to let the cosmic imaginarium of the students, when they allow themselves to be called into the Chi Rho page, do the work.  And even as I write this, I think of going back on Monday and filling them in on the cats and the mice and the Eucharist (the awesome Suzanne Lewis piece in Traditio), and I get excited to do so because of the perceptual work that will have preceded the iconographic work.  I think that I'm struggling with this tension (between the materiality of the image and the wealth of textuality I know to exist behind it) now, because I am aligning images and texts to write about about a work of art of especially vibrant matter, the choir screen at Le Faoüet. Perhaps I need to let myself wander the landscape of that choir screen as Bennett and Siewers invite me to. There's more to say here, but my own landscape stirs awake with children who have dreams to report and desires for their days.  What I would elaborate upon is Siewer's awesome idea of "inverse perspective" - of the landscape looking out at you, of you feeling called in. Here we go.

Thing-Power in the Classroom: stones, ladders, spit, onions, phalluses and roses

We've had a new student join our Ecology of Medieval Art class, and it was to him that I turned first in asking for a description of the image on the screen (the same one that you see here).  "An arrangement of minerals, stones, and quartz," he said.  Absolutely, yes, thank you. I then asked a student who'd been here the first day, and she answered, "It's a picture of our class."  Oh how this course gives!!! On the first day of class, I'd positioned the twenty objects you see, one at each spot at the seminar table. Students sat, some in accordance with the rock they wanted, others, to immediately start trading stones.  I asked them to read Lowell Duckert's marvelous essay in Animal, Mineral, Vegetable: Ethics and Objects (edited by Jeffrey J. Cohen and out through Oliphaunt Books last year): "Speaking Stones, John Muir and a Slower (Non)Humanities," and to write about where they would be placing their stone for the duration of the semester. Some carry their stones with them, others have put them within sight, out of sight, framed, ensconced, placed to be picked up again and again. And all, judging by the smiles today when the student answered "It's a picture of our class," have elided subjectively with their stones.  I thought that they would still say that those were their stones, or the stones given to them, or something else that still made the stones a separate object for their use. Perhaps this is the rapid work of Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter (chapter one was due to be read today), or the Anglo-Saxon riddles I asked them to read in combination with Bennett, but in that answer, those students were ready to talk about thing-power, and its ability to trouble the boundary between the human and the non-human (and I know that she was being metonymic, not necessarily loosening her sense of self when she answered - but metonymy can do powerful work to trouble boundaries).

I love those rocks. I chose them carefully at Squire Boone Caverns in southern Indiana this summer, thinking of the students I'd be working with, learning about each stone over the intervening months. Satin spar, citrine, lodestone, fossilized whale bone, agate nodule. Don't they have great names?  The goal was to move, with Jane Bennett, from thing-power via Spinoza's conatus to LaTour's actants and the idea of assemblage by way of Bogost's Latour Litanizer and in the process to continue to articulate our interest in the ontology of the non-human. Loving the idea of "assemblage as a perceptual style that is open to the appearance of thing-power" (5), I showed them this...

Arma Christi, 15th c. Boucicaut Master

... and asked them to simply call out the names of the objects that they saw. Ladder, ear, column, dice, nails, spit, lance, rooster. I find the Arma Christi such a fantastically haunting image: all objects, no human. (When it's the Mass of Saint Gregory, there's lots of Christ, but here, no, just some impossible space and time of representation). What is the Crown of Thorns when it is not on Christ's head? Is its thorniness more manifest? Are the nails' nailness more apparent? And then the medieval twist to this assemblage: the large swath of red at the bottom of the image that students started asking about, having identified all of the other objects: it's the wound of Christ (I actually got a gasp from one of the students on that one...!). What is the Wound of Christ when it is an object? Does it reveal its woundness to a greater degree? Does it recede further? I steered some students away from narrative and iconography - away from anything resembling epistemology - and insisted on a preoccupation with ontology. The being of these objects are all ultimately predicated on the Crucifixion, but that's later. Here, now, always, they are objects unto themselves, resisting our urge to subsume them into narrative, and possibly even morality. Does that mean that they mean nothing? Yes, in that that is not our concern, but just think: they are completely (well, as completely as an object in/as an image can be - something I need to work on: the ontology of representation).

The Onion one

And then the Riddles, the glorious Riddles, which allowed us to talk about the resistance of objects: riddles resist. (Some dare you to figure out what they are). Two big realizations emerged from this session: that there is a communal re-cognition of things, and that nature has a volatile ontology. I had the students again litanize: they read their answers to the five selected riddles and I filled them in on a table so that in a matter of minutes we had 100 words assembled in a Word document table. That in and of itself became a representation field - and a fertile one at that.  For #31 (commonly identified as iceberg), we had both snail and shark. One student said "ocean rocks" which is a great way to describe an iceberg. #79 (commonly identified as gold) produced more "trees" than "gold."  And my favorite, #23 - because it is commonly identified as an onion or a phallus, but in our class was over and over again dubbed a thorned rose. The class shifted from being an assembly of individuated thinkers to an assemblage of desires that produced roses, where others had wanted onions and phalluses. We now will, in our class, add roses to the litany of answers we could provide to this riddle. Here is said riddle, whose object now hovers in representation, no definite thing, but definitely a thing.

I am a wonderful help to women,

The hope of something to come. I harm

No citizen except my slayer.

Rooted, I stand on a high bed.

I am shaggy below. Sometimes the beautiful

Peasant's daughter, an eager-armed,

Proud woman grabs my body,

Rushes my red skin, holds me hard,

Claims my head. The curly-haired

Woman who catches me fast will feel

Our meeting. Her eye will be wet.

--- trans. Craig Williamson, A Feast of Creatures (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)

Thoreau on Carnac

Thoreau, though he never left these American shores, wrote about Carnac! At this late hour, I can do little but happily quote favorite lines and revel in his own mixed emotions. He's traveling down the Concord and Merrimack rivers and he starts to worry about nature and history.

"There lie the stones which completed their revolutions perhaps before thoughts began to revolve in the brain of man."

He keeps on looking at the trees and stones around him in his beloved American landscape and resigns himself to say "These, and such as these, must be our antiquities, for lack of human vestiges."

He then gets defensive, thinking on Rome and all of its vestiges:

"Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any... What if we cannot read Rome, or Greece, Etruria, or Carthage, or Egypt, or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare? The lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there."

And then he lets loose among his stones and trees: "Carnac! Carnac! here is Carnac for me." But he doesn't leave the matter until a full poem emerges:

This is my Carnac, whose unmeasured dome
Shelters the measuring art and measurer's home.
Behold these flowers, let us be up with time,
Not dreaming of three thousand years ago,
Erect ourselves and let those columns lie,
Not stoop to raise a foil against the sky.
Where is the spirit of that time but in
This present day, perchance the present line?
Three thousand years ago are not agone,
They are still lingering in this summer morn,
And Memnon's Mother sprightly greets us now,
Wearing her youthful radiance on her brow.
If Carnac's columns still stand on this plain, 
To enjoy our opportunities they remain.
     --- from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

He's seeking to displace Carnac's monumentality, I think, in favor of that of his beloved own stones and flowers, but he's drawn to Carnac's stoniness, to its age, to the age of its stoniness before it became art - as though trying (maybe?) to separate out the stone from the art. But at the same time, I think that somewhere in there (in his seeking of "that time" - the time of the stones, right?) he admires art's ability to hold nature in place. Maybe just a little bit. He does speak of the measuring art, albeit beneath an unmeasured dome.  May we all have our Carnacs, though for me, I will gladly always "stoop to raise a foil against the sky."

Back into the Reeds

Fits and Starts by Marc Swanson, now in Peeler Art Center

Seven years ago, some (many?) students got drunk, got naked, got on a public sculpture, got out their cameras, got back to their dorm rooms, and got on Facebook.  There, they posted pictures of themselves drunk, naked, and riding the deer, a public sculpture by Marc Swanson called Fits and Starts. (Indeed.) This night proved pivotal in our campus's history because it was the generational turning point  for social networks. It was the night that professors discovered Facebook. Through e-mails, and phone calls, and students and faculty running to the site at 5 a.m., word spread about the damage to the deer from the vigorous riding, and no matter what direction the word of mouth took - the outrage, the glee, the scandal - it all wound up in the same place: those pictures on Facebook. By morning, the deer had several Facebook pages, some defending its presence, others decrying it. By noon, we had our first protest against the damage (there were no rallies for the damage), and within three days, our first public conversations. By then, the conversation had expanded from the deer not "fitting in" (was it the exuberant pose? the glittering rhinestones all over its body?) to the bleak reality of many people on campus being made to feel they did not "fit it" (was it their sexuality? their talk? their body?). It was the ugliest of our school, the things you know people want to know about Indiana and private small liberal arts college and their intolerance and cliquishness. And then, it was also one of the very first times that homophobia was discussed in the public sphere on campus, that silent understandings were painfully articulated, that art's materiality (swiftly morphed by Facebook, I would argue) exposed ideology. Today, three things remain: the sculpture, safe (sigh) in the Peeler Art Center, cavorting at the top of a staircase; a great interview with the artist, Marc Swanson; and a 35-minute (!) documentary about everything called Deer Diary.

No, wait: five. A lasting conversation and activism about what makes this community what it is (as it changes and continues to feel its changes - that's what I find fascinating). And Facebook.  Students in a public sculpture class that had just watched the video on Friday stopped by my office and we had a good laugh about the part of the video in which I explain what Facebook is (I call it a "database of students") (!).  Multiple new controversies, many other tempests in our teapot, have exploded on Facebook since the deer - it's now half of where our community happens, maybe even exists - even as we share the physical space of campus and classroom.  And I think of my own migration through Facebook - it's where I go for the latest in all things medieval, it's where the newest (sometimes best) conversations in my field are happening. It's where you can start out as a voice in the wilderness and, as the comment stream and the likes build, be comforted that the wilderness is not so wild - that that crazy, or personal, or emotional thought has its place after all. It's a terrain, and it's become a natural (yes, natural in the sense of compulsive, almost instinctual, inevitable) response to events. I think, too, for the first time, that surely Facebook will change how I write out here. Facebook now feels more public than this blog. This blog now recedes a bit, more a set of reeds that I can whisper newly into.  I do wonder, as a new generation of students is wondering, if the deer, too, could go back out into the wild of the outdoors of our campus, if maybe now, those reeds are not so wild.

Fluid Communities

Portable Altar, Cluny Museum, Paris

It's late, but I don't teach tomorrow, and I'm so happy that my blog is now weirdo-ad free that I'm going to indulge in a little homecoming to the blog. (Plus, I get to tell you the really strange reason why those ads were there further down). Returning not just to teaching but to home and family has been a whirlwind.  My speaking on a panel at University of Chicago last week-end about how to present yourself (you, a newly minted UofC PhD) as a thriving candidate to a small liberal arts college, opened up into a 36-hour romp in Chicago for me and the girls, which included a night in a downtown hotel (pool with city views! cocktail hour for mommy!), and culminated in a visit to the (hang on) American Girl Store for Iris's birthday.  Wo. Ha.  Is it a blight? Is it a plague? No. All the parents I know and love agree there are good ideas behind it all. Is it overwhelming, but in a completely effective way? Yes.  Still relatively fresh from France, the ability of the place to create a community of fervent participants in no time flat was salient for me. How do they do it? I wish that I were more of a sociologist and I could tell you more. Is it that everyone uses first names? That everyone asks you what your plans are for your doll? That everyone there is so freaking happy? (This is not as snarky as it sounds, and please don't think that I was immune to anything there - I felt genuinely happy for my girls and I felt totally a part of something.). The objects that are the dolls are key, certainly, but it's really the care of the doll that unites the girls. (There's something here about "What It's Like to Be a Doll" and the Tool-Being of dolls, I swear). And I know that Americans get made fun of in France for being so quick to form communities, so quick to belong and join in, so quick to use first names and dispense with formalities, and so strange in finding authentic belonging in ephemeral, fluid (sometimes even virtual or digital!) communities. In France (she said, speaking broadly, but this is what stood out), authentic belonging can take generations.  It took our dear friend David a significant number of years to get a first "Bonjour" from a particular neighbor.  But of course, once that "Bonjour" has been made, then it's for keeps, then it's authentic.

Student photo of Pointe du Raz

All the stranger, then, that being out in the landscapes of Brittany gave so many of our students, so many of us, a sense of belonging.  Communing, bonding, euphoria - in a place so far from home and the familiar and yet, you instantly feel as though you are a part of something.  This generation being what it is, and my being fascinated to try this, I posted images on Facebook nightly about the trip (the one exception was our night in the nunnery), and so our sense of community moved seamlessly from the intensely material to the international virtual. 

new Facebook cover image

This is what currently graces my Facebook page.  Is it just the effort of the body in the space of this environment that gives this sense of belonging, of possession? There are more questions to be asked about why we feel so quickly "at one" with nature.  Why we are so sure this is wonderful and that we are a part of it. Why we can then walk away so easily.  I say this with the Ecology of Medieval Art, and its (in some ways) much more ambivalent responses to nature, very much in mind, and there will be much posting about that. I also say this with the fluidity of virtual communities in mind. While I was watching Iris's purposeful strides throughout the store, and still daydreaming about hikes in Brittany, and pondering which historical book and which pajamas I was going to get the girls, George Washington University was having a Digital Humanities symposium, filled with brilliant speakers and observations. The creation of communities was a big theme, as well as the spaces they inhabit: blogosphere (hello!), Facebook, Twitter. All authentic (oh my heavens, they have completely changed my life), all virtual, all fluid.  For my students, a now necessary step in their experience of nature is not just the gorgeous photography, but posting it on Facebook. Yes, granted, that was my last assignment to them (!), but many of them have gone on to post dozens of images on their own pages. And the fluid communities ebb and flow around "likes" and "comments," part of the authentic reach of being in Brittany.

That portable altar again

All of which brings me to the portable altar once again.  We'll be reading a rich article about it for EcoMed, but I paused at the Cluny and took this picture to savor a student's wonder that "God on the go" was a possibility in the Middle Ages. Despite its being made of stone and metal, there is something virtual about this object.  The architectural space that would normally frame an altar has become virtual.  The community that would worship around it was fluid, ephemeral, transitory. Virtual, as we now know, does not mean not real.  And this virtual altar allowed for an authentic connection/communication with the divine.  A real broadcast, if you will. Because that would allow me to tell you that it turns out that those weird ads, and our messed up Netflix, and our inability to screen pretty much anything for the past week has been the result of our router box thinking we're in Brazil.  That's right, our only subtitle option on Netflix was "Brazilian Portuguese," the kids' movie options were all in Portuguese, our queue disappeared, amazon-prime screening told me that I was out of the country, etc.  Oliver briefly contemplated watching his movies with Portuguese subtitles to maybe learn something. And so, for a week, we were unwitting members of a huge virtual community of Brazilian internet users. The kids were amazed: "Our internet thinks we live in Brazil!" We were transported.

I treasure ephemeral authenticity. I don't know if that makes me particularly American, or modern, or any other definitions.  But I treasure its possibility, I wonder about its traditions (the portable altar), I like to think upon the time of authenticity, and I love the thrill of it. Because it's the ephemeral authenticity that creates the fluid community - in forests, in Chicago, by the sea, in the virtual world.